Samuel Scoville: Noblesse Oblige

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Noblesse Oblige

Noblesse Oblige

Don't just do something: stand there.
                 (Father Daniel Berrigan)

You're Peter Process-Person and happen
too hook-up with Pauline Product Specialist
(Aims & Outcomes Devotee) for some Task
Force or other, say:

prepare to be gracious, deferential, & frame
your Mess, Guess & Indeterminacy
proclivity with something like

    Um, er, ah, the other hand maybe .
    or
    Yes, of course that makes sense, But...
        or
    Don't pay me no never mind: just
    gathering wool here.

so as gently to stroke The Order of Things
with your monkey-wretch assumption-
questioning, controlling-metaforce.
exposure, rubric-denying stuff
like that...

Me and Solomon would sit on Spidel steps
summer mornings bloviating blue sky &
stochasticizing streams of conjecture like
anything while workers passed and
re-passed hefting weed-eaters and
shovel-ready projects.

Embarrassed at our stoic status-quo position
compared to their peripatetic velocity, Fred
would eventually feel obligated to call out:

   Don’t worry about us. Keep moving.
   Nothing to see here. Just bullshitters
              bullshitting is all...

disclaiming immobility & by appropriate self-
denigration, confirming their industrial work
ethic momentarily easing somewhat suspicion
and making no never mind..
.
“Defer to them with the most scruples.”

Noblesse Oblige

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