[Dialogue] Recent discussions about identity and institutions

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

Greetings Frank,

Your deft strokes with your pen bring vital vibrations
to many strings in the interior of many of us.  It is
music to the heart.  Keep these kinds of reflections
going.  Thanks so much.
Charles Hahn
--- frank bremner <fjbremner at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 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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