CALL ME MAGGIE

To live is to converse.  Sounds glib, until you ask yourself how many people in your life you have a vital, clear, continuing verbal relationship with.  Some people do, but a lot do not; I include myself in the latter.  I have short intense wranglings, but rarely life long explications.

There is a history of dialogic relationships – friends who chat – in literature: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Iago and Othello, Holmes and Watson, Vladimir and Estragon, Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern among the best known.  A contemporary conversation worth checking out is that between Lars Iyer and W. – a philosophic and funny wrangle between two UK philosophy professors – in Iyer’s books Spurious and Dogma.

Here is a good description – by the philosopher Bakhtin – of how dialogue is the essential act of communion that gives us life, the medium by which we are inducted into…