Stalwart Pioneering

    Coursing Across the Curriculum
          (Stalwart Pioneering)

Possession has its single limited object.
Literalized desire (my terms) is therefore
a kind of trap of appetite. The consummation
of desire circumscribes ones’ freedom to
move and change. Better to balance at the
boundary itself (edge), to be in and out of the
game simultaneously—poise between acting
in the material world and taking it as a field
for detached symbolic play. (Lewis Hyde)

General Education

How much do I know? Let me count.
All told: a monument. I’m already
suffering post-partum depression,
anticipating loss of students for a
summer: the only action I get across
the curriculum—chemists & biologists,
mathematicians  & social scientists,
environ-mentalists, historians, creative
writers, outdoor educators & philosophers,
an occasional student of literature. Artists
--all in one room of our own.  All studying
3 courses besides mine. (But it's me they
have to please or else.)
 
            General Education R Us
 
We know 2 things :
 
1. That the WAYS we talk about  whatever
it is we talk about is as important as whatever
it is  we talk about.
 
2. I forget the second thing for the moment.
 
Oh it’s helter skelter all right,  Alice in Wonderland
croquet, all these disciplinary ways of knowing &
talking & thinking in play, a BP oil spill every class,
can’t be contained: dead flocks of seagulls all over
the shoreline.
 
I wish I could remember that 2^nd thing we know.
I used to know what it was.  Had to do with
conscious purpose, aims,  goals, measurable
outcomes: the  more conscious my
attention, the greater the field of
attention deficiency generated.

Something  like that.  How I eclipse a moon with the
sunlight of my lucid scheming.
  
No, No: that isn’t the second thing,  a 3^rd  thing, maybe,
emerging from the  first 2. 

(You’d think if I “knew” it, I could recall it. But I do,
and I can’t. Not at the moment. I can’t always get
what I want. )

A willingness to think systemically.  That was it, I’m
pretty sure.  Trumps critical thinking, I bet.  We could
argue. Imagine.