HAROLD BRODKEY
603
We have the experience of learning a broad-based version of
English at some point in our school lives to suggest to us what it
might be like to be part of a larger community that experiences peace
inwardly and is united against outward barbarisms, solecisms of
force - but this reality-of-Ianguage must be further looked at before
it is used too firmly as a base for what we do next.
What our generations do is they alter grammar and learn a
generational grammar, just as writers learn various kinds of writerly
grammars, and politicians learn political grammars and modes of
speech and methods of seduction and of negotiation and of argument;
and then they proceed to experiment with the world and the shape
and organization of the world.
In a highly politicized world-context, certain statements take
on a particular note of revelation which one might describe as pre–
ceding a change in law and culture which, however, can never be
ideal unless you change, by coercion, people's sense of themselves and
change, thereby, the actual meaning of the word ideal. The thing
must exist before the word truly changes .
. You can certainly attempt something which has not been seen
but that ought to represent a sensible limitation of attempt as well.
What-is-there, the what-is-there now must gain in force and impor–
tance until we are truly human. The loathesomeness of systems leads
us to deride all systems or most and their languages and language–
beliefs, the encoding of what is correct and essential to those systems
which lies within the language of those systems. This is American
and dangerous and anarchic and very dear to me; and perhaps there
is some justice and some sense in it.
Because of the role of language in these matters and because of
the requirements of knowledge about events that must be met, re–
quirements of adequate or inadequate but at least well-reported in–
formation, it seems to me that at this impasse, if we are not Catholic
or Pentecostal or Orthodox Jew and bound to uphold the inevitability
of Armaggedon and the end of the world, and the desirability of an
immediate end, if we are to avoid the impasse, we must band to–
gether with others and live in certain ways.
Within any reality experienced as largely
political,
by which I
mean nonabsolutist and open to competition and argument under
some form of common law, law held in common
despite
divergences
of belief, law in some system of altruism and self-interest, then, some–
times insufferably, nearly everything
moral
is to be considered a way
of working toward peace: personal honesty, attempting to rear chil-
