Great Falls

FICTION

Richard Ford's
great
falls

the title of today’s story.

DADA

A European movement in art and literature,
founded in Zurich in 1916 with an admittedly
destructive intent—to mock, pervert, and
demolish all the tenets of painting, music,
poetry, philosophy, logic, and even reason
itself, and set up a pretended madness instead,
in protest against what the leaders of the
movement regarded as the insane and vicious
destruction of civilization, life and thought
taking place in the trenches of World War I.

(William Rose Benet: The Readers Encyclopedia)


Salvador Dali: “The Persistence of Memory”

The famous and much abused word “surreal” and
“surrealism” was generated by DADA. and of
course you can hear that word often as a
companion to the phrase
oooomyyyygawd
on tv a lot—on reality shows (ironically) as well
as the many talk and Hollywood entertainment
programs where interview-ees express amazement
at one thing or another in their recent lives: astonished.
Stunned stupid as if struck by a stick and ready for
study.

great
falls:
felix
culpa:
“the
fortunate
fall.”

The Early Greek philosophers had a word for bottoming-out,
when any one finally hits rock bottom (fundament) and all
supports and addictions & belief-systems and fictions and
facts and illusions and logic and rationality and medication
and family ties, friends, and work & wellness and whatever
seems to make sense, uphold rationality and so called sanity
to provide a ground and a leg to stand on give way to great
falls bumppety bump all the way down the stairs so to speak.

A-PORIA is what they called IT; no pores, no opportunities,
no openings, no exit. Damnit. And that situation and state of
minding was considered JUST RIGHT for the Beginnings of
Philosophy (& religion—though the two are not the same deal.)

Imagine--putting into play:

,,,................no-sense-at-all
commonsense nonsense

It’s not necessarily the case that the Dadaists and Surrealists
hated the common sense (in their mocking perversions and put-
downs): but that they felt its dominance eclipsed the larger
resource of nonsense and no-sense-at-all and consequently:
look where our ignore-ance has landed us.

That was then. This is now.

ok ok Great Falls (the story) is not this dire, nor is it dada-esque
or surreal. Just a story about a kid watching his family values
break up. Great Falls. No big deal. Happens all the time. Get
used to it. Only a fiction. Once upon a time. We’ve got
chemistry to study. Environmental Science. Stuff to
get r done damnit. Taking care of business.