Where were we? Where is this is all leading? Our Library of the Future: A Ghost’s Story has been the replacement of some books with others, a library with another library, by a scholar to come who listens to ghosts. And, now, the secret at the heart of this project and of all that is to come after Minus Plato ends is this (and he calls on me to whisper it here): what he learns from Indigenous artists today. Here my dear settler colonizer is embarrassed by the sheer simplicity of what has just typed, and how it smacks of that metaphorical decolonization of each and every white move to settler innocence, but even so, he is compelled to admit it here, to hold it up to the light, so that he can at least begin to understand it. So what is it that he learns from Indigenous artists today? Is this just another neocolonial project of ‘Learning from Athens’? Yes and no. He learns that such things as ‘classics’ and ‘contemporary art’ cannot operate beyond entrenches violence supremacies (of the past and of the now), except through an open commitment to precedence that embodies generations of traditions in cycles of knowledge-informing forms. It is here, on this tremulous note that the worlds of Minus Plato wants to end. Not with some transcendental Form-like perfection, nor with a deflated whimper, but with the whisper that comes from the rough earth where seeds push themselves through, as a journey, with interruptions, swerves, obstacles, overcomings.
To be continued…
