Cross as many lines as you like!

Who sets these lines anyway?

???

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THANKS, smb............everyone has lines of some kind; some relate to poetry, others to other aspects of life---everyone has lines that define what they can and can't handle....I wish you well in the lines of your life.-Ron

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THANKS, smb............everyone has lines of some kind; some relate to poetry, others to other aspects of life---everyone has lines that define what they can and can't handle....I wish you well in the lines of your life.-Ron

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One of the values of being in a community, a community with any continuity, is that one learns the limits of one;s engagement with others. Even if that community is a literary one, limits are expressed all over the place. I wrote the following paragraph in my memoirs and it will illustrate some of what I mean:

For those with a philosophical bent, studies in biography and autobiography tap into some of the most profound and interesting intellectual issues of our time and previous times; for example, are we the products of nature, nurture or a combination of both? When we come to write the story of a life, be it our own or someone else's, what kinds of plot structures does our culture provide for telling the truest story we can? When do we need to invent our own plot structures, and to what extent is this possible? How true can stories about people be, and how do we know whether they are true or not? Is it possible to be objective about one's own self, or about another human being? What are the limits of confidentiality when putting a life on public record? How, and in what ways, does the experience of having a self, of being a person, differ from one culture to another? Is there any value in leaving behind a voluminous anatomy of self, Such questions, and others like them, reach into central issues of recent literary and cultural theory. Issues pertaining to subjectivity, the social construction of the self, agency, identity, the structures of the psyche, and so on, are all part of this vast territory. The four books, in volumes one to five, that make up my memoir or autobiography are part of this burgeoning, this dynamic, field. And limits, one is faced with limits all over the place. to write one's story in detail with no limits would produce a mountain of stuff that would bore people to death. Even with limits the job is difficult. Over and out for now.-Ron

And here is yet more for the keen reader. If you are not keen and if you are the type of person who prefers punchy little passages of a few lines on the internet; or if you prefer pictures and photos, funnies and the farsical on the internet--stop reading right now and go somewhere else.-Ron in Tasmania

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Margaret Atwood, a wonderful contemporary Canadian writer(wonderful for some anyway) sees the Canadian character as one that is incurably paranoid. There are various strategies suggested by artists, writers and critics to cope with this paranoia. Art, religion, relationships, a strong sense of fate or destiny, an avoidance of the heroic and a taking refuge in the ordinary, in a reticence, in trepidation, in the soft escape and boxing experience into frames, into limits. These are some of the coping mechanisms seen by these analysts. If one understands Canadian history, one can understand the sense of the overwhelming, the impenetrable, the claustrophobic, the sense of a world which denies entry to the human. It is these attitudes to self and life that are evinced by Canadians and Australian artists towards their existential condition. But perhaps the central attitude is a radical, deep-seated ambivalence. Both Canadians and Australians are ambivalent about the heroic, the posture taken by the American.

I mention the Canadian and the Australian because it is in these two countries where I have spent all my life. I have realized, though, that the range of effects I could achieve writing as if I was an Australian or a Canadian were too narrow. It would be like playing one instrument, say, the drums or a cello. It would be too limiting. So I turned to writing in as broad a perspective as I could. I may have bit off more than I can chew. But even if I have, I find that there's a certain synchronicity in writing autobiography and also living my day to day life which makes the big-chew relevant to the daily nibbles that constitute the routine, the trivial, the predictable and the wonder that fills the interstices of life. I like to see this autobiography--now some 2600 pages--somewhat like the poet George Herbert