Sunday, March 06, 2011
uphill, downhill—highland, midland
8:06 pm
OK, the evening’s not over yet. I’ve had a productive weekend, but you’ve heard that one before: It doesn’t bear fruit, such productiveness.
“The fruit spent so much time setting up the pieces of the game that there was no time left to play. Maybe he finished. We left him to his designs.”
Yes, I finished (in a manner of speaking). But now I have to take a walk—in the rain which will cease its weekend reign in the upcoming days we have to go to the office where we may be thankful for little breaks.
So, ummm, if God is Good luck, then right now God is dead.
9:20 pm
—which was a frivolous comment from someone who long ago (and deeply) took to heart the issues of “Being”—which wouldn’t help much in an office, given the character of that. It also awards no control over the rain. But it provides much gratitude for the fact that a little rain is the worst of my complaints.
However, an interesting point about practical inefficacy of admirable thinking might pertain to academic life altogether which lacks the comfortably good sense to stay ensconced in an ivory tower, relative to your average corporate office—an interesting reality, even fascinating for awhile: to fully inhabit all manner of Differences.
It wouldn’t have to be in any way elitist, just as ethnography isn’t as such elitist. How else is one to understand Differences other than by living them?—maybe living them so effectively that there seems to others to be little notable difference altogether, like being accepted as a tribal native, no extraterrestrial at all—except for our academic’s occasional bursts of intolerance for chronically slacker relations s/he has no “discretionary authority” to mentor, save by—let’s call it—a realism of provocative therapy (which, in such a setting, would require accepting the disciplinary consequences of appearing to not know what one is doing—thereby playing the character that others need in order for them to feel comfortable with their presumptions).
I surmise—just doing fiction there. But it’s good entertainment. The point of the little simulation above is to wonder about living a Difference fully. It could be amazing—provided one doesn’t get stuck there, due to a recession and a sparse market for academic attitude.
