Extraordinary Discourse Podcast

Extraordinary Discourse 121

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 18 May 2013 15:39:00 +0000

Rocking The Narrative

From Jesus the economist to naughty little monkeys.

Chinese Art and Greek Art
Rumi/Barks

The Prophet said, “There are some who see me
by the same light in which I am seeing them.
Our natures are one.

Without reference to any strands
of lineage, without reference to texts or traditions,
we drink the life-water together.”

Here’s a story
about that hidden mystery:

The Chinese and the Greeks
were arguing as to who were the better artists.

The king said,

“We’ll settle this matter with a debate.”

The Chinese began talking,
but the Greeks wouldn’t say anything.
They left.

The Chinese suggested then
that they each be given a room to work on
with their artistry, two rooms facing each other
and divided by a curtain.

The Chinese asked the king
for a hundred colors, all the variations,
and each morning they came to where
the dyes were kept and took them all.
The Greeks took no colors.
“They’re not part of our work.”

They went to their room
and began cleaning and polishing the walls. All day
every day they made those walls as pure and clear
as an open sky.

There is a way that leads from all-colors
to colorlessness. Know that the magnificent variety
of the clouds and the weather comes from
the total simplicity of the sun and the moon.

The Chinese finished, and they were so happy.
They beat the drunks in the joy of completion.
The king entered their room,
astonished by the gorgeous color and detail.

The Greeks then pulled the curtain dividing the rooms.
The Chinese figures and images shimmeringly reflected
on the clear Greek walls. They lived there,
even more beautifully, and always
changing in the light.

The Greek art is the sufi way.
They don’t study books of philosophical thought.

They make their loving clearer and clearer.
No wantings, no anger. In that purity
they receive and reflect the images of every moment,
from here, from the stars, from the void.

They take them in
as though they were seeing
with the lighted clarity
that sees them.

Extraordinary Discourse 120 Special: Elephants In The School System

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 11 May 2013 16:52:00 +0000

Elephants In The School System

The theme of schooling has played a part in this mural since the beginning: here it surfaces as the dominant theme for the duration of this associational documentary.

So here are the great educational mavericks, those powerful defenders of children who saw and named the elephants in the school system.

Links:

The Ultimate History Lesson, five hours with John Taylor Gatto

School Sucks Podcast

John Holt on YouTube

A. S. Neill on YouTube

1
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie,
I learned that soldiers seldom die,
I learned that everybody's free,
That's what the teacher said to me,
And that's what I learned in school today,
That's what I learned in school.

2
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends,
I learned that justice never ends,
I learned that murderers die for their crimes,
Even if we make a mistake sometimes,
And that's what I learned in school today,
That's what I learned in school.

3
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our government must be strong,
It's always right and never wrong,
Our leaders are the finest men,
And we elect them again and again,
And that's what I learned in school today,
That's what I learned in school

4
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that war is not so bad,
I learned about the great ones we have had,
We fought in Germany and in France,
And someday I might get my chance,
And that's what I learned in school today
That's what I learned in school.
Tom Paxton
from
TEACHING AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY
Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner

No one is wise enough or good enough to mould the character of any child. What is wrong with our sick, neurotic world is that we have been moulded, and an adult generation that has seen two great wars and seems about to launch a third should not be trusted to mould the character of a rat.
A.S. Neill

One thinks of Blake’s drawing of “Aged Ignorance,” in which an old man with an idiot’s face is clipping the wings of a young Cupid struggling towards the rising sun.
Northrop Frye
Fearful Symmetry

At first this new attitude to time, this new regularity of life, was imposed by the clock-owning masters on the unwilling poor. The factory slave reacted in his spare time by living with a chaotic irregularity which characterised the gin-sodden slums of early nineteenth century industrialism. Men fled to the timeless world of drink or Methodist inspiration. But gradually the idea of regularity spread downwards among the workers. Nineteenth century religion and morality played their part by proclaiming the sin of 'wasting time'. The introduction of mass-produced watches and clocks in the 1850's spread time-consciousness among those who had previously merely reacted to the stimulus of the knocker-up or the factory whistle. In the church and in the school, in the office and the workshop, punctuality was held up as the greatest of the virtues.

Out of this slavish dependence on mechanical time which spread insidiously into every class in the nineteenth century there grew up the demoralising regimentation of life which characterises factory work today. The man who fails to conform faces social disapproval and economic ruin. If he is late at the factory the worker will lose his job or even, at the present day [1944 - while wartime regulations were in force], find himself in prison. Hurried meals, the regular morning and evening scramble for trains or buses, the strain of having to work to time schedules, all contribute to digestive and nervous disorders, to ruin health and shorten life.
George Woodcock
First published in War Commentary - For Anarchism mid-march 1944.

Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competencies and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average --one is tempted to say, the ideal-- American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and "agribusinessmen," the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else --or, perhaps nobody else-- will be responsible. And, not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him.
Wendell Berry
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

The thousands who study Shakespeare, Hardy, Tennyson help later to swell the millions who read the most sensational Sunday papers-- naturally. For in a school system which makes emotion inferior to intellect, the sensational tales of crime and sex touch the starved emotions.
A.S. Neill,
Neill, Neill, Orange Peel

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
H.L. Mencken

Education...now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.
John Holt

Authoritarian ethics answers the question of what is good or bad primarily in terms of the interests of the authority, not the interests of the subject. ...the fear of disapproval and the need for approval seem to be the most powerful and almost exclusive motivation for ethical judgement. This intense emotional pressure prevents the child, and later the adult from asking critically whether “good” in a judgement means good for her, or for the authority.
Erich Fromm

The magical child’s awareness of death unfolds in late childhood in the form of the child’s driving desire for autonomy--an awareness of being responsible for his or her own survival. If the child has been given the proper education in survival, this expresses itself as designed: a period of intensive and ecstatic play, in which varying the possibilities of one’s survival tools are explored, in which concrete operational thinking and enhancement of primary perceptions are practiced. This would mean confrontation: the child actively seeking the tests of his or her prowess. Is this the education he receives? Of course not! At this most critical time we slap the child into the anxiety-ridden and frightful experience of schooling--for the newly-born individual system, this is the equivalent of a violent birth, and the results are pretty much a repetition of that earlier trauma--brain damage, shock, intellectual crippling, and an overall depression that becomes permanent. The great promise with which the child was born is now shattered completely. Each generation produced under schooling proves more shocked, crippled, violent, aggressive, hostile, confused, defiant, despairing.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Magical Child

What the school determines to accomplish it does so in a constant and total atmosphere of violence. We do not mean physical violence, we mean violence in the sense of any assault upon, or violation of, the personality. An examination or a test is a form of violence. Compulsory gym, to one embarrassed or afraid, is a form of violence. The requirement that a student must get a pass to walk in the hallways is violence. Compelled attendance in the classroom, compulsory studying in study hall, is violence. ...the amount of violence in a high school is staggering.
Charles A. Reich,
The Greening Of America

Under the sidewalk lies the beach!
Paris Grafitti

Extraordinary Discourse 119

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 04 May 2013 16:56:00 +0000

High-value flotsam on
the rising tide

That rocks all boats

I think it's [the Occupy movement] thrown open
an almost kaleidoscopic sense of possibility... We have no idea yet where it
all might lead if the democratic culture we're trying to build really does take
root. The main thing Occupy did was to throw open the imagination, to get us to
start thinking on a scale and grandeur appropriate to the times.
David Graeber
'A Kaleidoscopic Sense of
Possibility':
Interview with David Graeber on Democracy in America
Lynn Stuart Parramore
AlterNet

Extraordinary Discourse 118

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 17:45:00 +0000

Chopped Chautauqua

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.
You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite
the something you were after.
J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit

Sometimes game-changing, immensely lucrative
epiphanies lie on the far side of seemingly esoteric inquiries.
Questioning the Mission of
College
New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: April 20, 2013

Extraordinary Discourse 117

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:12:00 +0000

Freedom Dossier

Fun with fear, death, slavery, and much else!

I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks than as play.

Nietzsche

In the world to come, each of us will be called to account for all the good things God put on earth which we refused to enjoy.
The Talmud

In the language of enchantment, there is this sense of a living continuum that cannot be cut up or divided because of the symbiotic interactions and interpenetrations of everything within it. The lexicon is enormously wide, its spheres of reference global. Everywhere, categories overlap. Surprise synchronistic connections lead us into spell-binding ecstasy. Things configure in their own way, woven together as if in some divine aesthetic kaleidoscope. This is not doctrinal religious practice, but an aspect of "opening to shakti"-the dynamic life force that animates everything. One could say that these works are beautiful, except that the word itself all but vanishes in the glittering of a thousand refractions. Beauty here is not an end in itself, but has become a conduit for the living reality of signs and wonders and meaningful coincidences. Allusive repetitions come into play, and the world is no longer lifeless, inert, and without soul. Penetrated by powerful rhythms and by "the pattern which connects," with unparalleled cunning, it comes back to life.
Suzi Gablik © 2005

Extraordinary Discourse 116

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:22:00 +0000

Liberation Miscellany

We have to be in the culture making business, and soon. Real culture is not built on bad myths of superiority or inevitability or victory. It is built by people willing to learn and remember the stories that slipped from view, the rest of the truth that the empire won’t authorize.
Stephen Jenkinson

Extraordinary Discourse 115

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 17:50:00 +0000

Hints from the Edge

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind: Which, when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away.
Jesus,
Matt 13, 47

The chorus of springtime sings: Commodity labor for necessities sucks. It is a mass distraction, a miserable diversion from our evolutionary potential, which is teetering on the edge of a birth - or our death. These long trains of thoughts, past towns familiar and unfamiliar, are hints from the edge, looking down and in (depth psychology) and out to the socioeconomy in contractions or throes or both.

Extraordinary Discourse 114

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 17:06:00 +0000

Unauthorized Trails

Between the crucifixion and the resurrection.

And it is still narrative - just not in the closed-ended Aristotelian way. It doesn't have a simple crisis and conclusion. It just keeps going.
Douglas Rushkoff

Extraordinary Discourse 113

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 16:55:00 +0000

Spoken Scrapbook

Work-life balance?...

...oh, oh, if one but had the body for it one would live out one’s days in van Gogh’s room at Arles, eating up comfort and beauty and having it too, there in one last fell binge of boyhood.... to be there on the featherbed, on the oilcloth-looking floor amid one’s things... You wouldn’t even have to worry whether you can afford it. What, this poor Goodwill stuff...? ...I’d pay my life out there gladly, not so much a hero as a loving dilettante of idyll, using only the plain equipment of beauty. Substituting the hard work of freedom with the even harder work of contemplation... There are worse character flaws than sloth. Nationalism, I think, patriotism, the too-forgiving love of tribe, maybe even of family itself. All the flaws of a restrictive loyalty, whatever makes us want to be part of a small idea, whatever makes us dangerous or allows us to entertain, even for a moment, the idea of a Mother of Battles. Much better to wait it out at Arles. Much better never to have seen the flashy dance steps from which we take our marching orders.
Stanley Elkin, Some Overrated Masterpieces,
The Best American Essays 1992
(Ticknor & Fields, New York 1992)

Extraordinary Discourse 112

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Healers and Dealers

I tried to liberally shepherd this Talk Flock. It is not just sheep chosen from the enormous herds and strays, it is sheep, wolves, lions, snakes, bugs, apes, birds, "workers". From this flock can be heard laughter, cries, musings, dreamings, exclamations, hard-nosed assertions, and, of course, playful imaginative excursions.
Jack Saturday

Thanks to Caroline Casey for catching the unintended wolf diss last week, and for the remedy I had in my trove.

“Words are animals, alive with a will of their own.”
C.G. Jung

Extraordinary Discourse 111

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Reframing The Conversations

In our hands is placed the power greater than their hoarded gold.

Go and enjoy wise woman Caroline Casey and her enlightening guests, add support if you can afford it.

And of course the same with Dr. Dave at Shrink Rap Radio, for his premier psychology podcast.

Perinatal Matrices explained.

Extraordinary Discourse 110

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 17:52:00 +0000

Where The Hell's The Money?

Hopscotching around the neoliberal years, following dollar signs!

Extraordinary Discourse 109

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:16:00 +0000

A Cocktail Party Of Gurus, Pundits, Poets And Hecklers

"This is the city… and I am one of the citizens;
Whatever interests the rest interests me… politics, churches, newspapers, schools
Benevolent societies, improvements, banks, tariffs, steamships…"

Whitman’s Specimen Days, which he described as “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed,” is a moving scrapbook of clippings and jottings from the whole span of his life, including his years as a volunteer nurse in Union hospitals. While conceding that “the real war will never get into the books,” in Specimen Days Whitman tried to get at what he called the “interior history” of the war. Unlike more conventional scrapbookers with their impersonal digests of clippings from the distant battlefront, Whitman (who famously boasted, “I am large. I contain multitudes”) wrote himself into the proceedings.
...
A hyperactive cutter and paster, Emily Dickinson also repurposed scraps and clippings for original creative work, shifting—like Whitman, or perhaps like ambitious Facebook compilers today—from consumer to producer. Late in life, she wrote dazzling fragments of verse and prose on discarded envelopes, chocolate wrappers, and stray bits clipped from magazines and newspapers. These scraps functioned as something more than convenient notepads, encouraging spur-of-the-moment poetic spontaneity and the creative challenge of fitting stray thoughts to odd shapes of paper.
,,,
One can see in such forays a foretaste of what Joseph Cornell (a huge Dickinson fan) did with scissored detritus from magazines repurposed for aesthetic ends, some dazzling examples of which—along with many Max Ernst works that inspired them—are currently on display at an exhibition devoted to Surrealist drawing at the Morgan Library. Here, we have crossed the bridge from merely culling information from newspapers to making clippings the very basis of art. The show is a reminder that many artists have “drawn with scissors,” and that Photoshop, in our own image-drunk culture, gives new meaning to Max Ernst’s remark that “It is not the glue that makes the collage.”
...
Mark Twain was perhaps the king of American scrapbook culture. According to the OED, he was the first writer to use “scrapbook” as a verb, writing in 1881 about the origins of his book A Tramp Abroad, “I scrap-booked these reports during several months.”
...
...the pleasingly serendipitous and fragmented feel of life on the road. “Anyone may compose a scrapbook, and offer it to the public with nothing like Mark Twain’s good-fortune,” as his friend William Dean Howells wryly observed. “Everything seems to depend upon the nature of the scraps, after all.”
Scrapbook Nation
Christopher Benfey
New York Review Of Books

Extraordinary Discourse 108

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 18:23:00 +0000

More Of The Different

Following our path
is in effect a kind
of going off
the path, through
open country.
David Whyte

Here's some interesting info to go with the inspiring words about Samuel Pierpont Langley and the Wright Bros:

When Wilbur Wright was asked, in 1905, what the purpose of his machine might be, he answered simply, “War”. As soon as they were confident that the technology worked, the brothers approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their patent to the highest bidder. The US government bought it for $30,000, and started test bombing in 1910. The aeroplane was conceived, designed, tested, developed and sold, in other words, not as a vehicle for tourism, but as an instrument of destruction.
George Monbiot

Extraordinary Discourse 107

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 18:30:00 +0000

Clips For The Creatively Maladjusted

Cupitt's deeply performative and creative vision of religion asks us to place our faith in the incessant flux of language and discourse - signs and images being our earthly kingdom of eternal plenitude, an accessible realm in which we can exercise our spiritual liberation. At the very least, this is a religion that would chime with the most 'modern' (and perforce, postmodern) of our great play rhetorics - self-oriented play and imaginative play, directing a multimedia performance of the spirit.
Pat Kane
The Play Ethic

Extraordinary Discourse 106

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:36:00 +0000

Mindhold By Mindhold

"The psyche has many little pockets for tucking things away and sometimes it's a good idea to have a sort-out."
Posted by COINNEACH SHANKS

Extraordinary Discourse 105

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 19:54:00 +0000

Imaginal Cells

Cledonomancy!

In the occult of classical antiquity, cledonism, or cledonomancy, was a kind of divination based on chance events or encounters, such as words occasionally uttered. The word is formed from the Greek κληδὼν which signifies rumor, a report, omen, fame, name.

Cicero observes that the Pythagoreans made observation not only of the words of the gods, but of those of men; and accordingly believed the pronouncing of certain words, e.g. the word incendium (destruction, ruin), at a meal to be very unlucky. Thus, instead of prison, they used the word domicilium (residence, dwelling); and to avoid Erinyes, said Eumenides.

According to Pausanias, cledonism was popular at Smyrna, where the Apollonian Oracles were interpreted. He also mentions its use at the shrine of Hermes Agoraios in Pharae. An individual, upon whispering a question into the god's ear, plugged his own ears, left the agora, and then listened for the god's answer among the chance words of pedestrians. This was likely popular because the individual selectively chose which words formed the answer.

An example of cledonism occurs in the Odyssey, Book XX. Before taking vengeance on the suitors, Odysseus asks for a divine sign, and Zeus answers with a clap of thunder. This is immediately followed by words from a servant-woman, asking Zeus to "let this be the very last day that the suitors dine in the house of Odysseus."
Wikipedia, Cledonism

Extraordinary Discourse 104

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 18:59:00 +0000

A Little Of This And A Little Of That

… When Solomon
began to build the temple made of

awakened intelligence, various materials begged to be part of
it. Stones broke away and lifted off

the mountain, singing, “Take us along!” Light shone from the
mortar. The doorjambs and walls had

lively conversation. The door knocker striking made music.
Solomon’s mosque beyond matter is

One that each of us must build. There’s no way to say how it
Will look, constructed as it is of

What we intend, and passionate action.
Rumi (Barks)

Extraordinary Discourse 103

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 17:44:00 +0000

Thought Coming Through The Walls

Maybe our digital technology is still too new. Writing first appears on clay tablets around 3000 BC; it’s another 3,300 years before mankind invents the codex; from the codex to moveable type, 1,150 years; from moveable type to the Internet, 532 years. Forty years haven’t passed since the general introduction of the personal computer; the World Wide Web has only been in place for 20.

We’re still playing with toys. The Internet is blessed with undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Absent the force of the human imagination and its powers of expression, our machines cannot accelerate the hope of political and social change, which stems from language that induces a change of heart.
Lewis Lapham
Word Order: The Internet as the Toy With a Tin Ear
Huffpost

Extraordinary Discourse 102

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 17:24:00 +0000

People Saying Interesting Things

Tour

Carol Snow

Near a shrine in Japan he'd swept the path
and then placed camellia blossoms there.

Or -- we had no way of knowing -- he'd swept the path
between fallen camellias.

My words itch at your ears til you understand them.
Walt Whitman

Extraordinary Discourse 101

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 18:25:00 +0000

Here's To The Outsiders 2 of 2

And now at the edge of the year, we gather in the Edge community.

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative.
Bill Hicks

Jesus Himself, John the Baptist: Raggedy outsiders.
John Updike

...we needed three centuries of self-imposed alienation, of tearing things to pieces to see how they worked to be be able to come back to a coherent world, this time with the powers and knowledge we always felt were our birthright--powers and knowledge we had mimed with magic. But now that we have come back, we must cast away the habits of exile--the self-contempt, the illusion of alienation, the hatred of the past, the sterile existentialism, the fear of the future, the wilful imposition of meaninglessness on a universe bursting with meaning.
Frederick Turner

Extraordinary Discourse 100

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 18:29:00 +0000

Here's To The Outsiders (1 of 2)

We have come, along the wandering path of these podcasts, in the darkest time of winter, at a time when the news has also been dark, to the hundredth episode. Somewhere around 10,000 items so far. First day after the Mayan calendar cycle, just under Christmas, the time of family trauma and much loneliness. Let us take a leisurely stroll for a couple of episodes through the land of the Outsiders. Come with me and join the Outsiders!

It didn't work in the composition of this work to drop names with every item. But listen for Margaret Visser, Robert Anton Wilson, David Cayley, Jack Kerouac, John Livingston, Bucky Fuller, Leonard Cohen, Alan Watts, Douglas Rushkoff, Caroline Casey, Derrick de Kerckhove, John Taylor Gatto, Michael Ignatieff, Noam Chomsky, Marshall McLuhan, Jonathan Winters, Richard Kearney, Ivan Illich, James Hillman, Nils Christie. If I've missed any that concern you, please contact me and I'll see if I have a name.

Song clip: Baby Mine
Music: Frank Churchill
Lyrics: Ned Washington
Performed by: ? (let me know)

Poem: The Beginning, by Rabindranath Tagore
Performed by: Deepak Chopra

Extraordinary Discourse 099

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 20:29:00 +0000

The Current Scene Through Different Windows

The strength of language doesn't consist in its capacity to pin things down or sort things out. "Word work," Toni Morrison said in Stockholm, "is sublime because it is generative," its felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. "We die," she said. "That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." Shakespeare shaped the same thought as a sonnet, comparing his beloved to a summer's day, offering his rhymes as surety on the bond of immortality: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/So long lives this and this gives life to thee."
Lewis Lapham
Word Order: The Internet as the Toy With a Tin Ear
Huffpost

Extraordinary Discourse 098

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 17:52:00 +0000

In A Thousand Nutshells

All artists are pickpockets.
friend of Robert W. Fuller

The right way to wholeness is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus.
C. G. Jung (1968 [1944] par. 6)

Extraordinary Discourse 097

jacksaturday@telus.net (Jack Saturday) — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 17:40:00 +0000

Diverse Disclosure

Gratitude to Old Teachers

Robert Bly

When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake,
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?

Water that once could take no human weight-
We were students then - holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness.