To spite, I think, the arrogance of historiographers that all of progress is dialectic, that one side contradicts another to resolve in some somewhat new synthesis, it does sometimes happen that issues are in some interesting or significant opposition.

Most of the time, however, the process of the world is not oppositional but one side or position passes the other-by…on different trajectories in alternate concepts of what is a space.

But when resolutions occur, when a concept is bombarded, reasonably, in terms of its contradictions, its fading applicability, its historical place no longer, then the issue of process, of a certain sense of historical progress, is – as they say -interesting.

The difficulties include the outlook that all is dialectical, that change and history emerge from opposites, that the temptation, the persuasion of thinkers who want to taste or revel in change, spend their energies constructing theories of what is an opposition, thereby to discover meaning: for themselves? – for meaning’s sake?

But here, meaning and the politics of ideas-in-opposition merge, and it is difficult to distinguish what is meaning from what/who wins or loses.

It is difficult, too, to say that meaning or winning from a dialectic process is, in any real sense, progressive; merely that one occurs later than another, or displaces it. Here the winners claim primacy, virtually because they won, but call it ideological or truth.

Here, too, the claims of prophets tend to outweigh the claims of wisdom.

…and where am I?

Entering into the bureaucratic fray with my self, I thought, on the line, I discovered I did not exactly exist.

“I want,” I cried out into the winds blowing back at me, the spittled sounds thrown back into their esophageal source before they hardly passed the lips hoarsely whispered. “I want,” diminished into an unbearable, unheard, un-I-am.

“You are,” they told me each, who we say you are; a digit, a few numbers in a master main frame which writes checks each pay day, a contract for certain services. “You are,” I didn’t hear at first. “You can’t, cannot have,” grew inaudible at first crossing paths with my own, “I want” – then grew incessantly louder, bigger, encompassing my “I wants,” surging to a gigantism beyond my being.

I sat here licking wounds, my sheepish dog’s tail hanging down, wagging just so slightly to blow away the fumes of self’s fogging disappearance, trying to clear the air so I can see where I am, now, assess the wounds and other damages, and seek the places whose paths have not yet chosen to reveal themselves.