Posted on: April 23, 2008
Caught part of a very interesting radio interview today on NPR’s Fresh Air. Two brothers, David and Anton Treuer, fighting to protect and preserve the Ojibwe language. It was clear from their discussion that this Native American tongue is rich in metaphoric, poetic and symbolic resources. The multiplicity of words for key actions exist along side of the knowledge of the roots of those words. The brothers talk about the path we can follow back to the roots without needing to go to other language sources. And they discuss the precision needed when talking about things like water, weather, and natural phenomenon. Hunting and gathering activities have their own special set of words and images. And new words can be formed easily, because the roots are known. Combinations make sense, built upon the past.
English was formed from many different sources, nations, combinations, and that is…
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Posted on: April 21, 2008
About 166 pages into the book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow*. Not sure, really, what I think of it. Conflicted, basically. It’s a rather gossipy book, when I was hoping for more philosophy, as its subjects, Rousseau and Hume, would lend themselves to a very interesting comparison. It does some of that, showing Rousseau’s famous elevation of the state of nature and the benefits to humans in a that state, versus Hume’s far more skeptical, “realistic” vision. They also talk about his empiricism in such a way that I could see Nietzsche’s perspectivism arising from it, and then Husserl’s phenomenology. Had not seen the connections before, when I read Hume decades ago.
So far, however, the sections on actual ideas and the life of the mind are too few and far between.
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Posted on: April 21, 2008
Birds like maxims brightly devour
what is begotten born and dies.
Senators especially are
screwed into nose rings
and hunt catastrophic wisdom
to pass to be perch-brass.
Plucked anvils in shape of angels
climb down tether but butter
is in a hurry to melt.
The parenting beseems a fine
line for gentle loops in monastery
those kind thoughts of devotion.
Beeswax balls now lunge now
become centrally located.
Sexual urges flip their coin.
Time terplexed is knock
to new matter paisley wood.
Confucian?
Calmly on a later Sunday, March 23, 2008
— Robert Mueller
_____________________________
Robert Mueller is a Midwesterner transplanted to points East and has
enjoyed, in a manner of speaking, his residence of more than 20 years
in New York City. He has contributed poems to First Intensity and
American Letters & Commentary, and to other upstanding
publications, and his poetry may be viewed online in forthcoming
editions of Moria and SugarMule.com. He has a Ph.D. in comparative
literature from Brown University, and writes mainly on Barbara Guest,
and on Edmund Spenser…
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