Cosmopoetica

“My stake as a marginalized Other … should make quite clear my empathetic relationship with quantum subjects, such as photons and electrons. … Quanta are my soul sisters. We have multiple identities. We can’t be explained away by categories which are taken to be ‘objective’, ‘natural,’ ‘universal’ –existing outside of language, gender, sexuality, humanity, space-time (culture-history).”

–Karen Barad
From “Meeting the Universe Halfway”
found in Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science: A Dialogue

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[CC licensed image by darkpatator]

Eighteen months ago– a day after his suicide– I packed up every David Foster Wallace authored book, every journal, magazine, and photocopied piece of ephemera he appeared in, and everything else I could find with his byline and hid it all in a closet.

A few days ago– on what would have been Wallace’s 48th birthday– I told a friend how I still hadn’t been able to re-read anything Wallace had written. “Open that box. Like, now,” she said. And since I trust this friend, I did. I went back to the first words of Wallace’s I ever read, the short story “Everything is Green.” I immediately noticed the coincidence of the narrator’s age:

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“What is to give light must endure burning.”

–Victor Frankl

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I know this comment was a compliment… yet it illustrates the fundamental divide in the person I once was (and want to be again) and the person I’ve become, despite my efforts. No poetry.

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aka I am what I am
aka taking the guilt out of guilty pleasures

My second theme for 2010 is to double or treble my efforts to reinforce my defense against the pressure to conform aesthetically to please others. Some of this pressure is real, some imagined… but it almost always involves my own ego and the need to feel perceived in a certain way by some group or person. I need to banish the self-conception that leads me to worry that I’m not “post-avant enough” or “I’m too mainstream.”

I need to stop worrying so much that someone will come across my digital presence and find too much flim-flammery and tomfoolery and “off-topic” writing. I can live with the split between “work/edtech me” and “creative/maker me,” but I can’t continue to allow myself to become ever more splintered by worry about my (minuscule) audience. Each shard cuts me and in the end I suffer the death of a thousand cuts of the expectations I attribute to unknown others.

I like what I like. Those who aren’t interested in the same things– which is likely to be the significant majority– can walk on or look the other direction. I like British mysteries, BBC sitcoms, hard scifi, and the occasional romantic comedy. I like probably more than my fair share of pop fiction, pop culture and pop music. I like some television in controlled, commercial free doses… I’m not embarrassed at enjoying Red Dwarf & The Wire, The Sopranos and Rome, Dexter and Sherlock Holmes.

I like story in stories, narrative in films, coherence in poetry, and melody in music. Most of the time. And when I don’t, or I find something else… well, bully for me then!

I like Ray Carver’s “minimalism” and David Foster Wallace’s near logorrhea alike. I enjoy Le Carré & Hemingway, John Ashbery & Billy Collins, Jack Gilbert & EE Cummings. I love Faulkner & O’Connor but I also love Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels and Lawrence Sanders’ McNally’s series. Just to name a few.

I don’t have to choose between these authors when I can choose from them.

I don’t have to be ashamed that I read in different ways. Yes, sometimes I read as a writer, with pen in hand, and analyze. I’m not killing the subject with this examination. Sometimes I read for simple, unencumbered enjoyment. Sometimes, when I get really lucky, I and the work can sustain both of these activities simultaneously.

I can read without worrying about “readings,” and I can share what I enjoy in my reading without having to be a Theorist.

And I can substitute listening and looking at art for “reading” in all of the above. Shamelessly.

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The Buddha said:

“Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

It’s a cruel irony that by not giving of ourselves we are most diminished. Yet, the Buddha speaks of sharing our happiness. What if we have no happiness to share?

The more he cast away the more he had.
–John Bunyan

A friend continually reminds me that loving others– and what else is giving of happiness but a kind of love– is impossible if we can’t find something in ourselves to love. That friend appears to have embarked on ambitious project, maybe the greatest project possible, of figuring out how to love, how to allow himself to be loved, and finally to give to others from that love.

As Jon Kabat Zinn wisely put it:

Generosity is another quality which, like patience, letting go, non-judging, and trust, provides a solid foundation for mindfulness practice. You might experiment with using the cultivation of generosity as a vehicle for deep self-observation and inquiry as well as an exercise in giving. A good place to start is with yourself. See if you can give yourself gifts that may be true blessings, such as self-acceptance, or some time each day with no purpose. Practice feeling deserving enough to accept these gifts without obligation-to simply receive from yourself, and from the universe.

I need some of that. In trying to protect myself from the dangers that come from vulnerability and protect others from my own deep anger– a fire that refuses to stop burning– I’ve developed a callus around my heart, that paradoxical place where vulnerability and anger are seeded and rooted as they grow.

And my heart has grown smaller. I lack generosity in my thoughts and actions. Every thought I have of giving carries with it the taint of loss. When I do manage to give, I feel a reluctance that is sometimes conscious, but more often subconscious, a feeling that I’m forcing a rusting mechanism, rather than acting as Seneca would have it:

We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.

This isn’t (just) about charitable acts. It’s about a fundamental position vis-a-vis humanity and my purpose here, as I’ve been fashioned, whether that purpose be one tied to some cosmic power that includes me or a cosmic power I create. I need, as Confucius said,

To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.

I just don’t know if it’s supposed to be this hard… if the difficulty I find in what is, essentially, choosing to be a good person, doesn’t say something about my essential character and nature, however those may have come to be. I’m not the only one in this predicament. Witness Alexander Pope:

Many people are capable of doing a wise thing, more a cunning thing, but very few a generous thing.

But I derive little pleasure from knowing I have company.

So, one theme for the new year– and forever after, I hope– will be to cultivate true generosity, a generosity that can break through the chaotic trade and traffic in my buzzing head, a shoot to peep through cracked pavement, a green vein in the prison yard’s dark dirt.

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I’ll be indulging myself over the next few weeks with ruminations on my themes for the new year (I hope you’ve noted the overall optimism I’m implying by adding the year in this post’s title).

I’m not one who stands in opposition to the traditional New Year’s resolutions. I welcome any opportunity to contemplate my life and attempt a positive change. If anything we should have more times where sharing publicly in the ongoing remaking of ourselves is acceptable.

We should be making and re-making ourselves all the time… an activity impossible without constant resolutions. To be effective, the products of our resolve must be part of larger themes. For me, these themes tie into “core principles” of who I am and who I want to be, something I’ve been thinking intensely about over the last few months.

Most of my themes involve creativity and making, but some are best tangentially connected to the ostensible “purpose” of this blog.

Here ends the apology.

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[photo by Stuck in Customs]

I’m consciously convinced that aesthetic appreciation is ultimately a subjective experience—a happening, even a communion, but in the end comprising a wholly individual appraisal. People come together to beauty in part due to the skill of the artist and in part through fortunate circumstance, by dint of shared experience, empathy and simultaneously finding a place where the strings of contingency have been drawn tight enough to dance on.

But there’s a small part of me that retains a vague faith—the kind that supports superstition rather than conversion—in something more universal, a sublime Beauty real enough to touch, broad enough to accommodate Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile and the rictus of my dead father’s mouth. Because capital-B Beauty isn’t found only in the pleasing, but the awe-inspiring and the terrifying, the things that for a moment open cracks in the carefully constructed shelter we build to protect us from that vastness that is other than us and which we know we can’t possibly see even as we are seeing it, the all of everything.

Part of my task is to capitalize on that faith by finding—or rediscovering—my own resources, my individual inner vision. More than I like to admit, my attention, and thus my apprehension and the resulting appreciation, is brought to bear only through the suggestion of others. The dismissed, poem I have read and as quickly forgot, a painting I stood in front of without imprinting a single conscious memory, becomes noteworthy because someone else—a friend, a critic, a complete stranger—points it out and I take a look or listen… this time with eyes and ears open.

I need to find once again that place where I can comfortably kneel and receive those gifts. I wonder if I can, if there is any “there” there. I wonder if I’m consigned to consuming words as so much mediocre mental fodder, anesthetizing my mind the way I numb my body with food, a narcotic I continue to need long after any pleasure derived from it has disappeared…

The only path is mindfulness. The only approach allowing the grasping hands and gaping mouth of attention to have their way. The only posture one of presence, awareness of every word, note and hue. It takes good work to make such gifts, but it takes good work to receive them too. There’s a humility in accepting what someone else has to give without crushing the fragile offering beneath the weight of expectations and preconceptions or shaping it to my will.

When I’m fortunate enough to find those pieces which fit perfectly into my glistening spaces—the natural bend of my bodies and wounds alike—I can give thanks in the small ways I know how. And when I’m not, trust in silence.

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[photo by zebra.paperclip]

With depression comes malaise, apathy and torpor. I know the phenomenon well. Over the years I’ve developed somewhat productive ways of dealing with the high-wire unicycling of my psyche. But I can’t help thinking there’s something else going on too, a slowly gathering storm of real dissatisfaction–the first currents of which I felt nearly two years ago. Back then, I eventually made a quiet (and quietly broken) resolution to get out of the education/educational technology game… at least in the form I was playing it. Now I’m back to thinking I was on the right track.

I just don’t care about many of the things I used to… and naturally I care less about talking to people about them. The few issues, topics and themes I retain some connection to in my professional life are at such a remove that I suspect it’s merely a matter of inertia and duty that keeps them on my mind at all. The conversations continue on blogs and Twitter, but I’m slowly drifting away from them. I barely skim blogs. The Twitter conversation mostly makes me think "meh." The email has slowed to a trickle.

The primary reason I shut down Ruminate was because it was taking on the dull flavor of obligation and on-command, on-demand thinking. I was loathe to give it up because I feared (rightly) that in doing so I’d essentially "lose" a passel of friendly colleagues who are/were (again rightly) only interested in Education Chris. But I did. And what I suspected would happen appears to be happening. So I’m left wondering: now what?

Things I used to care about that are slipping away, if they’re not completely gone already: educational technology, social software, social networks, learning communities, educational innovation, edublogging, wikis, personal learning environments… pretty much everything my professional existence is based on.

It’s not that I don’t care about anything. That would surely be my brain chemistry talking. Some of the philosophical aspects remain of abstract concern, such as intellectual property/copyright, but I have nothing new to add to those conversations either. Perhaps I’m suffering from simple transition-sickness. Some of my foundational intellectual, political and personal beliefs, conjectures and principles are being put to the question–from within myself. That’s bound to cause some discomfort.

In the end I guess it’s just disheartening to try to come to terms with the loss of this community because I have no project (in the grand sense) to replace it. I don’t write this looking for answers from anyone, particularly since so few know about this blog in the first place! It just seems right to document who I am, whenever I can. If for no other reason than to leave a small trace of my passage.

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Does anyone else ever wonder how long they can keep pretending? I do.

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[image by naccarato]

It was pretty disconcerting to stumble upon, while reading The Guardian, a news story on the suicide–right here in tiny town–of a former faculty member at the small University I work for. And it was even more surprising to learn that the victim (or victor, because I’m honestly not sure that it isn’t a victory of a kind) was Sylvia Plath’s son! I didn’t know Nicholas Hughes at all beyond, I think, perhaps being introduced once or twice in large gatherings… but still this feels personal in a way I associate with the grief following the death of people I knew personally (or intensely and vicariously).

Beyond the abstract debate the suicide of a "celebrity" always sparks–the role mental illness in the arts, the function and effects of suicide, whether such events are relevant to art (or not), etc–it triggers in me a morbid triad of fear, longing and envy. Fear because it makes me wonder how I can make it through the endless black days ahead of me when I’m so much less gifted (equipped) than someone like David Foster Wallace and less accomplished (successful) than someone like Nicholas Hughes; longing because no matter what I do–no matter the pills I swallow, the books and poems I ingest, the art I absorb, the shrinks I talk to, the pep talks and encouragement I receive, the knowledge of the meager and damaging legacy I would leave behind–what I want, every day, and every hour most of those days, is to just mercifully have this damaged existence come to a close with as little fanfare and pain for anyone else as possible; and envy because it’s finally over for these broken souls while time just drags on for me.

Because that’s the truth of me: I was born broken in a fundamental and, I fear, unfixable way. I get so tired of people talking about suicide as the "easy way" as if it’s like turning out a light. Suicide is only slightly easier than the alternative of bearing the days which stretch out until each minute sometimes feels like hours and it’s blackness ahead, behind and all around. If someone builds a 777 jumbo jet and someone else chooses to build a 767, the latter hasn’t taken the easy way out, have they? I’m sure there is some distinctly small minority of people who take their own life without thinking too much, but my experience is that people who are finally driven to that end have exactly the opposite problem– being unable to stop thinking so much.

It’s a miserable way to exist, feeling trapped like an animal in a box by forces beyond your control, while listening to a chorus of well-meaning people explaining how it’s all in your mind or how just learn to stop worrying and it will get better. I feel for those suicides leave behind. I suspect the only reason I’ve not shuffled off this mortal coil is because of my children and what I fear it would do to them… and while I know the effect will never be nil, as they get older and finally become adults of their own I don’t know that those threads of connection will always be able to bear my burdensome weight. Because if there’s another way out of the box, another way to escape from the darkened figure with the bludgeon poised that towers over me and obscures my vision, I don’t know what it is.

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People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

–Marilynne Robinson
from “The Art of Fiction #198″
(Paris Review, Fall 2008)

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“Betrothed”

You hear yourself walking on the snow.
You hear the absence of the birds.
A stillness so complete, you hear
the whispering inside of you. Alone
morning after morning, and even more
at night. The say we are born alone,
to live and die alone. But they are wrong.
We get to be alone by time, by luck,
or by misadventure. When I hit the log
frozen in the woodpile to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of twilight that awakens
me in the middle of a life. The black
and white of me mated with this indifferent
winter landscape. I think of the moon
coming in a little while to find the white
among these colorless pines.

–Jack Gilbert
from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992

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I love Keats, and while it isn’t my favorite poem of his, today I can’t help but recall these words from his sonnet “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” (text and audio):

…on the shore of the wide world I stand alone, and think…

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…it’s a pretty depressing day, you must admit, when you feel you relate more importantly to poetry than to life.

–Frank O’Hara
from “Statement for the Paterson Society”

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[image by S. Casey] 

David Foster Wallace’s passing has spurred a lot of conversations that in one way or another invoke the idea of irony and his work’s relationship to it. Some of the arguments to be found in and around those discussions– and some of the hostility that DFW’s work drew from the beginning (not to mention a veritable murder of prescriptivists descending upon Alanis Morrissette like tweedy, elbow-patched crows on a field of green ESL learners)– comes from clear dissonance regarding what irony actually is and then proceeding to speak as if everyone involved is talking about the same thing at the same time.

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Last night I found out about another local teen suicide victim… another friend of my children… another child I knew. That’s two in as many days, three in as many weeks. And that on top of a string of senseless accidental deaths that seems to stretch back as far as forever.

It’s not just heartbreaking in the abstract anymore, it’s not just "a tragedy." I’m heartbroken. I’m worried. I’m at a loss.

As a very fortunate survivor (saved by a series of unlikely events) and one who has continued to struggle with suicidal impulses, I understand so completely that it would sicken these children, so convinced that their pain is unique and unbearable. And yet I also don’t understand at all, because in the 20+ years since I tried I’ve struggled with some part of the desire to try again almost every day and I’ve never been able to really make sense of it. My understanding comes from somewhere deep inside beyond or below rationality. Except for the brief honeymoon period as I made my recovery– a brief bloom of ecstatic awareness that I imagine survivors of all kinds of near death experiences can understand– the pull towards the ultimate denial of self pulls almost unceasingly. And in the rare moments that it doesn’t, the absence is conspicuous. When you become so accustomed to fighting against something and that something goes away, you might think you just steam off in the desired direction, like a boat breaking free of a rope. But my experience is that I no longer know how to operate properly or what it means to go where I want to go under my own steam. I’ve become defined by the constant struggle.

What these children don’t get is that they are children. I’m not minimizing the suffering they feel… nothing makes me more resentful even now than someone who tries to convince me that the pain I felt– the despair– was somehow illusory or unreal. What these children can’t feel is that life comes in stages and a good part of their life hasn’t even begun. They don’t understand that they are children still and that things can and will change so much for them so soon. That is an understanding beyond logic and intellect, tragically most needed at an age when it is impossible to understand that there really are a lot of things that you can only learn through time… through existing longer.

And I worry about my children because I know how thoroughly I fooled my own parents, partially subconsciously. I talk to my children more directly and more often. I talk to my children about these issues directly. But I know that they could– as I did once– walk right past me on an ordinary day, tell me they are tired from practice and want to take a nap, and almost casually close a door that will never open again.

Last night I finally just let out a howl, some kind of primal scream of anguish for these children, for my children, for me… and for the me that is not me (or maybe it’s the real me I glimpse in mirrors out of the corner of my eyes) that nauseatingly understands. And understands nothing.

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[photo by Greg Gladman]

As part of an effort at soul-salving, I am resuming my poetry memorizing routine. I’m just going to start with a new list, including some that I already know though I haven’t sat and recited them to myself for a long time. For me, memorizing is a way to burrow into and under the words. The poems I choose aren’t necessarily "great" in a canonical sense, they are the ones that grab my tongue and ears and won’t let go, sometimes obviously with a poem like Hopkins’ "Spring and Fall" and sometimes with more subtlety as in "Song" by Seamus Heaney. I don’t have a prodigious memory by any means, so I prefer shorter works where the language adds to my ability to recall, even if it’s not necessarily rhyming.

Up now is "Musée des Beaux Arts" — a poem I’ve always loved. Not sure what I’ll do next– suggestions?

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The calendar is about to tick over. I spend this New Year’s Eve like the last– and the one before that– alone with my thoughts, some music, and a drink (flowering oolong tea). At the best of times I’m not good company during this time of year, when introspection inevitably leads to introspection… and spurred on by a hospital visit on Christmas Eve, I hope the friends I’ve essentially blown off for the last few weeks aren’t too offended that I’ve gone to ground. And I still haven’t sent out Christmas gifts!

Given that I have reason to be thankful for simply remaining physically incarnate for these occasions, I won’t spend too much time complaining. I’m thankful for many of the usual things: there’s hope for reconciling writing with the rest of my life and many opportunities for interesting work, I have family and friends that I look forward to spending more time with, and there is always more to read, listen to, watch, and admire.

I made a few resolutions (yeah, I do that), none of which are earth-shattering and almost all of which are online for those who know how to find them. I miss how it used to feel possible– and not just on New Year’s Eve– to really start over in significant ways. Losing that ability is one of the worst things about being an adult (as Ben Folds sings it, “everybody knows it sucks to grow up, but everybody does”). But, despite the litany of things I could recite to show how much starting over is need, I have to count myself fortunate at what I do have.

And maybe this year (it is now officially 2008) a few of the irresolvable problems (such as: how do I reconcile myself with the– as of late very clearly demonstrated and brutal– reality that I will never be able to be close to the one person I most desire and with whom I have an almost unearthly rapport) will sort themselves out or a few of the unknowables (for instance: is there something out there, anything, larger than myself that can provide a context to make my life meaningful) make themselves known. There’s only one way to find out…

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And not just my skin, though we are down to just over 4 hours of daylight and not a lot of that is quality time with The Great God Sol. After a few weeks of rumination, scheduling and unscheduling, re-prioritizing, reading and sleeping, I am emerging from anti-social, introvert Cave 1.0 and re-joining the land of the socially distributed. At least to the degree that I can remain committed to juggling work, life and art.

Until I have more to say, I suggest you learn some answers to life’s important questions, helpfully depicted by The Stereotypist. As a sample:

Or you can quit wasting time reading this blog and go read Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech wherein, among other things, she makes clear why you shouldn’t be reading blogs…

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