Samuel Scoville: Always for the Sake of Argument

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Always for the Sake of Argument

HAP

As an academic in “school” rather than
in “church” or “state” modes, I am more
interested in the Ways People Talk about
what’s happening than what’s actually
happening which is mystery: always a
matter of he-says and she-says, lots of
he-ing & she-ing,, lots of hidden & overt
assumptions, of controlling and loose meta-
force, monkey business jumping from
branch, to limb, to twig to foliage, facts &
stats & data. logical to analogical ratios
all in the service of Proof & Prejudice and
individual homeland security; follow any
extensive thread off your favorite blog or
FB post and see what you can see about
Ways We Talk. as opposed to What’s
Actually Happening. . .

Of Proof And Prejudice. Clark Chapin
(80’s grad) gave me this phrase (in an
FB argument) and I like it and ripped
it off. xxxooo, Sam

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Auto Bio

I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by a thief in the night sometime in the late 19^thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow, squeezing off a couple of rounds and sending the burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to Philadelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him. She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-it would have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY but INSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville

Samuel Scoville