Swerving

On being overwhelmed…

… And swerving; like Tony Blair and the Iraq War, or being a parent, as ak suggested 2 days ago.  Swerving in the face of some momentous decision on the world stage, as well as swerving in the face of something commonplace and everyday like being a parent. And as a result of being overwhelmed, swerving, or being threatened with being overwhelmed, swerving; it doesn’t matter which, because at the precise moment we are incapable of telling the difference. The facts in the moment and our imaginations (the thoughts and the feelings of threat) of being overwhelmed are completely interchangable. What is called an event.

Is swerving the same as taking avoiding action? Apparantly not. The difference to do with control, degrees of control; more in control taking avoiding action, less in control with swerving. Apparantly. And notions of degree also being given to intensity, or tension as is it is commonly called, the degrees of tension ratcheted up over time. In other words swerving has a history, at any rate the kind of swerving being talked about in this conversation, non-random non-arbitrary swerving appears to be located in time. The story of what is called an event.

An event; one thing in from which all forward causation and backward causation stretches in life. For the political life of Tony Blair the event is called Iraq; the event, the defining moment as the political journalists have it, the decision to go to war. And for the rest of us, the different event, ordinary things such as being a parent, when as ak asks –

"The mind bends this way and that, threatens to break, we don’t sleep, stop eating, take to drink, have an affair, talk to friends, talk to a therapist, and hopefully our thinking expands to take on whatever the problem was and we move on. What if we don’t manage that?"

A birth, a death, a decision, the moment of swerving, the conflicting forces of an event. One that is never recalled, and from which there can be no recovery; recall, as in the failure to recall the famous charge of the Light Brigade at the battle of Ballaclava, put a stop to something, reverse time, and also the failure to recall a memory, forgetting; recovery, as in the impossibility of the recovery of health, and also in the sense of covering over, re-covery, hiding of the past; this duality, the opposing and conflicting forces that also permeate words; the backsprung bow.

The ground of walkingtalkingwriting.


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