Diabolical Opposition
or pyre to be redeemed from fire by fire Who then
devised the torment? Love! Love is the unfamiliar
Name Behind the hands that wove the intolerable
shirt of flame which human power can not remove.D
We only live, only suspire consumed by either fire or fire.
(T.S. Eliot: from a reformatted “Little Gidding”)
because they aren't studying sociology or chemistry etc.
What they put in play is not molecules, statistics or the
history of the Red Army and such, but hyper-critical
thinking, an exquisite sometimes snobbish sensitivity to
nuance in language, irony, school room grammar, love of
metaphor and a tendency toward contradiction and paradox...
Unless you put an institutional gun to our heads, make us
pay efficient rubric attention and full-cost account-ability in
which case we will generate thesis-driven, clarity-addicted
essays on poets and fiction- writers, novels, movies & non-
fictional-but-never-the-less creative work like anything, or
even proof proposals and funding requests for replicable
projects across the universe.
to disseminate seminars and seminaries. Pass the torch &
tradition.
But the potentially complementary opposite of Torch-Passing
is Gathering Wool & Wood & Starting Up a Fire & the 2 activities
are always—bottom-line—incompatible, irreconcilable: like thesis
& antithesis. If kept in play, and not conflated, collapsed, & confused:
prerequisite for synthesis. Liberal Art and not just liberal arts.
(We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire.)
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