PROCRUSTES
(hosting with the most desire
to be hospitable: "in my own
terms, of course.")
Hostile Hospitality:
Welcome to my Inn.
I’ve got just the right bed for you,
but let me tweak & twiddle, cut
some & stretch, advise & restrain
so you can FIT IN, of course, and
be happy.
Dear Readers in Humanity and
Colleagues Across the Curriculum
(courses w/o borders series)
“Typically, such webs of significance
are built around sets of opposites:
fat and thin, slave and free, natural
and unnatural, real and illusory,
clean and dirty. What tricksters
sometimes do is disturb these pairs
and thus disturb the web itself.
Once the web has lost its charm, its
terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem
contingent and open to revision. For
those epi-predators who work with
the signifiers themselves rather than
the things they supposedly signify.
language is not the medium that helps
us see the true, the real, the natural.
Language is a tool assembled by [users]
trying to make a world that will satisfy
their needs.; it is a tool that can be
dissembled if it fails them.” (Hyde.)
Can you make sense out of this HYDE
quote from our “text” (The Trickster
Makes this World”)?
Making sense is a different kind of action
than just giving and taking sense, true?
To inform someone.
To instruct someone.
To be informed.
To be instructed.
That’s one kind of a deal, yes? Call it
consumer mode—an exchange
Making sense, though: that’s a horse of a
different color.
Especially making some common sense.
Call it EDIFICATION, building up an
edifice—shared sense of significance.
A common web of meaning.
Or a common sense of making meaning,
like old-time music jam, say: or jazz: call
and response : in play together. Like, I said.
May we make some sense together?
Imagine.
Does the token subject, object, content
matter?
Making is Making
Content is galore, true?
Don’t collapse, conflate, or confuse the two:
They are related, sure: but not the same.
We can TALK about anything: spin a web
of significance. It’s the spinning that counts,
true? Need we argue?
Order: from L. ordiri – “to weave “
“Oh what a web it is we weave when
first we practice to deceive.” Shakespeare.
Make sense? Make sense! Or what’s a college for?
Epistemology (IV)
Leave as many children behind as prefer the
remains of the daze. No good forcing the issue.
If one “gets it,” we got lucky, is all
IT, I said. Need I spell IT out?
Like a thief in the night who plugs my grandfather
in the armpit
Like the lady from Tunisia who slaps a grocer.
Like the preacher in Florida who ignites the
Koran.
Like a butterfly in Brazil who instigates tornadoes
in Kansas.
Like the shot heard round the world fired in
New Hampshire or was it Massachusetts?
Whatever.
Once upon a time. No generalizing need apply.
“The heart has its reasons of which Reason
knows nothing.”
And can’t be forced. Well, it can be, and the
outcomes measured. But it's not the same deal..
IT, I said. Need we argue?
xxxooo, Sam
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