I don’t write in a journal everyday, but I have accumulated many entries over the past 50+ years beginning in 1966. Some items evolved into longer works. Among the leftovers little pieces survived. I thought a collection of these with a piece culled from the same date in a past year would make an interesting yearbook. The consistencies and inconsistencies of mind, skipping back and forth across time, provide varied perspectives. It is difficult to remember the context of the past we’ve lived; we also make suppositions about times that predate ourselves.

The few alterations from original drafts were to improve clarity. The worst of my work is not included. There remains enough mediocrity and immaturity to make me feel humble and you feel smart. There are also moments of accidental insight and incidental humor.

Author Stephen Crane referred to his little pieces as pills…apparently they were small and somewhat hard to swallow, but good for you.


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Monday, September 25, 2017

Motive Psychal –a theory


September 25, 1968  (I was 23)

Motive Psychal –a theory
         Teachers are perhaps some of the most insecure people on
earth, especially those of us who go right from college into the field
without an appreciable interlude in any other area of life.
         School life is secure.  It is organized, programmed, sheltered.
it is a microcosmic existence filled with tiny traumas and elfin
ecstasies which provide a suitable surrogate for reality.  In short,
the institutional environment provides a reasonable facsimile,
without the dangers of adult society.  It may be reasonable to
assume that those individuals who are attracted to life-long service
in the system,  are the same individuals who, during their own school
days, allowed themselves to become attached to the micro-facades of
school society to the extent of excluding identification with the world
outside that protective womb.
         If this is true, our educational systems may be filled with
people incapable of providing students with a suitable preparatory
program for living.  What proportion of the accepted values of school
society are those accepted in practice in a non-protective atmosphere?
Does great success depend on an ability to follow orders, to mimic a
textbook and subdue emotions, or is the truly successful individual
the maverick with a cultivated disdain for design, an aversion to
accepted truths and an outrage toward passivity?

         -this from one embarking upon a lifetime at the work   

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