“Truth springs up in [sustained]
argument among friends.”
David Hume
If Only
Wallace Stevens had suckled on
Lutheran catechism, large & small,
savvy as to snippets rather than
playful Presbyters teasing him with
predestination, who knows what
kind of poet he might have been?
If Only
my grandfather had not been shot
in the armpit by a thief in the night,
gunfire lighting up a late 19th. c
Connecticut suburb, none of you
would be-here-now resurrecting
this freeze-dried mind-on-a-screen.
Is what it is.
Be a phenomenalist if you can.
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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 19thc.
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
For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both
In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.
Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to
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
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