Suzanne W. Churchill

Language

The Originality of Ideas and Other Scholarly Myths

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I’ve been sitting with Andrew Rikard (Davidson class of 2017) in a classroom all morning. We’re attending ILiAds (Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship) at Hamilton College to work on our digital Mina Loy project. We’ve spent most of the week attending presentations, exchanging ideas with other teams, and tinkering with our website.  This morning, we sequestered ourselves in order to write. We wanted to reflect on the collaborative process and on the ways in which digital tools can transform how we teach, learn, research, and communicate. We each decided to write our own blog posts.

Andrew put in his earbuds so that he could focus and not be distracted when I mutter aloud to myself, as I invariably do when I’m concentrating. But every so often, he’d pull out an earbud and ask me a question, wanting to talk through his argument to make sure it made sense. He would say something that would trigger an idea in my mind or echo something I’d been thinking about in another context. I’d listen, take notes on the white board, ask questions, and map out connections and parallels. Andrew was developing a brilliant argument about how digital domains (students designing and managing their own web presences) could transform pedagogical practices in ways that would allow students to have ownership not just of data, but also of the creative production of original ideas.

Here’s a example of our dialogue:

Andrew: I’m starting to think that a “domain of one’s own” is a misnomer, because it implies an ownership over ideas, which isn’t what we’re actually after. We want more of an emphasis on methods, research, exploration, and process.

Suzanne: That’s right, and the metaphors we’ve been using to describe domains emphasize walled, bounded repositories and individual ownership more than creative processes and collaborative exchanges.

Andrew: Yes, because “domain of one’s own” draws upon Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and she’s not really talking about the same thing. But how can I say that when I don’t know enough about her argument?

Suzanne: Woolf was referring to the way, historically, women have been denied access to the material spaces and economic privileges associated with the production of knowledge: they didn’t have access to libraries, offices, or to the quiet and solitude such spaces provided. It’s not that they didn’t have the intelligence or imagination to write, think, and produce knowledge, but they lacked the material resources to do so.

Andrew: Okay, so this situation is different. I want to emphasize that a “domain of one’s own” shouldn’t be an isolated space for individual contemplation, but a space of connectivity and creative exchange.

In this conversation, whose idea is it that the metaphors we use to describe intellectual property are bound by architectural models of walled spaces and by economic notions of individual ownership? Is it Andrew’s or mine? He was first to protest the limitation of the language, “domain of one’s own,” and if he didn’t say that, I wouldn’t have thought to extend his concern to a more general epistemological problem with how we conceive of originality and ownership of ideas.

Here’s the problem as I see it (after talking with Andrew):

share_ideaIdeas do not form in my head, and I don’t think they form in Andrew’s or yours either. They form in the space between us—in the synapses between two (or more) minds at work. Andrew was sitting across the table from me when I explained this idea, pointing to the empty space between our two laptops: that‘s where the ideas happen. Ideas occur not within but between minds. If you’re perceptive and alert, you’ll grab the idea as it spawns and put it in a book, article, or blog post. (If, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, you have the material resources to do so.) But the print or digital document you create is not so much your idea bank, as it is a point of contact between you and other minds. When you grab an idea and put it in writing, you’re putting that idea between two minds. It’s not in your head; it’s in a space between you and your reader(s).

Originality means newness and creativity; it’s tied to the notion of origin or source. But if the origin or source of ideas is the space between minds at work, how can we claim individual ownership of those ideas? Everything I’ve ever thought, said, or written has in some way been shaped by something someone else said or wrote. Even if I have a “new” idea about a Mina Loy poem—an idea no other scholar has published—I wouldn’t have thought of that idea if Loy hadn’t written the poem, and probably wouldn’t have thought of it if I hadn’t read what Roger Conover, Carolyn Burke, and Cristanne Miller, and a host of others have written about Loy, modernism, and women writers.

Academic scholarship, especially in the U.S., is obsessed with the idea of ownership and copyright. When I presented our digital Mina Loy project at a recent academic symposium, I was surprised by the level of fear and resistance. The concerns centered on questions of ownership: What if someone steals your ideas? If published online, will your work be protected by copyright? Those are legitimate concerns that I should think about, embedded as I am in an academic economy where status and value are premised upon the quantity and quality of scholarly publications. But what I really wanted to say was: How valuable are my ideas if they don’t exist where others can interact with them? Or if they appear only in a prestigious, expensive, hardcover book owned only by university libraries and a few scholars? And are they really my ideas in the first place? Or are they ours?

Of course, as Andrew points out, it’s easy for me to promote a collective ownership of ideas when I’m a tenured professor. As an undergraduate, he has a lot more to lose if he doesn’t lay claim to his ideas, or if I run off with ideas from our conversation and publish them without attribution to him.

The whole notion of attribution, so central to the scholarly enterprise, is premised on a notion of intellectual property. An original idea belongs to a particular thinker, so you must attribute it to him or her. Attribution is vital to the scholarly enterprise, but perhaps not because an individual originated or owns an idea, but because the apparatus of citation and attribution reminds us that we are all embedded in a network of ideas. We are always in conversation with the people who came before us, are with us now, and those who will come after us.

I’m all for documenting the conversation. What we write and publish is stronger when we acknowledge its ties to others, not when we claim sole ownership. I’m also hopeful that the digital humanities can broaden our understanding of original scholarship in ways that emphasize the collaborative origins of intellectual thought.

 

On MindFULLness

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Experts argue that we don’t read online: we skim, scan, or surf. This is mostly true for me. I prefer a book to a webpage, especially if I want to get absorbed in what I’m reading. When I read online, I have a harder time staying focused. My sabbatical project is an attempt to design a digital environment that can sustain close and deep reading. I’ve found a few websites that give me hope that it’s possible.

BrainPickings logoOne of the first websites that was able to grab and hold my interest was Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.org. Popova is a librarian by training and a reader by nature. In this blog, which really isn’t like any other blog I’ve encountered, she guides you on a journey through books she has read, serving up generous samples, explaining the ingredients that make them so scrumptious, and making you crave the book—dare I say, priming you for consumption, since the hyperlinks to Amazon.com and my Amazon Prime account make resistance futile.

As you read about one book, teasers appear in the left sidebar, whispering in your left ear, “you might also like…” And indeed, yes, I would like that book, and the next one, too. Gorging is easy on Popova’s site, which is exquisitely designed. I don’t care for the highlighter yellow and black color scheme, but it works, directing my attention to the right places, in the right order, so that while I can easily get lost in the ideas, I never get lost or stranded on the site.

I assumed Popova simply had great taste in books, a knack for identifying the best bits, and good web design skills. But after listening to the podcast of her interview with Krista Tippett on On Being, I realized that the book magic she works online isn’t simply the product of good taste: it’s the work of a great writer. Popova is astonishingly articulate, perceptive, and wise.

In response to Tippett’s invariable opening question, “was there as spiritual background to your childhood,” Popova replies without missing a beat:

I grew up with an attitude toward religion that can best be described as a cautious curiosity as a child. And then befitting the teenager’s typical distaste for nuance, it evolved into contemptuous curiosity.

To come up with such a pithy blend of alliteration, parallel structure, and self-deprecating insight to describe any aspect of my childhood would take me hours of painstaking revision (I’ve already revised this awkward sentence 5 times).

Popova spontaneously generates aphorisms that you can chew on for days, like: “critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté.” She says she tries to “live in this place between the two,” but part of the pleasure of BrainPickings is that, even as it sharpens your critical faculties, it tips the scales toward hope. Popova leans toward hope in the interview, too. Reflecting on the news media’s penchant for horror, she says:

…Yes, people sometimes do horrible things. And we can speculate about why they do them until we run out of words and run out of sanity. But evil only prevails when we mistake it for the norm. And yet, the currency of news journalism is making it the norm.

Popova defies this norm, saying “to me, there is so much goodness in the world. And of course, we just kind of have to show up for it and refuse to leave.” BrainPickings refuses to leave no good stone unturned, especially when it’s inscribed with wisdom.

Reminiscing about her great grandfather, whom she met only through the “extraordinary” marginalia he inscribed in the English books he smuggled into Bulgaria, Popova says she felt a “strange kinship” with him—an attraction to “this sort of intellectual dance with another mind that you could see in the margins of his books.” This “intellectual dance with another mind” is what BrainPickings lets you see. It goes a step further and invites you to join the dance, demonstrating the steps so well that you naturally slip into a rhythm of deep and satisfying reading, feeling as graceful, articulate, and perceptive as Popova herself.

Listening to Popova made me want to be more like Popova. I mentally resolved to start a private blog of my own reading, a choreographic record of my intellectual dance with other writers. It would be, I imagined, a practice of mindFULLNESS. Rather than the mindfulness of meditation, in which you seek to empty your mind in order to be fully present in the sensations of the moment, I would record the FULLNESS of my mind just at the moment I finished reading something. I could visualize the posts—a string of endless glass beads, stretching out into the days ahead.

Then, I spent the next eight hours procrastinating, avoiding writing about the ways in which Popova’s words had inspired me. I took a shower, rode my bike to the office, replied to overdue email, including the one from a PhD student in India inquiring about little magazines and addressing me as “Dear Sir,” and the one from the scholar from New England, who asked me about research I’d done for my dissertation, 20+ years ago. I drove 2o minutes to  J. M. Alexander Middle School to get Zac after his E.O.G.’s, only to learn that early dismissal would be unexcused, and anyway, I’d forgotten my wallet, so I didn’t have any ID (a fact I couldn’t admit because there was a policeman behind the front desk, and I still had to drive home). I drove home, sticking to back roads and the speed limit. I even wrote three thank-you notes.

But here I am, refilling my mind with words I’d relished while listening to Popova and walking the dog this morning. We got back home just when Krista Tippett asked her the question that’s at the core of my sabbatical project: “do you have hope and confidence in the Internet, in our technology as a place where — perfection is a big word — but where the human spirit can be cultivated and deepened?”  Popova replied, “Well, the thing to keep in mind is that this is such a young medium, you know?”

I paused the podcast—eager to come back to it tomorrow.

This Hour Her Vigil

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Christmas ornaments on treeThe Christmas ornaments, decorations, and lights are packed away, a New Year’s Day ritual that is tedious but satisfying. This year, my sense of accomplishment is troubled by a nagging sense of something unfinished, something demanding my attention. But the task before me is not mine to complete: it is my mother’s. She is dying. We are merely keeping vigil.

Her Alzheimer’s has run a rapid course since her diagnosis 3 years ago. Nevertheless, this last stretch has caught us by surprise, so precipitous has been her decline. Last week, we received word that she’d stopped chewing her food. We drove up to Connecticut the day after Christmas. When we got to Arden Courts, she was dozing in her wheelchair. She never fully woke up, though I think she knew we were there. Luke claims she mouthed my name, but I never saw or heard it. The next day, Matt and I joined my Dad there at lunchtime, keeping company as he spoon-fed her pureed chicken and vegetables, urging her to swallow as she slept through the meal. His efforts were gentle, loving, and persistent, yet so futile. Why push her to eat, I thought? Why sustain a body whose mind has exhausted itself? Dad’s pastor arrived, told us about the St. Lucy’s Eve music at church, and asked us to join him in a prayer about letting go.

Outside, the sky is that pearl gray so common in Connecticut in December, when the icy, white sun never gets much past the horizon, even at midday. I think of John Donne’s “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day”:

‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
         The sun is spent, and now his flasks
         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
                The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar’d with me, who am their epitaph.
What a picture of morbidity! Donne compacts so much gloom into one landscape, only to suddenly invert its relative vitality: “compar’d with me,” this shrunken, dreary scene is bubbling with laughter. I measure the stick of my own melancholy against Donne’s and find mine wanting.

We stop in an Irish pub for lunch, with handsome woodwork and mismatched, faded velvet stools. I order a bowl of Guinness lamb stew—hearty, comfort food that quickens my appetite. We drink our pints and go on with the business of life, as Mom winds down hers.

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil

She didn’t eat that evening or the next morning. By early afternoon, when my sister and I stopped in to see her, she had been moved back to her bed, so she could be more comfortable. Her pulse was up to 134 beats a minute, she was running a fever, and her legs were turning blue. Mom has strict DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) instructions that prohibit feeding tubes, IV hydration, or even antibiotics. The nurses had ordered oxygen and morphine.

The end seemed nigh, yet she was awake and seemed to focus intently on us. Her wakefulness seemed like a gift—a last chance. When I said, “I love you,” she whispered, “I love you too.” My sister Elizabeth talked to her about not being afraid to let go and felt that Mom grasped her meaning. We called our sons to come back from their hike, and all six of them, ages 22 to 13, took turns alone with their Nana. Stoic and teary, they made us proud. I called Mom’s brother David, and put the phone to her ear so she could hear his voice. Dad arrived, hugged us, and held her hand. Later my brother Jonathan, his wife, and kids came in and sang her a lullaby. Jon, a trained EMT, hooked up the oxygen. We each said our goodbyes, believing, maybe even hoping, they would be our last.

The next morning, however, she had stabilized. She said “good morning” to the nurse and squeezed my father’s hand. Her fever was down, and though her heart rate was up to 150, her oxygen levels remained steady. We stopped in on our way back to North Carolina. I said goodbye again, this time leaning over and resting my head on her shoulder, feeling a warmth and softness that instantly transported me back to childhood, to the rocking chair in the living room, to her lap. I climbed back in the car, and in 12 hours, we were back home in Davidson.

Today, two days later, Mom remains “about the same.” Dad sits by her bedside, holding her hand; Sandy and Charles Wiseman drop in; my brother comes with a speaker to play some Gilbert & Sullivan for her; her nurse Emily—so loving, gentle, and attentive—checks on her; Hospice nurses measure her pulse and temperature; pastors offer prayers. And we wait.

Mostly it is my father who keeps vigil. As I imagine him there beside her bed, weeping and wracked with grief (he married her when he was 21! who is he? what is his life without her?), I think of another poem, from Tennyson’s In Memoriam:

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

Tennyson may be praying to God, but I also think he’s calling to his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, to whom the long elegy, written over the course of 17 years, is dedicated. This is just one of 133 numbered cantos, all written in the same verse form but in different lengths, expressing the many shapes and stages of grief. When I searched for the poem online, I found another gorgeous, wrenching “Be Near Me” poem, this one by Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

Be near me now,
My tormenter, my love, be near me—
At this hour when night comes down,
When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes
With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets,
When it comes with cries of lamentation,
                                             with laughter with songs;
Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step.
At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places,
Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil
For hands still enfolded in sleeves;
When wine being poured makes the sound
                                             of inconsolable children
                      who, though you try with all your heart,
                                             cannot be soothed.
When whatever you want to do cannot be done,
When nothing is of any use;
—At this hour when night comes down,
When night comes, dragging its long face,
                                             dressed in mourning,
Be with me,
My tormenter, my love, be near me.

That’s all I’ve got. This post may be overpopulated with poetry, but “When whatever you want to do cannot be done,/ When nothing is of any use,” that’s where I turn. Because, as Philip Sidney wrote in his “Apology for Poetry” (1595): “Dire sights, bravely pictured forth, do bring delight.” It is a delight—an exquisite pleasure and great relief—to find your own inconsolable torment expressed so perfectly by a perfect stranger.

Of Mere Being

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I’ve just returned from a much anticipated, much dreaded three-day sojourn in Connecticut, where I saw Mom for the first time in her new living quarters, an extended care facility called Arden Courts. My family had given me a pretty clear picture of what to expect, but they couldn’t prepare me for the emotional wallop of seeing her, dozing in the common room, wheelchair-bound, listing to the side, head tilted back, arms stiff, legs atrophied, feet puffy in her unused shoes. She rouses when prodded, but mostly stares off in the distance. When she looks at you, her brown eyes seem glazed, as if milk has been added to the coffee she always preferred black and hot.

In past visits, I  found it challenging and even amusing to analyze Mom’s speech as if it were modernist poetry, with its odd juxtapositions and parataxis. I got satisfaction from trying to piece together the associative logic of whatever constellation of phrases she managed to utter. What my poetry reading training didn’t help me with, however, was her performance of the poems. When she strained and grunted to get words out, it was so excruciating that my intellect and imagination failed, and I was wrecked by a complex of grief (desire to hold on) and desire to flee.

IMG_5516But now Mom scarcely speaks at all, and when she does, she is barely audible. There is no longer any trace of associative logic. Just flutterings of weightless words, like dust bunnies that hop away when you try to sweep them into a dustpan. Language eludes her going in as well as coming out: she got no pleasure from listening to me read Jane Austen aloud. She seems remote and distant, like a cuckoo tucked away in an elaborately carved wooden clock. She chirped up when I talked about her grandsons, Luke, Thomas, and Zac, and she sang along to a couple of children’s songs that she used to sing to them at bedtime, “Jack Was Ev’ry Inch a Sailor” and “Edelweiss.” She couldn’t get out all the words, but her sweet, pure voice came through here and there, marred only by my quavering pitch.

Although she said little, she knew who I was. When I told her I loved her on the first day, she replied, “I love you, too, Suze.” On the second day, she didn’t seem to recognize me, but on the third, when I said, “Do you know who I am?” She said, “Of course I do.” “Who am I?” “You’re Suzanne Churchill.” When I cried (admittedly often), she smiled more, as if trying to cheer me up. Her strongest sentence, the one she can articulate most clearly and at appropriate times, is: “I love you very much.” One could do worse for famous last words.

It was hard to see her so altered, hard to realize that her caregivers would never know her as she had been—a lover of books and music; intellectually curious, meticulously dressed, and sociable; an ardent wife, devoted mother, loyal friend, anxious perfectionist.

Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer, creators of the HBO series “Getting On,” talk about these hard losses in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. The show (which I haven’t seen but want to) is set in a women’s extended geriatric care facility, and the writers draw upon their own experiences caring for their aging mothers. Olsen’s description of his grieving process struck a chord:

I had that poetic little moment that was quite narcissistic that, oh my God, there will come a day when she says I love you for the very last time. And that was sort of my self-involvement with it initially.

But over the course of those years, I certainly learned that – that day did come, certainly, but the relationship did not die in any way, shape or form. It continued and progressed and had great value. … but when my mother finally lost the capacity to speak – because she was a very articulate woman, a very verbal woman with a very storied past – when she lost that ability to speak, and she was left with caretakers, it saddened me tremendously.

And it didn’t matter who the caretaker was, good caretaker, bad caretaker. It didn’t matter – that they would never know who this woman was.

That’s the bald reality of dementia: so much just doesn’t matter anymore. Even if her caretakers could know who she was, she wouldn’t know the difference.

You’d think losing language would make it harder to be with Mom, but strangely, I found it easier. My plan had been to visit twice a day, stopping in for a few minutes on my way to do research at the Beinecke Library and again at the end of the day. I thought short visits would be better—and probably all I could bear.

But now that she can barely speak, the only thing I can do is be with her, sitting beside her repeating stories about my life and hers, holding her hand, wheeling her around the halls and courtyard, and breathing with her when she gets agitated. An hour passed yet I had no desire to leave.

I didn’t understand my strange sense of quietude until I heard Will Scheffer’s explanation on Fresh Air:

I think what caring for our mothers really taught us, all the way up through the hospice experience was…that this part of life… that so many people are afraid of, and for good reason, it’s kind of a privilege to be able to be there when you can.

…that act of carrying on conversations with someone who can’t speak to you and being with them as they’re dying, there was a kind of sense of privilege that we began to feel and sort of a sense that gosh, you know, I was so afraid of this, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be here.

But being here is starting to feel like a good thing, a good part of life, something that we avoid in this culture but that actually is a rich experience, albeit painful. It actually is so much a part of life. And so many people never get to be in it.

I didn’t want to be here either. None of us did. I only get to be in it with Mom for a a handful of visits, a few times a year, so it is a privilege—”a rich experience, albeit painful”—to be with her as she withdraws, as her brain shrinks and the channels widen between its folds. As she diminishes into a state of mere being, all I can do is be with her—just be. That’s what my yoga teacher, Amy Schneider, invites us to do; she asks us to set aside our thoughts and feel “how good it feels to just be.” It’s a kind of meditative state, this mere being, one that makes me wonder what it feels like to be Mom, as she reaches the end of cognition and finds herself on the outskirts of language.

Wallace Stevens tried to imagine this state in his late poem, “Of Mere Being”:

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

~Wallace Stevens, 1954~

PiB_PET_Images_AD
PET scan of a brain with Alzheimer’s.

Stevens combines gleaming imagery and gorgeous alliteration to transport us beyond reason and emotion into a realm of pure sight and sound. I try to imagine what it’s like in Mom’s mind—”at the end of her mind,/ beyond the last thought.” She is moving to a state “without human meaning, / Without human feeling,” and it’s a “foreign song,” one I don’t understand and can’t sing. But there is a kind of grandeur to the utter, defiant loneliness of “mere being,” a primal beauty in the isolate calm. When Mom stares out into the distance, maybe she is seeing “fire-fangled feathers dangle down.” Or maybe she sees nothing at all. In any case, it is good to just be with her.

 

A Final Word

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I took a Russian literature course in college taught by a visiting professor from what was then the USSR. With an authoritarian teaching style that was a marked contrast to the American liberal arts approach I’d become accustomed to, he interrogated us with questions like, “What’s the one word to describe Raskolnikov?” A student brave enough to posit an answer was pronounced, “WRONG.” I sat in silence, fearing humiliation and fuming at the poetic injustice of a question that reduced a complex character to a single word.

Yesterday, when my son Thomas asked me to sum up my trip to Russia in a single word, I felt no such resistance.

Transformative.

I replied, without hesitation.

“Studio R” has transformed my assumptions about Russia. Until I toured Moscow and St. Petersburg, I did not realize how much my imagination was dominated by vague, grim images of Soviet deprivation; Kruschev-era, cement block buildings; soggy cabbage and pickled radishes.

In the place of these dreary images, my memory is now full of pictures of bustling, vibrant city streets; ice-cream colored buildings that blend European style with Russian folk accents; and gleaming pastries, salty cheese breads, bliny filled with red caviar and sour cream, salmon salads with citron vinaigrette, beet-wrapped goat cheese, and other sweet and savory indulgences.

image18-1024x768As in the U.S., such plenty is often juxtaposed to poverty and want (see Shelley’s post), though homelessness and panhandling were less evident, perhaps because of communal housing and aggressive policing. Prices were high, especially for clothing and material goods, and I wondered how the working class managed to get by.

The people we met were lively and vocal, offering perspectives strikingly different from my own: strange mixtures of free speech and adherence to what to me sounded like authoritarian, party-line thinking. They did not seem to feel oppressed by the state, nor obsessed by the enemy (aka the USA), but primarily concerned with making and sustaining a good, stable lives for themselves, their families, and their country.

In part because the language barrier limited my interactions with locals and in part because I was traveling with such brilliant, knowledgeable, and perceptive companions, I learned most from my colleagues.

Amanda and Irina generously and continuously interpreted the language and culture for us, helping us to understand menus, street signs, buildings, monuments, gestures, behaviors, and customs. They gave spontaneous history lessons, too, allowing us to see both transformations and connections to the past.

Shelley offered comparative political insights, with her keen insights into Russian politics and American cultural blind spots and assumptions. Kristi made me aware of the both subtle and monumental ways that individual and cultural memory operated. Shaw taught me to see the transition from stage paintings to scene paintings in the Hermitage, while Sharon taught me about Bulgakov and his contributions to Russian theater, explaining the origins and impact of method acting. Mark not only contributed to my understanding of method acting, but also navigated the streets with his trusty laminated maps and opened my eyes to the melodramatic power of the ballet when he remarked, “It’s like a silent movie!” Alison enabled me to recognize the distinctively Russian aspects of the ballet and appreciate the value of discipline and tradition.

In our casual conversations, we exchanged ideas and reactions, so that at every turn, my fleeting impressions were transformed into more substantive understanding. Studio R has given us an opportunity for learning and reflection in a relaxed yet invigorating environment. This is the best of the liberal arts tradition, and I hope it’s the beginning of many faculty enrichment trips to come. The innovation grant that funded this trip was large, but the pay off was immeasurable.

Pushkiniana: “that’s a story”

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Our Moscow guide speaks excellent English, with a delightfully idiosyncratic vocabulary. He speaks of “impudent” paintings and “violet” buildings in the skyline. As we approach the White House, he quips, “the closer you get to the government, the more forbidding the signs.”

He’s studied English all his life, but he acquired his marvelous vocabulary from an elderly Englishman who hired him to teach him Russian in the early 1990’s, when the USSR had dissolved and Russia was opening up to Western businesses. The Englishman would doze off shortly into the lesson. Then he would wake up from his nap and say, “Well, that’s enough for today; let’s go have a drink.” They would drink and converse about everything under the sun–in English. So the Englishman never learned any Russian: “He paid me to learn English,” our guide said, chuckling.

imageHe is also full of anecdotes, like the one he told in front of the church where Pushkin was married (there is the church, here is the steeple). Pushkin was of course brilliant, literary, intellectual, etc…, but he was also very short and not very attractive. He made the mistake of falling for a beautiful, shallow woman, who cared only about fashion and dancing at balls. Pushkin didn’t like dancing, because he was shorter than all the women. Despite their incompatible interests, he proposed to the beautiful young lady’s family, they accepted, and she was dragged reluctantly to the church.

Pushkin was normally very superstitious, but he ignored three signs that the marriage would be a disaster: [Read more…] about Pushkiniana: “that’s a story”

Microaggressions and the Need to Know More

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Microaggressions are in the news, nationally and locally. In a recent New York Times piece, “Students See Many Slights as Racial ‘Microaggressions,'” Tanzina Vega describes microaggressions as “the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.” The concept isn’t new. It was developed in the 1970s by Dr. Chester M. Pierce, a professor of education and psychiatry at Harvard University, to describe the “subtle, cumulative miniassault that is the substance of today’s racism” (qtd by Brockenbrough).  Common parlance among social scientists and critical race theorists, microaggressions have recently spread from the higher echelons of academic discourse into the mainstream, causing a stir even in the bubble of tranquility that is Davidson College.

tumblr_n2yc7hTiIr1tw512jo1_1280Inspired by a Tumblr blog at Harvard University, students here have created their own Tumblr, I, Too, Am Davidson (echoing Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America“). Standing in front of the new mural depicting the College’s multicultural history, they hold signs citing microaggressions like, “After a party, the police stopped me and said, ‘Hurry up and get to your car and go back to your school.'”

Microaggressions may elicit shock, disbelief, anger, isolation, alienation, fear, shame, or any combination thereof. But as poet Claudia Rankine observed in her recent talk at Davidson, a victim’s response is often delayed. The immediate reaction tends to be silence.

Rankine explores this effect in her latest work, Citizen, a documentary prose poem that collects microaggressions from her own experiences and from interviews, such as this one:

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.
You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.

Rankine uses the second-person “you” to put you, the reader, in the place of a microaggression victim. The use of “you” isn’t just a strategy for arousing empathy, however; it is also symptomatic of psychological alienation experienced by the victim who, instead of responding to the offender, goes silent, turning inward and questioning herself.

Rankine’s goal, she said, is to shorten the response time—that is, to offer language that may empower people to respond immediately and vocally to microaggressions, in order to promote healing and understanding.

In seeking to break the silence, Rankine’s experimental poetry is like the microaggression blogs (even if it doesn’t get as much internet traffic). Vivan Lu, co-creator of The Microaggressions Project, says the blog “gives people the vocabulary to talk about these everyday incidents that are quite difficult to put your finger on” (qtd by Vega). The blog testimonials are empowering acts of witnessing and protest: they allow people to assume ownership of damaging remarks, to reframe them, and to reverse the target. Contributing to a Tumblr may also replace feelings of marginalization and alienation with a sense of belonging to a community.

Athough these Tumblr sites are beneficial for the contributors, however, it’s less certain how much good they do for broader public discourse about race. Vega reports, “What is less clear is how much is truly aggressive and how much is pretty micro — whether the issues raised are a useful way of bringing to light often elusive slights in a world where overt prejudice is seldom tolerated, or a new form of divisive hypersensitivity, in which casual remarks are blown out of proportion.”

The concept of microaggression, by definition, does not imply intentional hostility or conscious racism. In Psychology Today, Derald Wing Sue and David Rivera define microaggressions as, “the brief and everyday slights, insults, indignities and denigrating messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned White people who are unaware of the hidden messages being communicated” [emphasis added]. Nevertheless, the term can lead to misunderstandings, in that it connotes aggression on the part of the microaggressor. From the Latin aggredi for “to attack,” the term aggression, even when miniaturized, doesn’t seem to allow for bumbling curiosity or hapless ignorance. For people unfamiliar with the social scientific definition who perceive themselves as implied offenders, the term microaggression may arouse defensiveness. “I hate the term microaggression,” I heard someone say, “it is itself a microaggression.”*

Which raises the question: are microaggressions reversible? This is a version of the controversial topic of reverse racism. My colleague Hilton Kelly, Associate Professor of Education Studies, who teaches courses on critical race theory, defines racism as “a system of advantages based on skin color.” He distinguishes racism from prejudice, the personal belief that one race is superior to another. Since racism is about deep-seated power inequalities, Kelly argues, it can’t be easily reversed. He offered the example of a white woman going to black nightclub, but feeling unwelcome and overhearing hostile remarks about her presence. Is this reverse racism? No, because the system still favors the white woman. As soon as she steps outside, who’s on her side? Whose side is the police and criminal justice system on? There may be prejudice the black nightclub, but it’s not racism unless it’s reinforced by a system of advantages based on skin color.

Okay, I said, but let’s take a local example: what about a black fraternity here at Davidson that won’t accept a white student? Kelly replied: “I’d need more information to respond to that question. For instance, I’d need to know, why is it that no one has asked the same questions about similar practices by white fraternities that went on for decades?” That’s not just a good point, I think; it’s good practice: ask for more information. Like racism, microaggressions aren’t reversible, but asking for more information is.

In my class the next day, when we’re scheduled to discuss Rankine, racism, and microaggressions, we start with an experiment. We stand in a circle and first identify our “triggers”: those remarks, attitudes, or behaviors that arouse anger and defensiveness, and shut down conversation about racism. Then we go around again and identify, “openers”: remarks, attitudes, or behaviors that encourage us to talk openly with each other. After we finish, one student observes:

Isn’t it interesting that our triggers are all different, but our openers are the same?

It’s a profound moment. Wow, I think, we’ve done it: we’ve broken through to a way we can talk openly about racism at Davidson.

Not so fast. A student raises the issue of affirmative action, asking if it is racist for positions to be taken away from whites and given to minorities. “Hmm,” I say, echoing Kelly: “I’d need more information to know if that’s racism. For instance, I’d need to know, why is it that no one complains about how many places were taken away from minorities and given to whites over the decades?”

“Good point,” someone murmurs.

The point isn’t mine, of course, and neither is the practice. But it is a good one. Instead of getting angry, try saying: I need to know more.

Take this example from the Davidson Tumblr, where a student makes the reasonable request, “Please stop asking why I can’t tolerate spicy food.” Presumably she’s been asked countless times, “Why don’t you like spicy food?” And she’s understandably annoyed by the question. But let’s reimagine that irritating encounter by applying Hilton Kelly’s approach:

— “Why don’t you like spicy food?”

— “That’s an interesting question. Why do you think I would like spicy food?”

— “Because you’re Asian.”

— “Asia’s a big, diverse continent. I wonder if tastes are consistent across any continent. Do you think North Americans like bland food?”

Is this approach putting more burden or responsibility on the minority? Maybe. But it’s also “shortening the response time” and giving everyone, including minorities, an opportunity to get beyond anger, and come to a greater understanding of the triggers that divide us and the openers that can bring us together.

And who knows? Maybe someday somebody will start a Tumblr, #NeedToKnowMore.

 

*The person who made this statement preferred not to be named, believing that openly expressing skepticism about the term microaggression would only incite more anger and resentment. This fear of reprisal reflects the polarizing effect the term can have: in this case, it foreclosed conversation.

Works Cited:

Brockenbrough, Ed, Ph.d. “Microaggressions: Conceptual Foundations.” Warner Graduate School of Education, Rochester University. Dec. 3, 2010. Accessed April 21, 2104.

I, Too, Am Davidson. Tumblr Blog. Accessed. April 13, 2014.

Kelly, Hilton. Personal Conversation. Summit Coffee House. Davidson College. March 20, 2014.

Sue, Derald Wing, Ph.D., and David Rivera, M.S. “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life.” Psychology Today. Published Oct. 5, 2010. Accessed April 21, 2014.

Vega, Tanzina. “Students See Many Slights As Racial Aggressions.” NewYorkTimes.com. May 21, 2014. Accessed April 13, 2014.

Speak to me : Take my hand : What are you now?

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1532116_10202895045715800_602969367_nWhen I FaceTimed with my mom on January 5th—her 75th birthday—she was surprisingly “good.” I put that word in quotations marks because I’m uncomfortable with the moral judgment it seems to place on the natural course of her disease. Yet that’s the word that come to mind, and she was really, pretty good: she knew it was her birthday, she said she was 75, and she asked me (un-prompted), “What’s Matt doing?” The question meant that she not only knew who I was, but also remembered who I was married to. Conversation seemed pleasurable but tiring: by the time I summoned the kids to the screen to wish her a “Happy birthday,” she resorted to echolalia, wishing them “Happy Birthday” back, even though it wasn’t their birthday. She was cheerful and smiley. She seemed to be enjoying herself and the attention, not to mention the chocolate cake.

1557651_10202895045755801_1173266732_nIn our Face-Time encounter today, two weeks later, things weren’t so good. My sister reported last week that Mom had started exhibiting a strange symptom of straining to get words out, as if she had to wrench them out of her throat. I didn’t need to hear the guttural straining to know what my sister meant. I saw an early stage of the symptom in an expression that began appearing on Mom’s face last summer. A shadow would rise up on her face, lifting her eyebrows and wrinkling her forehead in a paralyzed anguish (you can see it happening in the photo on the left). “What does that expression on your face mean, Mom?” I asked, describing and mimicking it for her. She said she knew her face was doing that, but didn’t seem to know why. It was as her face was expressing things that her brain could no longer comprehend or control. Was it anxiety? Pain? Or just a neurological reflex?

Now the facial expression coordinates with speech, or rather, with the anguished effort to produce speech. She strains as if she has tear the words out of her body. Often words won’t come, or when they do, they stop mid-sentence. If you question her about the end of her sentence, or try to suggest a destination, she’s already forgotten it. In these moments, the effort to make conversation is futile, no matter how much we both want it to happen.

Our fragmented conversation reminds me of a fragmented scene in T. S. Eliot’s, The Waste Land, in which two lovers are bound in a fraught, intimate exchange. The first speaker desperately pleads for conversation, and the other lover refuses:

“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
  “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
  I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

When I tried to talk to my Mom today, I felt as if I was silently urging her, “Speak to me. Speak. Speak.” It seemed as if her own mind was urging the same thing, pressing her to “Speak” and “Think.” And her own mind—or some other part of it—was as recalcitrant in refusing to cooperate as the lover in Eliot’s poem. Her mind had become a rat’s alley, and no matter how much she pressed it to speak, it would not give.

But maybe it’s not so bad for her. Psychologist Alan Dienstag, who conducts support groups for early Alzheimer’s patients, offers a reassuring perspective on the disease. Although Alzheimer’s is the disease Americans fear most, he says, it’s actually not the worst way to go, at least not for the patient. He tells this story about a workshop he ran:

There were about 20 people in the room and we were…going around the circle and people with early Alzheimer’s were talking about their lives and what they do to…give their lives meaning, find stimulating things to do, and so on. This man started talking about his experience as somebody with early Alzheimer’s, and he was painting a very…benign picture of it all. He said, “Well, you know, it’s difficult not to be able to remember, but I get up and I can do this and I can do that.” Basically he was just saying he’s fine, he’s OK. And over his shoulder, sitting behind him, was his wife. And she was crying…And I knew just how much he’d lost, how much she had lost.

 

…But there he was. He wasn’t uncomfortable. He really wasn’t. And so I think we project our feelings onto them, and we assume that they are suffering some terrible thing, but in fact that’s not necessarily the experience of it.

Listening to Dr. Dienstag’s interview helped me accept my Mom’s diagnosis: it was comforting to think that she wouldn’t suffer great pain—that for her, the worst was over. But now I’m not so sure. As I watch her on the screen, straining to extricate words, the effort appears agonizing. Maybe it isn’t physical pain. Maybe it’s emotional. Whatever it is, I can’t stand to see that look on her face and hear the words torn from her throat and shredded in the process. I feel like I’m not just witnessing pain, but actually inflicting it. By asking her questions and telling her about our lives, I’m putting her in a situation where she is compelled to speak, but cannot.

Our relationship has always been based on talking. Mom started reading aloud to my older sister and me well before I could understand the words. We spent the hot, humid summer days sitting in the living room in front of the fan as she read and read. When I was older, she would drive me places and tell stories about people’s lives and relationships—about marriage break ups, nervous breakdowns, jealousies and rivalries I was too young to understand but still fascinated by. I would ask questions, and she would always answer. Conversation became the fabric of our relationship.

So when she sees me, she knows, instinctively, that conversation should happen. And she can no longer make it happen. I can chatter on to fill the silence, but I’m not alleviating the pain that comes from the absence of reciprocation. Whose pain is it? Am I projecting my pain onto her, assuming she is “suffering some terrible thing,” as Dr. Dienstag says, when her experience is different? Her expression tells me I’m not projecting pain, though I’m probably mirroring it.

A few months ago, seeing her face on the screen gave me a sense of emotional connection, even when words faltered. But today, the effort of speech is too painful. I want to shut down the screen, to sit next to her and hold her hand, so that she won’t see me and feel like she has to speak.

Thinking about the effort of speech made me think of Muriel Rukeyser’s poem, “The Effort at Speech Between Two People.”  So I looked it up, and in one of those uncanny acts of grace, the poem handed me the very guidance I was looking for. Its recurrent refrain is:

:  Speak to me.          Take my hand.            What are you now?

In juxtaposing these phrases, the poem suggests that speaking to someone is analogous to taking that person’s hand. Both are reciprocal gestures of contact and communication. The poem also delivers a lesson I thought I’d already learned: we are always changing in relation to one another. So as my Mom and I continue to change (she on a more rapid course than I), I’m going to have to let go of speech and take her hand. That gesture may be my only answer to the question, “What are you now?” For now, anyway.