touches of sense...: Zootopia? - 0 views
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I would like to imagine that in the future our children will look at the enclosures in which past generations were kept as absurd anachrosnism.
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Terry Elliott on 05 Oct 14The first time I used blogs in the secondary high school I first taught at it felt like a not only opening up the cages, but also knocking holes in the walls so that no one could ever use them as cages again. At least for the students who I was working with, I think this was true. Once they tasted that freedom there was no going back. The ultimate check valve.
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Whatever happened to grand narrative?
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Well...maybe it's all grand narrative all the way down. For example, I had a grand day outside. Frost was expected last night so we had to dig our peanuts and check out the sweet potatoes to see if they were ready to dig (tradition here is to dig them after a frost). I think we are going to get about a five to one return on the peanuts (yield per pound planted) and God knows on the sweet taters. That is a grand narrative isn't it. One of the grandest narratives. Agriculture. And it is not one that without its...sad side. I was introduced to a grander narrative only a short while after we had battened down the garden to save the tomatoes and peppers and flowers from frost. My wife discovered a corn snake trapped in some bird netting. Corn snakes are the glory of the constrictors round these parts. Bright orange with diamonds patterns and black and white bellies. Astonishing. If you catch sight of of one in the wild you cannot believe that such a creature could hide from anything. Too bright. Too shiny. Yet...I have seen them slither away and disappear like the Cheshire Cat. We cut the netting away from him/her. Took her away from where the chickens might do her in (chickens are notorious snake enemies) and released her. She immediately serpentined about in a threatening "s" to let us know that she was not to be anthropomorphized. Three feet of grand narrative, millions of years old, with a legacy that lives on in one of the parts of our triune brain. I was unconsciously sweating the whole time I was cutting her away from the netting with scissors. I could not help it. That narrative is a potent legacy, not to be thrown off by my rational self that told me over and over that there was no danger. That is a grand narrative. So here I relate the narrative with words (pix to follow in a blog post). Whatever happened to the grand narrative? Is anyone an island entire unto herself? Should we not consider the unveilin
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fellow 'students' appeared to have their lives mapped out.
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Maps into the future--nothing inherently wrong with that. The danger is in thinking that any cartographer could draw one for us. We are not alone in this struggle, but we are still Daniel Boone when it comes to blazing our own trail. Any other map is the wrong one pulled from the cosmic junk drawer, the Procrustean one that will make us fit. Now that is a myth that comes true every day.
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He had become too dependent on his comfort.
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I was looking for a reference to the paradoxical phrase "risks may be our safeties in disguise" when I found a post I had written in Blogger in 2001 (http://tellio.blogspot.com/2001/06/my-eyes-are-shot.html). The takeaway quote is this: "I think John Berryman once said in a sonnet that risks may be our safeties in disguise. I put my hope in that paradox. I put my heart in the safety of change." So, Enso, the grand narrative is this: [Animated gif of the undrawing of the enso]
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