All Myths are Myths of Creation: Devotional Language, by Johannes Sloek
"or the child learns by playing the game of language" (67)
I've just been rereading this book and I won't stop telling everyone how much I love it: it's as good and better than I remember. Look, I tell them, if you're at all interested in mythology, theology, philosophy, language, culture, education--practically anything relevant to the inner life, and the possibility of cultivating and expressing it in any way--you should read Devotional Language, by Johannes Sloek. I'll send you a pdf that I found, since the book is expensive and hard to find, and it's not even all that long; you can read it in few sittings; you can sit with it a lifetime. Just ask! So far exactly one person has taken me up on this belated enthusiasm for the preeminent 20th-century Kierkegaard scholar's work, my friend and co-founder of this humble Video Game Academy, Ben, known online and to his students as Professor Kozlowski.
He has long since shared my admiration and written an excellent, detailed review of Devotional Language. What's more, in his writing and teaching, Ben has incorporated Sloek's insights about language being grounded in myth and begun to put him into conversation with other authoritative witnesses to the mythic worldview, such as the Tolkien of Mythopoeia and the Lewis of An Experiment in Criticism, as well as the likes of Foucault and Derrida, influential voices who are conspicuously absent from Sloek's work, and whose views on language demand a response.
For creative and scholarly projects alike, Devotional Language promises and proves to be a deep well of inspiration and encouragement. It is funny, erudite, full of cogent analysis and argumentation, laced with wry mysticism, by turns waxing poetic and delivering blunt and laconic statements of faith; at times reverberating with weighty allusions and a wealth of complexity, at times uttering phrases bordering on tautologies in their simplicity.
I implore you to read it.
What else is there to say? Why do I bother going on about it, having said what I had to say?
Not just out of enthusiasm, I hope. Importantly, the work of myth, in Sloek's view, is to ground other sorts of language and activity, but in order to function, the myth has a way of continually restating itself. We are bound, then, to reinterpret, but still more to recite, to reenact, the myths of origin. So it isn't enough to read the book, or to have one good response to it at hand. We make and remake our own. We recur to the myths, we hold fast to the faith, and say for ourselves what has been said time and again already by the community, which in spite of all appearances abides.
Wherever there is still meaning, wherever communication is still possible, myth is alive and at work, whether we know it or not. Sloek's presentation of this basic truth is profoundly reassuring. I'll try to fill out somewhat through the remainder of this brief, belated essay my own representation and response as to why and in what way, amplifying as I go with stories and some allusions of my own.
In college, Ben and I took our first philosophy class with a professor who specialized in Buddhism and Marx. We also had the good fortune to take a few other classes together along the way. We had Kierkegaard and Nietzsche with the same professor, and a seminar on language, much later; a class on the Eastern Shore in our first semester with a devotee of John Gardner; and one on the Bible, somewhere in between, with Corey Olsen, the future Tolkien Professor. Our Marxian-Buddhist philosopher had us write response papers on the readings to bring to each meeting. Occasionally he would ask us to read something from them, or follow up on a point we made there in the discussion. Mostly, though, it was an exercise for us as students and readers, to help us come to class with plenty of ideas and questions we wanted to share.
As much as the humanities are in decline, and have been for a long time, by all accounts, I have to say I still feel like this was a pretty good way to learn: reading books, writing about them, and discussing them with fellow students under the guidance of a more experienced reader, writer, and thinker. Our professor's voice was low and husky, almost at times a whisper, and the room lights were always left off so that the only light was what came in through the windows, with the branches of trees growing all around, and everyone in the class was making that earnest striving to understand that is the hallmark, for me, of a good class. In what sense, then, can it be said that the humanities are in decline?
Perhaps it is in the value, or lack thereof, which these activities of reading, writing, thinking, discussion, and contemplative feeling are accorded within the wider culture. Not everyone has had the rich educational experience of even one good humanities class; and even at our fancy liberal arts institution, where we enjoyed a great many, I know it was still fairly exceptional. To cite just one example from the research on the paucity of quality humanities experiences in schools, In Search of Deeper Learning, by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, holds up a single classroom in the traditional, comprehensive high school the authors study, where the teacher holds Socratic seminars with a small group of students on philosophical texts. Along with the production of a play by the extracurricular drama program, this is the only example of "deeper learning" they find at this typical, large public high school. Selective--and self-selecting--instances like these cannot easily be scaled to address the crisis of public education for critical thought in large democracies. And here we are.
A few, like Roosevelt Montas, digging through the garbage to rescue Socrates; many others, less fortunate in their pursuit of autodidacticism, doing their own research and disappearing down the rabbit hole--all of us, more or less, sensing that something is rotten. Would it be going too far to say the humanities may be a symptom, but the problem underlies language itself? To adapt a Nietzsche quote our professor used to like to share, "We have not got rid of God because we have not got rid of grammar"--but our God (or if you like, our value system as such) and our grammar are downright shaky.
In high school, and throughout my public school years, I had great teachers. I would not say, however, with few exceptions, that I did deep thinking. Despite the efforts of my teachers, education, like all the structures of life in our time, institutions of church, state, and industry, by their very structure, felt essentially trivial: a meaningless progression for the sake of who knows what end. Except insofar as I sought a meaning out myself, in the library, in video games, in writing short stories and writing about imaginary video games--and no doubt this reflects my own immaturity--I found only the slightest stirrings towards valuing learning for its own sake in school: in being assigned Macbeth and Crime and Punishment, in physics equations and chemical reactions, in Spanish and Latin grammar, of all things, and in playing soccer and going to friends' houses--until I went to college and had the good fortune to study abroad in Spain, meet more friends, grow up a bit, philosophize and look out the window, listen to music into the night, and all the while keep writing and playing video games. Strangely enough, these provided an early intimation of the deep learning I would find later in my studies, and that I continue striving to share with my own students.
At a young age I read The Hobbit, and because I liked that, Philip Pullman's fiction, and then I found his essays, which led me to Karen Armstrong, who led me in turn to Johannes Sloek. My response to all this is still inchoate, but a beginning may be found here as you are reading, and here, here, if you'd like to keep doing so.
But as I say, why read me when you can read Sloek? At best, this is a kind of response paper, me sorting out my thoughts. Let me just append a few annotations. For like what happens when I think about EarthBound and His Dark Materials, the way my thoughts tend to run is to further courses and curricula. Reading lists, in short, open-ended and interminable until with Augustine we "take and read" the one book, the story, the myth we really need, and find our rest therein.
If you haven't found it yet, read on! But I really suggest reading Sloek first, before turning to the Preface and Bibliography of Devotional Language, which would lead you into the various allusions the rest of this post mainly deals with knitting together.
To read Sloek's Devotional Language is to read (or reread, or realize you have to read for yourself) Kierkegaard. (As I mentioned, Sloek is apparently known, insofar as he is known, as a Kierkegaard scholar of some importance, but only one of his books, Kierkegaard's Universe, appears to exist in an English edition.) I recommend starting with Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments. Needless to say, to read Kierkegaard is to read (or reread, etc.) the Bible and the whole western philosophical tradition, along with a good deal of its literary and theological output.
In the course of Devotional Language, Sloek mentions, to name just a few significant influences and interlocutors, Plato and Socrates, chiefly instances from Cratylus and Theatetus; Homer's Odysseus and the sirens, and Coleridge's Ancient Mariner; Saussure; Eliot's "Unreal City"; Kant's ding-an-sich; Hegel; Marx; Fromm; Shakespeare's Hamlet, first obliquely and later overtly:
To be (a structuralist) or not -- my opinion is, as follows.
Language is thus [in such a way?] entwined with the phenomenon that the latter is always linguistic, beforehand, or, it is the phenomenon, designated by language. The phenomenon is not there, at first, and language is not something secondary, which interprets the phenomenon, but the phenomenon and the linguistic interpretation are simultaneous, occur at the same time, and imply one another. To put it in a different way: the world is always the world interpreted by language. Language doesn't speak about the world, but the world speaks linguistically. And when man--through language--speaks, he speaks about a world which--first--speaks the language that is the precondition of speaking about it. In this way language is a revealation [sic.], and the fact that language is a revealation is expressed in the allegation that language, as language, always speaks the truth. Language is truthful insofar as it is revealing. The concept of the truthfulness of language in this primary sense is a new one, and, still, an original concept of truth [as opposed to rationalist concepts of truth as correspondence, coherence, consensus, whether popular or scientific, etc.]. We may call it the truth of epiphany, and by using the Greek term, we may show that it is a revealation which is not--in any way--a cover-up. (22)
Who else? Sloek identifies himself on the next page as "a nominalist, not in the line of Occam, but in the sense of Cusanus and Spinoza"; he is (amenably to me) disparaging of Aristotle, beginning from his definition of man, which leads into dangerous dehumanizations based on ability, race, etc.; yet he does not claim that, "in this respect [ie. as to its "world-picture," such as the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian astronomy] one culture just as true as another, calling such political correctness "obscurantism, for after Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein we know better than Aristotle ever had a chance of doing"; yet again, "Give the Psalmist a crash course on galaxies, the big bang, etc. In his world, the information would be a pack of lies, or, rather, meaningless speech"; "When Sappho wrote about 'the soul'...'the soul' was born into the world." He is cool toward the Stoics, though giving the benefit of the doubt since Greek was not their primary language, either. We encounter Freud, not for the last time; Marx, again; Wittgenstein; Jung (per whose "claim that everything is psychical," like the "phenomenological way of expressing myself...a rather superficial way of thinking, according to my taste," "everything would be on a wrong track, according to my concepts); Pan, maybe? out in the woods; The Tempest, Hamlet again, and Macbeth.
To repeat, both because I love this paragraph and so as to break up the dizzying list:
"the scheme [of "the thing, quite naively understood as a thing," of "copy theories, the subjectivity of sense qualities, transcendental conditions, etc."] assumes the thing out there is itself as this particular thing, which is designated in a particular way and is understood by way of its definition. But this is not the case. A lot of philosophers know about this, eg. Spinoza" (43). [Mic drop. There you have it, capping off the best discussion of thinghood since Aristotle, or since Maritain's Creative Intuition, anyhow.]
Sloek goes on to consider a tulip in his garden as an exemplary thing in light of "Spinoza's way of thinking"; when he deals with "rational language... in its most consistent form--as logical empiricism" the thing becomes an ashtray, and he is obliged to bifurcate the thing into a "fact" in a "situation." But deal with it he does, elegantly and swiftly, and we come to the section on Mythical Language. Here we encounter Hume; Muller (Tolkien's representative misologue in "On Fairy-stories"); Creuzer; Frazer and Tylor; Levy-Breul and Levy-Strauss; Robertson-Smith; Schelling; WF Otto (not the same as The Idea of the Holy Otto, but he of Gesetz, Urbild und Mythos); Gorgias; Pindar; Euripides; Calypso in Homer; Hesiod; Plato as mythmaker; Shakespeare, ditto, in The Winter's Tale; Bergson shows up somewhere around here; Herodotus; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter; Waiting for Godot; Jung and Kerenyi's Einfuhrung in das Wesen der Mythologie; the parables of Jesus.
Again, let's pause here and listen to Sloek. Intriguingly, he claims:
You can hear a myth, or you may refrain from doing so. You cannot once hear it and, then later, have a more precise explanation of what it means. Mythical language won't be translated into rational language. [Though fortunately it seems we can talk about it, rationally I hope, and quote great quantities of such discourses at our leisure!] Here we find that the claim that Jesus and Isaiah agreed upon holds true: "Who hath ears to hear, let him hear" (St. Matthew 13.9). The myth reveals a secret which can't be revealed in other terms than those of the myth. I can't help but inserting a remark. Jesus' adoption of the words of Isaiah demonstrates that what holds true for the myth also holds true in the so-called parables of Jesus, as far as I can see [why "so-called"? What's at stake here? Is it perhaps that "parable" implies there's a meaning or teaching to be unraveled from and thus in principle separable from the words?]. I have claimed so before [presumably in the preceding book] and have often been contradicted by expert theologians. But I shall stick to my point [you go, Sloek!]; for in my view, it's of the greatest importance not to mix different kinds of language [Plato wrote dialogues, with distinct speakers; Straussians know that some of his teaching, like his inheritance from the Pythagoreans, or like the mysteries of Eleusis which Sloek takes as an example of a mythic cult, was esoteric in nature; Kierkegaard went so far as to write his many different books and styles of book under many different pseudonyms]. The parables of Jesus have been expressed in mythical language; every interpretation of them must be performed in rational language, and, in principle, this is a destruction of them--regardless of the profundity of the interpretation. The parables of Jesus are not [to] be interpreted. They are to be heard or preached, and preaching is a different category from interpretation. However, these observations belong to a different analysis [ie. the sequel], so here I shall leave them be as mere assertions. (83)
More! How in Acts, in Peter's Pentecost sermon he argues by quotes rather than putting forth new arguments, and so do the Scholastics, ie. Aquinas: "this thinker of deep reflection is still living in the universe of mythical language, which in no way prevents him from also being rational and claiming rational concepts of truth" (88); "Let me mention his counterpart--Descartes. In his thought, the mythical perishes definitively...he declines quotations" [and yet he has that flowery letter to the Catholic authorities. More Calypso-y logoi, maybe Sloek would say]. Then come Plutarch ["the great god Pan is dead"], Ovid, and Dionysios of Halicarnassus on the founding of Rome; math makes a cameo, with the School of Pythagoras; Jung's archetypes and collective unconscious show up briefly. Of their usefulness as to a guide to "the so-called primitive state of consciousness...I must admit I have my doubts," Sloek remarks. I wonder if he ever read Barfield. I have my doubts.
Apropos of "unconscious powers," Sloek prophetically channels Jung and his youtube/podcast-bro-sphere followers:
Whenever this vital relation [of a culture, a people, to its "profound spiritual background," its unconscious basis of myth and religion] is deserted, we shall find the human and cultural catastrophe we are returning to, again and again, for the very simple reason that we are in the middle of it. When the progressive differentiation of culture does not succeed in relating to this archetypical or mythical foundation through religious interpretation, the world of consciousness will, of course, be rootless, separated from its past, as it is, and the people of this culture will be defenceless when faced with just about any suggestion; a collective neurosis will arise; or, the age will fall victim to psychical epidemics, to obscurantism [there's that word again!], to scientific or political--psudo-religious--ideologies. Rational language loses its premiss, runs amuck, and is seized by megalomania (or, whatever you might prefer to call it). Ironically, rational language ends up being obscure. Instead of the myth, we have the ideology, and, in particular, the one which claims to be "scientific"...They are indeed, nothing but the consequence of the fact that rational language has lost its mind, by way of losing its premiss, and can now find no way out... (94). [cf. Demons; The Master and Margarita; I and Thou; Man's Search for Meaning; The Master and His Emissary; The Righteous Mind; the popularity of Jordan Peterson...]
Sloek delves into Freud next, Totem and Taboo, pointing out that he has misread or done intentional violence to the Oedipus story (the irony is wonderful; shades of Bloom's misprision), and that Freud would have done better to use Hamlet as a point of reference for his theory. He touches on more mystery cults. The Mithraic, which Pullman uses in his little-known first novel, and Cybele and Attis seem to be of particular interest:
It is by way of this discussion of variations on and responses to "the original crime" that Sloek alludes to Paul's mention of the Kingdom of God having no marriages, and turns his attention to the fall narrative in Genesis. The moment we've all been waiting for, right? This is where mythical language starts its movement towards devotional language, as such.
As I guess must be abundantly clear by now, I'm fairly in love with Sloek's work. Obsessed. Moony. He can do no wrong. And yet, it's just here, in the discussion of Genesis 2-3, that Sloek gets a little tiresome, borderline pedantic. This is partly due to his channeling now of Freud, or of his follower Reik: being obtuse about which tree is which; reading the serpent as phallic; "thinking rationally, we may ask what the purpose of this ban may be. And we wonder why the violation of the ban--eating a fruit, Dear Lord--should have such catastrophical consequences" (109). He indulges further in comparative mythology, with a "sidelong glance" at Prometheus' theft and punishment, the apples of the Hesperides, Ithunn's apples, and the choice of Paris. He compares the mythic content and ritual repetitions to "neurotic compulsion" and "guilt complex." Along the way, though, Sloek maintains his understated brilliance and recovers his own voice and idiosyncrasy, leaping ahead at last to the crucifixion in its diversity of representation across the gospel accounts: "The cross becomes the tree of life, which man may, eventually, get to" (114) [cf. Dream of the Rood]. Like Kierkegaard, he identifies "the trump card of the Christian sect" in "the combination of [historical] event and myth." Like Sufjan, he is fascinated by the star of Bethlehem and the old hymns and carols. To sum up:
The insight in The New Testament is not gained by deducing the message (in Greek: Kerygma) from the myth, but by understanding the uniqueness of the fact that a historical course of events (the fate of a human being) is only accessible to us in the shape of a myth. This means that this human being--his words, actions, and fate--were a truth of epiphany. (118)
Taken together with the rest of the book of which it forms a part, and a very high point after a relatively low one part-wise, at that, I find this the best formulation of the best insight (one of my favorite words) there is, or that I've yet seen, into the whole thorny question of the historical Jesus and the related, vexed one of the authority of scripture. I really can't recommend Sloek enough.
This brings us to the final, shortest section, on Devotional Language proper. Under the guiding lights of Shakespeare and Kierkegaard, Sloek contrasts Homeric passion with Christian love, touching on Socrates' and Aristophanes' speeches in praise of eros in Plato's Symposium; the "metopes of the Parthenon and the gable scenes on the temple of Zeus in Olympus"; and even "the fairy tales of Tolkien" (128). Sure enough, all he says about the greatest mythmaker of the age is that "to the Greeks, life is, apparently, a battle against supernatural enemies in a far more primary sense than is the case in" Tolkien's work, taking him as somehow representative, though whether in terms of his popular storytelling or his academic work on fairy tales is not totally clear, before hastening us along to "Heraclitus' fragmentary statements about war." Nevertheless Sloek is aware of his work, presumably recognizing a kindred spirit.
Snatches of hymns and Proust's evocation of loss sail by, guilt and angst, the akedeia of the monks and l'ennui in Pascal, and we're once more in the presence of Hamlet's "To be, or not to be," balanced this time by "There is a providence in the fall af a sparrow" [sic. I kid you not. The copy editors must have been so mindblown that every single one of these slips of the keyboard waltzed through the final proof]. And we come to "the final and decisive question: What is the good of devotional language? What is its function?" (137).
By way of stating the boiling point of water, talking about stock prices in The Financial Times, and opining about John McEnroe, Sloek arrives at performative functions of rational language that might be contrasted with the generative work of devotional language. His examples here are the rite of baptism, burial, and communion. "By this, the circle is complete," he concludes: "Mythical and devotional language is language in its original function, in which it establishes truth. It speaks on its own, and even when somebody, I eg., take it up and speak, it is still not I who speak, but it is mythical language which speaks through me" (148). [cf Paul. Wittgenstein gets similar treatment on the last page: "both kinds of language [ie. rational and devotional] demonstrate their wisdom if they know exactly when they have to speak--and when they had better remain silent," with the immediate caveat about preaching, presumably the subject of the sequel.]
I've quoted from length from Sloek--that's kind of the bit--and I'm going to turn now to the preface.
Unless you happen to read Danish, to read Sloek, again, is to read Mossin, Sloek's translator, with a great many endearing, and a few annoying, typos and quirks ("revealation," throughout the book, can't be on purpose, right? And "Herodot," more than once, is too adorable.) It is to wonder what Sloek has to say in The Misery of Theology and The Christian Proclamation, the other books in the trilogy of which Devotional Language is the central book, and the only one so far translated into English. A reply to The Misery of Theology, and Controverting Kierkegaard, both by K. E. Løgstrup, are all that I've turned up so far, aside from the commentary Mossin provides in the introduction. There he situates Sloek's task in the trilogy as:
polemically criticizing a modern theology of creation (in Denmark represented by Loegstrup) seeing it as "new wine in old bottles." Instead, [Sloek argues,] theology should understand its own "miserable" state and use this as the adequate starting point. Theology has come under pressure from two sides. On one hand it has been miscredited by a scientifically influenced non-religious, or even anti-religious conception of life, and on the other hand it is pressurized by obscurantist, 'new age'-religion with all its propaganda. In the context of a Kierkegaardian analysis of the absurdity of existence Sloek proclaims that Christianity assigns the individual to his or her own actual life as a God-given condition, without giving any explanation, change, comfort, or sense as far as this life is concerned; but by being a God-given condition the life of the individual gains its own specific quality. To Sloek a recurrence to or insistence on traditional metaphysical thinking is both outmoded and meaningless. Having performed [in Devotional Language] the analysis of language, in general, and mythical and devotional language in particular, Sloek goes on to focus on what Christianity actually proclaims in The Christian Proclamation. Essentially, Christianity proclaims a paradoxical unity of myth and history, and the life-story of the individual Christian is part and parcel of the incredible story of God's human life in Jesus Christ. (vi)
Glad that's all cleared up, then! In the introduction Mossin also cites a range of more specialized works with intimidating titles like Theologische Hermeneutik, by Wolfgang Nethofel, including discussions of Bultmann and Heidegger, Ricouer and Levi-Strauss, but also the tantalizing, perilous reference to "Luther's assertion that scripture interpreted itself 'sui ipsius interpretes'" in Assertio Omnium Articulorum. He goes on to Muller's Mythos - Kerygma - Wahrheit, van der Leuw's Phanomenologie der Religion, Hubner's Die Wahrheit des Mythos, and Dalferth's Jenseits von Mythos und Logos. Die christologische Transformation der Theologie, touching on Popper, Sallust's De Diis et Mundo -- "myth deals with what never happened but always holds true" -- along with Hegel's logic and Strauss' Life of Jesus, returning to Bultmann's "project of demythologizing," before wrapping up the review of the literature with the following beautiful passages:
Finally, Dalferth sees dogmatics as the grammar of Christian faith (as a "Grammar of Assent") and finds inspiration in the thoughts of Wittgenstein to take up the idea of descriptive grammar (which is both description and rule) and applying it to dogmatics, in general. If The Bible is to be understood theologically as more than a collection of texts [pace il n'y a pas de hors-text], we must, according to Dalferth, bear in mind that theology is a theory which originates in the practice of belief, and thus the christological, kerygmatic context is the actual text of theology ["written on our hearts"; "the world itself could not contain the books"]. This holds true for both a literal culture and a multi-media culture in Nethofel's sense [intriguing! I guess I'd better go learn German, after all, to say nothing of Danish], and it represents a kind of narrative approach to theology to which Sloek would feel sympathetic in so far as it doesn't go on to make "positive" statements about the world and give them the status of metaphysical "truths."
The kerygmatic [ie. preaching, proclaiming, gospel-sharing] character of the Christian proclamation does, itself, imply a performative conception of language, and from a different perspective Oswald Bayer has tried to revitalize the traditional Lutheranean [sic. upon sic. Mossin, you're too much!] theology of the word in his Schopfung als Anrede [...] without language there is no created world, but where dialectical theology (Barth) and existentialist theology (Bultmann) had a tendency to become "wordless" when focusing on the word... To Luther--in the light of the kerygmatic proclamation [delightful near-tautology preserved in and through (un)translation]--Geschichte [history as what "befalls" or "happens to" us. Sorry not sorry for all the interruptions, but this is important for the punchline] and created nature are one and the same. Creation is seen as geschehenes Wort--"the word that has befallen us" [Ah! See?].
[...] The question remains whether the so-called "worldlessness' [wordlessness? Or maybe that slippage is the point?] of the modern era and the sense of the "absurdity of existence" can, in fact, be overcome by Christian theology and more or less metaphysical statements and systems of thought, or if--as Sloek points out--this very predicament is, on the contrary, accentuated by Christian theology as a God-given condition, to be accepted and lived through as thus. To Sloek, the Christian is relieved from "the burden of his or her culture" by the forgiveness of sin and, at the same time, ordered to accept the very same burden and go ahead in whatever human activities it may demand of him or her, in the inexplicable reassurance that he or she is part of God's story through the incredible story of the incarnation with its paradoxical proclamation of a unity between myth and history. In the tradition of Kierkegaard Sloek sees the New Testament as a declaration of love, in short, God saying: "I love you" to man, and the impossible demand to love your fellow human beings becomes the only guideline in the human activities, which are only to be valued for what they are--ie. human activities.
--Henrik Mossin
July, 1995 (xviii)
Pretty good for 1995. Around the time, that is, when I was first playing EarthBound and reading Pullman. The core myths for me then, layered onto the (biblical) fall, and I'd revisit them all down the years when I came home in the (season of) fall, that "rhythm of life" Sloek speaks of being represented for me in homecoming and Halloween, Thanksgiving feasts and Christmas breaks, but also the gnawing sense of homelessness in the world's richest country, literal and metaphorical.
Is it enough to balance real suffering with these dilettantish efforts at reforming or reimagining education, these notes for a new school, from then-new school years long past? Enough to recur to wisdom, courage, and friendship in winter, spring, and summer terms, having read all fall about the fall--and what follows? Corresponding problems: ignorance and misinformation; fear, anxiety, and spinelessness; loneliness and conflict--it's asking a lot of the recitation of three words, replaying (even if while learning Japanese or programming as an excuse) a video game, rereading and writing about a pretentious fantasy book, to address. But academia is nothing without its projects for raising consciousness, even if we accept we're rooted in the unconscious, whatever that is, as a way to--as Marx would have it, even at the cost of revolution; as Buddha, or our old professor might have preferred to say, inwardly somehow--change the world.
Like Spariosu with his late projects for the local and global consciousness, we keep on going, in ones and twos and the classic party of four, imagining possible courses, curricula, schools, communities. Resolutely, if dilettantishly, circling the old questions of chosenness and contemporary ones of choice; injecting daily hints of personality, intervening to make space for freedom of play, reconfiguring benchmarks of progress and the whole external course of study, things like pop culture, language, code, music, religion, letting them all filter through humor, if not straying too far from sincerity into irony. Coming back time and again to place--the neighborhood--, time--the now--, theme--wisdom, courage, and friendship--as structuring principles. The library card, the yellow backpack. Freedom to learn, and a place, and time: they call it a sabbatical for a reason. The dream of a school for this humanities-laden, STEM-seeming idea of the video game academy, pictured heretofore as a classroom in Tales or a library in Onett, to become real.