Hell with Socrates

Humbly I till the garden of letters,
seeds and seeming fruit and flowers
ripe for picking or peering at.
For my own recreation and amusement,
they are my treasured memorials,
my rage against the dying of the light.

And if speech dialectic is not my call,
or house to house my words and private
wisdom and print for unnamed others?
I care only that I do not forget.

Thus I behold tender inclusion into ordered rows
their slow growth and interweaving and interleaving.
This is a past time where my days are spent.
If by chance my son or daughter stops by
to see and savor my works, know that my labors
were in truth not just mine and not just me.

They are treasures against forgetting who I am,
and who I was.

Harold Hoarder

Dearest Harold (the Hoarder),

Thank you for your message. I read it with compassion, but a pain in my heart. Compassion we need not dwell upon, mere sentimental and useless BS. But of pain must I speak, being a person of the cloth, your humble servant, bringing you ideas and words you, sadly, cast into the wasteland from which your materialism grows. My faith in your salvation continues, and so . . .

I recall you once threw a dildoe away. Blessings, my son, for therein is an evil material thing. Why, with dildoes, what woman has use of a man and his member? Is it not better to cast the thing from you and use your own, Gypsy-given tool to satisfy yourself and your woman? Besides, dildoes need batteries to work and they wear out and you have to buy more. With a dildoe you now have more things to worry about. You performed a good deed by casting that "thilthy"* thing aside.

I recall you once hoarded an empty box. Is it not so? Cast it also away. It is the occasion for sin, for you might put something in it and then where will you be? A man with a box now filled--you have two material things whereas before you had one. See how this error in your ways multiplies? And what if you put more than one thing in the box? You will forget all of what you have in there before nature takes your memory away from you naturally. What a tragedy! We need no stinking boxes.**

Does not the scripture say that to enter the kingdom of heaven you must pass through the eye of a needle? It indeed does. In the Holy Book of Gypsy it says that the damned will swim in their belongings on the lowest level of hell, for there is where all human waste and material objects sink and mire those who would not forsake and let go  their grubby little hands that which they could not part.

Ah, pain in my heart. Save thy self before it is too late. You don't wish after you part to be thrown into that infinite storage unit below with all that crap and all the crap that other hoarders and materialists have accumulated. Think of it. All that plastic and refuse and tools you can't use in the afterlife. You will be unable to grasp any of it with your immaterial hands. You will still, however, get a monthly bill for storage. Material hell is not a fair nor pleasant place.

Ponder and continue to pay until you are forced to yell, "Uncle!" or, "Pastor, help me. Help me. I'm drowning. I'm drowning."***

So ends this message from Word-of-the-Day Salvation and Redemption services, a non-profit church for the overly burdened souls of color on this earth. You being a whitie of some pinkish color, not politically of course.

I.M. Free

PS Where did you throw that dildoe? Is there any way of recovering that and having a quick sniff?****

___
* _Filthy_ pronounced thus for shock/amusement's sake.
** An allusion to a line from a movie, which was never, trivia buffs beware, phrased in this way in the original.
*** A reference to Harold' youth when he and a buddy rowed out a ways in the lake and called to the shore, thus bringing the Coast Guard and the county sheriff to the rescue.
**** Property of Diane Messchaert about whom another post will tell all sordid details.

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Phaedr. Yes, this is the tree.

Myths and fancies I'll have none.
No such leisure for: They
undo us, then we're undone.
Know myself, Delphians say.

Other's curiosities?
Not worthy my one concern.
Out ridiculosities!
Such nothings I will not learn.

Except I a monster Typho,
or other simple loathsome--
replete with passions' typos.
Nature gave me gentle sum.

Loft or lesser race,
I ask you, friend. Have we not
time? Conduct me, to the place,
please to respite where we're wrought.

Where truth stories I would hear,
such that mirror stuff to sear
from that I am, from which I'm made.

[Original. Now I have no leisure for such enquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny? But let me ask you, friend: have we not reached the plane-tree to which you were conducting us?]

How it looks like?

Consider.

A. "What it looks like"
This is a pointer indicating equivalence or similarity between this what and another what (things you can look at/see).

B. "How it looks"
This is a pointer indicating equivalence or similarity between this what and another what (things you can look at/see).

C. "How it looks like"
This is a pointer indicating similarity between, as seeing in a similar way or manner.

The erratic history of C's usage would tend to reflect what our care for precision of expression looks like.

The erratic history of C's usage would tend to reflect how our care for precision of expression looks.

ngram

ngram

ngram

I submit C is an error. Stop it.

PS And now (17.07.16) I find this, to my dismay: 'Pokémon GO' Unofficial Demo Shows How It Could Look Like On Microsoft HoloLens

We don't need no stinking labels

In this protracted season of slinging, swearing, smudging, slaying, smearing, and separation--distancing--here is where I guess I am. You?

And will your score prevent us from talking and reaching agreements on proceeding some way somehow? that is, making progress?

Or will you refuse both yes and no and just sit there impervious, ignorant . . . stupid?

Vote the obstructionists out, I say. It's the left-leaning libertarian's way, if this label has not also lost its meaning in the needless frays.

Penetration revisited

No, this is not about that.

Abstract.

To see and understand a culture one must move below the surface of things from one's own perspective to the inside as seen and understood from the position of the other. Experience of and in a culture can aid this movement to the inside. Cultural informants, broadly defined, can help interpret things observed, and not observed . . . such that useful insights are confirmed or uncovered for the observer.

Over ten years ago, I proposed

a model for penetrating a culture beyond its surfaces and how it might be used to structure thinking and discussion in cultural studies. Steps involved in thinking and discussion are finding more precise language for phenomena (defining), discovering why people do what they do (explaining), and discerning what their behavior means for them (understanding). As observer-informant interchanges produce better stereotypes using these steps, new formulations may change the levels and types of generalization. The object of using models like the one proposed and the suggested inquiry procedure is to realize fresh interpretations of cultural phenomena in and beyond the classroom.

I wish to revisit this model.

Penetration into the culture is a function of the depth of information and insights the observer has access to. What may sometimes be tacit and difficult to articulate can be loosened from its embeddedness by more careful observation and persistent inquiry. Some of the most useful but most difficult roots of behavior lie at the core, in strata of bedrock as it were, not readily available even to the most astute observers and insiders. What is needed is more information and knowledge, or perhaps dramatic events, to shake loose the unconscious and inarticulate ground. With these, and perhaps in crisis times, what a person or a people characteristically does can be more easily seen, and why they do it may be more easily understood.

The above model assumes there are behaviors and products, or artifacts, of a people that we can observe and describe. Of these, there are some that we can readily explain; others can be explained with the help of those who are informed, or are themselves insiders. As a product of interaction, the meanings given by insiders in their words can help us understand why they do what they do.

There are, no doubt, behaviors and products we cannot see clearly, or do not see at all. Perhaps even resident natives cannot see some things about themselves clearly or at all. And there are interpretations that elude even the most able and embedded resident native, leaving the cultural observer with but surface observations, unmediated insights, and best conjectures.

Objections to the use of the word _penetration_ and the up-down, height-depth language/visualization aside, the model still works for me personally.

The article was written while residing outside my own country and culture, and for most of the past ten plus years, I have continued living abroad. I am a student of culture and cultures (my focus is ways of living versus the study of high culture, art, literature, etc.). Sometimes the insights I get are dramatic and at other times mundane. So be they.

More importantly today, the model suggests greater care should be taken in the current discourse about huge groups of people living their particular and unique mores seemingly in thorough opposition to our own (your _own_ being yours and not this writer's).

We need better ways of stereotyping* as we cope with violations of the "live, let live" injunction I recently wrote about.

---
* For a copy of the unpublished paper from which this statement and summary derive, please request.