Parts and Pieces of the Hole

These Fragments I Shore Up Against my Ruin

Sustaining My SELF Sustainability
Sustainably

In School Mode, at least, as opposed
to Church and State Modes and more
primary than working for world peace,
saving the planet, polar bears and caps,
steep slopes, snail darters, the Near East,
universal health care, hunger, eating
disorders, body dys-morphia, family
dis-function, addictions to prescriptions
as well as to free-ranging agents, attention
deficiency, restless legs and other learning
disabilities and symptoms of humania…

…is fixing the holes in the roof which I
would be doing now if I weren’t flooded
in kitchen concerns, pouring outside and
when the sun’s shining there’s no problem.
.
(Eco-Combustion: Set this House on Fire
sparking an Intellective and Affective
consummation greatly to be desired.)

Sustainability is our shibboleth, & our own
students recognize its diminishing luster
from over-abuse, common as tattoos,
twitter, texting and as difficult to sustain
as the word “community” several decades
back: nothing gold can stay, things fall into
parts, centers can’t hold: we’re not for every
body and we’re not every body either.

Make IT new.

Liberal Art on the one hand.
Liberal Arts on the other; a
house divided in ongoing fight-club
wrestling & wrangling our clash of
values: bring it on as worthy opposition;
and anticipate emergent properties rising
up in revelation: storks flapping over the
roof dropping bundles of un-postponed
joy and immaculate conception down
the chimney & other holes..

Automotive people have co-opted our
mission, which is promising but we can’t
let our ways of talking get worn out by
commerce. Ray Anderson would have
us reconfigure our self, holding hire
education responsible for the ways we
think that got us into this kitchen mess
easier to describe than holes in the roof
when it comes to graduation-speak.

Shared Ownership: Key..
.
It’s not going to be physical.—like when
we all worked in the work program, lived
on campus, had the trustees into our houses,
drank beer in Glad, herded cattle down the
road, gathered as a whole, weekly. Prayed
before faculty meetings and staff forum.

Those days: good bye forever. Over and
done with. Good riddance. Dripping in
the nostalgia that eclipses the ongoing
whining of our discontent we have with
us always, our restless legs, and desire:
same as it always was.

Psychological Ownership: a possibility.
Working up a shared sense—not just
notions inherited & passed down, spins
of the forefathers and mothers; but an
IDEA of our own: a shared frame of mind,
habit of being, sense of the whole more
than sum of us parts. An edification:
shared ownership generated from
rebuilding templates together
again and again. Reinventing
the whee’s. .

An Environment Conducive to Free Play
wherein not-knowing is as much a part of the
game as knowing, uncertainty & stunned
stupidity: mothers of invention, along with
maybe
as-if
sort-of
kinda &
something like
all prerequisite to good sense, non-sense &
the no-sense-at-all necessary to encouraging
emergent phenomena, fishing the River
Random & how can I know what I ‘ve
caught till I see myself hauling it out?

The Prevention of Free Play

The dead hand of tradition in which one watches
one’s words, makes sure ducks are in order
before quacking: bite your tongue or at
least hold it until you have thought-through
what you have to say, to write called academia.
One hand clapping:

One might not be too overcautious to suggest…
At the risk of doing injustice to ….
Ah, er, um, let me um say…
If I might venture…
Without further
ado it goes
without
saying
be
that
as
it
may
&
not
with
standingt

The Sounds of Muse-ic: an Academic Clearing my
Throat about to profess in all modesty a tid bit nearing
the borders of frontiers yet unknown perhaps or just
playing it safe, used to lecture on the well-lit side
of discreet, not the wild side. Accuracy uber alles.
Footnotes in my mouth. I’d rather be safe
than sorry.