Monday January 7, 2019

Prepare for a spinning forth of words — poetic enunciation, in the hope that by acting one can learn the part. I’m roused by the interpellating “you,” the hailing of me as a person in the title and preface to Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, my nerves get the best of me. We live in frightening times. But it needn’t be this way. Let us dream ourselves into a post-neurotic utopia, without foregoing the underlying continuity of experience. I worry, though, that like Eldridge Cleaver, my most persistent intellectual quality is doubt. Ishmael Reed pointed to doubt as evidence of Cleaver’s role as a “trickster.” Am I a trickster, too?