Saturday, September 22, 2007

No More Sex With Students


Un Mode

Dear Gödel, Escher, Bach
Independent Students &
Colleagues At Large
Across the Curriculum,

Preludic:

No more Sex with Students,
consensual or other wise.

Platonic Love—sure.

Life of Mind Minding indiscriminate
& indiscrete: the mix of idea, meme,
& meta force: the mess & guess of
formal & unformed what-were-you-
thinking? scrambling for hook-up,
connection & brief bright moments:
yes Yes YES!

But: Embodimentalism ‘n Manifestation
—touch this, touch that tango tangle—
no! NO No no.

***
Ludic:

None of the notions expressed below
are User-Friendly as far as industrialized
academics is concerned. They might
could stand as Representing a kind of
Zen-Talk (& nu-age), in which case they
may be viewed as specimen samples of the
strange ways of Zen, the same way we
might talk-about early cultures, beliefs,
habits, practices, or the way we study
religions-as-academicians: "hmm, I see
parallels, sames & differences; v
ery
interesting!” I muse, scratching the hairs
of my chinny, chin, chinz..

As opposed to considering these words
and notions (below) as diagnostic and
somewhat prescriptive.

Imagine:

Given: the double-bind of Epimenides
who, Cretan himself, claims all Cretans
are liars, or any one like me always
caught between a rock and hard place,
devil and deep blue see: damaged &
damaging if I do; damaged & damaging
if I don’t, & all the varieties of paradoxical
experience generated by my recursive
self-reference and self consciousness….

Consider:

A) To suppress perception,
to suppress logical, verbal
dualistic thinking—this is the
essence of Zen, the essence
of ISM. This is the UN mode

not Intelligent,
not Mechanical

just “ UN.”

Zen is holism, carried to its
logical extreme. If holism claims
that things can only be understood
as wholes, not as sums of their parts,
Zen goes one further, in maintaining
that the world can not be broken
into parts at all.

To divide the world into parts is
to be deluded, and to miss
enlightenment. (GEB, 254)

B) A Zen koan is trying to
break the mind
of logic. (255)

Enlightenment always comes
after the road of thinking is
blocked.

C) It is like a dumb man who has had
a dream. He knows about it but he cannot
tell it. When he enters this condition his
ego-shell is crushed and he can shake heaven
and move the earth. He is like a great warrior
with a sharp sword. If a Buddha stands in his
way, he will cut him down; if a patriarch offers
him any obstacle, he will kill him; and he will
be free in his way of birth and death. He can
enter any world as if it were his own
playground. Mumon on Joshu’s MU (259)

I say—always for the sake of argument (& do you see what
a neat little disclaimer THAT is?)—that these 3 items above
can Stand-For the HEART of the Goedel, Escher, Bach book,
that messing around long enough with what’s contained in these
3 samples will unpack and reveal the whole spirit of what that
fat book is playing with so beautifully and encyclopedically.

Taking a sharp sword to any Buddha that stands in the way.
Killing the patriarch at the cross road: familiar life-of-the-mind
notions, true? (Not to be confused with Life of the Bawdy Politic.)

All the variations on a theme: an eternal golden
braid, a goddam Chinese finger trap:



what is the theme?

Don’t want IT eclipsed by all the examples,
mathematical, musical, mythological and
picturesque that provide it’s embodimental
manifestations, true?

Post Ludic

Can you pull IT off—the trap?
in your own words? Reduce
IT to a nutshell?

Feel free to hit Reply,
or better: Replay to All.
We can indulge in some
Public Consensualism.
Getting GOOD at it.

xxxooo, Sam

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