Haw-Haw Hog Slop
“Eh… what the HELL is goin’ on in my town?”
Come ‘n listen to muh story ‘bout a man name’ Jed,
A poor mountaineer, barely kep’ his fam’ly fed,
And then one day he was shootin’ at some food
And up th’ough the groun’ came a-bubblin’ crude!
Yee-haw! Hot diggity dog!
I done struck the grandest pappy of ‘em all, the swollenest, milk-ladenest pap of the queen mother of aaaaall lodes –
Black gold, that is –
Texted teasings!
Just kidding.
I’m sorry – TV has done gone and rotted out muh brain.
Nothin’ but porridge pourin’ out muh head-holes, scraps scarcely fit fer hog-slop, haw, haw.
But never you mind, nor yet fret:
“It’s not so bad, Homer. They go in through ya nose… And they let you keep the piece of the brain they cut out! Look! Oooh. Hello! Hello, there! Who’s that big man there?”
“Join us, Father!”
“It’s… bliiiisssssss…..”
“Wanna join us? Room for one more. We’re watching the TV!”
“Come on, Lisa. Join your family!”
“Are you... experienced?”
Are you... sufficiently synchronized to the swing of the tempo of my mentation and its externalized expression to have fully followed every turn of the deftly-woven thread I’ve stitched, reeeeal master-like, these last few days, and which comes to its conclusion here?
Allow me to refresh your musical memory, since I said I didn’t suppose you’d be able to keep all the liltings and listings of this fine air in mind this whole time:
Small Flowering, Vast Pleasance.
Anyway, in conclusion, and dressed in plainer English, such as I’ve come to know her – this is the last nugget left from my gold-panning, so I’ll share it here without too much further ado, contrary to convention.
I think what I’ll share below – two essays that I’ll give an explanation of and a context for shortly – fits nicely into the thematic flow of what I’ve shared these last few days, and serves as both a crown upon it all and a coda at its tail-end whose last note’s resonance will sound long and sweetly as it echoes into your innermost being.
It is to be hoped, anyway.
You know, at moments like this – when one stands with many well-fed hobbits’ faces turned to one, when one feels like a Bilbo Baggins at the end of his eleventy-first birthday-party feast, – I suppose it is conventional, right, and proper to Say a Few Words.
I promise I’ll keep it short and down-to-earth this time, I swear.
So, let me add a couple quick reflections that come right to mind.
In one of those essays that I linked above and asked you to read, I talked about language. What I said was that language isn’t always what you think it is (if you’re inclined to think about that sort of thing at all).
It’s not just words – sounds made with the mouth and related organs – but something more.
Sure, that kind of language may in fact be the “proto-type,” but if you step back a little, abstract things, and look for some universal qualities and characteristics, you can see that almost anything can be a language.
We can talk about the language of complex and ancient musical-systems used for soul-instruction.
Or the language of dance, used for much the same purposes.
This sort of thing – bharatanatyam – is what I have in mind, and check out this video that I found “by accident” amid the last few days’ flow of things – it really says it all:
Alarmel Valli Choreographing with Her Guru
And there’s the language of color and shape, of texture and substance, of space and positioning, whether we want to talk about painting, Feng Shui, or architecture.
Or – and I don’t mean to put this on the same level as those things, of course – the language of TV-, movie-, pop-culture-, and pop-music references, such as I’ve exposed and subjected you to these last few days – quite to my own surprise, too, actually.
Elsewhere, I wrote, speaking of dastgaah music and the extraordinary Master Mohammad Reza Lotfi – how will you ever get good if you don’t spend all your waking moments immersed in love with your craft?
You’ve got to absorb its very essence so deep into you that it indelibly dyes the fabric of your innermost being, and you’ve also got to bring every aspect of your inner and outer being to it, offering it all as a sacrifice in the name (and hope) of deeper communion with it.
You’ve got to absorb the spirit, of course, but you’ve also got to pick up every single little subtle detail, too.
And the more, the merrier – keep adding more, and more, and more to your lexicon and to your repertoire of modes and shades of rhetorical expression.
‘Cause then… when you’ve spent so much time in that world and in that communion that it’s as natural a part of you as your blinking and your breathing… boy oh boy, can you really begin to say somethin’.
I mean, there’s more to the process than that, but what I’m saying is that if you’ve got something to say and you really want to get it across and connect in ways that even you can’t understand or put into words, even as you do it…. there’s really nothing like having all the colors of all spectrums, visible and invisible, ready on your palette.
Speaking of myself – I don’t really care if one person sees my writing, or one million persons. Or, no persons.
I wrote that there’s already one eternal and perfect witness to all of this, and His witness is the only one that counts, while meantime – there’s so much joy and wonder and laughter on my part as I watch what unfolds from me that I think, “You know, even if this is only for me, that’s already enough.”
Of course, communion is a special delight, so I do also hope someone really gets all this, on lots of levels of understanding.
Let’s hope for that, but not expect it.
The two essays I’ll share today, without further ado:
I wrote them both, maybe, around 2010.
I’d finished up at community college and was on my way to the University of Maryland. I was seeing if I could get scholarships. I didn’t, but that’s ok – the money part worked out just fine, another “blessing in disguise” of living the humble life I lived then.
Anyway, the first scholarship was offered by some company that, I don’t know, made printers or ink-cartridges or paper or something. Probably all of those things.
They had some program where they supposedly recycled some part of their massive waste, and wanted applicants for their scholarship to scrape and bow, shuck and jive, talking about just how great that was and how they themselves were dutiful recyclers.
As you might expect, they didn’t give me the scholarship; I don’t think they expected the essay I wrote.
You know how that goes – my love is like fungus in an old forest.
The second scholarship... I don’t know who was offering it, and I never ended up submitting them the essay, anyway – missed the deadline, dontcha know.
Why am I sharing these essays?
Well, I kind of told you, but what I’d add now, in conclusion, is this.
This all started with a reflection on the nature of memory, which led to reflection on what changes and what does not, on what stays the same and what does not.
Which, in turn, led to considerations of... what’s valuable, and what’s not, and how “opinions differ on that subject.”
Boy, oh, boy, I’ve changed a lot over the last 30 years.
But you know, where it counts, I haven’t changed at all, and I really don’t intend to, deo volente.
I talked about it a bit here – Some Questions – but… why should I change what I know counts?
I’ve run the long gauntlet of unscrupulous vendors shoving ladelfuls of lie-laced swine-slop in my face (more than once, at that) and have lived to tell the tale,
I’ve found that conscious labor, voluntary suffering, and hitchin’ yer wagon to somethin’ high and holy and pullin' its plow only serves to refine and concentrate your golden essence, magnifying its luster and multiplying its value.
Who cares if the world has not the eyes to see it, nor proper scales to weigh it?
Life is short, and there are no judges on this side of the veil whose sentences are of any account, anyway.
“Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,
Let them go! Let them go!”
Onward, ever onward, turning neither left nor right... unless it’s to dally in an old forest or a flower-bed now and then, which surely must be right and must not be left undone.
Thus spake Jian.
10 June 2025
Beyond Recycling
Does the thief who, having stripped a home of food, furnishing, jewels and joy, leaves its owner a crate for a seat and a can of beans show a commitment to sharing? Does the cut-throat who, having bled a man for pleasure, gently binds the wound show a commitment to healing? Does the society which, having taken the very earth that gives it life as mere commodity, carving it up and sucking out its marrow to glut itself, then makes a parade of its ingenuity in reshaping a handful of its gluttony's waste show a commitment to the environment?
This is the nature of recycling; it still presupposes the inevitable necessity of ecological destruction, poisoning of air and water, and economic injustice through an approach to all of life's shared home as something to be bought, sold, eaten, and excreted. As such, my approach has been not just to recycle, but to buy as little as possible, travel exclusively by foot, bicycle, or bus, and to use as little water, plastic, electricity, or superfluous commodities as possible.
I cannot delude myself that my little efforts, living in a city, will bring the whole grinding machinery of consumption to a halt; but I believe that, by changing my own habits, ever refining them, I create an example and influence that affects all those whom I interact with, whether as a friend or as a “consumer” in a store.
Talk is cheap; but friends, seeing the joy and grandeur of my simplicity, and vendors, finding me a sparing patron, cannot help but respond to the effects of my actions. And as the few I thus touch come to change themselves, the web of influence spreads ever outwards. This is the true commitment to the environment; it is through all individuals, acting independently together, that collective change occurs.
There is wide-spread and deep-bred the misperception that education consists of a bound and graven set of facts – of knowledge – which, when stored in the mind and dribbled from the mouth, somehow imbues its owner with power. It is a sort of vestigial and atavistic tendency toward sympathetic magic – I eat your heart to gain your courage, I swallow your brains for cunning. It is the belly-view of a consumer-cult which is trained to think, Show me what to eat and where to buy it, so I can grow fatter with it and be satisfied.
So to be educated, as it is commonly understood, is an unremarkable and lowly thing; its jabbering eulogy is the joyful shrieking of swine for a jowlful of slop at the trough. But it should be remembered that boars do not feed from buckets nor sages from textbooks, whatever the habits of sows and students might be.
Can any amount of knowledge be equated with knowing? Knowledge is something dead and dried, flowers pinned on velvet and kept behind glass, never changing; knowing is the ever-living efflorescence of internalized experience, vital and unique. How does one teach the blooming of flowers? How does one encage it? So we are content with petal-counting and name-giving instead: this is the work of education.
The educated man has knowledge, while the wise man knows; the one has something, the other is something. Which of these is it that our society wants? If it is the intention of the society to manufacture a number of predetermined products, called “the educated,” differing, according to the needs of their consumers – social groups, political parties, religions, universities, employers – only in the measure and proportion of information they are composed of, then it must have many who are
educated and few who are wise.
It is then a simple matter of assembly-line mathematics; it is short-order human cookery – for this one, measure two parts economics to one part political theory, add a few pounds each of canonical history and literature, keep six years at two degrees, and he is ready to serve; for this one, substitute three parts English for economics, one part each psychology and management for political theory, keep four years at one degree, and he is ready to serve; and so on.
But if it is the intention of the society and its universities to have many who are wise, then there is no formula, there is no kind nor arrangement of mere information, however hallowed, that will serve. For the making of the wise, education will in fact be the greatest obstacle; universities will be the greatest obstacle; the society itself and its expediencies will be the greatest obstacle.
Reducing all of the complexity and subtle distinctions of infinite subjectivity that constitute life into a few historically limited, arbitrarily selected, culturally circumscribed, and socially expedient perceptual biases – conveyed through the inherently limiting and distorting medium of words – and reinforcing in the child, for twenty years, the lesson that such illusion is authoritative, so that his own perceptual organs never develop, tethered as he is by an artificial umbilicus to the bloated social womb – how can this bear wisdom? More genius idiots are graduated daily, and daily the world groans louder under the weight of its misery.
No, if education is not a means of allowing one to know oneself more deeply, more truly, it is worthless; but having known yourself, you are refined, you blossom. You know the one thing worth knowing. Then, it does not matter what you are doing, or where, what you have been taught, or what you are teaching. You yourself have become a lesson, you yourself are the education, and by virtue of the silent magnetism that arises from this knowing, you affect others and effect change in them, beyond and above the circumstantial means by which the change will be conveyed. Anything else that is called education is simply noise in the head; and who can learn anything worthwhile amid such a din?
So I do not know that my chosen career, my chosen academic major, of linguistics will have any role in “producing” educated people. Wherever the seed is planted, it will grow into what it is. I can only say that, taking the experience of further university schooling as a broader realm in which to explore myself, to experience others, to taste life as I have not yet done, it will enrich me and deepen my understanding; and by this enrichment, deepening, broadening, whoever will come into contact with me will also be enriched more deeply, more broadly. I will then become like a sun to the sprouting seed; that in itself is enough.
