Kiss a Toad

Kiss a Cliché (Liberal Art)

I have to compete with country & western singers’

word-play bromides carting clippetty-clop 3-chord  

progressions of every thing I hold up to light, what

everyone knows already  damnit. nothing new;

anything good I say in  class is on the car  radio

driving home & wherever I go there  I am—me

& my friends in low  places heard it all before. ..  

 “Collaborative genius,” says Keith Sawyer, is

nurtured by an environment that encourages failure

—one that sees the liability of clarity: how lucidity

occludes the rest of a whole, the  remainder of the

daze—the attention  deficiency that rides the

underbelly of attention efficiency: the underbelly

of  attention efficiency riding the underbelly of

attention efficiency. .

Richard Nixon would say repeatedly:
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear”

I swim in an addiction to clarity. Homeland Insecurity
Systems demand it.  How diametrically if not diabolically
opposed a failure-encouraging,clarity- suppressing
environment would be to institutionalized academia
with its sustainable bias for cultivating  individual  not so
much  collaborative  genius.

Easy to test.

Declare:  “Might we not be encouraging a little more

failure & less clarity in this  classroom so as to nurture

some local  collaboration & the mess &  guess, trial &

error and room for  play it  takes to get better and good

at anything: making sense-of-our-own  in particular  as

opposed to buying it  shrink-wrapped  off the shelf,

rolling our own holy smokes.

Got to kiss a toad.  Reinvent wheels.

Garden without tuxedos.