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I have been away from this landscape, away at work in a rehearsal room in Maine, and am returning now. I want to record how dizzying it is to attempt to find an entry into this space now. I feel its playfulness and its impulses to engage--in virtually every link and sentence. But I can't feel a sense of its base--I don't have a sense of the grid here anymore. There are so many conversations opened and each one seems so rife with multiple possibilities. I wonder if this is how students feel when they waft their way into our worlds--as if there are just so many things to think about and potentially to engage with and the tools to tell the essential from the interesting diversions are not, as Heidegger would say, present to hand.

I want to draw a map now. I want to name the main streets. I want to identify the nurturing spaces and the business zone and I want to say why the city and play are both important spaces to enter into and also why it feels as if these require entrances and why we are not there already which is, I think, in part, that the self that is our "ownmost potentiality" is in fact divided from us, in ways that are at least analogous to what Handke describes.

The city I imagine is both a real place and an idea. It is the secret outdoor space at the foot of Elfreth's Alley where you can sit and be alone in the afternoon, the hump on the back of the man making hoagies in the Reading Terminal Market, the pennies on Ben Franklin's grave, the high-pitched voice of the old man wandering along Girard Avenue, looking just like Walt Whitman in tattered 70s polyester. It is the pleasures of the senses of all of these things and it is also my capacity to find them interesting, my joy in moving through them and reimagining myself in relation to them. There is a doubleness at work here, a way in which the city requires of me a capacity for play. If I am *there,* then a kind of playful willingness to engage is necessay. When I am in the city, the city is, perhaps equally, in me and to the extent that my neural pathways are lit up by my urban adventures, I am possessed by the ecstasy of connection. 

Is it the same doubless, or a second doubleness, that allows my city-playing to also allow me to connect very deeply to the experience of disconnection that the city provides. To perceive the myriad othernesses that separate the citylives with one another. To feel the mutual mistrust of the races, the sexes, the classes on the train. To know the dance of eyes that all look away. 

In any case, given: the city as both real and ideal. Play as a set of techniques of coming to know but also as an attitude (or a set of attitudes) that constitute deep modes of being in the world. Also given: doubleness and probably, multiple doublenesses, practices of distinguishing and dividing that become a pluralistic, textured  experience of knowing. Knowing as a verb of becoming and not of having or possessing. And so "given" is not, precisely, "given" as in for god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son but, rather, given in the sense of perpetually uncovered, discovered, recovered, known.

Writing, here, is a kind of a talisman of being (?), it is shorthand recording of the knowing of becoming. We write to record our moves in the grid, to know where we have been, but also to know the spirit that animates/d our trajectory. Writing helps us return our flights of fantasy to allow them to be seen in relation to certain grids (grids our our own selection and perhaps devising. Handke's writing is important to me because it feels like a mapping of the self's journeys in relation to itself. (Not arguing for its inclusion in our class, just saying.) In writing we have a chance to puzzle out our play and to imagine our own version of the city.

Writing and speaking and wandering together are all double forms of self-engagement and fellow-traveling, which is to say that when we write we write, potentially, for ourselves and for others. (Miss Stein: "I write for myself and for strangers.") Our students will, I hope, come to understand that writing can funtion as either for oneself OR for ones readers OR both.

From the point of view of. In the city, which is given (as above) two of the nurturing zones of business for me are "directed curiosity" and "from the point of view of." More on these and more flesh on these bare bones soon.