The Role of the Arts in Hannah Arendt’s Boundary Spaces

Hannah Arendt opens the Prologue of The Human Condition with the suggestion that the (post)modern era hails a new (and potentially dangerous) development in human consciousness, a burgeoning desire to rebel from the human condition. [1] As Arendt develops her ideas, she traces divergent trajectories of interwoven concepts that include multiple definitions of the role and context of art. Art seems significant in its unwieldy ineffability; she returns to it repeatedly, from different angles, even dedicating a full chapter to the quandary of its placement in the vita activa. While not at the center of Arendt’s exegesis or her gyrating theses, art demands a place in the inquiry throughout the work. Its role remains elusive as she traverses the space between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, the tripartite division of the vita activa into labor, work, and action, and the transformation of the political realm of antiquity into the social realm of modernity. Art seems to suggest itself as representing both full engagement of and rebellion against the human condition, one of the few activities that revels in the space between. 

In a historical orbit that crosses 2500 years and multiple languages, definitions of central terms tend to take on new intonations and implications as frames of reference and cultural values change around them. In an exploration of the role of art across this time frame, it is helpful to understand the historical trajectory of these ideas before exploring their significance. Conceptually, there are several original Greek terms at play, transforming across their history of translation and retranslation. Arendt herself spends quite a bit of time on these lexical distinctions. 

Arendt’s primary exploration of the concepts and values inherited from the ancient Greeks pulls from Plato and Aristotle, with occasional references to presocratic thinkers, historians, and politicians. She uses the Latin for vita contemplativa and vita activa as she develops her theses, but she traces the concepts to earlier phenomena in Greek antiquity. She identifies Aristotle’s categories of ways of life as an early separation of modes of being in the world that will continue to evolve across the Western canon. These definitions, the result of early attempts by Plato and Aristotle to categorize aspects of the Western mind’s emerging rationality, have considerable significance for understanding the role and transformation of the arts in society.  English translations of art words, specifically, often occlude distinctions between art and craft, artisan and technician, and the concepts of making, fabricating, generating, and creating. The ancient Greeks, too, found their corollary terms challenging, but often settled their meaning in different places than their modern insinuations. 

In Arendt’s exploration of labor, work, and action, terms she defines anew as she attempts to differentiate between discrete ways of being that emerged in the ancient Greek relationships between private and public spaces, she establishes the foundations of what will come to be understood as the vita activa. She defines these three categories as follows:

“Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor…

“Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings…

“Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world…” (7).

In summary, the three activities of the vita activa offer a hierarchical approach to engaging the fullness of the human spirit, moving towards an apotheosis of human plurality and thus permanence through action: “Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history” (8-9). The overarching concept of “making” exists across these distinctions, but with nuanced and sometimes contrasting intentions. Labor is fleeting, and painful. Work is reifying, and solitary. Action is always unfinished, an engagement with a phenomenal field of independent others, “the only place where men could show who they really and interchangeably were” (41).

At first glance, the arts seem to live in the “work” category. The ancient Greek word τέχνη (often translated as either “craft” or “art” in various English editions of the works of Plato and Aristotle) encompasses several other terms that Arendt frequently calls upon as she explores the vita activa. Τέχναι is the umbrella term that might be most appropriately translated in the general sense as activities of “making,” but its usage in antiquity is somewhat varied. Plato differentiates τέχνη into two or three subcategories, depending on the dialogue. In the Timaeus, we see a distinction between natural τέχναι (such as farming, which belongs to Arendt’s category of labor), and productive τέχναι, or ποίησις (a term Arendt references frequently, and which is often translated as “making” or “producing,” sometimes “creating,” and includes examples of activities which generally belong to the category of work). In the Sophist, Plato adds a third category: μιμητική, or imitation. [2] 

In contemporary discourse, certain roles within the ancient category of ποίησις are often referenced with respect to the visual arts, μιμητική holds the theatrical arts, and musicians and poets seem to occupy an elusive space between the two. However, in ancient Greece, the terms  τέχνη and ποίησις encompassed much more than our current definitions do, raising questions about what art actually was in this ancient context. We encounter concepts in Plato such as the art of agriculture, the art of earning money, the art of navigation, the art of medicine, and the art of city crafting, and in Aristotle, the art of war, the art of speech or rhetoric, and the art of politics. 

Even as early as the Socratic school, as Arendt points out, the activities of lawmaking and city-building were legitimate political activities because men “act like craftsmen,” with tangible products and a recognizable end. It is not yet action (πρᾶξῐς), but making (ποίησις), “which [the Socratics] prefer because of its greater reliability” (195). Aristotle is the first to push against the primacy of ποίησις in favor of πρᾶξῐς, while both Plato and Aristotle grapple continuously with the role of contemplation in both of these categories.

Meanwhile, Aristotle picks up the mantle of Plato’s machinations around generation and immanence, applying Plato’s questions to the realm of human freedom, and identifying three ways of life in which freedom is possible. Arendt identifies the βίος πολιτικός as an Aristotelian concept later translated as the vita activa, a concept which reflects “a life devoted to public-political matters” (12). This is contrasted with the vita contemplativa (or, βίος θεωρητικός), and the life of pleasure (βίος ἀπολαυστικός) [3], which Arendt largely ignores in this work. Interestingly, as she points out, engagement in the various greek τέχναι does not factor at all into the three ways of life associated with freedom. The τέχναι, modern arts included, lack a fundamental freedom that they acquired in later eras, “since they served and produced what was necessarily useful” (13). “To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity, and this enslavement was inherent in the conditions of human life” (83-84).

There appear to be two terms that might apply to the role that we understand as belonging to the modern artisan, and both are often translated into English as “artisan.” Δημιουργός seems to have applied to anyone involved in the productive τέχναι, sometimes with the added intonation of a creative practice worthy of the gods. (In this type of usage, the gods are understood as the δημιουργοί of the world, and humans are imitating their creative prowess as they engage in the productive acts of the vita activa.) Βάναυσος, on the other hand, is a more derogatory term that referenced various servile arts, often including many components of Arendt’s “work” category, as well as engagement with what we now consider to be the fields of visual and architectural arts (81). Arendt tells us that “the Greeks in their classical period declared the whole field of the arts and crafts, where men work with instruments and do something not for its own sake but in order to produce something else, to be banausic, a term perhaps best translate by ‘philistine,’ implying vulgarity of thinking and acting in terms of expediency” (156-157). She emphasizes this in stark contrast with the modern approach to art, suggesting that “the vehemence of this contempt will never cease to startle us if we realize that the great masters of Greek sculpture and architecture were by no means excepted from the verdict” (157).

To emphasize the cultural derision of the artisans of Greek antiquity, Arendt offers an anecdote of Aristotle imagining a future world in which artisanal work (such as weaving or lyre-playing) can exist without the worker, whereas slaves will always be necessary, as “instruments of living” (122). Here we find a distinction between labor and work, but still with slaves and artisans in a similar non-political category. Labor and work remain wholly separated from the political realm of action. 

This distinction becomes blurred, however, when we begin to consider the role of the poets. Their type of making, belonging to Aristotle’s subcategory of imitation, has unique potential to powerfully impact the political realm. Sections of Arendt’s exegesis that reference the poets represent some of the most vibrant contradictions in her entire work, suggesting that we continue to be as unsure of where to place this type of active engagement as the Greeks were. In an exploration of the role of remembrance and history-making as contributing to human permanence, Arendt tells us that while “Homer was not only a shining example of the poet’s political function, and therefore the ‘educator of all Hellas,’ the very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its permanence” (197). This sentence seems to contain both a celebration and an indictment of the poets. They are simultaneously a critical element in maintaining human permanence, and also somehow not enough. On Homer’s poems, as she tells us later, “the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse” (205). The poets are both actively contributing to human immortality, and untouchable in the actual vagaries of history. 

Pericles, too, wades into these murky waters, contrasting the dynamic nature  of the polis with the craftsmanship of the poets. On Pericles, Arendt summarizes,  “the art of politics teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant…Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement” (206). Yet, the remembrance we gain through imitation is, in early Greek history, the province of the poets. 

As the Western historical journey approaches the medieval era, Arendt suggests that the vita activa and the vita contemplativa  diverge, with the vita contemplativa remaining the only truly free way of life (14). Truth is now to be found only in human stillness (15), and remembrance, once the province of poets and historians, centers itself in the eternal changelessness of the contemplative realm. In this new, Christian-era vita contemplativa, “the primacy of contemplation over activity rests on the conviction that no work of human hands can equal in beauty and truth the physical kosmos, which swings in itself in changeless eternity without any interference or assistance from outside, from man or god. This eternity discloses itself to mortal eyes only when all human movements and activities are at perfect rest” (15).

The role of generation, of bringing something into being (a fundamental component of the early expressions of what has come to be known as “the arts”),  loses its hold on the political sphere in the medieval era. After the fall of Rome and the rise of the Christian gospel, Arendt tells us that the cultural shifts “succeeded so well in making the vita activa and the bios politikos the handmaidens of contemplation that not even the rise of the secular in the modern age and the concomitant reversal of the traditional hierarchy between action and contemplation sufficed to save from oblivion the striving for immortality which originally had been the spring and center of the vita activa” (21). Nonetheless, while the human engagement in eternity settles squarely into the vita contemplativa and the political sphere transforms into a space of transaction, the role of artists is once again caught in spaces between. 

Again, the artisans land in the space of “work,” as craft guilds spring up to accommodate these social transitions and transform the inherited systems of antiquity. Arendt suggests that “the hallmark of these non-political communities [of later antiquity] was that their public place, the agora, was not a meeting place of citizens, but a marketplace where craftsmen could show and exchange their products. … What characterized these marketplaces, and later characterized the medieval cities’ trade and craft districts, was that the display of goods for sale was accompanied by a display of their production” (160). 

The role of thinking, a critical aspect of creating artisanal goods and the original hallmark of the vita contemplativa which supported human engagement with the eternal, unchanging divine, also seems to be a critical element of the process of bringing a work of art or craft into being in the medieval era, setting the stage for a break with traditional implications of τέχνη. And moving towards the modern era, process reigns, as the certainty of past cosmologies is upended with Galileo’s telescope and Descartes’ skepticism. 

The modern world discovers intimacy and inner subjectivity (69), ushering in a displacement of the political sphere by a vapid and self-aggrandizing social sphere. In a discussion of Rousseau, we return to the increasing sense of rebellion with which Arendt opened her Preface: “The modern individual and his endless conflicts, his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism of his emotional life, was born in this rebellion of the heart” (39). She suggests that this new radical subjectivism excludes humans from the realm of action, turning them inward and away from true political engagement. Public art is one casualty of this transition: “the astonishing flowering of poetry and music from the middle of the eighteenth century until almost the last third of the nineteenth, accompanied by the rise of the novel, the only entirely social art form, coincided with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture, is sufficient testimony to a close relationship between the social and the intimate” (39).

Meanwhile, labor (now disembodied) returns to subsume all aspects of the vita activa, taking on unprecedented dominance in Western history. Work disappears in the automation and specialization of the modern era, and the arts are distanced from the vita activa and the body politic, themselves turning inward, drowning in introspection. We now encounter the phenomenon of creative genius, which Arendt posits as not existing in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: “[the living creative genius] finds himself in competition with his creations which he outlives, although they may survive him eventually” (211). The art and the artist are at odds, the artist subservient to the product she has produced, while her individual human essence is lost in the process that guided her work towards completion.

“The modern age’s obsession with the unique signature of each artist, its unprecedented sensitivity to style, shows a preoccupation with those features by which the artist transcends his skill and workmanship in a way similar to the way each person’s uniqueness transcends the sum total of his qualities. Because of this transcendence, which indeed distinguishes the great work of art from all other products of human hands, the phenomenon of the creative genius seemed like the highest legitimation for the conviction of homo faber that a man’s products may be more and essentially greater than himself” (210).

There is a new pain in the artist’s self-recognition as “the son of his work” (212), and artists began to push against this development in the postmodern era: “It is only with the beginning of our [twentieth] century that great artists in surprising unanimity have protested against being called ‘geniuses’  and have insisted on craftsmanship, competence, and the close relationships between art and handicraft” (210). Arendt suggests that idolization of genius is its own form of degradation (211), and that artists now are reacting to the rise of a laboring society that doesn’t value creativity (210).

As we venture towards the postmodern era, which Arendt was straddling and which we now are fully immersed in, art is less accessible, but perhaps more transcendent. In this dangerous new landscape, in which we insist upon rebelling against the human condition (implication: against our own guaranteed existence as a species), it may be that our engagement in the transcendence offered through art offers us a way forward as we grapple with the loss of the public sphere. While Arendt does not state this explicitly, she returns to the arts over and over again as she identifies the most profound complexities of these broader cultural transformations, raising questions as to whether there is something we need to understand in the space between process and product. For her, this is a space that the arts traverse with blatant uncategorizability. 

In the arts, we continue to negotiate the spaces between creation and reification, being and becoming, natality, mortality, and eternity. Remembrance, once the province of homo faber, has lost its clarity in a world turned inward. Its original role, Arendt tells us, is to help us engage eternity in ways that our unique existence doesn’t have immediate access to: “Remembrance in this, as in all other cases, prepares the intangible and the futile for their eventual materialization; it is the beginning of the work process, and like the craftsman’s consideration of the model which will guide his work, its most immaterial stage” (90-91). 

In the eras of modernity and postmodernity, we seem to be dwelling more in that most immaterial stage, having lost the stability of the vita activa. Perhaps we are again seeking an elusive divine, even less accessible in the human world after having turned our attention toward inward subjectivity: “Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god–not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths” (22).

The risk, here, is the loss of our fundamental humanness, only truly expressible in the realm of action, and missing its integrity in the new social realm. Arendt warns us of the dangers of this reorganization:

“In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things–into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfilment and which makes it, indeed, as the Greeks held, the mother of all arts, the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been” (95).

She defines the polis as a space of  “organized remembrance” (198), “the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly” (198-99). The loss of the polis  also represents a loss of identity. Reification, once the province of “work,” takes on new urgency in this vacuum. 

Reification, through artistic practice, finds its beginnings in the process of thinking, an activity once isolated in the vita contemplativa. “Thought is related to feeling and transforms its mute and inarticulate despondency, as exchange transforms the naked greed of desire and usage transforms the desperate longing of needs–until they are all fit to enter the world and to be transformed into things, to become reified. In each instance, a human capacity which by its very nature is world-open and communicative transcends and releases into the world a passionate intensity from its imprisonment within the self” (168). Arendt applies this specifically to the arts with a reference to a poem by Rilke: “In the case of art works, reification is more than mere transformation; it is transfiguration, a veritable metamorphosis in which it is as though the course of nature which wills that all fire burn to ashes is reverted and even dust can burst into flames.” (168)

These references, poetic in themselves, push us towards a re-engagement with Plato’s eidetic landscape of the mind, with the eternal forms of being that the early Greeks sought through engagement in the realm of action. A term we don’t encounter much in Arendt’s work, but that is almost always at the center of modern and postmodern discussions of art, is “aesthetics.” Despite the term’s conspicuous absence in the text, the realm of aesthetics (Plato’s “beautiful” and “good”) seems to adopt renewed importance in the application of the arts in a new and unwieldy era. The beautiful once belonged to the vita contemplativa, but now seems to have its greatest expression in the lingering work space of the arts. Art, while often considered “useless” in a laboring society, still holds space for the beautiful. 

As we attempt to define the role of the arts in the modern and postmodern eras, it seems that we are once again required to consider the space between knowing and doing, to bridge the gap that the ancients thrust upon us:  “...the division between knowing and doing, so alien to the realm of action, whose validity and meaningfulness are destroyed the moment thought and action part company, is an everyday experience in fabrication, whose processes obviously fall into two parts: first, perceiving the image or shape (eidos) of the product-to-be, and then organizing the means and starting the execution” (225).

Perhaps, in the postmodern era, the losses we have experienced in the ascendancy of labor can be remedied through the boundary-crossing implications of contemporary artistic practice. Arendt compares the two with attention towards the beautiful, something inherently missing in the modern approach to labor and accompanying automation: “For although the durability of ordinary things is but a feeble reflection of the permanence of which the most worldly of all things, works of art, are capable, something of this quality–which to Plato was divine because it approaches immortality–is inherent in every thing as a thing, and it is precisely this quality or the lack of it that shines forth in its shape and makes it beautiful or ugly” (172). Arendt likens this to the action-oriented concept of “appearing publicly and being seen” (173).

The artist, too, occupies a unique place in the modern society of laborers: Arendt identifies the danger that the arts will be devalued through this social reorganization, but notes that it doesn’t seem to have happened yet: “No matter what sociology, psychology, and anthropology will tell us about ‘the social animal,’ men persist in making, fabricating, and building, although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist, so that the concomitant experiences of worldliness escape more and more the range of ordinary human experience” (323). 

As we begin to traverse the boundary spaces of the reification of product and the transcendence of process, art emerges to ferry us across. Arendt dedicates a full chapter to this possibility, titled “The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art.” It is here that the fabricated objects of art are separated from “use objects”: “Moreover, the proper intercourse with a work of art is certainly not ‘using’ it; on the contrary, it must be removed carefully from the whole context of ordinary use objects to attain its proper place in the world. By the same token, it must be removed from the exigencies and wants of daily life, with which it has less contact than any other thing” (167). Art stands apart from all other forms of making, hinting at a past that has transcended and confounded cultural shifts in other areas of living and working: “Even if the historical origin of art were of an exclusively religious or mythological character, the fact is that art has survived gloriously its severance from religion, magic, and myth” (167). Art, she tells us, has “outstanding permanence” (167).

“In this permanence, the very stability of the human artifice, which, being inhabited and used by mortals, can never be absolute, achieves a representation of its own. Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings. It is as though worldly stability has become transparent in the permanence of art, so that a premonition of immortality, not the immortality of the soul or of life but of something immortal achieved by mortal hands, has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read” (167-168).

Perhaps art is homo faber having transcended himself, now prepared to provide a critical service in reintroducing the modern world to values lost with the public sphere of action: We need “the help of the artists, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all” (173). Art is our insurance policy against losing ourselves in the “utilitarian instrumentalism” that has taken over our cultural consciousness: “In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech, for activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication by which the world itself and all things in it are produced” (173-174). 

We are reminded here of certain ancient arts encompassed in τέχνη, that “it was precisely these occupations–healing, flute-playing, play-acting–which furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man” (207).These activities “possess an enduring quality of their own because they create their own remembrance” (208).  In the modern era, after the vita activa split with the vita contemplativa, the concept of process was introduced into making (301). Art has a unique relationship with process, reflecting back to earlier antiquity when Greek contemplation was an inherent element of fabrication. The craftsman was guided by the eidos, the model, of the work-to-be, bringing it into a new kind of being, traversing the space between eternity and the human world: “work makes perishable and spoils the excellence of what remained eternal so long as it was the object of mere contemplation” (303).

As Arendt begins to wrap up her conclusions, she reminds us of the power that the beautiful and the eternal held for so much of Western history: “If one reads medieval sources on the joys and delights of contemplation, it is as though the philosophers wanted to make sure that homo faber would heed the call and let his arms drop, finally realizing that his greatest desire, the desire for permanence and immortality, cannot be fulfilled by his doings, but only when he realizes that the beautiful and eternal cannot be made” (303). Nonetheless, there is an intangibility expressed more clearly through the arts than through other objects or pathways of reification and remembrance, an intangibility that has new presence in the tumultuous uncertainty of the modern era. In her earlier discussion of the permanence of works of art, she suggests that “the process of acting and speaking can leave behind no such results and end products. But for all its intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common. We call this reality the ‘web’ of human relationships, indicating by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality” (183). As she concludes her warnings to us, it seems that the artists are left with great responsibility to guard against the loss of the public sphere: “...action, too, has become an experience for the privileged few, and these few who still know what it means to act may well be even fewer than the artists, their experience even rarer than the genuine experience of and love for the world” (324).

Arendt may be pushing us towards a new understanding of process, and using the boundary space of the arts to help elucidate its role in the world-to-come: “processes, therefore, and not ideas, the models and shapes of the things to be, become the guide for making and fabricating activities of homo faber in the modern age” (300). Then again, as she told us in the beginning, “good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go, leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.” (76) As humans begin to rebel against the world itself, working to extract themselves from the human condition and achieve a new kind of secular immortality, perhaps the arts are poised to show us the way. 

Work Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Notes

[1]: While Arendt’s work is placed at the threshold of the postmodern era, the term had not yet come into being at the time of her writing. I use the term “postmodern” to refer to the era that follows the modern era, which she references repeatedly as an undefined future. 

[2]: I rely on John Sallis in Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus for assistance with the etymology of the Greek words referenced here. Sallis also suggests that “all these τέχναι are directed to bringing something into being, whether it be a living thing, an implement, or an imitation.” (p. 16, Indiana University Press, 1999.) 

[3]: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1095b.

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Copyright 2023, Melinda Russial

Wanderlust-Counterpoise

A Literary Travelogue
Full Soundtrack: Spotify / YouTube

Postlude 

(July 2022)
Sultan Khan and Zakir Hussein - Rag Bhupali

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.

~Melville, Moby Dick

I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck–the pieces floating, finally legible.

~ Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The clouds above Bread Loaf are moving through the sky with confident purpose, while I am still, limbs contorted in an adirondack chair with my spine crunched up against the back.  –No.–  I’m static, not still. I’m squirming. I’ve forgotten how to wear pants. For over two years, I’ve been sporting pandemic pajama fashion, and the waistband of jeans now seems permanently oppressive. My ears itch from the mask bands, the black flies are carnivorous, I can’t decide if I’m hot or cold, and a caterpillar just dropped onto my keyboard. I think wistfully of the blue velvet chairs in the library, but I can’t bear the thought of another minute with my face trapped. Outside, no one is breathing in my immediate vicinity, and the wind is dispersing opportunistic pathogens, relegating them to rightful oblivion. Static, yet I am back in the world. A storm is rolling in. I am reading Angels in America, for the third time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Twenty-five people have tested positive on this tiny piece of mountain, the newsletter tells us; another routine outbreak. The day’s headlines read: “America has decided the pandemic is over. The virus has other ideas.” (Washington Post) “As Sixth Covid Wave Hits, Many New Yorkers Shrug It Off” (New York Times). “WHO Says COVID-19 remains a global health emergency” (Reuters). “Is The World Really Falling Apart, or Does It Just Feel That Way?” (New York Times). We ricochet through it. Right now, I’m squirming because I’m uncomfortable in this chair;  it occurs to me that I’ve been uncomfortable for thirty months. 

I’m living just as the century ends.

A great leaf, that God and you and I
Have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.

We see the brightness of a new page
where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure
and look at one another, saying nothing.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

We talk of change, and change fatigue. My fatigue is of a different sort. We’ve had such a striking chance at real change, and we’ve squandered it. We have hungered for patterns of old, even after it became clear that they no longer applied, and we returned to them with zeal the moment we could. We know now that the world can stop and change in a single sweep of virus.  But we have not yet shown that we can learn from this. We have not yet applied the experience of the Great Pause towards a better future for all of us. I am fatigued by our insistence on preserving old entrenchments, when a new world is staring us in the face. 

We would rather be ruined than changed; we would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

~ Auden, The Age of Anxiety

Millennium approaches, Ethel Rosenberg tells us, in Angels in America. History is about to crack wide open. It is 1985, and the AIDS crisis is settling in for the long haul.  

Almost forty years later, we are looking at the millennium line from the other side, awash in a new pandemic. Why does it feel like we stepped backwards across the divide? Did we fall through the crack of that history, spinning ourselves out of time, in this period of prolonged existential ambiguity? 

We have forgotten the lessons that we left on the other side. I fear that we are beginning to forget again.

Embarkment

(February 2020)
Ergin Kızılay - Segah Taksim

It is the bewitching hour in deep winter. The sky is pregnant with snow, but withholding. There are rumblings of unrest in the zeitgeist. A shadow is threatening to manifest, to blanket us in its cold embrace.  I can smell it, just as I can smell the snow approaching. I  finish reading The Shadow of the Wind, and am paralyzed by the effervescent beauty in this world of nested stories.

As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

Engulfed in visions of dusty books curling around gothic turrets,  I close my eyes and wait for sleep. 

The Antechamber

(Dreamtime)
Cappella Romana - Choral Stichologia (Palaion)

And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

~Eliot, Wasteland

That night, I dream that I am entering the antechamber of the collective unconscious. I approach a set of wooden doors with carvings like those on Norwegian stave churches: entire cosmologies of chaos, chiseled into the relief, charged with the task of keeping the inner sanctum clear of the discord and clutter of the world. I step across the threshold.

Wordscape

(Dreamtime)
Lou Harrison - Suite for Violin With American Gamelan ( Jahla 2 / start at 17:48)

Books are scattered everywhere, tentatively stacked to vaulted ceilings, piled in corners, lining irregular shelves, tumbling from towers. They are wordcrumbs leading to the dangerous houses and secret landscapes that populate our shared  psyche. The collective unconscious is a library. 

Some of the Books fold in on themselves, in kaleidoscopic journeys across the world’s Ideas. Some have been left abandoned, undiscovered, unfinished, blank, smeared, covers torn off and pages ripped out. Some of them seem to…change…as I grasp them. 

Με το μικρό σου δάχτυλο ανακινείς έναν κόσμο.
With your little finger you stir up a world.

~Ritsos, Monochords

The books are mountains, rivers, islands, oceans, marshes, tunnels, skyscrapers, subway systems, houses of worship. They are disrupted and reimagined by earthquakes, sandstorms, tsunamis, silverfish. They are in perpetual motion, in this landscape of the mind, while I am still, static, interrupted. They invite me to join them on their wanderings.

As the book quivered in her lap, the secret sat in her mouth. It made itself comfortable. It crossed its legs.

~ Zusak, The Book Thief
Χώρα I: Plato

Χώρα I: Plato

(Anamnesis)
Maher Cissoko - Kora By Night

Dead, who had served his time, 
Was one of the people’s kings,
Had labour’d in lifting them out of slime,
And showing them, souls have wings!

~ Tennyson, The Dead Prophet

My copy of Plato’s Complete Works is an enormous faded green compendium with my mother’s notes scribbled in the margins of a few dialogues from her early days of studying philosophy. The Dialogues offer an anamnestic detox, a remembrance of what I am when I am not censoring parts of myself to get along with others. They are gifts from the εἶδος, rare glimpses into the souls of thoughts that are rarely welcome visitors at the theater of shadows on the cave wall. 

When your innocent eyes glance
over this confused, beginningless book,
you will see a deep-rooted lasting rebellion
blooming in the heart of every song.

~ Farrokhzad, A Poem for You

In my first trimester of college, I enroll in an Introduction to Ancient Philosophy course at Northwestern University, a planned respite from the psychic oppression of clarinet homework. I summarily reject Aristotle after the first reading. (Aristotle: the Mythwrecker, the Mansplainer, the Original ISTJ.) Plato, however, is a known acquaintance, and I feel the stirrings of a protoplasmic literary crush. 

I am excited to thrash around in his delightful ocean of metaphor, language, and Ideas, but the TA does not appreciate it when I refer to Socrates as a “punk” in one of our seminars, and he discounts in perpetuity any possible future contributions to discussion. The teenage boys in my class climb all over each other to prove their analytical prowess to the world, in highly predictable commentary that reeks of Philosophy for Dummies. The girls (of which there are only a few), never speak in class. For a while, I engage in the blood sport of contradicting the boys, but I tire of it quickly. I spend the rest of the trimester doodling in the back of the class, or at the Chicago Art Institute, foregoing class entirely to sketch the music I see in Kandinsky paintings while thinking about the Republic. Kandinsky teaches me a lot about Plato in those museum halls. Plato teaches me a lot about the isolation of artists, and our role as carriers of myth in cultures that believe they have outgrown it. (Aristotle strikes again.)

I realize during one of these Art Institute afternoons that there is a stark and growing disjunct between the paths I follow to access these ancient texts, and the places that they have landed in our contemporary canons. I know I have veered off the trail, a dangerous prospect, but I sense that the trail is heading towards a dead end; I can feel something else out there, off the path, deep in the trees, waiting for me. Or perhaps, it can sense me, and I feel the rebound as it shimmers around me. I don’t know which way to turn. A profound and torturous writers’ block settles in for the long haul, and I store bits of my essence in Platonic dialogues for safekeeping. 

One day I’ll become what I want
One day I’ll become a poet
Water obedient to my vision
My language a metaphor for metaphors
I don’t speak or indicate a place
Place is my sin and subterfuge
I am from there
My here leaps from my footstep to my imagination…
I am from what was or will be
I was created and destroyed in the expanse of the endless void

~ Darwish, Mural

Every time I return to Plato, I feel the presence of the spectre in the trees. It is getting louder. It is anxious. I think it wants to be written into existence.

State of Siege

(April 2020)
Silvestre Revueltas - Sensemayá

Siege is the waiting
the waiting on a ladder leaning amid the storm

~ Darwish, State of Siege

Those who have not yet been initiated into the secret society of clinical anxiety are often tempted to describe it in terms of the future. Admittedly, the perseverations often show up as unknown and unlikely future prospects (the thing you are afraid of has not yet, and probably will not, come to pass; a sentiment intended to placate the sufferer). But anxiety also exists in a deep, embodied, assaulting present. It is a present that holds time prisoner. 

But all that, too, was not really motion. It was as if the same instant kept presenting itself from different perspectives. Looking at one instant forever doesn’t mean that, as you look at it, time passes.

~ Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

The disordered anxiety that envelops me germinates in the body: every headache is an aneurysm, every tingle a stroke, every flash of vertigo a brain tumor, every hint of heartburn a gallbladder affliction. Lower right pain is appendicitis, upper right pain is liver disease, leg pain is deep vein thrombosis. Every lump is lymphoma, every bruise is leukemia, every bowel cramp is colon cancer, every mole is melanoma. Chest pain, jaw pain, arm pain, nausea–all herald an oncoming heart attack. Yet, I do nothing. (This is the dark side of hypochondria.) I avoid assessment. I read and ruminate and self-diagnose, sometimes hourly. I talk myself down off of the ledge of fear, a coping mechanism I developed in childhood, when every concern was met with an eye roll, punctuated with an exasperated “you’re fine.” I’ve come to depend on that reaction. 

Then came pandemic: a permanent state of siege. 

Someone’s mask slips below their nose. There are unclassifiable liquid droplets on a counter. I hear a cough. I touch a doorknob. The pollen count is high; I wonder if my sore throat is a histamine response or a death sentence.  I spin out into a pulsating, sweating, shaking, fighting, fleeing, freezing creature. Amorphous and scared. Well-worn methods of fear-management no longer apply. Covid is lurking, and not just in my hypochondriacal imagination. My dark fantasies of germophobia are now everyone’s reality.

To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I’m like a duck – paddling, paddling, paddling.

~ Stossel, My Age of Anxiety

Before the pandemic, I was paddling. Now I am drowning. Time is stuck, and I am stuck, circling a present that is ripe with the agony of waiting. I keep reading, searching for the way out of the labyrinth. The way out seems to be pulling me…in…

In siege, time becomes place
petrified in its eternity.
In siege, place becomes time
late for its appointment

~ Darwish, State of Siege

Χώρα II: The Cave

(Dreamtime)
Claude Debussy - La cathédrale engloutie (Preludes: Book 1, No. 10)

I am standing in an estuary at the mouth of an underground cave system. A black, oily river flows from a narrow, winding channel, pooling at the mouth of the cave. Silver foam collects where the waves lap against the shore. Stalactites drip a similar, viscous, silvery substance. Gremlins, gray, bald, naked, wrinkly, gangly, begin to climb out of the water en masse. From the end of the river’s tunnel, an orb appears (the color of Neptune, but with rings like Saturn), and floats from the tunnel’s end toward the gremlins. They pause and look up, in worship. A bell tolls. The orb bursts into a thousand shimmering crystals that rain down upon the gremlins, a storm of light. The gremlins sigh, collectively, and dive back underwater.

Storm 

(May 2020)
Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit

You are not surprised at the force of the storm–
you have seen it growing.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

George Floyd is murdered and the country erupts. Again.

Soon, we will move on from the man, and embrace the shame-laden-feelings-fest spirals of remedial professional development for things that should be obvious but somehow still aren’t. Schools live and die on virtue-signaling, and businesses outdo each other with rainbow swag and cheap evocations of progressive slogans, the latest mandatory branding upgrade. “Black Lives Matter” underwear is now for sale. Robin DiAngelo is anointed as vizier to the (White) Guardians of the Temple of the Woke, the Twittertrain falls off the rails, and liberals begin eating their young. Eventually, DEI will become synonymous with late stage capitalism, while young Black men continue to die in the streets. 

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

I come by my cynicism deliberately. My liberal inheritance is, first and foremost, one of independent thought. This has always been a liability, in a culture that can’t figure out how to ride out the embedded contradictions of puritanical complacency and manifest destiny. I resent my assigned roles on the outskirts of these tragedies, and struggle to reconcile the growing space between individual privilege and shared humanity. 

A year later, while reading Homegoing, I am struck by the feeling that the author is speaking directly to parts of me that I did not know until I found them reflected in her words. Several days after I finish the book, she runs a piece about it in the Guardian:  “White people, black authors are not your medicine.”  

She says, it is wrenching to know that the occasion for the renewed interest in your work is the murders of black people and the subsequent “listening and learning” of white people. I appreciate this. Considerable energy right now seems to be attending, yet again, to the learning of white people, centered forever, even in attempts to reckon with the violence of a 300- (or 3000-) year legacy of being centered. The piece is poignant, and heartfelt, and nuanced, all things that belong in contemporary racial discourse. But it is picked up on Twitter as a flashpoint in a hurricane of glib division. 

I wonder whether the possibility of any universal experience is disappearing in contemporary takedown praxis. Are we each to be relegated to the inherited characteristics and canons of our visible forms, newly emblazoned with the scarlet As of embodied politics? The personal is political, yes, and we have not yet acknowledged this to the degree that it warrants. But the personal is also personal. We are more than our labels. 

…and yet…

The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is, rather than the way we want it to be.

~ hooks, Teaching to Transgress

Institutions, those great imperfect monoliths that spin platitudes through contradictory praxis, are perhaps the primary constant in (un)civilized history. Change is not a doctrine, it is a battle in fragments. (It is, itself, a labyrinth.) We tilt at windmills, each thrust of the sword a chance to delay for one more day the force of world-eating behemoths of history. 

The myths refuse to adjust their plot.

~ Darwish, Butterfly’s Burden 

Eulogy I: Shock on Shock

(July 2020)
Fairuz - Kamat Maryam

Every year the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.

~ Jansson, The Summer Book

A teaching colleague dies 400 feet from his campus house in midsummer, from head trauma after a bike accident. I am in the middle of facilitating an online summer seminar when the email goes out. The students see it, and we pause, the content of the seminar instantly inaccessible, irrelevant, undone. This is not the tragedy we have been planning for. We have been working so hard to live through this pandemic, to live, inside this pandemic; this loss disrupts the tenuous safety net we have built around our online, enclosed summer worlds. Covid is not the only way to die. 

The faculty come together at the site of loss, the first public gathering since closing the school, to wash the blood off of the road and offer tribute. We are afraid to be together. We want to hug but we don’t know if we are allowed to. We are masked, and the loss is masked with us. We are looking at each other as we would look at people in a sepia-tinted photograph of a funeral long forgotten. 

You depart to your country
I die like a drop of sad rain
Upon the faces of the passersby

~ al-Beyati, Three Watercolors

Eulogy II: Music Stands Still

(October 2020)
Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet - God Shall Wipe All Tears Away

Fog infiltrated lips and lungs
as if the air were sobbing,
going on about itself, about the cold dawn,
how long the night is,
and how ruthless stars can be. 

~ Zagajewski, Referendum

The last concert I played was a Mahler symphony, in February of 2020. I don’t remember which Mahler symphony. I could look it up, but the fact that I don’t remember is its own poetry. In conservatory, Mahler is the holy grail. Excerpts can be heard from across the practice rooms, any hour of the night. As students, we dream of playing Mahler the way southern debutantes dream of their weddings. In the intervening years since leaving graduate school, I have played every Mahler symphony except the ninth, some of them several times. (While running the gauntlet of my conservatory days, I imagined this Olympian achievement in the abstract, but never believed it would manifest in the flesh.) Though I can’t remember which one of the nine symphonies I played that fateful February, I do remember not being very prepared for it. I had been struggling to find the will to practice. The parts were high, they made my jaw hurt, I was busy, it was too cold in my office, and it is rude to subject one’s living companion to the practice sounds of Mahler. Unlike the symphonies entire, the practice sounds are not beautiful. They are excruciating to behold. 

I didn’t know then that it would be my last concert. When the curtains fell on the performing arts a month later, I felt a flash of guilty relief, a feeling I locked down the moment I recognized it. I sequestered it in its own quarantine, and slid into the Pause.

Now, it is October, and it seems that the loss has settled in for the long haul. My friends are collecting unemployment, we have all fatigued on online concerts, nobody is watching the composite videos of a hundred cellos playing whatever from their rooms across the world anymore, we’ve stopped posting our practice sessions on Instagram, and musicians, everywhere, are depressed. 

It is as though the space between us were time; an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.

~ Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Music is an exercise that disrupts the common relationship of space and time. It spatializes time, and temporalizes space. It is a holding tank for memory, a teleporter. But the sound does not act alone. In this period of stillness and silence, we are missing the scent of music, the breath of music, the rumbling vibrations that flirt with our bodies as they cascade off of the walls and through the caverns of our performance halls; we are missing the risk that can only surface when time and place and bodies and breath collide.

At Bread Loaf, two years later, with the world stepping tentatively out of containment, a classmate will offer a writing prompt while Max Richter’s Blue Notebooks plays in the background. I will freeze in the unsettling soundscape. The prompt does not match the music. The music holds too much. It is one of my soundtracks to the lockdown walks I took along sparse juniper forest trails, and hearing it in a classroom two thousand miles away with the New England humidity pressing in on me is jarring. I sit, my pen suspended six inches above the paper, poised to write but unable to move. I am far away, long ago and yesterday, time and space mingling inside this music. Risk is coming from the wrong direction.

It occurs to me that symmetry and asymmetry is the wrong geometry for describing collaborative risk. That, in fact, risk is shared in a far more dynamic way; risk passes back and forth between us too rapidly to fully negotiate, morphing as it goes, and morphing us as individuals and collaborators.

~ Lehrer, Golem Girl

The risk of being seen, of being heard, of blurring the boundaries between self and other, stage and audience, has been co-opted by another risk. The space of performance itself has become dangerous, and time is no longer a shared fiction. The existential risk of  growth pales against the existential risk of death, which looms large in the foreground. 

The school auditorium, a space still buzzing with electric echoes of memory, is empty. I sit on the stage and look out across the vacant space. I start to cry. Not because I miss it, but because I don’t. 

I suppose it remains, then, that I have been filled by foreign streams from somewhere which have poured into me, through my ears, as into a vessel. But in my stupidity I have even forgotten how and from whom I’ve heard these things.

~ Plato, Phaedrus 

I fear that I am starting to forget. 

Χώρα III: Origin and Abyss

(Anamnesis)
Carl Nielsen - Clarinet Concerto, Movement I and Cadenza

While writing is starting to feel like a carrier of creation, music is still a carrier of pain. The pandemic state pulls forward old scenes of the familiar abyss:

It is a bland and icy Minnesota February and I am working towards a master’s degree in clarinet performance, with one of the world’s most revered teachers. I am preparing Carl Nielsen’s unhinged clarinet concerto, and my teacher asks the predictable, yet dreaded question: “What is the mood of this passage?” He is asking this of a melody as uncertain of its emotional landscape as I am; I shrug my shoulders and curl into myself. I don’t know the answer to his question. Moods don’t have words yet, but I don’t know how to tell him this. He paces in silence for several minutes, and then says, quietly: “You don’t even know the first thing. You are wasting my time, and yours. I can’t teach you anything if you refuse to come prepared. What is the mood? It’s not a hard question!”

It was the hardest question. His disappointment settles deep into my lungs, disrupting the flow of breath that carries the music, but it doesn’t bring me any closer to an answer. 

That night, I get out my thesaurus and label the score to the concerto with hundreds of miniature sticky notes; words upon words that intone the nuances of minute and ever-shifting character changes. Words like melancholic, morose, frisky, facetious, antiquated, unyielding, effervescent. I bring it to him, proudly, the next week. For once, I have done my homework. He looks at it, he looks at me, and he says, “What is this, Melinda?! All I wanted was happy or sad.” 

It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself – struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see,” and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

~ Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Several years later, I travel to Ghana to study Dagara percussion music. While struggling to commit a difficult passage of polyrhythmic, pentatonic cacophony to memory, my gyil teacher says, “I think you know it, but the brains and the hands aren’t working together.” This metaphor is a gift, the unifying explanation for so many discrete sources of struggle across so many years of studying, writing, performing, and living. My brains and my hands have always been reluctant bedfellows. The body knows, but it doesn’t share. The brain thinks it knows, but it is easily confounded. In Ghana, the world grows larger, deepening into its contradictions. 

Chasm’s Door

(January 2021)
Lela Tataraidze - Makhkvdia

…until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself…

~ Woolf, To The Lighthouse

On January 6, white supremacists and other professional victims storm the capital. The Arab press of Lebanon runs a headline calling it the “Cowboy Revolution.” They are not wrong. 

Eighteen months later, we are still struggling to reckon with this historical fact, in the midst of the origin myths to which we intractably cling. While the damning hearing goes on, headlines start to hint that the Emperor of Fiction might run for reelection, again. I think of how many times in these past six years I have felt sick over the news. I fear that I am becoming another pawn of history; I am preparing to choose how deep into the minefield of righteous revolt I am willing to go, to fight against the advancing totalitarian repression. (Will it even be a choice?)

He responds: You and I are two masked authors and two masked witnesses
I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator
He says: No spectators at chasm’s door…and no
one is neutral here. And you must choose
your part in the end
So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning?

~ Darwish, I Have A Seat In The Abandoned Theatre

I struggle with US-American exceptionalism, as I collapse into the dawning realization that I have always believed myself exempt from the darker tides of history, and as I wrestle with the resentment of having to renegotiate that myth. For so many, these stories are not new, and no one has ever been truly exempt. Yet, I wonder all the same if the global scope of these shared crises are ushering in a new era of apocalypse, one that is faster and larger and more insidious than any this world has seen before. 

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

~ Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

Madeleines

(April 2021)
Max Richter - On The Nature of Daylight

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

~ Proust, Swann’s Way

I take walks in the woods and begin to smell the start of the pandemic, one year past. I feel the early fear, embedded (forever, now?) in the vanilla-scented pine as it begins to release in the spring sunshine.  

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind…

~ Zafón, Shadow of the Wind

I stop reading Proust, because the season is wrong. Swann’s Way is a winter book. It grates against the coming of the sun. After so much darkness, I need more light. Isolation has become tedious.

Will I ever again dance on wine glasses?

~ Farrokhzad

Χώρα IV: Introcosm

(Anamnesis)
Kalimankou Denkou

While plumbing the cache of my childhood in the inner space made louder by lockdown, I remember the early pull of books. I would retreat into words on pages, stories that told my story to me in a thousand different voices, wordscapes that I could explore from the protective stance of abstraction; reading alongside the emotions of others helped me embrace the outlines of my self, emerging. The books I read as a child also served as depositories for my own more difficult emotions; I posted sentries throughout the pages that kept watch over those emotions, while I skulked around the edges of their fortress. Every time a character in a novel cried, I felt that they were crying in my stead, and the burning in my solar plexus that was unveiled to me when I read those passages held unrequited pain and untrammeled jealousy. The characters had access to something that I did not. I followed them around, hoping to be noticed, hoping they would invite me home with them, but too afraid to impose. 

The gaping mouth slit heart from mind. Between the two eyes in her head, the tongueless magical eye and the loquacious rational eye, was la rajadura, the abyss that no bridge could span. Separated, they could not visit each other and each was too far away to hear what the other was saying. Silence rose like a river and could not be held back, it flooded and drowned everything.

~Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

Gerontion

(May 2021)
Djivan Gasparyan - I Will Not Be Sad In This World

…in a wilderness of mirrors…

~ Eliot, Gerontion

The Israeli army attacks the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan. Hamas returns rockets. 13 Israelis and 256 Palestinians are killed, a ratio often repeated across the region’s tumultuous history. I send text messages to former students from East Jerusalem, to see if their families survived the violence. (After half a decade working at an international boarding school, the world’s pain is never very far away.) US-Americans, secure in their homes, discuss fault with fervor. All I can see is faces, real faces, students past and present who don’t have the luxury of choosing which side they are on from the safety of abstraction. I am enraged by the audacity of settler colonialism, as well as the conditions of holocaust that inspired it.

He felt that his whole head had filled with tears, welling up from inside, so he turned and went out into the street. There human beings began to swim behind a mist of tears, the horizon of the river and the sky came together, and everything around him became simply an endless white glow. He went back, and threw himself down with his chest on the damp earth, which began to beat beneath him again, while the scent of the earth rose to his nostrils and poured into his veins like a flood.

~ Kanafani, Men in the Sun

Suddenly, while reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, I remember: I am one of those settlers. Mine is a different continent, but a similar story. Our cities are built on more ruins than we can imagine. Jerusalem holds up a mirror, and I see myself through it, standing among the rubble. 

…contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken.

~ Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Eulogy III: A Zen Death

(October 2021)
Nanae Yoshimura and Kifu Mitsuhashi - Yui II for Koto and Cello: No 1. Tidal Sound

I borrow moonlight
for this journey of a 
million miles. 

~ Saikaku, Zen Death Poems

The husband of a good friend dies. I revisit the Zen Death Poems I gave him the week before, nestled in a box with several paper cranes. The cranes symbolize honor, loyalty, and longevity. Japanese folklore grants wishes to those with the patience and perseverance to fold a thousand cranes.

At the wake, the last light of the evening transcends Santa Fe’s peerless legacy of sky painting. Birds trace fractals through the heavens, leaving impossibly conceived geometries in their slipstream, their silhouettes a contrast to the stratified orange effervescence of sunset clouds. There and gone. Forced ahead, left behind, nudged off the timeline. The distractions of minutia shield us from the slippery evanescence of living.

The birds disappear from view, gliding just beyond the curve of the earth, a final horizon that is only where it is because we can’t see beyond it. (In truth, a horizon is nothing. We make the horizon from where we stand. It is our fixed placement that calls the horizon into being. It moves as we do.) Linearity and circularity merge at the boundary; vice and courage entangle. We grasp for what we know when what we don’t know threatens to eclipse all of it.

I say so strange a dreaminess did there reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates…; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

~ Melville, Moby Dick

Χώρα V: Paper Cranes

(Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs II: Oiseaux tristes

A needle is threaded from my tailbone through the top of my head, along the body’s prime vessel. I dangle at the bottom of a long silver thread, and am joined by hundreds of iridescent paper cranes, threaded above me. We are suspended from a branch of a large willow. It is just dawn; a milky fog, sickly sweet, snakes through the willow’s tears. The sky is leaden, with a sepia tint. The thread swings in the wind, and the paper cranes are released, flying off into the sky in angular geometries. I am left dangling, alone. I smell a storm in the distance.

“The” Ukraine

(February 2022)
Letila Zozulia

My students and I are making borsch, stirring the stock. A student from Kyiv casually mentions the siege in the Donbas region and I ask if she has family there. She says, “I used to.” I ask when they left, and she says, “They died. Last week.” She returns to stirring the stock. Later, during dinner, a friend and I sing a Ukrainian song for the students, and the student glows with appreciation for our diction. Correct pronunciation brings so much joy, in the midst of genocide.

What’s Rome? It crumbled.
What is the world? We are destroying it
before your towers can taper into spires, 
before we can assemble your face
from the piles of mosaic.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours 

“The Ukraine” is a dangerous mislabeling. Ukraine is a country, with over one thousand years of independent history. Adding “the” transports the  living country back into the mythic, allowing us to both exoticize it and distance ourselves from it. The Ukraine inhabits a different space than the physical world of nation states.

While smoke ricochets off of buildings far away, phantom explosions curl into my dreams. The news tells me that the elephant in the Kyiv Zoo is depressed. His name is Horace. He is seventeen years old. He is given sedatives while shells fall around him. I wonder how many meals he has left, and whether the people who have stayed behind to feed him are hungry, too. 

The next day, I happen upon an online daily diary of the war: 

Many things have a beginning. When I think about the beginning, I imagine a line drawn very clearly through a white space. The eye observes the simplicity of this trail of movement–one that is sure to begin somewhere and end somewhere. But I have never been able to imagine the beginning of a war. Strange. I was in the Donbas when war with Russia broke out in 2014. But I had entered the war then, entered into a foggy, unclear zone of violence. I still remember the intense guilt I felt about being a guest in a catastrophe, a guest who was allowed to leave at will because I lived somewhere else. 

I am a guest of The Ukraine through these words I traverse, while Ukraine, the real Ukraine, collapses under the weight of history. 

Fire On The Mountain

(May 2022)
Chavela Vargas - La Llorona

Give not thyself up then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

~ Melville, Moby Dick

Evacuation. The largest wildfire in New Mexico state history is a quarter-mile from my front door. Flames are creeping over the ridge that hovers above the school’s main structure, a historic castle. The castle is surrounded on three sides, drowning in the smoke of our personal apocalypse. 

I drive away, for the second time that it might be the last time. (Last year, we evacuated for one day. This time, it will last a month.) Infernal evening sky, red sun, smoke curling up and out from Dante’s circles. The heavens are dilating, and I am dilating, pupils too large to accept the light without pain. 

While cooking in exile, I drop wet tofu cubes into boiling oil, and flames erupt. I freeze. Water, fire, ice. The flames lick the ceiling, and as fast as they appear, they are gone. A fleeting apotheosis. 

…We’ve got too little earth
And too much fire. We don’t know who we are. 

~ Zagajewski, Three Angels

The fire has wiped out legacy homes across Northern New Mexico, homes on lands that have lived in family trusts for upwards of fifteen generations, homes that are rarely insured, with occupants struggling to survive on subsistence farming in a rapidly desiccating landscape and a superstructure of imposed white capitalism. This is not particularly conducive to stability, even without the threat of conflagration.

The Heavens Set Loss On Fire
Irascible homesteads,
spiritual landscapes of conquistadores
who cauterized a first loss so long forgotten
(by most)
that the legacies 
festering in the ashes of progress
witness their coming destruction
with the certainty of an original fall from grace.
Yet, a third conquest has been smoldering
for some time
and shadows
that have lingered for five centuries
curl upwards in new flame
and embers rain down
on unsung and unsprung adobe cuentos.

I wish I could in just one glass
Collect and drink all these clouds;
And climb up a thunder ladder
To reach up and wash my heart with fire.

~ Osman, In Exile

Burn Scars
After the plumes recede
after a welcome–if circumspect–return
after the rain (however brief)
I drink a hibiscus rosewater martini 
and write fire poetry. 
The scent of smoke lingers 
(but it might be my imagination)
and the burn scars
bespeak new trails
in a tired landscape of patterned enervation.

Χώρα VI: Skeletons in the Springs

(Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs V: La vallée des cloches 

I am walking through a deep brook with ice cold clear water and pools off to the sides. The light is technicolor with a blue-green tint, not unlike the scene behind the secret door in Duchamp’s Étant Donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The air smells of electricity and sulfur. In one of the pools, a cold springs, three skeletons are frozen in celebration, raising gold chalices in a toast, heads tilted backwards, laughing. One is smoking a twig, and purple smoke curls upward. As I walk through the brook, I realize that the rocks I am stepping on are not rocks; they are egg-sized skulls. The aspen trees lining the brook are bleeding from their knots. I hear crystal wind chimes echoing through the grove. 

Great Expectations

(June 2022)
Gustav Mahler - Symphony No 5, Adagietto

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp
that all of my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and shape my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

I drive away from Montezuma, released from lingering smoke and ash for a summer filled with words. While skimming the dusty and lush landscapes of I-40 across six states, I listen to Great Expectations, the audio version. This seems to fit, somehow; it is a well-placed soundtrack to a US-American road trip filled with layers of mythic expectations (both met and squandered) that line the highways.

I have always had great expectations, the birthright of being raised in progressive cities with parents and teachers who cut their teeth on politics in 1968. I was baptized in the Church of US-American Liberalism, and was led to believe that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Not only that, but it is my job to get it there. These myths are my inheritance. Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known quote comes from a lesser known speech, “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution,” that rarely captures the attention of whitewashed celebrations of his legacy. He gave the speech less than a week before his assassination. Half a century later, the revolution continues, but in fragments. I don’t know what it means to work toward justice in a world that feels so shattered, but it occurs to me that no one ever really knows, and our history is littered with noble attempts amidst great uncertainty. We don’t choose the times in which we live, but perhaps we have some choice in what we bring forward within them. 

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth–
it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

ΧώραVII: Preikestolen

(Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs III: Une barque sur l’océan 

Preikestolen is set in negative film, with black wildflowers lining the field that leads to the cliff. I take a running leap and dive off the precipice, down into brackish water. As I swim toward the bottom, I am surrounded by fist-sized glowing orbs of fire. They get smaller, whiter, and more dense as I descend, until I reach the seafloor, where there are millions, like underwater fireflies. The water is uncomfortably buoyant, reminiscent of the Dead Sea. There is a wooden trap door at the edge of the deepest part. I can’t open it. 

Drawing the World

(June 2022)
Ross Daly - Erotokritos

In Philadelphia, I read Harold and the Purple Crayon to my three-year-old niece at bedtime. Harold is building a world with his crayon. My niece is a pandemic baby, imagination running wild in a world confined to a three-story house in Germantown. I mirror this origin story. In 1983, I was a baby of the AIDS pandemic, whiling away the hours  in a three-story house in Roxborough, a few miles away, reading Harold. Harold and I drew towers together to extend the vertical landscape of the house while the world was burning outside. 

The Tower had a hundred windows, all mobile, and each gave onto a different segment of space-time. Its ribs didn’t form Euclidian curves, they ripped the very fabric of the cosmos, they overturned realities, they leafed through pages of parallel worlds.

~ Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

I think of the story of the Maiden’s Tower in Istanbul. The Byzantine emperor locks his daughter up in a tower to protect her from a prophecy that foretells an untimely death by snakebite. On her eighteenth birthday, a fruit basket is delivered. An asp, coiled within the basket, emerges and bites her. She dies. (Prophecy unlocked.) I stood in that tower, six months before the world shut down, marveling at the glistening straits below. The tower smells like sea salt and fables. 

These days, it seems that there is always an asp hiding in the fruit.

Meeting Sisyphus On The Hill We Climb

(July 2022)
Ani DiFranco - Every State Line

Do you believe we can construct our country out of these ambiguous stories? And why do we have to construct it? People inherit their countries as they inherit their languages. Why do we, of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn’t lost and we find we’ve fallen into eternal sleep?

~ Khoury, Gate of the Sun

The United States, the version that we hold in myth, is one that we have never fully attended to in flesh. So much of this country lives in words, images, and symbols, the building blocks of great expectations and convenient fictions that conflate abstraction and empathy in our embodied politics.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
It can never be permanently defeated.

Amanda Gorman frames this in hope, but I do not feel it. I feel the deep blow of shattered myth. I cannot reconcile the many versions of my country. I rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance.

The wind blows from an unknown past, and spreads our doubts through the world.

~Kagekiyo (Noh Theatre)

Oceans of Stories

(Dreamtime)
John Adams - Scheherazade.2/I

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me…

~ Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Our oceans are rising. Our myths are supersaturated. Our stories are flailing in the breaking waves. 

In the absence of live music, I am learning to write again. Writing seems to be an underground passageway between the χώρα (Plato’s holding space for creation) and the world, with the words digging the tunnels. To write from the χώρα is to reject the binary, to dwell in the boundary lands, to reinscribe the borders. 

“Some places have more life in them than others,” my partner once said to me, as we were standing at the Spider Woman overlook at Canyon de Chelly. Some words also have more life in them than others, and when I happen upon them, I feel the same electric charge that I felt while in the shadow of that great sandstone cathedral.

I believe in holding still. I believe that the secrets we hold in our hearts are our anchors, that even the unspoken between us is a measure of our every promise to the living and to the dead. And all our promises, like all our hopes, move us through life with the power of an ocean liner pushing through the sea.

~ Ng, Bone

..but morning overtook Scheherazade and she lapsed into silence…

~ Arabian Nights

Χώρα VIII: Wine and Rust

 (Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs I: Noctuelles 

A pounding, bleeding waterfall is cascading down from the heavens, with pools of pink foam at its base. I walk behind the waterfall, into a small cave, red from sunshine pushing through the falls. The cave smells of wine and rust. A pinot noir sits on a table in a gunmetal chalice, next to a Chinese crystal ball with a silver serpent stand as its base. I drink the wine in one gulp, and a metallic film lingers in my mouth. I look into the ball. I see myself, in a transparent silk-gossamer white gown, spinning through deep space. I lower my forehead to the ball and am drawn through its membrane, head first. I clasp hands with my falling self, and spin with her into darkness. 

Borderlands

(Dreamtime)
Anat Cohen and Trio Brasileiro - O Ocidente Que Se Oriente

…it chooses me as a threshold…

~ Darwish, Butterfly’s Burden

Perhaps liminal spaces descend into us, rather than vice versa. I revel in the χώρα, the borderlands, the third kind, ein sof, the apeiron, the collective unconscious, but I struggle with all the ways I don’t belong. I seek the margins, and then resent them when they settle into me. There is a permanent tension in which I see my work–and my worth–in the service of radical transformation, but I want to be seen by people who fear and begrudge the radical. The radical will forever unsettle, offend, and disappoint. I’m not comfortable with the oppositional nature of the oppositional stance I feel compelled to hold, but radical is, by practical definition, oppositional. 

I feel most at home in borderlands. 
I don’t feel at home anywhere.

A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

~ Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

What does it mean to move beyond the oppositional, into the generative? To throw sand into the bull’s eyes, to reject the dilemma, to offend (and transcend) the binary? To create, to renew, to seek release from the captivity of the familiar?

‘We,’ I cried passionately, must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfill the promise of our birth!

~ Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definition of light and dark and gives them new meanings.

~ Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

I begin to write, to bridge the space between the νοῦς and the ψυχή, a borderlands space that is felt and thought simultaneously. I write to give voice to the χώρα.  

Mythscape

(Dreamtime)
Tinariwen - Toumast Tincha

Καλό προσωπείο, σε δύσκολους καιρούς, ο μύθος.
Myth: a good mask, in harsh times.

~ Ritsos, Monochords

There were myths that were lies and myths made from truth, and often the falsest ones were the most plausible and the truest filled with dragons and gods. Every journey is a crisis, a turning point, a shedding of myths, and mine began with the gnawing certainty that something did not add up. And in a way, this journey never ends, but in another sense, it ends where all great roads lead: to the discovery of voice.

~ Older, The Fire This Time

My myths are quaking and the world is in agony. Do I turn away? Do I wade in deeper? Do I climb the crest of the oncoming wave, always with the possibility that it might collapse around me and drown me?

It is not enough, deciding to open.

~ Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

I find myself searching for voice with the habits of distance I have cultivated in my decades-long love affair with words that spring forth from the νοῦς. There is safety in abstraction, and I am reluctant to take off the training wheels. I am afraid that if I drop into the mist of the mythos, I may never find my way back. 

Χώρα IX: Heart and Womb

(Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs IV: Alborada del gracioso

My solar plexus is burning in sharp undulations. I rip open my rib cage, pull out my heart, and hold it in two open hands. It begins spinning, like a top, faster and faster, throwing off sludge in every direction, to reveal an amniotic sac with a squirming creature inside. The sac ruptures, and the creature is a miniature me, sitting in my hands, looking up at me, naked, in terror and awe. 

Χώρα X: Raising the Sparks

(Anamnesis)
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Long As I Can See The Light

I encounter Kabbalah by accident in the days following the wildfire evacuation. I am reading Foucault’s Pendulum, and I see traces of Plato’s χώρα in Eco’s kabbalistic references. A good friend, who has graciously allowed me to sleep on her couch while I wait to hear if my school has burned down, tells me that she studied Kabbalah in her youth, and pulls out a stack of books. 

While the ashes of the fire settle into my lungs, the books breathe out mystery, creation, and renewal. I have found a phoenix. 

Traces of the light adhered to the shards of the shattered vessels. This may be compared to a vessel full of oil. If it breaks and the oil spills out, a bit of the liquid adheres to the shards in the form of drops. Likewise in our case. A few sparks of light adhered. When the shards descended to the bottom of the world of actualization, they were transformed into the four elements–fire, air, water, and earth–from which evolved the stages of mineral, vegetable, animal, and human. When these materialized, some of the sparks remained hidden within the varieties of existence. You should aim to raise those sparks hidden throughout the world, elevating them to holiness by the power of your soul.

~ Matt, The Essential Kabbalah

I remember, suddenly, that there is more magic in the world than these past few years have allowed for. A flash of anamnesis. I am newly flush with the ancient challenge of raising the sparks. 

Prelude

(Before and After)
Αντώνης Κυρίτσης - Πέντε μέρες παντρεμένη

An epiphany enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving, ascending. This transports you from a place where there is nothing new to a place where there is nothing old, where everything renews itself, where heaven and earth rejoice as at the moment of creation.

~ Matt, The Essential Kabbalah

During a day trip to Montreal to visit friends from Morocco, I find myself in a circle of Sufis, chanting. This is not my first time. I remember three years earlier, in Casablanca, arriving at a yoga studio with one of these friends to “check out this Sufi thing I’ve been doing for a little while.” I have no idea what I’m getting into. Young urban professionals are surrounding an old man, their teacher. The women are veiled, but they take them off when they leave the studio. The teacher begins with a lesson, in Arabic. I don’t know any of the words, but somehow I can understand him anyway. This man is clearly raising sparks. I am invited into their circle, to bathe in their chanting. I feel the lift of the chant, wishing I could fit those throaty Arabic sounds into my English mouth. Later I learn that their teacher is the shaykh of the Tijaniyya order, and his visit to Casablanca is a rare gift. 

At the start of the pandemic, this group convened daily on zoom; from my bedroom, I donned the veil, and attempted to chant along, slowly making out the Arabic script of the Wadefa that I was beginning to learn. Eventually it settled into once a week, and I drop in occasionally, when it’s not too early in the morning. My visit to Montreal allows me a chance to participate in full, three years after first exposure. It is electric. 

I stood in the little clearing round the ruined walls. I had immediately the sensation that I was expected. Something had been waiting there all my life. I stood there, and I knew who waited, who expected. It was myself. I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here, like reflections of my own coming. It was like a dream. I had been walking towards a closed door, and by a sudden magic its impenetrable wood became glass, through which I saw myself coming from the other direction, the future.

~ Fowles, The Magus

I am in Montreal, I am in the digital aether, I am in Casablanca, I am everywhere all at once, in the vibrating Now of this chanting. I still don’t know what the words mean, and I’m not sure that I want to. They mean something outside of language, beyond music, in their contours and cadences. I am not a Sufi, but I am renewed. 

***

Copyright 2023, Melinda Russial

Roe Rage

(Or: Preliminary Thoughts on Politics in the Classroom)

Last week, the US Supreme Court declared my body to be the property of others in thirteen US states (and counting). For some of us, born after 1973 (and without other contributing factors of identity that have continued to rouse the obstruction of bodily rights across the half-century that followed the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade) this is the first time. For some of us, this is a historical rewind, unwelcome dèjá vu after so much activism to force the personal into the political sphere in the 60s and early 70s. For some of us, this is an old, tired story, written deep into the contours of our DNA after generations of enslavement (physical, medical, existential, corporate). This is not my country’s first tangle with embodied politics, and we knew it was coming. This is a blow of scope, as remnants of erased histories and dystopian fiction have come to roost once again, in the flesh of millions. 

Literally. In the flesh. 

This essay is about the fall of Roe. But it’s not just about Roe. It’s about a senate hearing for political violence and sedition at the highest levels of government, a hearing that was boycotted by all but two Republican senators, a hearing that was browned out by Fox News. It’s about the now-disgraced Supreme Court striking down long-standing New York State gun laws while the country still mourns the loss of nineteen children and two teachers in the latest in an intolerable trajectory of school shootings. It’s about wildfires and floods wiping out entire centuries-old communities and poisoning our air and water supplies, while many in power push for environmental policy deregulation. It’s about Black Lives Matter signs on every street corner in Philadelphia, because so much of our national legislation continues to imply that they don’t. It’s about children trapped in cages and asylum seekers being denied entry at the southern border, as US health law continues to differentiate those who do and do not retain the right to safety, security, and bodily autonomy. It’s about food deserts on indigenous reservations and in resource-challenged areas of major cities. It’s about the fact that last week I saw “T**mp 2024” banners flying in upstate New York, despite what the mirror of that egregious presidency has already shown us about who we are when we refuse to engage the better angels of our nature. 

There are so many ways that the holy trinity of religious fundamentalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy threaten the body. The fall of Roe is a touchstone moment, a point of clarity that may help us see how deeply and stealthily new ideologies of totalitarianism have metastasized in our political landscape and continue to imperil our health, our agency, our livelihood, and, for some, our very existence.

This particular blow, one of many we have endured across our theme of embodied politics, carries the added disgrace of threatening so many other precedents that we have relied upon in our pursuit of life: the right to contraception, the right to marry, the right to walk safely in our grocery stores and on our streets, the right to bring our bodies, and those of our babies, to school without fear. 

Each new (or newly-branded) political assault generates a short-lived wave of action. We despair, we shout, we cry, we rally, we belabor the point on social media. We set up recurring donations, we create community funds, we call our representatives, we offer to drive strangers to abortion clinics two states away, we organize phone banks, we march in the streets. We engage, for a little while, with each cause of the moment, until the next outrage sweeps the country and we move on, collectively, to the next opportunity for performative solidarity in a deluge of community catastrophes that we can’t fully comprehend. 

Notwithstanding the cultural hyperactivity of our social movements, moments of action are noble and necessary in times of struggle, and many of us have been working diligently over time on the issues closest to us. However, we seem to be paralyzed in our liberal paradox in exactly the place that holds the greatest potential for long-term, deep, systemic change: the classroom. The classroom, the place where the seeds of a common humanity and an equitable society germinate collectively, demands an embodied politics of democracy. It demands that we fully engage the war zones of fact and opinion, the responsibilities that come with living in a diverse and changing social landscape, the nuances of where the individual body ends and the community begins. 

Teaching, in a country that purports to be a democracy, is a public service that works in part to cultivate and sustain that democracy. Now, more than ever, we need to march our protests straight into the classroom. We need to say the word “abortion” out loud, with the medical legitimacy it requires in a free society, and allow that the moral quandaries surrounding it belong in private discussions. We need to help our students differentiate between personal morality and public responsibility. We need to support our students in defining their identities with intentionality and understanding of the spaces between individuality and belonging, the spaces between universality and difference. We need to interrogate our disciplines for hidden agendas, consider whether our canons are weighted toward unspoken neocolonial and corporate values, and reckon with the ways our methods of evaluation sustain inequities. We need to interrogate our practices, and confront the ways our classroom architecture and school timetables are contributing to passive disengagement and disembodied abstraction. We need to teach our students to interrogate systems, even when it means challenging the very systems we have created for them, so that they are prepared to do the same as engaged and fully embodied citizens in a political framework desperate for challenge and reinvention. 

The classroom is an inherently political space, but one that is so often unexamined that many of us experience it as neutral, unconsciously working to sustain a status quo that is no longer (and likely never was) serving us well. We claim to model respect for multiple perspectives and diversity in our attempts to “keep politics out of the classroom,” but in reality, some perspectives are antithetical to democracy. Political neutrality, when it supports anti-democratic values, is incompatible with the tenets of a work-in-progress democracy. When anti-democratic sentiments are rising, overtly and insidiously, neutrality gives voice to burgeoning totalitarianism. Neutrality accommodates violence, even as it claims to rise above it. 

In the flesh, we feel the effects of that violence. 

In the flesh, we must rise. 

In the classroom, the space where flesh and history merge into a complex calculus of shared becoming, we have an opportunity to renegotiate the limiting paradigms bequeathed to us. Democracy requires an educated and engaged population, a population of citizens who are challenged as they grow to look beyond the confines of the ideas they have inherited and consider their unique role in the synthesis of a better world for all. 

Silence is not honorable, when the stakes are this high. If we don’t model political action with intention, honesty, and democratic integrity in our classrooms, we will struggle to successfully cultivate a politically-engaged ethos in our students. If we don’t make the personal political, again, we lose ourselves in overgeneralization and whataboutism. And in the absence of our continued, embodied attention, the metaverse will cultivate the boundaries of political action for us, and the narratives that our students carry with them into the future will follow the dystopian bread crumbs that have been so carefully laid out for them. We have so much work to do.

***

Copyright 2022, Melinda Russial

Requiem

Breath

A billboard on I-25 north of Santa Fe reads: “7.8 billion of us are breathing together.” The billboard is trying to remind us to share the air. 

<Inhale>

We breathe in, and swallow a miasma that is pregnant with invisible maladies of biological, psychological, and cultural origins. Past and future are suspended in fog, frozen at the point of collision.

It has been twenty months since January 9, 2020, when the WHO first suggested a link between a mysterious pneumonia and a novel coronavirus in Wuhan province. In Tarot practice, the twentieth card of the Major Arcana deck symbolizes judgment, absolution, awakening, rebirth. Across those dark and stagnant months, we’ve invoked the four horsemen and tasted the nine circles of hell, condemned ourselves to judgment and begged for absolution, hoping all the while that it’s not too late to catch a piece of redemption from angels above. 

Death, Famine, War, Conquest; Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, Treachery.

In the beginning, each COVID-19 death was another point of shock for all of us. As the numbers climbed, disbelief bled into statistical numbness, punctuated by the specificity of individual griefs. We have been assaulted with images of bodies lingering on this or that side of eternity, waiting in makeshift parking lot trauma centers or refrigerated trucks, because there is no room in the ICU or the morgue. We’ve learned more than we ever wanted to about machines that breathe for us, but we haven’t been able to hold the hands of those who need them. While covid patients languish in overstretched hospitals, our asylum-seeking neighbors languish in cages on the southern border, 2100 children still separated from their parents. US billionaires are 62% richer now than they were at the start of the pandemic, while eviction moratoriums expire, tent cities flourish on highway medians, and 42 million people face food insecurity. The streets of US-American cities run with the blood of young Black men, intimate partner violence increased exponentially in lockdown, covid fatalities in indigenous elders threaten extinction of entire languages and histories, and Texas just declared a citizen-enforced abortion ban, an insidious victory in a larger war to colonize the uterus. We ended our occupation of Afghanistan last month, one tragedy melting into another that was ready and waiting to take its place. And Bezos bought a rocket, blasted off, hovered at the edge of the atmosphere for ten minutes, and returned to thank us for gilding his path to the stars.

<Pause>

In the space between the Before and the After, we collect our collective unconscious, wondering what to make of these absurd moments of exaggerated humanity and primordial volatility. The COVID-19 pandemic has extracted us from our patterned reveries and forced us to face that which we share with history. The ideological shifts, plague logic, fatalistic conflicts, factions of competing conviction -- these are the constants of our mortal condition. We are kneading our myths and waiting for them to rise.

<Exhale>

We breathe out, and release a deep, sourceless sadness. We don’t know who we are.

The wrong protests are multiplying, and freedom isn’t what it seems. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers have seized the commons, spilling conspiracy and doubt into its cracks. Our politicians vaccinate in secret while their constituents take tonics meant for horses and call the rest of us sheep. The world looks on in disbelief; variants lie in wait while privilege becomes obsolete, a snake that eats its own tail and poisons itself from the inside out. 

The wind from within, our tired breath, falls like shrouds over interrupted dreams.

<Gasp>

Some of us can’t breathe. 

Millions have been intubated, ventilated, kept alive with mechanical lungs, their last breaths alone and veiled, as families say goodbye on iPads or struggle in parallel in the room next door. 

Some of us haven’t been able to breathe for a while.

Emmett Till couldn’t breathe, the last time this country took a moment to acknowledge its apocalyptic tragedies. Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Freddie Gray couldn’t breathe. And last summer, when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor stopped breathing, the country took to the streets once again, seething behind masks of cloth and confidence, reclaiming the right to inhale. 

<Cough>

Some of us are choking on smoke, grasping for air that has dried up and turned to ash (Blue River, Lytton, Tahoe, Evia, Kalemli). Smoke crowds out our oxygen, toxic particulates trespass upon our lungs and brown our bloodstreams, as our forests burn, our landscapes are razed, and whole towns are offered up as food for flames. 

Some of us are choking on gunpowder, tear gas, chemical waste, and other noxious fumes of accidental and intentional explosions (Lagos, Hong Kong, Beirut, Minneapolis, Nagorno-Karabakh, Washington D.C., Tigray, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Kabul). 

Some of us are choking on rain, drowning in floodwaters that rise to rooftops and flush away our legacies  (Maharashtra, Liège, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York City, Tennessee). Rivers are raging through our subways, and Greenland is melting in the heat. 

<Sigh> 

The arc of the moral universe has the impermanence of a rainbow. Justice, that great, monolithic myth, shimmers in and out of consciousness, in and out of reach. The locus of pain lives in another dimension, one that we can access only as it refracts. 

<Repeat>

Sometimes, inside all of this, I forget to breathe.
We are reeling like drunkards on the edge of a precipice,
suffocating, hyperventilating, aspirating, asphyxiating,
and I wonder whether the halcyon days slipped past us,
unsung and uncertain, 
while we mourned.

Greek Duolingo teaches me to say, Η ερώτηση σου δεν έχει απάντηση.”  “There is no answer to your question.” We await our awakening, which is still deciding whether to emerge. 

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.”

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Time

The zeitgeist is heavy, sticky, stuck.

“Time was making the visual world shrink so that it becomes a line on the horizon that lets itself be stretched more and more slowly, til the world is just a vaporous thing.”

— Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story

We are rapid-cycling through the phases of creation-preservation-destruction. Mortality seems closer now, for some of us, than we were accustomed to admitting, thrust to forefront with bludgeoning force. A spectre of possible nothingness hangs over an otherwise excessively monotonous time, claiming new corners of our shared psyche. For many, the spectre claimed flesh and future as well.

“Tangled, we are entangled…

… we do not know where are to-day our tears in the undergrowth of this eternal wilderness. We neither wake nor sleep, and passing our nights in a sorrow which is in the end a vision, what are these scenes of spring to us? This thinking in sleep of some one who has not thought of you, is it more than a dream? and yet surely it is the natural way of love. In our hearts there is much and in our bodies nothing, and we do nothing at all, and only the waters of the river of tears flow quickly.”

— Motokiyo, Nishikigi

Ceremonies and seasons, our familiar time markers, blurred into melancholy and remembrance. The late spring lilacs of 2020 still arrived, blooming with the veiled effervescence of what should have been graduation season, but we felt like we were smelling them through a black and white photograph.

“Memory is the process of organizing what to forget, and what we’re doing now, you and me, is organizing our forgetting. We talk about things and forget other things. We remember in order to forget, this is the essence of the game.”

— Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun

Minutiae

School, cancelled. Offices, closed. Restaurants, a pipe dream. Open season on toilet paper. Is the world really grinding to a halt? Can it do that? Is this really happening? Are we dreaming? 

In March and April of 2020, the country shut down, state by state. We looked to China and Italy, hoping (unsuccessfully) to avoid the scenes of destruction that inundated our news feeds from afar. 

We clung desperately to myths of return as bleak days merged into each other, tedium punctuated by fear. Flatten the curve, wear a mask, just get through these next few weeks, we told ourselves. Each new Atlantic article required a reassessment of risk. Cloth masks, double masks, N95, KN95? Inside and outside? Is six feet enough distance? Maybe twelve? Should we disinfect our groceries? Which vitamins should we take to ward off infection? Is wine an essential food item? 

We ricocheted between shared tragedies and private monotonies, between hope, despair, and sluggish numbness. My days were filled with parades of wild turkeys on the tryptophan speedway outside my front door, conversations with overfed hummingbirds, and the celebratory transition from daytime pajamas to nighttime pajamas each afternoon. I whispered sweet nothings to cilantro seedlings and remembered the refuge of books. So many of us learned how to bake bread that sourdough starters now boast their own TikTok category. Everyone became very interested in mRNA replication and polymerase chain reaction science, and our high school biology teachers felt vindicated. Trips to Whole Foods became as adventurous, for some of us, as transatlantic flights. When we dared to drift outside, we stepped around abandoned masks, an emerging category of litter and an enduring reminder of new obstacles between us.

Our memes became surreal (Bernie’s ubiquitous mittens) and macabre (the PPE-bruised faces of nurses.) Wellington the Penguin, our national celebrity, toddled through the Shedd Aquarium’s barrier reef exhibit, delighting us with his cavalier enthusiasm for oceans unknown. (He was less impressed with the Shedd’s gift shop.)

Digital concerts exploded, and virtual composite recordings went viral. For a few months it seemed like music was alive and well in a new online form. People streamed these free performances, marvelling at the sudden and stunning accessibility of the global arts. The Metropolitan Opera offered free nightly broadcasts (while dragging their heels in collective bargaining and orphaning their musicians.) Eventually, the novelty turned to despair, our patience waned, zoom fatigue settled into our bones, and many of us stopped watching. An insipid timelessness descended upon our summer. 

For a while, some of us experiencing the suffocation of isolation banged on pots in celebration of the daily sacrifice of those working to keep the skeleton gears of our world turning. Essential was, momentarily, redefined, but over time bled into a vapid essentialism and settled into a wasteland of righteous indignation and misplaced resentment. We offered up our wait staff to hordes of angry karens, coughed on our grocery store workers, and insulted our medical providers by insisting on getting sick. 

Early solidarity gave way to factions. 

Stella Immanuel, the succubus whisperer, was anointed by a sitting president as an “expert” to rival the forty-year career of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Ted Yoho to account for misogyny unbecoming of even the most egregious politicians. We lost John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Kamala Harris reclaimed our space with a simple phrase, “I’m speaking,” and a fly landed on Mike Pence’s head. We felt redeemed, for a moment. I bought a “Smash the Patriarchy” face mask and wore it to work.

I had hoped that the daily digest of absurdity would settle out a bit as the narcissist-in-chief left office and lost his twitter account, but it seems that drinking bleach was just the beginning. We witnessed an insurrection in real time through our social media feeds, apogee of the catastrophe that began with the rise of Sarah Palin and Joe Six-Pack. In the aftermath of a coup that was far too close to successful, Steny Hoyer offered closing remarks for an impeachment trial with a nod to the warning words of Benjamin Franklin: “...a Republic, if you can keep it.” Are we doing enough to keep it? We continue to accommodate the treachery of willful ignorance, and the Civil War rages on.

As we celebrated the demise and departure of a trumped-up administration, and cried over the rollout of the first vaccines, we became cautiously optimistic. After months of being disturbed by the sight of naked noses, and learning to read emotions through eyes alone, new hope emerged. Was this year-long nightmare finally coming to an end?  What have we lost? What have we learned? What have we gained? 

The hope was short-lived. Daily scaremongering in the press continued, and vivid stories of infection, illness, and death from the early days gave way to an onslaught of highly technical articles about variants. Our optimism was suspended, with new fears of covid strains that vaccines might not protect us from. We hit a point of collective exhaustion in February 2021, as though everyone in the country said at the same time, “Enough. I can’t take it anymore.” (But we did.) 

After a summer that for this privileged country was almost...normal..., we succumbed to the delta variant and felt the crush of déjà vu. Mu lurks on the horizon. Nonetheless, we have decided to send our children, too young to be vaccinated, back to school. Sometimes it feels like sending them to war. 

“We store our sorrows in our jars, lest
the soldiers see them and celebrate the siege…
We store them for other seasons,
for a memory,
for something that might surprise us on the road.
But when life becomes normal
we’ll grieve like others over personal matters
that bigger headlines had kept hidden,
when we didn’t notice the hemorrhage of small wounds in us.
Tomorrow when the place heals
we’ll feel its side effects”

— Mahmoud Darwish, “A State of Siege”

Before and After

In eras of excess historical heat, there are moments for each of us when it dawns on us that our cultures, our lives as we understood them, our imagined futures, have been permanently and irrevocably altered.

A few years ago, while wandering through San Francisco’s Castro District, I felt a palpable antiquity permeating the streets: vibrant murals of Harvey Milk, rainbow-patterned sidewalks, pamphlets for pre-exposure prophylaxis on display outside of mobile HIV testing units, anatomically correct pastries on display in storefronts. These twenty-first century commemorations offered a stark contrast to the early days of the AIDS pandemic, when a new global disease was politicized because of where and in whom we first noticed the symptoms, and the battles fought across these neighborhoods for the rights to access medical care, fund research, and sustain life were relegated to the sidelines in a larger battle between love and hate. 

Randy Shilts, an award-winning journalist whose investigative reporting gave voice to the early years of the AIDS pandemic, framed much of a 605-page narrative around lynchpin moments that separate the Before and After in the lives of individuals as AIDS emerged. As we passed through so many one-year-with-covid anniversaries last winter (a year since the last party, the last concert, the last dinner with aging parents, the last day of in-person school), I wondered how many of those moments would come to represent each of our final breaks with another phase of Before times, as this latest pandemic and the accompanying culture wars settle into the fabric of our futures. 

In May of 2020, George Floyd was murdered and the country erupted, forcing the whitest of us to contend with the fact that slavery’s legacy was alive and well. The twitterverse installed itself as a new locus of social religion, every institution put out a cliched diversity statement, internet activists became overnight experts on oppression, and even my favorite sock company came out with a Black-designed, African-inspired sock line. (When anti-racism becomes a pawn of the capitalist-industrial complex, it’s worth considering whether we have missed the point.) We shamed people for leaving their houses, unless they were protesting racism, which didn’t sit well with the racists who equated mask mandates with Nazi policy while banning critical race theory from schools. Meanwhile, many communities of color are still reluctant to trust vaccines, as heirs of long histories of unethical experimentation, medical neglect, and denial of pain. 

This is not our first cultural reckoning with polarization in the wake of a pandemic. Shilts wrote of a “traitor’s list” in 1984, when the gay community polarized around bathhouse closure, against a corollary cultural polarization that held gay identity in the balance. Sexual freedom and public health were at odds, all within a larger, shared context of justice for a historically marginalized population. Many on the traitor’s list were themselves fathers of the gay liberation movement in San Francisco. 

As we begin to explore the psychological impacts of our current era, I’ve thought often of the pandemic babies. Introduced to life in an anti-social world, surrounded by masked humans and the upper limits of stranger-danger, these babies are imprinting on phenomena we don’t yet understand. What will this mean for them? While reading Shilts’ narrative, I realized that I, too, am a pandemic baby. In July of 1983, the world was barely beginning to reckon with a dawning reality of a disease that wasn’t going away, a disease that would wreak havoc for decades to come. Consciousness of that possibility was just emerging, mostly behind closed doors and concentrated in the gay communities of large cities. On the day I was born, just under two thousand US-Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS, the NCI and the CDC were fighting over viral samples, and news stories were rare beyond the gay press. Funding was in short supply. AIDS came to define critical aspects of my development, and that was merely as someone on the edges of that pandemic’s real impacts. While my parents came of age in the glory days of sexual liberation in this country, I came of age in the shadow of monsters lurking in dark corners of blood and body fluids. By the time I was in elementary school, AIDS had settled into “respectable” heterosexual contexts, making it publicly palatable and a worthy component of health classes. By fifth grade, my prepubescent consciousness had inextricably linked the concept of sex with the concept of disease. 

AIDS, after forty years, is now fairly controllable, but it continues to plague poorer countries and marginalized populations in ways that betray deep global inequities and the staying power of harmful colonial narratives. We are continuing in that trend, as Israel offers a third booster shot for COVID-19, the USA considers the same, and much of the global south has yet to receive a single dose of vaccine. Meanwhile, an embarrassing percentage of our privileged population would rather take ivermectin, and vaccine batches expire in our freezers. 

We are nearing the point at which COVID-19 death counts exceed forty years of AIDS deaths in this country, and we have not yet cleared the two-year mark of the coronavirus emergence. We are also approaching the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 bombings, another event that defined a poignant Before and After for the culture of this country; during many single days in this pandemic, as many people died of COVID-19 as died in those bombings. The comparisons are staggering, yet we continue to run around misappropriating the concept of freedom and extricating it from any sense of responsibility toward the public good. Much of the United States appears to be bored with the pandemic, but the pandemic is not yet bored with us. While the governors of Texas and Florida embrace the rugged individualism of denial, and fail to will the virus out of existence, we are losing opportunities to make a real dent in its global spread. 

Have we yet reached our tipping point? (Current trends indicate no.) Can we yet conceive of what we’ve lost, and the losses still to come? Shilts wrote, of the 1985 Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco:

“There was a different mood to this parade, as well as to the community it represented. The depression that had marked the penultimate phase of a community coming to grips with widespread death was beginning to lift. In its place was acceptance. There might have been a time Before, but it was no longer the moment that people longed for; it was gone, everyone understood now, and it would never come back. Life would forevermore be in this After. It was cruel and it wasn’t fair, but that was the way it would be, and at the sixteenth annual Gay Freedom Day Parade it was clear that most gay San Franciscans understood this.” ”

In the post mortem of those early days of the AIDS pandemic, the vagaries of human avarice, as well as the ultimately more damaging ignorance of well-worn convictions, were on full display:

“The numbers of AIDS cases measured the shame of the nation, [Cleve Jones] believed. The United States, the one nation with the knowledge, the resources, and the institutions to respond to the epidemic, had failed. And it had failed because of ignorance and fear, prejudice and rejection. The story of the AIDS epidemic was that simple, Cleve felt; it was the story of bigotry and what it could do to a nation.”

Reconstruction

Once again, we are trapped in a labyrinth of ruinous contradictions. It is poignant that the cicadas chose this summer to emerge, a momentary renaissance after seventeen years underground. They must be trying to tell us something.

“Inwardly, however, numbness seized his heart, wiping away signs of joy, like melting snow erasing the footprints of life. He was losing his faith in his workmanship. Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one’s faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back”

— Elif Shafak, The Architect’s Apprentice

With faith often comes gratitude. But where do we look for the gratitude that is expected of us? Gratitude that we live in an era where the human genome has already been mapped and mRNA vaccines are possible? Gratitude that there is still beauty in unexpected places? Gratitude that within this landscape of depletion, we have learned to love more deeply in moments, in those spaces between futility and promise? 

Rather than giving thanks, I call upon hope. Hope, as gratitude’s more practical sister. Hope, as the embodiment of an agnostic, deontological gratitude not so sure of its telos, but worthy enough through effort alone. With hope, nothing is settled, nothing is certain, nothing is fully known. Action is required. 

The reluctant dawn of a new world settles into our fissures, illuminating our past, and our promise. As new norms approach stasis, we are called upon to avoid constructing them to be as impenetrable and unyielding as the old ones. 

In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino speaks of the inferno of the living:

“There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

It is Zozobra season in Santa Fe.
How does one cast off the gloom of such an era?
How does one eulogize such a comprehensive miasma of loss?
The United States death count as of September 9, 2021: 651,000 souls, departed;
each of them a universe, collapsed.

“...no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.”

— Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Quotes and Citations

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1974. (165)

Darwish, Mahmoud. “A State of Siege.” The Butterfly’s Burden. Trans. Fady Joudah. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. (136-137)

Khoury, Elias. Gate of the Sun. Trans. Humphrey Davies. New York: Picador, 1998. (161)

Motokiyo. Nishikigi. Reproduced in translation in The Noh Theatre of Japan, Ed. Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. New York: Dover, 2004. (132-133) 

Nooteboom, Cees. The Following Story. Trans. Ina Rilke. San Diego: Harvest, 1991. (65-66)

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004. (245)

Shafak, Elif. The Architect’s Apprentice. New York: Penguin, 2014. (321)

Shilts, Randy. And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1987/1988. (349, 445, 569, 601)

Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. San Diego: Harvest, 1989. (178)

Feminism in Education: Praxis and Promise

Preface:

Any meaningful social justice work invites conflict between the expected processes and values of the broader cultures that surround us, and the values that we espouse within intentional educational communities. These conflicts are often exacerbated by the challenges of deeply connotated language, with multiple orientations to familiar words at play in our dialogues. The constellation of feminism includes various and often conflicting movements, including several historical waves of US feminism, theories of intersectionality, gender-inclusive feminism, and international feminisms. We also carry and continually reimagine loaded terms (such as sexism, misogyny, transmisogyny, patriarchy, and paternalism) that complicate a shared understanding of blended concepts. For the purposes of this essay, I will be using “feminism” to refer to a set of practices and values that are oriented toward equalizing the opportunities and experiences of all genders, and eliminating harmful biases and superficial understandings of gender roles that contribute to dangerous and destructive gendered social structures. 

Part I: Tropes

The “hysterical woman” trope has multiple origins, etymologically traceable to ancient Greece and frequently mirrored conceptually in other cultures, where the words ‘υστέρα (womb) and ‘υστερικός (suffering in the uterus, hysterical) directly link a physical organ of the female reproductive system to female expressions of emotionality. These terms eventually evolved into Latin versions of the word hysteria that support its contemporary usage. In a relatively more recent history of early feminist movements in the United States, this term is acknowledged for its relationship with social and emotional capabilities and perceptions of the roles and limitations of women in society. Medical historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg suggests in an article on the role of women in the 19th century that “physicians saw woman as the product and prisoner of her reproductive system. It was the ineluctable basis of her social role and behavioral characteristics, the cause of her most common ailments; woman’s uterus and ovaries controlled her body and behavior from puberty through menopause.” [1] Complications of menstruation could include temporary insanity [2] which would have to be closely monitored, implying a thesis, widely accepted in medical communities for hundreds of years and culminating in the Victorian era, that woman is inherently abnormal. This language contributed to a systematized foundation that placed women in subordinate roles in an effort to protect them from their own emotionality. 

For all of her revolutionary ideas and work that provided a foundation for later feminist movements, even Simone de Beauvoir (celebrated French feminist and philosopher who came of age in the early 20th century) acknowledges these tropes as having validity, while nonetheless working to situationalize them and separate them from concepts of inherent capacity:

“We can now understand why, from ancient Greece to today, there are so many common features in the indictments against woman; her condition has remained the same throughout superficial changes, and this condition defines what is called the woman’s ‘character’: she ‘wallows in immanence,’ she is argumentative, she is cautious and petty, she does not have the sense either of truth or of accuracy, she lacks morality, she is vulgarly self-serving, selfish, she is a liar and an actress. There is some truth in all these affirmations. But the types of behaviors denounced are not dictated to woman by her hormones or predestined in her brain’s compartments: they are suggested in negative form by her situation.” [3]

In the wake of de Beauvoir’s work (as well as the foundational works of scholars of Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and others who put forth early concepts of intersectional feminism), the United States experienced a political avalanche of concrete attempts to attend to overt situations of individual and structural misogyny. Patterns of treatment of women in the community and the workforce, including access to healthcare, reproductive rights, family leave, equal pay, equal employment opportunity, recourse for claims of sexual violence, and countless other gendered issues, were nominally resolved in hard-won battles during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 70s. The following decades saw what Susan Faludi describes as a backlash in her eponymous 1991 work, wherein women began reacting to situations that were a result of their successes: for many (white) women, feminism was no longer deemed necessary, as problematic conditions had clearly been attended to by the success of past legal battles, even as they simultaneously grappled with the challenges of managing expectations of dual roles in careers within and outside the home.

Concrete changes in policy that nominally supported equality for women overshadowed (for a time) a more insidious manifestation of some of those ancient impressions of the hysterical nature of women that continued to operate in the background and interstices of formal legal language of equality and civil rights. Faludi’s 2006 Fifteenth Anniversary Edition of Backlash rounds out the anniversary preface to the original edition with the following admonition:

“What is missing is the deeper promise of a woman’s revolution, a revolution that was never intended to champion cut-throat competition or winner-take-all ethics, a revolution that was abandoned on the road to economic opportunity. Women’s disillusionment comes from the half-gleaned truth that, while we have achieved economic gains, we have yet to find a way to turn those gains toward the larger and more meaningful goals of social change, responsible citizenship, the advancement of human creativity, the building of a mature and vital public world. We live within the confines of a social structure and according to cultural conventions that remain substantially intact from before the revolution. We have used our gains to gild our shackles, but not break them.” [4]

Another decade past, and our vitriolic response through media to the character, wardrobe, and vocal tenor of female presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the last several election cycles, as well as the emergence of the #metoo phenomenon [5], indicates that, as a culture, we have been far from successful in internalizing the spirit of our Civil Rights Era victories of equality. The vestiges of those early links between the perceived instability of the womb and its impact on the uncontrollable behaviors of women are still evident in the headlines of major newspapers and the conclusions of arbitrary definitions of professionalism in many workplace settings. 

Rebecca Solnit outlines this phenomenon beautifully in an exegesis on the national response to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign:

“Clinton was constantly berated for qualities rarely mentioned in male politicians, including ambition--something, it’s safe to assume, she has in common with everyone who ever ran for elected office. It was possible, according to a headline in Psychology Today, that she was “pathologically ambitious.” She was criticized for having a voice. While Bernie Sanders railed and Trump screamed and snickered, Fox commentator Brit Hume complained about Clinton’s ‘sharp, lecturing tone,’ which, he said, was ‘not so attractive’; MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gave her public instructions on how to use a microphone; Bob Woodward bitched that she was ‘screaming’; and Bob Cusack, the editor of the political newspaper the Hill, said, ‘When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses.’ One could get the impression that a woman should campaign in a sultry whisper, but, of course, if she did that she would not project power. But if she did project power she would fail as a woman, since power, in this framework, is a male prerogative, which is to say that the setup was not intended to include women. As Sady Doyle noted, ‘She can’t be sad or angry, but she also can’t be happy or amused, and she also can’t refrain from expressing any of those emotions. There is literally no way out of this one. Anything she does is wrong.’ One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses.” [6]

Earlier this year, as I watched the Vice Presidential Debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, I was reminded again of the ways in which women, and especially women of color, are so often expected to tolerate patterns and techniques of oppression in male counterparts: gaslighting, stonewalling, character attacks, blatant lies, frequent interruptions, and a pathological unwillingness to cede the floor when asked, are just a few of the tools Pence used to maintain dominance in conversation. These behaviors were shown to be sanctioned (for men) at our highest levels of government, but anything less than perfect poise from the now-Vice President as she grappled with those attacks would have been immediately criticized in the usual ways. 

Numerous studies suggest evidence that female professors are more harshly judged by students than male professors, indicating that students find women performing similarly as men to be more arrogant and harsher evaluators, among other undesirable traits [7]; studies that determine the efficacy of CEOs often find that women are perceived as arrogant, whereas men exhibiting similar behaviors would be perceived as assertive [8]; reports that offer advice for emerging female professionals often encourage them to strongly emphasize their successes in language of the “team” as opposed to themselves as individuals, to be more likely to be perceived as cooperative, whereas male individual successes are more likely to be celebrated [9]; studies and frequently documented personal accounts indicate that we are more likely to accept angry behavior as a matter of course in men, and to find similar behaviors as problematic, or even pathological, in women [10].

What we face in the current era is a culture in which many of us seem to have command of the correct language to use to avoid direct responsibility for actions that might indicate misogyny (and other forms of identity-based discrimination), but in which we fail to recognize the impact of conditioned implicit bias and the way it presences in our everyday language and assumptions. This is made even more complicated by the fact that, in any given situation, it is possible that the individual descriptors could also be accurate. It is possible that a female CEO could exhibit traits of arrogance; it is possible that a female professor could be unduly harsh in grading; it is possible that a female professional could be disinclined to support team projects. It is not the individual situations, but the trends that show us evidence of an underlying bias that forces minoritized genders (and ethnicities) to maintain much higher standards of decorum and composure in difficult situations than their (white) male counterparts.

When the tropes of misogyny are buried so deep in our unconscious that we don’t recognize them for what they are, assessment of the motives behind individualized actions becomes almost impossible, and the burden of proof requires a level of certainty that is rarely accessible. Nonetheless, patterns of injustice persist. 

Part II: Institutional Norms

In progressive communities, it is extremely challenging to make claims of structural injustice in a way that will hold up against defined institutional standards, practices, and policies. This challenge, however, does not absolve us of the responsibility to attend to problematic patterns of injustice, and the need to explore new ways of addressing individual situations that honor the nuanced landscape of those patterns. 

In efforts to teach and model feminist-informed practices in institutions, we are often forced to grapple with an ennervating paradox, as culturally sanctioned standards for professional decorum often inhibit actions that may help us to identify and address examples of systemic oppression. Conditions of propriety often serve to perpetuate unjust systems, even as we work to dismantle them from other directions. In progressive communities, our experiences and practices of implicit bias and prejudice are often rooted in behaviors that can be justified, defended, or criticized from other, less incriminating angles. Nonetheless, the continued presence of discrimination in the subtext is extremely harmful, and still presents barriers to equality. 

We are trained to respond quickly to concerns of a breach of the contract of professionalism, a tool that often limits the options of engagement for exploring the underlying claims of discrimination, while we are often much slower to respond to concerns about background issues that inspire such professional transgressions (if we respond to them at all). Furthermore, we are often forced to question ourselves when we personally experience acts of injustice. While a continued commitment to self-reflection is relevant and important, and will help us avoid applying a single lens to a complex problem, this personal questioning should exist while simultaneously interrogating the lenses of the system. In practice, a system is almost always defended at the expense of an individual, and if, as individuals, we have valid complaints, we are rarely permitted to articulate those complaints authentically. We are trained to think that unless our claims are overt and explicit, they will not be successful, and may invite more scrutiny of our motives, legitimacy, and character than of the complaint itself. 

The uncertainty we feel when our methods are called into question at the expense of the content (especially when no effective methods are available to us within the boundaries of decorum) is a particularly insidious form of institutionalized gaslighting. For example, the accepted practice of generalizing issues (so as to avoid public criticism of individuals) is often ineffective, as individuals are thus tacitly allowed to exclude themselves from responsibility. In offering specifics, we have the opportunity to move from the abstract embrace of shared values to a realistic institutional confrontation with the ways we struggle to live up to those values. If we continue to address issues of marginalized communities only in the abstract, those abstractions themselves can serve to perpetuate problematic behaviors. 

The tendency to evade accountability through abstraction and generality is often intensified through complex power differentials, especially when those in power are not invested in recognizing the impact of their own prejudices and deeply-held biases. Traditional institutional hierarchies often uphold a directionality for decorum: any upwards challenge must be extremely careful, polite, airtight, and perfectly executed, whereas policies of supervision often serve to reinforce the perspectives of those in power, regardless of legitimacy. When our attention to professional decorum and traditionally-sanctioned power structures distorts realities that we are ill-prepared to manage, we have lost the opportunity to engage some of our deepest challenges with integrity and acuity. 

It is inevitable that institutional structures and policies that are informed by the conventions of the broader culture will also represent aspects of existing cultural conflicts, as these structures are sustained by the dominant cultures surrounding us and are cultivated in our consciousness before we are able to form abstract thoughts. Our challenge, if we are to authentically address the complexities of institutionalized, structural injustice, is to engage questions that will help us build the foundational values that we cherish into our very systems, acknowledging that, in many areas, this is uncharted territory.

What happens when our shared work in dismantling structural injustice comes into conflict with institutional and community standards of decorum and professionalism? Are there events that justify pushing against the institution in the service of helping us to move closer to the values we proclaim, and if so, how do we determine which events are worthy of this attention? How do we recognize which standards of decorum are no longer serving us? How do we honor a commitment to constructive engagement of conflict and a recognition of the basic humanity in each of us without also conflating the word “constructive” with the word “complacent”? I believe these are dilemmas that each of us face daily, and that require us to accept that all actions (including the choice not to act) have consequences. If we are going to attempt to address structural injustice head-on, we may occasionally find ourselves needing to break some of the rules that hold the system intact. 

As we recognize that we have a responsibility to our students to build a globally-inclusive curriculum that attends to these liberatory ideas, it is important to also begin to hold our institutions to similar standards. A feminism-informed set of institutional practices will undoubtedly require a reimagining of the role and placement of hierarchies (including attention to what it means to fight embedded patriarchy and paternalism), a commitment to community accountability that may require more specificity of transgression and more accommodation of emotional experiences than we are accustomed to, and a courageous examination of the underlying cultural norms, assumptions, and language patterns that are embedded in our institutions but which may no longer be serving us.

Part III: The Implications and Limits of Language

Any curriculum that centers justice will require us to take on some of the most controversial, challenging, and ideologically-laden concepts in our language structures and declare a commitment, within our learning communities, to cultivating a nuanced understanding in ourselves and holding each other accountable for the same. Nothing about this work is easy, and its implications reach beyond our classrooms, into our interpersonal communication patterns, our policies, our systems and schedules, and our comprehensive institutional praxis. Our culturally-sanctioned and institutionally-sanctioned patterns of language may be serving to support systems of structural bias and injustice, even as we use that language to try to counter the injustice.

The ways that we use language, manipulate language, and sanction some forms of language while rejecting others can be seen as a tool of social control (whether implicit or explicit) that is frequently used to protect the status quo, often without formal recognition or awareness of this reality. Professionally-accepted language and patterns of response are among the most deeply embedded practices in institutional cultures. These language patterns often serve to unconsciously misdirect and invalidate the experience of people who are historically marginalized within these cultures.

Gikuyu writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, in Decolonising the Mind (his final work written in English), offers a retrospective analysis on the ways in which languages of the European colonizers have impacted both the construction of identities and the potential for engaging culturally relevant ideas in the people who were forced to adopt unfamiliar language structures across various African communities:

“[Colonialism’s] most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.” [11]

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s introduction to a compendium on the writings of Critical Race Theory also highlights the power of language to influence and control the conclusions of both law and scholarship. Critical Race Theory represents a movement that emerged in academic law programs following the critical legal studies movement of the 1970s, in which legal scholars began to question the linguistic foundations and claims of detachment in law studies, insofar as the language and practices were found to implicitly support structural bias against marginalized groups. Previous to this work, law was perceived to be an entirely objective, neutral practice; the work of these scholars helped to define a path forward in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Era, and provided a new language to support a more inclusive legal practice, influencing, among other things, case law and interpretations of Title VII and IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Crenshaw explains,

“[Critical Race Theorists] contended that liberal and conservative legal scholarship operated in the narrow ideological channel within which law was understood as qualitatively different from politics. The faith of liberal lawyers in the gradual reform of American law through the victory of the superior rationality of progressive ideas depended on a belief in the central ideological myth of the law/politics distinction, mainly, that legal institutions employ a rational, apolitical, and neutral discourse with which to mediate the exercise of social power. This, in essence, is the role of law as understood by liberal political theory. Yet politics was embedded in the very doctrinal categories with which law organized and represented social reality.” [12]

bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, identifies similar concerns when discussing the construction of curriculum:

“My pedagogical practices have emerged from the mutually illuminating interplay of anticolonial, critical, and feminist pedagogies. This complex and unique blending of multiple perspectives has been an engaging and powerful standpoint from which to work. Expanding beyond boundaries, it has made it possible for me to imagine and enact pedagogical practices that engage directly both the concern for interrogating biases in curricula that reinscribe systems of domination (such as racism and sexism), while simultaneously providing new ways to teach diverse groups of students.” [13]

Scholars such as those above recognize that language is not, and never has been, politically neutral. There are ways that the expected, sanctioned language patterns themselves, patterns that we have been trained to use in institutional practices, patterns that we acknowledge as acceptable or unacceptable because we have been culturally conditioned to do so, may actually be contributing to the process of tipping the balance of power away from those seeking a justice-oriented pedagogy.

Part IV: Toward a Praxis of Subversion

In progressive institutions nominally oriented towards justice, various paradigms of thought and practice collide, such as when restorative justice frameworks and theories of intersectionality bump up against embedded legal hierarchies and culturally-sanctioned professional standards. The resultant challenges unveil questions about the promise, power, and responsibility of modeling subversion in an educational context.

If we are to accept Paolo Freire’s claims of the responsibility that the oppressed bear in bringing to light the issues that bind them, we are then tasked with recognizing the role that our students play in bringing forth justice in our community and our world, and in modeling behaviors ourselves that support their work as revolutionaries. Freire suggests in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that

“...this lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves and from those who are truly in solidarity with them. As individuals or as peoples, by fighting for the restoration of their humanity they will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffer the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors’ violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity.” [14]

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner further remind us in Teaching as a Subversive Activity that 

“We are, after all, talking about achieving a high degree of freedom from the intellectual and social constraints of one’s tribe ... We become accustomed very early to a ‘natural’ way of talking, and being talked to, about ‘truth.’ Quite arbitrarily, one’s perception of what is ‘true’ or real is shaped by the symbols and symbol-manipulating institutions of his tribe. Most men, in time, learn to respond with fervor and obedience to a set of verbal abstractions which they feel provides them with an ideological identity. One word for this, of course, is ‘prejudice.’ None of us is free from it, but it is the sign of a competent ‘crap detector’ that he is not completely captivated by the arbitrary abstractions of the community in which he happened to grow up.” [15]

Students are highly attentive to these distinctions. While no intentional community that exists within the world can entirely ignore the expectations of the broader culture (most notably, with respect to the law and due process in a physical location), anti-oppression lenses require us to work toward progress at a level that may exceed the accepted standards of the communities that surround and influence us. In the categories of identity construction, we must acknowledge a shared humanity that, while inherent in concept, can only be achieved through thoughtful and ongoing engagement in the nuances of difficult issues. Our challenge is to model higher standards and a more inclusive and informed approach to these conflicts, even while recognizing that similar conflicts continue to challenge federal and global legal systems. 

Part V: The Promise of a Feminist Lens

An overarching feminist lens can offer a unique entry point for educational reform that meaningfully elucidates broader issues of justice and equity, and has the potential to provide a foundation for questioning archetypal experiences and expressions of misogyny in social and institutional contexts. This lens can also serve as a metaphor for beginning to understand an interrelated set of concepts of systemic injustice that becomes broadly accessible through its application -- while there are nuances and variances in the experience of gender across cultures, every culture has a complex relationship to gender roles and gender expression, with immediate and meaningful connections. Other facets of injustice (such as race, socioeconomic status, neurodivergence, health and wellness, etc.) lack the same level of universality, as they often represent conditions that are understood within contexts of a specific time, place, or culture, and are often defined initially at moments of encounter between cultures. The universal lens of feminism has the power to be uniquely instructive, with gender serving as a multifaceted but nonetheless permanent phenomenon of the human condition.

The praxis of feminism encourages us to hold ourselves accountable for envisioning systems that may eventually transcend the limitations of our contributing cultures and help propel us towards greater integrity and a more just and sustainable future. This praxis encompasses shared principles that are woven throughout specific feminisms. Within these feminisms, there are many points of divergence and occasionally ideological conflict, and this overarching lens is not to be confused with the dominant lens of white feminism, which often masquerades as feminism-in-its-entirety. Nonetheless, when the shared generalities are explored and applied in tandem with specific lenses of intersectionality, critical race theory, and distinct global feminist interpretations, we are uniquely positioned to explore these multifaceted challenges from a place of authentic, personal engagement. To borrow from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “we should all be feminists.”

Notes

1: Carol Smith Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth Century America”, Women and Health in America, ed. Judith Leavitt, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 112.

2: Sharon Golub, Periods: From Menarche to Menopause, (California: Sage Publications, 1992), 13. 

3: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (New York: Vintage, 1949/2011), 638.

4: Susan Faludi, Backlash:The Undeclared War Against American Women, Fifteenth Anniversary Edition, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1991/2006), xvi.

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Too_movement

6: Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays), (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 24-25.

7: Colleen Flaherty, “Same Course, Different Ratings,” Inside Higher Ed, 2018.

8: Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, “Speaking While Female,” The New York Times, 2015.

9: Eileen Elias, “Lessons learned from women in leadership positions,” IOS Press Open Library, 2018.

10: Rebecca Solnit, Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays), (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 24-25.

11: Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, (Rochester: James Currey, 1986), 16.

12: Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Introduction,” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, (New York: The New Press, 1995), xviii.

13: bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.

14: Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: Continuum, 1970), 29.

15: Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, (New York: Dell, 1969), 4-5.

**Copyright 2021, Melinda Russial

San Diego Serenade

San Diego Serenade: An Essay on the Dissolution and Repair of the Body Politic

I woke up in the early hours of November 9, 2016 to a changed country. Or, more accurately, a country unchanged, but finally and bombastically exposed in dramatic irony; on that day, we lost the privilege of denial of the terrors that many of us had been nominally willing to condemn, in moments of convenience, but could never agree to commit to expunging for good. I wondered, when confronted with the dawn of an unwelcome new era, by what forces did we decide to anoint these terrors, to elevate them and endorse them so brazenly? Was I witnessing a regression, a reckoning, a dystopian revolution? Or, at my most optimistic, could I hope that this was the death rattle of a colonialist vision whose time had long passed, a final battle cry for a Civil War that never really ended, both sides falling victim to their narratives of uninvited manifest destiny? Perhaps, in the wake of this death rattle, we might finally make space for a long overdue reconciliation.

As I drove from Montezuma to Santa Fe at the end of that first day of a newly-dulled world, Tom Waits’ “San Diego Serenade” played on repeat as the soundtrack to my heartbreak:

I never saw the mornin’ ‘til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine ‘til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed the song

As a new initiate in the international community of UWC-USA, with a role that endorsed and encouraged my long-held inclinations towards global citizenship, I found some latent patriotism that day. I also found anew our systemic misogyny, our racism, our anti-intellectualism, all consummating passions that had felt fragmented and polarized (and thus, easier to ignore) before they forced themselves upon our highest office. I wept for a country that I didn’t even know I maybe sort of loved until its illusions were cracked on a national scale. That day, and throughout the years that followed, my students have continually reminded me that we all take turns struggling to define ourselves, both within and separate from, the boundaries of our histories. 

I was raised in a version of the United States where the dominant values suggested that the arc of the moral universe was, indeed, bending towards justice, however slowly. In this version, we were taught to recognize the fatal flaws of the country’s origins, and to take responsibility for acknowledgement, repair, reparation, and reconciliation. In the days following that electoral transgression, I remember hearing from optimism-tainted progressive US-Americans, “Don’t worry, our systems won’t allow this to go unchecked.” “There’s always impeachment, or the 25th Amendment, if it gets really bad.” “He won’t last a year.” “It won’t be as bad as you think.” “This is why we have checks and balances.” “Congress will protect us from the worst of it.” “It’s not fascism, don’t exaggerate. That can’t happen here.” “We will get through it.” 

Almost four years later, we find ourselves In the midst of a global pandemic, our cities and our landscapes burning, our promised Wall raised by accident as the rest of the world has shut us out. The mark of 200,000 dead passed largely unnoticed amidst scandals of lesser import (and greater distraction), while 5.4 million new people have suddenly found themselves without health insurance. Black and Brown and Indigenous people are dying disproportionately from this novel virus (catalyzed by a system of exclusion), and country-wide protests to secure the bodily autonomy and breathing rights of humans are being co-opted in a misinformation and denial campaign with language that even Orwell couldn’t have imagined. 

This country, born of a violence that lingers in our law, our politics, our schools, our common spaces, and our own selves, is learning to see the other side of its exceptionalism. We have, lately, been forced to recognize it as an incomplete narrative, a veiled one, often a lie. But the idea of exceptionalism persists, nonetheless. And when I ask myself if it is time to leave, I keep coming back to that exceptionalism: it lingers in me against my better judgment, tethering me to a psychic landscape that is not always as beautiful as others I’ve admired, but that carries a sense of responsibility I can’t ignore. It is a responsibility cultivated in the liberal origins of a national ethos always framed in potential, framed in the process of becoming, framed in recognition of past and future crimes with an enduring belief that we are not predetermined by them. 

It is this potential, perhaps even more striking against the backdrop of these layers of tragedy,  that I claim as my birthright. This potential represents the version of my country that I choose to engage, the version in which the arc of the moral universe may yet rediscover its telos. Carl Jung, in a reflection on the changing landscape of pre-war Europe, but equally applicable to the present, once surmised: “We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise.” 

To my fellow US-Americans, as well as to those who are willing to tolerate our idiosyncrasies in the service of a shared vision: this is our moment to reinvent this country, and the sun won’t rise without us. We may not get another chance. Will this be the moment that we give in, finally, to the darkest parts of what we have always been? Or will we choose this moment to repair the cracks in our forever-embattled illusions, and commit to the hard work of bringing that better world we have long imagined into being?

Last Minute Graduation

First published 13 March 2020, on the UWC-USA website.

Last Minute Graduation Speech for the UWC-USA Class of 2020

So, I’ve been thinking about ceremony. The word traces back through Old French, Medieval Latin, Old Latin, and probably Etruscan, to convey “sacredness,” “awe,” and “reverent rites,” with a sense of the ancient. Solemn, ancient rites require preparation...usually... We’re rushing this one a bit, but isn’t that one of our defining skills at UWC-USA? Wait until three days, three hours, or three minutes before something is due, cry a little (or a lot), throw up our hands and say, “this will never work, I’m quitting, I can’t even,” and then pull out one of the most magical and compelling pieces of creation that humanity has ever seen? I’ve seen you do this, over and over again. And so, our Last Minute Graduation Ceremony follows suit, in all of the glory and splendor of the UWC-USA way: exceptional, at the last minute, because we didn’t have any other choice. 

I want to honor the fact that we are rushing this, that we are losing ceremonies this year, so many ceremonies, ceremonies that you were all anticipating pouring your life and love and spirit into. Nothing about this is easy. (I mean, Ben probably doesn’t mind that nobody had a chance to steal a chicken, but I can’t think of a single other silver lining here. So it goes. … And don’t steal a chicken tonight, now that I’ve said it. I will have to do some trauma counseling for that chicken, and I really don’t need chicken poop on my red chair, on top of everything else.)  

This graduation, albeit a little rushed, is the bookend to your arrival, one or two summers ago. Each year, you roll in on those white-and-blue buses, boasting complicated, nuanced relationships with your home cultures that maybe you only began to know in that moment, hoping to transcend stereotypes, with all of the unbridled passion for a better world that we encourage and celebrate ... until you direct it towards curfew violations. When you get off the bus, your new roommate almost knocks you down while smothering you with enthusiastic hugs (hopefully after asking for consent!), you’re not sure if it’s ok to flush toilet paper (and if you’re from Japan, you’re really, really disappointed that the toilets don’t have any of the right buttons, either), you can’t pronounce anyone’s names, and all of a sudden, you’re eating dehydrated legumes or superoats that a second-year leader showed you how to cook on some rickety camp stove contraption, sleeping in a tent in the woods, which definitely confuses some of your families. If English isn’t your first language, and maybe even if it is, you have a headache at the end of the day for at least three months. Eventually, it all starts to feel, confusingly, normal, and sometimes even annoying. You’re offended that the town bus got cancelled for that event you weren’t even going to, you’re not sure if you’ve managed to accidentally insult all the cultures on campus yet, but you’re pretty close and you don’t even know how it happened; you can’t believe you didn’t get that sick day, you’re so tired, you’ve been trying to live up to the standards of world-shaking perfection that you brought with you, and then you discovered that, somehow, even your perfectionism isn’t good enough! (For the record, you are good enough. You are more than good enough. When I grow up, I want to be like you.)

Idealism and despair surface at intervals, as you grapple with those same self-improving and world-improving standards within yourselves and for your community. Sometimes it feels too hard. But last week at the Cultural Showcase I watched students from five continents dance Macedonian and Bulgarian traditional dances together; you drew parallels across distant mythologies, you mingled past, present, and future, time, and place across multiple art forms, you honored your cultures and challenged them simultaneously. You called for a better world. For a brief two-and-a-half hours last weekend, I watched as you merged your discrete phenomena of life with each other, in our little microcosm, as you do every day here in your classrooms, your hiking trails, your dorm bathrooms; it is anything but normal. You all come trooping out of your individual histories, collide into each other, and create new worlds inside your friendships and your shared experiences. 

We are changed by these collaborations and occasional collisions, and the world will be transformed in tandem as we carry those interactions within us and through us. As I was struggling for the right words last night while considering how to best to summarize this indefinable, and indefatigable, community, I thought I might borrow a bit from Rumi:

Think of how phenomena come trooping / out of the desert of non-existence / into this materiality. … 

This place of phenomena is a wide exchange / of highways, with everything going all sorts / of different ways // We seem to be sitting still, / but we are actually moving, and the fantasies / of phenomena are sliding through us / like ideas through curtains. // They go to the well / of deep love inside each of us. They fill their jars there, and they leave. /// There is a source they come from, / and a fountain inside here. // Be generous. / Be grateful. Confess when you’re not. /// ……./ Who am I, standing in the midst of this thought-traffic? [from “The Long String,” Coleman Barks translation]

For me, this question of “Who am I?” in this miasma of cultural collision has been forced wide open, shattered and pieced back together again, repeatedly, by all of you. Last summer, and a bit this winter, I had the honor of visiting several of your home countries, and I was surprised by how quickly the teacher-student role was reversed. İrem saved me from oncoming traffic in İstanbul once. Raneem spent an hour cajoling and directing a cranky taxi driver over the phone, trying to get me from Madaba to Amman without maps or GPS, since I somehow managed to get a ride with the only taxi driver in Jordan who doesn’t believe in either of those things. Keita and Hiyona showed me how to navigate the Tokyo subway. During these trips, students became my caretakers, an interesting and instantaneous shift in role that reminded me how important our practices of seeking student insight and leadership really are as we craft the specifics of this vision together. I saw the other side of the independence, risk, courage, and hope that you all carry within you as you take the plunge into this beautiful and impossible vision that we share. This work belongs to you, and you have been, from the beginning, my teachers; learning from you has been an honor and a privilege that is so overpowering as to seem unreal at times. 

In the weeks and months ahead, as you begin to define this experience for yourselves, and what it means as you move beyond this little bubble, you might also find the memory of these experiences overpowering. Rilke, another of my favorite poets, has some suggestions for you, in his poem, “Turning Point”:

For there is a boundary to looking. / And the world that is looked at so deeply / wants to flourish in love. // Work of the eyes is done, now / go and do heart-work / on all the images imprisoned within you; for you / overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.

The time we’ve had together here is overpowering. You’ve raised protests, small and large, from agora articles to vagina monologues to climate strikes. You’ve offended and you’ve been offended. You’ve pushed against every boundary placed around you, and even many that you had defined for yourselves. You’ve loved each other more deeply than you ever thought possible. You’ve been frustrated that, as a generation taught to be everything, you can’t do more, and you have to do too much. 

This movement, the United World College movement, was created during the Cold War, when the white knight was talking backwards and the doomsday clock was two minutes to midnight, and teenagers were maybe the last best hope for a peaceful future. The global landscape, whether in the immediacy of this novel coronavirus, or in the more permanent possibility of climate catastrophe, is seeking your wisdom and your courage once again.

As you go forward to do that work in whatever ways you find meaning and possibility and hope, please remember that this is always your community, and it is what it is because of you. We are here to support you, and to share in your challenges and your successes, wherever you are. We know that you will show us what it means to live in this world with integrity, conviction, compassion, empathy, and care; we know you will, because you already have.

Work of the eyes is done, now / go and do heart-work / on all the images imprisoned within you.

The Mystic Chords of Education

Learning is a temporal art. It is defined by experiences in liminal spaces, as well as by the processes that take advantage of those spaces to offer access points to past, present, and future discovery. Edmund Husserl suggests that experience can be understood as a convergence of three stages of consciousness, operating simultaneously: retention, in which past experiences are retained in memory; attention, in which immediate sensory impressions are encountered; and protention, in which we construct expectations for the future that inform our understanding of the present. [1] With such a multilayered approach to time, boundaries of the experience of learning are not easily demarcated, and real learning is rarely encapsulated in the linear structures we so often assume to be critical for legitimacy in teaching.

 Before institutionalized learning begins, we develop a relationship with learning through the novelty of everyday experiences. Maxine Greene describes this early construction of knowledge systems as a process of beginning to structure the phenomena that engage us: 

“We are first cast into the world as embodied beings trying to understand. From particular situated locations, we open ourselves to fields of perception. Doing so, we begin to inhabit varied and always incomplete multiverses of forms, contours, structures, colors, and shadows. We become present to them as consciousnesses in the midst of them, not as outside observers; and so we see aspects and profiles but never totalities. We reach out into the world – touching, listening, watching what presents itself to us from our prereflective landscapes, primordial landscapes. We strain toward horizons: horizons of what might be, horizons of what was. Because we have the capacity to configure what lies around us, we bring patterns and structures into existence in the landscape. Before we enter into the life of language, before we thematize and know, we have already begun to organize our lived experiences perceptually and imaginatively. We inform our encounters by means of activities later obscured by the sediments of rationality.” [2]

 As learning beings, we initially welcome a process where knowledge is absorbed and undone, repeatedly, through layered experiences (conscious and unconscious), in a context of ever-widening fields of perception, with a developing awareness of memory and anticipation that accompanies those perceptions. If we accept the premise that learning is, at its core, experiential, the question arises as to why we have such powerful distinctions between institutionalized learning and experiential learning. The separation likely began (in the Western tradition) with Pythagoras, and may hint at the beginnings of this now well-worn dichotomy. However, it is worth noting that its origins are murky.

 The school established by Pythagoras in the fifth century BCE in Crotona emphasized an institutionalization of activities of “higher learning.” Students studied mathematics, astronomy, music, metaphysics, and theology. [3] 2500 years later, we retain the names of many of these disciplines (and those that followed in the schools of Plato, Aristotle, and later ecclesiastical traditions) in our institutions of higher learning; we have expanded our concept of a discipline to allow for many more subdivisions and inclusions, all with supposedly distinct boundaries. However, in laying claim to the boundaries and procedures of our disciplines, we have lost track of their origins, which began as orientations to support exploration and discovery from a variety of angles and emphasized a relationship to the unknown that could be confronted through a combination of experience and disciplined thinking. The origins of our academic disciplines were mystical in nature, as evidenced by Pythagoras’ relationship to older mystery cults that informed his practice. The mathematics (μαθηματικός) of Pythagoras’ time, a word connected to mathema (μαθήμα), which meant learning in a much more general sense than our current associations, emphasized the metaphysical relationships between number and reality. Because Pythagoras was operating under the belief that everything can be understood through number, mathematics over time came to be associated with the manipulation of numbers. It was once (and occasionally still is) full of mystery and possibility; it unveiled integrated relationships that only later were bisected into disciplines as we know them now. 

 Education, when oriented around experience, has the potential (and perhaps the imperative) to serve as a modern-day, humanist exploration of those same cross-disciplinary themes of human life that were once approached with mystical reverence. Math has not always evaded experience, and music was once considered a corollary discipline, both offering a way into a deeper cosmological understanding of the world and its mysterious origins.

 Perhaps the distinction between institutionalized and experiential learning that has emerged is one of politics, rather than one of modality. Institutionalized education as it currently exists carries with it a set of unexamined experiences that work to preserve society as it is. The unspoken values that are implied via desks, chairs, whiteboards, fluorescent lights, and rote memorization codify a relationship to education that is a distinct type of experience – one that is passive, hierarchical, and authoritarian. We accept and perpetuate canons, with the assumption that those who came before have already done the work of determining what is worth knowing. Why do we so often relinquish the right to this question?

 As the canons of thought and carriers of culture that we rely upon for traditional education send out roots that take hold in the unexamined depths of our collective psyche, the surface-level conversations about education give rise to structures that limit our access to those more formative questions of worth. The contemporary educational landscape in the United States, for instance, is developing in a context of ever-increasing codifications. We speak of standards and rubrics and accountability and learning targets and backwards planning and measurable outcomes as though outcomes result directly from specific, definable inputs, and as though all those inputs can be accounted for. Students in the United States from as early as kindergarten learn to parrot “I can” statements about concrete skill acquisition that teachers are required to define daily on whiteboards; the students have a clear understanding of the goal of each lesson forced upon them, but through this process they are losing contact with the sense of discovery that might propel them towards the unknown and allow them to glimpse the liminal spaces where so much authentic learning takes place. Control of that which falls within the boundaries renders the teacher irrelevant, removes the sense of self in learning from both teacher and student, and dishonors the relationship of an ever-changing individual in the context of an ever-changing collective. Our cultural attempts to impose artificial structures of control to define all things as measurable are at odds with an experience-driven education, and the dichotomy is increasingly polarizing. Greene describes this dichotomy as structured by official languages of domination, entitlement, and power: “…where what we conceive to be our tradition is petrified, located in private enclaves, or surrounded by auras that distance it from lived experience, from the landscape of our lives.” [4] Our canons, in the form of curriculum, represent established nodes of power that generate from sources long forgotten.

What of those long forgotten sources? Of the Pythagorean mandate that we cultivate the spirit in and through our learning spaces? In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates and Diotema explore this spirit through an exegesis on Love and Beauty. Diotema tells us that Love is “a longing not for the beautiful itself, but for the conception and generation that the beautiful effects.” [5] This illuminates the real promise of experiential education: it is in the interstices of being, doing, searching, and longing that we are able to integrate learning and living.  

Notes:

1: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp.168-169.

2: Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), p. 73.

3: Philip Wheelwright, The Presocratics, (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 200-201. 

4: Greene, pp. 47-48.

5: Plato, Symposium, in Collected Dialogues, Ed. Hamilton and Cairns, (New Jersey: Princeton, 1961), p. 558/206:e.

Copyright 2019, Melinda Russial

(Re)discovering North America

The UWC-USA Arts and Culture program features a series of Cultural Weeks, each culminating in a two-hour multidisciplinary performance that highlights one of six geographical regions. The regional designations feel somewhat arbitrary (South Asia combined with the Middle East and Central Asia, separated from East Asia; Mexico linked with the United States, separated from the Caribbean which is combined with South America and Brazil, but not connected to origin cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa; North Africa joining both Africa and the Middle East, Europe separated from its colonial consequences, etc.) 

My first two-year cycle as showcase director for these regional performances concluded with the North American Division (which, curiously, includes Australia and New Zealand, but not England). Working with my own region at the end of a cycle that introduced me over time to teenage impressions of global cultural life offered me a unique opportunity for reflection on the substance and process of enculturation. I have wondered throughout these two years how these productions reflect, inform, and challenge regional stereotypes. I have noticed that students often remark that their behavior in groups reflects the stereotypes of their regions – these kinds of comments are especially common from students who belong to more than one region (or who perform as guests) and have the opportunity to participate in multiple cultural showcases.  I also noticed a level of familiarity of process for myself with the North American show that was much more organic for me than in all of the others – I was better prepared to anticipate sources of possible conflict and stress, and I felt more fluent with methods of managing leadership decisions, conflict resolution, and decisions and values related to show content.   

This raises questions for me, personally, about the impact of cultural conditioning in areas that are so deeply embedded in the unconscious that they are rarely discussed, including: how we respond to concepts of hierarchy and the characteristics we value in leadership; how we behave in groups and how we respond to each other under pressure; and how we value public and private engagement in performance activities. These behavioral identities reflect values frameworks that may be less obvious components of culture, but perhaps they are at the core of cultural conflicts that often masquerade as something more concrete and specific.

One frequent comment I heard in response to this show that I found particularly compelling was that it seemed especially “political” when compared to previous shows. I raised this issue in the arts leadership seminar that followed the show, and in doing so, I happened upon an especially complex conversation – the connotations that we carry unconsciously for a word that is used with such impunity seem to have the power to define these conversations before we are even allowed to start them. It was surprising to me to realize how many people carry negative associations for the word “politics;” this was reflected in criticism for show content that I personally saw as positive and instructive. It made me wonder how our decisions to avoid political engagement function as unconscious political decisions, reinforced by cultural norms. 

For example: a jazz performance opened with a monologue that drew attention to the problematic racial elements of an art form that has a long history of appropriation, erasure, and economic disparity. While dominant (white) narratives might suggest that the jazz without the monologue is “apolitical,” allowing people to “just enjoy the art,” this reflects an avoidance of context. It may be apolitical for those who hold a position in society that allows them to experience the art outside of context. But for anyone impacted by or interested in the ramifications of this history, its exclusion is also political – it allows for a narrative of erasure to be perpetuated, a narrative that is rarely discussed but that is nonetheless embedded in our cultural landscape.

Another question that came up during our debriefing seminar was whether politics is something that specifically defines the US-American character, and whether this impacted the direction of the show. While this is reductive, it may reference a US tendency to engage in embittered oppositional political statements that don’t often result in action, as opposed to organic and authentic engagement in political activities for concrete change that is sometimes evident elsewhere. The question may unveil something about the nature of US politics that was reflected in show content. Themes that students integrated throughout the show often spoke to related quandaries, including: the complexity of identities perceived as “mixed,” challenges with labeling national, regional, and politically marginalized identities, the relationship between the US and Canada and the impact of perceived US dominance, and the impact of colonialism across several historical British colonies. All of these themes (and others) offer opportunities for considerable exploration related to the manifestation of political behavior and orientations in North America. 

I remembered, while working on this show, how it was precisely my immersion in other cultures through travel that helped me begin to recognize and understand the values and conditions of my own culture. I have heard many US-Americans say that they didn’t know that they had a culture until experiencing similar moments of contrast, as well, an odd casualty of belonging to a culture so globally imposing as to be habitually perceived as universal. The attempt to define these moments of contrast in a performance medium also betrays many of our more problematic assumptions: How often, when we talk of US-American culture, do we really mean white culture? Do we picture some midwestern town surrounded by cornfields as the Real America? How often do we ignore indigenous narratives, immigrant narratives, the cultural collisions that define our political structures, the impossible task of belonging as a perceived “other” when the concept of an “other” goes against our sacred melting pot mythology?  Why is it that when we do highlight those narratives, the result is perceived as “political,” but the dominant cultural narratives are perceived as neutral? 

This collision with the “other” through the medium of performance is an extremely powerful site for collateral learning. It forces us to reckon with that perceived neutrality in the distilled and concentrated reality of the stage. It unwraps the labels we unconsciously apply to ourselves and each other, and broadens our sense of identity. It shows us who we are.