The Big Idea

I recently enjoyed "What’s the big idea?" by Jennie Erdal, an article in Financial Times that came into my google reader today.  Her question is literal, not idiomatic, and it is the same question that teachers routinely ask when creating a unit or learning activity.  For teachers, it means what idea/concern of the real world does an activity and all of its resources explore?  For Jennie Erdal, the question is whether novels are philosophical anymore in the sense of writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, James, and Kundara--or if they give up philosophy for intricate plots.  More simply put: Are philosophical novels weak on plot and therefore boring?  The implication is that for a book to have a "big idea," it must contain long passages to explain the underlying theories being illustrated by the characters in action. 

Frankly, I loved Anna Karenina and The Brothers Dostoyevsky and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  These Big Books and others had characters who suffered magnificently in the face of dilemma.  I loved the microscope held up to situations, or rather, the enlarging and dramatizing of the emotional situation so that a microscope was not necessary at all to get "the big idea."  Today I find that this type of romantic tragedy bordering on naturalism remains in luscious mysteries by P.D. James and Elizabeth George and fantastic science fiction by Sheri Tepper and Octavia Butler, among others. Most recently, students tell me they find it in Twilight, Harry Potter, and in the Hunger Games--and otherwise they do not like to read..  

In the classroom, the big idea need not be inferred from the elements of fiction, but may be explicitly stated in advance.  The classroom then is the laboratory that tests out and debates the idea through a series of instances--fictional and non-fictional--presented by both teacher and students.  Ultimately the learning community uses its experiences to examine "the big idea" itself and how it shapes perceptions, events, and artifacts.  While students become Socratic, they also become structural engineers who examine how various events and artifacts in their environments are built on implicit ideas and are, therefore, able to strategically choose the degree of implicitness or explicitness of  "the big idea" in their own work.  If they are fast enough.  Whether or not they can keep up, students and teachers learn the value of time, and how one thing cannot quite be resolved before the next must take its place, as in "We only have 3 days for this."  The possible learning is profound, but the pace undermines the progress.  Those sensitive to what they are not quite grasping can become quite defensive, irritated, angry, squashed, rebellious.  Is this what the Financial Times author is ultimately noticing?  What's the big idea of living like this?  Is this breakdownof community the real big idea?

 I believe that the big ideas are not sacrificed to plot, but changing into plot.  The big ideas are pressured by space and time into the action of questioning itself.  Back to "Dubito, ergo sum"?  Not quite. This seems an intermediate stage before those who are unwillingly unemployed take back "the big" question, those who are squeezed out of the Picture of Progress in Industry, Faith, and Knowledge  make themselves heard.  Will this be through the fictional form?  Not yet, or not evidently.  

When I read those luscious novels of yore and even later ones like Animal Farm and 1984, I had the time.  Now at the later end of life, I have time to read again and also to write.  Publishing, however--on paper and in binding--takes resources and time.  The internet is less expensive and travels faster. Maybe, then, the next type of philosophical novel is already up there twittering around the world in instant translation or in pictures of the quietly growing Occupy Movement or on Face Book or everywhere.  If we are among the romantic who are longing to hold the magnificent philosophical novel in our hands and our hours, it is possible that we will, like Miniver Cheevy, miss it.

Muse with yesterday's NPR poet of the news

 

 Quote:

At last the Internet is before my eye,
the actual world merely the consequence
of the search terms I supply.

Looking up, I see information in the sky:
not just birds but related stories and comments
from readers of the Internet before my eye . . ..

Above are the first two stanzas of Craig M. Teicher' poem "Through The Google Glasses: A Villanelle,"  a response to the proposed Google computer screen to be worn as eye glasses.  The idea of wearing such a shield reminds me of Oscar Wilde's famous proclamation that "life copies art" and also brings to mind the overused response to travel and special events from participants in the marijuana generation, "I don't remember; I was high."  I wish the people I see in my daily outings were simply where they were and not attached by electronics or by drugs to elsewhere.  

I wonder how Google's new product and mobile electronics as used in developed countries is influencing creativity and especially literature.  William Shakespeare and August Wilson and other playwrights who were simply where they stood had no trouble seeing "the particular" against the background of greater events and all of history and the universe.  Will those attached to elsewhere be able to place their virtual location amid a steady attachment to their present location as well as to larger locations and philosophies?  Will they have authority, or forever be part of a viral reality of tweets and emails?

The new science fiction represented in such films as Inception predict a dire connection between corporate economics and technologies cut loose from an old house or an original place of origin.  Art as representation leaves the moment of the phenomenal and enters a world of melting boundaries.  Essence proceeds existence but neither truly matters at all.  Paradoxically, the individual character becomes amazingly important as he/she/it struggles to matter.  Does his, her, or its "aura," exist in the universe at all?  Does the universe . . . ?  Had I not completed my undergraduate philosophy major in the 1970s, I might know the terms for discussing post-existential, post-phenomenal, post-post-modernism.  


Meanwhile, I see immersion in technologies as a double-edged sword: One Side has us making cutting-edge combinations of ideas and joining creative collaborations of people not otherwise possible.  The Other Side cuts us off from the environments that need our stewardship, nurture and awareness in order to sustain human life. Together, in the double-edged sword, they are addictive like psychedelic drugs and music.  "Do you remember?" we might ask. "I don't," comes the answer.  "I was connected."

Shameless

Is publishing my latest scribbles to a blog and to face book--and calling them poems--shameless self-promotion?  It is, at least, courage, though I may live to blush another day. 

I was thinking about this while reading Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's Blog  "Unselfish Self Promotion" on 21st Century Collaborative.  This is the brilliant site that accompanied my learning and application of Web 2.0 while a teacher during the last several years.  Now, I read it to help me think about the transformative power of learning communities.  Sharon justifies self-promotion because it is necessary for collaboration in positive change, in fact she shows that what we may shy away from as self-promotion is a necessary sharing of ideas.  This is the dialectic of discovery in any field.

When I put forth my writing, however, I do not think it will make the world a better place.  I know writing poems and sharing them will make my own world a better place for this while, that it may lead me to recognize my next ministry.  And it may not. 

I have pushed publishing on my students in the past so that they would experience the possibility of influencing others and being influenced; so that they would experience the equality of their own choices and articulation among myriad others; so that they would consider the possibility of the public and caring exchange that can be the best feature of democracy.  Am I to be less demanding of myself? 

My students trusted me to keep them from embarrassing themselves, and that is the partnership I am missing at present.  I fear the labels that cause readers/listeners to turn away.  I feared turning away myself as a teacher--feared having a delusion that a student might already be set in stone and not worth following through the changes that experience can bring.  Looking back at my teaching, I think this is the best of it: that I encouraged writing before knowing the truth, before the possibility of contradiction was past.  Imagine walking forward in the dark without fear, without reason to fear. Not so easy.

Can I be a teacher to myself?  I have moved past the outbursts of obscenity and anger of youth, the iconoclastic rhetoric of extreme positions.  I think subtlety, satire, and skepticism may be left--but nihilism is gone.  That leaves hope.  Shamelessly publishing is the next necessary step, before I definitively decide that this mind here (that is the mind of a learner) should be silence, before I know beyond a doubt that I have something to offer.

Here's the official poster for National Poetry Month, an event created in 1996 and hosted by Poets.org. 

It features a snippet from the poem "Our Valley" by Philip Levine:  ". . . wait on the wind.  Catch a scent of salt, call it our life."   


I remember singing "Down in the Valley, the Valley so low" on long Sunday rides in the car with my family, my Dad leading with his bass tones.  I loved the spirituals best, which Dad sang with gusto, I think partly because the lyrics resonated with who he was as a Jewish man called Joseph.  "Down in the Valley" was often followed by "Go Down Moses" and  "Way Down upon the Swanee River" and "Old Black Joe."  I think he was really happy during those Sunday afternoons with his family.  It is also the most relaxed vacation-like time I remember from childhood

At first I sang loud and joyfully during those years, but as I reached the uncertain years of puberty my voice must have pitched up, because Dad commented on a screech effect.  I sang low or not at all from then on.  In school I moved from chorus to band where I played trombone, a wonderful brassy low-tone instrument.  During those same years I wrote a short story that was published in the literary magazine and I won a contest for writing a biographical sketch of Frederick Church, one of the Hudson River School of Painters.

My mother was convinced that I would become a writer, but--at age 60--I haven't become one yet!   I write all the time, of course: lists, emails, journal entries, greeting cards, and grant proposals.  I give talks and lead discussions whenever I am asked.  I have even earned my PhD and printed labored articles here and there.  But most of my writing is in the moment, wild and rough.  And once written it is put away as if a secret.  Unless I read it to someone.  This anti-social behavior is still a mystery to me.  I am moving past it, maybe, with this blog.  Here and on facebook my tiny comfort zone with "The Public" is changing.

New Blog

Feeling optimistic this Spring, maybe even feverish, I dedicated a new blog to poetry that I plan to write during International Poetry Month, April 2012.  As an afterthought, I added a second page for poetry that actually exists.  And I uploaded two poems that I wrote with a very special group of people: The Poetry Club of the Franklin Learning Center.  In fact, almost all poems for the last 8 years originated in the club.  We met for one to two hours on Fridays.  The entire week could have wiped us out, and that short Club Meeting would revive us.  The poem "TGI Poetry" is about exactly that.

I promise to type in an old poem on page two for each day I do not add a new one to the Home Page.   To keep my promise I delved into boxes of old poetry not yet word processed:  poems of yearning, poems of loss, poems of Look-at-Me, poems in rhyme, poems in time.