Monday, June 3, 2013

Diabolical Opposition




Diabolical Opposition



The only hope or else despair lies in the choice of pyre
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”)
 

You may wonder why Eng Majors talk funny . That's
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...
You should see us when we are on a roll.

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 univer
se.

Yes: the business of  academies is not so much to innovate as
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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