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Old 09-12-2009, 09:48 AM   #33
Erick Mead
 
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Dojo: Big Green Drum (W. Florida Aikikai)
Location: West Florida
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Re: Transmission, Inheritance, Emulation 15

Quote:
Peter A Goldsbury wrote: View Post
Well, we will have to agree to disagree about that.

Actually, nowhere in my columns have I ever set up a conflict between how scholars allegedly 'dictate' language use and how language users, including scholars, actually function as part of a language community.
No, you have not, but you have privileged the objective view of some matters over their subjective practice. Both are valuable -- but the latter cannot be fully apprehended by the former.

What you are doing is of immense value -- I am simply saying that there is a great difference in understanding something other people are doing and doing it so as to understand it in ways that do not lend themselves to articulation in reasoned discourse. Why else do the Doka exist? How else would one seek to understand O Sensei's lectures on his own terms? It may be less accessible analytically, for reasons of history, changes in language or culture or a host of other reasons -- but we still read and listen to Shakespeare, Homer, Chuang Tzu ... --

And even if analytic recourse is had and is of use to create different understandings of those texts, one needs in a primary sense to simply play with the sound-feel and the image of phrase in the context of its expression -- immediately and more largely. For all its analytic interest, is a digression on causes of color spectra that ocean waters may reflect, really needed to appreciate the image of "the wine dark sea?" Or is its lingering and striking image not immensely and immediately more powerful as all the blood in the tale runs out? Analysis in that case is interesting and useful, certainly, but there are other ways of "getting" the coherence from creative expression, which sometime benefit from waiting and playing with it expectantly. Kotodama, the Doka, and the mythological excursions that make up O Sensei's preferred way of expressing himself are not, primarily, objects for analysis. Though it can certainly ably serve in its turn.

Cordially,

Erick Mead
一隻狗可久里馬房但他也不是馬的.
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