I read a survey this morning concerning the impact of the recent economic downturn on employers’ attitudes toward college learning. Does it astound anyone that employers overwhelmingly say that there is “room for improvement” in what and how students are taught? Discovering the carbon footprint of a leprechaun would be less surprising. The survey confirmed my belief in the centrality of the liberal arts, and that, I realized, was precisely the problem with it and with surveys in general. What exactly do surveys measure, what insights do they reveal, and how useful, really, are they for guiding thinking? It seems to me surveys disclose only the prevailing narrative already existing at the time they are taken and, thus, reinforce it.
No conception we have about reality is unmediated. We get our information and, as a result, our opinions, largely from the media, either mainstream or new. Stories appearing in mass media are amplified and assume significance, sometimes unwarranted, precisely because they are massively mediated. Now, according to agenda-setting theory, the media tell us what to think about, not what to think. This theory, however, gazes past several significant considerations.
Media stories are selected by people who work for media outlets that are in the business of selling viewers to advertisers. “Good” stories—good, that is, from the media perspective--tend to be chosen for their hot topicality, for their potential to provoke a reaction, increasing the likelihood of their riveting the easily distracted attention of viewers. However, these stories seldom present historical context; they venture timidly, if at all, into an analysis of the animating assumptions or full implications of what they report, and that present conflict in an easily discerned binary fashion, without assessing the validity of the competing claims. No nuance allowed. Let’s not complicate things. We the audience won’t sit still for that.
Moreover, stories are often framed in a way that shapes our thinking about them. It makes a difference, for example, if low student persistence rates are framed as the result of teachers being insufficiently engaging in the classroom, or the lack of supporting infrastructure, or homesickness, or comfort issues like unfamiliar or uncongenial surroundings, or being unprepared for the academic rigors of post-secondary study, or whether or not the persistence rates are any different than they have been in the past. Too, stories are often presented as a crisis unique to our current historical moment, an ominous declension from the usual. A familiar one in this age of texting is the “crisis” in students’ writing ability. The current crop of students, we are told, can’t write, can’t express a coherent argument, flout the rules of grammar. That “crisis” actually has a pedigree that stretches back to the 17th century.
Now, the large and small failures of our educational institutions have always been “good”stories. They entice because they provoke an apocalyptic future of diminished American global influence; or because they prod the limbic region of those who think teachers have a cushy, nine-month job and are protected even in their incompetence by overly powerful unions; or, perhaps, because they arouse a feeling of vague displeasure with institutions in general. Think tanks and polling firms churn out reports and academics write articles and books suggesting various purgatives for the bacillus of educational ineffectuality. Those reports, articles, and books become news stories, and once picked up and broadcast, their resonance dilates and courses through the cultural capillaries. They become socially circulating attitudes. Business executives watch them, read about them, talk about them. Is it any wonder, then, that, when surveyed, they express the belief that colleges need to do more, and do it better?
I wonder if education is solely responsible for employee performance. Educational preparation is surely important, but it does not guarantee performance. Perhaps equally important is on-the-job training, the impact on performance of focused experience. As a college professor, I can teach communication skills, critical and analytical thinking, ethical decision making, finding and assessing information from multiple sources, and direct experience with the scientific method—but these skills must be connected to and activated by, must be particularized by, the context of a specific job. I can teach Kant’s categorical imperative, but as an ethical principle it assumes functional clarity only within the boundaries of the work one does, the job-defined issues and loyalties and persons with which one deals. Besides, Kantian ethics is one among many: Aristotle’s golden mean, Bentham’s utilitarianism, Dewey’s pragmatism, Rawls’ veil of ignorance. Which applies, given the particular company, its image, its relation to its customers, its degree of social consciousness? Or, I can teach how to write a business letter, but I cannot teach the specific purposes, customers, or situations that letter must serve. Only orientation to the job and the institution’s culture can teach that.
For the last 25 years, polls have repeatedly revealed that almost half of Americans, despite abundant evidence, deny the factuality of evolution. Is this surprising, given that the last 25 years have seen the religious right annex political discourse and that evidence supporting evolution is seldom reported. Angry people waving placards promoting the young earth theory bristles with compelling drama; a scientist explaining the evidence for evolution, not so much. Recent polls by CBS News and ABC news show a majority of Americans support extending jobless benefits. Is this surprising, given the economic downturn and deplorably high unemployment rates that have no immediate end in sight? At my university, the annual poll of faculty satisfaction consistently announces that the faculty disagrees, robustly, with the statement that it is adequately compensated for the work it does. Year after year this statement’s rating on the five-point Likert scale stands at 2.8. Is this surprising, given that the university is small, located in rural Iowa, religiously sponsored, and liberal arts oriented? What person with just a pint of common sense and a few fluid ounces of awareness could not predict the results of these polls?
Most surveys, it seems to me, do little more than stencil the common wisdom, the attitude de jure, on public consciousness. Perhaps their confirmatory nature is the point. Despite chanting silvery hosannahs to personal autonomy, maybe we like being validated by the majority, like the certification those hard numbers confer on our view of things, like the feeling of being in the know, of being bolted to a sturdy chassis, of being certain of our certainty. Or, perhaps, we simply like fires that comfort us with heat without blinding us with light.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Not Knowing
I am astounded by what I do not know. What I do not know would fill the Mariana Trench. Cataloguing what I do not know would be “heaping infinite upon infinite and multiplying infinite by infinite.” The Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards used those words to express his inexpressible sense of wickedness. I do not think not knowing is a sin, but it does seem that everything I come to know carries with it the anguished knowing of what I have yet to know. What I do not know is a wound, perpetually open, refusing suture. What I know is such a small flame, so negligibly luminescent, that I doubt it would attract even the most flame-intoxicated moth.
There is a cruel irony, maybe even a tragedy, in knowing what we do not know. We are finite beings, frail creatures. We are aware that our time and energy are bounded. Responsibilities annex our days, our weeks, our months and years. Our minds flag, grow dim with fatigue. Even if the human life span were capable of being extended, brain capacity, despite 100 billion neurons, each tangled by tendrils to other neurons, is finally, limited. And even if some transhumanist dream of neural implants or cognitive nanobots to boost brain capacity came to pass, the what we would want to know would outpace our capacity to know. We will always get no farther than the foyer of what we want to know, no matter how enhanced we might be, how posthuman we might become. “Much study is a weariness of the flesh,” we are admonished in Ecclesiates 12:12, and “the making of books hath no end.”
Of course, I do know some things, know them broadly and deeply. I am an academic, a professor at a university. I profess my expertise in and my best thinking about literature and language. I specialized in Puritan literature, so a thorough knowledge of the Bible was a must. I read through the Geneva Bible, which the Puritans read, a dozen or two chapters a day, as did the Puritans. It was an invaluable, if flesh-wearying, experience, to be sure, but it prompted a desire to know more. I wanted to know how the Geneva Bible compare to other versions—the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, the New American Standard Version, even the Thomas Jefferson version, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” in which anything not directly pertaining to the ethical principles Jesus advocated was sedulously razored out. I wanted to know how the books in the Bible became canonical--how were they chosen, when and by whom and according to what criteria. I wanted to know if they were inerrant. I wanted to know who their actual authors were and when, exactly, they wrote. I wanted to know how historically accurate they were. I wanted to know how the history of Biblical interpretation from the German “high criticism” to the present. I wanted to know about the sacred texts of other cultures, the Qur’an, the Torah, the Veda, the Analects. I wanted to know why the Bible contained so many discrepancies and contradictions. I wanted to know—and I knew I never would because I never could.
This is how it goes with me, this unfurling, this exfoliation, of wanting to know. Everything I come to know, every concept, every perspective, every way of being and doing in the world, every way of understanding it, catalyzes a wanting to know its history, its progress, its mutations, its key players. Everything I read points me to something else I want to read. But I also know that my wanting to know arcs far beyond my ability to know. It surpasses what my finitude permits. So I sample articles, read the occasional book—brief migrations to regions of knowing that I know I can never fully inhabit.
And I want to know more than academic things. Once, I was sitting with my brother-in-law, a welder by trade, at his kitchen table, grading literature exams. He was drawing plans for a trailer to hitch to the back of his Ford Explorer. He suddenly said, “You know, I really envy how much you know about literature. It’s really important.” “John,” I said, “here we are, sitting at a table you made, in a house that you built, and I’m watching you draw up a blueprint for a trailer you will create from lumber and iron. And what am I doing? Writing comments and assigning grades. Who’s really doing something here? I envy you.” “Well, there are different kinds of knowing and different kinds of doing,” John replied. And he was right, except that I wanted to know how to do what he could do. I wanted to know his knowing. My dad could carpenter, fix any appliance, and play the stock market; my mom could coax tomatoes and cantaloupes drunk on their own juiciness from even the most inhospitably soil; my brother, a sports therapist, develops his own photographs. I want to know how to do all these things. They are practical, they leave a tangible imprint on the world. Even Thoreau, that arch-Transcendentalist, knew beans. I don’t know beans about beans, or much of anything else that would pass the cheek-swab test of practical knowledge.
Socrates says “True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.” There’s some consolation in that, though to speak candidly, while it sounds good, I do not know what it means exactly, and I would like to. Who knows: perhaps I should celebrate the yawning expanse of my ignorance, give it a snappy salute and the fanfare of trumpets. Maybe it’s a good thing that I’ll never find that granite substrate upon which to build a structure of self-satisfied knowing. It can be healthy to be humbled, to be pulled away from the self-reflecting pool that so much of our culture places us beside. The world is complex. We are complex. Things dwarf us. Perhaps awe and reverential wonder provide a fair exchange for not knowing. Who knows? I don’t. But I want to.
There is a cruel irony, maybe even a tragedy, in knowing what we do not know. We are finite beings, frail creatures. We are aware that our time and energy are bounded. Responsibilities annex our days, our weeks, our months and years. Our minds flag, grow dim with fatigue. Even if the human life span were capable of being extended, brain capacity, despite 100 billion neurons, each tangled by tendrils to other neurons, is finally, limited. And even if some transhumanist dream of neural implants or cognitive nanobots to boost brain capacity came to pass, the what we would want to know would outpace our capacity to know. We will always get no farther than the foyer of what we want to know, no matter how enhanced we might be, how posthuman we might become. “Much study is a weariness of the flesh,” we are admonished in Ecclesiates 12:12, and “the making of books hath no end.”
Of course, I do know some things, know them broadly and deeply. I am an academic, a professor at a university. I profess my expertise in and my best thinking about literature and language. I specialized in Puritan literature, so a thorough knowledge of the Bible was a must. I read through the Geneva Bible, which the Puritans read, a dozen or two chapters a day, as did the Puritans. It was an invaluable, if flesh-wearying, experience, to be sure, but it prompted a desire to know more. I wanted to know how the Geneva Bible compare to other versions—the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, the New American Standard Version, even the Thomas Jefferson version, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” in which anything not directly pertaining to the ethical principles Jesus advocated was sedulously razored out. I wanted to know how the books in the Bible became canonical--how were they chosen, when and by whom and according to what criteria. I wanted to know if they were inerrant. I wanted to know who their actual authors were and when, exactly, they wrote. I wanted to know how historically accurate they were. I wanted to know how the history of Biblical interpretation from the German “high criticism” to the present. I wanted to know about the sacred texts of other cultures, the Qur’an, the Torah, the Veda, the Analects. I wanted to know why the Bible contained so many discrepancies and contradictions. I wanted to know—and I knew I never would because I never could.
This is how it goes with me, this unfurling, this exfoliation, of wanting to know. Everything I come to know, every concept, every perspective, every way of being and doing in the world, every way of understanding it, catalyzes a wanting to know its history, its progress, its mutations, its key players. Everything I read points me to something else I want to read. But I also know that my wanting to know arcs far beyond my ability to know. It surpasses what my finitude permits. So I sample articles, read the occasional book—brief migrations to regions of knowing that I know I can never fully inhabit.
And I want to know more than academic things. Once, I was sitting with my brother-in-law, a welder by trade, at his kitchen table, grading literature exams. He was drawing plans for a trailer to hitch to the back of his Ford Explorer. He suddenly said, “You know, I really envy how much you know about literature. It’s really important.” “John,” I said, “here we are, sitting at a table you made, in a house that you built, and I’m watching you draw up a blueprint for a trailer you will create from lumber and iron. And what am I doing? Writing comments and assigning grades. Who’s really doing something here? I envy you.” “Well, there are different kinds of knowing and different kinds of doing,” John replied. And he was right, except that I wanted to know how to do what he could do. I wanted to know his knowing. My dad could carpenter, fix any appliance, and play the stock market; my mom could coax tomatoes and cantaloupes drunk on their own juiciness from even the most inhospitably soil; my brother, a sports therapist, develops his own photographs. I want to know how to do all these things. They are practical, they leave a tangible imprint on the world. Even Thoreau, that arch-Transcendentalist, knew beans. I don’t know beans about beans, or much of anything else that would pass the cheek-swab test of practical knowledge.
Socrates says “True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.” There’s some consolation in that, though to speak candidly, while it sounds good, I do not know what it means exactly, and I would like to. Who knows: perhaps I should celebrate the yawning expanse of my ignorance, give it a snappy salute and the fanfare of trumpets. Maybe it’s a good thing that I’ll never find that granite substrate upon which to build a structure of self-satisfied knowing. It can be healthy to be humbled, to be pulled away from the self-reflecting pool that so much of our culture places us beside. The world is complex. We are complex. Things dwarf us. Perhaps awe and reverential wonder provide a fair exchange for not knowing. Who knows? I don’t. But I want to.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
No Deposit, No Return
Most mornings, at dawn, I walk. I like being present when dawn dawns. In my zanier moments, I imagine myself the monitor of dawning, tasked with inspecting the process, making sure it all goes well. And most mornings I encounter the “can man.” We exchange a brief greeting, and he passes on. But I watch him. He is not monitoring the dawn.
The “can man” is astride a Mercier Orion AL road bike, from which hang a half dozen white plastic bags that he fills with empty soda cans and bottles. He is spandexed in light-colored shorts and wears a sleek, tailed helmet. He is aerodynamic. He visits dumpsters, scours the streets and yards, and even peeks into the garbage receptacles of well-known soda swillers. He’s been out far longer than I, judging by the contents of the bags. Shortly, they will be bulging with empties, and he will head home to await the opening of the local Hy-Vee grocery store where he will redeem them for a nickel apiece. Iowa is not a blue state or a red state; it is a deposit-and-return state.
The “can man” causes me to experience cognitive dissonance. Scrounging for soda empties seems venal, somehow, and sordidly moneygrubbing. A genuflection before Philistinism. It “don’t seem natural,” as Huck would say, certainly nothing a grown man should be doing. Surely he must think so, too; otherwise, why would he be out before dawn breaks, safe from public observation? But, then again, perhaps he is a man pledging allegiance to acquisition, that most American of pastimes. Perhaps he is a smart man, seizing an opportunity. Perhaps he is a man drawn by the prose of the world rather than its poetry. Perhaps he is a serious cyclist, and the money he makes redeeming cans and bottles has enabled him to pursue his passion, to purchase the bike, the clothes, the helmet. Perhaps this is part of his training for a race. Perhaps his family needs the supplemental income. Perhaps he is an environmental activist or an exercise enthusiast who has found a clever way to monetize his commitments. Perhaps he is a performance artist of sorts, enacting a comedic search to comment on human finitude, the cramped coordinates of human spirit in the world. Perhaps he wants only the symmetry of closing the circuit of deposit-return-redemption that others have left incomplete. Who knows?
But I do know this. Each of us comes into the world with a deposit. We are given minds with which to reason, contemplate, and imagine. We are given hearts with chambers and valves and aortas to fill with and pump out love, compassion, and courage. We are given tongues to speak truth and ears to hear it. We are given hands with which to work and play and hold other hands. We are given feet to hasten to the assistance of others. We are given souls to see a beckoning beyondness that summons us to faith and hope and to being what it is in us to become. Our task, and it is a most difficult one, is to make a return on that deposit. If we don’t, there is no redemption.
The “can man” is astride a Mercier Orion AL road bike, from which hang a half dozen white plastic bags that he fills with empty soda cans and bottles. He is spandexed in light-colored shorts and wears a sleek, tailed helmet. He is aerodynamic. He visits dumpsters, scours the streets and yards, and even peeks into the garbage receptacles of well-known soda swillers. He’s been out far longer than I, judging by the contents of the bags. Shortly, they will be bulging with empties, and he will head home to await the opening of the local Hy-Vee grocery store where he will redeem them for a nickel apiece. Iowa is not a blue state or a red state; it is a deposit-and-return state.
The “can man” causes me to experience cognitive dissonance. Scrounging for soda empties seems venal, somehow, and sordidly moneygrubbing. A genuflection before Philistinism. It “don’t seem natural,” as Huck would say, certainly nothing a grown man should be doing. Surely he must think so, too; otherwise, why would he be out before dawn breaks, safe from public observation? But, then again, perhaps he is a man pledging allegiance to acquisition, that most American of pastimes. Perhaps he is a smart man, seizing an opportunity. Perhaps he is a man drawn by the prose of the world rather than its poetry. Perhaps he is a serious cyclist, and the money he makes redeeming cans and bottles has enabled him to pursue his passion, to purchase the bike, the clothes, the helmet. Perhaps this is part of his training for a race. Perhaps his family needs the supplemental income. Perhaps he is an environmental activist or an exercise enthusiast who has found a clever way to monetize his commitments. Perhaps he is a performance artist of sorts, enacting a comedic search to comment on human finitude, the cramped coordinates of human spirit in the world. Perhaps he wants only the symmetry of closing the circuit of deposit-return-redemption that others have left incomplete. Who knows?
But I do know this. Each of us comes into the world with a deposit. We are given minds with which to reason, contemplate, and imagine. We are given hearts with chambers and valves and aortas to fill with and pump out love, compassion, and courage. We are given tongues to speak truth and ears to hear it. We are given hands with which to work and play and hold other hands. We are given feet to hasten to the assistance of others. We are given souls to see a beckoning beyondness that summons us to faith and hope and to being what it is in us to become. Our task, and it is a most difficult one, is to make a return on that deposit. If we don’t, there is no redemption.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Seeking Solitude
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau Walden
Even though I am a teacher, an inherently social profession, I am not an especially social person. I can be social, but I am not social. I have social skills, but I do not enjoy having to mobilize and deploy them. It does not come easy to me, as it did not to my father. I am my father’s son—the father I once vowed to be different from but now, older, find I am the same as, right down to voice inflections, handwriting, and body language. Who knew my father was like a werewolf, lurking inside me, dormant, hidden, deep as marrow, waiting only for the full moon of my advancing years to leap to ferocious life? Is that the reason I solicit solitude? A genetics of solitude? Some recessive allele, its biological alarm clock sounding, that has sprung awake? Or is it some synaptic shift or neurotransmitter imbalance brought on by advancing age? Is it some combination of these? Something else? I don’t know. What I do know is I find myself, as did Thoreau, companioned best by being uncompanioned “the greater part of the time.”
Don’t misunderstand. I am not arrogant. I am not indentured to myself. I feel no self-absorbed sense of entitlement, no lofty disdain for others. I do not consider myself the sweet spot of the universe. I do not gaze longingly in the self-reflecting pool. I adore my wife, cherish my son and daughter-in-law, and delight in my grandkids. I am, without fail, answerable to my obligations to friends, colleagues, employer, and community. I am socially encumbered. I accept that, understand that. I do not demand that the world speak in my accent.
I believe in the outward reaching virtues--courage, compassion, truth, loyalty, duty, self-command, commitment, charity—and hate that they have often been kneaded by the internalizing dictates of a New Age-overlay into personal mandates for individual growth: your first duty is to yourself, feel compassion for yourself, be loyal to yourself, commit to yourself. Burn incense and light votive candles to yourself. Sing a thousand silvered hosannahs to yourself. Re-enchant yourself. It’s Me O’Clock. And thus does the self shrink to the size of a Post-It, with room enough left to print The Odyssey. I believe dream-deep that such a self-regard feloniously assaults the soul, a version of which I also believe in.
And yet, I find it wholesome to be a onesome, to be off the social grid. To withdraw the greater part of the time. I think I agree with the speaker in Robert Frost’s “Into My Own,” who, having entered a woods, determines to keep on going:
I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew —
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
That, for me, is the affirmative summons of solitude: to be “more sure of all I thought was true.” It’s a matter of learning, and coming to trust, the motions of your mind.
I have long since stopped attending parties, dinners, get-togethers of any sort. I am quiet by nature. I do not spend words lavishly. I prefer to listen, to heed Polonius’s advice to young Laertes in Hamlet: “give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.” My reticence to speak is sometimes misinterpreted, and I’m considered aloof, disdainfully uninvolved. I am, in fact, neither of those things. I simply lack the verbal qualities required by the social affairs I used to attend. I am not glib. I cannot be witty on demand. I hate talking smack. I do not long to hear my echo in the world. I do not speak unless I have something to say that will advance a discussion or contribute an idea that isn’t well past its expiration date.
I found these social affairs marked by a narrowing of discourse and governed by rules I did not know and, ultimately, felt no interest in fathoming. A sort of status quo sensibility reigned, a smartly uniformed uniformity of opinion that pushed contrarian ideas into silence. A cocoon of reinforced certitudes. Saltine crackers of thought gone soggy sitting in the pantry. I struggled with conversation, always, inevitably, knocked outside myself, casting about anxiously for the next thing to say, something, anything, to meet my dialogic obligation. Language does more than declare, question, command, and exclaim. It gives pleasure, or it should, anyway. Finding little of that in these social functions, I gradually withdrew. Sought solitude.
Possibly this is a failure on my part. Perhaps I’m simply lazy and self-indulgent. Perhaps my desire to seek aloneness masks a raging individualism, a sidewise impassivity to the gregariousness we are supposed to inherently possess. Perhaps I’m genetically maladapted, lacking the energy-generating mitochondria necessary for social engagement—some stray strand of DNA having eluded the vigilant evolutionary police. Certainly, inwardness receives little social encouragement. It “don’t seem natural,” as Huck would say. It does not seem to me, though, that I have violated some social covenant. I have not foresworn social being. I am not cloistered. I am not a hermit living in a tree. I can be social, am social on a daily basis. I want only to withdraw for a while, carve out of social space a loophole of retreat where I can read, write, ruminate, deliberate, imagine, analyze, remember, assess, question; where I can confront my thoughts, even impulse-imbued prethoughts; where consciousness is palpable, and I experience most authentically who and what and why and how I am. I want to practice willed attention, if only for a while; to seek rather than be sought.
I do not stand in opposition to society. I seek only a private space within it. The kind of binary thinking that opposes solitude to sociality has a long pedigree in Western culture. It needs to be deconstructed. Emerson tells us that to descend into one’s own mind is to descend “into the secrets of all minds.” The felt intersubjectivity of the inner life, he suggests, draws us upward and outward; it is, finally, a social solidarity. Even Thoreau entertained visitors at Walden, and several times a week walked to Concord to dine with acquaintances. But, like Thoreau, I find solitude companionable “the greater part of the time”. The word “companion” derives from the Latin com (with) and panis (bread). A companion, then, is, etymologically speaking, someone with whom you share bread, nourishment. Solitude is my bread fellow.
Henry David Thoreau Walden
Even though I am a teacher, an inherently social profession, I am not an especially social person. I can be social, but I am not social. I have social skills, but I do not enjoy having to mobilize and deploy them. It does not come easy to me, as it did not to my father. I am my father’s son—the father I once vowed to be different from but now, older, find I am the same as, right down to voice inflections, handwriting, and body language. Who knew my father was like a werewolf, lurking inside me, dormant, hidden, deep as marrow, waiting only for the full moon of my advancing years to leap to ferocious life? Is that the reason I solicit solitude? A genetics of solitude? Some recessive allele, its biological alarm clock sounding, that has sprung awake? Or is it some synaptic shift or neurotransmitter imbalance brought on by advancing age? Is it some combination of these? Something else? I don’t know. What I do know is I find myself, as did Thoreau, companioned best by being uncompanioned “the greater part of the time.”
Don’t misunderstand. I am not arrogant. I am not indentured to myself. I feel no self-absorbed sense of entitlement, no lofty disdain for others. I do not consider myself the sweet spot of the universe. I do not gaze longingly in the self-reflecting pool. I adore my wife, cherish my son and daughter-in-law, and delight in my grandkids. I am, without fail, answerable to my obligations to friends, colleagues, employer, and community. I am socially encumbered. I accept that, understand that. I do not demand that the world speak in my accent.
I believe in the outward reaching virtues--courage, compassion, truth, loyalty, duty, self-command, commitment, charity—and hate that they have often been kneaded by the internalizing dictates of a New Age-overlay into personal mandates for individual growth: your first duty is to yourself, feel compassion for yourself, be loyal to yourself, commit to yourself. Burn incense and light votive candles to yourself. Sing a thousand silvered hosannahs to yourself. Re-enchant yourself. It’s Me O’Clock. And thus does the self shrink to the size of a Post-It, with room enough left to print The Odyssey. I believe dream-deep that such a self-regard feloniously assaults the soul, a version of which I also believe in.
And yet, I find it wholesome to be a onesome, to be off the social grid. To withdraw the greater part of the time. I think I agree with the speaker in Robert Frost’s “Into My Own,” who, having entered a woods, determines to keep on going:
I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew —
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
That, for me, is the affirmative summons of solitude: to be “more sure of all I thought was true.” It’s a matter of learning, and coming to trust, the motions of your mind.
I have long since stopped attending parties, dinners, get-togethers of any sort. I am quiet by nature. I do not spend words lavishly. I prefer to listen, to heed Polonius’s advice to young Laertes in Hamlet: “give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.” My reticence to speak is sometimes misinterpreted, and I’m considered aloof, disdainfully uninvolved. I am, in fact, neither of those things. I simply lack the verbal qualities required by the social affairs I used to attend. I am not glib. I cannot be witty on demand. I hate talking smack. I do not long to hear my echo in the world. I do not speak unless I have something to say that will advance a discussion or contribute an idea that isn’t well past its expiration date.
I found these social affairs marked by a narrowing of discourse and governed by rules I did not know and, ultimately, felt no interest in fathoming. A sort of status quo sensibility reigned, a smartly uniformed uniformity of opinion that pushed contrarian ideas into silence. A cocoon of reinforced certitudes. Saltine crackers of thought gone soggy sitting in the pantry. I struggled with conversation, always, inevitably, knocked outside myself, casting about anxiously for the next thing to say, something, anything, to meet my dialogic obligation. Language does more than declare, question, command, and exclaim. It gives pleasure, or it should, anyway. Finding little of that in these social functions, I gradually withdrew. Sought solitude.
Possibly this is a failure on my part. Perhaps I’m simply lazy and self-indulgent. Perhaps my desire to seek aloneness masks a raging individualism, a sidewise impassivity to the gregariousness we are supposed to inherently possess. Perhaps I’m genetically maladapted, lacking the energy-generating mitochondria necessary for social engagement—some stray strand of DNA having eluded the vigilant evolutionary police. Certainly, inwardness receives little social encouragement. It “don’t seem natural,” as Huck would say. It does not seem to me, though, that I have violated some social covenant. I have not foresworn social being. I am not cloistered. I am not a hermit living in a tree. I can be social, am social on a daily basis. I want only to withdraw for a while, carve out of social space a loophole of retreat where I can read, write, ruminate, deliberate, imagine, analyze, remember, assess, question; where I can confront my thoughts, even impulse-imbued prethoughts; where consciousness is palpable, and I experience most authentically who and what and why and how I am. I want to practice willed attention, if only for a while; to seek rather than be sought.
I do not stand in opposition to society. I seek only a private space within it. The kind of binary thinking that opposes solitude to sociality has a long pedigree in Western culture. It needs to be deconstructed. Emerson tells us that to descend into one’s own mind is to descend “into the secrets of all minds.” The felt intersubjectivity of the inner life, he suggests, draws us upward and outward; it is, finally, a social solidarity. Even Thoreau entertained visitors at Walden, and several times a week walked to Concord to dine with acquaintances. But, like Thoreau, I find solitude companionable “the greater part of the time”. The word “companion” derives from the Latin com (with) and panis (bread). A companion, then, is, etymologically speaking, someone with whom you share bread, nourishment. Solitude is my bread fellow.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Dad Danced When He Mowed
Dad danced when he mowed. No, he didn’t foxtrot or cha-cha, or waltz. Rather, his body fell insensibly into a rhythm that, in its deft agility, its expressive rhetoric of physical movement, went beyond utilitarian movement to achieve a kind of embodied harmony. He danced.
Our suburban backyard was large enough to serve as the default football and baseball field for the gaggle of young boys in our neighborhood. In mowing it, Dad, a systems analyst by trade, plotted it into squares, working from the outside in. It was at the right angles that the dance appeared. First, there was the downward push on the mower handle with the left hand to raise the front wheels; then the swoop of the hand under and to the right to turn the mower 90 degrees, accompanied by the swinging out of the right leg and a quick left foot, right foot two-step to reposition himself behind the mower. A seamless motion. As the square shrunk, this patterned movement repeated itself more and more frequently, taking on a balletic athleticism, an elegant power, a prowess informed by balance and grace. The systems analyst became Gene Kelly. Dad danced when he mowed.
He would have scoffed at the very notion. For Dad, mowing had all the charm of a junkyard dog. It was the bacillus lurking in the healthy constitution of suburban homeowning. It was something he owed to social expectation, a bit of surrendered autonomy. No choice, really. Dad came up the hard way, an immigrant kid who spoke only Italian when he entered first grade, a Great Depression kid whose breakfast often consisted of a piece of toast dipped in the yolk of an egg he shared with his father and two brothers, a skinny kid who muscled himself by becoming an acolyte of Charles Atlas. Having made it by scrappy self-reliance and hard work, he did not like the idea of having to do another’s bidding, even if, especially if, that other was the substantive insubstantiality of social convention. He had paid his dues. But, if you aspire to a suburban home, you must cut grass. It was a duty, nothing more, and a disagreeably hot and fatiguing one at that. He contemplated it much the way a coffee bean might contemplate the grinder. It was a penance with no redemption in sight save the cold beer he rewarded himself with when it was finally, thankfully done.
And yet, he danced when he mowed.
How is it that the body speaks in a language the mind cannot understand? Descartes disjoined the mind, soul stuff, from the material, body stuff. And because he was aware of himself thinking, felt himself cogitating, he famously declared, “Cogito, ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am.” I’d amend this to “I think, and also I am.” Watching my dad dance when he mowed, I think I saw Descartes’ “sum” without the “cogito.” We disparage mindless tasks, the unthinking routine, but I suspect those are precisely the times when the CEO located in the neocortex, that master deliberator and analyst, takes a break, heads out for a smoke or a Frappaccino. And when that happens, other, older, deeper areas of the brain kickstart, areas having to do with balance and coordination and fluidity of movement. At those times, the body is restored to itself, to its own intelligence, to a blood-deep rhythm not defined by clocks and keystrokes, quotas and quarterlies. To riff on Pascal, the body has reasons that reason knows not of.
Is anything more awkward than a task performed in full awareness of each and every step involved in its performance? Has painting by the numbers ever produced a work of art? Is it not the case that all truly great athletes ultimately, finally, rely on an athletic instinct so deeply imprinted it seems molecular?
I’d answer no, but I’m speculating, really. Shamefully unempirical of me, undoubtedly. But here’s what I do, empirically, know: my dad danced when he mowed.
Our suburban backyard was large enough to serve as the default football and baseball field for the gaggle of young boys in our neighborhood. In mowing it, Dad, a systems analyst by trade, plotted it into squares, working from the outside in. It was at the right angles that the dance appeared. First, there was the downward push on the mower handle with the left hand to raise the front wheels; then the swoop of the hand under and to the right to turn the mower 90 degrees, accompanied by the swinging out of the right leg and a quick left foot, right foot two-step to reposition himself behind the mower. A seamless motion. As the square shrunk, this patterned movement repeated itself more and more frequently, taking on a balletic athleticism, an elegant power, a prowess informed by balance and grace. The systems analyst became Gene Kelly. Dad danced when he mowed.
He would have scoffed at the very notion. For Dad, mowing had all the charm of a junkyard dog. It was the bacillus lurking in the healthy constitution of suburban homeowning. It was something he owed to social expectation, a bit of surrendered autonomy. No choice, really. Dad came up the hard way, an immigrant kid who spoke only Italian when he entered first grade, a Great Depression kid whose breakfast often consisted of a piece of toast dipped in the yolk of an egg he shared with his father and two brothers, a skinny kid who muscled himself by becoming an acolyte of Charles Atlas. Having made it by scrappy self-reliance and hard work, he did not like the idea of having to do another’s bidding, even if, especially if, that other was the substantive insubstantiality of social convention. He had paid his dues. But, if you aspire to a suburban home, you must cut grass. It was a duty, nothing more, and a disagreeably hot and fatiguing one at that. He contemplated it much the way a coffee bean might contemplate the grinder. It was a penance with no redemption in sight save the cold beer he rewarded himself with when it was finally, thankfully done.
And yet, he danced when he mowed.
How is it that the body speaks in a language the mind cannot understand? Descartes disjoined the mind, soul stuff, from the material, body stuff. And because he was aware of himself thinking, felt himself cogitating, he famously declared, “Cogito, ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am.” I’d amend this to “I think, and also I am.” Watching my dad dance when he mowed, I think I saw Descartes’ “sum” without the “cogito.” We disparage mindless tasks, the unthinking routine, but I suspect those are precisely the times when the CEO located in the neocortex, that master deliberator and analyst, takes a break, heads out for a smoke or a Frappaccino. And when that happens, other, older, deeper areas of the brain kickstart, areas having to do with balance and coordination and fluidity of movement. At those times, the body is restored to itself, to its own intelligence, to a blood-deep rhythm not defined by clocks and keystrokes, quotas and quarterlies. To riff on Pascal, the body has reasons that reason knows not of.
Is anything more awkward than a task performed in full awareness of each and every step involved in its performance? Has painting by the numbers ever produced a work of art? Is it not the case that all truly great athletes ultimately, finally, rely on an athletic instinct so deeply imprinted it seems molecular?
I’d answer no, but I’m speculating, really. Shamefully unempirical of me, undoubtedly. But here’s what I do, empirically, know: my dad danced when he mowed.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Grandma Jay's Rolling Pin
When Grandma Jay made the long bus trip from Ohio to visit us in Wisconsin, she spent much of her time making ravioli, hundreds of ravioli that we put in the freezer out in the garage and broke out for special occasions. We were perhaps one of the few families in Wisconsin—maybe the entire United States—who ate ravioli on Christmas, Easter, and, though less often, on Thanksgiving. This, I now know, was a silent sacrifice on my mother’s part. She preferred the traditional meals, and much preferred making them than thawing and cooking ravioli. She felt it diminished her role as wife and mother. She was a woman of her generation. But, since for my dad, my brother, and me, ravioli was nothing short of a taser jolt to the brain’s reward pathway, she deferred to our less than traditional taste. She loved us.
I watched Grandma Jay make ravioli, standing on a step stool next to her, watching her crack eggs into a crater in the middle of a pile of flour, listening to her sing softly in Italian, admiring the way those practiced hands mixed everything together into a sticky blob placed on a floured cutting board the size of a small kitchen table. Those hands, the felt knowingness in them, the pinch or sprinkle of this, the handful of that, the mounding and kneading. No measuring cups, no measuring spoons. Just the hands. Then out came the rolling pin to flatten the dough, from which circles were cut with a sharp-edged metal cup, which were filled with a manicotti mixture whose composition she refused to reveal, which were, finally, sealed with the tines of a fork. A low-tech operation, to be sure, but the ravioli that emerged from it would have made the most hardened Calvinist smile.
But that rolling pin. When Grandma Jay boarded the bus in Cincinnati, she stowed her luggage but carried that rolling pin. It never left her hand. She held it vertically, one end on the seat, for the entire journey. That rolling pin. Made from a broom handle. Tempered with olive oil. Worn smooth at the ends from the friction of her hands. Progenitor of untold thousands of ravioli. That rolling pin. It was a magic wand she carried to us. That rolling pin. The deft rhetoric of its outward push and inward pull. The rhythm of it, the grace of it, in it. That rolling pin. It spoke the deep grammar of simplicity, skill, and love. That rolling pin. It never left her hand.
I watched Grandma Jay make ravioli, standing on a step stool next to her, watching her crack eggs into a crater in the middle of a pile of flour, listening to her sing softly in Italian, admiring the way those practiced hands mixed everything together into a sticky blob placed on a floured cutting board the size of a small kitchen table. Those hands, the felt knowingness in them, the pinch or sprinkle of this, the handful of that, the mounding and kneading. No measuring cups, no measuring spoons. Just the hands. Then out came the rolling pin to flatten the dough, from which circles were cut with a sharp-edged metal cup, which were filled with a manicotti mixture whose composition she refused to reveal, which were, finally, sealed with the tines of a fork. A low-tech operation, to be sure, but the ravioli that emerged from it would have made the most hardened Calvinist smile.
But that rolling pin. When Grandma Jay boarded the bus in Cincinnati, she stowed her luggage but carried that rolling pin. It never left her hand. She held it vertically, one end on the seat, for the entire journey. That rolling pin. Made from a broom handle. Tempered with olive oil. Worn smooth at the ends from the friction of her hands. Progenitor of untold thousands of ravioli. That rolling pin. It was a magic wand she carried to us. That rolling pin. The deft rhetoric of its outward push and inward pull. The rhythm of it, the grace of it, in it. That rolling pin. It spoke the deep grammar of simplicity, skill, and love. That rolling pin. It never left her hand.
Monday, July 5, 2010
The Metaphysics of Cutting Grass
Everything I know about cutting grass I learned from my father. He had three rules and one quasi-rule. The three rules undoubtedly reflected his occupation as a systems analyst. Rule 1: to maximize efficiency and, thus, save energy, plot the yard into squares and mow inward from the outer edge. Rule 2: to prevent the engine from overworking and, thus, save gas, always position the discharge chute away from the square. Rule 3: to extend the life of the mower and, thus, save money, always service the machine according to the manufacturer’s specifications. The quasi-rule, however, was prompted not by occupational mindset but, rather, to reward himself for performing the tiresome chore he found cutting grass to be: have a cold beer afterward. I follow these rules today, though I confess I do occasionally fail to observe the letter of the quasi-rule by having more than the one cold beer my father permitted himself. But far more seriously, perhaps, I violate its motivating spirit by not finding cutting grass a tiresome chore at all. In fact, I enjoy it. Despite pushing a rotary mower up, down, and across the sometimes hilly terrain of a double lot, I like cutting grass.
Actually, Dad was a hostage to his lawn. Weeds were a noxious assault on Dad’s sensibility, and he waged a grim campaign against them. A brown paper bag and pronged weeder were always on call should an offending dandelion dare raise its head amid his manicured turf. An aerator was annually rented and an edger procured—much more efficient than the hatchet with which he had previously edged by hand--and an assortment of turf builders, disease abolishers, and chickweed, spurge, ground ivy, deadnettle, and crab grass dispatchers were routinely purchased and applied. I have not inherited that passion for lawn maintenance nor felt compelled to mobilize and deploy an armory of lawn weaponry. I own no broadcast spreader; do not monitor soil chemistry, pH readings, soil compaction; do not dethatch, top dress, aerate, fertilize, or apply lawn activators; do not observe watering cycles (I don’t water); do not use herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides; hold no animosity toward crabgrass; and am indifferent to fusarium blight, rhizoctonia yellow patch, necrotic ring spot, and snow mold. I am, in fact, sympathetic to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “weed is a plant whose virtue has not yet been discovered.” It’s all about who does the defining, isn’t it? Dad, though, was unmoved by the contingency of definitions. I quoted Emerson once to Dad. I should have known better. Dad asked, “Was he a homeowner?” “Yes,” I replied. “Well,” Dad declared, “then, he wasn’t a very damn good one.” Case closed—QED, as they say.
Like many men of his generation, Dad was eager to show that he had “made it,” that he was firmly entrenched in the middle class. Thus our house on a suburban cul de sac, thus steak for dinner every Saturday night, thus the tail-finned 1959 Chevy Impala, and thus his passion to display a well-tended landscape for public viewing. Men of my generation tend to use means other than our lawns to announce our social identity. Still, grass must be cut, and while most regard it as they would a TV that only showed CSPAN, I like doing it.
Cutting grass is transformative. Having finished, one can see, immediately, that the lawn is manifestly different than it was, manifestly better, improved, prettier. Mowing is applied art; in doing it, one edits the lawn, grooming the ragged, shearing the shaggy, making the unruly ruly. I value this transformation because it stands in such stark contrast to what I do for a living. As a teacher who has instructed thousands of students, preparing them for the event horizon of the “real world” into which they finally disappear, I never really know, in an indisputably empirical way, if what I have imparted has made a dent, has had any consequence, has advanced their skill set, altered, if only a little, the cartography of their lives—in short, has made any difference. Perhaps I yearn too much to hear my echo in the world. Yes, occasionally, I do hear from a former student, several years out, that something I said or did has assumed some meaning in their lives. And certainly I understand that students are with me only for 50 minutes three times a week, or that the results of instruction oftentimes reveal their value only in the fullness of time. Still, I find it troubling when, over the course of a semester, I see no palpable impact; I begin to doubt myself, feel vaguely fraudulent. Thus the satisfaction I find in cutting grass: when I’ve finished, I can see, clearly see, a genuine accomplishment, a consequence of my contact, a change in the physical, “out there,” external reality wrought by my expended effort.
But I find there’s another reality involved in grass cutting, one aptly figured by grass itself. Grass does most of its growing invisibly, underground, the result of an intricate root system designed to retain water. For me, cutting grass involves a kind of invisible growth. Ironically, the very routine of grass cutting, its essential mindlessness, clears mental space to fill with intentional, task-unrelated thoughts. I call it “the mull.” I experience regrets; weigh alternatives and make choices; plan upcoming events; sing songs I find meaningful, which almost always means songs from the 1960s; make up poems or recite poems from memory; analyze books, movies, TV shows, and ads; wax nostalgic, sentimental, skeptical, or cynical about something or other, and then wonder why I feel that way; examine assumptions; ponder love, justice, free will, God, or the best recipe for pasta primavera; and wonder at string theory, quantum physics, and the passion of the Mel—Mel Gibson’s proclivity for behavioral meltdowns. It could be that “the mull” is a mind-body thing; after all, cutting grass is a walk. Kierkegaard claimed “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” Rousseau asserted that “my mind works only with my legs.” Thoreau called walking “a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us,” to reclaim the holy land of deliberation and imagination. Less romantically, Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, speculates that such a churn of cognitive activity has an evolutionary advantage as a “reminder mechanism”: in resisting the gravitational pull of one preoccupying task, individuals are more vigilant because, Klinger says, they keep their “larger agenda fresher in mind.”
But I find there’s another, less volitional, mental activity that occurs while cutting grass, one that seemingly lowers a hook to snag things lurking beneath the surface of consciousness. Experts would call it “the incubation effect.” Most would call it “zoning out.” I call it “the dream-drift.” The mind wanders. Stray images and unkempt thoughts slipstream in from some far away cognitive Pacific. It’s strange, uncanny, pleasant, and just a bit unnerving, a kind of letting go which, for me, takes the form of a surrender to a mental whateverism, a kind of watching, one step removed, the products of unwilled mental activity, products broken free of any establishing context. It’s a being willing, not a willing—a willingness to be open, not a willed effort to establish a goal against which to measure myself.
Once when mowing I had a sudden image of a first-grade classmate, Drucilla, someone I did not know especially well and had not thought of, ever, for over 55 years. For reasons I cannot explain, it was accompanied by sadness. Another time I was struck by a fully-formed interpretation of a movie my wife and I had watched two nights previously. It did not take shape; it came to me fully shaped. Yet another time I had an abrupt, powerfully moving image of my grandmother making ravioli, speaking in soft Italian, with 10 year-old me standing beside her on a step stool, watching her crack eggs into a crater centered in a pile of flour. Yet another time Frank Sinatra singing “Witchcraft” sprang to mind. I heard it; my body fell into the rhythm of it. Where does this all come from, and why? No doubt Freudians would rub their hands and say, “Boy, do we have some work to do.” Neuroscientists would likely offer explanations involving neuron-firing sequences and unperceived stimuli. All I know is that a gated mental enclave briefly opened for a showing, that something, some connection, was occurring among my brain’s 100 billion neurons, each, like grass, part of a dense root structure, each entangled with the tendrils of other neurons.
It spooks me that the syntax of our minds so complex, so capable of recursivity. It spooks me that the texture of our mental experience is so embodied, that our bodies and minds greet each other in mutual recognition and do not, as Descartes would have it, pass each other with an indifferent look. It didn’t spook Emerson, though; he knew that “under every deep, another deep opens.” All I know is that, sometimes, while cutting grass, what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens” happens. I am in time, on the beat. My “I” meets my “me.” We have a beer afterward. Maybe two.
Actually, Dad was a hostage to his lawn. Weeds were a noxious assault on Dad’s sensibility, and he waged a grim campaign against them. A brown paper bag and pronged weeder were always on call should an offending dandelion dare raise its head amid his manicured turf. An aerator was annually rented and an edger procured—much more efficient than the hatchet with which he had previously edged by hand--and an assortment of turf builders, disease abolishers, and chickweed, spurge, ground ivy, deadnettle, and crab grass dispatchers were routinely purchased and applied. I have not inherited that passion for lawn maintenance nor felt compelled to mobilize and deploy an armory of lawn weaponry. I own no broadcast spreader; do not monitor soil chemistry, pH readings, soil compaction; do not dethatch, top dress, aerate, fertilize, or apply lawn activators; do not observe watering cycles (I don’t water); do not use herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides; hold no animosity toward crabgrass; and am indifferent to fusarium blight, rhizoctonia yellow patch, necrotic ring spot, and snow mold. I am, in fact, sympathetic to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “weed is a plant whose virtue has not yet been discovered.” It’s all about who does the defining, isn’t it? Dad, though, was unmoved by the contingency of definitions. I quoted Emerson once to Dad. I should have known better. Dad asked, “Was he a homeowner?” “Yes,” I replied. “Well,” Dad declared, “then, he wasn’t a very damn good one.” Case closed—QED, as they say.
Like many men of his generation, Dad was eager to show that he had “made it,” that he was firmly entrenched in the middle class. Thus our house on a suburban cul de sac, thus steak for dinner every Saturday night, thus the tail-finned 1959 Chevy Impala, and thus his passion to display a well-tended landscape for public viewing. Men of my generation tend to use means other than our lawns to announce our social identity. Still, grass must be cut, and while most regard it as they would a TV that only showed CSPAN, I like doing it.
Cutting grass is transformative. Having finished, one can see, immediately, that the lawn is manifestly different than it was, manifestly better, improved, prettier. Mowing is applied art; in doing it, one edits the lawn, grooming the ragged, shearing the shaggy, making the unruly ruly. I value this transformation because it stands in such stark contrast to what I do for a living. As a teacher who has instructed thousands of students, preparing them for the event horizon of the “real world” into which they finally disappear, I never really know, in an indisputably empirical way, if what I have imparted has made a dent, has had any consequence, has advanced their skill set, altered, if only a little, the cartography of their lives—in short, has made any difference. Perhaps I yearn too much to hear my echo in the world. Yes, occasionally, I do hear from a former student, several years out, that something I said or did has assumed some meaning in their lives. And certainly I understand that students are with me only for 50 minutes three times a week, or that the results of instruction oftentimes reveal their value only in the fullness of time. Still, I find it troubling when, over the course of a semester, I see no palpable impact; I begin to doubt myself, feel vaguely fraudulent. Thus the satisfaction I find in cutting grass: when I’ve finished, I can see, clearly see, a genuine accomplishment, a consequence of my contact, a change in the physical, “out there,” external reality wrought by my expended effort.
But I find there’s another reality involved in grass cutting, one aptly figured by grass itself. Grass does most of its growing invisibly, underground, the result of an intricate root system designed to retain water. For me, cutting grass involves a kind of invisible growth. Ironically, the very routine of grass cutting, its essential mindlessness, clears mental space to fill with intentional, task-unrelated thoughts. I call it “the mull.” I experience regrets; weigh alternatives and make choices; plan upcoming events; sing songs I find meaningful, which almost always means songs from the 1960s; make up poems or recite poems from memory; analyze books, movies, TV shows, and ads; wax nostalgic, sentimental, skeptical, or cynical about something or other, and then wonder why I feel that way; examine assumptions; ponder love, justice, free will, God, or the best recipe for pasta primavera; and wonder at string theory, quantum physics, and the passion of the Mel—Mel Gibson’s proclivity for behavioral meltdowns. It could be that “the mull” is a mind-body thing; after all, cutting grass is a walk. Kierkegaard claimed “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” Rousseau asserted that “my mind works only with my legs.” Thoreau called walking “a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us,” to reclaim the holy land of deliberation and imagination. Less romantically, Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, speculates that such a churn of cognitive activity has an evolutionary advantage as a “reminder mechanism”: in resisting the gravitational pull of one preoccupying task, individuals are more vigilant because, Klinger says, they keep their “larger agenda fresher in mind.”
But I find there’s another, less volitional, mental activity that occurs while cutting grass, one that seemingly lowers a hook to snag things lurking beneath the surface of consciousness. Experts would call it “the incubation effect.” Most would call it “zoning out.” I call it “the dream-drift.” The mind wanders. Stray images and unkempt thoughts slipstream in from some far away cognitive Pacific. It’s strange, uncanny, pleasant, and just a bit unnerving, a kind of letting go which, for me, takes the form of a surrender to a mental whateverism, a kind of watching, one step removed, the products of unwilled mental activity, products broken free of any establishing context. It’s a being willing, not a willing—a willingness to be open, not a willed effort to establish a goal against which to measure myself.
Once when mowing I had a sudden image of a first-grade classmate, Drucilla, someone I did not know especially well and had not thought of, ever, for over 55 years. For reasons I cannot explain, it was accompanied by sadness. Another time I was struck by a fully-formed interpretation of a movie my wife and I had watched two nights previously. It did not take shape; it came to me fully shaped. Yet another time I had an abrupt, powerfully moving image of my grandmother making ravioli, speaking in soft Italian, with 10 year-old me standing beside her on a step stool, watching her crack eggs into a crater centered in a pile of flour. Yet another time Frank Sinatra singing “Witchcraft” sprang to mind. I heard it; my body fell into the rhythm of it. Where does this all come from, and why? No doubt Freudians would rub their hands and say, “Boy, do we have some work to do.” Neuroscientists would likely offer explanations involving neuron-firing sequences and unperceived stimuli. All I know is that a gated mental enclave briefly opened for a showing, that something, some connection, was occurring among my brain’s 100 billion neurons, each, like grass, part of a dense root structure, each entangled with the tendrils of other neurons.
It spooks me that the syntax of our minds so complex, so capable of recursivity. It spooks me that the texture of our mental experience is so embodied, that our bodies and minds greet each other in mutual recognition and do not, as Descartes would have it, pass each other with an indifferent look. It didn’t spook Emerson, though; he knew that “under every deep, another deep opens.” All I know is that, sometimes, while cutting grass, what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens” happens. I am in time, on the beat. My “I” meets my “me.” We have a beer afterward. Maybe two.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
What Books Are For
I built the bookshelves upon which my books stand, soldierly, at attention, spine out, though in places they break ranks in a jumbled stack. In my twenties I used boards laid across cinder blocks for bookshelves, and idea I plagiarized from my best friend Jim, who seemed on constant hailing frequency to all things chic. But cinder blocks are, well, cinder blocks, about as aesthetically pleasing as the drone of a vuvuzela. So, I replaced them with red bricks, and later replaced them with a variety of designer bricks. At some point I decided to build my bookshelves. Perhaps I was haunted by Willy Loman’s contemptuous comment to his sons that a man who doesn’t know how to use tools isn’t a man. Or maybe I decided that my books deserved a better display than boards laid across bricks—that I should give back to them in physical energy what they had given me in mental energy. The line of books on woodworking, power tools, fasteners, and do-it-yourself home improvement projects mark the evolution of that decision.
And that’s what books are for. To sit on shelves where they chronicle the stages of our interests, curiosities, knowledge, tastes, and dreams. Which is to say, us.
On my shelves sit all seven of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia series, in order of publication, beginning with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle. I read them to my son and looking at them reminds me of my childrearing years. Standing alone on a bottom shelf is the missal I used in elementary school, the facing pages in Latin and English, to remind me of the Catholicism into which I was born and educated, and which I so fervently practiced until, for reasons I still cannot explain, I joined the ranks of the fallen away. I see my mother’s copy of Gone with the Wind, which reminds me of her and of the cruel Alzheimer’s Disease that took her from me before it took her from me.
I see almost book written by Stephen King, a better writer than many are willing to acknowledge. Surely his dismissive self-characterization as “the McDonald’s of writers” was a playful irony. My avidity for King used to be an embarrassment, considering that I teach English for a living and am therefore supposed to read only literary literature. But they remind me that I long ago forsook such pretention for books that propel me along with an interesting story and characters whom I care about. That’s why I also have most of John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and all of Sherman Alexie.
The queue of books by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau remind me of my college years in the 1960s. They prompted my shift from a business major, where my heart wasn’t, to English, where I found my heart. I recall that Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” struck me as the most radical piece of writing I had ever read, and it fostered my participation in an anti-war sit in where I was roughly handled by a policeman.
My bookshelves house a series of books on theology; philosophy; the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Billy Collins, and Kay Ryan; the complete plays of William Shakespeare and August Wilson; mass media, with recent additions of both Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky; evolution; neuroscience, all of Carl Sagan and Steven Pinker’s popularizations; even a sizable collection of that most self-absorbed without being self-examining type of writing: literary theory.
The books on my bookshelves bear witness that I have not been pushed and jostled out of my own life, that, to paraphrase Martin Buber, my “I” and my “me” can still hold a conversation.
That’s what books are for. They are to be put shelves where they can act, to use an inelegant phrase, as memory retention devices, where they recount our personal history’s embodiment, our felt experience. Where they can, finally, ineluctably, bring us back to ourselves.
And that’s what books are for. To sit on shelves where they chronicle the stages of our interests, curiosities, knowledge, tastes, and dreams. Which is to say, us.
On my shelves sit all seven of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia series, in order of publication, beginning with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle. I read them to my son and looking at them reminds me of my childrearing years. Standing alone on a bottom shelf is the missal I used in elementary school, the facing pages in Latin and English, to remind me of the Catholicism into which I was born and educated, and which I so fervently practiced until, for reasons I still cannot explain, I joined the ranks of the fallen away. I see my mother’s copy of Gone with the Wind, which reminds me of her and of the cruel Alzheimer’s Disease that took her from me before it took her from me.
I see almost book written by Stephen King, a better writer than many are willing to acknowledge. Surely his dismissive self-characterization as “the McDonald’s of writers” was a playful irony. My avidity for King used to be an embarrassment, considering that I teach English for a living and am therefore supposed to read only literary literature. But they remind me that I long ago forsook such pretention for books that propel me along with an interesting story and characters whom I care about. That’s why I also have most of John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and all of Sherman Alexie.
The queue of books by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau remind me of my college years in the 1960s. They prompted my shift from a business major, where my heart wasn’t, to English, where I found my heart. I recall that Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” struck me as the most radical piece of writing I had ever read, and it fostered my participation in an anti-war sit in where I was roughly handled by a policeman.
My bookshelves house a series of books on theology; philosophy; the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Billy Collins, and Kay Ryan; the complete plays of William Shakespeare and August Wilson; mass media, with recent additions of both Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky; evolution; neuroscience, all of Carl Sagan and Steven Pinker’s popularizations; even a sizable collection of that most self-absorbed without being self-examining type of writing: literary theory.
The books on my bookshelves bear witness that I have not been pushed and jostled out of my own life, that, to paraphrase Martin Buber, my “I” and my “me” can still hold a conversation.
That’s what books are for. They are to be put shelves where they can act, to use an inelegant phrase, as memory retention devices, where they recount our personal history’s embodiment, our felt experience. Where they can, finally, ineluctably, bring us back to ourselves.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)