Voice is All

Dear Colleagues

If a fool persist in his ways,
he becomes wise.

The road of excess,
leads to the palace of wisdom.

Wm. Blake
Proverbs of Hell

2 of my favorite bumper stickers
proposing both audacity of hope
& the appropriateness of
fear & trembling.

Engmajor talk.

VOICE is ALL
(well: TIMING is ALL, too)

Content is galore.
Subject-object matter
& token topics always
at hand. E = mc square,
how bout them heels,
Pi & the Decimals,
slaughter of baby seals,
genocide in Darfur, global
warming and Jeremiah
Wright: what will we
discuss? profundities or
trivialities: always good
& plenty to talk about.

This is “School” mode,
yes? Not to be collapsed,
conflated, & confused
with “Church” mode,
“State” mode or
sticks & stones.

WHAT’s being said is NOT
what counts, damnit. Sure: it
counts, but not COUNTS-
counts, know what I’m saying?
There’s a difference, true?
Need we argue? The
media is the
message.

I read student writing talking
about room mates, motorcycle
rides, depression, sleep, Poe,
piglets, parents, decline of
masculinity, Emerson, body
image, sunrise, sunset, suicide
ridge, calling cows, Free Tibet,
Thoreau, greening of the campus
& its sustainability; & some of
it’s alive and some of it’s dead
and its animation don’t correlate
with the profundity or triviality
of its subject-object matter
and the token topics they
put in more or less
play.

But with its VOICE: author
authorizing authority
authoritatively.
Or not.

Content is galore. It counts,
sure, but it’s not what counts.
That’s the difference right
there between liberal arts &
Liberal Art. Need we argue?
I wish we could: it seems
crucial, the distinction.

It’s not WHAT we argue about,
but that we CAN & DO that counts.
Yes?

Timing counts, too. Is probably ALL even
more all than voice— worth arguing. Or you
can call it contextual awareness & the match-up
between depictive representational systems and
strategic analysis protocols.
A rose is a rose is a rose.

xxxooo, Sam