The Usual Circumspects

Don't you hate it when you can't place a face?

Watching Law & Order, last Monday, the guru looked so familiar there was no rest until the mystery was solved.

Turns out he's Greg German, Fish, from Ally McBeal.

Our featured philosopher of the month, I. Murdoch, says "the thought is not the words (if any) but the words occuring in a certain way with, as it were, a certain force and color."

Problem is, once we place Fish in the certain way of a repetitive sitcom, he's taken on the color of Fish, forever.

On the other hand, locating something in a repetitive context can allow for useful distance on a painful subject.

Just as we enquired last week if Logan is entitled to the legacy of 60's music, minus its values, is the Spotsyltuckian entitled to teach on slavery, as a tour guide, within the repetitive context of a Southern plantation tour?

Kal-El wasn't one of the 100,000 imprisoned Kandorians, yet, thus far, on New Krypton, he's progessing beyond his undercover surveillance assignment to incorporate value-laden teaching moments. When Aunt Alura yearns nostalgically for a reunion of scientic and artistic guilds, Kal refers to Mandelbrot-Julie sets; how art's aesthetic appeal, tethered to complex structures of nature, manufactures the elegant details upon which to ponder.

Alura and Kal are forming an identification of shared language.

For Spotsy, the traditional Gospel/Spirituals in the Lift Every Voice and Sing hymnal, as sung in the repetitive context of Sunday church, forge a shared language, all the more, once learned the hymns incorporate Underground Railroad code.

Maya says "she who does not know where she has come from cannot possibly guide a path to where she has to go," though Quincy warns "it can bring tremendous peace or open all wounds."

When the question is put to Shirley, she says 'you ought to know better than that - each and every tour group must walk the same tour, for not to do that, is to slight those there to witness, whether or not, the process stirs discomfort in the narrator.'

Up till now, it's a Western legacy which has most influenced Spotsyl thought: per Tolkien (our other prominent thinker of the month), for example, "the Light of Valinor is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees both scientific (or philosophically) and imaginatively, and says that they are good."

The West is making room in Spotsyltucky for the shared languages of Diaz and Morrison.

Perhaps, ultimately, in the literary universe, the Oxfordian John Ruskin claims (even if we would wish otherwise), "art can not be divorced from social realities."

Can hope be found, as reported in Vanity Fair, that the 'dirty secret of conservative talk radio is listeners average age 67?' The Speaker of the Iowa (Iowa!) House confirms the statistic succintly, when, after a surprising victory there on marriage equality, he says, 'the battle is lost. His children simply do not care about what fuels aging, vanishing, prejudices.'

In the ebulient age of Obama, where fascists continue to obscenely cite abolitionists to justify a fast waning majority dominance, isn't open discussion of slavery, despite the unease of the guide, a good way (in Lloyd Garrisonian/Edward Carpenterian fashion) to promote progressive values, which once displayed, carry the dual possibility of not only honoring the victims of one historical experience of oppression but by planting seeds to do away with all oppressions which still plague our common humanity?