I.A.M.

Dear American Literati and Colleagues
Across the Curriculum.

“Pure chance might lead to absolute
newness, to creations that could not
have been forseen even if one knew
the unrevealed contents of self or cosmos. 

Almost as a matter of definition, such
absolute newness (in either evolution
or art) can only arise if the process
itself has no purpose, for where there
is purpose, creations  reveal  it and are
not, therefore, absolutely new.”
                        Lewis Hyde, on Trickster.

Outdoors of Doors
Leadership Programs
 
Incommensurate:  to measure  one
realm or domain or aspect in the terms
of another realm or domain or aspect.
 
To assess Outdoors, say, in terms of
Indoors or vice versa.  Judge Florida
in terms of North Carolina & vice versa.
Assess Turk&Greek rivalry in terms of  
a small liberal arts college nestled in the
Blue Ridge,  my so-called courses with
them other guys etc.
 
Incommensurate: 
      can't measure one in the terms
      of an other without doing injustice
      to the integrity of both. 
 
We do it all the time.  
 
                        I.A.M.
Incommensurate Awareness Month
 
Celebrating how I rip-off, reduce and
translate into my own terms the values
of Other and Whole—any other, any
whole.
 
How could it be other wise?
 
Irrationality?  I rationalize to understand.
Illogical:  I make logical or scold as  illogical
and ignore. Dreams, I translate into Waking
Life
 
I curse the darkness & lite it with my own
lucid schemes:  illuminate unconscious with
my conscious aims, goals,  and measurable
outcomes.
 
Naturally.
 
Knowing this ( my incommensurations)
is different if not better than not.
 
I hate “other”  and “else”  and “whole”
and “holy”  if it’s not in  my own terms
of desire. My way.
 
I could deny this.  Cover it in emperor’s
new clothing  But this is I.A.M.  Time to
confess my  crimes of fashion: throw
beads,  bare my breasts.
 

Cake & Eat IT too (What Really Counts)

          Sustain Ability:
    Imagine Converse Action
        across a Curriculum
         I wonder if I can.
 
I like to team up with Liberals and
excoriate Bad Guys across the I'll
& then cross-over to Conservatives
and help them blast their own Bad
Boys Bad Boys. 

Double Agency, Double-Dealing,
Duplicitous and 2 faced: cake &
eating it, too.

Why be half-assed when I can be
whole?  Bad Guys galore.  Any
one have a problem with this?
 
Evaluation
 
Cool trumps all.  Hot: second place
Savvy: third.  Sick’s cool in extreme
sports and Gnarly  too, though not
so much in Connecticut . . .
 
Need a rubic to assess these &
other designations (novice,
competent & exemplary
classifications) for what
counts, what really
counts.

You count me!
You really count me!
 
  Heart of Thinking:
Drawing Distinctions:
  When to Holdem
  When to Foldem
 
 Guardian Naughts.

Rigor on the one hand.
Innovation, too. Choice
on the one hand--life,
too. Neither  either/or
nor alternatives but cake
& eat it too.

Failure Validates Faith

The heart of thinking:
             drawing distinctions
The heart of academics:
             arguing them out.
The heart of liberal art:
             relating them.

   “Talent of the Room” *
 
Crossing the rubric con parting
red sees into the wildness toward
promised lands & frontiers yet
unknown: nothing better  than
waiting for Gödel to finish my
consistency & completeness
theorems.  
 
Flannery sat stunned studious
every morning: even if nothing’s
happening, it’s important  I be
present when some news comes in.
 
Bly says ideas are flocks of birds
roosting in his skull after flying by
everyone else to where there’s
room in the inn.
 
     Success confirms Belief.
     Failure validates Faith.
     I’m not spiritual worth a
     damn but religious as hell
     Religion is so far beyond
     my Good & Evil damned
     moral sense, it’ s not
     even  funny.
 
             
* Michael Ventura
http://kelleyeskridge.com/other-things/the-talent-of-the-room/
 
Most people can blame their sellouts on the institutions they work for, or on
the way everybody else does business, or on the political climate, or whatever.
The vast majority of us are simply hired to do a job and then ordered to cut
corners, and we feel we have little choice. But nobody orders anybody to
become a writer. And nobody becomes a writer without dreams of glory and
art. Writers do their selling out consciously, alone in their rooms, where they
can’t help but know what they’re doing, adjusting sentence after sentence to
what’s saleable, to what the publishers or the editors or the studios want. It
takes a while for those adjustments to become reflexes — a long while of
whittling away what’s best in yourself.

IT (amateur & professional and why they can't Just Get Along)

IT

IT has to come from beyond me
flapping in on a wing & a prayer:
doves, alien invaders, incoming
information,

I want IT so bad I can’t afford
the bad-it-takes. My macular
conceptions. Pretend.

      Goodie for me.

Repelling what I ask for
resisting like rhino the
slings & arrows of
Miss Fortune.

Accentuate the negative:
lack, want, need, desire,
poverty I have with me
all ways. .

Look, the doves cry:
a deficit.
 
Dear Leagues & Legions:
Co laborers across the
      Curriculum.
 
I would avoid like sin the
sound of  professionalism
its dominant pair of dimes
   I salute and  preach
      subversion.
 
 Bumper Sticker Professing:
      Bite the hand !
 
   (All ye, All ye: in free!)
 
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind That is
blowing in  the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in
the snow, And, nothing himself,
beholds Nothing that is not there
    and the nothing that is.
 
 Wallace Stevens' Snowman
         reconfigured

IT

IT has to come from beyond
me flapping in on a wing &
a prayer: doves, alien invaders,
incoming information,

I want IT so bad I can’t afford
the bad-it-takes. My macular
conceptions. Pretend.

Goodie.for me.

Repelling what I ask for
resisting like rhino the
slings & arrows of
Miss Fortune.

Accentuate the negative:
lack, want, need, desire,
poverty I have with me
all ways. .

Look, the doves cry:
a deficit.

TRIAD

I. TRIAD

Looks binary, sure but consider that
reverse S in the middle—separating
and  joining, mediating one could say,
governing ruling.



First Church of the  Yin-Yanger, other
wise nothing but ongoing  battle of the
sets--what Gary H. might  call
           The 2 Economies
 
    II. PROFESSIONALISM
 
I talk it & talk it 
Risky business,
I say go for it:
the daring: Do !
Be a fool for
christ’s sakes.

Toward Frontiers
yet Unknown,
Follow your gnosis,
Stalwart pioneer: you
yr  drinking gourd. 

Walk it? O my my
O my no  I’m a
professor: talking
is my  walking.
 
      III     Free Play:
 Improvisation in Life and Art

My cousin: a fine painter & alcoholic.
 [ Narcotics cannot still the tooth
      that nibbles at the soul.
           Emily Dickinson ]
  He painted clouds and skylines.

“If I could just get my head out of
the way,” he’d  be telling me—often.
    “I could do something good.”

We  know this.  Some insist on writing
our first person pronoun in  lower case
(i)  so as to  down-play EGO.  And we
kick our own and each other’s ass for
our EGO ways.  What an Ego! we
proclaim. 

I watch myself side-wise out of the
corner of my I walking past windows
of department stores.

 “mirror” and “miracle” both derive
from  Indo European smei meaning
“to smile.”

I  watched baby sister playing peek-a-boo
with herself in themirror above the sofa:
hide & seek and a great grin as she caught
herself in the glass:  I see you

                Ha! Aha! Ah!

Steven Nackmanovitch (Free Play)
reminds us that in some sense we
must disappear to be creative. 

We know this  already. It's frustrating
that we can not.  Wherever Ego there
I am. 

For art to appear, we have to disappear. (51)

Tell me something I don’t already know.
Tell me how.

Origin of Humor, Science, Art

Dear American Literati, Readers in Humanities, Dialecticians.
and Colleagues Across the Curriculum. (Courseing without
Borders Series)
 
   ORIGINS ORIGINATING ORIGINALITY ORIGINALLY   
 

 
CLASH, CRASH, COLLIDE: when 2 or more “matrices” (frames of
mind, realms of culture, custom, disciplines, traditions) bump into
each other at the cross roads, so to speak, THAT RIGHT THERE
is the  origin of
 
humor (ha!)    -     a reversal of frames of reference
                                   (release of cognitive tension)
science (aha!) –    fusion into a new synthesis, discovery
                                              (Eureka!)
art (ah!)    -           illumination of incompatibles, symmetries,
                                paradoxes etc: ritual & arts.
                                           (catharsis)
 
Mahatma Gandhi, spic & span in white
loin cloth & wooley winter scarf steps
from his limo, hits  black ice and,  kinetic
body language & gesture galore,  flails
to avoid the fall of man,  landing  splat-
solid on  the  side walk —askew, askance,
akimbo  
 
Collision of 2 matrices:
proud appropriate dignity on the own hand,
humbled appropriate indignity on the other.
                 HA!  AHA!   AH!
 
The humor may be obvious. 
Consider what science could generate.
Sandal crampons?   And as for ART.
Ah the humanities  born &  born again
at the crossroads—birth of the blues and
the devil’s hangout.  
 
Gregory Bateson spent his last months and days
at Esalen on Big Sur outside San Francisco. Early
80’s—fully aware of the whack-o, castles -in-the-
sky  character of  New Agers. 
 
Raised a hard core savvy atheist by his British 
empiricist father and spending his life time as
biologist, anthropologist, old school (then new
school) cyberneticist:  systems, information,
and  communications theorist:   by the end of
his life he was aware of the inadequacies of both
science and mystical-ism 
 
“A pox on both houses,” he proclaimed,

But Gregory New Agers as a necessary corrective
to a Righteous Science  blinded by its own rationalistic,
logically positivistic lite & lucid schmes: aims, goals,
&   measurable outcomes same as it ever was.
 
Rationalism and Irrationalism
& why can’t the Just Get Along?
“The doctrine of hatred must be
preached as the counteraction
of the doctrine of love when that
pules and whines.” says Emerson,
more or less in the same dialectical
vein more and less on the same
page.

HA!  aHA!  Ah!