Hi Francoise,
I see that I did misinterpret an earlier message:
>I refuse pain and cruelty which I see as sad-masochism because
>>in my mind pain and cruelty are very separate from pleasure and joy. That
>>these experiential constructs are fused in ways of being is another
>>set of isssues that are fine with me. That these are decent ways of being
>>(or indecent) again never struck my mind! Am I understanding what you
>>are saying?
I was not understanding what you were saying.
There's another miscommunication in our last exchange -
You wrote:
>>And I cannot imagine a triumph that is contingent upon someone elses
>>failure. There is something odd to me about the picture that you paint.
>>In chemistry there are these kinds of tubes that communicate so that
>>when you pour a volume of water in one of them the water goes into the
>>other tube too. That is the picture that I am getting and it somehow
>>doesn't fit with a picture of mutual constitution. I don't know
>>that things work the way that you describe them.
If I have given the impression that triumph is contingent for me on
someone else's failure, I have to correct it. Sometimes, triumph
does entail succeeding despite expectations, and then it is
tinged I suppose with the triumph of combat - the defeat of
expectations. More often, for me, triumph implies going beyond
oneself, triumph over the past, over real and imagined injustices,
disappointments, mistakes - and insofar as all such memories and
imaginings index concrete situations and relationships with others,
the ghosts of the past are defeated in my triumphs.
I suppose that things may not work for you the way they work for me.
Those tubes you describe in the chemistry lab are a lot like how I
imagine channels of influence - tangled & cross wired.
- Judy
Judy Diamondstone
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
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