In the tradition of Mark Twain's satirical wit, Dalpe chronicles a humerous debate in the form of a Platonic dialogue between two friends, Becky and Tom, who wrestled with the age old dilemma of artists relationship with society; namely, IT DOESN'T EXIST.
Their exchange was an amusing anecdote that compared the creative mind of the ages with the hive-mind of our founding fathers and their academic institutions.
Becky referred to the academic mind as the 'others, ' as they became oblivious to their obliviousness upon completion of their social mind training. While Tom referred to them as hybrids, as they look human, but that is as far as the similarity goes.
The venue was set in a garden-variety kitchen. It wasn't a dialogue per se, it was more of a catch-as-catch-can series of complaints about their inability to communicate with the 'others.' They were trying to bridge the divide between the creative mind, and a Sam Hill grocery clerk's mind of a goods and services social bazaar called an academic, whose bottom-line mentality has never been concerned with such creative matters, as they are too busy worshiping the banquet to take time out of their busy schedule.
Interestingly, the question that has plagued academia for millenniums, that being, 'How do we know what we know?' was never intended to be resolved any more than an artist's dilemma. Becky and Tom recognized that resolving academia's hypocritical question required, you guessed it, opening a dialogue with the creative mind, which would inevitably lead to academia's undoing, because every interesting idea of any value came from our imagination.
Hence their obviating question, and thus round and round we go down through the ages, where the blind lead the blind, to who knows where, and for what reason, no one is able to foresee beyond their seat at the banquet.
Apparently, and to paraphrase Shakespeare, we have already achieved the height of our greatness, and from that full meridian, we now hasten to our setting!
However, I prefer Becky's Grandma's admonition of the academically trained mind, who never went to school a day in her entire life, which explains her superior intellect. She always used to say about the 'others, ' "Loud and slap plumb stupid ain't no way to go through life!"
