Made In America

This is not really a post against Radio Lab.  Well it is, but it's also a post against all entertainments like Radio Lab.  I suppose I would include any and all podcasts/radio programs that pretend to a "scientific" exploration of phenomena.  I suppose I'd also include all news programs ("news" programs) like 60 Minutes and similar programs.

I would not begin to include shows like Rachel Maddow or the Daily Show or Fox and Friends or the O'Reilly Factor and so on.  That is to say, these shows are not "news" and barely informative...or, rather, they exist as misinformation primarily.

That is to say, you can't trust anyone, even yourself, so why "tune in" to any of these things?

I can't answer that.

I can say that I have spent my radio/podcast listening time primarily in the world of literature and philosophy where I don't even begin to believe there is a "truth" to find in any of them.  I know I'm just going to get another person's opinion/perspective and that I will find it commensurate with my own or I will not.  I look for those programs that will give me a little of both so as not to alienate me and still encourage my "thinking again" about my current opinions on such and such a poem, novel, author, idea, etc.

In some way I am seeking to expand my intelligence at least at the same rate as I expand my waistline and number of gray hairs (though this is offset by hair-loss).

That is to say, I want to encounter more art, more literature, more expression so as to give my own "self" a larger framework to "be" in.  I firmly believe the human mind is an extremely powerful analogizing engine.  It can be limited and constrained or it can be a rebel of sorts.  In short, our minds can be conventional or than can be rebellious: lawful minds or outlaw minds.

I seek to be an outlaw in my thinking.  This is not to say I seek to be an outlaw in how I live materially. That is, I don't seek to be seen as a criminal.

Art, as I understand it, might best be seen to operate most "usefully" (I'm not sure what other word fits--I don't mean pragmatically though) as a rebellion.  One does not need to be rebellious or to feel their art is rebellious to BE rebellious.  Some minds are out of step with their times, constricted by convention and so they see things from the outside (outlaws stand outside of conventional rules and restrictions which in the main are established by power structures and are wholly arbitrary but for the service of power).

What I get frustrated with is the media program that offers "understanding" of incredibly complex issues.  Even if I agree that a program has interesting content, I will always be dissatisfied with how that content is framed and contained...limited by a program's parameters and its ideas of success.

There is a Radio Lab "style" and "format" just as there is the Ira Glass approved style of program wherein young "story-tellers" present "life" in just such a way.  They SOUND so right, so generous...that might be the right word.  They sound so GENEROUS in their presentation.  Look at how we presented this...it entertained you and perhaps opened a window on another world, another culture, another class, anything "other."

But it's all "mediate."  Which is to say, it's all offered through a filter and contained in a format that begins and ends in a particular way (the Ira Glass way for example).

Radio programs MUST pick and choose what they share with you.  That is, editing is, I think, the ultimate stamp of "voice" or perspective on these shows.  You and I can never know what is left out; we can never know if that question and that answer were really offered in that context.  We cannot know if that particular bit of music actually worked to change the tone of the way that particular bit tape conveyed meaning.

We are really dealing with a medium ripe for manipulation performed to, upon, for, the most manipulable of beings.

Every single thing in our mediated world is working towards that one goal, manipulating approval, acceptance, agreement.  At the very least, a radio program, television program, podcast, video game, etc., wants you to return to it or stay with it.  If you are entertained, you will return.  If you are entertained you will agree.

Very few of us know how to freely disagree.  That is to say, we agree with an ideological stance and care less about particulars and we disagree with positions in opposition.  We seem to act upon, think upon, ideology.  If we disagree with a person, assertion, law, book, song, movie, picture, value, etc., it is likely a "gut" disagreement based upon an ingrained (trained) ideology.  It is a kind of simplification. We have some folks who will argue that it serves an evolutionary development--we NEED to be decisive in fight or flight moments and so we must create easy templates of actionable categories.

I am one to believe this: that it makes sense that from day one our particular environments serve to train our minds and bodies to act and think in particular ways to ensure the best hope for success in those environments.   This does not serve us well when our environments collide with other, often institutional, environments for which our decisive ways to act are entirely at variance with an often more powerful institutional environment.

An example from Radio Lab of a complex simplification of human activity

"Cut and Run"

Here is the show description:

Legions of athletes, sports gurus, and scientists have tried to figure out why Kenyans dominate long-distance running. In this short, we stumble across a surprising, and sort of terrifying, explanation. 

At the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City, Kipchoge Keino overcame a gall bladder infection to win gold in the 1500 meter race. Since then, one particular group of Kenyans - the Kalenjin - has produced an astonishing number of great long-distance runners. Gregory Warner - NPR's East Africa correspondent - takes Jad and Robert down a rabbit hole of theories about what exactly is going on in Kalenjin country.  

David Epstein and John Manners help Greg untangle a web of potential factors - from something in the cornmeal to simple economics. And, after talking to a young Kalenjin runner named Elly Kipgogei, Greg discovers a somewhat disturbing explanation for Kalenjin running prowess that actually makes him want to get on the treadmill and push himself just a little harder. 

So, because we live in a particular society, in a particular moment in time, with particular value systems (some of which are provided dominance by the sheer wealth and power of the society which "believes" is said values), we must FRAME our thinking in a particular way.

In this show we begin with sports and racing and the Olympics.  Already we have begun to frame our expectations of how we should think about it.  The show's NPR East Africa correspondent wants the success of the Kenyan in 1968 to be about the "triumph of the human spirit"--perhaps there are those o my age among you who will remember the ABC Wide World of Sports and its balancing of triumph with the "agony of defeat"?  That is we glory in the battle.

Then the program moves into genetics--body types determine certain inherent capabilities--this "worries" the hosts...and perhaps puts one in mind of Jimmy the Greek's comments on air that black athletes dominate due to their being bred for those qualities as slaves...which would assume, I'd guess, that black Africans would not be dominant athletes UNLESS they were bred that way--"Made in America" has a whole new connotation, eh?

On the show, the Kenyan has long legs and thin ankles, nearly a prerequisite for success in distance races.  Seems something indisputable that a physical characteristic unique to particular tribes, peoples, regions, will affect a talent or skill based on the physical performance.

Then, and this is more interesting and more controversial, the show pivots to pain endurance as a very large factor in the success of these particular runners.  Namely, they must, as children, endure initiation rites into manhood/womanhood that includes what the West terms "genital mutilation."  That is the boys and girls both undergo a ritual of circumcision that must be extremely painful and during which they may not "flinch"--no reaction is permitted...if a boy or girl reacts to the pain in any way they are considered shamed and they become outcasts.  And what is worse, they are restricted as procreators--they will not get to procreate with the best and strongest (stoical) among them.

The show then posits that this is a kind of selection (what we fear to call "breeding") for pain endurance.  And that this is what gives Kenyan runners another decided edge...if they can mentally train themselves to endure that pain then they can overcome any adversity.  In this scenario, the 1968 success of the Kenyan "Kip" Keino is a foregone conclusion.

The conclusion the show wants to come to is that a genetic strength like longer thinner ankles is "unfair" in sports, but that a social convention, like pain endurance due to circumcision rituals IS fair.

That is to say, while we cannot choose our ankle type, we can choose to put our children through ritual circumcision.  And that "choice" creates fairness in competition.

Of course, we can choose our ankle type--we just have to copulate and procreate with a person who has the "right' kind of ankle!  Sure it'll take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, but I think that's the idea behind selection.  However, we cannot guarantee that our simplistic breeding will yield what we contend is our goal...nature, we are told, can offer a chaos of "wrinkles" to the best laid plans of mice and men and they will, as often as not, "gang aft agly."

So, what did I learn from this show?  Well, I might contend I learned nothing of value to me.  But I also might say I learned to partially understand ideas about selection and breeding and partially understand ideas about social conventions, and cultural breeding...that is to say, I learned to misunderstand.

I might also contend that, with the right training, I might be able to hear bias and cultural assumptions in the very framework of this program, in the very words used to describe these athletes, these runners, these people, these tribes, this country, this region, etc.  I might learn more about the assumptions of Radio Lab than anything else--and by extension the culture within which Radio Lab has become a success.

Breeding Success


In the comments at the Radio Lab page for this particular "short" I found this:

Marete 

On the other hand, we here in Kenya are horrified by the limitless leeway and endless coddling afforded American and western children in general, so that they any manner trivial eventuality traumatizes them and lands them on the therapist's couch. 

Further, the application of epithets like "torture" and "child abuse" to proud traditions here (such as circumcision) is ridiculous and we reject it as hysterical. This kind of sneering attitude towards Africans (as well as other non-white people) has been familiar to us for the last 500 years, more or less, and does not shock us. We understand it very well. It is manner in which modern, educated westerners act-out the age-old instinct to colonize and dominate that is so deeply embedded in western culture and which, appearances notwithstanding, has never abated. 

Nov. 13 2013 11:04 PM

I have to say that this makes sense to me.  Or, rather, this comment has merit.

While I was listening I thought about a Utopian novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman called Herland.  In Herland there are no men but by a process (miraculous as all "evolutionary" processes seem to be) called parthogenesis women give birth to more female offspring.  The society is then dominated by the "feminine."  Though because there are no men, what we might call masculine characteristics are indeed present but Gilman's novel offers this labeling as an error--that traits we define as masculine or feminine are only also conventions of the dominant gender.

But why I'm linking these thoughts (or why my brain did, I suppose, with me only coming along for the ride in order to explain the analogy to myself and now to you), is that the creation of the society of Herland was INTENTIONAL and self-conscious.  That is to say, faced with a catastrophe that wiped out all of the men in the area (I forget why, war perhaps), the women had the opportunity, after the miracle that sustained their tribe's existence potential, to design and fortify traits that would lead to an ideal society (dangerous ideas, I know).  That is, Gilman proposes a eugenics that was at first accidental but that became an intention.

With knowledge of what is ideal and the opportunity to create it they do so.  In the above comment, circumcision as ritual, as tradition, is offered as a convention of choice that serves to fortify traits the community believes are of real and sustaining value to the group's existence over time.  In this novel-cum-polemic Gilman understands the concept of accretion: that time is the creator of a sustainable eugenics.  That the humans create institutions that must be replicated with values that must be constantly affirmed as good.  But time is not moral while institutions decidedly are.  The question in all these cases seems a case of "encoded" moralities.

Further, the commenter makes an indisputable point about Western hubris and condescension towards non-Western (non-White and likely non-Christian) peoples.

I would argue that this seems in itself an inherited trait.  White, Northern and Western Christians believe very strongly that they are chosen by a god to be the rightful and final creature of heaven.  That is to say that progress is Christian.  That progress is European and White--that this is now American and White.  That the method of progress is technical and material.  That the morality of such conforms to those advances and that any negative consequences of those material and technical advances to "others" are inconsequential or "incidental" and perhaps even necessary in the grand (White Christian) scheme.  That, finally, progress IS the fulfillment of White Christian on Earth.  (Are these Steven Pinker's "better angels"?)

I suppose that finally I tend to experience most, if not all, of these media presentations of the ways to understand the vicissitudes of life as framed in this way.

"Sold!" (Updated)

Do we feel like we can now label this a "Gladwellian" era?  One in which "science" is made fabulous in order to feed the hungry belief that is the dream of human progress?  The She-Wolf of human self-regard.

In this era we have I think finally brought out the open secret that "science" IS our story--our fiction, our religion, our poetry--we create out of its "discoveries."  Gladwell seems our most conspicuous example of this, but he is by no means alone and by no means unique.  It is the praxis of the times.

We cannot see this; or rather, we "relativize" truth and laud "uncertainty" with certainty.

I suppose I'll expose myself here as one who doesn't believe these stories.  Rather, I happily believe in experiments that can be replicated, but I begin to doubt (yes, I said it) when we begin to narrate the MEANING of said experiments.  That is, the experiment is valid in all its own parameters, but that is ALL.  There is no meaning outside of this.  Experiments must be a "closed" system, a universe unto themselves.  Yes, let us guess what comes next based on the results.  But that too creates another separate universe of predicated factors.  The world is not a "laboratory" experiment.  There will always be other factors we cannot "allow for" to make "best" guesses that have real ("dose-dependant") meaning.  I realize I am likely exposing myself here as someone who "doesn't get" the scientific method.  So it goes.  Eviscerate away.

It cannot be doubted this is the era of TED, revelatory as Gladwellian enterprise.  But this is only a progression: snake oil is as baseball and apple pie to us, just as the savage, black or red, is the devil.

It is not unusual that the country which prizes novelty and showmanship (chooses Edison over Tesla; Columbus over de las Casas), that which seems to characterize our understanding of "economy," over the staid yet miraculous daily and seasonal changes of the non-human, the trees, the rivers, the wild, that which characterizes our ecology, should love TED, love Gladwell, love the "reveal" which is not in the least a revelation but instead an exposure: there are suckers who will discount the reveal and there are suckers who will honestly love being taken.  What we are responding to is the show, and any show will do as long a the performance is "real."  (Huck Finn is probably our greatest exposé as regards this circus-belief; Brave New World only expands upon it, scientifically.)

I might contend that this very tendency is what the human ought to be trying to work itself through and out of...and verily into another way of minding the world.  Perhaps the exposure of "enlightened" skepticism ought to have taught us to return to the beginning using a truer sight and wiser eyeballs.

But really, my only point, I think, is that these experiments in "machined-sight" (our brilliance requires a capability beyond rubies after all) are in a way simply abstractions, like mathematic equations.  They prove only themselves and carry no other content.  Until we use them to narrate an idea.

That is, until we put them to work.

***

Update

I've been reading For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers by Sherman Paul (author of what I think is probably the best Thoreau biography-study) and I find this section in the essay on Aldo Leopold (Sand County Almanac) illustrative of my own thinking (but perhaps I've simply borrowed it and called it my own):

Science, [Leopold] finds, has encouraged rather than halted this [environmental] destruction (of land bureaus, agricultural colleges, and extension services, he notes that "no ethical obligation toward land is taught in these institutions"), and his own scientific education, making him aware of what is invisible to others, has penalized him by isolating him, forcing him to live alone in "a world of wounds."  "An ecologist," he says, "must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well, and does not want to be told otherwise."

I suppose the TED Circus reveals to me the self-aggrandizing nature of the human who, in the delusion of "mastery," simply continues world-wounding in the service of promoting a next brilliant technological fix: a fix one imagines will bear the moniker of the performer though the genealogy is out of Houdini and Barnum.

The Creature of His Own Creations

The justice of a nation's claim to be regarded as civilized seems to depend mainly upon the degree in which Art has triumphed over Nature. Civilization is the influence of Art, and not Nature, on Man. He mingles his own will with the unchanged essences around him, and becomes in his turn the creature of his own creations.

The end of Life is education. An education is good or bad according to the disposition or frame of mind it induces. If it tend to cherish and develop the religious sentiment, — continuously to remind man of his mysterious relation to God and Nature, — and to exalt him above the toil and drudgery of this matter-of-fact world, it is good.

Civilization we think not only does not accomplish this, but is directly adverse to it. The civilized man is the slave of Matter. Art paves the earth, lest he may soil the soles of his feet; it builds walls that he may not see the Heavens; year in, year out, the sun rises in vain to him; the rain falls and the wind blows, but they do not reach him. From his wigwam of brick and mortar he praises his Maker for the genial warmth of a sun he never saw, or the fruitfulness of an earth he disdains to tread upon. Who says that this is not mockery? So much for the influence of Art.

Our rude forefathers took liberal and enlarged views of things, — rarely narrow or partial. They surren- dered up themselves wholly to Nature; to contemplate her was a part of their daily food. Was she stupendous? so were their conceptions. The inhabitant of a mountain can hardly be brought to use a microscope; he is accustomed to embrace empires in a single glance. Nature is continually exerting a moral influence over man; she accommodates herself to the soul of man. Hence his conceptions are as gigantic as her mountains. We may see an instance of this if we will but turn our eyes to the strongholds of Liberty, — Scotland, Switzerland and Wales. What more stupendous can Art contrive than the Alps? What more sublime than the thunder among the hills? The savage is far-sighted; his eye, like the Poet's,

"Doth glance from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven."

He looks far into futurity, wandering as familiarly through the Land of Spirits, as the civilized man through his woodlot or pleasure-grounds. His life is practical poetry, a perfect epic. The earth is his hunting-ground; he lives summers and winters; the sun is his time-piece, — he journeys to its rising or its setting; to the abode of Winter, or the land whence Summer comes. He never listens to the thunder but he is re-minded of the Great Spirit, — it is his voice. To him the lightning is less terrible than it is sublime; the rainbow less beautiful than it is wonderful; the sun less warm than it is glorious.

The savage dies and is buried; he sleeps with his forefathers, and before many winters his dust returns to dust again, and his body is mingled with the elements. The civilized man can scarce sleep even in his grave. Not even there are the weary at rest, nor do the wicked cease from troubling. What with the hammering of stone, and the grating of bolts, the worms themselves are wellnigh deceived. Art rears his monument. Learning contributes his epitaph, and Interest adds the "Carey fecit" as a salutary check upon the unearthly emotions which a perusal might otherwise excite.

A nation may be ever so civilized, and yet lack wisdom. Wisdom is the result of education; and education being the bringing-out or development of that which is in man, by contact with the Not-me, — that is by Life, — is far surer in the hands of Nature than of Art.

The savage may be, and often is a sage. Our Indian is more of a man than the inhabitant of a city. He lives as a man, he thinks as a man, he dies as a man. The latter, it is true, is learned. Learning is Art's creature, but it is not essential to the perfect man; it cannot educate. A man may spend days in the study of a single species of animalculoe, invisible to the naked eye, and thus become the founder of a new branch of science, — without having advanced the great objects for which life was given him, at all. The naturalist, the chemist, the mechanist is no more a man for all his learning. Life is still as short as ever, death as inevitable, and the heavens as far off.

HDT--College Composition: "The Mark or Standard by which a Nation is judged to be Barbarous or Civilized. Barbarities of Civilized States." Reproduced in The Life of Henry David Thoreau by F. B. Sanborn, 1917.

My Radio Show and Podcast: The Custom House

I am hosting a radio show and podcast on WFHB, community radio, in Bloomington, IN, called The Custom House that will air on Saturdays at 5:30 p.m. through August and continue as a podcast.

The first show aired June 1 and can be downloaded here: Babo's Razor.  This show is about our inability to see through our cultural "blinders" even when there's a razor at our throats.  The fiction that illustrates this for us is Melville's novella, "Benito Cereno."  My guest was Jonathan Elmer of Indiana University.

The second show aired June 8 (has yet to be posted) and featured biographer Christoph Irmscher.  We discussed his book Louis Agassiz: The Creator of American Science.  In one part of our discussion Irmscher details a letter that Agassiz wrote discussing Psalm 8 saying the Psalmist's view is in error as he did not know that the mind of the scientist would bring Man closer to realizing God in himself.

This weekend, June 15, I'll talk with Purnima Bose (International Studies at IU) about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.  We examine the "template" of theocratic totalitarianism that lives just below the surface in America.

Much more to come including shows on photography, environmentalism (Rachel Carson), moral machines, Sylvia Plath, Robert Browning, Autobiography, Herman Melville (Hershel Parker), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), Women and the Law and much more.

A Progressive Experiment

“The angel of history”

Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and join together what has been smashed to pieces….But a storm is blowing from Paradise [and] irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of ruins before him grows skyward.  What we call progress is this storm.”   

Walter Benjamin quoted by Hannah Arendt

***

I find my poems reveal "me" and reveal the stories that reside within me in ways that are surprising, but only if I give myself time to think about them; that is, to read and interpret my own accidental being in the moment of composition and consequently in the moment of interpretation.  Sorry for that meta-me talk...but it seems highly necessary these days to see yourself as a particular agglomeration open to disciplined attempts at understanding as a process investigation.  This is akin to saying of words that I put on paper, "Who wrote that?" or "What of that is true of me?"  As might be obvious, those are difficult if not impossible questions to try to answer with anything close to certainty.  If asked, "what did you mean to say?" I might be tempted to assert that I don't mean to say anything but the words seem to say something.

***

Below I excerpt stanzas from a longer piece, "test results," to illustrate my own compositional confusion as I try to discover the ways this condensed version spotlights a stronger and more dangerous interpretation.

furious chemicals will
impregnate political
flesh to embody the fates

they no longer remember
entangled in the specious
present their own history

described by the same quantum
mechanical description
which is indefinite in

terms of important factors
a treachery forgotten
in the course of thousands of

years, forgotten by the gods,
the eagles, forgotten by
the jew as metonymic

experimental subject
a rational example
yielding progressive results

***

The italicized words are out of Kafka.

***

What I wanted to offer here is something akin to that economic quip by that horrific man Milton Friedman, "we're all Keynesians now."  Is it wrong for me to think of Friedman in the way I imagine Eichmann--a man who's thinking and justifications are excused by ostensible obeisance to the operations of a system one doesn't "control."  That is a refusal of responsibility and an acceptance of following power as the correct, pragmatic, action.

***

One thing I mean to say is that what is visible to us culturally is often this very powerful and strange recurrence of narrative elements with often, again, visibly, a "representative" of the "storied" Jew in his storied guises.  It's often inescapable AS story but too as real elements of our imaginary.

But here, that is in the poem, it is the Holocaust, the genocide, that "becomes us" and the Jew in the poem (as metonymic) stands in for the whole of us.  Historically we are all in this relationship to extreme arbitrary power and our current mechanisms of state--primarily military and financial (or should I say as citizen-debtors), but also really all systems of sustenance and knowledge--make it extraordinarily easy to CREATE useful catastrophe wherein we are all subjects of experiment.

***

Himmler seems as readily characterized as an opportunistic businessman.  A rather staid description for one committing genocide.  But a key factor in much of what he perpetrated was how this human resource might be used to enrich him before liquidation.

***

So it is from this vantage point that we look back to the example of history.  The narrative lessons of easy systematic eradication.  Man's chemical fury is NOT effective on insects, but VERY effective on Man.  That is "we are all jews now," objects to expunge without compunction--ie, un-beings.  There is only power, and only what power can use or destroy.

And here is Arendt, corrective to the "man" Heidegger, and a furtherance of his best work but with greater human, relational, insight.  An ethics of how we might correct "technicity" before it loads onto cattle cars (controlled remotely) all those useless to the paradigm "at large."

***

The full poem is dedicated to Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring as a warning to us about the "banality" of our response to the chemical war on fundamental aspects of our ecology ("bugs" and "weeds" and people who are bugs and weeds to those who hold the spray nozzle), was incisive and clear and a deeply poetic writer.

But in the end the book, while certainly alarming, can be too readily minimized by the human ignorance of interconnectivity.  Human chemical agency is like a billion-billion butterflies flapping their wings and altering the world.  And it only weakly addresses the fact that human "control" mechanisms are imaginatively as "positive" as the economic realities of the human lives employed in this industry.  We invest our being in our economic validation.  Death-dealing is a livelihood.

***

In another context I heard that science, to some, can reveal God to Man, that with enough money, enough people seeking, we will find out the "mind" of God.  This is a Progressive idea.  It posits a Good that must (reasonably) be considered a Universal and then calculates the cost/benefit of achieving it.  This might be considered a scrambled eggs utilitarianism promoted by those whose shells won't ever be cracked.  That is, from the right perspective "experiment" will be justified.  In fact, we like to say, as those do who praise and seek to justify military aggression in the Middle East, "time will vindicate us."  That is, what seems like a terrorizing and murderous venture will be shown "in time" to have been an act of great benefit to "human freedoms."  So perhaps, with the aid of passing solar revolutions, humans, if there are still humans, will make The Holocaust out to be a useful experiment for the species.

***

Or, perhaps, nothing is as hot when you eat it as when you cook it.

***

This poetic truncation seems a more powerful poem, but as I read this rendition (now a troubling term itself), it becomes arrestingly problematic in interpretation.

A procedure I use in many of my poems is to strip "location" from the text by eliminating the signs of direction...upper case, punctuation, enjambing lines that should be separate...in order to, as a friend has said (warned of), disconcert.  I think of it as opening up interpretation.  It's a kind of experiment in miscommunication.

In the full poem the "they" in stanza two is meant to refer to the chemicals (furious and fatal) and to render that fate via the political flesh that then applies those furies to other flesh--the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

In this version, due to this lack of direction and this particular truncation, it reads something more like the familiar "blaming the victim" for treachery against God (the Kafka parable of Prometheus).

And that story too has been tested.

There is proficiency in dissection...

The whole field of education is affected -- There is no end of detail that is without significance.

Education would begin by placing in the mind of the student the nature of knowledge -- in the dead state and the nature of the force which may energize it.

This would clarify his field at once -- He would then see the use of data.

But at present knowledge is placed before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained which is superlative.

nothing could be more ridiculous.  To data there is no end.  There is proficiency in dissection and a knowledge of parts but in the knowledge--

It is imagination that --

That is : life is absolutely simple.  In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always.  There should never be permitted, confusion --

There are difficulties to life, under conditions there are impasses, life may prove impossible -- But it must never be lost -- as it is today --

I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture -- In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the winking of an eyelash.  Not one.  The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge.  There is no end --

And what is the fourth dimension?  It is the endlessness of knowledge --

It is the imagination on which reality rides -- It is the imagination -- It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization.

It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science -- in spite of everything.

Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality -- Poetry

The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current -- which it has always sought --

In other times -- men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense -- Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts -- broken, bruised

few escape whole slaughter.  This is not civilization but stupidity -- Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination --

The effect will be to give importance to the subdivisions of experience -- which today are absolutely lost -- There exists simply nothing.

from Spring and All by William Carlos Williams (1923)