My Ongoing Failure

Dear Colleagues,

Stalwart pioneers toward  frontiers yet unknown  

A brand new grad wrote this morning:  “what is

mental  liberation, or is this just a  language problem?”

Too late to ask, I told him. Your work is done here..

“The policy of preparing oneself for tough choices by

arranging to do the right thing when the time comes is

one of the hallmarks of mature responsibility.” 

                     (Daniel Dennett, Free Will Evolves, pg. 123)

I like the sound of this sentence by Dennett and wish

I could recollect the nature of a policy of preparation

whereby I worked-out and worked-up routines and

moves so that when the time comes for doing the right

thing I was consciously prepared, like walking into an

exam, say, with my mind on flip-cards, full of info and

facts and data to put into play: the hall marking

of my mature response ability.

I have given some thought to DRAWING THE LINE.

You know: when there’s a big old mess of  concern going
on and someone almost inevitably  offers the insight: Yeah,
that’s all well and good but where do we draw the line?
 And I want to think well, I could step up and say: hey, I’ll
show  you; I can draw a line like anything, & even keep both
sides in play: the hall mark of my  mature response ability! 

In my dreams.  This is the nature of my failure:

I can’t successfully get my students  to split  life-of-mind

ways of talking from life-of-body ways of talking from

life-of-body-politic ways of talking so that all three ways

of talking don’t just mush together indiscriminately

confusing  the issues so bad I got to  call out the noetic

ku klux klan to ride rampant through the cerebral country

side and cut the ties of  faux incest and miscengenated

amalgamations that then  get mistakenly  acted-out in the

body politic and it’s one big  ongoing throbbing wound,

our ongoing ignorant vulnerability know what I’m saying?. 

NO?   See: right there. My ongoing failure.

The cosmic whole-istic just-connect, it’s all-one-and-related

(relatively) environmentality is an overpowering windmill,

see, and me and my donkey Coyote mostly get thrown

whenever we tilt:  THEY call up Descartes whom they have

heard has something to say about a Cartesian Split they’ve

heard bad things about and  his dreams about head and body

floating separate and they  don’t think THAT image stands for

wholeness, not to mention (they decry) that he thought  way

too much & identified with the Thinking I AM rather then the

Body I AM or even the  Political Bawdy We ARE, and so

DESCARTES becomes a shared shibboleth among these

savvy youngsters: a shield and defense against my efforts to

cut IT  into 3’s: all gall, know what I mean? 

Life of the Mind minding  Life of the Body—embodying life of
the mind, yes? Life of the  Body Politic: there’s the rub. Not
life-of-the-mind & not  life-of-the-body  either but not NOT
either either  & the language begins to show my strain,

“cracks under the burden, under the  tension, slip, slide, perish,

decay with imprecision.”  A language problem.