Drafted But Not Published Letter to the Editor

As I listlessly leafed through recent articles on courses on religion and editorials regarding ‘ISIL’ in the Bee, I thought...

How tempting it is to explain 'extremism' with religious fundamentalism, even if doing so opens up a space for a not-so-hidden racism to rear its ugly head again, ignoring our co-participation in a tennis-ball-like-volley of the means of force which has exponentially increased the use of violence overall.

And while it’s easy to blame the opposing party (and I agree that some really don’t want to share the world with us), I still wonder: will annihilating them really create the environment of cooperation and liberty for which we, as a community, strive and stand?

Moreover, I think: are not the “zings” and “bangs” and flashes-in-the-night that make the news like Rambo-in-the-theater real scenes of death? Of real pain, of real destruction, of real, irrevocable annihilation for countless anonymous millions?

While I worry about our future, too, I still ask: who is the enemy anyways? and what do we win in this escalation of death and debt? Victory may seem to cover irreparable loss - even if another bears the cost - but is war really just a game to be played like any other?

On Writing, Critique and Audience

I don’t want my writing to merely become a stale indictment of my frustrated being in this place and unequivocal evidence of the fact that I feel poorly adjusted: I want to explore and think and test out and adventure and develop as a thinker, critic and writer. To this end, I feel I should hold letters to the editor to once a month in order to prevent my critiques from becoming too expected, unnovel and irritating to the general public.

Moreover, I’m looking for someone to vet my writings before I post them, because I do have a tendency for being far more critical than what is generally considered as such (and sometimes even unfairly, bitterly and meanly in ways I do not originally intended); or, possibly, I should always give an additional read (at least one) for meanness or for crotchety-ness: this will help me work through some ideas without going to far to alienate my audience. For maintaining a strong rapport with one’s audience is as key to being considered a credible speaker - of maintaining a status of being someone to whom others continue to listen – as saying the thing that might cause the rift.

The difficulty is knowing how to strike that balance, wherever or however one chooses to, not to mention being willing to - at the cost of fully indulging oneself in critique of the world – still say something that means something without being written off as a mere contrarian or an irreconcilable opponent. Working to maintain ties of community while still honestly publicizing one’s critiques is the name of the game, but doing it in practice is what presents obstacles.

Thinking about the possible effects of one’s utterances is also bound up with this practice of stating in public something of or about the world that may seek to highlight certain problematic, criminal or inhumane aspects in need of redress.

Friends can help us figure what might well become alienating, even if being alienated is sometimes the cost of distancing oneself from the problematic nature of the status quo. What one needs, above all, however, is an anchor: something to remind oneself that one can get through, that at least one other in the world “understands.” Without this person, however, the project can ultimately and finally be futile, doomed and fated to annihilation at the ends of lacking the very community it seeks to produce and engender.

The skill I need to work on, I think, amongst so many others, is identifying when I should say what I want to say and how so as to remain

Origins of An Organizer

It interests me as well how the social position of Community Organizer received far greater attention with the rise of the Obama spectacle. He effectively called attention to its importance, not permitting that people in high school, junior high school and elsewhere might note his ‘accomplishments’ and use them as a model for themselves, their own activity. I remember back to junior college myself, feeling as if there wasn’t quite yet a social position, a category for what I wanted to do, but increasingly, I see there is. Still, many have been left out in the singular scrutiny and credit Obama has received. So many Organizers who will remain unknown and unconsidered. 

It is a trend of the spectacle to fixate on a handful of individuals (possibly) in order to displace an explanation which suggests far greater participation in such activity or merely for the purposes of commercial and political concision, relegating those who do not cleanly fit the bill to official and written and archived historical oblivion.

On a more personal note, I feel the yearning for academic life has not yet deserted me, even if I have relatively little time to dedicate to it (while I do, certainly dedicate every non-committed waking hour to these questions and matters nonetheless). 

Other questions that continue to interest me - what do we mean when we say 'organizer; what and who are they organizing exactly and what qualifies them to determine the standard for organizing? That is, to what end? These questions remain marginalized as pundits and advertisers look for expedient ways to simply frame and circulate a superficial understanding of what it may be - assuming a lay appreciation of the term - in order partially to avoid a more complex discussion of what is assumed but not explained or explored.

Hopefully I'll return to them in up and coming posts.

Moreover, it's not just with his rise in notoriety that we begin to care further about the position of those who work to solidify, furnish and fabricate necessary community relationships within, inside of and between different local, regional and global communities, but with a more broadly felt sense that, perhaps the way that we've created this world - as result of the structures of political economy that predominate and are routinely reproduced - has directly resulted in the absolute demolition of community, or at least the production of a false or hollow sense of it that systematically fails to provide that which we hope to produce.

That we have people paid to fix, arrange and produce Community says so much about the tragic state of the world, and, forebodingly, a lot less about what we might actually be able to do to go about changing it.

Politics and What It Is Not: Letter to "Democracy In Decline," 08/10/2014. Submitted 08/25/2015.

Weighing in on the statewide report on Civics, the Bee’s “Democracy In Decline” squanders a momentous opportunity to criticize the report’s limited reflections on Politics while failing to appreciate persistent institutional disdain for popular participation.

Crucially, the article and the report neglect that Politics is just as much about how we manage, share, and mediate the space between us in (ideally) mutually-beneficial ways as it is about policy or law or institution, something Jefferson knew well.

And while the report and the article boringly continue to unreflectively worship ‘our’ “forefathers” for being “extremely adept” at turning their radical privilege into productive “Civic” conversation, it hardly notes Jefferson’s ultimate inability to Constitutionally-furnish (and protect) forums known as Wards (spaces of communal, popular participation).

Finally, the article – like many – painfully scapegoats “complainers” as a primary enemy of a verdant democracy, disregarding that they are a byproduct of a polity that systemically fails to provide its own citizens with ample, gainful and accessible participatory opportunities, remarkably suggesting we could achieve Ultimate Citizenry status by voting regularly-enough on other's initiatives or by more religiously showing up in court, all welcome prescriptions but which still, nevertheless fail to effectively involve Me and You.

Gravity: A Familiar Yet Foreign Force

As a kid, gravity made sense. It was what kept me from falling up when I looked at the sky, upside-down, from the school play bars. Yet what perplexed me was what I read about it in textbooks. I wondered: why did I find this concept so un-attractive? It seemed like there was a ‘gravity’ that we felt and then a ‘Gravity’ that we studied. And so my curiosity was seeded.

Mathematically, ‘Gravity’ is the force between two objects, measured by ‘G,’ the universal gravitational constant, multiplied by the mass of the two objects, and divided by the square of the separating distance.

But where do I fit? Am I lodged in between ‘G’ (gravitational force) and ‘R’ (distance)? Or perhaps, am I some product of the two? Perhaps I’m object 1 or 2, then. But how can I tell? And which one? At this problem, I felt the dizzying need to consult a physicist to prescribe a formula for my existential-physical crisis.

These ideas plagued me. Intuitively, they felt limited, but any freshmen ‘physician’ would tell me that I’m crazy to distrust the Gravity formula: I mean, something keeps me on the ground, right?

However, it all made sense when I read Merleau-Ponty’s, Eye and Mind. Sure, he admits, science is “admirably active, ingenious, and bold” but, it also “manipulates things and gives up living in them”. Was he implying that scientific language, while useful, might actually obscure what I immediately see and feel? Might not be my personal language for understanding my everydayness, my world?

I realized that I am more than what a scientist tells me; I have and am a physical body, but I also experience this body, and my experience and what it tells me are my own.

Still, the answer left me wanting.  What about the growing distance - and diminishing gravity - between scientific descriptions and my felt experience? Maybe it wasn’t that one framework was right and the other was wrong; perhaps something else was happening here. Another thinker, Hannah Arendt, helped me work through some of these complex feelings. In her view, science’s complex language prevails for its utility and universality, for being useful and applicable to many spaces in the world (This same language that vaulted us into outer space and endowed us with the super human power to annihilate ourselves irrevocably). Scientists created these symbols (like G (gravity) and R(distance)) to ease the process of speaking with one another about complex concepts, and while it originated in ordinary language, it have since departed from it, along with the resemblance it once had to individual experience. This explains what I was feeling as a child.

So, how do we reconcile the gravity-defying, skyscraper-building capacity of science with the hollow feel of its calculations? How can we meet science’s cumbersome language with our everyday? My answer: we can’t. They’re speaking different languages in different frequencies, like Chinese and English, and it’s not that one is right and the other is wrong: they just both have their purposes, each of which is necessary to fashion our shared, human world. Moreover, we couldn’t bear to lose either, so we have to compromise in mindfulness of when to use the one language and when to use the other. Like being in San Francisco or Beijing.

In this way, I’d like to think (perhaps self-satisfyingly) that my childhood intuitions weren’t wrong after all: ‘gravity’ is not ‘Gravity’.  But, lemme tell ya, none of this made that fall from the school ground playbars any softer when I hit the ground.

Thanks gravity. And science.

References

1. Tipler, Paul A. 1995. Physics For Scientists and Engineers. Worth Publishers. 3rd ed.

2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Pg.1,2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind.” The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Carleton Dallery, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Pg.1,2

3. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pg. 4

On Our Engagements

I concern over how quickly many of us purport to digest and/or comprehend something, when often that very judgment prevents us from taking the third or fourth read that might yield other insights, the sort that might incite a much more radical revaluation of our previous thoughts. It is in and through the first or second engagements that we apply and reproduce (or insinuate) cliched and established paradigms and judgments; but it is in and with third, fourth, even ninth that we begin to how a text is constructed, what makes it unique, where it comes from and how riddled with contradictions it is. Now, we cannot all be experts in everything we read (and hence give such time), but it is worth noting what we lose when we read an SAT passage and pretend that five minutes will tell us 'enough,' which may be sufficient for the questions but is not at all what we need to think ourselves back to health.

Benjamin considered the superficiality of our engagements in his essay on technological reproduction. Popular art often exhibits the trait of closeness, of being readily accessible to us by fitting within established artistic and literary conventions: pictorially and otherwise; while it often also exhibits the trait of being supportive or elaborative of predominate ideologies, although, admittedly doing so with new flares or flourishes (that intrigue and entrance new readers but do not seek to fall from the tree). Novelty is avoided, while 'newness' is praised. And the novelty that is quickly fades.

I think this thought as I read through Adam Fell's Dear Corporation, his latest poetry compilation. The book, which I won't describe here at length in anticipation of a later review or consideration, is embraced by a dark cover that ends with an inscription by him, observing sublimely: "some choices are not really choices at all." What appears to be is not always is, and when we come closer to something, we begin to see its details, its fissures, its blemishes and wrinkles. And when we think more narrowly on our own paths, we begin see the outlines of anticipation and predictability, where one moment follows from the next, although always with the possibility of new and different iteration present within the germs of preceding ones. Nevertheless, however, the germs of the novel and of beginnings must from somewhere. And that somewhere is someone: it is us and where have been and will be.

A Long Day In The (Sub)Mines

No blogging today, but I'm thinking about getting a Subtips (and gripes) website going. We'll see where it goes (and I'll keep you updated of and about its progress).

On this sub site, I would discuss best practices, helpful quieting techniques, ideal conditions, what to bring to prepare, how to avoid overpreparing, how to avoid coming off as too self-aggrandizing and how to focus less on yourself and more on the overall maintenance of the class (which should be the vanishing point around which all actions take place for all teachers but might be even more difficult for subs). I'm still relatively inexperienced myself, but perhaps I could speak with others to see what they think, too, and then maybe I can put something together.

Toodles.