3 Mothers of Invention

  Imagination Across the Curriculum.
   (Frontiers Yet Unknown Series)

  Does that make a kinda sense?

a squinting Ed Scott would ask us over
and over,  working us through one of
his faculty seminars  on Wittgenstein
or Plato--"a kinda sense?" he'd ask,
again and again hoping for feedback,
knowing there had to be  a difference
between our common sense & nonsense
& no sense at all--and transition.
 
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves.
   Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
 
   A kinda sense.  No bottom-line sense but
   still: something familiar going on here we can
   recognize, admit, confess:  not no-sense-at-all.
   Nonsense, sure.  Almost common sense. .

                   No-Sense-at-All   
          parabolic (parable): to throw beyond
     Sense  Nonsense
symbolic: to throw together        diabolic: to throw across
 
               3  Mothers of Invention
                 & the greatest of
                          these…
 
This is the triad to conjure if I see myself
trying to make some maybe common sense
though that always remains to be scene.
 
As an almost rubric-like standard for assessing
fiction in fiction class: I’ve sometimes  asked
students to classify the samples we read in
terms of
 
symbolic – essentially throwing together
             a shared collective sense of sense

diabolic – essentially throwing across and
           apart the common sense, antithetically
                        or antagonistically.

parabolic – throwing beyond, out of the box
                beyond symbolic and diabolic
                      beyond good & evil
                          (so to speak)
   
Arbitrary? Sure.
Reductive? Absolutely.
It puts symbolic, diabolic, and parable into
play:   3 notions that are normally separated.

And  so sense, nonsense, and no-sense-at-all are
seen as all-in-the-family.  A good thing.
 
Sally Sense, Ned Nonsense, and Nina No-Sense-
At-All walk into a bar… imagine: will they Just
Get Along? Who will be boss, do you guess?
Dominate the converse action?