Rambling about speaking or not

I've been acting my Quaker self for a couple of weeks: a retreat, a yearly meeting (PYM) full of sessions and queries and friends and Friends and new and renewed connections.  I think I made a commitment to rejoining Quakers in the Arts today.  I also "anchored" the afternoon session in which PYM passed the yearly meeting budget.  To anchor means 'to hold in the Light," so I did not so much attend the meeting as I did feel the spirit of the session, put prayer around its attendees, their ways of testifying, and the smooth moving forward of the agenda.  In previous years I felt the strong affect of a few people sitting aside to tend to the overall meeting, so I was glad to take on the role.  I will pay physically for sitting so long, but I am full of smiles for doing it.  

Before dinner I attended a "Telling our Stories" Holy Experiment (workshop) in which the leader talked a great deal about the importance of word choice and gesture and we told stories of our experiences with the nonverbal aspects of communication and how--despite commonalities across cultures--we can make some big bloopers.  My story was about being in Italy with the members of a theatre company I was studying.  We were praising the food in our effusive American way--and even broader--because most of us did not speak Italian and so we were gesturing and pointing, etc.  Later I discovered that our hosts assumed we were overacting and not only being stupid, but also lying.  They thought we disliked their food and trusted us less after that interaction.

Words.   As a stage director, I called non-verbal run-throughs as well as normal dress rehearsals because I wanted to be sure that body language communicated even if my viewers were not English speakers.  I'm not talking about overacting or "indicating" but I am talking about being theatrical.  Fun theatrical moments can be made of an opposite meaning between what the body is doing/saying and what the words/tone are saying. 

What's the equivalent for poetry?  I think, like in music, it is the meter, rhyme and vocal emotion that reach beyond the words.  Also sound choices like onomatopoeia and alliteration contribute a lot to mood and meaning.  And PERFORMANCE!  On the blogs, sound clouds allow the poet's voice to carry the poem and pictures add meaning just as they do in children story book.

I read my poem "Making Theatre" at the workshop because I thought it addressed the workshop leader's points, and now I realize that was MY holy experiment--to speak my art here.  I do not know how the rest of the workshop went, because--believe it or not--I am an introvert who has to recover a bit from public speaking my OWN things (teaching is not a problem).  It felt wonderful.  It was a little story, a tiny piece of a life, but it took our talk of words and non-verbals in a slightly different direction and I felt great.  Remember what poet Audre Lorde said?  "It is better to speak."  And to act.

 Making theatre

The theatre director has to expose his uncertainties to the cast, 

but in reward he has a medium which evolves as it responds:

a sculptor says that the choice of material continually 

amends his creation: the living material of actors 

is talking, feeling and exploring all the time — 

 rehearsing is a visible thinking-aloud.

-Peter Brook, The Empty Space

I wrote it.

I speak it.

I listen to an actor speak it

A wonder!  it has more than I thought.

Where is she from and where is she going?  

I ask, and starting here, the actor creates

the character's movement for me 

with the actor’s added motivation, 

always asking "what would I do if?"

what would I mean if?

and who am I doing it to?

and why?  Why?

Wanting something is key

(at least in the Western world)

without desire there is no drive 

and without drive, there is no show.  

Even words are empty gestures 

when they should be strategies.

Use s t i l l n e s s until you must 

speak until you must move.  

What would you 

do if . . . ?

You must speak 

these words

called a script, 

but this script 

is mayhaps only 7%

of what I mean.

  

 Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

Inspiring Truth in Art

 

As I say on top of my poetry blog almost everything inspires me to write these days.  This video from 2009 is one of the visuals that I return to again and again to see the small strokes details sounds senses . . . how so little makes so much.  In her sand animation, Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova tells a story of the Ukraine's involvement in WWII so powerfully and sensually that it is also a poem and a dance.   It is truth in art.

 

 

Today Mrsupole's post on Theme Thursday convinced me that I should blog occasionally on the videos that inspire me.  You may want to visit his too!  And we'll meet back here to talk.

 

 

Tell all the truth, but cook it first*

Today a poetic blog buddy wrote in a comment on one of my poems that he thinks "truth plays out best in the tales we tell each other....as opposed to raw truth..."  which made me want to chart my poems and commentaries on a scale of truth.   However,  I can't conceive the dimensions of such a chart and therefore, instead, place all my poems at one point: the point of "how the truth appears to me now in a moment after time."  I wrote a poem about this "moment after" in the lines of Shakespeare's sonnet #18:

Shall I compare my Truth to that of a summer day?

Mine is much more lovely and more temperate.

Rough truths shake us, the limbs of raw truth sway,

And summer's truth hath all too harsh a gait.

Sometimes too bright the truth of heaven shines,

And often is its too solid purpose dimmed;

And every truth with Truth sometimes rhymes

By chance, or Nature's changing course, untrimmed;

But Truth's eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of the greatest Light it caught

Nor shall life brag Truth is of a grey shade,

When in eternal lines to Time Truth is wrought.

     So long as humans can breathe, or eyes can see,

     So long lives my Truth, and this Truth shines on thee.

*reference to Emily Dickinson's poem "Tell all the Truth but tell It Slant."

Truth and Poetry Part Three: Commenting on others' best efforts

perhaps truth is even more varied than I have asserted before
when it comes to comments

let's think about this together

Which comments do we find the most useful?
Which comments do we want from everyone?
Which do we want from only a few?
 I don't know.  I have been basking in encouragement lately, although I get little detailed information from the very short comments.  I like when people give me back a detail and interpret it.  That gives me part of them too.  Sometimes I can tell that way whether I need to do more to get my ideas across.

Which comments can we most easily make?
(Most readily and truthfully make without guilt that is)
Are we commenting to encourage?
Are we commenting to improve?
Are we commenting to give back parts of ourselves? 
I find that I can always give back a detail whether or not I love a poem or see its structure.  I can say when I don't understand--but I cannot say outright if I dislike or see major errors in facts or see overused . . . Indeed, I find that I do not trust others to tell me the truth in these areas either.  There is more going on here than insecurity.  When I obscure part of my response, I assume others do too.

And what if we are wrong?
And what if we disagree?
We have a lot to talk about here.  
I am not afraid to learn I am wrong, and I have a limited amount of tolerance for disagreement.
I don't like either feeling, but so what?


What can I do to be braver and more helpful than I am with all these thoughts about what I and others need and like as inhibitors?

Bring on the theories about stages in creativity.

Bring on the truth about human nature!

On my 61st birthday

I should be vacuuming and completing the little things I do when my parents are coming to visit, but here I am instead capturing these thoughts while they are ripe.  Just an instant ago, I wrote this poem on a theme that has been with me these past few months:  

Hitting the top

I am at the ceiling, I shall want

the days when sky was the limit--

nor is the ceiling made of glass.

I rub my eyes as if clearer vision

will assist me to rise above

like eyeglasses help me to hear.

I have roof tiles in my hands

tar between my teeth,  and grit

in my hair as I bat my head up.

Is the sky still blue?  And clouds?

Are they puffy? sketchy? still?

When did I become color blind?

When bound? What eagle eats

my bloody heart as I relish—

or try to—gifts I once gave?

I resist plucking feathers as past

you zoom and I try again to rise

in the tail of your gravity.

I am exaggerating, of course, but I feel this occasionally in the Halls of the Poets I have been visiting who have not even yet reached the peak of their knowledge or abilities in science, music, mathematics, probability, statistics, philosophy and chance.   I want to crack codes to hear the truths poets share.  Conversely, I want to stand in my own truths and admire the parade as it goes on by, proud that I used to be part of it.  

Amazingly (or not), I find many of them enjoy reading me, too—not as a relic but as a participant in their emerging culture.  It is a daily joy to walk with them as we nudge each other toward our bests. Something true is happening here and the poem above is part of it.   I have tears in my eyes, which I now know is a sign of more to come. 

Truth and Poetry, Part Two

In my poetry and fiction I fabricate stories, narrate from perspectives I could not possibly experience directly, and even--when using my exact experience--distance it from myself in some way so that the reader can not assume that I am the "I" that is the voice in the poem.  I seem to use these devices at random--and though there is always a  purpose to my strategy--I am not sure I can always articulate the reasons behind my choices.  Are my poems untruths, then?  

This question came to me because of new experience I am having workshopping my poems in two on-line groups.  The posted poems are exceedingly  good, and the comments range from helpful to outright praise.  But those who comment often speak to the writers as if they were the voice and as if they experienced the emotions and actions they present in their poems.  And the writers' responses often second that impression.  Except in the allegorical types of poetry, then, I feel out of step.  Should I change my ways, or frame my poetry in a fictional contest?  

I think, if I am not telling the truth, I am also not lying.   I write what I know, following the advice Audre Lorde gave me long ago.  But I remember also what Aristotle insisted was the difference between poetry and history: They are two different kinds of truth.  He even implied that poetry's truth was superior.  Here are his words--and yes, I am trusting the translation:  

. . . . [I]t is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen- what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.

       Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

      By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. 

      The particular is- for example- what Alcibiades did or suffered. . . .

Aristotle is one dead white male that I don't mind referring to because I believe that he was trying to save education and literature and art back in his day just as many are trying to do now.   His teacher, Plato, and his time were trying to banish art and poetry and theatrical expression from political authority.  The evidence of this is in Plato's Republic, which preceded a new stress on military and local authority and seemed necessary for the obedience required in a more fascist state.  In The Poetics, to which I refer above, Aristotle is trying to establish the necessity of poetry by showing that it too has formal rules that could be quantified and then obeyed.  The Classical Age and its Ideals, according to Aristotle, had to embrace poetry as well as what actually was more controllable.

Two types of truth exist: poetry and history--maybe even more.  And many kinds of lying exist.  Adrienne Rich describes two in her essay "On Lying."  One is lying directly and the other is lying by omission. Plato (and my contemporary faith) show another kind of lying: saying words and taking perspectives that are not our own, IE acting and "playing at" as one does on the stage or when quoting another's truth.  And that is another subject for another time.  In the meantime, I console myself that my poetry fulfills some kind of ministry, even if as yet I do not know what that is.

(I'll be back to provide the links.)

Truth and Poetry, Part One

Truth has been troubling me lately.  

By "troubling," I mean that it insists on being considered from more than one perspective, and it will give me no peace until I do that.   

By "Truth," I mean truth itself in as much as I experience it.  

As a Quaker, I am a Friend of Truth, which means that I do not have a double standard that lets me lie if I have not taken an oath.   Telling the truth got me in lots of hot water when I was a child, but I could not even lie to avoid punishment.   I laugh about that now although I would live it the same way again.  But I did not discover Friends of Truth until I was fully 30 years old and working alongside them to create the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice.   

Early Quakerism (1660-1760) believed so much in truth and individual experience that it warned against the art of theatre.  Theatre encourages people to act, speak, show things that are not themselves, and deliberately participate in untruths.  It was seen in the same light as gambling and horse racing.  

Things change.  In my 1980s political activism, I had experienced theatre as an essential tool.  It (1) communicates to and convinces audiences of hard truths and (2) re-energizes those who already believe its message.  And when I discerned that my ministry would be in theater, members of the Friends Meeting in Albany, NY helped me season the decision that moved me across the country and earned me a PhD in Dramatic Arts.  

When I moved to Philadelphia 20 years later, I planned to research and write about the late addition of theatre departments at Quaker Colleges—not until the 1960s.  I had just been part of a controversial staging of a “gay” play; and I wanted to examine religious strictures on theatre, dance, and certain populations.   Instead my ministry took me to inner-city public school teaching for the next eleven years. 

Now I am a retired teacher and a poet.  Truth has been troubling me again.  In my poetry I make up persona and experience; I invent situations rather than always tell my own.  Indeed, I distance myself deliberately at times when I seem to be spilling my guts.  It doesn’t always interest me to be plain and simple and straight forward; and if it doesn’t interest me I do not think it will interest my reader.   I use devices to get at a Kind of Truth, but not the one I was talking about earlier.  This behavior borders on equivocation.  "But everyone does it."

Two nights ago, however, I found myself playing the poetry game in front of a Meeting for Worship.  I entertained instead of telling the truth.  I wanted to get a laugh and I did.  Does everyone do that? I wanted to hide that I was in physical pain (chronic condition, long story), and so I talked about going to graduation at my old high school.  This was not a lie, but it was an omission of truth that could ultimately mean I did not ask for help.  Does everyone do that too?  And who cares?

I do.  I told the truth before worship ended, and the corrected lies became a ministry in our silent meeting.

But I believe now that there is a place for a Poetic and Literary Truth that is both different from  and more inclusive than Day to Day Truth.  It doesn't belong in between God and I, but it is part of a God-given ministry of some importance.  

(to be continued) 

The Gift

Yesterday I went to the Last Poetry Cafe of the 2012 high school seniors at my old place of employment to hear poems from and to read poems to those I abandoned by retiring back in March.  I was surprised and moved when they gave me a little sculpture of 2 white geese, mother and child.  I immediately associated to the fairy tale about the Golden Goose and imagined myself as a guide into a marvelous world.  An instant later I associated this with an undergraduate memory from my sophomore year of college in 1970 when I gathered a tiny contingent of friends for a follow-the-leader to a bar.  The drinking age was 18, not 21 as it is now.  

The way led through a snow and ice encrusted park--according to Worcester, Massachusetts legend, the oldest public park in the USA.  One image stands out in my mind even without a photograph:  Walking single file across a wooden fence rail, I looked back and laughed at the line of "baby ducks" imprinted on me as if a Mom.  I won't tell you about the awful end of the tale where two of us incited a bar fight by pretending we were native Americans (Indians, then).  I don't remember how I got home.  What I remember from the chilled park is the laughter and clouds forming in our breath and lack of fear and delight in being alive.  I remember that I couldn't lead them had they not wanted to follow.  

And that is what I felt yesterday in the school library setting of the cafe, a feeling reminding me of what work had been like a few years back before my actual pinched nerves worsened under the terror of metaphorically pinched ones.  What a gift!  

Teaching had been my ministry and I had loved waking up in the morning to go in, revising long laid plans in my head as I drove: what had worked and what hadn't, which students needed more practice etc.  Driving was for planning and centered prayer, noticing what was new, grinning at yesterday, being friends with Jesus.  Each day I remembered and smiled at my Grandmother's admonition to "be kind."  She had been my art teacher in high school, and she was not kind to me.  In an attempt to avoid favoritism, she had aimed her sharpest comments at me.  Now I wonder if she just wanted me to be excellent, but she was decidedly not kind and I often fought back tears while trying to meet the goal just out of reach by time or by talent.  

As a teacher in love with learning, I think I was kind.  To my own surprise, I was also very conservative in demanding students learn basic skills and formats as well as the creative writing and inquiry that I so loved releasing. Hard that, to want to follow them into the future but to demand observant attention to their artifacts, a kind of meta-learning.  They always "got it" by the end of the year when they put together portfolios of their work along with self-evaluation essays.  These were the real gifts to me and to themselves.  Not everyone cared (understatement) and some hated the classes I taught, but I hope that some will remember how it felt to know they were good because they knew what to look for--to know they were good because they applied this skill to things that mattered to them, not to me or anyone else.  I hope someday when raising children or singing to fans or studying or pumping gas, they will see that as a gift.  Meanwhile, the gift I gave myself is that I did not compromise what education is to me.  I did not cave in to the conformity forced around me.  

I think that same strength is motivating me now as I keep writing and practicing both revision and talking to a public that so far is on-line and very small.  I need the practice.  Yesterday, again, students and a faculty member urged me to publish. I will break through that stay-back-stage, ride-in-the-back-seat mentality with practice.

And the public schools--in the midst of the financial crisis and the unbearable number of pink slips and lost programs--have been re-valuing creativity.  The younger teachers have that covered.  I don't have to be there because, in fact, they are better than I could be with my hit-and-miss methods of finding what works.  If anyone can help students overcome the "I-know-better" mentality they have developed over the last few years, it will be these brave new ones.  I shift my focus to re-directing me, to refuse to compromise on the move toward publishing.  I will try to remember not to aim at perfection, but to get on with it, to finish, just as I told my students.  Honing skills comes with practice.  Meanwhile, do not hide thy light under a bushel.  No more standing behind and pushing others forward without moving myself however small my steps are at first.

I thank my poets for this reflection, for this gift.

About my poetry

This one is about me, sitting here and getting more and more excited about the number of public demonstrations against the latest proposals--travesties all!-- for school reform. I listen and watch from a side-balcony, the bay window desktop connection to the world that I have in this second-story apartment in the suburbs.  Can you picture it?  I used to be out in the crowds.  Now I write poetry every day and must decide a path for it.  Publish for real?  Make available on the web?  Save for something?  Read in public?  Give them to Alice? 

Let me explain.

I have an intent to open my closet door and go through the hidden and crumbling boxes to (1) find the poems that I have written most of my life, and (2) rediscover the experience that shaped Alice's thinking.  Alice is the character in my novel.  As yet mostly unwritten, Alice is the novel itself waiting, as Pirandello said, for an author.  I think the author is in the boxes with my selected history of partings.  History of the passion before leaving and of the partings themselves. And about today's wonder: Can I rebuild the burnt bridges to those who peopled my past?

Which brings me back to the poems.  Today I noticed a common theme in what I had thought was random responses to prompts, considered explorations of how I might play with poetic devices if I followed my instincts.  And if I deliberately tried to play.  The theme is separation and return.  Separation and the impossibility of return, snippets of joy in the most vivid of memories until I try to live them backwards and then what?  The poems are grieving though they are not all sad.  They are the painting and the frame of "thinks" to store or to hang, of "thinks" like irrational impressions of something past and let go of, and also present journeys into the past. 

They are not current in a political sense, which surprises me, knowing myself pretty well.  They are surprisingly self-indulgent despite the fact that I have "invited strangers" to narrate.  Why am I surprised?  Read a person's journal and see how they lie.  Read a person's poems and fiction, and learn her deeper secrets and truths.  I have seen that in others and now open to myself.

Just saying.  I thought it was time to let my reader know where I disappeared to.  And that I am happy.

Money and profits

I have never been convinced that throwing money at a problem is the best way to solve it.  Indeed, having a problem to solve is the best way to ask for money.   Funding a study and delaying the application of what we know can be regressive as well as progressive.  That aside, public school administrations throughout the United States have been clamoring about budget deficits which result in the need to (1) lay off professional personnel and (2) give away public schooling.  And they've been persistent enough to convince even me. 

But I am uneasy.  Perhaps the loud howl about money is a diversion?  Am I just a conspiracy theorist from the old left?  My ex-students don't think so; they think I just care too much about everything.  I know we are in a world-wide financial depression.  I also believe that this truth is covering other moves of a regressive nature, and the public education crisis is just the one I am most familiar with.

Here in Philadelphia, the hidden agenda is to destroy powerful unions which really do have the quality of work and the quality of schooling as top concerns.  The last two Superintendents had been very successful at what the state wanted them to do: break the back of public schooling in order to make possible business deals in the profit sector of our economy.  I was astonished that President Obama didn't see this ploy as he turned the heat up from "No child left behind" to "No teacher doing a good job."  I watched my own school aim for higher scores on tests which falsely evaluated the system while teaching children that anything goes if they win and are not caught.  By the time I retired with disability, my heart was as broken as my back was tired.  My mind was as pinched as my spinal chord.  The work atmosphere in my school was at a life-time low. 

Articles like today's "Cash on Hand" at PennLive.com raise different questions:  If there is a monetary surplus within the Pennsylvania budget, why is that not being applied in a way to save public education?  Who and/or what sees privatization as a solution to what they see as problems?  Ample warning has been given that privatizing education breaks the constitutional guarantee of free education for all and builds in automatic privilege for those who make the schools look good.  This is the aspect of testing that has not gotten enough publicity:  Public schools test everyone whereas private schools test those who they wish to include.  Who loses?  Democracy as a whole loses its argument for itself when it goes back to the leaden age of equality for the few.  Class-ism trumps racism.  As James Baldwin noted, long ago: For these are all our children. We will all profit by, or pay for, whatever they become. 


I note that I have a few passive statements above;  my analysis is not complete and my links could be more complete and persuasive.  I hope my readers will correct this deficit in their comments, be they for or against my argument.

 

Brag a little

Check out "Science Reveals Why We Brag So Much" in today's Wall Street Journal.  I had thought the reason for bragging was compensation for self-doubt or for being neglected as a child.  What science revealed, however, is that bragging stimulates pleasure synapses in the brain: "Generally, acts of self disclosure were accompanied by spurts of heightened activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic [sic] dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction from food, money or sex."  In other words, we brag because we cannot help it.   The scientists gathered statistics and drew their conclusions by testing whether a person would rather give their thoughts than accept money. 

If I were still in the high school classroom, I would do a study on this.  There it might be more pleasurable for students to succeed in pretending a degree of disinterest in self.  I had to beg students to brag about what they were doing better and what they liked--except for the domineering 3 or 4 students per class who were the disciplinary challenge.  Those loud few seemed to enjoy hearing the sounds of their own voices and even silencing others.  The few were bragging, for sure, but the self-disclosure was often inappropriate to the classroom and to the activity.  However, there was always a small audience to entertain, a few who enjoyed and approved the interruptions. To me, the behavior--whether they could help it or not--seemed like a love of power rather than a love of bragging.

How would offering monetary awards for  "bragging" or for not bragging alter classroom behavior?  What other nonverbal behaviors were observed in addition to preferring talking over money?  Did scientists consider the myriad distinctions between bragging and self-disclosure?  Or is this provocative journalism making sensation out of a more modest scientific study by  skewing the terms under examination?

If anyone knows more about the where, why, and how of this study, please let us know!

Respect generates respect

       I have to thank Maria Popova for her site Brain Pickings which does, indeed, “bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.”  I already know I am interested in creativity and the way it manifests and changes given various and advancing technologies, but Maria Popova combines ideas as a “cultural curator and mind at large” that expand my little world.    Her “mash ups” are always food for thought,  as in this one on “Networked Knowledge and Combinational Creativity” which brings together Richard Dawkins, Susan Sontag, Gandhi, and Maria Popova in an argument for choosing and creating norms for “creative labor”: Norms that help us pay attention to each other and use each other gently.  Especially, she reminds us, consider how we value what inspires us—the threads from the vast history of ideas which have stimulated our own thinking.   There may indeed be newness in our contribution, but only because we have been exposed to others.   Is it possible to establish a norm (beyond literary citations) to credit cultural curation of the museums of our life?

A few thoughts:

(1)    I remember a moment in feminist scholarship when we over acknowledged to the point of confession.  Whereas this life history was often separated into Prefaces and Introductions, we referred to it so often in our work that it became essential.  I actually loved this grounding.  I found it easier to pay attention to the scholar when I was invited to know her/him first.  I more easily heard—rather than just listened to--lectures that began with “establishing authority” and not assuming it.  I know the practice was not universally appreciated:  “Get to the point already!”  But the practice made its imprint on me so that I enjoy saying, for example, “I was walking with Michelle when this idea came to me.”

(2)    As a HS English teacher over the last 10 years, I found great student resistance to even informal citation.  This only surprised me because I didn’t understand what mashing was and how in music and poetry and fun and games, internet users freely “borrowed” and combined from each other.  In fact, I was teaching a generation of students who believed and practiced “no ownership” of words and images.  I think, though, that they know from whom they borrow and who borrows from them in a subliminal world of flattery and pride.  This “internet memory” is a new skill internet generations share that I am not privy to.  If I "googled" and found original sources for phrases and paragraphs that I doubted were written by my students, I accused the individuals of plagiarism.  I told them they could be expelled for stealing, that being educated meant entering a dialogue wherein ethical people acknowledged each others' contributions.    

The LANGUAGE of plagiarism is posted everywhere in the public high schools.  Yet this internet generation doesn’t understand the traditional meaning and implications of plagiarism because their world has extremely different values.   

A new norm that could actually be communicated in all the places where people learn and practice being part of societies and cultures would be wonderful.  But, the norm has to be insisted on and experienced by practitioners of all ages.  Respect generates respect. 

(3)    When the same students formally presented their research process and results to their classmates, citation and documentation improved.  With few exceptions, students found it fun—if not worthwhile to others—to recall the “detective” process they engaged in order to come to the conclusions they report.    Noting this, the problem for me became how to get them to isolate their borrowings in their written pages or in the visual images they shared and then to write these acknowledgements down.    The carrot was the grade I would assign the project.   I doubt if they would choose to bore each other with these details if left to their own devices.  Precision is not a value for mashing.  And this is not unique to youth.  Quotations of the masters that are used and re-used are no longer trustworthy either!  See, for example, Brian Morton’s  examination of famous quotations in his Op-Ed article “Falser Words Were Never Spoken” in the NY Times (8/29/2011).

(4)    Ultimately, the solution will lie in a combination of “internet memory” and hyperlinks.  And we will demand a wider knowledge of each creative moment in the world than ever before.  How will we ever keep up with the young?  Should we let go our rigid grip on the technical formalities of academic thought?

 

 

Ground-up organizing

NATO and Facebook Join Forces in the Global Digital Age screams the Blog headline.  I am reading the Tech page of The Huffington Post on 19 April 2012.  I reread, assuming that the announcement is a hoax, but when I see that the authors are Dr. Stefanie Babst and Elizabeth Linder, I know that it is not.  Not a hoax.   I think not.  Yet the proposed unity seems too practical to be real.  A major political alliance is working with a profitable digital social network.  This ought to be interesting.

According to The Huffington Post, "Dr. Stefanie Babst is NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy";  Elizabeth Linder is Facebook’s Politics & Government Specialist for the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions."  And they explain:  "In pursuing our efforts to contribute to this global conservation, we -- two individuals at Facebook and NATO -- have started to collaborate. Because we believe that instruments of diplomacy, no matter how hard or how soft -- or how smart, for that matter -- bring people together."  WOW!  At the end of the blog, a gloss cautions: 

"Their views expressed are solely their own and do not represent the official views of NATO or Facebook."

So what is going on?

The blog is a collaborative post that begins by predicting how this digital age will appear in future history texts for school students.  Delightfully optimistic, the two authors state that history will foreground

Walking On-Line

After spending my two to three hours on-line each morning, I walk for exercise and enjoyment.  The exercise is calorie burning, I hope, but is mainly for increasing muscle strength in limbs under-used due to spine and nerve injuries. Because I need not walk for speed, enjoyment is primary—a delightful reversal that came with retirement.  And at least twice a week I treat myself to the Schuylkill River Walk where I pretend I am in Paris walking along the Seine.  There, enjoyment takes one or more of (1) browsing the sights and smells en route, (2) thinking, and (3) talking with a co-walker.  Lately I have been thinking about the many individuals I see who are taking cell phones and internet devices for a walk, a multitude that includes loners, groups, and both dog and baby walkers.  I think the callers probably can double task with looking around, whereas the texters may be playing a blind kinetic game.  I feel compassion for the dogs and babies who are missing out on interaction with their significant others of the moment.  What do young children learn from this pattern, I wonder, but look!  The two over there—younger than 10 years old for sure—are also walking their texts or texting their walks!  

I brought up this problem here earlier this month in "Muse . . . ."  which was inspired by a poem  Today I am inspired by new ideas, anecdotes, and scientific language from Stephen Marche's essay “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” in the May 2012 on-line issue of ATLANTIC magazine.  Mr. Marche's analysis includes an examination of recent studies on social connectivity and loneliness. 

I now see the problem is really a paradox that we ourselves create. 

The paradox of social communication in our times is this: When home alone we use social networks to talk; and when out in society, many of us turn on a device and pretend we are home alone.  It is as if we enjoy the selves we send out for others to know much much more than the physical self who could be right there.  Does this absentee friendship fulfill an ego need for absolute image control?  Marche addresses "narcissism" as the flip side of a popular new brand of loneliness that Americans both create and  regret.  Social networks do not create isolationists, but they do take the tendency to a new--and to  this reader--dangerous level.  

I am among the endangered; I could disappear from real life entirely without anyone noticing!  I enjoy using Face Book partly because my confidantes are long distance.  (Though my cell has its free hours, I have not broken the "long-distance taboo" to actually use it.)  I live alone and have a life-long hermit tendency that I indulge now in retirement. I luxuriate in solitude, in the days that go by without hearing the phone ring, in lurking on-line with all messengers disengaged.  And I am caught up in "The Last Big Waves" of danger as well: I watch senseless and endless TV and play hours of silly computer games.  One good thing--a point made more poignant by reading  "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely"--I play Scrabble on-line with actual people, and they would notice within a few hours if I did not play my turns. 

 

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.

April 2012:  I will take the poetry a day challenge this year, my first April in retirement.  I commit to writing everyday and recording the results. Heart in throat!  This is a public commitment, whereas I have been happily in hiding, not committed, and hoarding my every word.  Except in a high school poetry club where I felt at home.  I will be grateful to those students forever for all that they taught me.

At the end of my last work day, 3/1/2012, a few of my peers gathered with me at St. Stephens Green to ease the transition to retirement because, of course, I have mixed feelings about leaving.  I invited my "go-to" friends, those whose presence at FLC and readiness to work together eased the day-to-day job pressures.  The catered gathering was also my thank you to them for their positive support through the years.  It was a small and sweet gathering.

Under the hugs and best wishes and smiles I sensed the hyper energy and exhaustion of my friends.  It had been a difficult day, especially for the three whom a student had confided in.  She had come to school after an incident of sexual abuse and, adding this to other recent losses, was ready to give up.  She didn't; she talked to her teachers instead.  The challenge was that no resources were available to the staff: Counselors were out of the building and no handouts of help-lines or other resources were in evidence.  One teacher surfed for information which she made available to the child, but wasn't sure whether she would be liable for any negative results from her action.  We sat and discussed that problem, repeating the ritual support that teachers give each other when the challenges of teaching seem to endanger us.

There is no avoiding the lives of our students.  None of us would want to.  In these days of teacher ultra-accountability, however, all acts away from the script--acts that are both trust-provoking and educational--are dangerous.  Self-preservation makes us hesitate to follow the very instincts that we have honed over the years.  These are teacher instincts, the instincts of teachers who teach children rather than merely subjects and who set up learning environments in which meetings for learning occur regularly.

In his recent NYTimes editorial "Confessions of a Bad Teacher," William Johnson details this problem.  Following good instincts leads to both negative evaluations and strategic ambiguity on the part of administrators who also seem to be protecting themselves.  We have to ask, from whom?  Whose job is it to "put the students first" these days?  My friends in teaching are the ones who take the actions to make this rhetoric true, and they are the ones who fear for their jobs when the worm keeps turning.

These issues had a part in my need to retire.  Nothing makes physical pain more difficult to bear then emotional pain and psychological undermining.  I have often been a radical in the face of mind sets--even my own.  This weekend's meeting with a successful ex-student from the College of William and Mary reminded me of that, big time.  My educational philosophy was  honed in the halls of Ellen Stewart's LaMaMa--the subject of my doctoral dissertation and critical hero of international diplomacy through performance.  She demonstrated how to guide potential clashes into both collaborative work AND individual integrity--what I think of as the quantum theatre and the United Nations and a classroom of students.    I expect to write more about this in the future.

Meanwhile, the friendship among like-minded teachers remains the major life-raft in the sea of politically-motivated school reform.  Thank you friends.  We do because we do.  I will miss you greatly and admire you always. 

Sunday morning--the last Sunday before retirement.  My head and heart are too full to sort out.  I miss teaching.  Even though I have been on sick leave and wage continuance for almost 2 months, I feel THE DAY approaching like a kiss or a bite.  How long will I know that the students are in my 3-4 class or that it is 11th lunch or poetry club?  How long until I know about surgery?  How long can I work on what I have saved to do When I Retire before I have to earn money again?  Why am I instead looking forward to the next incarnation of teaching--tutoring and editing?  THE DAY could be the hug of a bridge between two continents rather than the violence of a kiss/bite.  I may stand on the bridge to watch a few days turn around.

It's been a Long Time . . .

I haven't so much as opened this page in years! 

At the risk of embarrassment, I will leave the ancient posts.  It was Marsha's Blog that brought me here, simply because I wanted to leave a comment on her influential Ferlinghetti post! 

Because I am here, I will leave my latest poem--a harsh one--but approved by the FLC Poetry Club.  I love the years I spent with them.  No regrets.

Waiting

See, it’s like this:
If I were going to hit you  You would be flat on the floor already Or smeared in print on yesterday’s front page. There is no waiting in my world At least, not without a cigarette And I quit the day I retired. This is my time, see And I don’t have the time or the money for waiting And I don’t have time for old habits I don’t have money to burn Retired is the wrong word for now I am de-tired and de-livered With what I know and what I must learn I was never good at waiting for And have spent way too much time doing it As if it earned interest in a hidden bank of the future But I looked in that hopeful vault yesterday And there God’s voice echoed what I had not heard And lists of to-do-laters fluttered in the empty breath So, you see, time is now.

By Susan L. Chast
12 February 2012