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I have been stuck on the greatly-overused metaphor of the Titanic for too long now, given that a year or more ago I reported on my visit to the artifacts exhibition now being toured by the Atlanta-based company that has recovered objects from the wrecked ship. I may have said at that time that while I couldn't resist the replica of a steerage coffee mug, I decided against wrapping myself for the winter in a replica of a White Star Line steerage blanket on the grounds that I felt too much like a steerage passenger on the Titanic already. The replica of a towel from the first-class Turkish bath was entirely too horrific, somewhat like the Atlanta restaurant offering a $75 menu replicating the last dinner served on the doomed liner.
Since then, I have abandoned my fragmentary poem "Towels from the Titanic" on the grounds that all my elegant metaphors of foreboding have already been borne out in reality. The elegantly usernamed sinnombre1 confesses raw terror at the visible condition of America (or actually did confess, having imitated myself and the Baltimore-dwelling Estonian by taking her posts private soon after posting them publicly). I do likewise, but withdraw only my ill-composed parables (which I may re-post once I decide they are worth posting).
Some of my characteristic convolutions come under the category of what Gautama the Enlightened called "questions that tend not to edification" (or rather, what his Victorian translators called that; probably "questions that don't do anybody any good"). You recall the Buddha's parable was about the man stuck with a poisoned arrow who refused to have it pulled out until someone could tell him all about the manufacturer of the arrow, the style of the bow that shot it, and the social standing of the archer.
In like fashion, my fascination with the biologically based structural parallels of the widely dispersed millennial movements that arose in response to famines and colonial exploitation is a a question that tends not to edification. It can be disposed of over the short term with a rude, blunt appeal to the idea that folks who get the shaft react similarly to being shafted.
And the great theoreticians from whose insights I have learned much were perfectly capable of being thick-headed when it came to practice. Ernst Bloch, whose The Principle of Hope I cite endlessly in spite of not having looked at it in years, caught considerable flak in recent years from a Scottish progressive journal, for having been an apologist for Joseph Stalin long after he should have thought better of it. Walter Benjamin continued in hopeless contradictions more out of passion for his strong-willed Latvian lover, and his muddled-up accounts of human motives still contain more wisdom than most contemporary theorists will ever manage.
Regardless, the job at hand is to get the damn arrow out. And American politicians are quarreling over whether pulling out the arrow constitutes unacceptable restriction on the noble art of archery.
Since then, I have abandoned my fragmentary poem "Towels from the Titanic" on the grounds that all my elegant metaphors of foreboding have already been borne out in reality. The elegantly usernamed sinnombre1 confesses raw terror at the visible condition of America (or actually did confess, having imitated myself and the Baltimore-dwelling Estonian by taking her posts private soon after posting them publicly). I do likewise, but withdraw only my ill-composed parables (which I may re-post once I decide they are worth posting).
Some of my characteristic convolutions come under the category of what Gautama the Enlightened called "questions that tend not to edification" (or rather, what his Victorian translators called that; probably "questions that don't do anybody any good"). You recall the Buddha's parable was about the man stuck with a poisoned arrow who refused to have it pulled out until someone could tell him all about the manufacturer of the arrow, the style of the bow that shot it, and the social standing of the archer.
In like fashion, my fascination with the biologically based structural parallels of the widely dispersed millennial movements that arose in response to famines and colonial exploitation is a a question that tends not to edification. It can be disposed of over the short term with a rude, blunt appeal to the idea that folks who get the shaft react similarly to being shafted.
And the great theoreticians from whose insights I have learned much were perfectly capable of being thick-headed when it came to practice. Ernst Bloch, whose The Principle of Hope I cite endlessly in spite of not having looked at it in years, caught considerable flak in recent years from a Scottish progressive journal, for having been an apologist for Joseph Stalin long after he should have thought better of it. Walter Benjamin continued in hopeless contradictions more out of passion for his strong-willed Latvian lover, and his muddled-up accounts of human motives still contain more wisdom than most contemporary theorists will ever manage.
Regardless, the job at hand is to get the damn arrow out. And American politicians are quarreling over whether pulling out the arrow constitutes unacceptable restriction on the noble art of archery.
