Writing this ‘author’s subtext’ didn’t come as easily to me, as it usually does and I have had to ask myself ‘why’?

I never write ‘from planned structure’ but instead I ‘explode a central idea’ that is essential ‘relational’.  The ‘exploding’ is guided from the outside-in by certain thoughts that are in my mind at the time which are ‘bigger than’ the ‘idea’ itself; such as ‘why am I writing this particular article’, and a miscellany of thoughts that pertain to the act of writing it, and how it might be interpreted (or not) by the reader etc. etc.

After I have written the article, then I review what all of those ‘outside of the article’ influences were as I was writing.   This is kind of like describing the movements of one’s fingers as one fashions a snowball in one’s bare hands.  The shape and quality of the ‘content’, the ‘snowball’ is the thing that ‘persists’ but all of those wigglings and bendings of the fingers have disappeared.  What were the shaping forces  like along the rocky coast where giant arches persist just offshore, their centres having been ‘chewed out’ of them by the violence of the waves?  As one regards ‘content’ (the ‘dynamical figure’) and lets the mind move back and away from it into the invisible-because-purely-transient shape-sourcing ‘dynamical ground’, one can only capture a few of the most ‘obvious’ ‘shapers’;  e.g, there was the big storm of ’37 or the missing finger or etc.

Out of my early memories I remember my mother (daughter of Italian peasants who emigrated to Canada before she was born) expressing disgust and outrage over the brutal way in which Mussolini and Carla Petacci were ‘taken out’ and while there was no doubt of how firmly she opposed fascism and supported her brothers who had all  served in the Canadian military, she could not support such vile vengefulness of those (perhaps all of us) who were in no way ‘innocent’ themselves. (more…)