21/1001 - FryeDay and a trip to the Port of Tacoma

 

Illustration by John D. Batten

Short story: The Laidly Worm of Spindleston

My friend Heather recommended this story to me today and it was such a good one. I love fairy tales more now than I did as a kid, I think because I have outgrown the expectation that a fairy tale will be a mini novel. It is its own little creature, sometimes bold and vicious, sometimes bright and iridescent, always interesting and surprising and vivid. There were hints of Snow White and it reminded me of Thr Silver Chair and Quickbeam the ent from The Lord of the Rings because of the rowan trees. 

Essay:  The Instruments of Mental Production by Northrop Frye

"In a society devoted wholly to labour, leisure would be thought of as merely rest or spare time : ifthere is continuous leisure, it becomes idleness or distraction. Idleness and distraction are reactions against the unpleasantness or dullness of labour: they make up for the time wasted on work by wasting time in other ways. life divided only between dull work and distracted play is not life but essentially a mere waiting for death, and war comes to such a society as deliverance, because it relieves the strain of waiting. It is generally realized that idleness and distraction are very close to the kind of boredom that expresses itself in smashing things, and hence there is a widespread feeling, which is at least a century old, that mass education is needed simply to keep people out of mischief. This is not a very inspiring philosophy of education, nor one at all likely to effect its purposes.

"Education has nothing to do with this vicious circle of labour and idleness: it begins in that moment of genuine leisure in which Adam is neither tilling the ground nor going fishing and leaving the real work to Eve, but remembering his lost Paradise.

...

"A theory of education, then, implies a theory of society: a theory of society demands the construction of a social model, and all social models, as Max Weber remarks, have something Utopian about them. Conversely, all Utopias are really embodiments of educational theories. We cannot discuss educational theory simply in relation to an existing society, for no educational theory is worth anything unless it can be conceived as transforming that society and, at least to some extent, assimilating to its own pattern. The moment of leisure, as have defined it, is that moment which can come only to a fully conscious human being, when he is able to draw back from his activities and compare what he is doing with what he would like to do, or could conceive as better worth doing. This is also the moment at which the sense of a need for education begins, for our words school and scholarship, as Aristotle pointed out, are connected with schole, leisure. That is why I spoke of education as something that has for its ultimate goal the vision of an ideal, that is, a theoretically coherent and permanent, social order."

Northrop Frye, The Instruments of Mental Production in The Stubborn Structure

Poem

Simples

by James Joyce

        O bella bionda,

        Sei come l'onda!

Of cool sweet dew and radiance mild

The moon a web of silence weaves

In the still garden where a child

Gathers the simple salad leaves.

A moondew stars her hanging hair

And moonlight kisses her young brow

And, gathering, she sings an air:

Fair as the wave is, fair, art thou!

Be mine, I pray, a waxen ear

To shield me from her childish croon

And mine a shielded heart for her

Who gathers simples of the moon.

Today we took a field trip with our co-op to the port of Tacoma. There was a strange kind of prettiness mixed in with the cranes and the ships. Everything stacked and ordered, with intentional, skillful, and precise movement, the sort of symmetry of movement that makes a line dance or a ballet pleasant to see. This goes here and that goes there. Of course, it wasn't tidy, but it was orderly. And the colors on the containers made little quilts of industry that were pleasant, too. It reminded me of Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" and Masefield's Cargoes.