Class on September 17th brought about the discussion of anger towards smart people. Sutter takes us back to some quotes in his blog post, The Learning Curve, by Dr. Sexson who joked about losing friends when they catch just a whiff of your brilliancy and intelligence.
Sutter has many other interesting points in his blog post, The learning Curve, and says that Adults and teachers become molders of the child and builds it's phsychic life and by doing that adults claim the divine power making themselves gods. Read more of his blog to get the full story.
This concept of people trying to be like gods reminded me of Samuel Coleridge and his view of the eternal act of creation. Perceiving the world is like creating the world for ourselves, but didn't God create the world, so then humans become like little gods in that sense. I think humans are all trying to have that power by manipulating everything they have a hard time 
understanding. Sutter talks about children being molded and manipulated by adults. Don't we do this to nature as well? Moving it, destroying it, rebuilding it. Feminist literary criticism suggests nature is womanly because it is deemed mother nature and men conquer nature and men conquer women, however this seems extreme, but it does reinforce how humans try to conquer and manipulate nature. We try to percieve and recreate nature because, as Sir Phillip Sidney believes that nature's world is brazen, but the poetry world is golden because it improves on what is real. There we go percieving and creating again, but it is so fun. We can manipulate books as well by construing a meaning from them and twisting it making it work for our purposes. The author works it for his or her own purpose. I don't mean to say there is anything wrong with manipulating children, nature, or literature, or maybe there is something wrong in it, but we do it. All three of these things must be more than thinkable to give themselves a future.
Now we get to the painfully straightforward questions: what is a child? what is nature? What is a book? All of these things have the beginning of life. A child is a new human, nature creates itself anew each year, and books make the old new, and as Percy Shelley said, restoring the vital metaphoricity of our language by creating new associations...new metaphors. All three of these concepts make the world as if it were fresh and new. And all three can be manipulated, and adults like to manipulate them. Could they manipulate adults? I don't see why not.
1 comment:
I like your idea that the book, the child, and nature are all new and easy to manuipulate. I didn't really look at it that way but it makes tons of sense. It's like they are waiting for us to mold them into something. We categorize books, we designate nature, and children are herded around to where adults want them to go. Dr. Sexson's concept of nothing is original is totally fitting here. Perhaps it's because nothing is really ever given the chance to be it's own "original" because it is caught early enough in it's life - the child stage - that it becomes what everyone else already is.
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