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?

2 am Monday / Tuesday

by Lucy S.

I've been up cleaning my room - something I never do anymore at this time of night. Years ago, I sometimes had these bursts of energy that I used for cleaning and organizing my domestic space. But I've been eating no grains and in general, just not eating much, which - done right - gives me more energy.

 And Matt and I have been arguing more lately, instead of just staying out of each other's ways.  Yesterday there was one, then another today, then another tonight. It's like the bad old days. Not really, but these carry the echo of all the old ones forward, and I feel desperate again to finally solve this dilemma. I'm trying to figure out if I can solve it financially, and then figure out which parts aren't financial.

(Why is it that these different pieces of living are always written about so segregated from each other?  Home care; food and health; personal relationships; our financial lives...)

I've returned to reading about adult education as I try to begin a book or even just a decent scholarly article that blends my experience as a non-traditional student with other stories, poetry, critical theory, feminist theory, and liberatory pedagogy (if any pedagogy can even be truly liberatory in an oppressive system). Yesterday, I was reading from Stephen Brookfield's The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching.and this passage struck me, a passage that wouldn't be found in texts that focus solely on 'how to succeed as a nontraditional student!!' or policy guides for community college administrators, or how to run your class. :

Even the most private and traumatic tearings in the fabric of personal relationships, such as divorce, should be understood as social and political phenomena. The restlessness and unfulfilled desires that lie behind a divorce are manifestations of the receptive orientation that predispose people to want more and more with no prospect of achieving anything more than temporary satisfaction – the eternally expectant ones forever doomed to be the eternally disappointed ones, as Fromm put it. Alternatively, divorce, unhappiness, and isolation are the result of people needing to leave their home communities in search of work that will provide them with the financial means to satisfy their appetite for the commodities they feel are necessary to create the good life. (174)

Reading it again now, I wonder how to make knowing this make a difference. How does this awareness translate into what I do in my life? This insight would have been especially useful about twenty years ago. But there must be a way to apply it now. How do I individually apply insight that by its nature is collective?


Lately I feel that I cannot take another statement which in one way or another tells me what is wrong with me or in some way conveys how irritating I am. Yesterday's flash of an argument began because Matt had put a package of uncooked chicken in the refrigerator three days before and I said it needed to be cooked right away. He said the package said it was good until May 30. I said the sell by date didn't mean it could sit in the refrigerator for eight days. I said this matter-of-factly - not yelling, but not in an overtly friendly tone, either. He argued the point and I then said I couldn't believe he wouldn't know this since he's cooked chicken for years. One of the kids asked how long it was good in the refrigerator and he said, "I guess about five minutes according to her." I said, "Why do you get mad at me for being the messenger from some part of reality?" He got madder and I said something like that again, but I was starting to cry so I walked out of there. Trying to transcribe it now, it seems trivial, and depressing in that very triviality, but that is how these arguments tend to be. In a different frame of mind, I'd be irritated but could roll with it. Not lately, though.

I've looked up the chicken info: ."Fresh or raw chicken should be selected just before checking out of the grocery store. It should feel cold to the touch when purchased. Put chicken packages in disposable plastic bags (if available) to contain any leaking juices which may cross-contaminate cooked foods or produce. Go right home after food shopping and immediately put the chicken in the refrigerator if you plan to use it within 1-2 days. If you won't be using the chicken by day 2, freeze it."
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/food-safety-education/get-answers/podcasts-archive/food-safety-at-home/CT_Index141

I will copy and paste the same information into an email to him (and to my kids who live here). I think he'll be irritated that 'I was right.' But I don't any of us want to get food-poisoning in order to prop up the ego he's invested in this issue. And I didn't want to be audited to preserve his ego or the fledgling relationship with a woman who "does accounting" (who he'd given our tax info to and who'd taken thousands of dollars in illegitimate write-offs before I ruined it all by saying the deductions were wrong).

At times over the years I've argued to Matt and others that these too are feminist issues - that the expectation that I should deliver any statements of that sort with lots of smiles and warmth is rooted in ideas about how women are supposed to communicate -with lots of deference and subservience - feminine forms of a sort of "Aw shucks" style.  Matt, meanwhile, can communicate matter-of-factly or can keep raising his voice, and this is either just 'how he is' or something I've made him do.

I believe this is sexist, but then my confidence about it always bleeds out. What if I really do sound irritating? Why can't I deliver the information about how long uncooked chicken can safely be in the refrigerator in a likable way? How do I know that I'm not just using feminism to justify my side of things in these situations?

This too is a problem with oppressive social relations. They make us doubt ourselves - both the would-be oppressors and the would-be oppressed. We bounce around in limbo.


And so I am acting on what I can. This week I will finish and submit grades, thoroughly clean and organize my room (and other parts of the house), work in the garden, and stay off grains. My food is the same most days now. Salmon and green beans cooked in coconut oil for breakfast. Some coconut oil and then a grapefruit for lunch. A couple pieces of chicken with garlic and basil for dinner. When the greens growing outside get bigger, I'll eat some with the chicken. I'd prefer to be vegetarian or even vegan, but every time I try, I start to gain weight and feel lousy. And that's on basic organic food - not junk food. Also, I think I'm allergic to yeast, going by some intense reactions I've had (trouble swallowing or breathing, heart racing, dizziness).

And I already changed my light bulb in the lamp next to my bed back to an incandescent because I've had pressure in my head and shakiness for months, and in the search for a solution, I stumbled on some university studies showing that both LED light and fluorescent light can make some people have seizures. Who knows if this has anything to do with me?  Who knows if it's only a placebo effect that it's gone away since I changed the bulb?

But if you talk about these things too much in the wrong circles, people think you're just a hypochondriac or narcissistic woman obsessed with herself. So I try to just unobtrusively do what I do and avoid what I feel sick on.

I'm going to look at apartment rentals for either me or Matt. Maybe it is time to just act in this as well.


9 am now, and I've been up for an hour. That late night room-cleaning and writing made me sleep till 8 instead of 6 or 7. But I want to wake up every morning by 5:30. It's overcast. My room has a door to the backyard, and it's almost always open from May through September. If we sell the house or if I move out, I will miss hearing so many birds every morning and sleeping with the door open. I'll miss hearing the water rush over the rocks in the small pond my friends Gloria and Martha (who are partners and are in every way that counts family to us) helped us dig in and set up when they visited in May 2007. I sometimes feel spoiled for having this pond where I can look at it while I sit on my bed writing (or having it anywhere in my yard). Who am I to have this pond, I think. I never grow so used to it that I don't see or hear it. I often look out at it. The birds come to it often. They take up positions on the rocks partway down the waterfall.

The Trouble with Idealism

by Lucy S.

                                      

Yeah, so I’m an idealist (as I said in my last post) when it comes to hoping and trying to act on that hope – try being the key word. Sometimes that “trying” manifests as action – as DOING – and sometimes it manifests as deferring action while I “try” to think of an answer or I wait for what I “hope” will be an answer. (I used to have Yoda’s “Do or do not – there is no try” as my screen saver about ten years ago…) I live at some crazy hybrid intersection between being a mom to kids that are now almost all raised (yet feeling responsible still to keep us safe); my longtime ties to the close friends and family members of my life; plain-speaking that calls out what I think is bullshit (cusswords sprinkled in liberally); ‘practicality’ in terms of home projects, growing food, figuring out how to make it financially; impracticality in trying to hold onto so many contradictory ideals and aims that I get paralyzed into not solving major problems; love for my experiences in formal education; anger at the exclusivities of formal education and the erasure of people’s cultures and relationships in various ways; my ongoing love for Thoreau; my chronic yearning for California… That’s enough – I’m getting lost trying to list it all. Who cares? Justin says that to me sometimes to snap me out of whatever knots I get tied up in. WHO CARES?????!!!  Sometimes we email that to each other and laugh about it.

It’s not like I just live in daydreams, of course. This past school year, I taught college classes for the first time, got approved for two next fall, and helped organize an adjunct union for us at our institution. Tomorrow we file for an election. Tomorrow we also meet with the president of the college. Talking with someone like that intimidates the hell out of me – or it always used to. I’m hoping I’ll do better now.

That reminds me: I don’t write like I talk, and the chasm between the two troubles me because I start to wonder if I’m full of shit when I write and who this persona is on the page and why it's so hard to write true, and I also wonder why I can’t speak the way I write – why my brain can’t produce the words unless they’re flying from my fingers on the keyboard onto the screen in front of me. I wonder yet some more whether my writing itself is just a way to write my way to feeling good or vent all the despair and – either way – not solve the main problem.

The main problem, I would say, is that Matt and I need to live separately. We’ve needed to for so long that the deferral has permanently damaged both of us and used up too much of our lives. Not that we didn’t each find ways to live with some dignity and happiness anyway, but we each deserved better.  Our lives have been so constrained by our economic realities and our deeply ingrained sense of responsibility for each other’s basic security and our kids’ wellbeing in a system that can be too brutal – and man, do we know it – that we have waited, and waited, and waited, year after year for the right time to finally fully separate.

Doing the taxes this past spring brought it all slamming back at us again.  I hate who we become in these arguments.  He had someone he was romantically involved with unofficially do our taxes (but not file them) without talking to me about it, and when it came time to do them and he gave me this news, I was so pissed off that my head started pounding and my heart raced, and what is already a stressful experience got much worse. I asked him what right he had to give her my social security number without asking me. I referred to her in such a juvenile way – as his “latest infatuation person” (how I hate that I used such a dumb term). He meanwhile probably felt dominated because what I said maybe sounded like an interrogation and lecture. I felt that he’d disrespected my labor doing those taxes for years, and my private information. She said we could take huge write-offs that I said weren’t legitimate; he said she did accounting and did I think I knew more than her; I said I’d done our taxes for years and knew the write-offs were way out there; it went on for hours and into the next day; finally, he checked with the government and found out I was right. A hollow vindication for me. That old feeling I hate so much came back – just wanting to disappear. He felt humiliated. I don’t want to participate in humiliating him. I don’t want ANY of this. I just want out of these interactions.

In those two days, I kept thinking I didn’t care anymore about the unfairness of him working so hard on this house for years and ending up in an apartment, and now I knew I WOULD keep the house and I would stop worrying about his side of things… I felt the ancient anger revive – condemnations about how he hadn’t really “tried” all these years to talk, to have any kind of genuine relationship… But that is such a dead-end line of thought, and I detest the moralizing it always leads me into – the thoughts about how people “should” try to make their partner relationships work and make them last…. blah blah blah. Yeah, sounds great, we all should, and now back in our actual lives – what happens when they DON’T? Do we beat ourselves and each other down with what “should” be?

I do want Matt to be happy – happy somewhere in his own life, or at least I ‘wish him the best’ while not wanting to be involved in the details of however he wants to strive for that happiness.  And I cannot – I just CANNOT – solve my situation on his back. I can’t see him end up with no home after all the work he’s done on this house and the others – including the Aguanga house. At the same time, I’m close to my kids and they want me to stay in the house with them – and so we have remained stuck – but most of all, we haven’t had enough of an income to keep us all going in two separate places, even if one is an apartment.

Our total income (Matt’s and mine) last year was the highest it’s ever been: in the lower $40ks. But Jonathan’s working at Starbucks, so he pitches in, and Justin does when he can, but has had trouble making enough some months. Interdependence sounds great – I believe in it… But there’s something awful about needing your kids to pitch in so that you – the mom and dad – can separate. Even if we sold the house, the rent on a three bedroom apartment (if one of us had even just Sean and Ryan with us) would be more than we pay on this house payment.  

Kevin’s the only one who doesn’t live with us; he lives with friends further into the city and is working swing shift at a factory now.

Idealism’s great, but the material profoundly shapes our lives.  One way or another, people have to meet their material needs.  And the need to do so can erode our psychological and physical health.

The other day at our union meeting a guy from their media group wanted to ask me more about my experience. I said I’d been a working-class person, gone back to school, graduated with honors, did the master’s with a fellowship there, and now I’m teaching.  Another guy said he wanted to talk to someone with more years in teaching, which was understandable. At the same time, I knew I wasn’t making my point clear.

So I said something close to this:

The point of my story isn’t self-pity. I’m not saying my story is worse than others; this is wrong whether it’s someone like me going back or someone continuing on to grad school in their 20s. What I’m saying is I’ve raised five kids; I went to the U, graduated summa, then did the master’s here; now I’m teaching, and if I had to just wait longer to make decent wages – if there was an end in sight – fine. But there is no end in sight.  The only end in sight is the union.

Most of the people I come from – my family and longtime friends – didn’t go to college, and when I went back and graduated, some of them were really proud of me. Then came grad school, and they said, “Wow, a MASTER’S.”  But when they realized how low the pay is and the situation, they were shocked. Some didn’t understand why I’d even bothered. So it impacts the people I come from, too, when they think college doesn’t seem to do much. Not that it should just be for money; I wouldn’t have gone into this if I wanted high wages, but I should at least make pay I can live on. My son makes more per hour at Starbucks. My best friend was making $17 an hour last I knew (maybe more now) with benefits, and she has a high school diploma. And she DESERVES her pay; she works hard. I don’t need to make more than her. But I can’t even make the same. I get a check every two weeks for $420. My other son started reading adult history books when he was nine, and is maybe the most intellectual of us all – but he gave up on college. The thing he’d have studied was history, and when he realized the job outlook is a disaster for teaching college history, what was the sense in continuing?  My youngest son says he doesn’t know if he’ll go to college and I don’t know if I should try to get him to go. I find myself wanting to say to him, whatever you do, don’t major in English.

What they do to me affects my kids and the people I come from.

Partway into me talking, one of the organizers started writing down some of what I was saying. They were all staring at me. The media guy said, “Can you say that again or write it down?” Another organizer said she had no idea until a couple years ago that the situation was so bad for so many people teaching college. She shook her head and said it was terrible.

Afterward, walking down the street by myself to my vehicle, I started to cry. I’ve told the story in various ways, written about it here – but telling it succinctly and straightforwardly made me hear it for what it is without worrying about whether I was 'feeling sorry for myself.'

Back at my California community college, teaching English literature and writing was my dream.  When you think of how the vast majority of people in this world not only don’t get to make their most cherished dreams come true, but work jobs they hate or they can’t meet their own or their loved ones’ basic needs or can’t even read or write, I am lucky. I should be ecstatic. At times I am ecstatic. But I’ve been so scared that it would all just go away.

When you carry a dream around for so many years, you can get to feeling like it can’t really come true.  When I was 12 and 13, I learned to ride horses with my friend Marsie – she had a horse – and I started reading horse care books from the library, making lists of tack I’d need, scouring the newspapers for horses for sale, and then I’d tell my mom about it all. One time when Marsie was over, my mom said, “Lucy, stop dreaming. You’re never gonna get a horse.” (Marsie still imitates her saying this.) And it probably was pretty impossible. But I think a college degree and then teaching came to feel like that, too. Me teaching seemed as unlikely as me really having a horse back as a kid.  And even though I’ve been teaching now this year, it’s taken so long to sink in that I AM doing it, that it’s not an ideal I’m “hoping” for and “trying” for – and maybe I can keep doing it if I can make enough money to live on.

But I’m still idealistic. I wrote my honors thesis about the importance of relationship in education. Relationship is the biggest reason I care so much about winning a union and working to broaden this and to change higher education’s trajectory in this country. I’ve seen too many of us hurt. Our dreams get crushed, or we get a dream that twists back on them and makes us pay a painful penalty for trying to do great work.  What would a world be like that made so many forms of learning, teaching, and creating its center?  Who might we all become living that way, where most people’s dreams could come true?  Idealism makes me ask these questions and imagine possibilities, but the trouble with idealism is that on its own, it can be a substitute for changing our real lives. If we want to know what that world would be like, we’d better change our material realities. 

Writing Troubles, Or: Idealism

by Lucy S.

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 1^st 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 1^st paper on Alexandra resisting institutionalization and colonization in her relationship with Ivar in O Pioneers

John’s 3^rd paper arguing that inhumane immigration policies must change

Burke’s 3^rd paper also examining cruelty in immigration policies

CARE / RELATIONSHIPS

Personal Relationships:

Care for oneself and one’s life: Austin’s 1^st 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 2^nd paper examining the way money and relationships work in The Winter of Our Discontent

Jimenez family's care for each other 

Alexis’s 1^st paper on Alexandra as a mothering figure

Jack’s 1^st paper on his father

Nick’s 2^nd 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 3^rd 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 1^st 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 2^nd 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 2^nd paper

Alexis’s 3^rd 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 1^st paper on the problem with wanting to escape yourself in cruises and resorts where everything is done for you

Natalie’s 1^st paper about student loan debt

Connor’s 2^nd  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 2^nd paper critiquing the terms some use for those who have immigrated to the U.S. without governmental permission

Katie’s 3^rd paper dealing with the difficult topic of males who are raped

Alexis’s 2^nd paper about eating disorders and how deadly they can be

Natalie’s 2^nd 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.”

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 1^st 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 1^st paper on better possibilities in education, including Finnish schools

Rachael’s 2^nd 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 1^st paper on his father

Mike’s 3^rd 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.