Got Room?

Dear Colleagues,

Everyone’s a Writer.
It’s the media
via/per
anyone goes
thru college.

The media is the message
& messenger; but it never is.


The Talent of the Room

All mankind's troubles are caused by
one single thing, which is their
inability to sit quietly in a
room.
~Blaise Pascal, Pensees, II, 139

variant:

All man's miseries derive
from not being able to sit
quietly in a room alone.
BLAISE PASCAL

Apologia for my Strife

Years and years ago my daughter asked
me how come I was always going over
to the office which I call a study and
studio in the summer & I couldn’t justify
my love until I noticed Ernst Larsen
constantly tending tractor as I walked
over and again as I walked back; and I told
her: I’m a buttfarmer, Liz. Worker-mans:
all day long rain, snow, sunshine, sleet.
Cultivating local food for thought—
scritch, scratch like Mr.
MacGregor & his
carrot patch. .

No excuse for it. Indefensible. Esp.with no
product of significance & lasting value.
Got to be turning the other cheek.
Fred Solomon used to call out
as we wasted a June morning
on the Spidel Wall:

“Don’t pay us any
never mind. We’re just
sitting here, passing time.
Stochasticizing.”

hoping to relieve concern of passers-by
passing and re-passing with weed
whackers & wonder.

Paranoia.
Comes with compulsion.
Companion to obsession.

“Look: we’re working here!”

I’ve known Writers and I’m not – rant-er &
rave-er, sure; but Michael Ventura’s words are
generalize-able. Go and don’t do the same but
likewise, the equivalence, writer or no writer:
make room of your own, desert retreat. hole
in the wall—noggin Walden right in the mist
of the maddening crowd, colleagues, family,
friends: a place to learn to listen, obey, garden.

“There’s no harm or blame in not having a talent.
But it is very painful to have some of the talents,
almost all of the talents, except the one you
really need”:

the talent of the room: sitting weeks,
months, years—alone in a room

“The teachers who fawn on your early work
don’t usually tell you about this because they’re
not writers, they’re teachers. They may do some
writing on the side, but few have staked their lives
on writing.

Their wages, their prestige, their social life, their
surroundings, the rhythms of their days and of
their years, are rooted in the profession of
teaching, which is an activity done in a room
with other people, surrounded by rooms filled
with people, upstairs and downstairs and down
the hall.

You cannot teach
the demands of solitude
in such places.

Even if you talk about it,
you’re not teaching it—the
surroundings contradict the lesson.

The surroundings are always the lesson.
That’s the trouble with college.That what
it teaches more than anything else, is
how to go to college. Michael Ventura

http://www.michaelventura.org/writings/LA4.pdf

I quibble with Ventura here: We teach
How to Take a Course—and I’ve
mentioned that before always for the
sake of argument but no one takes the
bait: an indoor challenge event.

Emerson said to be great is to be misunderstood;
it don’t follow that to be misunderstood is to be
great. And the same with the Talent of the Room.
I got that ability--weeks, months, years: but can’t
claim freedom from troubles or any skill in
capitalizing them: starting a swell, squeezing
the universe into an over whelming questioning
across the curriculum: paper or electric company?

“The room, you see, is a dangerous place. Not in
itself, but because you’re dangerous. The psyche
is dangerous. Because working with words is not
like working with color or sound or stone or
movement. Color and sound and stone and
movement are all around us, they are natural
elements, they’ve always been in the universe,
and those who work with them are servants of
these timeless materials.

But words are pure creations of the human psyche.
Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations.
Every word leads to another and another and another,
down and down, through passages of dark and light.
Every single word leads, in this way, to the same
destination: your soul.

Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word
has the capacity to start the journey. And once you’re
on it, there’s no knowing what will happen.

Locking yourself up with such things, letting them stir,
using these pure psychic creations as raw material and
deciding, each time, how much or how little you’re going
to participate in your own act of creation, just what you’ll
stake, what are the odds, just how far are you willing to
go—that’s called being a writer.

Every one’s a writer.

And you do it alone in a room.

(This is EngMajor kind of talk:
you won't hear Soc Science or
Hard talking this way. Fine Arts,
maybe--if not in howard cosell
mode. Just trying to differentiate
the parts, parties & partialities
here: turn up the differences so
as to put them in play across the
curriculum as usual: otherwise it
all sounds like house keeping:
eco-logic.)


xxxooo, Sam