Samuel Scoville: Environ Mental

Monday, March 2, 2009

Environ Mental

Enviorn Mental

Flakes as large as
dollar bills falling
on lawns filling
up woods on
Jones Mountain
& communities
across our Western
Appalachians. .

MacGregor Smith
dumped a 2 liter
Coke bottle full
of bb's on the desk
simulating bombs
dropped since
World War One.

“We've got to find
new ways of thinking,”
he was always saying.

“To guide growth with
vision, to galvanize as
if the quality of life for
future generations
depends on upon
acting now,” urges
Margo Flood

There was a time not
long in the past when
everything changed
too soon & too fast.

New ways of thinking?
I would ask Mac. How?

Thinking about thinking?

Thinking about
thinking about
thinking?

Thinking about
thinking about
thinking about
thinking?

No comments:

Post a Comment

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