Samuel Scoville: No Country for Old Men

Friday, December 30, 2011

No Country for Old Men

   Disentanglement Studies
     & Leadership Programs
         (What Counts)

Clumps of Luther
Swatches of Calvin
Some Yeats. I could go on.

Face it: salvation’s the only
subject that engages my
safety-minded old age. .

Transcending the damage
and the damage done.

Walking on 3 legs on eggs or
water: nothing else counts.
Oh, other stuff counts, but
not COUNT counts, know
what I mean?

I am slack.

Indifferent to details &
things that so-called “matter,”
Kardashions et al. Iranian oil,
the new young executive of
North Korea, Bachmann & Perry,
Newt & Willard & even Obama
My Love

Count, sure they count.,
but COUNT count?

Soul clap its hands and sing, and
louder sing for every tatter in it
it’s mortal dress,

Sailing to Byzantium.

xxxooo, Presbyter

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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