You should be dancing, yeah

Okay, that title has nothing to do with this post, but I’m listening to a WNYC program’s discussion of the Bee Gees, and they played this song, so, y’know, why not.

Anyway.

Classes begin tomorrow, and while I’ve taught all of these courses before and my syllabi are set, I’m always a bit nervous before the curtain rises. Last semester my bioethics course kicked ass and my American government course sucked ass, so I’m hoping to maintain the performance of the former while raising that of the latter.

I’m also teaching a course I haven’t taught for a couple of years, and I’ve rejiggered it somewhat from my last pass. It’s an intro to political theory course (more or less), and the last time out the students never truly engaged the material. I don’t know if it was them or me, but I do know I was rather listless by the end. This time around, I cut back a wee on the reading and reconfigured the written work; we’ll see if it works.

<<Oh, shit, I haven’t yet updated my course website. Dammit. Maybe tomorrow morning.>>

Is this all a way of excuse-making in advance for not posting as much as I should? Why, why would you even think such a thing?

Actually, the busier I am, the more likely I am to write, so who know: maybe I’ll be a bloggin’-machine this semester.

~~~

I need to get some real writing done, too. The Unexpected Neighbor is already e-pubbed (link at right), but I stopped in the midst of editing Home Away Home. I really should get back to it, not least because it’s a better manuscript than Neighbor, but also because once I finish that, I’ll have no excuses for not working on my next project. If only I could settle on that next project.

Anyway, here are bits from Home, the first, in honor of the previous post:

Kurt had taken Jamie for a ‘walk-and-talk’ before his son left for Daytona. ‘I know we talked about this before, and I know you’ve been living away from home for awhile now, but I don’t want you to get in any trouble in Florida.’
Jamie tugged on his ponytail, trying to keep a smile off his face.
Kurt noticed. ‘I know, you think this is funny, and your old man is way behind, but James, seriously, a person does things on vacation that, that he wouldn’t do at home.’
‘Dad!’ Jamie looked at his father. ‘What do you think I’m going to do?’
Kurt took a deep breath. ‘Well, Rachel is going to Florida, too, isn’t she?’
Jamie laughed. ‘Jeez, dad. She’s staying in another hotel from us guys.’
‘She’s been staying on another floor from you in the dorm, but that hasn’t stopped you, has it?’ Kurt kicked aside a melting chunk of ice.
Jamie said nothing.
‘Look, Jamie, I know you’re not a stupid kid, and I assume you and Rachel have been. . . smart about. . . your relationship.’ Kurt shuffled around more ice pebbles. ‘But Florida, the beach, the booze, everything—your common sense can fly right out the window.’
Jamie scratched his still-unshaven face. ‘Dad, don’t worry. I can handle it.’
‘And no drugs. All right? No drugs.’ Kurt continued as if he hadn’t heard Jamie. ‘You don’t know what kids can do on those things.’
Jamie paused behind a large ice chunk, retreated a few steps, then ran and kicked it down the path. ‘I’m in college, dad, all right? None of this stuff is new.’ He tapped his boot free of slush. ‘Besides, you’ve met Rachel, right? She’s not exactly Janis Joplin.’
Kurt stopped. ‘Janis Joplin? Kids still listen to her?’
‘They listen to all that sixties crap.’ Jamie walked ahead of his dad. ‘Well, Rachel loves Janis, so I can’t call her crap, but, you know.’
Kurt double-stepped to catch up to Jamie. ‘She’s not, she’s not like Janis, is she?’
‘Dad! I just told you. Jeez.’ Jamie looked at Kurt, shaking his head. ‘She’s a chem major, for crying out loud. That’s super hard.’
Kurt nodded. They ambled along the gravel path in silence. ‘Have you picked a major?’
‘I was thinking math, but, I don’t know.’ Jamie hitched up his back pack. ‘I don’t think so. I got time. Maybe sociology. Journalism.’ He looked sideways at his dad. ‘Those aren’t very hard majors, are they? I mean, compared to chemistry. Or philosophy.’
Jamie was now staring ahead, his cheeks reddening. Kurt rested his hand on Jamie’s nearest shoulder, and leaned into his son. ‘Do what makes you happy, James, and do it well. That’s what matters.’ He moved his hand under Jamie’s ponytail. ‘The rest will take care of itself.’

And the second bit:

Summers in Madison alternated between the glorious and the brutal. There were days Maggie would borrow Laura’s bike and tool along Lakeshore path, cooled by the shade and the breeze from Lake Mendota, and other days when a dip in Lake Wingra felt like taking a warm bath. ‘I get cooler going under and standing up than staying in,’ Maggie said to Laura.
‘I know,’ Laura responded. ‘I’m in the water and I’m sweating. This is ridiculous.’
On those nights they’d set up cots on the back porch for sleep, the humidity making them careless if the neighbors saw them in their underwear. ‘I’d go naked if I thought it’d make a difference,’ Laura declared.
Maggie only smiled. ‘We used to sleep in the basement.’ She handed a beer to Laura, and flipped the tab of her can. ‘It was nice, though. Not like the dungeon here.’
Laura turned the can away from her as she opened it. ‘No shit. I don’t even like going down there in the day.’ She put her mouth over the fulminating beer. ‘Too bad we can’t turn it into a pool.’
‘That’d be nice,’ Maggie agreed. ‘Sleep on air mattresses.’
‘Pfft, those things leak.’ Laura pushed her cot against the wall then slouched against the boards. Her dyed black hair was piled on top of her head, and she held the cold can against her pale neck. ‘So you’d sleep in the basement, huh? You usually don’t talk about your life before here.’
Maggie was wedged in the opposite corner, her beer on the railing next to her. ‘Yeah, well.’
‘So what’s the deal?’
Maggie peered through the stiles at the backyard trees. ‘I don’t, uh, I don’t really have much contact with anyone.’
‘Bad?’
Maggie pulled her beer back to her belly, setting it on the exposed skin between her cut-off t-shirt and underwear. ‘Not really. It’s just, I left, you know, after graduation. Needed time to myself.’ She brushed the condensation into her belly button.
Laura looked over to her. ‘Does your family know you’re here?’
‘Not really. I mean, maybe they figured it out.’ Maggie yawned. ‘I was born here, and I wanted to come to school here, so maybe they know.’
‘But you haven’t called them or anything?’ Laura was staring at Maggie.
Maggie avoided her gaze. ‘Nope.’
‘Wow. You just left?’
‘Yep.’
Laura took a long drink, then let out a long belch. ‘Wake up, everybody!’ she laughed. Then she frowned. ‘I don’t know if I could do that. My dad and I fight all the time—you’ve heard me, on the phone—but, jeez, not talking to him? And it would kill my mom.’ Laura’s family lived about nearby, just on the other side of Sun Prairie; she was the second of three children. ‘Do you have brothers or sisters?’
Maggie continued to squeegee the water off the can. ‘Yeah.’
‘And they don’t know where you are, either?’
Maggie shrugged. ‘Well, my older brother, you know, he was at school last year, and he’s never around, so I bet he doesn’t really notice. And my younger brother and sister, they’re really young.’
‘So nobody knows you’re here?’ Laura was now sitting cross-legged on her cot, looking directly at Maggie.
Maggie sipped her beer. ‘Not really. I called my friend Colleen the other day—which reminds me, I gotta write down the number—but I didn’t tell her I was here.’ She peered up at Laura. ‘It’s just easier that way, you know?’
Laura was shaking her head. ‘I don’t know, Mags. I think they must be going a little crazy.’ She peered down into her can. ‘What if they think you’re dead or something?’
Maggie waved her off. ‘Oh, I left them a note. Told them I was leaving, I was fine. Had money saved, the whole thing.’ She paused, drinking her beer. ‘Just wanted to be on my own for awhile.’
‘I don’t know.’ Laura squinted at her. ‘That’s pretty rough.’
Maggie raised her eyebrows. ‘They’re fine. We weren’t getting along. They’re probably relieved I’m out of their hair.’
‘I don’t know,’ Laura repeated. ‘I think maybe you’re making a mistake.’ She swirled her beer. ‘But hey, it’s your life.’ She took a drink, and grimaced. ‘Shit. Even the beer can’t stay cold.’
Maggie raised her can and laughed. ‘Just gotta drink it faster.’ She chugged the rest of it down, paused, then burped. ‘Then you can taste it, twice.’
‘Gross.’ But Laura finished off her beer as well. She stood up, and held out her hand for Maggie’s can. ‘Want another?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘Nah. It just makes me sweat.’
Laura stood at the door. ‘You ever going to go back?’
‘I don’t know.’ Maggie turned and looked up at Laura. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
Laura held up her hands. ‘Like I said, it’s your life.’

I’m not giving anything away in these excerpts: You figure out very quickly that someone—Maggie—who was long gone has now been found, and then are sent back for the story leading up to that point; the narrative catches up to the first page by the middle of the book, and goes from there.

A friend who read the earlier draft wasn’t convinced that someone would just leave home and never look back, but oh, haven’t there been times when you wanted to keep going, just (to steal a line from Neighbor) to see how far you could go?

Where was I?

No work, not enough work, too much work, work.

That’s been the last six months. Nowhere near enough money, even with too much work (really blew it on this last freelance job—shoulda charged double), but now things to be evening out: three courses for the spring, half-time admin work for a local-international organization.

I have some idea of what I’ll be doing with the teaching, no clue on what exactly I need to do with the admin work, but hey, I’ve gone from clueless to clue-full before.

~~~

Hey, I’ve got some a few new readers! HI!

Thanks for poking your head through my window! I’ll try not to slam it down on your noggin’. . . .

(And yes, I’ll return the favor and check out your blogs as well, now that I have the time to do so.)

~~~

I really hate not knowing things.

The problem, of course, is that the more I learn, the more I learn what I don’t know. Frustrating, that.

And embarrassing. Before I embarked on my jaunt through the European medieval period, I knew nothing about this history. Nothing.

Oh, something about the break with the Eastern Church in the 11th century, and Luther in the 1500s, but I couldn’t have told you the difference between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, or between the various emperors and the pope.

Yeah, it was bad.

So now I’m learning stuff (yay!), but I’m running up against the parameters that I had initially set for this project. It was conceived as an investigation of intellectual history, with not much room for social (writ large) history, but I’m too much of a materialist to dismiss the conditions (see below) under which these ideas were generated and spread.

This is a very long way of thanking petefrombaltimore for his suggestions in reading.

Yes, a project like this can sprawl out over any boundaries set—hence my initial attempts at capturing only intellectual history—but sometimes the most interesting bits are discovered in the spillage.

Anyway, I just finished Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment and am now on Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation; I may then mix in some close-up histories, as well as tackling some of the primary sources.

Can’t say I’ve yet gotten anything solid on the late-margins of modernity by poking around in the early margins, but I am still poking along.

~~~

Got my first round of applause for teaching in. . . ever?

It was for my bioethics course, a class which was terrible the first time I taught it (at another university), pretty good the first time I taught it here, and now, well, good. I’ll continue to tweak it as I go along, but I’ve got a solid set-up which should hold for at least another few semesters.

It’s much easier to keep teaching the same thing over and over—all that prep work is already done—but I get antsy. I don’t think there’s a perfect syllabus or course (see: not a Platonist), so after a certain number of repetitions I overhaul the course to try to capture something missing from the previous go-around.

It’s not always better, and almost always requires adjustment, but it keeps me thinking.

Anyway, the applause.

It was common at UW-Madison to applaud professors at the end of the semester. Most of my classes were large lectures, so the performative aspect of teaching was more apparent than in seminars, but classes were similarly large at Minnesota, and I don’t recall the students applauding professors there.

It’s nice, both to applaud and be applauded. I liked that I could show my appreciation for a good professor (or lack thereof with tepid clapping); it seemed to signal that there was something more going on in that lecture hall than a contractual transmission of information from instructor to user.

The best professors gave us knowledge far and beyond that necessary for a good grade: they gave us an appreciation for the wonder of knowing.

I don’t know if that’s what my students were applauding. I work hard to tamp down my urge to overwhelm them with my words—as the person who constructs the syllabus and leads the discussions, I already have great, if indirect, influence on how they approach the subject—but on this last day of class I gave them a concentrated shot of my approach to bioethics.

I started with a truncated version of the epistemology/ontology/practical lecture, zeroing in on the significance of being (or Being, if you please) in one’s understanding of practical ethics. I then moved on to Hannah Arendt’s distinction between human nature and the human condition, namely, that while we cannot with any certainty know our nature, we can approach our condition.

And the most basic of our conditions are that we are biological beings, we are social beings, and we are mortal beings. We may be more than this, I noted (spiritual, philosophical, etc.), but we are damned-near-incontestably conditioned by our biology, our relationships to others, and the fact that we are born and will some day die.

This matters to bioethics, I argued, because any ethics which does not take account of these conditions cannot be of any practical worth.

(You might think that this would be so obvious as to be banal, but it is not.)

I can’t tell you that consequentialism or deontological ethics or casuistry or any other way is the correct approach, I said. We need standards to keep us from justification-by-convenience, to force a critical appraisal of our actions, but, pace our conditions, we have to allow deviation from those standards: the rules are to serve the human, not the human, the rules.

Finally, I said, circling back around, this is where I center my ethics, on the matter of  human being. What makes us who we are, and what we could become? It’s not that our abilities have to be unique among species, but we should think about ourselves, as humans, in how we approach one another.

We don’t have to be heroes, I observed. It’s not about pulling someone out of a burning car or tackling the bad guy or dodging bullets; it’s about recognizing one another as humans.

And then I told the story of a group of people in a small town in Wisconsin who decided to hold a funeral for an unknown woman who had been found, murdered, in their town. She wasn’t one of their own, and would never know what had been done for her, but through the donations of the funeral home and money raised for a plot and marker, and in the service at the cemetery, these people did in fact claim her as one of their own.

There was nothing heroic in this ordinary act of burying the dead, but by taking care of this dead woman’s body, they recognized her as one of them; they demonstrated their humanity in their recognition of her humanity.

We can take care of one another, I said. Our ethics ought to be centered on how we take care of one another.

They seemed to like that. I didn’t expect the applause—I thought I had gone too far—but even if I had, they didn’t seem to mind.

It was nice.

~~~

As a coda, I’ve consolidated my earwig approach to teaching (“I want this stuff to bother you for the rest of your lives”) into a line stolen and adapted from Serenity:

I aim to trouble you.

It’s not me, really, who can do this, but I can bring the trouble of politics and theory and ethics to my students, and hope that it disturbs them a good long time.

I’m free to do what I want any old time

My students are failing.

My American government students, to be exact: first-semester, first-year, bright, inquisitive, charming, and failing.

A big piece of this is on them. I tell them what will be on the exam (“make sure you study all of the terms which are bolded in the text, and the context in which these terms are used”; “study Figure x.x, as I almost certainly will ask questions about it”), write out the main points on the board, pause often for questions, and still, they fail.

They fail, in other words, because they’re not studying.

But they also fail because I’m doing something wrong. When I taught large lecture courses I always prepared lectures and rarely strayed from the material. My notes were always outlines rather than fully-articulated texts, and I made time for questions and comments every class, so a certain amount of riffing always occurred, but boyo, I kept the trains running on time.

Once I moved to smaller classes, however, I realized this approach didn’t necessarily work; smaller classes, it seemed, demanded more interaction. So I started mixing up my prepped lectures with more open-ended sessions, giving more time over to the students and allowing for a more free-form approach to the material. I hated doing this, at first—when I lectured, I was in control, and independent of students who may not have given two hoots about the material—but over time I learned to ease up, let things happen.

This still works in my upper-division courses, but, man, it is not working for this intro class. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll change things up next semester, but it will clearly involve a tightening of  my requirements and a battening down of my presentations. I do think freedom has its place in the course, and will preserve as much of it as I can, but it’s clear that without more rigor, that free-thought is simply frittered away.

Our boy Newt: Professor-in-chief

Because being president wouldn’t take that much time:

By the way, I think I will probably teach a course when I’m president. I think I will probably try to do something that outlines for the whole country what we’re going to try to accomplish, and offer it online sort of like the University of Phoenix or Kaplan. So that way if the country wants, they can sign up. It would be free. Although given the news media’s assumptions about me, oh he’ll probably charge $100 a piece so I can get rich. No! It’ll be free. But the idea would be, why wouldn’t you want a president in the age of social media to methodically in an organized way share with you what they’re going to try to accomplish, so that those people who want to understand it can understand it.

When he’s president. Uh huh.

h/t: Think Progress

So tell me something someone and help me get it right

I don’t know what I’m doing. I may have mentioned this once or twenty times before.

Freelancing is feast or famine. I get inquiries, but when I tell people that I’d expect to be paid for a two-hour consultation on how to improve their writing, well, poof!—there goes any further contact.

I write in the ad that rates are negotiable, but, really, do people think negotiable means “free”? Just to be clear: negotiable does not mean free.

Or I’d get requests to write college papers; I’ve since put in a line stating that I do not write college papers.

No, the corporate gigs are the way to go, but that particular boat only pulls into the harbor on occasion. All aboard when that happens, but otherwise, dry dock.

So, yes, back to looking for FT work. But doing what? And who’d hire me? And can I still teach and work for The Man?

This is an issue because I had to decide whether to accept a teaching gig for the fall even though that might interfere with that ol’ 40-hour workweek. But then I said fuck it, who know if I’ll even have that 40-hour workweek, and besides, I like teaching and I like my department. So yeah, fuck it.

This attitude may explain my current life circumstances.

I honestly don’t know what the answers are to the questions I don’t know which to ask. I don’t think there’s any, one, way to do/perform/be in/live this whole life thing, but I gotta tell you, I think I”m doing it wrong.

If I wanted to be optimistic, I guess I could say that at least I’m still holding on, but, y’know, I’ve never been accused of being optimistic.

Yep, things are as backasswards or assupwards as they appear.

Excellent.

Photo: Seriously Cute

I’m lying by the road/because she cut off all my clothes

Enough, already. Enough.

Enough with the rules, with the regs, with the rights and wrongs and victims and perps and goods and evils and innocent and damned. Enough.

No, I haven’t deliquesced into a moral puddle on the floor—I’ve got a fan in the window—or lobotomized myself with an icepick*. And I’m as cranky and squint-eyed as ever.

But I’m also finally, finally beginning to understand what Caputo and Vattimo are getting at with their radical hermeneutics and weak theology and the utter necessity of resignation.

A resignation of a particular sort, I hasten to add, one which begins rather than ends inquiry.

Part of this understanding began amidst my adjunct teaching, when I gave up punishing students for handing in work late. Just get it done, I now say. The work matters more than the date.

I could do that because the terms of my contract are clearly defined: I’m paid for x-number of hours, full-stop. I’m not trying to get tenure, not trying to impress colleagues with my dedication to departmental norms, not trying to impress students with how ‘hard’ I am. To get paid, I simply need to fulfill the terms of my contract.

But since I don’t get paid that much, I had to ask, So, why am I doing this? I’m doing this because I like it, because I think it matters, because I think the students should know this, because there is something more in the material itself.

I’m a pretty good teacher—not great, but not bad. But because I am finally learning to clear out the bureaucratic hedges which have occluded my pedagogical sight, I’ve given myself the chance to offer those students a glimpse of . . . of. . . of knowledge, of questions, of human being beyond those hedges.

Ahh, crap, this all sounds. . . woo, and I am most definitely not a fan of woo—metaphysics!—nor am I trying for some kind of vagueness as a way to avoid the hard edges of being. I do, after, still follow rules, still bitch when others don’t (is it really so hard to put your trash in the can?), and still impose rules on my students.

But the rules are provisional, practical in the most rooted sense of the term: as means to ends, not ends in themselves. Will this paper help the students learn something? Yes. Will punishing them for handing it in late serve any purpose? No.

And I’m lucky in my ability to dissolve some of these rules: I don’t have 150 students and two TAs who have their own work. Perhaps if I did I could work out something else, but, honestly, had I gone the tenure-track route at a large school, I almost certainly would have not only left those nice hedges alone, but planted a few more. The point, then, would have been to get tenure, and everything else would have been shaped to serve that purpose.

That’s not a rip on tenure-track faculty—some of my best friends have tenure—but a recognition of how one’s necessities get ordered, how my necessities would have been ordered, and without me quite realizing it.

Perhaps I would have come to it, eventually; perhaps, after earning tenure, I would have thought, Okay, so what was all that for?

This is what Vattimo means by nihilism: the shedding of the unnecessary, the recognition that almost nothing is necessary, so that one is confronted with the question, Now what?

I have resisted this, largely because I like the sharpness of edges, because I do hold to my allegiances, and because I not only do not want to let some people off their hooks, I actively want them to remain on the hook. I think there is a distinction between clear thinking and obsfucation, between teaching and manipulation, and between domination and liberation.

But these are, in the end, practical skills and political positions, and, as much as they matter, there is still that question beyond them: What for?

I don’t have the answers, don’t know if I even know what these answers would look like.

But, still, I am giving up: there’s too much to see.

(*Yes, there really was a type of lobotomy performed with an icepick: the transorbital  lobotomy. I’ve got pictures!)

h/t: J., for the 3pm walkabouts. . . .

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

‘I love grading! It is the best!’

‘Grading has nothing to do with learning.’

‘Ay? No! Of course it does. It is the best way!’

‘Paugh. We do it because we can’t think of anything better.’

‘Because there is nothing better! This is what intellectuals have done since the beginning—the best, the smartest.’

‘Socrates?’

‘Okay, no, so it was different then. But Karl Marx, Adam Smith—they all had to study! They all had to take exams.’

‘So. So did we. What does that prove?’

‘No, you are wrong. It is the most just and fair way to determine how much the students have learned.’

‘What does justice have to do with learning? Justice has nothing to do with learning!’

‘And you, the philosopher. You should love grading. Write a blog on how much you love grading.’

‘Hah, no.’

‘Grading is the best, I tell you.’

‘You only love grading because you can inflict pain and assert authority.’

‘True. . . .’ (Jtte. laughs)

Be like Johnnie too good, well don’t you know he never shirks

Hate grading. Hate hate hate grading.

It’s not just the labor of it—tho’ it is also the labor of it—so much as the pointlessness of the process.

Identify this, define that, explain how this fits with that. . . oh my god, I’m falling asleep already. But don’t worry, I’ll rouse myself with coffee or beer (what the hell) and read every fucking word written before scribbling a number which just might bear some relationship to the worth of that collection of words.

Dot i’s, cross t’s, jump hoops, student and teacher alike. You get a grade, I get a paycheck.

So why bother with grading at all? Well, there’s that matter of the student needing a grade and my desire for that paycheck.

Practicalities, in other words.

Please don’t think that, if I had my druthers, I’d abandon all work requirements for the students. If you are not a prodigy or genius and you want to learn, you have to work. (And if you are a prodigy or genius and you want to be good, you have to work.)

The problem is that the work required for learning is only approximated by the work required for grading, and often, not even that.

I shape and cut and alter the course requirements, but, in the end, what I grade only partially captures what they learn, and, for that matter, what they haven’t learned.

A big part of the problem, perhaps even the main problem, is that most students don’t much care about learning. They care about grades, yes, performance, at times, but learning? Mm, no.

How do I know this? Besides the dearth of students who visit me during office hours to discuss the material, or who approach me wanting help puzzling through a problem I posed, or who show any energy at all in class or in the written work? Besides the slack look on their faces when I ask them the most basic questions about the material? Besides the utter lack of interest in finding their own way into the material?

Simple: because every once in a while, one of them does learn something, and he or she is overwhelmed—because they don’t expect to learn.

Understand? They don’t expect to learn, so when it does happen—when an insight or a question percolates up and into their consciousness—they are visibly giddy or discombobulated or even scared. I never knew. . . .Is this real. . .  ? How could this be. . . ?

I’m not exaggerating. I’ve had students stand in front of me with their mouths opening and closing  and their eyes wide and darting as they attempt to corral this feeling into words. They are agape in the presence of knowledge.

I let them work their ways through it, tell them they have something real, and that they should do whatever they can to make sense, that I will help them to make sense.

It doesn’t always work. You can see them back down, or let it go, or watch as they’re distracted by other matters.

But even then, with those who seem to have tossed their insights aside, you can see an angle to their thoughts, and you know it’s still in there, somewhere.

There’s no way to capture that, that abashed curiosity, in a grade. On the margins, maybe, but in the main? No.

This is why I hate grading. This is why I love teaching.

Friday poem IV

What lyric this week?

A poem for war?

Or perhaps a poem for my aching head, dunned twice with migraine.

Or for the half-awakening in which Chelsea dipped into that triangle between arm and body and air and purred me back to sleep, even as I cried, again, at her absence.

Sifting through the cut-outs, I could find nothing. And then I came across this poem by Kelly Cherry, who taught a poetry seminar I took at UW-Madison.

Cherry was a bit ornery, a bit odd, and a hell of a teacher. She had definite ideas about poetry—no misspellings and odd capitalizations, and you goddamned better well know the difference between lie and lay—but she didn’t seek to stamp herself into all of our styles.

Her approach was, instead, Make your work, better.

I have kept that with me for over twenty years, and try, and more often fail, to live up to that in my own teaching.

This poem was originally published in the Atlantic in two columns. I’ve inserted a stanza break between the two columns, but it’s possible that this was meant to be  a one stanza poem.

Regardless, it’s lovely: a grace note to us all.

Grace

You know of course that you haven’t earned it.
For if you had, it would not be what it is:
Beauty of the candle after you’ve burned it,
The dark bird rising like smoke, always from ashes,
Remembrance of heat and light, describing itself
Invisibly upon the air of the mind,
That takes the life lived in a fury of self-
Love and remakes it into something that shined

So brightly that it might have been a star;
Instead of a candle you were burning at both ends.
And now the night grows black, wherever you are,
Except for the golden shimmer than descends
To the earth through miles of lonely outer space
And lights up your misspent live, with saving grace.

And fear the silence is the voice of God

Legos or coins—which are you?

What, you don’t get what I’m referencing? Oh, that’s right, you weren’t in class this past Thursday.

As I’ve mentioned, I teach political science at a CUNY school, an endeavor which doesn’t pay much (or not at all: see previous post), but which I enjoy. Most of what I teach is pretty basic—100- and 200-level stuff (with occasional forays into the 300s)—which means I don’t usually get much of a chance to toss mind-blowing stuff at my students.

Except. . . except for the one lecture near the beginning of this particular 200-level course. I tell the students this will help them make sense of the readings, and I’m not lying, but, honestly, they could get by without this. I spend 60 or 75 minutes on this stuff because I dig it.

I begin by writing on the chalkboard the following:

The Good

Practical-reflective

Ontology

Epistemology

(Because I’m html-illiterate, I’m unable to show the arrows running up and down between the levels. Luckily, the chalkboard doesn’t require html.)

I like to explain this spatially: epistemology is deep in the ground, ontology is in the middle layers, the practical-reflective on the surface, and the Good out in the sky.

After the requisite this-would-not-pass-muster-in-a-philosophy-class disclaimer, I dive into epistemology, or, How do you know what you know. The stuff of late night conversations, drug trips, or too many viewings of The Matrix. It’s tricky, I note, not least because any answer you give can be parried with a ‘. . . but how do you know that?’ and lead to endless regress.

Above that is ontology, which I define existentially: as a matter of Being-in-the-world. The key question here, I note, is Who are you? How do you understand yourself, your relationship to others, and to existence itself.

The practical-reflective: this is where most of us live, with the main question What to do? The use of the practical often stands in for pragmatic, but in this case I use it in terms of practice, as in the practices in which we engage, of how we order the doings of our lives. These aren’t merely banal issues: what to do can involve questions of love, work, where to live, whether to have children, etc.—hence, the reflective part. (And, as I tell the class, it’s also the level of politics, of how to arrange ourselves vis-a-vis one another and any authority we choose to install over and above ourselves.)

Before ascending to the Good, I pause and note that at times of crisis the ontological may crack open, and people may question who they are and what they’re doing with their lives. (More rarely, they may tumble into the epistemological abyss, a place more mind-blowing than any intoxicant, and one best scrambled out of as quickly as possible. Voluntary spelunking in the epistemological is to be discouraged, especially if unaccompanied by a guide.) In any case, while most people don’t think of their lives in terms of ontology, the questions which arise from it are not unfamiliar. I then point out that while most of our work for the course will deal with the practical-reflective, we will occasionally bounce down to the ontological—or up to the Good.

Finally, then, the Good. This term is taken from Plato, and denotes an eternal, fixed, reality—the Really Real, the True. Given that most people on the planet are religious, I point out, the Good is often understood in terms of God or gods*. It is that around which people orient themselves, or seek, or toward which they aim. Understandably, then, contemplation of the Good can affect how one approaches the questions at the other levels as well as how one acts.

(*The main secular competitor to god/s may be nationalism, with very strong versions allowing the nation to stand in for the god/s; less common would be an utter devotion to science and methodological naturalism. There are likely other ideological permutations as well.)

At this point, I gesture toward the arrows running along side of this little chart. One happens at one level can affect what happens at other levels, both up and down, but not necessarily so.

And thus, the Lego-vs-coin question.

For some people, the four levels are locked tightly together, as if they were Lego blocks. Knowing the Good can tell you how to act in the world, how to understand yourself in that world, and how you know anything at all. It is a comprehensive vision.

I’ll give at this point the example of the devout Christian who has a very strong sense of God, who tries to live her life according to her understanding of God, who thinks of herself as in this world but not of it, and who knows what she knows because God allows her to know. Even if her understanding is imperfect or she is occasionally confused, she nonetheless allows for very little light between the levels.

For others of us, however, the relationship between the levels is less certain; we have at best partial visions. I’m an epistemological skeptic, I’ll admit, and am not sure if we can know anything, not even, against Descartes, whether we exist. This past Thursday I analogized the levels to lumps in a bag, shifting and bumping against one another, but I think the better analogy is that of coins. Yeah, I can stack them on top of one another, but they don’t lock in, and they can be fairly easily scattered.

I didn’t go so far as to state that followers of the Good are all Lego-folk, and agnostics, coin collectors—and not just because that would  have taken me away from the point of this exercise (which was to tie it all back into political analysis). I think the predisposition to Legos or coins is a temperamental one, and that this temperament has no necessary relation to belief or skepticism.

(Okay, so dogmatic skepticism is difficult to square, but it’s also clear that devout believers may  carry a doubt or a humility great enough to prevent any lockdown. In any case, if it is temperamental, it’s not clear how much it can be changed.)

The students are popping in with questions and comments all throughout this exercise, and when we finish with the Good, usually one student will ask But what if we don’t all have the same Good?

Yesss! This leads rather nicely to a discussion of the theory we’ll be examining for the next month or two, and how it seeks to create framework for development which allows individuals to choose their own versions of the Good, and which discourages the imposition of any, one, version. Onward to politics!

This is all very nice, you might say, but I’m not your student, so why are you telling me this?

Because I’ve been preoccupied of late with matters which, I realize, are related to Legos and coins, and I don’t know that I could have approached them in this blog without sketching out the underpinnings of that approach.

Of course, now that I’ve so sketched them, it’ll probably be awhile before I bother with the matters themselves.

What can I say? My coins have scattered.