This discussion thread is based on The Farmer and the Snake: An Aesop's Fable.

On Monday, October 16, 2000, Gary McCullouch wrote:

This may be just a fable, but its so true in life. "The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful ." Gary Mc.

With that message came Gary's version of the illustration:

The Farmer and the Snake.

On Thursday, November 2, 2000, Gary sent the following message:

On Thursday, November 2, 2000, jeanne responded:

Gary, I see the little wiggle lines on the original snake. Now, this is an example of how we can use art, and learn to be more expressive, without having to formally study art. When I first saw the green snake, I missed the wiggling feature. I only figured that out a little later. I think the lines might have helped me catch on more quickly.

Now I want to know what the other green wigglies are doing? Did the snake multiply? And now I see that you altered the farmer's headpiece and turned his sleeve and collar into what looks like a mantle. Does he have horns now? I would like to know if you were changing the moral, as you drew this? Or does the moral still relate to how you can't afford to trust people?

I want us to draw with this topic until that phase gives way to our trying to talk about what our drawing means to us. One of the advantages to drawing and music, all the arts in fact, is that they give us alternate ways of expressing our feelings, and help us to recognize that there is much beyond the cognitive world we think we "know."

Gary, you alluded to the moral that Aesop gave the fable: "The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful." I would like us to reconsider that moral in term's of Fellman's plea for "mutuality" to temper our "adversarialism." If the imaginary could provide us with alternative ways of helping the snake so that his own identity would not be threatened in the process, perhaps we could find a realistic way to live with the snake in peace.

And ultimately, we want to relate the tale back to our disciplinary focus. For example, how does this tale relate to statistics? Well, consider that the farmer had never had any experience with a frozen snake. But he must have had personal experience in thawing people out who had been "near frozen." Those people were grateful. Imagine that the farmer concluded from his personal experience that thawing live creatures out saved their lives and made them grateful. He applied his conclusion to the poor frozen snake.

But the snake is not a person. The snake's natural instinct is to bite, particularly when it is being held by someone or something it does not recognize. So the snake did not respond as the farmer had concluded from his personal experience. Hmmm, maybe that's a pretty good comment on what's wrong with extrapolating our personal experience and drawing the conclusion that we "know" about more than just what we have actually experienced or gathered more accurate data for. To generalize, we need to be sure that we are not drawing "spurious" conclusions.

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