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Bio-Sketch
Mackie J.V. Blanton, a pro bono advisor and
group leader to the Gestalt Psychotherapy Institute of New Orleans/New
York, was an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of New
Orleans, Department of English, and an Associate Dean of Student Life
for Multicultural Affairs. Having written essays in linguistics,
poetics, scientific and technical discourse, Louisiana dialects, and
Sufi and Hasidic sacred language, his current research is in subtle body
mysticism and in sacriture, i.e., the practice of and the study
of sacred discourse and sacred study as categories of a
psycho-hermeneutic phenomenology. Mackie has traveled extensively, since
1964, in North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Europe, and Asia Minor. Presently
(May 2007), Dr. Blanton is teaching in Turkey.
buyurun7@yahoo.com
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Did I say that I still plan to go to Iznir? I was supposed to
leave yesterday but I've postponed my departure to the 20th. I
need time to buy some clothes, but also to continue clearing the
land as much as I can. Linda and I think it makes a lot of sense
for me to proceed as usual just because for us, fortunately,
life will be somewhat as usual, even if
it will again become so slowly.
UNO is setting up offices and courses at LSU;
so she will be needed there. She will more than likely commute
to Baton Rouge from Covington, or from her Cousin Patty's home
in Houma, or from Patty's apartment in the French Quarter. There
is very little that we can do but sit and wait for insurance
agents. After they make their estimates, we can hire local crews
to clear away fallen trees in Covington and, if it comes to
that, to bulldoze our home in New Orleans. So life needs to go
on.
Eh La Bas
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I made it to my apartment, where I
unburdened myself of my satchel and laptop and took the
elevator back down to the ground floor and out once
again onto the street. I took an academic journal from
my study to read because I had decided to stroll over to
Cinar (The Oak Tree), my new favorite coffeehouse.
Among people milling about aimlessly or rushing past one
another with purposeful, determined, pinched faces, I
sauntered my way through Grand Park just opposite my
apartment building, toward its main entrance opening on
to where Cinar was. This was going to be my way of
dealing with earthquakes, I thought. I won’t panic
against the worrying newness of all of this, I told
myself. I would just quietly find a table near a window
where sunlight would be streaming through dusky
off-white curtains and I would read, and concentrate
intently on what I was reading, an essay on the center
of Western Marxism of the 1930s, the Frankfurt School of
Critical Theory.
I immediately ordered baklava with
tea and bottled water. In Turkey, when you order
baklava, you don’t just get one piece as a single
serving; you get five wonderfully syrupy squares. I
soon learned, weeks before earthquake time, to savor and
to devour them all, slowly, especially while pouring
over tracts of intellectual history and literary
theory. There I sat, until dinner time. Later, I went
off to a restaurant for an evening meal and returned
afterwards for more of Cinar’s baklava, even though I
had promised myself weeks before that I would have the
pleasure of this great dessert only once a week, on
Sundays. But here I was, on the Monday of my first
earthquake ever, having a single serving of five
perfectly inviting pieces twice, as my way of contending
with earthquakes and consoling myself!
After Katrina
Table
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How could I be sure I was not simply
projecting my own flitting, fretful internal reality on
to these poor hungry street mongrels? Plato was right
after all, I realized. We can’t ever really hope to
capture the ideal moment, the ideal found object, in our
artful amateur moments. For through our senses all was
nothing but mere imitation, never the real thing. The
single lens reflex of Plato’s mind had captured a truth
greater than any subsequent teaching. No teaching could
ever hope to imitate it and any teaching that opposed it
would lack an eternal, perspicuous rationality. A
photograph or slide was no true ideal form, but only an
arbitrary, artificial structure ritualized endlessly by
an academic or artful searching down here below;
endlessly missing the mark, a mere approximation, a
representation at least thrice removed from Heaven.
Make pictures. Take pictures.
What’s the difference?
Can you see what I am getting at?
Why should I take photos of people, places, and things;
of faces, landscapes, and cats; of monuments, ruins, and
a dead bird between a hound’s teeth – when, as Plato
taught us, these photos will be merely mimetic,
imitative of the real, when the real itself is only
apparently real, since it also, being earthbound, is
imitative of ideal forms veiled from the human eye and
touch and taste and smell? But then there is the more
immediate question: Why should I take photos of anything
in which I see only apparent beauty, a beauty that
hurricanes and earthquakes will destroy, transforming
them into another kind of mimetic, though sorrowful,
apparent beauty? It’s the mere apparentness of even the
sorrowful that makes the sorrowful beautiful.
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update 3 November 2007
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