Why Does the Labor of Writing Hurt?

by Lucy S.

I have almost ten different pieces going right now for this blog, and for some reason, I keep setting them aside and moving on to yet another idea that excites me on a given morning. For years now, I have been wondering why it hurts so much sometimes to push on through an essay.  But “hurt” is such a non-specific word. What is the pain, exactly?  It is not the pain of not doing well enough for a good grade, because these are not written for grades and even with my university essays, I do not tend to worry about grades very much. 

Sometimes I have thought that it is the pain in confronting the inadequacy of our own minds. When the words leave my head and form on the page in front of me, I can see them at least to a partial extent as I would if someone else had written them.  But I judge them far more harshly than I would if someone else had written them. I see mediocrity.  Sometimes it manifests as self-pity or as sweeping generalizations or as a moralizing insistence on something readers already know, an insistence that may not give them the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes I see an inability to make the right connections or to draw the right conclusions from them or to move from stating the obvious to actually contributing something significant to the human ‘conversation.’

The confusing seeming contradiction is that at the same time that we try to say something new, we seek commonality. I am trying to understand how to navigate the seemingly different goals of discovering what we have in common and using words in fresh enough ways that they are even worth the time it takes to write or read them.  There was a Russian writer whose heyday was in the first half of the 20^th century, and what he wrote has some bearing on this, I think. His name was Viktor Shklovsky. In his essay, "Art as Technique," he wrote:

 If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic....

And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.  'If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.' [Here he includes an excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s Diary.] And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.  The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.  The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.  Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.

This is very difficult. I always feel that my words are everyday tool type of words. Likewise, the ideas which they express feel like regular workaday ideas. I think that I am a proficient writer, rather than a great one. Moreover, I often want to bring about some aspect of social justice more than I want to linger in the artfulness of the words. But the lingering is itself the justice we seek, isn't it? We cannot always be on our way to something else or the stone will always only be a stone. And this utilitarianism is itself part of what drives destruction.

Yet I do not think this is the main cause of my writing pain. There is something about the creation of this kind of art that threatens to disentangle us from the flow of life. When we speak in a conversation, our words flow, and sometimes we express ourselves brilliantly and surprisingly – sometimes we do not know how a particular phrase landed just at that moment in our mind to come out as speech. Other times, we speak well enough, and we feel ourselves grow closer to those we converse with, yet the words or content are not particularly astounding. Then there are the times when we cannot seem to express ourselves well at all.  But in all of this, our words flow. 

Trying to write at the level of artfulness which Shklovsky describes requires painstaking effort yet simultaneously the burst of creativity. And it requires going back over something repeatedly. Maybe that is the part which most of all hurts. The erasures.  But I don’t mean that they hurt only in the sense of being inadequate or of taking time or even in the fear that others will find them inadequate. For me, they hurt also in that they somehow seem to unravel something about the nature of life itself, some wholeness.  It is almost as if I were sitting talking with a friend and he asked me to keep repeating something I had said, to replay the scene until it contained a maximum amount of insight expressed in as aesthetically pleasing a manner as possible, when what I most wanted was to somehow bind myself to that other human through communicating. Can you imagine if a loved one had you keep backing up and starting over?  Would it not threaten to loosen your hold on sanity or the nature of reality at least a little?  This may be it. But I am still thinking about it.

I know all of the arguments against this feeling. We would not have great books or films if people merely sped along on the energy and joy of their flow without alterations. And if what we write is more than simply our feelings and ideas – if we need to follow some logical sequence of history or ideas in our care for our readers – if our writing is more than self-indulgence – if we want to use words profoundly – then we have to craft it very carefully.  I believe this. But knowing this does not make it hurt less.

The irony is that I am writing this quickly and without any serious revisions because I cannot psychologically bear to do that careful writing right now. I am still shaken in some strange way by the paper-writing of the previous semester.  At least I think that is it. I’m not sure.  

I am also going to include a poem which for me connects to this. I wrote it sometime between late 2009 to early 2010. I rarely try to write poetry, though as a kid I did, so I find myself wanting to set up some defensive barricades by saying that I know it may not be very good, and so on. At any rate, here it is.

So What

For those of us who failed to phrase our pain beautifully 

Whose words were too threadbare and dull 

Our run-down sorrows were not taken seriously by anyone, except maybe one another.

We did not haul elegant, astounding metaphors from our coarse, slack minds to depict our pain refreshingly

So that others might derive aesthetic pleasure from it.

We used the same old hackneyed metaphors

And so our misery, and we ourselves, became hackneyed.

No eloquent requiems for our losses – we had only our clumsy conversations.

Floundering to find words for our amorphous despair,

Those who translated their feelings into rich, nuanced, evocative language were more human.
They crafted their sentiments into opulent masterpieces

To be examined from a multitude of angles with fascination.

Was there anything worthy in our discounted, bare-boned language?

We stuttered and hemmed and hawed.

Our intimidated breaths dammed up in our nervous lungs
Until they burst out as desolate sighs.

Our voices wavered when we looked away to avoid inflicting our unbeautiful mix of resentment, pleading, and resignation.

We, also, used many forms of speech – our sounds and words, our bodies and faces,
Whatever we had to communicate with – but they were lightly mocked, or tastefully ignored

Because they lacked – something.
They lacked the sophistication and intelligence of their pain.

Not exotic –  just that same old pain anybody can find anywhere.

We folded in on ourselves –
Those of us just smart enough to perceive how stupid we were to them,
But not smart enough to make our suffering more intellectually delightful.

We ripped into ourselves in an effort to beat them to it,

And cauterized the wounds with our acid self-disdain.

In a time and place in which only the exceptional were valued,

We – it followed – had little value.

We did not pass the so-what test.

Bearing a Title: What is Labor?

by Lucy S.

This will be quick and informal because I am now in the throes once again of my work for the upcoming semester. Well, quick for me may not mean short, because I find that it takes far longer to write something shorter than to type quickly, rambling away from thought to thought. (Thus Mark Twain famously wrote that if he’d had more time, he would have written a shorter letter…) I have modified this blog’s name, as you will see, from “Bear Down” to “Labor 2 Bear Down.” This is in part because it matches the site address, and partly because there are umpteen blogs called Bear Down (something I realize, in retrospect, was bound to be the case), but also because I want to emphasize the labor which brings us to and is inherent in these various forms of bearing down to produce – create.  

But I am interested in the question of what we even mean by laboring. What constitutes labor?  Is it labor only if someone pays us money for doing it? Is it labor only if we dislike it? Is it labor only if we produce a material object? Is it labor only when it benefits someone else rather than solely oneself? Is it labor only when it meets the basic needs humans have to stay alive? What if someone labors hard to support her/himself and perhaps their loved ones as well but the labor produces something which has harmful effects on those who buy the product or on the environment? Is this blog labor? I would really like to hear people’s thoughts on this. I think we could benefit from some extended dialogue on this topic.

David Graeber writes, near the end of his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years:

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren't hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they're probably improving the world more than we acknowledge. Maybe we should think of them as pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one's penchant for self-destruction (390). 

I love him for saying this (and I love that whole book). But I am wondering if “enjoying and caring for those they love” constitute labor, too. If I am a first grade teacher and read stories to my students during part of the day, is that labor? What if I read stories to the neighbor’s daughter who I am paid to take care of? What if I read to kids who are not my own and who I’m not paid to take care of, but do so as a favor to their parents? What if I do it because I enjoy it, and the parents are home? What if I read to my own kids?  At what point is this labor and at what point is it not?  Is it labor if I am a paid psychologist listening to clients talk about their life struggles and providing feedback and suggestions, but not labor if these are friends or family who do not pay me?  Is it not labor if I then in turn talk with them about my own struggles? 

At the same time, I do not want an interrogation of labor to result in a conclusion which says that one person working in a grueling factory or harvesting job all day is the same as another person reading stories to others, having lunch with friends to talk over ideas and challenges, and so on. There is actual work that must be done for our physical survival and for what we have decided are necessities or highly desired extras. I believe ideally this work should be shared and that it would not take up very much of anyone’s time if we all did our part in the ways that we can and if we stopped producing the glut of junk which does nothing to contribute to a better quality of life for anyone. But we do not live in that ideal society.  We live out our real lives in our real societies, and the question I always have is how to not just succumb to the same old so-called pragmatism which does nothing to challenge the ruinous status quo while keeping serious change always in some imaginary space inside of our wistful heads. How do we labor to labor better? Is there a way to challenge these false divisions of labor in our real lives now?

And Life is Like a Song

by Lucy S. (This is a nonfiction short story I wrote in the last months of 2010.)

January-May 1989.  My seventy-three-year-old gramma takes her first and last college class with me, a class called “History of Music In America..” When I mentioned I'd registered for this semester's classes, she surprised me by asking me what I was taking, and then surprised me even more by saying, about this class, “Now that's one I wouldn't mind taking.”

“Really, Gramma?!”  For three other semesters, I tried so hard to talk somebody I know into taking a class with me.  Why did I never think to ask my gramma?  But this one is made for her.  My gramma loves music.

The three credit class costs us each $15 at Antelope Valley community college. One night a week, we sit with two other students at a small round table among many tables, while our teacher begins to talk us through the musical decades.  He comes from L.A. out to our Mojave desert town of Lancaster to teach this class; the rest of the time, he works in 'the industry.'  He tells us that he's arranged the music for the Country Music Awards that year.  Music accompanies his lectures each week, and my gramma sways and lightly bops her head and taps to it.  But during the last hour, she usually starts dozing off, especially when he gets more technical.  Mainly, she just wants to hear good music, and hear the stories about that music.   I nudge her under the table and whisper, “Gramma! Gramma!” before or sometimes after she starts snoring.

As the weeks march forward, music eras begin to coincide with periods of her life. She tells me stories she never told me before.  Little stories...  Her dad's special weekend breakfasts....scrapple, eggs, and biscuits... mixed, rolled, fried, and baked after his week gone from their New Jersey home, dredging canals.  Scrapple is some kind of back east sausage I've heard about my whole life and never tasted.  “My dad always was the better cook,” she claims. Our teacher plays Fanny Brice singing “My Man,” recorded in 1921, the year six-year-old Marion Collison (who would later be my gramma) started school. Fanny was married to gambler Nicky Arnstein. The song was a huge hit, and my gramma said she liked it from the time she can remember.  Fanny sang (and Marion later sang along), “Oh my God, I love him so.  He'll never know.  All my life is just despair, but I don't care.  When he takes me in his arms, the world is bright, alright.  What's the difference if I say, I'll go away, when I know I'll come back on my knees someday, for whatever my man is, I am his.  Forever more.”

 

But the Twenties were also jazz in its glorious, umpteen incarnations and evolutions... There was the Harlem Renaissance, which Marion knew nothing about as she began her teens in New Jersey, even as she danced the Charleston, which came out of Harlem.  There's a picture of her at 13, dressed like a young flapper. 

That year, 1929, two years after Fanny Brice's husband left her and their two children, Fanny recorded, “I'd Rather Be Blue Over You.”  “I'd rather be blue thinking of you, I'd rather be blue over you, than be happy with somebody else...” 

           

I go early on Thursday evenings so my gramma and I can hang out, eat dinner together, play a few hands of Rummy.  Still an easterner at heart (or at least at taste bud), she likes me to pick up fish for her to cook us for dinner.  While she cooks, I go through a section of her jam-packed refrigerator, pulling out jars and bottles with creepily old looking contents.  “Gramma, I'm throwing this away.  It's been expired for three years.”  I'm making progress, week by week.

Ana usually comes to my gramma's apartment to watch my almost five-year-old, Justin, and my twin babies, Jonathan and Kevin, while my gramma and I go to class.  Now in her twenties, Ana's been one of my closest friends since our early teens.  I tell Ana to come over early enough to eat with us, but she usually doesn't.  Her husband doesn't like it.   Less than two years since their wedding, he's begun making bizarre accusations: “Why do you keep unbuttoning the top buttons of your blouse when you're washing dishes so the guy across the street can see you through the window?!”  Ana doesn't pleadingly try to convince him.  She says, as any of us might, “What?  What are you talking about?  Why would you even think something like that?”

 

I'm haunted by a picture of Ana from the previous year.  April, 1988.  She's holding her baby girl, Crystal, born when Ana was only twenty weeks pregnant.  Crystal is so small. Ana cups her in her hands.  Her daughter only lived for a few hours; the hospital said she was too premature to be saved.  Ana, who never goes anywhere without her hair styled and makeup on, has no makeup; her hair hangs limply.  She looks so young, and so still and bleak.  Of course, everyone is still in photos, but this photo holds the hush that accompanies sorrow, that sense that everything has stopped, or whatever has not stopped seems foolish anyway. 

Our teacher ushers in the Great Depression, kicked off by the October, 1929, stock market crash, and our class moves into the 1930s.  Singers of tunes like “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” mournfully crooned the woes of poverty sweeping the country, while other songs such as “We're In the Money” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” (FDR's campaign theme in 1932) jauntily bounced out buoyant melodies with optimistic lyrics. Do we get more relief from telling the truth about pain, or from staring it down, chasing it away by having a good time – or at least pretending to do so? My gramma says her family was fortunate; her dad kept his job, though his pay dropped way down.  They already owned their small home in Oaklyn; thirty year mortgages only began during the Depression.  

By her late teens and early twenties, Big Band music was the rage – songs like “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller, and “Sing, Sing, Sing,” by Benny Goodman.  When we hear these songs in class, I'm amazed at how young they feel.  These aren't slow, romantic songs; they make you feel daring and elated, and most of all, they make you want to move. No wonder my gramma, back when she was just Marion, loved these songs, and went out dancing every weekend. 

When we get back to her apartment, she tells me and Ana that she used to finagle two dates in one night sometimes, an early one and a late one.

“Did you do that with Grampa?” I ask, and she gives me a nonchalant nod.

 

“Which one was he, the early one or the late one?” Ana wants to know.

She answers without a trace of irony, like a kind schoolteacher explaining to children who don't understand something.  “Well, he was the early one, because he liked to go out to eat, and he didn't like to dance.”

“Gramma, that should have told you right there!  Where did you meet Grampa, anyway?”

“Well, I met him out dancing.”

I wish I could play those Swing songs for Ana; they'd make her feel good. Sometimes I think happiness is as easy as being immersed in an amazing song.  But my gramma says she hasn't had any of those records in decades. I ask her what happened to them, and she says most of them got broken over the years.  Ana loves to dance. Even though these aren't her era or usual style of music, I bet she'd start moving to them.  Ana holds conversations while standing and casually dancing.  Funk, soul, club music, her family's Colombian music, old Motown stuff, old 50s music, New Wave – she'll dance to just about anything that's danceable.  Unless there's a wedding, she just dances in her home now, or in my place or my gramma's or her sister's.  I was with Ana when she met the guy she would marry at the main club in our town.   He said he loved to dance, but they don't go out dancing anymore.  

When I lived 'Down Below' (as people in Lancaster and its environs refer to the megalopolis of greater L.A. and its adjacent counties), the idea of the town dance place would have been impossible.  But Lancaster and her sister towns remain an island, separated from Down Below by miles of Joshua trees, flat and then hilly terrain, and blue skies, and so we still have places like the one club in town which is a blown-up version of somebody's weekly house party.  People we know will be there – those we want to see – those we hope not to see, or at least be seen by.  When we meet new people there, the odds are, we'll run into them regularly after that. This 'one club in town' quality is one of the reasons I felt so good when I moved back home to Lancaster.  Counter-intuitively, I always felt like what happened in Lancaster mattered more than what happened in L.A.,

My gramma tells me her parents and two older brothers gave her a mostly happy-go-lucky life. She had one paid job during those years singing soprano for a New Jersey radio station.  Most of her friends still lived with their parents, and one guy had frequent parties in the basement rec room.  They ate potato chips out of big cylindrical tins, drank soda, and danced.  Sometimes she went to Atlantic City, and enjoyed a sandwich and a beer for a quarter. “A quarter,” she always emphasizes, shaking her head.  “So then, was that a good deal for those days?” I ask.  “How much did people make?”  She shrugs, unsure. I feel like the Great Depression hardly happened for Marion Collison.  She remembers people lined up for bread or apples, and says her family tried to help out others they knew who were struggling, but it seems to have barely touched her own life.

My grandfather didn't have the same bright, carefree life Marion Collison was having.  He  came over from Northern England on “a boat,” as he always put it, at sixteen; his family was poor.  By the time they met, he was in his mid-twenties and had lost all trace of his English accent.  The first time they were engaged, she broke it off, still having too much fun at twenty-two to settle down.  He sold the ring she gave back.  The second time, he bought her a very basic ring, not trusting her frivolous nature.  They married at sensible, respectable ages; she was a month shy of twenty-four; he was twenty-eight. But I know all this already.  I try to get from her instead some sense of why they married, some glimpse of them as a young couple.  I sympathize with my grandfather because of certain defining characteristics of his life, but he was just such a drag sometimes – never wanted to go anywhere, often in a bad mood.  My best memories of him are when he'd bang out improvised songs on the kitchen table, slapping his hands down in concert with rhymes featuring  “Jed, Ed, head, lead...”  But what did that happy, vibrant Marion see in him?

“Well, he was a good husband, never ran around, not the jealous type.” 

“Gramma, come on, that's not why you got together with him.  You didn't even know any of that when you guys got together.” An idea. “Did you guys have a song?”

“No... Not really a song.  There were songs I loved, but I don't think your grandfather cared a whole heck of a lot about 'em.  If you mean romantic songs.  I always loved the Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers ones.  I loved “They Can't Take That Away From Me,” the Gershwin song.  Seems to me, most of the time it's the women who love those songs and the guys they're with don't care about 'em at all.”

“That's for dang sure,” Ana says, and the three of us laugh.  “There's all these good songs, and these guys mess them up!  I think we're more in love with the songs than the guys!”

Our teacher tells us about Marian Anderson, one of the most amazing American singers ever.  She sang opera, spirituals, traditional American songs.  During some of the 1930s, she toured Europe, singing with some of the most important orchestras there, winning over fans by the thousands in several countries.  Anderson was black, and back in the U.S., in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution prevented her from singing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall; the D.C. Board of Education also refused the request to use a high school.  The nation's capital was still segregated.  Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in, quitting the DAR and helping set up an outside concert for Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  Millions of people, including my gramma, listened on the radio to Anderson perform that day, and more than 75,000 were there in person.  She began with, “My Country 'Tis of Thee.”

Driving home from class that night, my gramma can't stop raving about Marian Anderson.  “Oh, she had a beautiful voice.  Mmm!  Just outa this world.”  Anderson sang some of the songs my grandmother herself loved to sing.  I think that magnified her appreciation of the combined strength, range, and beauty of Anderson's contralto voice.  Sometimes I think my gramma's absence of at least any racism she's aware of came more from her love of music than anything else.  She might have changed later as the times changed, but my dad says even as a kid, he can't remember her voicing or displaying prejudice.  Considering how many white people her age I've met who were prejudiced if you delved enough – or some who displayed their racism with no prodding at all – I can't help wondering what gave her this liberality.  Maybe that's why those racist DAR women didn't want Marian Anderson singing there.  Maybe they were afraid too many white people's racism would erode if they fell in love with the music she made.

So my gramma married my grampa, and I know this part.  They had my dad and my uncle eleven months later.  But she tells me my grandfather actually changed diapers and cared for his baby boys for one week, while she rested.  My gramma has some of the weirdest sayings, stuff I've never heard from anyone but her. “It's like my mother always said: you loved him so much you coulda ate him, and after you married him, you wished to hell you hadda ate him.”

  

One evening, Ana joins us, and my grandmother reports that one of her daughters might be pregnant with her fifth child.  My gramma, who had six kids herself, says, “I don't understand what good these birth control pills are, when women still wind up getting pregnant.” 

I say, “Well, they're better than nothing.”

  

Then my gramma, who never talks about sex and uses only the mildest curse words sporadically, says, “There were things you could do back then.  It's like my mother always used to say, 'Chew the cigar and spit out the juice.'”

Ana and I say, “What?!  Your mother said that?!”

 

My gramma turns red, and we start laughing.  

I ask, “Gramma, what the heck did she mean by that?”  But she won't answer me.

When our class gets to World War Two music, my gramma relives for me how she used to take my dad and my uncle as toddlers or preschoolers to stay with her aunt and uncle in Maryland for a month every summer.  By then, she and my grandfather had bought a small home in Ashland, New Jersey, where raspberries ran wild in the woody areas near their home.  For a Southern Californian like me, this represents an idyllic life both familiar, from family stories and books and movies, and utterly separate from my own experience.  My gramma never learned to drive, but the train went by their home; she could catch it right nearby, and ride it all the way to Philadelphia, or to her aunt's and uncle's place in Mayo, on the Bay. Driving across our desert town at night to and from the college, these stories of the Chesapeake Bay and leisurely visits with relatives and a young gramma I've never known make me both happy and sad for her, because I know what's coming after those years.  

I try to see inside her stories. She is not a silent kind of person; my gramma likes to talk, but there is so often the sense that she cannot begin to express what she remembers. Maybe the plain quality of the words available to her hurts, and she shrugs off the pain of being unable to convey that past with a determined nonchalance. But I can’t help pushing her. What did it look like?  What did the air feel like? 

“Pretty, “ she says.  “A lot greener, and I always loved the ocean.  But it was sticky humid in the summer.”

My grandfather was thirty with twin babies by the time the U.S. entered the war, which made him low on the draft list.  He never got called up.  Glen Miller, my gramma's favorite Big Band artist, disappeared in a plane over the English Channel in the end of 1944 while he was going to perform for the troops in France.  My gramma's favorite song in those years was “Stormy Weather” by Lena Horne.  “Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky, stormy weather since my man and I ain't together, keeps raining all the time....”

Post-World War Two music, and I know what story goes with this. My grandfather  decided they were moving to California to follow his English mother, who was after his English father, who was chasing “some American woman.”  His mother had two younger sons with her, and supported them by “scrubbing floors in big buildings,” is the way I always hear it.  She didn't win her husband back; neither did he get the American woman.  Meantime, my gramma headed off to California with her husband, twin six-year-olds, and a new baby girl.  With the car all loaded up, they said goodbye to her mom and dad in her parents' driveway. Her mother cried and her dad made her promise to bring the boys back to see him.  

Against my own future existence, I still want to stop her.  “Gramma, why did you go?  Why didn't you tell him no?” 

My gramma in her mild, slightly ironic, sort of resigned voice, answers, “Honey, that's what you did.  You went where your husband went.”

 

My gramma let her six-year-old sons hold onto their fantasy on the drive across the country.  They had cowboy boots, and thought they were going to ride horses and live on a ranch out west.  Their baby sister, Marian, thankfully slept for most of the trip.  When they arrived at their new home on 95th Street in L.A., my grandfather's mom guided them to the middle house they'd already arranged to rent for $18 a month – cheap even for those days, says my gramma.  Her mother-in-law lived in the front house with my grandfather's two younger brothers.  My father has told me things about that house that my gramma doesn't talk about, unless he brings them up first.

“The walls would sweat.  Moisture would pour down on the covers on the bed, and they'd be all wet.  That house was so small, and so ugly.  We lived there for four years. I think my mother's spirit just broke after we left New Jersey.  I don't think she was the same after that.”

Of course, my dad was only six when they left New Jersey, so it's hard to know how accurate his perceptions are of their life back east and anything connected to their uprooting.  He idealizes that life back there himself.

My gramma wrote to and received a letter from her mother in New Jersey every single week.  She sang to herself, to her kids, with the radio and her records.  And she danced at home.

My grandparents bought a two-bedroom house in 1950, across the street and four houses down from the one they'd been renting.  One of my grandfather's first home improvement acts was to tear out both the front and back steps, envisioning something which he couldn't quite communicate or bring to fruition.  He make-shifted some block steps for the front, but the back had nothing but a three foot drop out of the back door for years.  Early on, my dad's friend, Wally, went out the back door, and they forgot to warn him as he stepped down without looking.

Our teacher weaves the music into the larger social and political realities of each era.  Not long after my gramma and grampa moved into their house, one of my gramma's favorite's, Lena Horne, didn't get the role in the movie they were making of Showboat.  The industry's own censoring board didn't allow romantic relationships between blacks and whites to be depicted in films. Lena Horne is black, and would have played Julie, who 'passes' as white and is with a white man in the story. 

Our music class moves further into the 1950s.  By then, the songs in my gramma's life were partly her own, partly her two sons' music.  She loved Gogi Grant singing, “The Wayward Wind.” My dad and his brother listened to Hunter Hancock, the first white DJ to play rhythm and blues, and rock and roll.  By then, the twins were sleeping up in the attic. My grampa had cut a hole over the refrigerator so that the boys could jump onto the counter, then onto the top of the refrigerator, then "walk the plank," as my father always jokingly describes the walk on the narrow lumber my grandfather had laid down for them to follow to their beds, situated on larger boards, to keep them from falling through the drywall into the home below. My gramma finally took a train home to see her folks in New Jersey, eight years after she left. She took the younger kids; they were too young to leave behind.  Unable to afford tickets for all of them, she left her two oldest boys behind.  In some strange gap in communication, her parents thought she was bringing all the kids.  Her dad asked sadly, “Why didn't you bring the boys?”  A year later, he died, and my gramma has carried her guilt and regret ever since that they didn't “somehow” scrape the money together. 

My gramma tells me she bought herself some roller skates when she was forty, and skated for a week on their L.A. concrete driveway and inside the adjoining open-doored garage in back.

“You did?!”  I love this image.  “What did grampa say?”

 

“He said I better knock it off before I broke my neck.  I told him to mind his own business.”

 

I laugh my support. “But why did you stop?”

She shrugs. “Well, I found out I was pregnant.”

As the Fifties continue and glide on into the Sixties, my gramma's music is hers in a different way than the earlier music is hers.  It's the music she lived with her kids.  Though my grandfather didn't like R&B and rock and roll, my gramma became more and more attached to it.  Hearing it far away from those years takes her back through my dad's and uncle's teens to a Marion who now feels young to her, though she didn't feel so young at the time.  She loves The Drifters, especially “Save the Last Dance for Me.”  And she loves Etta James and her classic, “At Last.”  That song brings it all together; it's slow and romantic, but it's got attitude.

When we get to the folk music of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, or the later rock of the Beatles, and so much that comes after, my gramma still loves the music, but she's not as deeply enthralled as she was with the earlier stuff. 

The last night of the semester.  I've been frantically working on my ten page folk music paper and finishing up work for the other two classes.  I arrive early at my gramma's with kids, fish, and a typewriter.  She hands me a stack of handwritten tablet papers on the marching band music of John Phillip Sousa.  I'm surprised she chose him of all people to do her paper on.  Why not Lena Horne or Glenn Miller or one of her other favorites?  She never seemed all that psyched up on Sousa and his marching band music. 

“What made you pick him, Gramma?”

“Mmm, I don't know.  I just liked him.”

Ana joins us.  As I type, I see some paragraphs end abruptly; I read them to her and say, “Gramma, hurry, tell me something to connect these!  What else?”

 

She wracks her brain and comes up with a bit more information or at least some word-bridges. Justin and Jonathan play with the blocks and toy animals I've taken along.  Kevin wants me to hold him, so I bounce him on one knee, take bites of food and keep typing, finishing a few minutes before we have to leave.      

While my gramma's changing, Ana says she doesn't know what to do, that her husband's getting worse.  “He kicked the dog really hard, and I told him, 'Don't be kicking her like that,' and he goes, 'So now you're screwing the dog.'”  She starts to cry.

By now, it's clear to me that something is wrong with her husband's mind, and whatever it is manifests in cruel ways. I'm scared for her, and I can't help feeling surges of hatred toward him. I want to urge her to leave him, but I know from past experience that if I say that and she's not ready to do it, she’ll just stop talking to me about it, and then she'll have nobody.  I sigh.  I sit by her, listen, and agree, saying things like, “That's ridiculous,” and “Yeah, that's so weird.”

My gramma comes out with a new blouse on and lipstick.  Ana smiles at her and says, “Wow, you look nice.”

On the way home from class that night, we're quiet for a change.  Then, when we get near her street, my gramma says, “You know, your grandfather played the trumpet.”

My gramma and I get our papers back.  We both get A's on the papers and A's in the class. I keep saying to her, “Man, Gramma, pretty good!”

 

She keeps blushing and smiling and shrugging and saying, “Well...”

  

We celebrate with a long hang out at her apartment.  She makes her homemade macaroni and cheese, the only mac and cheese I've ever been willing to eat.  My kids dig in.  Justin plays Rummy with us.  Her refrigerator shelves are clean and organized now.   Who will keep them this way after I'm gone? 

September 1989.  I'm getting ready to fly to Germany with my kids. The Air Force won't approve travel or medical care or housing allowance for dependents in Germany until the military member has shown proof of procured housing.  My husband has been there for two months. He has found a rental in the little village of Rhaunen.  I don't want to go.

My parents, sister, brother-in-law, and an aunt and uncle go with me and my three kids to LAX.  We bring two full size car seats and several heavy bags with us – the things we've been living with which must now travel with us to Germany.  We get through the lines, in that weird emotional mix of drained exhaustion and hyper-tearful-awareness that this is it – I'm leaving my home for three years.  At check-in, they tell me that the dates we have from the Air Force are wrong.  Come back tomorrow.  We do it all again the next day.  When we reach the point in which the kids and I must proceed without my family, I say goodbye again and push the two car seats forward on the floor with my babies in them, carry-on bags on each shoulder, Justin at my side.  A line of people are behind me.  The employee at the gate asks why I'm taking so long.  I say, “I was told I'd have help!”

November 1989.    We live in the Hunsrück region, a half hour's drive to the Moselle river, where they grow grapes for wine.  I can't get warm.  The cold here is so wet; it seeps through everything, no matter how many layers we put on. I put thick sleeper pajamas on my kids and crank up their radiators at night, but the radiators in our house provide such little heat.  The sky looks like it rests on the roof of our house, melancholy gray.  Now I know what people mean about Seasonal Affective Disorder.  I hurry into bed early and try to read, holding book pages through flannel sheets.  My spouse stays every other night at the fire station, so I usually let Justin sleep with me on those nights, and we play My First Uno until he falls asleep.  Sometimes I let all three kids sleep with me.  It's chaotic with all of us.  Someone's likely to accidentally kick somebody and set off ricochets of crying.  Still, it always starts off so nice.

I'm always working on a letter home to someone.  I mail out letters every week.

A few of the fire fighters my husband works with ask if I'm going to join any of the wives' organizations.  I don't want to hurt their feelings, but... no!  I can't stand this celebration of the domestic arts right now!  I've made a few friends, but why do I always have to adapt myself to others – why doesn't it ever work the other way?  I don't want to learn anymore about cross-stitching or canvas art or any other craft.  I've crocheted since I was a kid, but I just want to do it without making a big event out of it.  Talk, listen to some good music, and – yeah, I'm crocheting.  And I don't want to have long discussions about recipes, either!  I miss my gramma, my mom and dad, my best friends, my uncles and aunts, and all my people back home. I miss college so much that it's begun to reach epic, mythological proportions in my mind already. I've become so sentimental and nostalgic about it. College.  My college.

 

I'd rather be in my house dancing with my babies than in those social groups where I don't fit in... at home listening to my anti-war music or the music that makes me feel like all my people are there with me at all their different ages at once.  How will I ever get through three years here?  When my spouse is at work, I put on old songs that he doesn't like.  Songs that I love, my gramma loves, my mom and dad love, Ana loves, and for now at least, my kids love.  They take turns having me hold them to dance and sing along with Sam Cooke's music.  Or Etta James, singing, “At last, my love has come along... My lonely days are over... And life is like a song...”

           

            

Why Write?

by Lucy S.

A good friend emailed me this morning to express her doubts about the value of this or any blog, along with so many other efforts to challenge the multitude of injustices in this world.  She wondered if these things change anyone’s minds or if we are all only talking to those who already agree with us.  Meanwhile, the atrocities continue.

I can certainly understand her feelings. I wrestle with my own despair and defeatism. It comes and goes, and I cannot always tell when it will hit me again.  This is particularly true not only when we are saying and/or doing something that goes against prevailing views and the systems as they function – difficult enough – but when various aspects of who we are makes what we say not be taken seriously or takes away a forum in which to even say it. I know this feeling oh so well. I wonder how many thousands of times over my life thus far I have said or written to someone something close to this: “What difference does it make anyway? I am nobody. No one cares what I have to say anyway.” But that is a feeling that eats away at us. Moreover, the various oppressors benefit when we are chewed up inside by these thoughts, because people who feel that way are more likely to cry in isolation and blame themselves than to fight back.

Yet I do not believe in the individualist ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ approach. It doesn’t work for most people, and the system itself is structured so that it cannot absorb everyone doing this.  Can we ALL go to college and get great jobs?  That justification for making more money than other workers only works if most people do not go to college. These are all just different sorting schemes to make us believe that if we play by the rules of a continually changing game and give it our “best,” we will “win.” Those who don’t will deserve to “lose.” And if even the game fails to conform to its own rules and we dare to complain, those who defend the system will say, “Nobody said life was fair,” as if we are just supposed to accept that it is unfair.  We are then cast as malcontent whiners if we do not accept our lot or find some individual way to claw our way up past everyone else.  So instead, we have to find collective strength, find some kind of way to pull each other up.  Otherwise, the system will continue to play us against one another as “competitors” in so many ways.  We will stay isolated in our despair, not understanding our commonalities or the particular ways in which oppression manifests in different lives.  And we will think that this despairing condition is somehow just “life” rather than the outcome of systems structured in specific and brutal ways.

So I say we write and talk to each other and find any ways that we can to care for each other and band together.  In what ways do we labor?  In what ways has our hard work been appropriated and devalued by the system (paid or unpaid work of many kinds)? I don’t think we can write thinking that it is only valuable as a means to an end. Yes, we need to change so much in this world, but this work will go on and on. We have to value the writing itself, to value our participation in this work, to realize that this is life itself. So many of us have been telling stories to one another for years anyway. This has always been our strength. So we’d might as well find ways to write them down and share them.  We can create our testimony, like many others have done and are doing now, and see what comes of it.

In Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, Richard Wright relates what happens when destitution forces him to go to the relief office during the Depression:

When I reached the relief station, I felt that I was making a public confession of my hunger.  I sat waiting for hours, resentful of the mass of hungry people about me. My turn finally came and I was questioned by a middle-class Negro woman who asked me for a short history of my life. As I waited again, I became aware of something happening in the room. Black men and women were mumbling quietly among themselves; they had not known one another before they had come here, but now their timidity and shame was wearing off and they were exchanging experiences.  Before this they had lived as individuals, each somewhat afraid of the other, each seeking his own pleasure, each staunch in that degree of Americanism that had been allowed him.  But now life had tossed them together and they were learning to know the sentiments of their neighbors for the first time; their talking was enabling them to sense the collectivity of their lives and some of their fear was passing.

Did the relief officials realize what was happening? If they had, they would have stopped it. But they saw their “clients” through the eyes of their profession, saw only what their “science” allowed them to see.  As I listening to the talk, I could see black minds shedding illusions. These people now knew that the past had betrayed them, had cast them out; but they did not know what the future would be like, did not know what they wanted […]  Had [the ruling class] understood what was happening, they would never have allowed millions of perplexed and defeated people to sit together for long hours and talk, for out of their talk was rising a new realization of life (300-301).

We have seen this time and time again, that when enough people talk to each other about their “perplexed and defeated” condition, they become less and less perplexed and defeated. At the same time, our stories themselves have value. Just as we do not have relationships with each other as only a means to make the world better, but for the sheer love of it, we can write this way, too.  Caring hurts, but what is life without it? And at the same time, our relationships DO make the world better. So it is with our writing, which in itself is another manifestation of our caring labor for ourselves and each other.  From all of this can rise, as Wright says, “a new realization of life.”

My lifelong friend Gloria sent me a short passage today which she wrote to express her feelings about what has happened to her in her job.  I will let her tell more of her story when she is ready to, but for now, I will say that she worked at a job which required her to put a tremendous amount of stress on her hands over and over throughout the day. And so one of her hands has been damaged by this overuse. She cannot do the job anymore.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

We Labor -- We Bear Down: Gloria A.

by Gloria A.

I am so upset with the outcome of my job. I thought people would recognize the value of my work. It is so frustrating when you have worked so hard and hoped to be noticed for it, then you go and lose your job all because someone is given so much power over a situation. No one in this world should be allowed to have that much say so in someone else’s life. I have always worked beyond that which was expected of me and it seems as though it's just not worth the outcome. People are so self-centered that the focus is always on how they can come out looking like they have made it to the top and not on how all that have worked hard are a big part in where they are at. People of this world are always trying to give themselves the credit for it all and not truly looking at how it all came about. I truly believe that it takes a lot of us to make something really be successful, one man or two alone cannot build an empire into a great success unless they have a great team of people working for them (as I said it's due to a great team of hard devoted employees). Situations like these can sure tear a person down, makes me feel that I am not much of any value.

Bearing Down – Some Belated and Partial Introduction

by Lucy S.

As is probably clear, I started this blog by putting up some essays I had already written. One was a guest post for a friend’s blog; another was a modified version of one of the essays from my honor’s thesis circa late 2010; and yet another was from an essay I wrote for a graduate class last semester.  I chose those which in some way are hybrids, some melding of academic and more personal (“creative” as we call the latter) writing. 

This is a form I’m particularly drawn to since it allows me to merge what I have put my life efforts into for many years before and beyond academia with the work I now do within it.  It also expresses how I have lived in all the years before I went back to school and how many of those I’m close to likewise live.  I can't disentangle the personal from what we often label the academic or intellectual or political and I don’t think they should be disentangled. The imagined separate compartments never stay neatly separated. And compartmentalizing allows people to participate in normalized racism, sexism, nationalism, exploitation, and other mentalities which are also practices and which always have effects upon real people’s lives while feigning or believing oneself 'innocent.' The effects remain invisible or ignored by those insisting on the compartmentalizing.  And so I try to make sense of these blurry boundaries and uncontainable mergings.

Starting a blog or any kind of writing in which we write as if others will read what we compose is an act of faith.  Like so many efforts in which we are attempting to be what we have not quite been before, we have to ‘go acting as if….’  We write ‘as if’ enough people really will care about what we have to say, because we have to take ourselves seriously in order to even try to write well and to keep returning to the labor.  But I have found – not in a blog until now – but in writing academically – that there is no substitute for confronting myself on the page and having to recognize the weaknesses and contradictions in my own positions, having to push beyond that, one slow sentence at a time, or one erased paragraph or page(s) and more. Well, there is another way to experience this, and it is in dialogue with someone else who likewise interrogates and pushes hard for thought that goes further than only emotionalism. Either way, we need to take what we say seriously and have faith that these efforts are worthwhile, even when they are painful.

Don’t get me wrong; I'm not devaluing the importance of our emotions.  But many people express their opinions as “feelings” which are supposed to override facts. In a recent discussion / debate with a family member, he clearly “felt” so strongly about immigrants in the U.S. without documents that he could not get past repeating the kinds of slogans we hear so often by those on the Right with regard to this issue. “They’re ILLEGAL. PERIOD.” That kind of thing.  I have strong feelings about this issue as well, for personal reasons that I will not get into for now, but these things must get beyond contests in the intensity of our mutual feelings if we are to ever talk about them ethically and intelligently. Interestingly, he recently wavered somewhat on this issue when he was vehemently expressing that he would NEVER give up his second amendment rights and that owning a gun did NOT make him a racist, even as I kept pointing out that the article I’d referred him to was not actually saying that he should or was. When he pointed out that people will have guns no matter what, I said that in that case the same could be said for immigration - that people will immigrate, no matter what - and for some reason, that argument elicited from him: “GOOD ONE on immigration.”  But this revelation may not last long unless he chooses to seriously educate himself on this issue.

What I have realized is that there is a discipline that comes from having to engage with history and other complex information and theories, and that discipline can act as a balancing force when it merges with our feelings, particularly feelings bound to care for our own growth and for others.  That doesn’t have to occur in academia, and in fact I think it’s problematic that it too often gets thought of as something people do ‘for school’ rather than as an integral part of living in various kinds of communications – spoken and written. For that matter, it doesn’t occur often enough in academia.

Moreover, there is no guarantee that this intellectual engagement will make people care for one another or the planet better. This is something I struggle with because I wonder, then, how we are to do better. How do we bear and raise better people – whether those people are our own selves, our collective children, and the multitude of people who in various ways, depending upon how we construe it, make up “us”? We are constantly becoming; the question is who we are becoming. And of course, the definition of “better” itself is contestable. But we can’t afford to just throw up our hands and say, “Who is to say what ‘better’ is?”  There are few neutrals on these issues. And sooner or later, if we push ourselves, we find out that claiming we can know these things by “simply” using our “common sense” is false.  So we can either continually labor to grow in our understanding of an always changing world or we can give tacit agreement to horrific realities. And even as we labor, we will not find our way to personal purity. We can try to live with integrity, but if we stop with aspirations of individual ‘goodness,’ we will simply be refusing to acknowledge the systemic realities in which we are enmeshed and from which many of us benefit unfairly, whether we like it or not.

Hanging our head in guilt or sinking into despair is hardly the best response, either. The only thing I know to do is to try. We can try to understand better and do better.  For me, part of that effort has meant going back to school. It is not the only solution and it is not even any kind of end-all, be-all solution. But it has mattered tremendously to me to labor in this way. Others I know labor in a multitude of ways to bring a better world to life.

When I write academic essays, I generally have to write for quite some time to find my way to what the essay will actually be.  I think that will be the case with this blog as well. For now, I know that it is about the question of what we mean by labor, how we value our own and other people’s labor, how labor is bound to creating and growth, and how learning (in or out of institutions) is interwoven with labor in all of its connotations.  I think it will be a mix of essays I choose to share here (in case they are of interest to other people beyond the usual reading audience in academia of one or a few) and this less polished writing that I do to think things out on the page.  I will also ask people I care about to sometimes contribute their own essays, poetry, or even just brief statements about their own experiences and ideas with regard to labor and bearing down. My good friend, Sue, has been the first to contribute.  I asked a small number of people if they might want to write about some experience in their lives that hurt so much and required tremendous effort and focus yet was also bound to love in some way.

Presuppositions of Equality - for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Lucy S.

This is from my honors thesis. It was the last essay in that work, and I finished it at the very end of 2010, then revised it in early 2011 and resubmitted it to the university with my small changes.  I have been interested in Ranciere's call for a "presupposition of equality" since i first learned of it, and remain interested. 

Essentially, what an emancipated person can do is to be an emancipator: to give, not the key to knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself. 

~ Jacques Rancière  The Ignorant Schoolmaster (39)

 A friend is writing about the sexual and other abuse she and her siblings experienced as well as the difficult aftermath, which is, of course, the rest of their lives.  She notes that many victims don't know anyone who has had those experiences and has then gone on to have healthy relationships and care for themselves competently.  She stresses the importance of example, which is why she is writing her book.  Knowing someone (personally or through the intimacy of a memoir) who has not only survived but learned to flourish lifts the pervasive hopelessness so many victims feel.   Imagining a better life and specific ways to create it are crucial. 

 This makes me think about how difficult it is to re-imagine and re-create life beyond our commodified, capitalist society.  A professor of mine said to me we can't have revolutionary education without a revolution.  And an unschooling mother I know told me she believes in living as if the revolution already happened. She buys from small independent businesses and lives a somewhat Bohemian lifestyle.  Like me, she's educated her kids outside of schools, and their learning has been primarily interest-led. Her 'revolution' must be quite different than the one my professor, who has taught classes for years on the Cuban Revolution and African independence struggles, has in mind.  Both applications have their difficulties. Children grow up to find capitalism and all its attendant ills waiting.  Even while they are kids, wars rage, ecosystems deteriorate, billions suffer, and their own families' economic security can dissipate.  Those small businesses she buys from may have employees who are more exploited and less able to unionize than a large company's workers.  Creating spaces outside the commodified system can keep us from being fully processed or destroyed by it, but we must find ways to keep these from becoming merely a retreat or private solution.   Relationships which transgress hierarchies and boundaries teach us things we can't learn any other way, and remind us over and over, as we confront the suffering of so many, that the revolution has not happened.  But as much as I respect that professor and recognize the validity of his point, the problem is that without revolutionary education, we won't have people capable of bringing about revolution.  Thus, we have to see ourselves to be, not before it, nor after it, but perpetually making the revolution, and creating revolutionary education in whatever ways are available to us now. 

Telling the truth about the abuse is an important part of my friend's work, so that people understand how it affects those forced to endure it, and victims gain some perspective by recognizing variations of their experience in the lives of so many.  She then teaches through example that another life is possible. The more radical academic theories about society work similarly to the truth-telling component of her work, with important exceptions. They provide us with needed insight into the structural realities in our society, but are too seldom used by students and professors to analyze our positions and experiences within our own institution.  We learn about struggles in other times or places without applying them to the time and place in which we can actually have power.  Marxist theories explain how capitalist society perpetuates itself, but Marx's basic tenet is generally ignored: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” ( Theses on Feuerbach). Thus, radicalism itself is contained, safely ensconced in class discussions and essays, which then add up to grades, credits, degrees, and ultimately, jobs in the capitalist economy.  This strikes me as somewhat akin to providing abuse victims with well-developed theories about why their abuse occurs and how it affects them, but not stopping the actual ongoing rape.  It's better than nothing, but falls far short of an adequate response.

As horrifically common as rape is in this society, it isn't normalized in the ways that the commodification of life is so entrenched.  What would happen if my friend had tried to free herself and others, but wherever she went, rape was a way of life?  For those who find the comparison offensive, I point to ten million people dead from starvation every year in a world which refuses to feed them, because they don't have paper and coins to exchange for food.  I could also point to ecological devastation, or locally to the one third of all students in a charter school who were recently homeless, according to a professor I know.   

 Where do we find the examples which do what my friend's example does, modeling specific actions which add up to transformed lives? Who can demonstrate for us that a whole society rooted in love of life is possible?  That education is not to compete against others in a race to turn living beings and experiences into lifeless objects, but for mutual benefit and growth?  Where are the emancipated whom French philosopher Jacques Rancière  says can in turn become emancipators?  How do we wake up tomorrow or next week or next year with a dramatically better society? 

The multitude of possible answers correspond with the vast array of life itself on this earth.  Historical examples can be theorized to determine how new people with different sets of circumstances to contend with might apply those lessons.   And throughout this thesis, I call for an education in which we form long-lasting relationships with the people we learn with, and an education deeply embedded in the rest of life.  The right kind of relational education, the kind which transgresses authoritarianism, becomes an oppositional force in itself, leading people to 'take' rights deemed illegitimate, acting as rescuers.  And because my primary area of study has been literature, I've asked what literature contributes to relational education, finding that, as the poet Randall Jarrell said, we learn certain “differing and contradictory truths” through our written art which can't all be learned in other ways.  Literature teaches us empathy, and shows us fleshed out, extended embodiments of truth which otherwise might only remain abstract arguments.

 Yet relationships which cut across hierarchy don't always erode authoritarianism.  They may help one individual with a 'higher up' friend, but that isn't the same as transforming our institutions and society into one which is participatory and egalitarian.  Relationships can weaken our ability to fight for rights; think of workers who won't organize or join a union because they are 'friends' with their bosses.  Relationships can even corrupt, as exemplified by  politicians who initially went into politics to represent the common person but are altered by their friendships with corporate leaders and other politicians.  Or, consider union bureaucrats and lawyers who have closer relationships with management and the lawyers on the other side than they do with rank and file union members. 

 Clearly, for those who want a just, communal society, not just any kind of relationship will do.  We have to ask ourselves: if we model our relationships after a commodified society's 'business' relationships, how will we ever  move beyond objectified categories interacting with other objectified categories?  People who protest that they 'simply' have 'nothing in common' with those who are, in terms of power and privilege in this society, 'less than' and 'other,' perpetuate that reality by making it the defining basis of their relationships.  They accept it as a static state rather than as a shortcoming in their knowledge and current comfort zone which can and should be altered.  Would academics say, when encountering a difficult text for the first time, that they 'simply' have 'nothing in common' with it because understanding it requires that they stretch beyond who they are now?   If they are willing to work at it, to push beyond their interpretative abilities by spending time with that text, what are they implying if they're unwilling to broaden themselves in their relationships with other human beings?  Clearly, the idea driving that decision is that they have nothing of value to learn from 'those people,' that building relationships with them would be only an act of pity because they cannot imagine an equal relationship.  In We Make the Road By Walking, Paulo Freire tells a story about a student who goes to the fishing village and keeps questioning a fisherman about who the president is, who the governor is, or finally, the local authority, and the fisherman doesn't know the answer to any of these questions.  Then the fisherman asks him if he knows the name of this fish, or how about this one, or surely this one, at least.  The student knows none of them.  The fisherman replies, “Do you see?  Each one with his own ignorance” (150). 

I don't have one recipe for how to form these relationships or for creating relational education.  But I know that unless we make a conscious choice to forge egalitarian relationships, we'll tend to revert to what feels 'natural.'  We live in a society saturated in authoritarianism and inequality; what seems normal and standard to most people is often fundamentally unjust, ultimately held onto because it props up privilege or because people are attached to it as a tradition.   A situation in which some people have a certain natural authority in the sense that they have a knowledge base or set of skills that other people want to learn from them does not require the perpetuation of hierarchical relationships.  Friends can teach friends; it happens all the time.  What is harder is for friends to grade friends or pay them as little as possible or fire them.  But that is precisely my point.  It should be hard – so hard that we ultimately recognize the inherent inequality in it, and let go of these worn out methods for humans to dominate other humans. 

There are ways to push toward greater relationship even with those acting as oppressors, if we do so from a position of strength.  In his sermon, “The Drum Major Instinct,” Dr. Martin Luther King explained that while he and other demonstrators were in a Birmingham jail, the white wardens liked coming to talk about “the race problem” arguing for segregation and against demonstrating and intermarriage.  Because he always tried “to do a little converting,” Dr. King reasoned with them about their true position without weakening his stance.

And then we got down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, "Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You're just as poor as Negroes." And I said, "You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you're so poor you can't send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march. (King)

King was 'speaking truth to power' while inviting the holders of what is in actuality a pseudo-power – a force for their own oppression –  to cast it off by opening their eyes, joining their fellow oppressed human beings and taking hold of genuine, meaningful power.  By explaining it this way to his listeners, Dr. King called them to do the same, to not water down  their convictions but to magnify them by using them to bring as many as possible around to seeing clearly. 

In King's interactions with these white wardens, he did not in any way replicate their notions of him as an 'inferior'  speaking to 'superiors.'  He instead enacted what Rancière calls a “presupposition of equality.”  In her translator's introduction to Rancière's book, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Kristin Ross explains his position:

Rancière's critique of the educational theories of Bourdieu, Althusser, and Milner shows them to have at least one thing in common: a lesson in inequality.  Each, that is, by beginning with inequality, proves it, and by proving it, in the end, is obliged to rediscover it again and again.  Whether school is seen as the reproduction of inequality (Bourdieu) or as the potential instrument for the reduction of inequality (Savary), the effect is the same: that of erecting and maintaining the distance separating a future reconciliation with a present inequality, a knowledge in the offing from today's intellectual impoverishment – a distance discursively invented and reinvented so that it may never be abolished … But what if equality, instead, were to provide the point of departure?  What would it mean to make equality a presupposition rather than a goal, a practice rather than a reward situated firmly in some distant future so as to all the better explain its present infeasibility?

When I was a child, my parents periodically played in our home an album of Dr. King's sermons. My parents, and my father in particular, do not play anything they love at low volumes; they play it loud, and they call your attention to it by occasionally saying things like, “Isn't that great?!”  and (in response to especially key moments in songs or speeches), “He's working it!”  They are not fans of the tepid.  And by not only exposing us to these speeches, but responding to them with strong emotion, my parents helped us learn to connect the moral, intellectual, and socially significant with the emotional.

“The Drum Major Instinct,” preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 4, 1968, is the sermon I most remember.  King begins with Mark 10:35. 

Imagining that Jesus will soon restore the kingship and rule the earth, two of Jesus' apostles, James and John, have asked to sit on his right and left hands when that time comes.  In walking us through this passage, King manages to simultaneously empathize with us, lead us to empathize with James and John as well as the other apostles, make us honest with ourselves, and identify a crucial aspect of human nature:

But before we condemn them too quickly, let us look calmly and honestly at ourselves, and we will discover that we too have those same basic desires for recognition, for importance. That same desire for attention, that same desire to be first. Of course, the other disciples got mad with James and John, and you could understand why, but we must understand that we have some of the same James and John qualities. And there is deep down within all of us an instinct. It's a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life.

Then, doing something I haven't heard preachers do in quite the same way when visiting friends' churches, King shares elements of his secular education in a way which brings his audience in on that knowledge. His knowledge isn't presented patronizingly or used to exclude.  He doesn't assume that his listeners know what he's talking about, not does he assume that they don't know.  It is a metaphorical breaking of bread, an offering of what he can contribute. 

We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade. Alfred Adler, the great psychoanalyst, contends that this is the dominant impulse. Sigmund Freud used to contend that sex was the dominant impulse, and Adler came with a new argument saying that this quest for recognition, this desire for attention, this desire for distinction is the basic impulse, the basic drive of human life, this drum major instinct. 

What I find particularly moving here, and again, later, when King mentions reading back periodically in Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is that he's not conceiving of his audience, as Eduardo Galeano puts it, as “heads and hands.”  This is a practice or “verification” of Rancière's presupposition of equality. 

 My father was a carrier for the post office, but he didn't limit himself to being merely a set of hands to deliver the mail.  My mother worked as a part time bank teller, and she didn't think her mind was only good for holding onto a monetary sum while she counted out cash to people with her hands.  I don't know where they got the idea that of course they would grapple with the intellectual (always in concert with the emotional on some level), but they've always done this.  Big topics were not discussed in their homes growing up, but they were discussed in our home.  We had no family or friends with any sort of college degrees, and so we had no ideas about how we were 'supposed' to analyze the material we read or listened to or viewed in conjunction with the world around us, past and present.  We just did it, according to what made sense to us, freely debating with one another when points of disagreement arose (often talking at the same time, but somehow understanding each other).  We were in the conversation, whether the accredited intellectuals conversed with us or not.  And anyway, we had their books, and so we could make them 'talk' to us.  But King freely brings us all in on the conversation here.

Near the end, embracing the full equality and humanity in everyone, he emphasizes Jesus' response and its significance:

He said in substance, "Oh, I see, you want to be first. You want to be great. You want to be important. You want to be significant. Well, you ought to be. If you're going to be my disciple, you must be."  But he reordered priorities. And he said, "Yes, don't give up this instinct. It's a good instinct if you use it right …Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be first in love. I want you to be first in moral excellence. I want you to be first in generosity ..."  And he transformed the situation by giving a new definition of greatness … If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new definition of greatness.

And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.  You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.

Many of us have been taught variations of this principle: “the greatest among you shall be your servant.”  But King makes the principle exciting, makes it something to strive for, a way to achieve “greatness,” rather than something to abjectly submit to.  With the overt mention of Plato, Einstein's theory, thermodynamics, and so on,  he simultaneously marries the intellectual to the moral while transcending it, so that they're bound up together.

His conclusion must be listened to or at least read in its entirety with his voice in your head; summarizing it can't begin to do it justice.  Repeatedly, he talks about how he wants to be remembered after he dies.  (And two months after this sermon, he was killed.)  It's a kind of poem, or music even, to my ears. For all my remembered life, I've had that cadence in my head:

I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love somebody. 
                                                                                                                              
I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question.  
                    
I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. 
                    
And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.

I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.

I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say. 

If I can help somebody as I pass along …. then my living will not be in vain.

This was part of my revolutionary education.  I'm not conventionally religious, but this ethic of service and of wanting the legacy of a “committed life” is at the core of any genuinely radical challenge to the individualist, competitive, exploitative status quo.  Many years later, while in my professor's class on the Cuban revolution, I read Che Guevara's “Socialism and Man,” and found a similar emphasis on the cruciality of love and service:

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.  It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality … One must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth in order to avoid dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticism, or an isolation from the masses.  We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity is transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.  (225, 226)

Two of the vitally important revolutions in the twentieth century were the Civil Rights movement and the Cuban Revolution.  Against formidable enemies and a seemingly entrenched status quo, both succeeded.  Their philosophies and practices were far from identical, but in both we find relationship and solidarity driving the determination to 'take' rights for not only themselves, but with the exploited, the 'less than' and 'other.'  Or, as José Martí, the revolutionary from Cuba's first revolution put it, “With the poor of the earth, I want to cast my luck.”

Love, creativity, service, courage, and integrity should drive and define our educational practices and our entire way of being in the world.  Together they nourish the healthiest kind of growth in both the individual and society as a whole. This is what education, art, and life itself is for.

Works Cited

Galeano, Eduardo.  We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991.  New York: Norton, 1992. Print.

Guevara, Ernesto. “Socialism and Man in Cuba.”  Che Guevara Reader.  Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003.

Horton, Myles & Freire, Paulo.  We Make the Road By Walking: Conversations On Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. 

King, Martin Luther.  “The Drum Major Instinct.”  http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/the_drum_major_instinct/ 

Rancière, Jacques.  The Ignorant Schoolmaster.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.