The Mickey Mouse Episode

At my house, the Mickey Mouse Episode has assumed iconic stature.

To understand, you need to know two things about me.

First, I am reluctant, quite reluctant, to part with T-shirts. I’d rather spend a week factoring polynomials than part with a T-shirt. I’d rather hand-tat lace while operating a jackhammer than part with a T-shirt. If it is in shreds, held together by little more than a molecule or two, I’ll begin to consider throwing it away. I have T-shirts that are 25 years old. I had one that was 32 years old, but this past spring the molecules finally gave way, and I consigned it, ruefully, to the dustbin of T-shirt history.

I do not suffer from T-shirt Hoarder Syndrome., though my wife Kathy is convinced that if such a diagnosis appeared in the DSM, the definition would consist solely of my photograph. My T-shirts are really tinseled backward glances. They recount for me the races I competed in during my running days, the cities my son D.J. and I visited on our annual post-Christmas trips, the athletic teams I played on or rooted for, the politicians and political causes I supported, and the one sentence witticisms that, at the time, I took for profound truth. Besides, T-shirts are like excuses for procrastination: you simply cannot have too many. So it was that I fished out of a basket of clothing which had lain, undisturbed and with yet undecided future, for 18 years under a table in the laundry room, a T-shirt emblazoned with a portrait of Mickey Mouse—wearing a red and black polo, with a three-fingered hand outstretched and palm up—encased in a red circle, across the bottom of which is written the proud declaration “Mickey Mouse Club.” It had belonged to my stepdaughter Alma. It was in mint condition, it fit, and it cataylzed a nostalgic remembrance of my own membership in Mickey’s jolly clan, the sole benefit of which, for me anyway, was any number of prepubescent fantasies about Annette Funicello.

Second, I have a temper. I get angry. Really angry. Normally, I am imperturbable, a meek-shall-inherit-the-earth kind of guy with a portfolio of self-discipline well into the six figures. But, at times, not often, but at times, normal dissolves in the solvent of anger, an anger that does not start out small and mount, that does not, like the overture of Don Giovanni, begin in a minor key, but explodes, with a choral uproar that, to paraphrase Keats, becomes my only music. It is an anger with kleig-light intensity; it is gale-force anger, tasered limbic circuit anger, a hard-booted and sharp-spurred anger riding a horse with a caffeine IV, a lava-like anger that could rebury Herculeneum, a mutinous anger that strips my frontal lobe region of command and sends it off in a lonely rowboat to some small, faraway deserted island, an anger that has bid a flippant adieu to anything but rant, a “tiger-footed rage,” to get all Shakespearean about it, an anger like a sequence of wrathful cannons that “spit forth their indignation.” And, therefore, the Mickey Mouse Episode.

On an afternoon when the heat index hovered at 110 degrees, wearing my newly-reclaimed Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I began the ritual that precedes my mowing the lawn: coiling the strung-out 50 foot garden hose into the window well under the spigot. Coiling the hose is a skill my father taught me and which I duly passed on to my son. I take it seriously, not just as a practical matter, but as an aesthetic one. There is, quite simply, a beauty in a well-coiled garden hose. However, the supposedly kink-free hose was, with bullying audacity, with adamant kinkitude, resisting my art. And its antics didn’t stop there, oh no. It knotted, too; intricate little gordian knots for which the solution of Alexander the Great would be wholly inappropriate. Instead, I was forced to unthread yards of hose, often to find the knot still stubbornly in place. And that’s when I went ballistic. Mark Twain counseled that “when angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.” I dispensed with the counting part. I flung every Anglo-Saxon derived profanity I knew against the indifferent sky and then, for full measure, repeated them. I stomped and waved my arms, steroidally kinetic, tempestuously adrenalized. I quivered with fury; I gesticulated ungovernably; I gyrated tumultuously. And all the while, I was being observed through the dining room window by Kathy and Alma, who were laughing uncontrollably at the dissonant sight of a grown and graying man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt given over completely to a ponderous, pulsating rage. Thus was born the Mickey Mouse Episode, which my ever-mindful wife never tires of recounting. It has become, in the space of a month, the light, loving mockery of that most delightful of narratives, the family story.

I am not puzzled by my angered outbursts. I know exactly what causes them. I am not even especially alarmed by it. It is never directed against other persons, or sentient beings in general. It is directed against things, the unfairness of things, the rampant refusal of things to do what they are supposed to do, to yield to our expectations and intentions. Prior to the Mickey Mouse Episode, the light-saber wattage of my wrath was leveled against a string trimmer whose string repeatedly broke and, despite my repeatedly tapping the spool on the ground, declined to advance so much as a millimeter. Before that, the unaccountable rupture of a supposedly impervious 9 mil, 13 gallon garbage bag, spilling a toxic distillation of coffee grounds and other kitchen waste on a floor I had just mop ‘n glo-ed. I believe we need to dust off existentialism and rename it resistentialsm, a philosophy of resistance against the stiffarming, ego-addling, tranquility-plundering nature of things. We need a resistential Satre or Camus under whose banner we can conscript ourselves and proudly march.

I know the Bible advises us to be “slow to anger” and warns us that “anger resides in the bosom of fools.” Yet, God often displays anger, as does Jesus at the Pharisees’ hardness of heart and at the moneychangers in the temple at Jerusalem. St. Paul openly and angrily rebukes St. Peter, the first pope, for goodness sake—literally, for, to Paul, Peter’s insistence that Jews and Gentile Christians cannot lawfully dine together unsutures the Galatian church Paul has sought so arduously to infuse with Christian unity. Righteous anger, I suppose, aroused in defense of faith’s principles, yet I would argue that my torrential anger is defensible and, in its own way, even righteous. It is a natural human emotion, a product of long-evolved brain processes serving perhaps to alert us to the wrongness of what should be right. It vents and dissipates pent-up stress, thereby promoting psychological hygiene. It is honest. Love can be feigned, friendship faked, caring counterfeited; anger, however, does not lend itself easily to affectation. Most significantly, I think, my anger is a refusal to accept the givenness of things. My anger makes demands: that things should be answerable to our expectations of them, that they should make sense, that they should make our lives easier, not strew them with obstacles. My rage is, at bottom, a rage for order, and packaged up tightly within that rage for order is a belief that purposeful change and improvement are possible.

Still, I have no doubt that, had she seen my exhibition of all-suffusing fury, the lovely Annette would have frowned, folded her arms, and turned her back on me. Cubby no doubt would have sought a restraining order. And parental figures Jimmy and Roy would no doubt have rescinded my “you’re as welcome as can be” status and banished me from the Mouseketeer tribe’s jamboree. Fortunately, Kathy still keeps me around, and that is a jamboree exquisitely, gratifyingly, all its own.

Battling Mom's Alzheimer's

My brother Dennis called to warn me.

Mom’s forgetfulness. I had noticed it while visiting the previous summer. He was calling to say that it was worse, that she had, in fact, been diagnosed with mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she called me by someone else’s name, that I shouldn’t be astonished at the disarray, the lack of cleanliness, of the place, that she was refusing to take any medication, that her personality had changed. He was calling to say, though he did not actually say it, that Mom was dying.

Still, despite his warning, I was surprised, astonished.

When I arrived, she kissed me on the cheek, as usual; asked after my wife Kathy, my son D.J., and the grandkids, as usual; asked how I’d been and how the school year went, as usual. Then the usual stopped. I watched a blankness steal into her eyes as she lost the thread of our conversation. I watched her stand uncomprehending, immobile, in front of the Mr. Coffee machine. I watched her take packages of chicken condon bleu from the freezer, unpackage them, put the entrees on plates, and serve them to my Dad and me, accompanied by a lettuce and tomato salad without dressing. I saw a shower that was an oversized culture dish of mold. I saw her normally generous, wholly hospitable personality transform, in an instant, into biting criticism of and paranoid accusations against Dad. He had forced her to give up the home she loved and move to a retirement village condo she hated. He wanted to steal her jewelry. I saw her hide her purse and her wedding ring. I saw that the carpet had not been vaccumed, the furniture had not been dusted, and the cupboard shelves had not been stocked. Dad told me she spent most of the day sleeping, no longer cleaned, and no longer shopped. Dad, a man of his generation, did not clean or cook or shop. Didn’t know how. Mom refused his suggestion that he hire a person to clean, that they apply for Meals on Wheels. He was losing weight.

Alzheimer’s is an insidious disease, lurking, lurking, lurking, like a thief in the attic, for as long as ten years, descending every so often, unobserved, to pilfer an item here and there, before swaggering through the front door, declaring that it now owns the place and everything in it, can’t do anything about it, resistance is futile. Alzheimer’s is a remorseless disease, the tangled clustered clog of amyloid plaques, and nerve cell fibers, and blasted nerve cells progressively, insistently evaporating the backward look of memory and beckoning beyondness of anticipation, systematically pillaging control of thought and emotion, ruthlessly decentering time and space itself, relentlessly dispossessing the located and continuous self and replacing it with a kind of mental white noise. If there is such a thing as the ghost in the neuro-machinery of the brain, Alzheimer’s is the ghost buster.

Over the winter Mom was placed in an assisted-living facility. Early in the summer she was placed in hospice care. When I visited in August, she did not recognize me at first. I prompted her, repeatedly: “I’m Jerry, your first-born son.” “Oh, yes,” she said, and a look of recognition faintly bloomed. I began an incessant monologue, talking nonstop, telling her about Dennis and Kathy and D.J. and the grandkids. I reminded her that I taught at Graceland University in Lamoni in southern Iowa and recounted for her the courses I taught and my colleagues in the Humanities Division and what the students were like, anything, anything that would anchor me in her awareness, and as I talked, her face became a polite mask, the kind I had seen her put on before in social situations where she encountered strangers. She became a shuttered window. I became a nameless voice.

Mom was being taken from me before she was taken from me. When I returned home, I decided that, like Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief who led an army of warriors that rolled back the encroaching frontier in mid-19th century Texas, I would arrest, even repel, the disease spreading across her mental landscape. Every Sunday morning I wrote her a letter. Each one began, “Hi Mom, this is Jerry, your first-born son,” and then I recounted an experience from the past we had shared. I reminded her of the time when, as a five-year-old, I had taken half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator and, standing on the front porch, tossed them against the side of our next-door neighbor’s house, just to hear the satisfying little explosion they made. I reminded her of the time I had to be physically restrained in Dr. Shaw’s office when he attempted to give me a shot. I reminded her of the dream she had when I told her I was getting married, how she walked into the living room only to see the lone inhabitant of the fishbowl had mysteriously disappeared. I reminded, I reminded—a desperate rhetoric of memory, an invocation of remembrance to call her back me to her. It was, I knew, a fool’s mission; the ravaging, ravening frontier of Alzheimer’s Disease cannot be deterred, cannot be rolled back. But it was my Mom. Attachment theory tells us that the mother’s presence provides children with the secure base from which to move outward into world, to explore and play, to venture, to adventure, and that that bond persists, in some form or another, as the child grows into adulthood. I was losing the woman who provided, who in many ways still provided, my secure base. I had to intervene.

Mom died that October. After the funeral, Dennis and I bundled up her clothes for Goodwill, donated the television to the assisted-living facility, and moved her furniture back to the condo. There were only a few pieces: a dresser and mirror, a rocker recliner, and a nightstand. Removing the top drawer of the dresser, I noticed, tucked in a back corner, the dozen letters I had written. They were all unopened.

Mysteries

I have long been attracted to lonely roads, the ones “less travelled by,” but I have not ventured down any. The attraction is enough. I have long been enticed by abandoned farm houses, but I have not entered any. The enticement is enough. I have long been beguiled by the nooks and cubbies in old Victorian homes, but I trust I am not a “nook dweller,” that term of contempt Nietzsche applied to “colorblind utility men.” Besides, it’s the being beguiled that is so beguiling. I am fascinated with string theory and quantum physics. But I am not consumed with knowing whether or not eleven dimensions exist, or whether particles can, as was reported of Moby Dick, be in more than one place at a time, or exactly how electrons vast distances apart manage to synchronize their spin rates. That string theory and quantum physics fascinate me is enough. I really don’t need to know if the Voynich Manuscript, a 16th century text written in an unknown language, is a medieval version of Web MD, or what actually happened in the ancient Athenian town of Eleusis during the annual rituals in which initiates were inducted into the worship of the grain goddess Demeter. That they beckon me, intrigue me, captivate me is enough.

All these things—the “less travelled by” roads, the derelict structures, the odd crannies and theories and manuscripts and ceremonies—are mysteries for which I do not wish a solution. It is enough for me simply to be a receptive subject of the experience of them as mysteries. Originally, the word “mystery, from the Greek mystes, described a person initiated into secret rites or doctrines. Its meaning was theological. Only in the 14th century did it take on the non-theological meaning of a hidden or secret thing. I like things whose origin or use is hidden or secreted. I do not wish to be an initiate; I do not wish to encounter the truth of these things; I do not wish to be, as Thomas Carlyle says, “one who goes through a wonderful world unwondering.” Initiation arrests conjecture, and, for me, conjecturing is the best kind of encountering.

I know most people who enjoy mysteries anticipate their resolution. There is pleasure in tension released, expectation fulfilled, vicissitudes overcome. Cognitive psychologists can no doubt demystify the mystery of this pleasure, in much the same way they would explain the mystery of my periodic jones for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Certain neural circuitry in certain functionally specialized modules firing in certain sequences releasing certain opioids seeking certain receptor cells, a holdover naturally selected to solve problems that tasked our hunting and gathering Pleistocene forebears But the problem with mysteries solved, with wonder satisfied, is that we move on. We enjoy the break from the humdrum substrate of reality upon which our lives are built, but, then, you know, time to get back to work, to face facts, to deal with what is in front of us, to solve real problems, to get real. I prefer the state of wonder, the condition of mystery, to the satisfaction of it. I wonder about wonder. I’m out for, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “the renaissance of wonder.” I’m out for the awe of it, the reverence of it, the humility of it. I’m out for the imagination in motion of it, the adventurous flight of fancy of it. That Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not more satisfying for my knowing the biology of it.

Those abandoned farm houses—who lived there, and where did they come from? Were they a happy family, was there rampant affection, or are the walls pitted with the acid spray of angry words? Are they collapsing inward from the resentments they harbored? That lonely road—who made it and for what purpose? Did some young boy walk that road, thinking about dinner or a best friend’s betrayal or the girl who sits behind him in school or a father’s hand tenderly resting on his shoulder or his mother’s small smile and brightening eyes every time he enters the house? Those nooks and cubbies—do they impugn our right-angledness, our geometrization? String theory and quantum physics—do they speak to our need to transcend three dimensionality? Is there a lesson in sociology to be learned from those recalcitrant particles that blithely stray beyond the jurisdiction of what the laws of physics say they can do, or a lesson in metaphysics in the search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle theorized to be the source of mass for all other particles? That Voynich Manuscript—could it be a guide to perfecting ourselves, to more fully experiencing our being? Those Eleusinian ceremonies—did the initiates confront a vertiginous realm of reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy beyond which thinking itself cannot go? Is it simply the case that they shared a psychedelic drink? I hope the latter is not the case. I want no Oedipus to arrive in the Theban precincts of these mysteries and solve their riddles. And we all know what happened to Oedipus.

I make a covenant with all things whose mystery summons me to them. If they give themselves to me, if they consent to enter me, I will use but not consume them, will not steal way the tonal core of their otherness, but will accommodate myself to their tenor and texture. I will embody them, but only for a while, carry them away, but only for a short distance, and, then, leave them as they are, unchanged, though they have caused great change in me. I like to believe it is a covenant that fosters an ecology of imagination.

Philosophers have debated, and, I suspect, always will debate, what is true. One favored theory of truth, the correspondence theory, tells us that what we see is what is really there. A direct correspondence exists between the seer and the seen, what Thomas Aquinas called “the equation of things and intellect.” If things conform to objective reality, they are true. Work in cognitive linguists and pyschology, however, tells us that the seen is always distilled through interpretation, shaped by specific historical, social, and cultural processes. We see not the thing itself, in itself, but a representation of it—not the what is but what we construct it to be. The thing itself, in itself, has always already stolen beyond our perceptual boundary. If that is indeed the case, I am heartened, for it means that everything is, finally, deliciously, a mystery.

Tracked and Profiled

My small southern Iowa hometown boasts a recreational train that stretches 2.2 miles from the east side of town to the freeway and, on the west side, 2.5 miles to Liberty Hall, a restored Victorian home and museum. The east trail follows the long-abandoned CB&Q railroad track. To enter it is to enter a tunnel of mature forest of oak, white ash, basswood, and maple. In the spring, the blossoming wild plum trees conjure a confederation of angles. Yellow and purple coneflowers, thistles, Queen Anne’s lace, and wild rose line the trail. Gooseberries, currants, and serviceberries, those clever blueberry imposters, provide a savory diversion for those out for exercise. The west trail, though dotted here and there with pale blue cornflowers and purple prairie clover, is mostly untreed, unflowered, and unberried. It winds through gently rolling open fields and past small tucked-away, reed-surrounded ponds. Around one bend, off to the south, a small, solitary stand of hickory shelter huge bundled wheels of hay that appear to have been forgotten by their owner. In contrast to the shadowed and canopied east trail, where the sound of your motion echoes among the branches and makes you feel large, the west trail offers pure vista, the fields and hills running off as far as the eye can see, making you feel small, a humble point of movement in an expansive landscape. Two trails, two personalities, made one by the recent addition of a connecting segment that runs through town.

The recreational trail was constructed entirely by some 65 volunteers, the core group of which was known as “The Heart Attack Brigade,” retirees who had suffered, in one form or another, cardiac problems ranging from mild to serious. Through the shy green smile of May, the confident laugh of June, the golden shouts of July, and the humming, hazy heat of August, the Brigade and the other volunteers laid down, cubic foot by cubic foot, a 10-foot wide slab of concrete. Thoreau noted that “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The walkers, runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers, and cross-country skiers who use the Recreational Trail are ever mindful that they walk, run, roll, and glide upon the three-year labor of their fellow townsmen and townswomen. It was a labor of civic pride and a labor of love, of hearts, some of which, though wounded by disease, perhaps grew stronger in the process.

Strangely enough, I found myself remembering the creation of the Recreational Trail after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new, ever-more impinging, ever-more infringing technologies web sites use to track consumers. According to the article, the top 50 websites use, on average, 64 tracking files, the information from which is transmitted, often keystroke by keystroke, to “a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers” which “analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections.” This aggregation of data-gatherers builds “personal files” that, while excluding identification by name, “could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.” Our privacy and our friends are the currency we pay for access to free content, and that free content justifies, according to a spokesman for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, providers’ involvement “`in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.’”

Undoubtedly, journalists, features writers, and bloggers will, once again, inveigh against our privacy colonized, traduced, systematically pillaged, Cuisinarted. Yet another instance, an upgrade, as it were, of the surveilling Panopticon that locks us in its indifferent gaze. Congress will investigate. The FCC will propose rules and guidelines. Progressives will decry the predations of capitalism. The gears of the lobbying machines will clank into motion and soon be running at frictionless velocity. For me, however, the article’s revelations of high-tech tracking and profiling induce not anger at what they reveal, but sadness at what they conceal.

Should the 65 volunteers who worked on the Recreational Trail visit any of the 50 most popular websites, or any of the many others that accumulate customer data, the tracking files would duly register that they purchased cement, in quantities large enough to indicate a major project, along with trowels, floats, darbys, tampers, edgers, and jointers to work the cement and 2x4s to frame it. The tracking files would duly register that the volunteers were mostly male, mostly married, mostly white, between 40 and 68 years of age, inclined toward local volunteerism, lived in a small, rural, southern Iowa town, and that a subset of that group had experienced heart problems requiring medication and, in some instances, hospitalization. All 65 neatly and dispassionately quantified, abstracted, and readied for delivery to some business or organization. All 65 retailed, transacted. All 65 algebraized and algorithmed, pieces in the cogwork of market share, bottom lines, and online advertising. All 65 reduced to online habits. None of the 65 really known.

What the tracking files cannot duly register is the volunteers’ experience of creating the Recreational Trail, their embodiment and feel of it, the rhythm of it, the tenor and texture of it—what it was like. Was the labor enjoyable or mind-numbingly, bruisingly monotonous? Did the summer sun draw them upwards or hammer them dizzy? Did they discover that the space between work and prayer is but a small step or a gaping abyss? Did they experience the experience or simply document its onset and passing? Did they banter, philosophize, make small talk, make large talk? Did they display character traits that marked them as accepting or indentured to a single way of being? Were new friendships made, established intimacies strengthened, enmities formed? What contexts and commitments summoned them? Were they companionable, glib on the uptake and confidently assertive or reflective and slow to respond? Did they listen, really listen, engaged and with understanding? Did they recognize and respond to joys and sadnesses, naivetes and hardnesses, in themselves and others? When their minds strayed, where did they stray to? What thoughts, heeled to their right side, dogged them through the forest and field? If they were married, were they able to wholly imagine their spouses? If they were white, were they able to wholly imagine racial others? If they were older, were they able to wholly imagine the younger generations? For that matter, how wholly were they able to imagine themselves? Do they see imagination as a threat or a thrill? What meaning, finally, did working on the Recreational Trail have for them? When they reached the end of that 5 mile journey, did they meet themselves or someone different?

No tracking file yet concocted can duly register these things, things that precisely gesture to our humanness, our being human. They cannot be captured by the algorithmic gravity of a tracking file, cannot spin within its computational orbit. We are always more, so much more, than our purchases and demographics. We are always a bundle, often a messy bundle, of qualities and intentions and purposes, and every so often, if we’re fortunate, a moment of transcendent spirit, a chain lightning flash of imagination, a stiletto-sharp intensity of enlightenment, possesses us. We are always the heirs of contingency and inheritance, chance and will. The world enters us and we attend to some of it consciously, most of it unconsciously. We are always in control and out of control, always rational and visceral, analytic and intuitive; we always delay gratification and succumb to it, always strategize and go by gut feeling. We are always more verbs than we are nouns, and the deep grammar of our being always will exceed the impertinence of a data-generated profile. We are, finally and always, untrackable.

Palimpsests

Until quite recently, I did not know what I was, exactly. I knew I was something, and I was assured that that something was special. The culture told me, insistently, relentlessly, that I was unique, an irreducible genre of one. Advertising proclaimed that it is Me O’Clock or Me Time, that I deserved or was worth whatever product or service was being promoted, that I could customize my credit card to suit my personality, that I could demand a hamburger made just for me, that a taco was my taco, that I could buy a car that adjusts to me, that I could an app for my every heart’s desire.. Self-help gurus admonished me to cultivate myself, reach in and touch myself into being, and that now, now, now is my time. Popularized history endlessly recounted to me the storied story of rugged individualism, of the westering impulse, the restless journeying of men and women to possess the bright flame of self-actualization, each embarked on their individual manifest destiny. I was bludgeoned with the discourse of self-esteem, told I was a majority of one, an autonomous, self-referential being of unequaled exceptionality. Reality TV showed me makeovers of every sort, where I saw a genuine self can break free into the golden summer splendor of its exclusive July. I was assured from every cultural corner that I was unprecedented, one-of-a-kind. And yet, I did not know what that means. I certainly did not feel unique. I didn’t even know what feeling unique would feel like.

I suppose I could have said I am a human being, a Homo Sapiens, though, I confess, most days I felt more like Homer Simpson. I could have said I am a teacher, a husband, a father and a grandfather. I could have said I was organized, disciplined, sometimes obsessive, always driven. I could have said I am empathetic, caring, sometimes skeptical, and easily exasperated. I could have said I am a vegetarian, have a jones for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and mainline coffee. But those are all qualities shared by millions of others. They are not essences; at least, I do not experience them as such. They merely qualify “I am,” the fact that I exist; they merely domesticate my existence by circumscribing it with an adjective or a noun. They describe me, but do not seem to name the substance, the radical, fundamental something that I was told makes me unique.

I have my father’s toolbox. It is a slapdash affair, really, banged together from a couple of boards and painted beige. Yet, if I were offered the priciest Craftsman toolbox in exchange for it, if I were offered an exact duplicate of it, right down to the rusted heads of the tenpenny nails holding it together, I would refuse the offer. The toolbox has an essence, it is unique. It is sui generis. I know that with a knowing deeper than a dream, even though, struggle as I might, I cannot find the language to name, in a propositional way, what it is, cannot find the words to literalize what that essence is. In such cases, when words fail to provide a perch upon which to land, it is best to rely on metaphor. Perhaps that is the way to make sayable this uniqueness I supposedly possess.

Not too long ago, I ran across an article about the Archimedes Palimpsest, a volume consisting of 714 parchment pages from which the original writing had been scraped away and reused to create a Byzantine prayer book. The palimpsest is so named because among other texts contained in the original, were seven treatises written by the Greek mathematician Archimedes. It sometimes happens that, due to the simple passage of time, the “underwriting” reappears beneath the “overwriting” superimposed upon it, resulting in a text with a discernable layer beneath the surface. The trace has left a trace for the fullness of time to birth.

The article swept me back to a time when, in the middle of a conversation with my brother, I suddenly realized that he used the same hand gestures as our father, used the same grimace before responding to a question, had the same manner of speaking from the side of his mouth when intending irony, laughed the same wheezy laugh. And I realized I did those things, too. And I remembered my mother telling me my handwriting was exactly like my father’s, and that, on the telephone, my voice was indistinguishable from his. In my brother and I are the underwritten trace of our paternity appearing in the selves we have written and are still in the process of writing. We are palimpsests.

The problem with most assertions of individual uniqueness, at least as that quality is commonly conceived, is the assumption that human beings exists in a gated enclave of the self, walled off from circumstances and influences, imbued with an unrepeated, unreplicable core that, like some fairy-tale gift, like some wave of a Hogwarts wand, simply appears out of thin air. It seems to me, though, that we are anticipated, prepared for, mediated, but not determined, not passively absorbent. My brother and I are not copies of my father, not duplicates or facsimiles. The three of us are layered texts, separate in time, each telling its own story while sharing the same page, the overwriting and underwriting overlapping at some points, indistinguishable, the same perhaps, but, finally, different. We are palimpsests.

We are carried forward, like an integer in a math problem, by our legacy, but into the ethos of our own historical moment, the habitus of our own time and place. We are actively courted by our moment, and we actively collaborate in that courtship. We affiliate ourselves with others; we gain information, knowledge, perspectives, attitudes, and values; we form perceptual boundaries; we pursue enterprises; we use our natural gifts and acquire others. We are what we already have, what we find, and what we do. We are legacies, but the song of that legacy arrives in the present and is overwritten in a different key. A new song, but not quite, for under its emergence is the trace, the unerasable residue with which it started out.

That, I think, is how we are unique, the intrinsic character of what we are. Palimpsests. The gesture of the self to and beyond itself. Anything less makes the self less complete, smaller, limited. Anything less is to invoke the oven bird’s question at the end of Robert Frost’s sonnet: “What to make of a diminished thing.”

What Is It That Surveys Survey?

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.

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.