Samuel Scoville: Pedagogue For the Depressed

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Pedagogue For the Depressed

I don't understand economics, I don't understand

politics, I don't understand chemistry, I don't

understand Finnegan's Wake, I don't understand

sociology, I don't understand Obamacare, or GPS

systems, auto mechanics: I don't understand that.

A lot of poetry flies by my head. Monsanto-hatred

or at least suspicion, I confess I don't understand
that. Chinese, Spanish, Russian for example: I can't

understand what they are saying.

Students in my classes are studying 3 or 4 other
courses and are savvy in them beyond my under
standing. I don't know how to read but can fake
some literacy and do--have to. No choice.

Ignorance: my main resource and asset--don't have
much money. Black birds singing in the dead of night--
news out of noise of which there is good & plenty. Pull
the black plastic off the strawberry patch. Weeds
galore. Local food. Gardening without tuxedos.

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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