"Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I’d always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a “people’s capitalism” where you “owned a part of the company” and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you’re not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don’t know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic."William Gaddis, born 103 years ago today, in a 1986 interview. For boatloads of excerpts click the Gaddis tag.
Clearly from this and similar eloquent testimony certain members of the community have been subjected to annoyance and serious inconvenience in the pursuit of private errands of some urgency, however, recalling to mind that vain and desperate effort to prevent construction of a subway kiosk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, enshrined decades ago in the news headlines PRESIDENT LOWELL FIGHTS ERECTION IN HARVARD SQUARE, by definition the interests of the general public must not be confused with that of one or even several individuals (People v. Brooklyn & Queens Transit Corp., 258 App. Div. 753, 15 N.Y.S.2d 295, 1939, affirmed 283 N.Y. 484, 28 N.E.2d 925, 1940).
- Gaddis, Frolic of His Own
Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...
- Gaddis, JR
I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.- Gaddis, Recognitions
an imitation of an agriculturalist remarked: Before we go farther along this road we have taken, has it ever come to you—quietly, perhaps while walking a fencerow or sitting on a porch at dusk—that what we call education in these times may be nothing more than one long, sorrowful mistake?You do not come to school as a farmer comes to his fields: eager to learn the nature of the ground, the habits of the weather, the needs of living things. No, you come to be taught what is required, measured, and certified, so that you may pass on to the next gate. And so knowledge, which is as wild and manifold as any old-growth forest or native prairie, must be cleared, plowed under, and planted in straight rows so that it can be efficiently tended and harvested as information. Do you see what this does? It teaches us to believe that order is the natural condition of knowing, that neatness and arrangement belong to knowledge itself, while disorder—the wild tangle, the unexpected bloom, the fox in the corn—is merely an intruder from outside, something to be fenced out or poisoned.But any man who has worked good land knows better. The wildness is not the enemy; it is the source. The soil itself is born of chaos—ancient forests fallen, glaciers retreated, floods and fires and the slow grinding of stone. Out of that wild beginning we coax our fragile order: the turned furrow, the planted seed, the pasture fenced for cattle. We impose our patterns, yes, but always provisionally, always humbly, knowing that drought or deluge, pest or frost, the wild return of hawk or coyote, can undo our work in a season.So it is with minds and souls. They are not empty lots awaiting the surveyor’s grid. They are living ground—part wild, part cultivated, part tended by generations of care. True knowing grows as crops grow: in conversation with the weather of experience, in companionship with domesticated beasts and cultivated plants and the wild creatures that come and go at the edges. It requires patience, affection, forgiveness for failure, and a willingness to let the ground rest now and then.Order is not the inherent property of knowledge. It is the thin, perilous, and always temporary crust we lay upon the wild fertility beneath. And if we forget that—if we come to believe our straight rows and clean fences are eternal—we will exhaust the soil of the mind as surely as we have exhausted so much real soil, and the wildness, when it returns, will not be kind.
ReplyDeleteanother plagiarism machine,produces: Here is the passage re-imagined in the hopeful, celebratory style of Michael Dowd, viewing our temporary order not as a lie, but as a sacred, participatory gesture within a grander reality.
ReplyDelete***
Friends, let's bring up the lights! And as we do, let’s bring up a wonderful question, a truly liberating one. Has it ever dawned on you—and I mean really *dawned*, like a sunrise in your heart—that our whole project of organizing knowledge is based on a beautiful, human-scale misunderstanding?
You see, we often approach learning as if we are here to be *filled up* with facts, to pass them from one container to another, all to succeed in a game of tests. So we take this glorious, throbbing mystery of reality and we break it into bits—into information—so we can manage it. We build little shelves of order.
And from this, we can start to believe, deep down, that the shelf-making *is* the reality. We see the universe's wild, creative ferment as a threat to our little piles. We fear the chaos.
But here's the glorious, good news truth of it: **Our order is not a fortress against chaos. It is a dance within a greater harmony.** That "chaos" is not a void; it's the fertile ground of all possibility, the cosmic compost from which every new thing emerges! It is Reality herself—the 14-billion-year-old Universe Story—unfolding in her creative dynamism.
We are not strangers here. We are born of this dynamism. The stardust in our bones, the deep-time wisdom in our DNA—we are *participants* in this grand unfolding. Our temporary, human projects of order—our sciences, our arts, our classrooms—are not pathetic lies. They are our way of *joining the dance*, our sacred and humble way of saying "Yes!" to the process, for a little while.
So trust your connection. You are not a lonely thinker in a cold universe. You are the universe, in a particular, precious, temporary form, reaching out to know itself. Our perceived order is a lovely, ephemeral pattern we trace on the surface of a deeper, wiser current—and that current is what carries us. It is our true home. So let's not fear the unknown that grounds us. Let's thank it, trust it, and play our beautiful, temporary part in it with awe and gratitude.