Epistemology primer

Prima facie, double take. One, two:

Unbuckle my shoe. For it is sacred ground, third world, fourth dimension.

Three, four: Open the door.

But first, The New England P rimer

was printed in Boston in 1690 by Benjamin Harris. More than five million copies of the book were sold, and it was used as an educational textbook well into the 19th century.

A: In Adam's fall, we sinned all. B: Thy life to mend, this book attend.

Even at first glance, beginner's mind, not yet synaptic pruned, is not ordinary ordinal. It is prime time, sunrise hour, primed for creative formation or ignition.

C: The cat doth play, and after slay. D: A dog will bite a thief at night.

And yet we give imperious imperative. Study hard, and you will get the prime rate. You will be of prime significance, prime authority, prime rank. You will be pumped primer. Perhaps you might even dare to be prime mover, divisible only by yourself, the One.

E: An eagle's flight is out of sight. F: The idle fool is whipt at school.

It is all so clear, measured out from 0 degrees longitude, the prime meridian. You will never be lost. You know it all.

Yet in the prime of our humanity there is the odd room, prime real estate within that knowing for unknowing. The pentimenti of life continually reveal a kaleidoscope of changing images, narrative birth and death out of changing point of view: First person, second person, third person.

Here, hear: Listen to the voice of the omniscient narrator. Pentimenti are alterations painted over an original image. There can be a change in perspective, or perhaps a detail is added or eliminated. The word pentimenti comes from the Italian word meaning "to repent." Did the changeling artists mean to pent again, to repress anew, to create an infinite regress of primal suppression?

Or did they desire to un-pent, to free, to dance like the gods in whom Nietzsche could believe?

Pent up perhaps we be, if truth be told. From primer to post, before and beyond modern necessity, we are capturing and captured. Or whistled. Or pointed beyond. All stories humming, lyrics supplanted, told to be untold or retold.

Even the hard stories of science are subject to the shifting of paradigms, to the structured revolution cited by Thomas Kuhn. Anomalies first hide their charms, then seduce explanations, and then become matrons enthroned in comfortably purple lipids.

We long to undo and redo, and yet, frightened, we cry out for the primer safety. We rant against the million little lies of James Frey or the Pentimento of Lillian Hellman's characterizations. The vision of the third eye is the third rail, necessary and untouchable. Kaleidoscopic visionary is colliding scope.

This pirate can only echo the words of Dorothy Parker: "I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."

To know and Gordian knot, we recast and destroy. Sublime creation and base disintegration are our play, our programmatic realizable. It is all our bill of goods.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes t o inspire profound mutiny in all those w ho care to read. Our Rx may be wearing a pirate cl oak of in visibility, bu t emanating fr om within this shadow is hope that r eaders will f eel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may even inspire the muse. Mak e contact if you dare.