On Confusion and Misunderstanding

Dear Dialecticians, Transcendental Romantics,
American Literati: colleagues on both sides of
the desk and Across the Curriculum,

On Confusion and Misunderstanding
(Courses W/O Borders series).

Puns, jokes, creative play as well as misunderstanding
and pathological schizophrenia--all made possible by
the multi-level (and therefore ambi- valent, ambiguous)
significance of language and contexts and terms being
used in lower to higher “contexts” where their meaning
is in contradiction, generating delightful or problematic
paradox—depending on how savvy the users.


good Good GOOD GOOD GOOD
And these “goods” don’t Just Get Along.

What’s good for Farmer Brown is not good for goose and
gander (their fine feathered good) and what’s good for
Swannanoa valley might be bad to the bone for Brownm
and what WWC calls sustainable may well be non-sustainable
to the larger Meta-Sustainability going on globally. See
what I’m saying? Goodness gracious.

To say Warren Wilson CARES for me is to commit an
error of logical type, to use Bateson’s way of talking (and
also Russell & Whitehead from whom he got his use &
mis-use of their Hierarchy of Logical Types. Google if
you want.)

I slap my “lower level” partial & humanistic notion
of CARE onto WWC—which is a “higher” level of
organization—and I reduce and contaminate the Idea
(entity) of WWC by embodying it into my own terms
of concern.

“God is no respecter of persons.”
(“God never answers letters,” says John Updike)

Disturbing notions maybe, only when I forget how
I reify and personify ideas of a higher “level “ of type—
and talk about it in our “lower level” terms I stereotype
the ARCHTYPES—a terrible but necessary reduction.
A crime against the whole & holy, yes?

Not that there’s anything wrong with THAT. How can
I not? Don’t I materialize and often personify all
abstractions—give them characteristics of my physicality
so as to manifest a tangibility: measurable outcome?
Assessable? I make “God” and all abstractions into
my own images, so as gauge and weigh and use
& abuse —naturally.

It’s LIKE mixing metaphors.

Frozen by the burning sun.
The bullet hit me like a splash of rosewater,
Like chocolate as sweet as sauerkraut.

KNOWING I am doing it is one thing.
Pathetic? Maybe. Not knowing?
Pathological. It makes a difference.
To know or not know. Remember
or not.

I could not care so little if I did not CARE so much
makes perfectly good multi-level sense to me even
as it might seem a contradiction if not paradox to the
“uninitiated.”

There, there.

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make,
that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither
men nor toad-stools grow so....I fear chiefly lest my expression
may not be extra-vagant enough… many don't wander far
enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience,
so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been
convinced.....
Extra-Vagance! It depends on how your are
yarded.

I desire to speak somewhere without bounds, like a man
in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments, for
I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay
the foundation of a true expression...

This is from the man (Thoreau) who “wouldn’t walk across
the street to save the world.” “Rescue the drowning and tie
your shoelaces,” he said. Cold & uncaring—his dis-connect
and flat affect.

xxxooo, Sam