Samuel Scoville: Digital Reduction of Analogue Process

Friday, May 11, 2012

Digital Reduction of Analogue Process

Digital Reduction of Analogue Process

Unable to appreciate the difference and
then the relationship between “quantity”
and “quality.” Pirzig quit teaching, bought
a motorcycle and took his young son on
a cross-country road trip while thinking
about the passion of the Western Mind
and the Zen of motorcycle maintenance.

A student just now said “I only did 2 & ½
pages of the suggested 8 for my paper on
creativity. Should I give myself ½ a point
credit instead of the full point, Sam?”

Summer in E-Hyde Park

Come let us argue together. Truth springs
from [sustained} argument among friends
& neither logic nor sermons nor stats, nor
facts, nor data convince and peer pressure
is forever and if fools persist in their folly
they become wise and the road of excess
leads to the palace of wisdom and let him
with no spin cast the first stone and if you
point your finger at your neighbor there are
3 pointing back at you and an enemy is as
good as a Buddha and if you see the Buddha
on the road, kill him.

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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