POMO MO and Curly

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

When I studied philosophy and poetry the politics of the
authors did not prevent us from loving them for what they
had written. It simply astounds me, angers me, to here a
"teacher" stand up and tell young students that Freud's
great works or Plato's or Pounds can be reduced to some
biographical or political scrap of nonsense and tossed away.
Balance is very important, and the acadamy is not providing
it. I know I sound like a cranky younger version of Frank
Kermode here, but I am really suggesting balance. You are so
right to condemn the acadamy for its lack of restraint, it
seems that Plato's chariot is off and running without a
driver. In the US students can challange the pulpit, and
"progressive" pedagogical practice should be augmenting such 
inputs, but what is most often heard in the classroom today,
is statements and questions  that  are not indicative of
"critical minds"  free to explore the richness of the
tradition, but popular political agenda reflecting a blind
leading the blind fury that niether listens to reason nor
knows how to use it, but bows to passions, is swayed by 
sense alone, and lives in the present, heedless of the past.
The distinctive faculty of young men and women is his/her
eager desire to investigate the truth. To stand up to a
professor and say, wait just a minute, here. To do so,
students must be free of pressing duties and cares, but they
are busy earning the cash to pay for the insane bills of
being a student, and it is no wonder they feel their
happiness incomplete as students, for they given the
opportunity to studies the mysteries and marvels that excite
young people when they open a book and discover a new world.
With this eager desire to explore, to learn new things, is
allied the desire for independence and "the soul in flux." 

"What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the
changes, not the still photograph of the finished character
but the movie, the soul in flux...and education too, as
Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever." SL.23
Pynchon

The soul in flux, not fixed by a photo:

"Scott thought the photgraph might make him look older. Not
older in the picture but older as himself, after the fact of
the picture. The picture would be means of transformation.
It would show him how he looked to the world and give him a
fixed point from which to depart. Pictures with our likeness
make us choose. We travel into or away from our
photographs." 

Why are the photos never seen or described? 

TF off the soap box, feeling much older than I am....