drifting
February 7th, 2008Getting the Drift
Today I find my world in banking snow,
Accounting for this winter’s days, the cold
Within my heart, and costs still left untold
Until I settle down with one I owe.
In silent drifts I heap up all I know,
Accumulating here like Fafnir’s gold,
Sole hoard of things I’ve bought that never sold,
Investment in this winter’s window show.
In unrelenting ardor I confess
My love for silver moonlight and the days
Twice brightened, cloud and snowbank, and the haze
That spreads through world and mind at my address
To one who hears these secrets with a smile:
Who longs for spring, yet stays to talk a while.PGE 2-6-2008
May 9th, 2008 at 1:00 am
I -love- the new digs. It’s good to see your mad coding skills put to such a nice use!
As an aside, I think you’re completely out to lunch on the worthlessness of culture, btw. How do you reconcile your committment to education, literature and culture with your seeming belief in its meaninglessness? For some reason, that reminds me of the existentialists. . .
Or am I the one out to lunch?
May 12th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Well, understand that I am in a field founded by Matthew Arnold, for whom “culture” was the replacement for an outmoded Christian consensus. The missionary zeal with which the study of literature has been pursued is due to this Arnoldian founding (which is in turn indebted to the Romantics) of English Literature studies. You can go back to Rousseau for another piece of the pie.
Of course, Amos Comenius (a Dutch guy of Reformed persuasion) is the great contact point for the notions of public schooling and the “teacher:classroom :: sun:flower” principle which underlies modern education (and much homiletics). He’s wrong, but interesting. In any case, though, he does not have the theoretical commitments to “culture” as the new Messiah which is pervasive in my field.
It is not that what we might call small-c culture, that is, the artefacts of a society, particularly the ones we preserve and prefer, don’t have meaning. Otherwise I *would* be in a rather pointless place.
And, as I’ve said, there have been times I *do* think it’s rather like a game, which one plays because there are those who will pay to see it played well. Some aspects of any field of worldly endeavor *are* so.
Generally, I do not think that placing any cultural vision at the center makes sense. Certainly, in the sense current in American culture, to do so is to concede from the outset the Arnoldian / Marxian / Deweyan vision, in significant part if not in whole. One concedes that the production of such-and-such citizens, who fit in with such-and-such State, are the purposes for art, and scholarship, and education, and science, etc. Just because one version has a (reduction of) Christian morality and creed for its flavor and color, and another has an in-your-face and in flagrante delicto repudiation of this, does not make the candle worth the game.
Rather, with all our ability to critique and “read” culture for the benefit of our lives and learning as Christians and as churches, we must have the ability to continually repudiate any particular culture; we must perpetually be able to affirm that we would rather not be here.