Samuel Scoville: Trigger Warning (violence bears it away)

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Trigger Warning (violence bears it away)

TRIGGER WARNING
(the violence bears it away)

I "r-word" the children: me, village elder,
presbytering a kind of noetic circumcision
& cerebral clitorectomy continuing institutional-
ized traditions & the industrial constraints of
alma matrix, forcing kidlets to do my bidness
against their natural born willy/nillies & double
forcing them to pretend to LIKE IT, too.

yes, Yes, YES, this IS what I want, Sam,
sock it to me: I wouldn’t be doing it on
my own, not knowing what’s good for me:
take my attendance & attention efficiency
span & make me learn, damnit. Show me
the syllabus.

I would show them the cunning, if not the
uncanny Liberal Art as opposed to, as
differentiated from & not to be conflated,
collapsed & confused with the liberal arts.

Built-in tacit violence bears us away: full
of soundless, furtive fury so sub-liminal
it looks like teen spirit, like dedication &
discipline & no clothes line need demonstrate
the surreptitious secret school-daze rapture
going on all in the family. Mum’s the word:
this can’t be said without demoralization
round here or any where: a cultural relativity:
relaying Or relations relatively.

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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