[K.W.]
I don’t know… I don’t… I mean, I…
[K.W.]
I wonder about…
ageism in the States. . . . But I think it’s partly youth culture, it’s advertising culture, but I wonder if it also serves… these sort of firewalls between generations…conversations and generational…relationships to… to…
our own…moral values.
[K.W.]
This sense a moral effort is sort of a series of assaults or something.
Rather than continuous and ordinary.
[K.W.]
I don’t know, and that sounds… it sounds a little theory-land-y.
[M.D.]
It’s a fitting theory for…
for passing the buck, because it suggests that there’s no generational overlap, and generations don’t face the same things, and that if you’re alive, whatever generation is dominant in terms of media discourse, the people that are alive are facing the same challenges.
[M.D.]
. . .What is the dominant discourse a generation is facing . . . . ?
[M.D.]
There’s Akhilim Bembe, he’s a Cameroonian philosopher, and he speaks about this idea of multiple enclosures. We just want to continue dividing, dividing, dividing.
[M.D.]
And so, that’s another enclosure.
[M.D.]
But put one generation on this side.
[M.D.]
And the other generation on the other.
[M.D.]
But… and then he says, like, his idea is,
[M.D.]
the enclosure, the only enclosure we have . . .
[M.D.]
is common human vulnerability, that infinitude.
[M.D.]
That’s actually the only enclosure.
[M.D.]
That’s the one we’re all in. But that’s all.
[M.D.]
And the moment you dissolve all, you’ve got problems, I think.
[K.W.]
Which reminds me of our fragment of a conversation we had walking over to the…
[K.W.]
That sports bar . . . about… about the ancestors, I mean,
[K.W.]
this sort of continuum with the past.
[M.D.]
Hmm.
[M.D.]
That, yeah, that it doesn’t end, in a way.
[K.W.]
It’s just simply essential.
[M.D.]
disinformations.
[K.W.]
The sense of the world that’s overcoming me is…is this sense of, you know, the ancestors and the gods being in…
[K.W.]
in the world and in me, and myself being only a part of the nested set of…
[K.W.]
of systems which are overlapping.
[K.W.]
Sets of systems from which I get… from which I take…
[M.D.]
Hmm. In Zulu mythology, it’s called… well, the English word is “shades.”
[M.D.]
They’re, like, the shades around the ancestors or the shades around you.
[M.D.]
Um, and you just…
[M.D.]
They’re there to support you. Like, that’s a good ancestor.
[M.D.]
Which is pretty much all ancestors in zoolumatology. They are there to support you.
[K.W.]
Mm-hmm.
[M.D.]
And, uh, so…
[M.D.]
… the connection point is there.
[M.D.]
even if it’s just in sight, like, you can see the shade,
[M.D.]
or in feeling, like, in being.
[M.D.]
connected to that.
[M.D.]
that long stream.
. . . Pause. . .
[K.W.]
Just there watching you masturbate and silence a call from your mother?
[ted]
Wait, is that part of the Zulu thing?
?