[Dialogue] Recent discussions about identity and institutions

frank bremner fjbremner at hotmail.com
Thu Jul 26 01:25:56 EDT 2007


I'm grateful that this discussion is proceeding.  From time to time I have a 
story from the past that I share with people in other situations - often 
students I'm tutoring and/or their parents.  In 1982, when describing my two 
years in the US 1978-80 to some students on a three-day bushwalk (they kept 
on asking bloody questions?), one of them suggested I write a book.  Yeah, 
well ...... in another lifetime, maybe.  Or can I fold time (see the novels 
of Terry Pratchett!)?

The iron cross on my wall comes from when the Sydney House closed, although 
it may come from the Apia House (I scavenged the brass plates for another 
wall).  Underneath all the institutional forms, it still means something.  
But what?  Continue the conversation!

I have a couple of forms of Exile.
1)  One form of Exile is when someone - of long experience - defiantly 
refuses to see any continuity between ToP work now and the long history back 
into the 50s etc.  "We're in a new time now" - aren't we always?  I feel 
exiled into a category of "religiosity" that I don't belong in.  Rationally 
it makes sense not to live IN the past, or use the language we used back 
when.  But in my gut I have the experience OUT OF much of that history and 
it makes sense.  So those of us with that sense and language need to keep 
talking.  I'm constantly translating between various jargons.
I feel the same way Marshall does, as if someone was burning down the 
ancient Library of Alexandria.  Maybe "The Third Archive" can be seen as the 
new Library of Alexandria of recent times?
2)  Another Exile was when I had two experiences of workplace bullying as 
people justified their positions in the hierarchy of education systems.  
Thirty years (approx) of high school teaching came to end.  My catharsis of 
this - write a novel about every school I've been in - "but no-one would 
believed it!".  I don't know - "Boston Public" touched on a lot of it.

When I started teaching "Religion" in schools, and then when I started the 
BTh, I said to some friends who would understand "I know the language is a 
jargon, but the area of investigation  and discussion and "praying with the 
mind" just "won't lie down for me".  Some people understood.  Walking away 
would be an apostasy, not against some set of doctrine or practice, but 
against an inner voice that will not go away.

How else do I talk about my fascination with Nikos Kazantzakis, such that I 
buy books about him, and chat with a Greek Orthodox scholar in Melbourne 
(the globe's third largest Greek city) about who shoudl direct a film based 
on "Report to Greco"?  It just will not lie down.  And so I wrestle with 
this angel, too.

Cheers

Frank Bremner





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