Samuel Scoville: The Other Environmentalism

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The Other Environmentalism

Drawing Distinctions Across the
Curriculum (Courses Without
Borders Series & Local
Food , too)

The Other Environmentalism

Encourage failure.
(broad margins for
error aka room for
play)

Acknowledge & even
turn up the liabilities of
clarity, recognizing the
unsung resources in our
attention deficiencies
& ignore-ance..

Environmentalism

(on the one hand)
help! help!
I can’t breathe!
but don’t touch my hands

The Other Environmentalism

(on the other hand)
oh, that’s so
much better!

Can you tell the difference?

Can you tell the relationship?

Can you tell the difference
between telling the difference
on the one hand and on the
other hand: not telling the
difference?

And the relationship?

Can you put it in play?

(IT, I said. Do I always
got to be spelling IT
out?)

xxxooo, Sam

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Auto Bio

I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by a thief in the night sometime in the late 19^thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow, squeezing off a couple of rounds and sending the burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to Philadelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him. She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-it would have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY but INSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville

Samuel Scoville