alchemy
I am going to tell you somethings about my goddam childhood. The sheer miracle of aliveness and perception itself was a constant wonder to me. How could it be??!!! And then, How could I be? Somehow I wanted to learn everything. But as Polyani, I believe, distinguished, there is knowing that...and knowing how.
Let us skip along to college, because there was no Beatrice. I was blessed to have a great teacher, John Crosset, who ended his days as a professor of classics at one of those fine mid-western liberal arts schools, but who taught English seminar to me. Lionel Trilling said Crosset had given him the best English translation of the Aeneid he had yet read, when Crosset was 15. So much for bona fides
We started with the Iliad, Lattimore's translation, and metaphor, which is analogous to alchemy, was introduced. Crosset taught through the Socratic method, almost exclusively asking questions---gold to answers' lead. But what questions! On beginning the Old Testament he asks, "Why need God ask questions, presumably He knows the answers?"
Oh, you mean authors actually think about these stories they write? And deeply? Think does not go deep enough. In His own image created he them. Male and female.
When I dabbled in the intelligent layman's guide to physics, seeing if there might be scientific correlates to imagination, memory, & self reflection and lost myself in speculations about holography, superstrings, quantum mechanics, and relativity, I found Mandelbroit, Godel, and even Dirac's Unitary Hypothesis. But none was as profound as that cartoon in the New Yorker: two physicists, young and old on a Princeton- like campus, the younger crying to the older as a voluptuous earth goddess of a coed strides by, "Look, professor, there it goes, The Grand Unified Theory of Everything!"
So I became a psychoanalyst: first because I thought I could never study German to get a Ph.D. in English; and then because I thought an M.D. would make more money and have greater social prestige than a psychologist. Status feels very important when you feel insecure and inferior.
But there is no escaping your fears. I know that one's fears is the proper construction, but if there were anyone I knew as well as yours truly, I would write about him or her. And this enabled me to pursue my alchemic researches (metaphor, dear reader), though which the life of the mind and heart could be joined to God's.
Let us skip along to college, because there was no Beatrice. I was blessed to have a great teacher, John Crosset, who ended his days as a professor of classics at one of those fine mid-western liberal arts schools, but who taught English seminar to me. Lionel Trilling said Crosset had given him the best English translation of the Aeneid he had yet read, when Crosset was 15. So much for bona fides
We started with the Iliad, Lattimore's translation, and metaphor, which is analogous to alchemy, was introduced. Crosset taught through the Socratic method, almost exclusively asking questions---gold to answers' lead. But what questions! On beginning the Old Testament he asks, "Why need God ask questions, presumably He knows the answers?"
Oh, you mean authors actually think about these stories they write? And deeply? Think does not go deep enough. In His own image created he them. Male and female.
When I dabbled in the intelligent layman's guide to physics, seeing if there might be scientific correlates to imagination, memory, & self reflection and lost myself in speculations about holography, superstrings, quantum mechanics, and relativity, I found Mandelbroit, Godel, and even Dirac's Unitary Hypothesis. But none was as profound as that cartoon in the New Yorker: two physicists, young and old on a Princeton- like campus, the younger crying to the older as a voluptuous earth goddess of a coed strides by, "Look, professor, there it goes, The Grand Unified Theory of Everything!"
So I became a psychoanalyst: first because I thought I could never study German to get a Ph.D. in English; and then because I thought an M.D. would make more money and have greater social prestige than a psychologist. Status feels very important when you feel insecure and inferior.
But there is no escaping your fears. I know that one's fears is the proper construction, but if there were anyone I knew as well as yours truly, I would write about him or her. And this enabled me to pursue my alchemic researches (metaphor, dear reader), though which the life of the mind and heart could be joined to God's.
posted by bezdomny at 9:49 AM
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