PRIMORDIALISM (my term paper)

Dear Fiction-ers, Language-ers & Liberal Artists
and Colleagues Across the Curriculum

Be Wary: Rationalization Ensues.

Primordial
{“prior to ordiri: the weave)

no order
no rule
no regulation
no governance
no authority (author-ness)
no agenda, aim, purpose
no arches: an-archy

freedom
blank slate (tabula rasa)
apo-calypso: unveiling, uncovering
nothing (nihil) but to begin again,
start up from old scratch,
initiate, inaugurate,
originate, create,
generate

A frame, a state of mind:
primordialism
“in the beginnings: the word”

Uncanny: so used to
in medias res

on the road going some where
covering ground getting R done
are we almost there, through, over,
out of here... that originating original
origins seems uncanny. Don’t have
good words for IT. I’m calling IT
primordialism—but you can improve
my terms and images.

My classes: the 2^nd half (open-mic):
always provides some experiential clue
as to what primordialism is LIKE when
the arches of convention are not in place as
usual.. Uncanny. Lost. Where's the
lord of the flies when we need him?

DADA

A movement during the 1920’s 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
saw as the insane and vicious destruction
of civilization, life and thought taking
place in the trenches of World War I.

Wm Rose Benet: The Reader’s Encyclopedia.

Attack on convention:

nihilism
deconstruction
anarchy
elenchus

You know at least 3 of these terms.

Elenchus is the term for classical Socratic questioning
—questioning everything: digging up hidden and
underlying assumptions like truffles & exposing them
to light, pushing controlling and operating metaphors
till they collapse, challenging shared definitions and
common sense, under-cutting belief until ultimately: a
kind of bottoming out (except: no bottom) called
APORIA
(no pores, no portals, no openings, no exit)

At the point of aporia (in the classical view), philosophy
is said to begin: zero base, up from old scratch, re-invention
of the wheels of thought and belief: a rebuilding of the
“temple” (templates)

While not in just these terms, but in spirit, the Zen tradition
practices this nihilistic, anarchistic, deconstruction of habits
& habitations of thought and thinking with non-answerable
inexplicable koans, conundrums: riddles and parables intended
literally to “blow the mind” (nirvana), augmented by blows to
the shoulders with a stick—(I.E. steu: origin of the words “stun,”
“stupor,” “stupid,” “student” and “study”) rendering the
novitiate just right for the practice of what I call the liberal art.



Forgive this cheesy representation— Uma Thurman being prepared
to kill Bill: spanked by the Zen master as part of her reconfiguration
and transformation.

Creative Destruction (Bakunin, Nietzsche): pre-requisite for Creative
Construction. This is the awesome eco-logical truth & scandal of
“liberal art”—that BB Wolf blows the house away—straw, sticks,
bricks: makes no never mind. The house must come down in order
for “more stately mansions” (as Oliver Wendall Holmes describes it)

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted
past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine
outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!



Holmes is talking about the chambered nautilus
—which keeps enlarging its “house” (ecos) as it
grows. Creative destruction pre-requisite to
creative construction. We hate the destruction.
It hurts. The construction too: labor of love. Hurts.

Talking Life of the Mind here (“School Mode”)
Do not collapse, conflate, and confuse these IDEAS
with Life of the Bawdy Politic (“Church & State Modes”)

All this above is an effort to rationalize my own
madness and method—to put IT in a lofty frame
of dada-ish, nihilistic-like anarchistic deconstruction
not by burning down the educational house or throwing
stones and shoes at the convention we swim in—but
rather simply removing the convenient and conventional
structure of CLASSROOM EDUCATION: the lecture and
guided discussion that glues together a bunch of people
sitting to take notes, be informed, educated in accord
with a discipline: take the credit and run with it.

What happens when the mic is open and the resource
of mind minding mindfully is invited to play & be played.
No king, ruler, governor: NBC--nothing but chaos, mother
of invention too often eclipsed by getRdone noise from
which (always) the possibility of news.

That’s my version of DADA & you can say what it’s
LIKE and worth, if any thing, when the whelm filters
have been suspended and the ground is no longer
being covered nor is WORK or SERVICE getting
DONE, damnit. Nothing but the possibility of
potential: potency, power un-tapped or channeled.

As usual, anyone can improve my terms
and images, or what’s a college for? .

xxxooo, . Sam