Samuel Scoville: Be That as IT May

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Be That as IT May

The Prevention of Free Play

The dead hand of tradition in which one watches

one’s words, makes sure ducks are in order before
quacking: bite my tongue or at least hold it until
I have thought-through what I have to say, to
write, called academia. One hand clapping:

One might not be too overcautious to suggest…

At the risk of doing injustice to ….

Ah, er, um, let me um say…

If I might venture…

Without further

ado it goes

without

saying

that

may

not

with

standing

The Sounds of Muse-ic: me, an Academic Clearing my

Throat about to profess in all modesty a tid bit nearing

the borders of frontiers yet unknown perhaps or just

playing it safe, used to lecture on the well-lit side

of discreet, not the wild side. Accuracy uber alles.

Footnotes in my mouth. I’d rather be safe

than sorry.

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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