Outrage

Outrage

This here is SCHOLA: Pure Leisure-Time Academics :
Not to be collapsed,. conflated, or confused with
deeds good or bad, bonus or bailout; or with
the liberalarts either.: those majors and minors.

Why don’t you bang on my door once, when you’re lonely?
We can have a cigar together, save the world a little.
You like to talk nonsense?
Very much.
Okay. We talk nonsense

John LeCarre, A Perfect Spy

Thus, what we need is an irrational language
with a new vocabulary, something like what
modern art is trying to find for an expres­sion
of the subconscious

Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology;
copied by Theodore Roethke into his notebooks.

Reading Steve Runholt’s beautifully written account of spring
service among the Lakota reinforces my sense of the discrete
differences and “hostile” incompatibilities that provide proper
pre-requisite to relating the values of

........................................Y
..........................SERVICE
.....................(in-performance)
X Academics Z Work
(theory)...............................(practice)

Naturally eclipsing this deep differentiation and relationship
is our ongoing desire to “integrate” the triad in surface terms:
with courses where work and service reinforce a specific
content & subject matter. Gideon Burdick’s estimable and
assessable project monitoring heat loss, for example..

I’m being academic here.
A Self Service.
Theoretical:
walking the talk under the
Bo Tree to mix meta force:. .

(“Don’t just do something,” says Father Berrigan; “Stand there.”)

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent

A shadow, Eliot calls it: call it
gap, gape, chasm, chaos, yawn:

Y factor: I call it: beyond (and incommensurate with)
X & Z –a realm :neither rational nor irrational nor
not rational, and not not-irrational either.

The House of Us
(Ecos Divisus)



I think one way but feel another: split between mind & body,
head & heart, masculine & feminine, rationalization & emotion,
logic & analogy. parts & wholes, starving children in Africa &
the warm buzz of my PBR. Turn it up. Put it in play.

If I could say IT, Martha Graham claimed,
I wouldn’t have to dance IT;
(If I could dance IT
I wouldn’t have to say IT.)

A couple years back, an art student and piano player among
the environ-mentalists, math people, social workers, biologists
& physicists (all fulfilling with me a GenEd Require-mentalism),
would announce . “I’m ‘conflicted’.”

She’d say it redundantly & descriptively, without anguish:
her matter of fact response to the literature, to ideas, to the
comments & discussion among cohort & peers..

“Do I contradict myself?
I am large I contain multitudes.”

I Think & Feel therefore I am conflicted: & a house
divided damnit: ecos divisus – crucible, excruciation.

“One of his cruder exercises which all could profit from
was to adopt two “opposite” personalities, such as a
vegetarian pacifist and chauvinistic militarist, key each
one to a different piece of jewelry ( talisman or ring) and
change his verbal opinions, his outer behavior, and his
(more subtle) inner responses depending on which piece
of jewelry he was wearing. It sounds childish, but the results
are profound. even physicists and anthropologists, who
understand relativity better than most, could understand it
more deeply if they tried this exercise a few times”.

R. A. Wilson describing Alistair Crowley, whose motto was

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law

Variation, perhaps, on Saint Augustine’s
Love God and Do What You Want

Shakespeare’s To thine own self be true,

R.W. Emerson’s “To believe your own thought,
to believe that what is true in your private
heart is true for all men—that is genius.

I hear similar stuff on the car radio all the time:
teen age love songs & cowboy ballads.
Dance it, maybe.
Or put it in play.