Friday, April 17, 2015

Pushing Back the Tides of Ignore-ance


“Words strain,  Crack and 
sometimes break, under the 
burden, Under the tension,
slip, slide, perish, Decay with
imprecision, will not stay 
in place, Will not stay still.” 
 [T.S. Eliot]

Selfi-Reliance. Selfi-Indulgence

Falling in love with Contradiction and 
Paradox and the ability to put both in 
Play without undue offense to one’s 
family and peers and colleagues might
could be worth the price of tuition in 
my courses, I say presumptuously 
though it’s a bitch to “teach” and make 
folks comfortable with the two.

Carl Contradiction and Paula Paradox
walk into a bar. Fly on the wall. Will 
they just get along?  Collaborate?  Will
Larry Logic and Reyna Rational, our
institutional darlings, arrive and beat them
up—make monkeys of them? Mock and
 ridicule? Who’s to say?  You. You say.  

A terrible violence of course: to reduce 
the whole, domesticating all our wild 
words and notions on paper and in air 
to Siamese Twins:Carl&Larry,
Paula&Reyna.  It’s a crime.  Never
the less.  What isn’t? All a crime. S’all
good. Criminal. Salvational.Rip-off of 
the whole if not the holy, yes?  How 
could  it be otherwise?  Natural selection.
 It’s the  denial & cover up that raises  my
 Bozone Layer.

What many of us have in common is 
outrage,  shock  and dismay at this or
 that—the this’es  and that’s vary of course:
 we celebrate diversity But the outrage is
 the Same old Same old across the board.
 EquiValence, my detractors call it, a
false equivalence in their eyes as if some 
Oh-My-God’s are more worthy than others. 

But I see it as all the same: indignation,
consternation: don’t matter the token
 horror, aggravation, moral compass
 violation, moral sense disruption:
 absolutes whatever the  relativities, not
 to diminish the relativities,  not to eclipse 
 the absolutes.  Need we argue?

I don’t meditate (sit still and focus 
on breathing).  I contemplate: sit and 
wonder  how if not why, assuming  it
all makes sense and wanting to get
some sense of it; me: dumb founded,
 stunned stupid. I preen a bit—grateful 
for my privilege, how I’m not like other
 myn—ignorant, biased, prejudiced,
 fearful angry, greedy,inconsistent,
 contradictory self-serving—on the
 wrong side of  history. . .

Accentuate Some Negative. My posts 
can’t stand up & compete next to the 
nice and the good and he right side of
history, the appalled and outraged. 
shocked and dismayed by the horror
going on not to mention waffles and
wine and sunsets. robins on the lawn, 
wedding dresses and cowboy boots—
so I try to represent my-bad at least &
somewhat ugly as niche and brand 
understandably neglected: a gesture 
toward whole-ism and always the need 
to call attention to myself and at the 
same time be liked, be really liked.



No comments:

Post a Comment