16 December 2006

Historical note

my spiritual/esthetic
evolution/education
split into 'before' and 'after'
on 13 april 1974
as i was mopping a floor
pondering krishnamurti and
a girl i had a crush on
but felt unworthy of

and then the penny dropped

(as it had, i think
for joyce in august 1902
pondering maud gonne)

i had put my spiritual room in order
(in krishnamurti's phrase)
and the window could open

not as an act of will

seeing an image
(in the gospel of thomas's phrase)
as an image

and my tastes mostly crystallised then
pynchon-nabokov-stone-murdoch-gs brown

no longer straining to emulate
the priorities of academics

but still unable to articulate
or defend my preferences

so over the next decades
as i practiced this articulation/defense
i was appalled to find myself
a magnet/target
for vituperation

my independence consistently
rubbed people the wrong way

and the more articulate i got
the more extreme
became my isolation

(so far as i can tell
the notion of
loyal friend
is a myth

and nobody nowhere's
dared to make a webpage
appreciating my site/ideas)




the blog was an attempt
to bridge that rift

a window of opportunity
when quality web-content
was hard to find

and so long as
my conventional tastes
sufficiently balanced my heresies
my blog audience grew

but once i'd linked
shahak
and other critics of israel
the balance catastrophically
and vituperatively
shifted

hardly anyone dared link me anymore

so i retreated to joyce studies
and the history of ideas





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