“Speaking Silence” has been improved.

I started noticing the essay’s weaknesses and incompletions a few days after being posted. The whole thing didn’t tie together, so it felt way too complex. So, I started making changes. And then, finally, the missing order to the whole thing made itself clear a few days ago.

It was also hankering for a missing element, which was seeing language through the prism of Castaneda’s idea of “controlled folly”. I’d been hankering to talk about controlled folly and its relationship to language for a long time. And I almost missed the opportunity. Better edited than never.

I think this fictional conversation finally approaches the satisfying clarify I felt with another semi-recent fictional conversation — “Neither Materialism Nor Idealism.”

The fun part in these ordeals of self-interrogation is that I’m sincerely at a loss for how to handle these questions until I start reflecting, walking, sitting and then writing. And I end up with a clarified sense of where this is all tending.

These are my favorite forms of essay when they work. And this one finally seems to work.

——–

I prefer Peter Coyote’s reading of Castaneda’s “Controlled folly”, but can’t find an excerpt other than these:

1) Controlled Folly 1 of 6

2) Controlled Folly 2 of 6

3) Controlled Folly 3 of 6

4) Controlled Folly 4 of 6

5) Controlled Folly 5 of 6

6) Controlled Folly 6 of 6