Dear X
Yes “our discourse” has been less than positive. More my contributions to it have been nit picky and darn ornery.
I do want to commend you for speaking up and holding me to account.
I have thought a lot about what I was really driving at in so inept a fashion. I think I confused your call for balance for a call for neutrality. Reminded by Pierre Berton’s remarks about Canadians and canoes, I can now see that the call to stay balanced is also a call to keep paddling.
I am willing to wager that your canoe will bring you back to podcasting and that the little portage through writing/scripting will allow you to shoot the rapids. I know I’m stretching the analogy. So why not imagine that the podcast conversations take place in a canoe? Who all is in the canoe? I bet there is an “I” rooted in time and place and willing to speak from a specific locale. I know from your call out there is a sense of a “you” — someone who has some basic paddling skills — your imagined listener. I imagine your “we” is not an expansive, amorphous, universal but a construction out of the embodied I and the imagined you.
[…]
I truly believe that you have a unique voice. One that deserves to be heard. I for one definitely want to hear more of your “I”. Out on a calm lake or shooting the rapids…. or guiding the water cooler chatter.
BTW what Pierre Berton said was cast in the third person (opening up a non-coercive space for a “you” to project themselves into) : A Canadian is someone who knows** how to make love in a canoe.
With that image in mind, I leave you to your ruminations. F
** Note: knowing and making are distinct activities.
And so for day 2802
14.08.2014