Dear etc.
Indo European steu: to strike with a stick
etymological root for "stunned," "stunning,"
"stupor," "stupid," "study," and "student.".
Party on:
Putting IT in play.
Playing with IT
Throwing IT
(Gk ballein: to throw, ball)
parabolic – to throw beyond (parable)
Symbolic – throwing it Diabolic – throwing it
together across, apart
no-sense-at-all
sense nonsense
Mothering Invention Triads.
Imagine: operating only 1/3rd assed.
I love my symbols and common sense. Prefer IT
dead to alive. Nailed! Who wants wiggling when
I’m trying to do my bidness. GetRdone.
Be still my soul mate.
Much as I aspire, I haven’t been enabled to raze
the dead.
Beat a dead horse and it’ll eventually get up off the
ground mad has hell and I’m not going to take it
anymore. But a Collection of Calm Collegials?
Twitch? Scrunch?
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
O sages standing in God's holy fire
Come .. be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.*
The violence bears it away
The practice of dialectic does not begin until some
body gets hurt. Not your sticks & stones hurt, pissed
off—some violation, border crossing, transgression
against my Directional Navigational Algorithms.
Insult of course. Offense. Annoyance Homeland
Security nudge. A bit stunned stupid & just right
for study, exploring my borderlands yet unknown.
Stalwart Pioneer Liberal art.
(Not to be conflated and collapsed and confused
with the liberal arts, those majors and minors and
capstone experiences.)
(* from Yeat’s Sailing to Byzantium reconfigured
and that previous post ripped-off parts of T.S. Eliot's
"Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which many may
recall from high school English or else some required lit
gen-ed course in college.)
xxxooo, Sam
There are different kinds of fields of inquiry.
ReplyDeleteMy doctrine professor said: "If you are coming up with 'new' things in theology by this stage, you are either a genius or a heretic, the latter being much more likely."
The part about being hit with a stick was probably literal seeing how the pedagogical methods were.
ReplyDelete(Sometimes I've wished we could go back to that. :))
Other than that, yes, we need to be stretched, and mostly it hurts.
Heretic is a word with negative connotations for some. Greek: hairetikos: able to choose. Inside the "tradition" (box, bubble, culture, cave, convention) the so-called "new" will feel like heresy in the negative sense. I come from a long line of religious heretics (Beechers. Trumbulls, Gallaudets, Howards )and embrace the word.
ReplyDeleteIn the Zen tradition: koans and sticks and paddles administered to metaphorically blow the mind. IN the Greek pre-Socratic tradition: Elenchus to Aporia - elenchus: deconstruction and undermining of all beliefs so as to "bottom out " and reach no exit, no pores, no doors (a-poria) at which point philosophy was said to maybe begin. Willing novitiates. Couldn't impose this kind of naked training ("gymnasium") For the love of it.
Are new ways of seeing and talking about theology a problem with you doctrine professor? Heresy-of course: choose: this way of talking (imaging, representing) or that way, or maybe this way. . . Heresy: bring it on. Turn it up. Diversity & variations tend to eclipse or occlude the SAME (absolut), but that's always a problem with mapping the territory.
ReplyDeleteIn Germany the grammar schools are called "Gymnasium".
ReplyDeleteRight: "naked training."
ReplyDeleteTheology is not like philosophy.
ReplyDeleteNor psychology, or anthropology, etc. Discrete disciplines. My old man, when I told him how much I liked Thoreau said "that's just philosophy." Well, very unsystematic philosophy. Dad would pronounce from time to time: "The best pill is the gospel." Which I agree--but, as you say, that's not philosophy.
ReplyDeleteWhich Thoreau are we talking about? The last Thoreau I read was "Dark Star Safari" about his trek across Africa. Ooops. That's a Thoroux. A thoroughly hopeless book. It took me weeks to recover from it.
ReplyDeleteHenry David Thoreau - Walden, Civil Disobedience 19th c.fellow "transcendentalist" and younger friend of Emerson's His civil disobedience essay influenced both Gandhi and M.L.King in their expression of "non-violent" resistance.
ReplyDeleteDon't know anything about some of those people except for Gandhi and King, whose resistance only worked against "civilized" people, so to speak. Bonhoeffer was going to meet Gandhi and that did not work out and then he felt forced into violent resistance against a tyrant.
ReplyDeleteRead about Thoreau. Funny, how I've not crossed his path at all. Never trust a teetotaler though. A man who prefers water over every other drink. I don't know.
ReplyDelete