styles of thought

Listening to Zoe Williams again made me think. In the discussion Kruger comes a cross as all academic, his thought somewhat abstract and removed from realities. Well-meaning, I'm sure, but still, speaking as if there was this invincible ring around him. Zoe, on the other hand, is on the mark, tot he point. Maybe I'm just being swayed by the arguments since I lean towards her views anyway, but perhaps there's something else, something about a style of thought, a way of speaking that is self-assured, engaged, and still not dominating? Maybe after reading anton's blog I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't, after all, something about the gender of the speakers here that makes all the difference.

And then there was this marvellous bit of broadcasting: F.Shaw

Cricket: Aggers: 'Kumar is like a tireless labrador. He's spent. But if you threw him a stick he'd still go and fetch it.'

Good radio is so much better than the box...still, the banter between the former cricketers is a good approximation to it. But what is it? The voice, the to and fro of discussions, the deep familiarity of feelings housed in a place free from the relentless gaze of the eye, a different type of intelligence?

Fionna Shaw: 'My grief is not irrelevant to my imagination'

'You have to be alive to the scale of the possibility of other people'

And then she's got this line about the 'arc of thought'. And you think about how limited your own is; partly because of language, not really inhabiting any, but also, partly, because you don't have any skills or the ability to concentrate on one single thing. There's a lot to be said about the multiplicity of intelligence-from photography, to music, to art, to sport. Academia is a very shallow or pale form of it.

The wider the arc, the more it intersects, the more it bridges over differences. "There's a point, " Milosz wrote, "at which all lines intersect".

~~~

I showed this to the swami who said, half way through: You know, when I was in class nine (about 13 or 14 yrs old) I wrote these words in my scrapbook and showed them to my best friend: 'something is better than nothing'. But she turned around and said, no, you're wrong, 'nothing is better than something... with nothing that's the end of it, there's no moving forward or back, there are no more stories.