Samuel Scoville: STUPID: an Embarrassment of Riches

Friday, June 28, 2013

STUPID: an Embarrassment of Riches

Dear Colleagues.

STUPID - shares the same etymological root with Study and Student.
From Indo European: steu - "to be hit with a stick, stunned, a stupor "
(What? What the? What the hell? What the hell is that? What the
hell is that deal? What the hell is that kind of a deal?"

Pre-requisite to study

The tradition of Zen koan and paddy-whack treatment is within this spirit.
Also the early Greek practice of elenchus-to-aporia.

I suppose the "fear of god as the beginning of wisdom" might could be
been in the same vein.

"...Operate as though the 20th c will be the last century in which we
believe that knowledge is adequate to run the world. Acknowledging
ignorance might be the secular mind's only way to humility. Embracing
ignorance has the potential to unite the secularist with the seriously
religious."

Vitek and Jackson: The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability,
and the Limits of Knowledge.

Imagine: ignorance as our chief resource. Counter Intuitive to
Institutional aims, purposes, measurable goals? Unless
tweaked to fit the language. That's possible. An
embarrassment of riches. Sitting on a mother
lode.

xxxooo, Sam

No comments:

Post a Comment

Auto Bio

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