Forward Whoa......8/26/80

    In a recent unpublished survey entitled "Forward Whoa" by prominent factoids Merle Seton and Jem Masters, it has been revealed that 24% maximimum of  armed soldiers will use their arms against an oncoming enemy. The majority will either fire in the air or not fire at all until they literally see "the whites of the eyes" in the foe conducting its onslaught. The "reluctant 76" will hope that the firepower of the majority will be enough to suppress the hostiles who in fact have their own "reluctant 76" who are hoping for the exact but opposite effect.

    Next, they surveyed second and third clarinets in high school bands and discovered that only 24% of that woodwind section actually played the notes of the music in front of them and the "reluctant 76" only played 24% of those notes and only the ones that they were sure of reaching and only at those rare moments when the orchestra leader was paying attention to them.

    Seton and Johnson were unable to demonstrate the high relationship between those second clarinetists who would play the notes and those who would fire the guns. Most of the students who played the notes were also in the honors sections of their classes and were among the most likely to end up in the infantry.

    Armed with this improvised information, I leapfrogged to the conclusion that only 24% of readers read the forward to a book with the 76% majority, "just trying to get through the goddamned assignment", went right to the first page of chapter one, where the skirmish began.

    As this is a forward to a book that supposedly will written by my friend Ice Rivers, probably next century, I can pretty much assume that very few readers will read this preamble even three times fewer than the miniscule amount that will read Ice's book in the first place if it ever comes out which provides me with great artistic license and assures my continued obscurity. Even I myself haven't read Ice's future book "Late Boomer" which as all English teachers know, doesn't prevent me from teaching it, criticizing it, grading it or forwarding it.

    So let's go forward shall we which of course means going backwards to Aristotle. Aristotle was the first famous student of Socrates which means he was the first to misunderstand Socrates. Plato was the great student of Aristotle. Plato took notes and through his misunderstanding of his own notes based on the misunderstanding of Socrates by Aristotle, he somehow arrived at a philosophy that yielded a semblance of the philiosophy of Socrates which Plato did not understand. So to insure further progress, Plato wrote very little about his understanding of Socrates because there was very little of Socrates that Plato understood. 

    Plato had the solution. He would depend and insist upon his students taking notes when he was teaching. Those notes constituted the misunderstandings that Plato' students had of Plato which were meager understandings of Aristotles original misconceptions of Socrates.

    Thus Plato and his students stumbled upon the misconception known as metaphysics. Centuries later when I studied the accumulated ruins of metaphysics, I came to the conclusion that it was 'close but no cigar'.

    One day I was smoking a cigar when I met Ice Rivers. We got to talking about all this stuff because I was putting together a seminar on "Metaphysiction" which I considered an evolution of metaphysics. "Metaphysiction" is the culmination of written communication which means that in one and the same time it is singular and plural, it is biography, autobiography, fiction, faction and non-fiction all delivered from different points of view all at the same time because past, present and future  are all present at all times with only the present being "visible" or "real" or "sane". Metaphysiction embraces misunderstanding and includes misundertanding as a milestone in the mastery of itself.

    When I first presented this concept to Ice he said " I got it" which means that I must have presented it incorrectly which again was "good but no cigar". I lit another cigar. I threw in a few contradictions, a couple of faulty syllogisms, overgeneralized non sequiturs, sincere ironies, a dash of gentle sarcasm, upside down sonnets  along with the all important factoids who add questionable backstory and are not quite human enough to be considered humanoids. I was pretty sure I nailed it when I asked Ice if he understood what I was professing and he said "You lost me with Lisa Mona".

    That made me feel confident enough in my thinking that I wrote up a fake course description and submitted it to a local community college where they were running short of adjunct professors willing to work at minimum wage to instruct what had been identified as high risk students. 

    I did just that. I hoped that at least one of my students would take notes and pass his misconceptions back to Ice who said he would use them in his book if I would write a forward to the book which is still underconstruction as I complete this forwarding task which very few will ever read and if you are amongst those few who are reading this as we come to the conclusion of the forward that means the book was finished. I sincerely hope that you misunderstand.

Doot Doo

Thornton Krell

8/26/1980