Samuel Scoville: Takes a Pillage and a Punch Line

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Takes a Pillage and a Punch Line

Embodimental Studies &
Vocational Leadership.

Body & Blood manifest here
& there wherever 2 or 3 are
gathered for crying out loud
so to speak & on the same
page as it were. Presence
when absent. Absent
when present.

The problem in trying to
provoke ( my colleague
                     advises) :

“you might provoke.”

Word “god” etymologically
means “the invoked,”
invocation: invocative as
opposed to provocative.
       Do you hear me now?

              EUREKA-ics.

     Showing but no Telling.
Imagine a pedagogy based on

I GOT IT! I GET IT !

What Archimedes shouts,
nude, descending the tub:
an epiphany concerning
DISPLACEMENT & how
to measure how much gold
in the King’s crown.

      Commensuration!

Thrilled: he runs naked down
the streets. Eureka! he cries.
   I get it! I got it !

    Your last Eureka-Time:
    a surge of joy & stunned
astonishment when suddenly,
      a bolt from the blue:

    YOU GET IT!
        YOU GOT IT !

       A grand JOKE!

Pedagogy for the Impressed
& hell with her if she can’t take
a joker. Hell with him if he
don’t get it. Leave any child
a behind.

Tough noogies. Takes a pillage
& a punchline.

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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