Reflections: Pattern Recognition

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I realize that I’ve been wearing out the book Straw for the Fire (selections from the journals of teacher and poet, Theodore Roethke) combing through it for pithy “Quotes du Jour.” Well, the book just happens to be full of them: deal with it. I am now gleaning gems from the last four or five pages anyway, so that well is about to run dry.

But it is not quite dry yet. Last night I found this:

Not only to perceive the single thing sharply; but to perceive the relationships between many things sharply perceived.

Does that sound like a truism? Perhaps it does. But on the other hand, if one listens closely to one’s fellow man, and to the way that your man poses his arguments—particularly on controversial topics—it can be discerned that many, perhaps a majority, of those arguments are founded upon facts viewed perhaps sharply; but viewed in isolation.

Take as an example the assertion made by Rush Limbaugh, and subsequently parroted by others on the political right, that Colin Powell’s support of Barack Obama’s candidacy for POTUS was based on race. I think that this is true. And I also think that if race alone—disconnected from the whole constellation of Obama’s other attributes, which together made him a desirable candidate in the minds of a majority of his countrymen, regardless of race—had been Powell’s sole motive in supporting him, that would have been wrong. It would have been as wrong as Limbaugh, et al., have striven to make it seem.

Let me uncharacteristically give Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt. Let me stipulate my belief that Limbaugh actually believes what he said; that he has an actual, deep seated, conviction that Powell’s only motive in supporting Obama for POTUS was their shared racial background. Hmm. Has Powell supported the prior candidacies of other Black liberals? Did he, for instance, campaign for Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, or Al Sharpton? I don’t think so.

It would be odd if race were not a factor in Powell’s support of Obama for POTUS. But, given the fact that Powell is a Republican of long-standing, it seems to me to be obvious that Powell’s support for Obama must be based on Powell’s recognition of a broad network of talents, personal characteristics, and historical factors pertinent to Obama’s person and professional career, which together, in concert, form a pattern which made Obama a viable Black candidate for Powell, where other African Americans who have sought that office were not.

So Limbaugh may have perceived the race factor in sharp outline; but he saw it only out of context. And this failure of pattern recognition is the basis of the category of error that has made Mr. Limbaugh look so abysmally ignorant in his discussion of this and of many other “controversial” issues.
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Quote du Jour: Having a Bad Day?

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Earthling, the dark is true; the sun’s an accident.
xxxxx~ Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Firex
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Quote du Jour: Ranking the Oligarchs

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The following observation was entered into the notebooks of poet and teacher, Theodore Roethke, sometime during the period, 1948-1953:

We have come to expect the public man, at best, to be third-rate; most of the time. A considerable section of influential American public men are simply hillbillies who have learned to count. ~ Straw for the Fire

Amen. Timeless...
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Reflections: Some Uncomfortable Truths

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I continue to pick up, from time to time, Straw for the Fire, editor David Wagoner’s reassembled gleanings from the notebooks of teacher and poet, Theodore Roethke. I have quoted from this neat little book twice before, here and here. Interested persons will find the relevant links in the first of these locations.

In sections titled by Wagoner, “The Proverbs of Purgatory” (1948-49) and “I Teach Out of Love” (1949-53), I have found several more pithy quotes that I wish to highlight here.

First are two related thoughts from “Purgatory”:

1) The weapons of the weak are too violent.

We don’t need to think too hard about the geopolitical acting-out which regularly tears painful wounds in the security-hungry world we inhabit to see the truth of that statement. But the following, which I feel to be prerequisite to many instances of the emotional violence that we experience in our personal relationships with others, may be less obviously true:

2) The passive are first bewildered, then malicious.

Think only of some of the compliant, non-analytical, hyper-receptive people whom you have known over long periods of time; of how they were routinely probed, mauled, manipulated, and taken advantage of by more aggressive persons; and think of the spiteful, passive-aggressive behaviors which now manifest as delayed reactions to such shoddy treatment, once they have curled up into the spiky defensive postures from which they cannot straighten out to display the true beauty of their rightful forms. The harm we do to others!

And then there is this one:

The Devil today takes the form of noise.

Along with excessively humid heat, one of the aspects of a Midwestern summer that I find most aggravating is the constant roar of mowers, blowers, trimmers, and saws. At any given time during daylight hours, at least one nearby neighbor is doing his yard work. Then there is the jarring noise of TV commercials; the constant, arrhythmic distraction of jangling telephones; the annoyance of seemingly endless, empty collegial talk about irrelevant topics; and worse, those noisy songbirds raucously bragging about their sexual prowess at the first light of an insomniac’s desperate dawn. Satan sent those fucking birds.

Finally, from the “I Teach…” section, there is this:

That’s the horrible thing about being a genius. Everything’s so obvious.

One can only imagine.
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Quote du Jour: Ouch!

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A philosopher is one who worries and worries about the obvious.

~ Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire
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