Two
posts that I’ve merged:
Writing Troubles
The
trouble with this genre – the nonfiction personal narrative via blog post – at
least in my hands – is that it is more a hybrid of confession and testimony
than it is informative or theoretical in any scholarly sense or even ‘positive
thought for the day’ (not my forte to be sure). Why would that be a problem, you
ask – well, it is a problem because my life of course fuses to and entangles
with other people’s lives. And I dislike the various instantiations of dragging
relationships out before a public (though this is a pretty tiny public) – the
talk shows of the 1990s, the ‘real world’ shows, the sensational interviews
with celebrities about intimate aspects of their lives… I hate the inevitable
search for ever more touching or shocking stories and the false sense that we
might ‘know’ these celebrities via their public confessions about their private
lives, and I hate even more the possibility that after enough documentation of
some lives, maybe we do ‘know’ these people – but what does ‘knowing’ even mean
under those conditions?
And
so what weighs on me the most often feels off-limits to write about here. Those
troubles belong more in a private journal, I guess – and I kept one for almost
thirty years, starting in my teens, until I went back to finish my B.A. and the
habit dried up within that first or second semester (I’d have to look back to
see the last entry in the last of those thick spiral notebook journals), and it
partly became my course papers, and my honors thesis, and…
I
wrote earlier: “How is it that a person
can get stuck trying to get out of a pattern by performing that pattern over
and over again?”
Idealism
I
taught the last class in American Idealism on Friday.
I’d
had something planned, but it seemed pretty lackluster to me. I thought that
was the best I could manage because something happened a couple of weeks before
that… I'm trying to find the right words here and keep deleting them… hurt. That’s enough to say.
But
sometimes the universe outside or inside us places a gift before or within us.
That happened Friday morning. I woke up
for no reason at 4. Then I remembered the hurt. Plodding to the kitchen for water,
rubbing three fingers against the center of my forehead to push back the pain
and anxiety too near the surface there, I wondered if
this or its aftermath would go on for weeks, months. Years? Then that burst of the so much better idea
for my last class showed up, unsought, unexpected. I paused, stared out at my internal
vision half-smiling in the dark living room as if somebody had leapt out with
a welcomed “Surprise!” – and hurried back to my room to write it further into
being.
What
follows are my notes and links to videos I showed in part or in their entirety –
and then some further thoughts. The references to papers (“John’s paper…”) are
references to my students’ papers, some of which they read out loud to the
class with the paper also showing on the projection screen for others to listen
to and read. I am sharing them knowing
that they can’t replace an actual presentation and that many words and lines
are only evocative at best here.
Class Notes –
Last Day – May 16, 2014
Strains
of American Idealism:
Are they all bound together in the attempt to do
better – to conquer adversity, personally and collectively?
(John’s paper on his grandfather)
What part do ethics have?
FREEDOM
Individual:
Zora Neale Hurston “I love myself when I am
laughing…”
Megan’s paper on happiness’
Thoreau in Walden
or “Life Without Principle” “I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not
learn what it had to teach, and not, when it came time to die, discover that I
had not lived” (Walden)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance:” “Trust
thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine
providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the
connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves
childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the
absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands,
predominating in all their being.”
Audre Lorde Burst
of Light Ithaca: Firebrand Books,
1988. Print. “This is my life.
Every hour is a possibility not to be banked. These days are not a preparation for living,
some necessary but essentially extraneous divergence from the main course of my
living. They are my life … I am living
every particular day no matter where I am, not in what pursuit. It's not as if I'm in struggle over here
while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living
it again” (152).
Collective:
Frederick Douglass: abolition of slavery;
emancipation
Joan Baez “Oh Freedom” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNzmiowUXiQ
MLK “I Have a Dream” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs
start at 15:00
EQUALITY
Frederick Douglass
MLK “I Have a Dream”
Lincoln Gettysburg Address
Women’s struggles for equality – to vote, to work
for equal wages, to have equal access to education, careers, political life
Cristina’s 1st paper on the importance of
a female protagonist in O Pioneers
Democracy – efforts to create this, even in this
class space
Civil Rights
PROSPERITY
Individual:
Benjamin Franklin
Austin’s hilarious critique of Franklin’s
Autobiography (that made me laugh when I was feeling low)
Essays about their grandfathers by Burke, Derek, and
Grant
The Winter
of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck and its moral conflicts
Collective:
“A rising tide lifts all boats”
Camille’s paper on raising the minimum wage
Unionizing
Jack Conroy The
Disinherited
“I no longer felt shame at being seen at such work
as I would have once, and I knew that the only way for me to rise to something
approximating the grandiose ambitions of my youth would be to rise with my
class, with the disinherited; the brick-setters, the flivver tramps, boomers,
and outcasts pounding their ears in flophouses. Every jibe at any of the paving
gang, every covert or open sneer by prosperous looking bystanders infuriated me
but did not abash me. The fat on my bones melted away under the glare of the
burnished sun, and the fat in my mind dissolved, too. It dripped in sweat off
the end of my nose onto the bricks, dampened the sand. I felt weak as from the
loss of blood, but also resigned. I felt like a man whose feet have been
splashing about in ooze and at last have come to rest on a solid rock, even
though it lay far below his former level” (265).
PROGRESS
/ CHANGE:
Mike’s presentation of “The Times They Are
A-Changing” by Bob Dylan
Reaching outward – what is America / the Americas?
RESISTANCE
TO OPPRESSION:
Civil Rights movement
Malcolm X
Protests
Strikes
Unionizing
Occupy
Occupy Homes
American Revolution
Frederick Douglass
FDR “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”
Resistance to wars
Prisoners’ rights movements
Bonnie Honig – making demands and staging rights
that are always considered illegitimate (Democracy
and the Foreigner)
Thoreau: Civil Disobedience “Let your life be
a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
Camille’s paper arguing for raising the minimum wage
and that workers’ need to stand up together to make it happen
Katie’s 1st paper on Alexandra resisting
institutionalization and colonization in her relationship with Ivar in O Pioneers
John’s 3rd paper arguing that inhumane
immigration policies must change
Burke’s 3rd paper also examining cruelty
in immigration policies
CARE /
RELATIONSHIPS
Personal
Relationships:
Care for oneself and one’s life: Austin’s 1st
paper on surviving a car crash
Valorization of family, romantic love, and
friendship
American Dream (home in the small town or suburbs?)
Kristen Ann’s paper on her father
Erin’s paper on farming and family
Connor's 1st paper on Emil and Marie in O Pioneers
Grant’s 2nd paper examining the way money
and relationships work in The Winter of
Our Discontent
Jimenez family's care for each other
Alexis’s 1st paper on Alexandra as a
mothering figure
Jack’s 1st paper on his father
Nick’s 2nd paper on ways to raise a child
Chase’s paper from last semester on his grandfather
and him
O Pioneers by Willa Cather
Judith Butler. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence : “It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then
simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part
of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not
only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without
you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not
know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to
discover that “I” have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I
have lost “in” you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a
relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to
be conceived as the tie by which
those terms are differentiated and related” (22). "Let's face it. We're
undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something."
(23)
David Graeber. Debt:
the First 5000 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).
Huck and Jim’s friendship in Huckleberry Finn
Communal:
Paul Farmer in Haiti
Derek’s 3rd paper on Paul Farmer and the
importance of relationships
Conroy's quote in The Disinherited (I will rise with
my class)
JFK “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
what you can do for your country”
Theodor Adorno “Education After Auschwitz” Critical Models (197-198) “This entire sphere is animated by an
alleged ideal that also plays a considerable role in the traditional education:
the ideal of being hard …. This
educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting
about it, is utterly wrong …. Being hard, the vaunted quality education should
inculcate, means absolute indifference toward pain as such. In this the
distinction between one’s own pain and that of another is not so stringently
maintained. Whoever is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others
as well and avenges himself for the pain whose manifestations he was not
allowed to show and had to repress. This mechanism must be made conscious, just
as an education must be promoted that no longer sets a premium on pain and the
ability to endure pain."
Chase’s 1st paper on his team experience
– The Comeback
John Berger. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. New
York: Vintage, 2007. Print. “When somebody has the opportunity to leave a camp
and cross the rubble to slightly better accommodation, it can happen that they
turn it down and choose to stay. In the camp, they are a member, like a finger,
of an endless body. Moving out would be amputation. The stance of undefeated despair works like
this” (18).
Oliner, Samuel and Pearl. The
Altruistic Personality, Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Germany: What Led Ordinary Men
and Women to Risk Their Lives on Behalf of Others? New York: The Free
Press, 1988. (p. 249): "What
distinguished rescuers was not their lack of concern with self, external
approval, or achievement, but rather their capacity for extensive relationships
- their stronger sense of attachment to others and their feeling of
responsibility for the welfare of others...
Language / communication as communal care:
Cristina’s 2nd paper on the access we have to others through their
language and the culture carried in it
MLK "If I can help somebody, then my living
will not be in vain" start at 35:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBiFnDuCJIU
FAITH
Kristen Ann’s 2nd paper
Alexis’s 3rd paper
Jimenez family
Jimenez, Francisco. Reaching Out. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. “We were
to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it
to our lives. I chose the “Allegory of the Cave” in Plato’s Republic. I compared my childhood of
growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark
cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the
captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day
after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and
living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no
electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our
tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I
explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified
with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to
return to the cave and help others to break free” (120-121).
Liberation Theology: Matthew 25 – to the extent that
you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me. A preferential
option for the poor.
“NATURE”
Tori’s paper on her transformative experience in
Boundary Waters
Thoreau in Walden
Our national park systems; John Muir, Yosemite…
The oceans
ART
Testimony
and Critique
Thoreau in Walden
“Life Without Principle” “Civil
Disobedience”
Mike’s 1st paper on the problem with
wanting to escape yourself in cruises and resorts where everything is done for
you
Natalie’s 1st paper about student loan
debt
Connor’s 2nd paper on American idealism as too much fiction
Zitkala-Sa’s trilogy of her experiences in Indian
boarding schools (an opposition to Pratt’s own imperialistic idealism of “kill
the Indian – save the man”)
American
Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings. New
York: Penguin, 2003. “For the white
man’s papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit. For these same papers
I had forgotten the healing power in trees and brooks. On account of my
mother’s simple view of life, and my lack of any, I gave her up, also …. Like a
slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and God. I was shorn
of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love for home and friends…” “But few there are who have paused to
question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of
civilization.” (112-113, end of trilogy)
Chowdhury’s essay
Jack’s 2nd paper critiquing the terms
some use for those who have immigrated to the U.S. without governmental
permission
Katie’s 3rd paper dealing with the
difficult topic of males who are raped
Alexis’s 2nd paper about eating disorders
and how deadly they can be
Natalie’s 2nd paper about trading morals
for riches in Winter of Our Discontent
D Watkin’s essay “Too Poor for Pop Culture”
Frederick Douglass’s depictions of the bloody
whippings and so many atrocities under slavery
Robert F. Kennedy - announcing to a crowd in
Indianapolis the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. – April 4, 1968. “My
favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.”
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.”
Our
Ability to Imagine, Craft, and Create Better
Amir Hussain’s poetry and visit to our class – a
bridge between writing and reading poetry
Aurora Levins Morales “Child of the Americas”
Langston Hughes “I Too Sing America”
Michael Lee’s spoken word performance as
an example of Art (testimony, imagining and creating better) and Education
(another strain of American Idealism) (and of course we see how all these
bleed into each other in so many ways, all these strains) and Care (Personal
Relationships)... (We’ll return to this at the end.)
Close
Engagement with /Relationship with Someone's Art in a Way that Itself Can
Become Art
A great essay about art – that close observation,
close-reading, magnifying…
Alexis’s 1st paper and so many of all
your papers that engaged deeply with our readings
Randall Jarrell, “The Obscurity of the Poet:” “Art
matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most
nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. From
Christ to Freud we have believed that, if we know the truth, the truth will set
us free: art is indispensable because so much of this truth can be learned
through works of art and through works of art alone …..And all these things, by
their nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things
ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not
have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as
anything can …. One of the oldest, deepest, and most nearly conclusive
attractions of democracy is manifested in our feeling that through it not only
material but also spiritual goods can be shared: that in a democracy bread and
justice, education and art, will be accessible to everybody.”
EDUCATION
Jennica’s 1st paper on better
possibilities in education, including Finnish schools
Rachael’s 2nd paper on her writing and
reading process, which in turn educates others
Heather Williams
Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.
Myles Horton – helping people know what they know –
Highlander Folk School
Post World War 2 mass expansion of the college
system
Experimental Community Education
Jack’s 1st paper on his father
Mike’s 3rd paper (what we are to do with
our education)
What we are all doing here together
Stephen Brookfield. Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic
Classrooms. “These classrooms may be
one of the few arenas in which students can reasonably experience how
democratic conversation feels. Taking discussion seriously moves the center of
power away from the teacher and displaces it in continuously shifting ways
among group members. It parallels how we think a democratic system should work
in the wider society.”
George Dawson Life
Is So Good Learned to read at age 98
Giselle – Cuban literacy campaign of 1961- young
teens going to live with peasant families, to work with them and teach them to
read over the course of months
Me going back to school (the very quick story)
All of your efforts
“You have to do something as well as you possibly
can and live your way through that process to find out who you will become.”
(advice to me from someone)
Dan: “Our efforts, if we allow ourselves to be true
and if we acknowledge that our work is important, must be a constant struggle
to stave off the disaster that is a democracy without art, without true
literacy, without a full education. Keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.
We – the collective we, the democratic we – need artists and thinkers like you.
We need your Excellence.”
Michael Lee’s spoken word performance http://english.umn.edu/ugrad/StudentStoriesMichaelLee.html as
an example of Art (testimony, imagining and creating better) and Education
(another strain of American Idealism) (and of course we see how all these
bleed into each other in so many ways, all these strains) and Care (Personal
Relationships and Care on a Broader Scale by seeing those lost loved ones in so
many people we meet)…
***
That was it. When I told them this was my first year
teaching, some of them opened their mouths in surprise. We talked a bit more.
They applauded.
I sat at the desk while some came up to express
their feelings about me as a teacher and our class. I hope we all did well together.
***
One of my students wrote an excellent essay
critiquing American idealism which I had him read to the class on the second to
the last day. He began by exploring the question of what it is. Not the
American Dream, he said; that is a subset of it. He wrote:
Dictionary.com defines idealism as “the tendency to represent things in
their ideal forms, rather than as they are.” (Idealism). This goes to show that
idealism is fiction. When this newfound knowledge is applied to American
idealism we get a definition somewhere along the lines of American idealism is
the manner of thinking about America as much better than it is. Examples of
this are the belief that anyone can reach success if they work hard and are
determined, the United States of America is the best country in the world, and
the thought that happiness can be obtained as simply as a few material objects.
He went on to argue his point with evidence that
these premises are fictitious. We need his critique.
We also need the utopian vision and the effort to
make that vision real.
Here are two other definitions:
“the attitude of a person who believes that it is
possible to live according to very high standards of behavior and honesty.”
“the practice of forming ideals or living
under their influence.”
The only pop-psychology book I ever read and liked
was one my cousin Carolyn had; I liked it because I was 18 and hadn’t read any
others, but also because the basic premise is good: that you change by
going and acting "as if." Maybe the two authors had read Pascal or
just found their way to the same truth. In my pedagogy group in April, we read
Bourdieu invoking Pascal, saying that "habit makes us believe
things." I think this is the only way that people can make themselves into
a new way of being - by going and acting "as if" they are the way
they want to be. That's the truth we get from Emerson and Thoreau, too - as in
Thoreau's famous claim that "if one advances confidently in the direction
of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will
meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
***
I will not write about that particular hurt here –
it is private. And I won’t say that after that last class day, I moved
unwaveringly forward in enacting who I want to be. But I am hoping I can. I hope to transcend troubles – writing and otherwise. Idealism in at
least some of its definitions fuses with hope. In that way, then, I am an
idealist.
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