All the reach that can be visioned and sustained

I find I’m in a journey in a large and heaving landscape: both personally, in a life, and as a member of the quote-unquote 'post-war' baby-boomer cohort. It’s something I need to write about, for both personal and collective-activist-generational reasons; for purposes of day-to-day navigation and for continuing mobilisation. I’ll start from two experiences – that's the kind of thing I'll persistently do here, because that's how in fact it is, this living – and move along from these, exploring and travelogueing, in the blog I’m initiating with this paper here.

Why 'Methuselah papers'? OK, it's a joke. Methuselah is a biblical patriarch and figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, who lived to 969 years: the longest life of all human beings, in the line from Adam to Noah.

To have Methuselah pinned at the head of the page, as we write or read this paper here, is a persistent prompt to beware patriarchy, delusions of continuity or bloodline, clinging and craving, factionalism and essentialism, a Promised Land or a Chosen or any other kind of supremacy; mythologising, cultural hegemony and adherence to any Book and priesthood.