Ideas are More & Less Important than People

Ideas are More & Less Important than  People

"Christ! What are patterns for?"

This is an effort to speak to the it-all-reduces-to-
the-same-box that Chandler appropriately criticizes.
(Seeming at best always to end up where we started
and maybe know it for the first time like a virgin or
maybe repulsed by redundancy).  And Philip:
We’re not getting any Where, damnit.

Heisenberg's Indeterminacy:  you can measure velocity
or you can measure position--but not both at the same
time.   That's physics. Psychologically: we can go some
where and no where at the same time, as long as you
don't get literal on me and start wondering whether
Winnie the Pooh can actually talk, let alone Eeyore.
 
Covering the Ground and Going Some Where:  you're
used to that, I know: Dr's Kahl and Kalinowski: down
the road you'll go, no fooling.  All them other courses:
beginnings, middles, and endings  milestones and
benchmarks, take the credits and run.  
   
Consider:

 
Represents a structure behind a specific sentence—
but the same structure, if you  add the “rules for
generation
 
S-->NP VP
NP--> (det) N
VP-->V (NP)
etc.
 
would produce

the dog bit the boy,
the mother killed the baby,
the president bombed the terrorist
the girl picked the flowers
the psychiatrist analyzed the patient,
the teacher flunked the students.
sunlight kissed morning dew 
etc

Infinite, yes?  the surface sentences  are symptoms
emergent phenomena generated out of  this finite
tructure + a few rules of  manufacture, algorithms
for diversity.

This is what generative/transformational grammar
looked like as conjured and imagined by Noam
Chomsky  in  the mid-50s to represent a more
holistic map of grammar than the prescriptive
schoolroom traditional regulations to govern
surface sentences in an agreeable and
properly punctuated fashion suited to
the written conventions of discourse
and that.course. .
 
Let each of those sentences above stand-for a discipline.
ON the surface: information regarding flowers and bombs
and babies and dogs  and students  No apparent kinship.
Each one like some illegal immigrant: alien and incommensurate
each to the other and as radically diverse as academics, work,
and service, say.
 
BUT the structure generating them is ONE: e unum pluribusAnd the same old sam old "box" we keep falling back into is
UNUM--from which: many.  .
 
I can teach you 3 chords (I, IV, V) on guitar and you can
generate infinite rock & roll & country & western songs. 
Same deal.  Pay attention to the symptoms or pay
attention to the structure.  Choose where you
put your pay-attention-efficiency-disease.

 Box—on the one hand
 Boxed—on the other.
 
         

Meta force be with us, and immaculate concepts, and
let us not always be stuck in the surface sentences, obvious
and compelling: subject-object matter and token  topics &
devilish details which while they SEEM like what-it-is we
are talking about: the more we get lost in  the trees & the
less we see of meta-forest  and vice versa the other way
around. .
 
If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact,
you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces,
as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge
dividing you through the heart and marrow,
and so you will happily conclude your
mortal career.
 
Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle
in our throats and feel cold in the extremities;
if we are alive, let us go about our business.
                          
                                 HDT Walden