Through the Lens of Writing Abandoned – One Re-Walk in Spring Semester

by Lucy S.

Early February. Writing True?: Chasms Between Me and My Writing

There is something about writing that sometimes gives us the idea, I think, that those words stuck down on the page reveal what their author REALLY thinks and who they REALLY are in far deeper ways than spoken conversation or observation of what a person does. Writing offers a window into a writer’s REAL psyche – into their ‘soul’ – or so we may believe.

Not true, I say – but writing ‘up against’ this idea makes things difficult for a person like me who tries to communicate via the written word, and who keeps in touch with some people in part through writing.

Mid-February. I think I know what I want to do. I was talking with my kids about it today. That conversation was the culmination of thoughts and conversations I had while in California on this last trip – and years of reading, going back to school in these recent years, other conversations, email correspondence, hands on experiences, relationships, dreams from my childhood… my whole life, really. I was surprised at the words coming out of my mouth as I sunk more deeply into the conversation. Not surprised to find that I believe these things, but surprised that I could finally articulate it all in a way that made sense to me and to them. I want to try to get it down in writing now, not to replicate it exactly, but just to explain it all again, hopefully as clearly as I was able to in that conversation.

Before I do that, I want to say one thing. When I went back to school in 2009, I used to tell Dan, my directed study professor (and friend now), that if I could only sit at a computer and type conversations back and forth with him or whoever else, I’d communicate more eloquently than I could in spoken conversation. I told him that I always felt such a chasm between my writing abilities and my speaking abilities. I’d begun to feel that it was insurmountable by then. I still struggle at times, but the last 4 ½ years in college / grad school and now this short time teaching have at least filled in some of the chasm.

I want to teach college classes (not more than two at a time, fall and spring semesters). I want to build a home, probably a straw bale home, as I’ve been wanting to for years. I want to get out of all debt if possible, or minimize it as much as I can. I want to grow so much food that it supplies us with almost all that we eat and gives us extra to share. I want to live in a way that makes us as healthy as possible, and cares for the ecosystems around us and even further away as well by living far more sustainably than we can in mainstream life right now in U.S. society. I want time for relationships. I want to put in a grey water system that filters our laundry and shower water through a series of holding ponds that progressively clean the water (using gravel, water hyacinth plants, and more), and then use that to water our gardens. I want time to write. I want a place where we can bring people we care about to visit and feel replenished and hopeful, a place where they can be healthier, more optimistic, and more willing to try so that they might decide to grow food where they are or build or paint, write, read, dance, take classes, walk more, try to make their lives more fulfilling. And not only that: start a union, or get more active in the one they’re in which may not be doing a good enough job; demand spaces to grow more food in urban areas; demand free education at all levels; demand better wages, less hours, paid vacation for all; make worker-run, worker-owned workplaces; change our energy sources to at least try to heal the massive damage done to the planet. And not only that: connect with others around the country, continent, and world to demand and create better.

These are utopian impulses. They’re utopian on multiple scales – personal, communal, regional, national, and global. They cannot all be fulfilled under a capitalist economic system.  And we have to try anyway. 

For one thing, sometimes we will succeed. When we do, we’ll have a far better quality of life than we would otherwise. We’ll help other living beings (human and otherwise) also have better lives, and they’ll help us, in that great back and forth enacted dialogue that reminds us of why we need each other so much.  These lives – our lives - matter. If they didn’t, no other lives would matter. Imagined lives in the future are just other particular lives, like each of our own. When we succeed, we provide a living example of what is possible. It’s an example other people can see and maybe experience in various ways. My old political science professor often told us about the phenomenon of rising expectations. When people in a particular group or society experience improved lives, they often keep demanding even more improvement. When this happens in a consumerist way by the already affluent, it devastates the planet and the living beings upon whose bodies these goods and services are supplied. But when it happens in more holistic ways, bound to others, grounded in an ethic of mutual care and stewardship, people’s rising expectations and demands might transform the whole system in marvelously positive ways.

There’s another reason to try. Trying can run us smack into the walls of the system’s inherent obstacles to full realization of these utopian dreams and efforts. Even when we achieve some of these goals, we or people we love can still be systemically harmed in too many ways. This is especially true if we seriously care about more than a few people. If many of those people aren’t part of the more privileged in this country or world, the odds for systemic harm go up even more. People we love may be to imprisoned; struggle with substance abuse issues; may lose their jobs and homes; work far too many hours at jobs they hate; graduate from college with massive student loan debt and no decent jobs; work for decades with no vacations, get sick from exposure to the toxins in our environment; ache to take classes or make art or help their community and be blocked by economic forces stealing their lives; be stuck in harmful relationships; suffer racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and other prejudices or systemic attacks; be deported; suffer with depression because of their own losses or the emptiness of life under capitalist logic or the physiological effect of toxins on their own bodies and minds. 

What I’m saying is that we need the Utopian impulse (as Frederic Jameson calls it), not just as a never attempted imagined idea, but as something we try to enact. And at the same time, we need to confront the contradictions of capitalism. We need to confront the dystopia – the nightmares continually unfolding and worsening.

***

Late February.  On a personal as well as scholarly level, at times, I think I’ll never really belong in academia. Maybe I’ll never be deeply accepted by other professors there who can’t understand my experience and frame it inside their own. At times, I want to emphasize to them: I AM NOT YOU.  You haven’t lived my life. You haven’t raised five kids, homeschooled them, lived in the situations we lived in. And I haven’t lived your life.  But then I find myself wanting to insist: I AM YOU. I too love these studies, and I too feel the insecurities of what’s being done to higher education, and I too am a human being who wants friends, who wants some sense of abiding, genuine community in these endeavors. Regardless of to whatever extents ‘I am not them’ and ‘I am them,’ I can’t say I have it worse. I know that too many find themselves struggling on low incomes and/or in tenuous jobs, afraid that they can’t ever forge long-term partner relationships, buy homes, settle somewhere, or have kids if they want them. And even if I have it worse than some, what is there to be done with that? It’s not a basis for relationship. I don’t want pity; I want friendship. And with friendship comes compassion, trust, and some sense of equality. I go around in my head about these thoughts at times.

***

March 1. I don’t regret going back to school. Or sometimes I do, but that’s a passing feeling. I don’t regret it in any lasting sense.

But what I’ve done has been hard on me at times. I was one kind of person, and then I became a different kind of person. Not entirely; I always loved these endeavors. But so much in my life changed.

It’s hard to explain to people how you can be just throbbing with gratitude – overjoyed, excited and interested for each day – but sometimes also in pain because you feel so out of place, and you miss the life you had before – the people you don’t talk with often enough anymore, the small rituals, the open time.

***

Early March. I remember my mom first growing tomato plants in Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert, spraying onion juice (onions thrown in our blender) on them to repel big, voracious tomato worms that could devour a plant in no time. I remember her growing tomatoes, zucchini, and bell peppers in the backyard in Poway, near San Diego, after they moved there. It was only a small taste of what could be, but it made me realize that to do something, you have to jump in and do it. You learn as you go. I saw her tackle big project step by step, such as restuccoing the back of the house in Poway when it needed it. She’d mix up a small amount in empty yogurt container and go out every morning for 15 to 20 minutes, applying it, until she finally finished. When I was staying there, she’d say, “Come out and talk to me while I put this on.”  My mom taught me that people can take on many projects if they see themselves as capable, research how to do it, and work carefully at it. 

My mom taught me that we have choices, and my dad taught me that we don’t have nearly enough of the most important choices. Both lessons are vital.  They emerge from their differing realities and histories. 

***

Mid-March. I dread doing the taxes. Tax, taxes, taxed, taxing. taxiing

***

Late March. For these four and a half years since I went back to school, I’ve been asking myself what the significance is of my academic efforts. At times, I’ve so badly wanted someone else to provide that answer in such a convincing way that it’d work like a religious conversion on me. I’d walk forward mesmerized to the altar of Strong Personhood, washed clean of all doubt. The rest of my days would be a living testimony to why education for everyone matters. This probably sounds like self-absorption and delusions of grandeur, but that is in part because I’ve been battling the flip side of all that – the fear that it was too late, and I can never be the kind of college teacher (or scholar or writer) that I should be to do this work, and that on every front, it was a terrible decision. And although I’m not constitutionally all that prone to the ping-pong of mania and depression (okay, maybe a little, but never in a disabling way – and isn’t this just what it is to be alive?) – these extremes in connection with my academic experience manifest, I think, as something that sounds somewhat like manic-depression (or bi-polar – but honestly, I hate that term, and I’m deeply skeptical about the pathologizing of so much of human experience – all to be remedied with profitable pharmaceutical products).  Where was I?

(French feminist scholar Helene Cixious has said that this is how women talk – in a circular manner.  My mom would vehemently disagree, and my sons would say, “Who says it’s only women?” because they do that, too. I learned about Cixious my first semester back in college in 2009.)

***

Early April. I think the mix of fluctuating anguish, desperation, anxiety, resignation, awkwardness, self-pity, anger, humor, pain over real and perceived exclusions, resilience, somewhat euphoric ups (with all my new plans at various times) – I think all this comes from craving intellectual engagement, camaraderie, and challenge, and at the same time, from the deep connections I feel to the people I've been bound to during my life - and separations from both (the intellectual growth and participation as well as some of my relationships). Some of this makes me think of Virginia Woolf writing that if Shakespeare had had a sister with similar talents and aspirations, she'd have ended up killing herself. Woolf of course genderizes it - and it is grounded in gender, because of the ways even this society functions - but at the same time, it's not. I believe it has to do with people who yearn so badly to do something, to create, to engage with others who UNDERSTAND and feel similarly, but not in a way that leaves loved ones behind and leaves them with their own pain because of their stamped out yearnings and their own awareness of their intelligence. 

***

Mid-April. This morning I woke up thinking that Matt cannot even access most of me and I likewise cannot access most of him.  By this I mean that he cannot access the person I am in my interactions with all other people. I’m different ways with all of them, of course, but nonetheless, I cannot be almost any of those ways with him. And I cannot access who he is as he interacts with a multitude of people. When I say that we live in the same house but are permanently separated from each other, this is true on many levels.

Living like this for so long can make you dislike yourself, or at least what you sometimes fear as “the real you.” You cannot help blurring into the other person’s perspective at times – empathizing with it, imagining how that person experiences you – and figuring out or at least thinking that you know what is unlikeable in yourself.

We both experience that with each other. Knowing we have that effect – eating away at the other person’s sense of self-esteem – deepens the damage to each of our feelings about ourselves. We know that our effect on at least this other person is negative. This is a terrible thing to have in common. Maybe it is possible to become friends someday when we don’t live in the same house. We both forgive quite easily, and that is a better thing to have in common.

***

Late-Mid-April. I’m trying to help us adjuncts where I teach unionize. I’m continually emailing somebody back or initiating emails to one or several adjuncts, urging people to join us at the next meeting or begging people to tell us when they can make it so we can schedule a good time for the next one. For going on three months, I’ve been meeting other adjuncts individually, going out with the organizers to approach adjuncts after their classes, wracking my brain to think of ways to strengthen our chances. I figured out how to get a website up. I wanted the site so adjuncts could take courage from seeing people sign the solidarity page and from seeing posts, interviews, and resource lists gradually added. Many fear that if the administration decides we won’t back down, they’ll figure out some way to eliminate our positions, even if they aren’t legally allowed to retaliate for organizing.

I don’t know if we’re going to have enough cards signed by the end of the semester to initiate an election for fall, but we’re trying.

I want this union because it is the only way forward I can see for us as a group.  and for many of our academic disciplines to survive. And I want it because I’ve been waiting for over four years to fight effectively for this cause. At my undergraduate university, I came to understand the situation contingent faculty were in because I studied under several during those last three semesters after I went back to finish the B.A.  I can’t say that I went into teaching in order to fight for this cause, but I can’t quite disentangle that motivation from my others.

 ***

Late April. We all “believe” in capitalism because we all enact it. We live it. As Pascal says, kneel down, put your hands together and pray, and you will believe. Belief is a habit more than it is a disinterested act of reasoning. We believe what we DO. As long as we keeping DOING capitalism, we will believe in it. The problem is that we don’t know how to survive if we stop ‘doing’ it when we live in a society where everyone else is ‘doing’ it. How do we all stop believing at once and start doing something different? How do we get beyond its logic? Why is it that no matter what we say to critique it, our critique stops where our bank account and wallet begin? We talk about ‘boundaries’ and ‘needing our space’ as if this lingo from capitalist psychology would provide insight on how to proceed. What do WE who are so colonized by capitalist ideology know about healthy versus unhealthy boundaries? Why did we not put up boundaries to keep capitalism from infiltrating our relationships with each other? Weren’t those the ‘boundaries’ we REALLY needed? Which ‘spaces’ do we really need? How about space to create, to share with people, to grow food, to teach and learn, to drink clean water, to not have everything turned into a product to be sold to or by me? I need THAT space. Where is it? How about space where I don’t have to feel the precariousness of my own and other people’s situations all the time? Where is THAT kind of ‘safe space’? Space to LIVE while we’re alive. Why must we live with fear chewing at our edges or core so often? Or why is the only antidote to that fear a sick acquiescence in some way – many ways, really – with devastation of other lives and our own – and of our whole planet?  But the fear remains; we know that when we stop acquiescing, our precariousness instantly seeps back in through the brittle protective shell of that cracked and broken acquiescence.

end

noun:
1.the last part or extremity, lengthwise, of anything that is longer than it is 

wide or broad: the end of a street; the end of a rope.

2.a point, line, or limitation that indicates the full extent, degree, etc., of 

something; limit; bounds:kindness without end; to walk from end to end of a 

city.

3.a part or place at or adjacent to an extremity: at the end of the table; the west end of town.

4.the furthermost imaginable place or point: an island at the very end of the 

world.

5.termination; conclusion: The journey was coming to an end.

We are in the end of the semester. At fourteen weeks long, not counting spring break or finals week, it feels longer than it is wide or broad.

What is the connection between “end” as an edge, “end” as an aim or purpose, and “end” as a conclusion?

***

May 1. May Day (May Day, May Day?)

Mayday is an emergency code word used internationally as a distress signal invoice procedure radio communications. It derives from the French venez m'aider, meaning 'come help me' https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Mayday_(distress_signal).html

Seelonce Mayday or Seelonce Distress means that the channel may only be used by the vessel in distress and the coastguard (and any other vessels they ask for assistance in handling the emergency). The channel may not be used for normal working traffic until 'seelonce feenee' is broadcast. (Wikipedia)

Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.

In the late nineteenth century, the working class was in constant struggle to gain the 8-hour work day. Working conditions were severe and it was quite common to work 10 to 16 hour days in unsafe conditions. Death and injury were commonplace at many work places and inspired such books as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Jack London's The Iron Heel. As early as the 1860's, working people agitated to shorten the workday without a cut in pay, but it wasn't until the late 1880's that organized labor was able to garner enough strength to declare the 8-hour workday. This proclamation was without consent of employers, yet demanded by many of the working class. http://www.iww.org/history/library/misc/origins_of_mayday

Solid, singular May Day – once – a demand, a stand.

The repeating May Day, May Day, May Day – the call for help.

Just when you think things are getting better, they may suddenly take a turn for the worse.

 ***

Mid-May. I have almost made it through the second semester teaching. Friday we meet again for the last time – I may even bring food, since my class meets during lunch time – and then I meet with students individually to try to help them with papers – and then I grade and submit the final grades on May 31.

During this semester, I taught a course I designed for the first time, a literature / composition course in American Idealism. I worked to help get a union off the ground for those of us who are adjunct instructors. I and my family lost our dog who lived with us for 15 years. I think I also lost a friendship.

At 11:30 this morning after I’d finished meeting with a student

Second to the Last Week

Take Yourself Seriously

Word Failures

What can you do when you find that the more you say, the less you manage to convey? 

I think that my deepest religion has been language. My core faith has been in words.  Enough of the right (truest) words might change everything for the better. And the wrong (false) words can land you in purgatory or hell.

Talking back always got me into trouble. But the worst impulse – the one that went beyond defending myself (which I felt proud of) to using words to hurt another (which made me so ashamed) – that one always got me into trouble with myself.

 ***

Late May. There are people in our lives who play such key roles – our parents, grandparents, kids, a small number of close friends, our partner, siblings, and sometimes others. And of course to have a humane relationship, we must engage with them beyond the idea of a role; we want to relate as specific people to each other. Yet still, if something goes wrong in those relationships, it's devastating because whole parts of our lives and ourselves have fused to those people.

We filed for a union election. We made it this far at least.

***

End of May. I have to submit the grades. One of my favorite students – irritatingly self-centered at times, too sulky, lazy at times, but a brilliant writer – never sent her last essay. I kept emailing. She would not respond. Her points add up to a D. I think of everything I might have done differently in the past four weeks. I might have saved her. Or do we never save anyone? I think we save one another all the time, or we fall short of it. I hope she is okay. I don’t know if I will keep teaching after this. Everything is too much.

May 31. To share with my students next fall: Close-reading can be a profoundly ethical practice that changes how we interact with others beyond the text.

“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” Thich Nhat Hanh

We pay money to counselors just so they will sit and listen carefully to us and respond from that place of careful attention. What would happen if we brought that deep attention to more of our interactions with one another?