The Crow's Eye: Thank You

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

May 8, 2011

Thank You

Just wanted to offer my sincere thanks to anyone who's taken a moment of his or her day to read or comment. I'm humbled, grateful and vain enough to admit that I'm gratified.

I don't always get right back to an excellent reply because I'm often at a loss for words. I don't want to write what I don't mean, or haven't given enough thought to call my own.

Not that anyone's wondering or worrying why it may take me a week to reply, but I appreciate the patience.

Thank you.

7 comments:

senecal said...: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/08/nato-ship-libyan-migrants

I always sense a struggle going in you, Jack, between the dark and the light, and I hope the light wins. So I probably shouldn't be forwarding this: but it seems to be such an epitome of human evil that it needs to be stored somewhere. Sorry.; May 9, 2011 at 11:31 AM
Jack Crow said...: I don't accept the manichean division of the human mind, Sen.

If there's a single philosophical quibble to which I'm attracted, it's the dispute over dualism - and you can put me firmly in the monist camp.

Dualism has no proof. It has no merit. It has no value. Not as dialectic. Nor as paired opposites. The cosmos does not seem content to neatly divide events into twos. Nor does the human brain, for all the recent attempts to reinvent Descartes fundamental error.

We do not think in a base two, because we readily conceive of more than yes and no, light and dark, right and wrong, valued and worthless, good and evil.

We humans do quite well with all that we don't know, all that we might know and all the myriad gaps in between.; May 9, 2011 at 11:48 AM
Soma said...: Jack, you have the moxie that keeps me reading. We need people like you, to speak truth of and to power, with the perception of large, shadowed social structures.; May 9, 2011 at 3:23 PM
Jack Crow said...: Soma,

Thank you.; May 9, 2011 at 4:26 PM
Randal Graves said...: Hey, let us non-excellent repliers thank you for writing quality stuff.; May 10, 2011 at 10:15 AM
Jack Crow said...: Heh. They're all excellent. It's equal opportunity, equal outcome anonymity.; May 10, 2011 at 11:04 AM
Brian M said...: Another in your legion of fans, Jack. I may not always agree but you always make me think.; May 12, 2011 at 12:52 PM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.