i feel like I am camping near the entrance of something important. I have been roaming these shores for months, unable to enter. I smell it, I see its contours obscured by fog, I hear sounds, I am drawn, but I cannot figure out how to grow gills. Arts based research and its philosophical fibers. Currents and waves. Or just an alien world, not necessarily one like a sea. I want to breathe it in, but even at my best, I am just a snorkler with a mask who bobs on the surface, limited by my physiology of a land creature. Or an earthling limited by my earthly shape. I am taking classes with Janet and now and then I talk to Jenni, and I want to come visit them where they are, but I was raised a positivist. Positivism is my reality. I understand its rhetoric, or at least, I feel comfortable inhibiting its structures, but in my heart, I know I am more, much more. I never fit in. As a child, I used to draw a lot. I played an instrument and enjoyed classical music. I knew where to escape when life became monotonous with all its demands for sense-making.
Postructuralist ideas became a highway that brought me back to the familiar shores of thought. And now I am quieted and dumstruck by Erin Manning’s “what if knowledge were not assumed to have a form already? What if we didn;t yet know what needed to be taught, let alone questioned?” (Minor gestures, p. 9) What if? We are condiitioned and trained to live in the reality that Manning calls neo-liberalism. What if we did not have to conform? If only I could take a pill like Neo in the Matrix trilogy and wake up a real reality. Is it even a specific reality? Neo and his fellow humans shared one, but are realities singular?