limit theory, I don't know that it will be too followable; but here goes.

Derrida was a French Lit Crit (now dead) who modeled a rather amusing practice called "Deconstruction," in which a structure built of charged opposite is
For instance, "We, the Republicans, defined ourselves to be the party of family values; all that sexual weirdness, that's a Democrat thing." Fine, until there is a radical flip-flop, like Foley's. Then things come down like a house of cards.

Derrida took the word Pharmakon from the Plato's Phaidros.

The word means both medicine and poison. The key structural "wall" that Derrida wanted to attack was the artificial distinction between ORAL and WRITTEN culture. Written culture is cold, unresponsive, a mechanism of social control; oral culture is warm, human, a social context in which humans find themselves. This is a clear distinction, until Derrida goes to work on it. By pulling on the word Pharmakon, like a thread hanging off a knitted sweater, the whole structure comes apart.

I'm taking that approach to culture as a whole.
and to the scarlet P word in particular.
"Pedophile" means, simultaneously, "shining culture hero," AND "evil child molester."

In every abuse situation, no matter how evil, you can find cultural initiatory aspects for which to be thankful; and in every cultural system, no matter how large, how publically acceptable, how contemporary, how bland, you can look back and find the pedophile concerns that were present at its founding. It's not often that you find such a gross and disgusting example of sexual cruelty as Abraham (with his interest in cutting little boy's penes) sourrounded by such a pervasive and successful mechanism for "normalizing" and "not-knowing"...But that's the Bible and Christianity for you!


It's true of the Minster's son that abused me:
He initiated me into a lot of Presbyterian things...but he also initiated me into the cycle of sexual abuse which I struggle every day to step out of. I don't have the liberty to either ACCEPT everything that boy laid on me; I'd kill myself if I did. Nor do I have the liberty to completely REJECT all the trappings of Presbyterianism. I've done a year in an Anglican church and a year in a Mega-Church; in both I had very strong feelings that I was a tourist, that I was throttling the boy in me that wanted very badly to engage in dialog...with the PCUSA to which he belonged.

I have to keep the thing TURNING, like a flapjack on a griddle.

True of Dante, Socrates, Baden-Powell, the founders of the YMCA.

I would like to simply step forward and say, "Here I am! a socially constructive boy-worker in the Baden-Powell tradition! Everything I teach boys ADDS VALUE to them as members of society. There's nothing socially negative in what I teach."

But of course I know that that's absurd. The road to becoming a socially integrated adult male is NOT a straight road; there are all kinds of tests and stresses and secret ordeals and zig-zags that have to take place. I can preside over one essential department of it: the heroic poetry stuff. But of course, the road to being an adult male requires that the boy enter the heroic context to UNLEARN all the domestic stuff he learned at his mother's knee; and then it requires him to reenter the social context by UNLEARNING all the heroic stuff he learned from me. (Or, since I work wholesale now, from the people who've learned about heroic poetry from me)
In short, a certain theoretical nimbleness is required.


Now, where does LIMIT THEORY come in?
Limit theory is a cute mathematical tool for looking at things that only have any existence at the point at which at which they vanish. For instance, if you pick two points on a function, it's easy enough to draw the line that goes through both of them and figure out the slope of that line. But if you draw ONE point on a function, then the slope is undefined. Like a spinner for a game, the line could have any angle.

Now, for pedophilia, there is some paradox in the fact that men are men because of their well-defined social roles, and boys are boys because of their "puerile" tendency to play different roles, and drop them; play different roles, and drop them. A well-defined role is exactly what they haven't got.

Between creatures of such completely different nature, how can there be any communication? It's like an old-fashioned car with no clutch, nothing between the moving engine and the stock-still body of the car.

The pedophile (in the Didaskalos theory!) is like the fluid differential
betwen the male psyche and the puerile psyche. He has to be flexible enough to dance the boy dance, dance the man dance, and dance all the forms in between. If he gets trapped in the frenetic, repetitive rhythyms of the boy-dance, any boys that follow him will be trapped there as well. If he does the slow, grave, man-dance, then the boys will never be interested.

Like Charon the ferryman, he has to go back and forth, back and forth.
But inevitably, any human being is going to fail with respect to that ideal. To take just ONE example, any given man is either going to the kind of person boys would NEVER talk to about sex (which means that the boys in his circle develop their own crazy ways of expressing their sexuality) or he'll be the kind of person who boys CAN talk to about sex...and you know the problems that come with that territory!

That's one of the MANY, MANY reasons that the "socially constructive" boy-worker is both necessary AND impossible.

Take Pindar: He dances the boy dance very well, and he dances the boys (he's the dance leader, you know) into the adult dance of his aristocratic culture; but that culture is already fading in his life-time, under the impact of democracy.
On the other hand, you can probably think of many well-thought of gentlemen at your church, who have the Man-Dance down perfectly, but attract no boys whatsoever, because they've killed the boy in themselves in order to fit into contemporary society.

What I'm trying to talk about is the Trinity. In the Trinity -- thank the Lord for the image - you DO SEE the Man-Dance and the Boy-Dance danced to perfection, forever, outside of time. It's up to US, in our fragmented, sin-laden human way, to bring that perfection into 2006, or rather, crossing the year-boundary, 2007. Baby Jesus' cry, circumcision, gifts, birth, the whole shebang, is the beginning of the boy dance in time.

Probably not too much clearer, but that's the best a poet can do.

---Didaskalos