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Icarus at home # 4
I am embarrassed, I don't even know the title of my own book, which is actually not as stated in the previous posting - sigh, how sad is that? In fact it is actually called, Here Comes the Bogeyman: Exploring contemporary issues in writing for children. It is not surprising, then, that I omit stuff I shouldn't. In the last posting I was talking about Derrida (Duh - Duh.... Duh... Duh... Duh... Derrida - who is not as hard to read as some may think - once you get him you can see what he says) but I am ashamed to say I omitted to include this because its not my thinking, though the thinking of someone I work with. She says, "...over the past two millennia artists and writers have been moved to fill the gaps in the story of Icarus, and to tell and retell it in line with contemporary axiology and epistemology. Such intercessions can work as devices that allow us to articulate Foucault’s insistence that anyone’s life can be a work of art. But art is created only with effort, and with a conscious decision to intervene in the present. This involves several epistemological acknowledgements. One is to confirm that we are indeed dependent upon intimacy, and that it is incumbent upon us all to nurture such relationships. This is at the heart of the African philosophy of the self, ubuntu, the humanistic ideal that can be loosely translated as, ‘a person is only a person in relation to others’. It is also at the heart of the communicative mode known as parrhesia: free speech, or openness; the speech that is about intimacy, honesty and truth. Intimacy is about communication with the other, and parrhesia is a form of intimacy that requires courage because there is risk involved in it: the risk of offending those to whom we are attached, the risk of hurting those we love, or those who love us, the risk of damaging our own reputation." And then we were thinking, ubunto, we are only here in relation to the "other" and then we spin all the way back to ideas on the consequence of real, true stories which become more fiction than history. Our imaginations, shaped as they are by the twin impulses to connect, and to detach, fill in the gaps. The Icarus story, like our own biography too, is one whose bigger story lies in the ellipses,
lurks in the unsaid, and loiters in the silences as hypothetical postulates which exist in and around the story itself; in and around the story of the other and otherness... and this makes perfect sense to me. But I remember this boy, I met him a couple of times and he lived in Brighton and was such a darling - don't look but listen, Gary Moore was 58 when he died yesterday - shit, such an Icarus boy - and what a player, listen live - I can play this but only as parody or pastiche and not like the man who wrote it and plays it here or indeed the man who sings it - and he is dead too - oh: