Time-Out International Park

I would have posted these thoughts at "overworms" blog, but I don't think he has any comments. Or I couldn't find it.

How many of us worry about the state of the world? We can hear so many people, especially in blogs, challenge the workings of politics and war and desire conflict resolution without violence and suffering. If you talk to almost every body you will find we all want the best for our friends and family. And the best for all nations. So why can't we acheive this goal? I think we can get there. The first step is talking about it, and the second is taking the risk to throw out ideas into the court of public opinion.

I love Shakespeare and I love thinking about his world through literary criticism, performances and Harold Bloom. One thing that stuck out to me from Bloom is that he suggests Shakespeares characters manage transformation because they talk. They talk talk talk...out loud, to themselves, to each other. Bloom suggests that Shakespeare understood that a phase towards change or healing and transformation is through speaking.

I found this in among the above link and I thought it was charming and displays the kind of rivalry and posturing that also conveys a friendship in talking.

"Oh, yes, I remember. In those years, Paul [de Man] and I were always debating one another in public. In private, we would take long walks together, or he would sit where you are sitting now and argue this, drinking a Belgian beer.

What struck me most was your next sentence: "But these two ways turn into one another at their outward limits."

Yes. I know the passage you are citing. I remember saying to Paul that I did not care whether one taught what he and Jacques [Derrida] were teaching—which was the absolute dearth of meaning, the permanent wandering about of language—or whether one had a linguistic theory that taught an absolute plenitude of meaning, as with Kabbalists such as my great mentor Gershom Scholem and my friend Moshe Idel. All that I cared about was the Absolute, as it were. Because in the end, the two turned into one another.

This is fascinating, but how would you explain the seeming paradox in what you're saying?

To me, it doesn't seem paradoxical at all. Isn't that strange? Essentially, what Kabbalah is always saying is that the Torah, and indeed any single Hebrew letter, contains within itself the total plenitude, which is what the Spanish Kabbalists called the Ein Sof, the "without an end," the divinity, God."

What am I getting at?

Taking a risk of imagination and applying it to social and environmental challenges. Say it out loud!

I'll give an example...I have an amazing idea for resolution in the middle east. Time Out International Park. No body gets to live there. Everyone can move to Canada, sure the weather is a bit cold, but we have a lot of fun. Card games are an international language besides, everybody speaks Dead Prime Ministers. I hope Prime Minister Stephen Harper reads this post. So, no one can live in the Fertile Crescent anymore. They have to go to their naughty mats, in Canada. (well we have the room) And it becomes an entire huge International Park. $50 U.S. , passports and I.D.s up the yinyang to walk into the armed gates, searches and scanners and customs officers with large rifles. Mecca is only for the visitor. Mecca is for sharing.

We spend big money to send our kids to fancy day cares, why don't we hold those adults to the same standard, but with international discipline efforts?

The West Wing is coming to an end, and its value as a play, much like Hamlets play-within-a-play to out his fathers murderer, is a resource we are sorely going to miss. The other night an episode had outgoing President Bartlett raising gas taxes to 50 cents a gallon. An outrage, but when incoming President Santos lowers the tax to 5 cents a gallon he will be a hero and pay off deficit and no one will resist the 5 cent tax.

This is how we need to think, without rules or boundaries but with love and imagination. And we need to think out loud. And scare the heck out of our leaders by doing so with great ideas...transforming...I think part of the reason we continue to believe in leaders and vote for them is because we forget they are elected to be our ASSISTANTS. We don't need leaders. And if we talk to each other with strange ideas we can see the possibilities and not expect so little from these "leaders".