Jeremiads was a Bullfrog

Compose & Be Composed

(Can you imagine: requiring this kind
of fooling around? And then: grading it,
too? You’d have to serve wine!)

Sampling Edward Hirsch's
the demon and the angel: Searching
for the Source of Artistic Inspiration..

“That is always best which gives me myself…
that which shows God in me fortifies me, that
which shows God out of me, makes me a wart
and a wen.” Emerson

“What reasonable man would like to
be a city of demons, who behave as if
they were at home, speak in many
tongues, and who, not satisfied with
stealing his lips or hand, work at
changing his destiny for their
convenience?” Czeslay Milosz

Adam Zagajewski approves “the great
artists and prophets of our time
who rebel against the dictatorship
of reason, rationalism, science,
technology, common sense” —
working for a return of faith &
a metaphysical imagination.”

“It is an enormous error,” says Hirsch. “to try to
implant these categories in society, for, as
Zagajewski makes absolutely clear, ‘there is not
even the slightest correspondence between the
organic and holistic in imagination and an organic
and holistic society and state’”

Right there: a distinction between kinds of TALK
that address the possibilities of an organic and
“holistic” imagination on the one hand,

and Society & State on the other

—like the difference between SHALOM, say, and
war&peace; the difference between the kingdom
within, say, & inner city crime Darfur Iran & Iraq
our college debt & smoking tents gender equality
in the Cowpie Owl & Spade items of interest…

We conflate and confuse this distinction
(inner and outer affairs) when we talk about
INTEGRATING THE TRIAD
in external terms: finding courses and work
assignments and service projects, all three
devoted to the same themes as if integration
were to take place in society and state rather
than in the individual imagination.

“I wouldn’t walk across the street to save the
world” says Thoreau somewhere in Walden: a kind
of talk that makes good sense in “School” Mode but
not in “Church” & “State” modes: might as well take
Rev. Jeremiah Wright to your next Hilary debate and
expect applause.

Kinds of Talk

I call this kind of talk I'm talking Engmajor Talk only
to differentiate it from the kind of talk in Bob Swope’s
Cognitive Science article on Protocals for Creative
Strategy, or the Dr. K. kind of talk in the Asheville C/T
about the “shallow levels of conversation” regarding
“the real systemic crises confronting our county,” or
Professor Collin’s “desiderata” & “consideration”
(from "sidereal," of the stars) talk in his Physics Photo
of the Week, and of course the Housekeeping Kind of
ex officio talk glue & mortar that addresses home eco-logics
and the business of doing business.

Sloppy talk-taxonomy here. Anyone can improve my terms
and categories. It all can be said to amount to what the
anthropologist Malinowski calls PHATIC—empty strokes
& status differentiating & sustaining talk like hey, how you
doon? what’s going on? nice day! etc.

See me
Hear me
Touch me
Feed me talk:
crucial means for maintaining relationship.

Stephen Pinker (The Stuff of Thought)
claims every utterance has 2 agenda:

1) information & expression
2) negotiating relationship.

Bottom line and BOTTOM LINE

The first bottom line is rational & conscious:
talk tokens, subject-matter, content manipulation.

The second bottom line is irrational & unconscious:
(frame of mind-set, attitude, bias&belief tolerances).

We “privilege” the first bottom line: makes sense.
The second bottom line is literally non-sense

(no thing: which is why any interest in this aspect
of experience is appropriately nihilism in the best
sense although Dr K & I have yet to argue this Out)

We talk about the second bottom line in the terms of
the first bottom line, a natural born ongoing confusion
and of course the mother of much necessary but
insufficient contra-addiction & paradox which
together plus ongoing conversation provide
the only meansI know for putting it all in
play or what’s a college for?

xxxooo, Sam