A Course of a Whole Nother Color

Dear Colleagues Across the Curriculum

Knowing my noggin notions will
never have the impact on the
culture as post-its or paper clips:
I can write every day like Anais
Nin  out of  Africa: with  out hope
& without despair.
 
             Me: A. Pot.
 
If I could just
figure out
how to call
Kettle black,
without his
annoying
denial,
defense
& backlash:
 
             I-know-you-are-
                  but-what-am-I?
 
But rather: educing him
to respond with appreciation
& agree-mentality
 
          “Yes, black: I am,
            Aren’t we all? It
            must be said; glad
            you brought it up.
           I keep forgetting.
 
That would be
a liberal art.
                                 A. Pot
 
Toward Frontiers Yet Unknown
 
:Let that stand for the Core/Gen-Ed
program if it didn’t generate too many
snickers.
 
Or:
 
Toward Pedagogies of Emergent
Phenomena & Values  would amount
to the same deal and sound  more
Chronicle-of-Higher-Ed worthy.
(Professional.)
 
Sound counts. And the “Towards.” too.
 
Finding the edge between what sounds
ludicrous (snickers from smart & savvy)
and what sounds offensive (snorts from
decent &  conscientious): that in itself is
an ongoing frontier border land & outlaw
territory.
 
It’s  easier to claim Rigor &: ratchet up
what ever’s in place so the tough get going
than to invoke stalwart pioneering toward
Innovation, making it new but  not in the
Buckminster Fuller sense where new don’t
cog-in with old &  the status quotiddean
will over throw the apple cart.
 
Toward a RELATIONSHIP  Way of Talking
& Knowing. An Epistemological Observation
         that Could Make a Difference:
               (if a shared language for it
                      might emerge)
                 

 

My self-contained sealed-in solipsistic  Narcissism
is reinforced by our habit (a convention, really, our
convenient ways of talking) of reducing
         
                relationship
 
(always some emerging phenomena) rising up
between me & an OTHER, any other (person,
place,  thing, rock and hard place), and reifying it
(the ratio, rationale): giving it a name and locating it
in the OTHER, know what  I’m saying?
 
For instance: I or anyone is  likely to call a rock
hard rather than: I see again and again that the
relationship between me and this rock emerges
every time as a quality I call      “hardness.”
 
But I could know better:
“Hardness” doesn’t live
in the rock, is not a
characteristic of rock
alone but describes a
relationship going on
between  my butt or
noggin, say, and the
cave wall or stone
bench mark where I
sit.
 
Wood’s not hard.
Sugar’s not sweet.
Cat’s aren’t sneeze-makers.
Obama’s not evil, nor Osama—
nor  good either  except in our
mannersof speaking so to speak.
Our Ways of Talking..
 
This Book Sucks! observes an 8 o’clock
dillar-dollar scholar: characterizing it for the
benefit of  Mr.Kite & class. .
 
Convention (conspiracy, literally) would have it that
 the Book Sucks, or better: that it is his opinion that
the Book Sucks.
 
But it’s a reciprocal 3-way relationship going on, a
ratio (rationalizing)  between speaker, speaking, and
spoken-of; between signer, signing, signed; between
observer, observing, observed; between  boy,
relationship, & book  reduced to a binary
opposition, anthro-morphism &
cultural relativity.
 
Conveniently, our Attention Efficient Focus is on BOOK,
yes? Need we argue?  To  focus elsewhere amounts to
A.D.D.as far as convention is concerned: not paying
attention to where WE collectively, culturally,
customarily, conveniently, conventionally
pay our attention.. 
 
What is eclipsed if not occluded by our ways of talking is
the reality of Relationship.
Relays.
Ratios.
Rationalizing
emerging phenomena
which we collapse into some
adjective for convenience’s sake
reducing a ternary dynamic
                          Y 
                    X        Z
 to a  binary opposition:(x/z) adjectivally fixing the
relationship on the on the “other” (some  thing
else: alter, ultra. terior, alien), nailing  IT down, 
so to speak.
 
There may be more elegant ways of pointing this
out—how it is I omit to factor my self into the
relationship between  rocks,books, persons,
places, things, but  and this is the original (as
opposed to conventional) sense of Narcissism
a class action suit, say: species habit of being
bubbled, en-caved, closeted inside our
ways of knowing., .

I’m looking into the pond  not knowing it’s my own
 image that’s got me in  thrall.  I pronounce my love
& hate. attraction  & repulsion, likes & dislikes,
descriptions, assessment, evaluation & terms
of desire toward what I think is some OTHER quite
beyond me in the mirror unaware I’m talking about
myself for the whole time being. ..
 
Imagine: if I knew better.
That would be a course
of a whole nother color.
 
xxxooo, Sam