A Country French Salon
You enter a salon furnished with fin de siecle wit, yet modernist
tastes in color scheme, and an oddly comfortable kitchen table covered
with a red checkered oil cloth bon homie. One would think this would
all clash. Oddly enough it doesn't. You hear Burke (down home on the farm) chatting
quietly with Foucault (French).
Obvious exits path (to Conversation Foothills),
beach path (for a copita),
window (to flowerishes),
webme (to a digital parlor),
tavern(to an OnGoingLogue),
Foucault (French) says, "I wish I could have slipped surreptitiously into this discourse which I must present today, and into the ones I shall have to give here, for perhaps many years to come."
Burke (antinomian) says, "Imagine you have entered a room."
Foucault (French) says, " I should have preferred to be enveloped by speech, and carried away well beyond all possible beginnings, rather than have to begin myself."
Burke (antinomian) says, "You come late."
Foucault (French) says, "I should have preferred to become aware that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me..."
Burke (antinomian) says, "When you arrive, others have long proceeded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion..."
Foucault (French) says, "so that I should only have needed to join in, to continue the sentence it had started and lodge myself, without really being noticed, in its interstices, as if it had signaled to me by pausing, for an instant, in suspense."
Burke (antinomian) says, "a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retract for you all the steps that had gone before."
Foucault (French) says, "Thus there would be no beginning, and instead of being the one from whom discourse proceeded, I should be at the mercy of its chance unfolding, a slender gap, the point of its possible disappearance."
Burke (antinomian) says, "You listen for awhile, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar."
Foucault (French) says, "I should have liked there to be a voice behind me which had begun to speak a very long time before,"
Burke (antinomian) says, "Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you; to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally's assistance."
Foucault (French) says, "doubling in advance everything I am going to say, a voice which would say, You must go on I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin,..."
Burke (antinomian) says, "However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late,"
Foucault (French) says, "you must go, perhaps its done already,"
Burke (antinomian) says, "you must depart."
Foucault (French) says, " perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens onto my story,"
Burke (antinomian) says, "And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."
Foucault (French) says, "that would surprise me, if it opens."
Burke(antinomian) and Foucault(French) point to a Guest Book, and invite your comments.
Obvious exits: help (to the Welcome Room),
garden (to Reflections Onna MOO),
study (to A Tale of Some Teachers),
work rooms (to MOO && Theory).