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.
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.
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