Samuel Scoville: Noise is the Mother of News: Happy Mother's Day

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Noise is the Mother of News: Happy Mother's Day

NOISE is the MOTHER of NEWS. Happy Mother's Day.
Imagine your self with your own Teleological Natural
Selection Bias: a kind of filter that will pull out what you
need/want from all the random “noise” that comes to you.
You are ADD with regard to the NORMS and CONVENTIONS,
say—because you are SCANNING for what feeds your own
personal aims, needs, plans

To scan the random for information is called Stochastic
Process. The Stoa is an archer. The image is like shooting
arrows into the dark, and listening for a THUNK that
indicates a connection. You can improve my images,
I’m sure. Think of how you cultivate and harvest the
NEW for yourself—your personal “natural selection” process.

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(Got to Love The Generalization. Specifics: not so much.
I am convinced that GENERAL TRUTH is more true
than my specific individual experience, and so I will
rely on statistics and probabilities to urge me to check
my colon and breasts and lungs for cancer, wear seat
belts and helmets, go to college rather than avoid the
bother…. the predictable-ness seduces me. Who wants
to live in an unpredictable world? Give me Generalization.
The Devils in the Details.)

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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 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