Posted by Estra on October 27, 1997 at 14:56:14:
Ahoy captain,
I wanted to thank you for maintaining the web site and wanted to let you know
that you are very much appreciated.
An Elegy for Great Authors and Great Books
(the modern academy and the dismissal of the canon)
Today we are gathered for a celebration
beyond signification and inculturation
a celebration of a decadent ideology, however bourgeois,
critiqued for its political incorrectness and cultural hegemony
that still forms for us a ring of words
bright with meaning.
We have come to this union as willing partners
recognizing what we have formed
and knowing that who we are
is the result of a clandestine partnership
shared generation after generation
passed down over the years
as a way of contending with our condition, the world and its ways.
Our lives are inexorably bound; they always will be. We have shared a past
rich with meaning, joy, struggle, absurdity, and sorrow--a past whose
indelible presence, sketched in memory's picture portrait gallery parades,
binds us in ways that discursive ways of knowing cannot express. By this we
do not mean the obsequious dribble and purple-prose drool of which moral
maxims, Hallmark cards, high society weddings, and coffee-talk are made. We
mean the very real way life has presented itself to all of us, impressed its
joys and pains upon us, forced us to move and continue to keep on moving to
survive, and set before us the many things we have experienced and felt and
shared and talked about and not been able to talk about that form and will
continue to form the complex matrix of closeness and estrangement that is the
dance of intimacy played out in this place of solace, the contemplative
dance of intimacy played out in this place of solace, the contemplative
world.
That we understand ourselves or are able to believe in ourselves
we owe, in large part, to this relationship--
its boldness, strangeness, strength and endurance empower us now
and have fueled, throughout our lives,
the will to live.
That this can happen and does happen
we rejoice
and know that
even if the day will come when what we have experienced is no longer
appreciated
that what we have shared, mirrored, and understood
will provide a kind of daily bread
from which the iniquity of the past
and the fear of the future
may be kept at bay.
We send our appreciation, compassion, and forgiveness
for words, spun into the void of history,
won over hours of pain, and
often given without recognition, remuneration, or fame.
May they continue to bear us,
as an eagle's wings,
for the journey that lies before us
this day, each day, and always