For ten years, I’ve been hammering the possibility
of ongoing converse action thru facultyL & FacultyThink—
wondering why it hasn’t taken-off as a venue for sustainable
interaction and emerging phenomena. Our local food
production.
One of you suggested that when someone
does respond I hop on it like sumo-fat-boys
flattening comments & knocking air & self
steam out—which I guess I somewhat realize
I do for show & tell & fun & diva-self-indulgence
as well as monumental un-crucified ego that
undercuts my desire to win friends & influence
people & encourage a good time had by
all across the curriculum.
And (time, work-load, priorities, interest,
computer-screen-exhaustion) there are plenty
of other good reasons for not playing this
particular home-groan academic game even
though it’s really the only game in town that
could cultivate our faculty body into developing
a VOICE-of-voices and bring us OUT as faculty
that can bray together which is to say play together.
Don’t let me get away with it.
IT, I said. My too fast flop and tickle.
Maybe consider IT part of our Empowermental
Studies and Leadership programs. (I still remember
Ali scolding me & Frank K for a blaring monopolizing
of a faculty conversationon the charge that we were
dis-empowering the rest, undercutting her accusation
& demonstrating her empowermentalism in the very
act of reprimanding.) But I presume. You know, the
word "ISRAEL" literally means "god-wrestler," so IT
is a kind of a Fight Club of the best sense we're all
involved in--like that way of talking about it or not.
Us, like, Children of Israel wandering in the wildness:
metaphor for. . . .
FREE PLAY as maybe a Shared
Metaphor for the Fine Art & Humanities
Division
At FAH lunch today, several of us considered the
notion of FAILURE as “a source of cultural energy,”
the encouraging of which could be a common goal
in our work—one that is both “subversive” and yet
complementary to the whole.
I’ve quoted Keith Sawyer (his study of collaborative
genius) many times, his acknowledging that the
encouragement of failure and a collective suspicion of
“clarity” is necessary to an environment of shared
creativity. (And cultivation of “resilience” a word
soon to be replacing “sustainability.”)
Bullshit Detecting
Might be The Way of approaching what We mean
(our shared sense) of The Liberal Art (not to be
collapsed, conflated, confused with the liberal arts
which constitute our majors and minors and disciplines
and inter-disciplines: the rigor of applied and instrumental
education: aka , vocationalism)
To the extent we realize we inescapably contribute to this
always emerging phenomena – rising up daily like mist,
smog, a cloud of unknowing generating our collective
bozone layer—toxic, if denied; intoxicating if acknowledged
as necessary and part of the process of resilience:
that’s what I’m wondering about.
To know I contribute to the bullshit rising up and maybe
how and in what ways and especially the unavoidability
of my ongoing contribution seems to me a monumental
knowing— and knowing how-it-is-&-why doesn’t diminish
it or my participation in it, but moves me toward being an
informed as opposed to an uninformed bullshit-er, no
cover up, no denial. Can’t. How could I claim to
be a liberal artist—but no bullshit-er. That's some bullshit
right there, need we argue?
Once the realization is experienced and put into shared play,
there’s no return.
You might well say, well, Sam: what do you mean by bullshit?
Define your terms for heaven's sakes! .
There: THAT right there! we’re in the liberal art business:
origins always originating like original spin.
ANYTHING can initiate, inaugurate, instigate, generate,
authorize the process. Zero-ecological footprint. Am
I wrong?
xxxooo, Sam
SACS or Arthur Vining Davis or Sustainability Commitments,
but please correct me if it's so. )
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