Good-bye and thank you letter to my 6th and 7th graders after first experience of student teaching.

Dear everyone in class V, Y and Z,

I could not feel more blessed to have spent the past few months with you.  This was my first experience ever of student-teaching and I want to thank you for spoiling me!  My experience would not have been the same if any single one of you were missing.  You each bring something unique and equally precious to this classroom and the world.  Always know this.  As a well-known Irish playwright and writer, Oscar Wilde, has quipped (a quip is a clever or witty remark), “Be yourself.  Everyone else is taken.”  

My teaching philosophy is: “Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”   I hope you have felt how much I genuinely care about all of you.  I know that each of your goals and dreams are only a thought away from becoming realities.  Think about what this passage means to you, from the ancient spiritual texts of India called the Vedas:

You are your deepest desire As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.

Think about what you truly desire.  If it will benefit not just yourself but all who may be touched by it, then, as Ghandi has shared, “Everything your heart desires must come to you because the universe is infinitely bountiful and you have put forth a clear request.”  When you do this, you are in touch with the laws of nature which create the impossibly complex and beautiful natural world around us according to the principle of harmony.  Rain doesn’t just fall on a raindrop’s favorite flower, it waters and gives life to all it touches.  The ocean doesn’t just give one wave to one surfer; there’s room for millions of surfers.  The sun doesn’t just shine on a favorite strip of the Earth, it warms and nourishes us all, as well as all of its animals and plants.  A famous mystical poet from the 14th century named Hafiz once said, “The sun has never said to the Earth, ‘You owe me.’  Only a love that strong can light up the entire sky.”

I say this to guide you to consider that if you pay attention to the silent processes of nature around us, we learn keys to successful and harmonious living. I know when I look out over the sea at sunrise, busting the seams of the sky with with a rainbow-sherbet bouquet of neon colors, or when I gaze at a mountain range heaped with pristine white snow, each demure flake twinkling like angels with secrets they are winking in my direction, I can only see beauty at work and a feeling of gratitude for getting to share in these gifts of nature.  We didn’t have to be given such gems, but they are here for us.  And I believe we can learn from them because we all come from the same mysterious place that inspires so many to wonder about.  Where DO we go when we die?  Where were we before we were born?  Why are we here?  What is our purpose?  When a body dies, one second later that person is entirely different.  But why?  Where does that spark of life go?  What puts it into bodies and minds in the first place?  There may always be many more questions than answers, but we can say that even if we don’t know WHAT that source of creation and life is, we can’t deny that we all came from it.  We came FROM somewhere bigger than any of us individually, yet still a part of us once we are here (and perhaps after we are gone?).  If this SOMETHING that created you and me also created Crayola sunrises over the shimmering ocean, and moonlight draping hushed glow over mountains fluffed with snow, and if this magical force flows through me, too, then it seems I may have the power to create beautiful, harmonious things in my life as well.

This is a pretty mighty force to have on our side!  We are part of nature so we can tap into this creative principle by aligning with it through the power of thought, of positive, expansive, harmonious thoughts which seek the welfare of oneself and all.  Like the sun, who warms everything, discriminates against no one and asks for nothing in return.

Thoughts are as powerful as we want them to be; they are the parents of everything that comes to be in our lives, they give birth to all that we materialize.  A person, just like you and I, known by the name of Albert Einstein, once said that the most important decision you will ever have to make is to decide if you live in a hostile world or a friendly one.  The choice is entirely up to you.  Your perception is yours to own, and it determines the quality of everything you experience.   You may have heard the expression, “Is the glass as half full or half empty?”  There’s no right or wrong way to perceive something, there is only what feels right for you.  And the moral necessity to allow others to their own perspectives, perceptions and opinions, as long as they do not harm anyone or deny anyone the freedom to his or her own way of looking at and inhabiting the world.

Another way of putting it, that I’ve seen on a bumper sticker: Harm none and do as ye will!

So, my message to all if you is one of thanks, as I’ve learned as much this semester as (hopefully  ;]) you have!  And I cherish each of you for being the reason I decided to pursue the path of becoming a teacher of kids your age.  You all are more interesting, intelligent, compassionate, and wise than some of you may give your own selves credit for and my wish is that you only grow in confidence and self –love.  All those slogans about being able to change the world and make a difference aren’t just lofty and unrealistic catch phrases.  They are true because the secret lies in learning that it’s not about changing the world (which seems like an intimidating prospect!), it’s that when we transform our own selves, starting with being aware of the quality of the thoughts we think, we soon notice that the world does start to change before our eyes, and, hopefully, it becomes the friendly place that I’m sure we all would love to feel a part of.

…throw your pennies down Merlin’s well
-clink- -tinkle- -clank- *poof* —  a wealth of spells
Each wish, a vision, a seer’s truth
a soothsayer’s jaw all gummed with sooth
So brush your teeth and brush with care
make them shine and sparkle and ready for air
because when the tooth fairy lifts your pillow tonight
your wishes are headed for light years of brightness
Each little white piano key
a smile’s dashboard ivory
is headed for fame in a starry above
each tooth, a star, to be wished on for love
Yes tooth fairy knows where to store your grin
up up and away, the stringlights of heaven
So when you look up and make a wish tonight
remember their source is right inside you
Each tooth you lost is now lightyears away
the perfect morning star (a rising sun) to wake to every day.

With love,

Ms. Turner 

New student-teacher musings. *this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart. i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)*

I write kind of like a no-filter-Tourettes dandy, a beatnik sustained by an emotional fix engendered by authentic connection with students, and, hopefully, the world embracing all of us.  Einstein once said that a person’s most important decision s/he will ever have to make is – to decide if s/he lives in a hostile world or a friendly one.

This distinction vividly shapes, in essence, the quality of one’s life. So much of what we experience pivots on the all important axis of perception and when we expect a friendly world, we attract experiences to validate this reality.  Unfortunately, vice versa is true, too.  I think you can gather I’m quite the “friendly-world” proponent and thus, despite apprehension that often attends experiences poised on the threshold of eliciting positive growth and nurturing expansion (i.e. decision to be an English teacher and embark on this student-teaching odyssey), I always mush ahead, indefatigable in the belief that that which scares us has the potential to teach us the most about ourselves, leading to the more significant ability to then engage in the world with the potential to bring most benefit. Only from a place of complete self-awareness can we – like Hegel said, “self recognition in recognition of otherness” – truly relate to and thus empathize meaningfully with those around us.

My philosophy rests on the premise that when we truly know ourselves, we also experience ourselves, and thus everyone else, as love, because it’s who we are at our core, essential, energetic forms.  Paraphrasing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a Sherlock Holmes story called The Naval Treaty, only an Intelligence who loves His/Her creation gives it such beauty as the rose.  ”What a lovely thing a rose is … Our highest assurance of the Goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.  All the other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance.  But this rose is an extra.  Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.  It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”  Taking this further, Fibonacci’s spiral exhibits this principle of exquisite, mind-explodingly beautiful complexity; a demonstration of an organizing principle motivated by love and goodness, to give such glorious, mysterious wonders for us to simply enjoy.  (My favorite analogy to the Benevolent Intelligence principle behind creation is imagining a colossal junkyard filled with all manner of corroded, oxidized, derelict refuse and garbage.  Then imagine a tornado sweeps through it, leaving a Boeing 747 in the place of all the chaotic random junk.  Yup, to me, it is not just improbable but impossible to imagine anything other than an incomprehensibly sophisticated loving intelligence as the organizing power behind our bewilderingly complex and beautiful universe, including every single being within it.)  So things like the Aurora Borealis, or Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio sequence found in things like flowers, petals, seeds, cones, shells, and many more natural phenomena only begin to exhibit, to me, the proof of the Aesthete who loves His/Her/Its Creation and infused in it a natural order and exquisite harmony.  And these are nothing compared to the complexity of the human form and psyche! Science even has a name for the mystifying wonders of the heart, they call it “The Hard Theory!”  They can analyze and recreate so much on the physiological level, but on the metaphysical, or abstract, “irrational” level of emotions, they don’t even have a theory to explain things like love, intuition, creativity, hope.  Thus, they are only at the stage of calling it “The Hard Theory” which I get such a chuckle out of.  Speaking of naming things, here is another aside, which is really a central notion, at the same time.

I recently read an article by Ruth Vinz, “If We Could Only, What?” where she deftly articulates our naturalized penchants for drawing pedagogical boundaries around students and their potentials.  This is a fancy way of saying that we, as human beings (much too enamored of ourselves as human doings and not human beings, uncomfortable as we are with simply being, in favor of the Descartian predilection to dichotomize, and thus must be always be thinking to predicate being) are addicted to categorizing, compartmentalizing, judging, evaluating, labeling and thus limiting everyone and everything. Kirkegaard said, “When you label me, you negate me.” To label something as “this,” it automatically breeds the ground of conflict, because to be “this” necessarily implies to not be “that” and hence, a world of tension and division ensues, where we cling to artificially imposed identities, feeling that without these designations to give us a sense of presence, of validation, of “I Am Here-ness,” our beingness, our identities, our sense of ourselves would likewise die. We are in the ingrained habit of generalizing the unique, of simplifying the complex, of trivializing the significant/unusual, of reducing the irreducible.  It’s easier to deal with the static image and expectation of what we want from someone or a group of people, than it is to face the bewildering and problematizing individual natures of unique individuals who resist the miniaturinzing process that our culture has naturalized into its process of socialization.  We like to make people smaller than we really are.  We condition people to be afraid of their own natures, if they stick out and don’t “go with the flow.”  We prefer docile sycophants who follow the herd, but think about what we step in if we really do follow the herd.    In one of my favorite bumper stickers, “God, protect me from your religions!”, we demonstrate how religions serve to separate and breed distrust and judgment, more than cooperation, tolerance and collective will to elevate consciousness to new levels of connectivity and family as diving beings.  I love HG Wells’s witticism: “Moral righteousness is just jealousy with a halo.”  Probe most dogma and hypocrisy will surface.

When we prefer to look at kids as the easy, reductionalized brands we stamps on them, like herds of cattle to the slaughter – “special needs,” “disturbing element,” “slow learner,” “problem child,” “lost cause,” etc., not only do we alienate ourselves from ever truly knowing these kids authentically, we also alienate ourselves from our own nature. As Lao Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching, emphasizes, labels are only words and words are only noises in the air.  No one ever got wet from the word “water” and no wood ever burned from the word “fire.”  No child will ever be known, and thus loved, if we relate to the taxonomic title we stick to his or her forehead, instead of taking time to borrow new eyes with which to see him and be courageous and against-the-grain/caring enough listen to her with new ears.  This is also what I love about Gertrude Stein: she purposefully invents new and profoundly abstruse-seeming lexicon and parlance, for the express, fundamental purpose of jolting us out of our lockstep hypnotism of thinking along such linear and homogenizing lines.  She detonates our intellects by mystifying us along the lines of language, so that we have no choice but to approach meaning-making, and thus the world, in new, fresh, and original ways, inhering the possibility to finally discover truth and authenticity, that has grown ossified and stagnant through the repetition of status-quo thinking.

Emerson said “a floolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

I believe love is inside every one of us, and not only that, but the essential ingredients of us all are this love-substance-matrix so we are much more connected than the divisions of bodily form like to delude us into thinking, leading to all the ‘isms and polarizations that divide humanity on small and large scales. Without bringing spirituality into this (secular, scholarly/conversational) discussion, from a quantum physics perspective, spinning our protoplasm at blindingly rapid speeds until the essence of energetic wisps of probability waves, subatomic indivisible units of “emptiness” with the potential to crystallize into observable particles from diffuse identityless waves, are revealed to be what we are. The building blocks of all disparate matter, are revealed to be these uniform vibrating photons of possibility. And when we look at ourselves as made up of the same essential stuff, one race as the “Human” race, it’s easier to make the leap that in loving ourselves, we are also loving all.

I’d like to end on a Mark Twain quote that quaked my world open like a 10 on the ontological semiotics scale: “Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushes it.”  And another from Native American lore: “No tree was ever foolish enough to war with its own branches.”

What I mean is that I chose to become a teacher because I have a good does of Holden Caulfield in me and believe in the inherent goodness and, not only that, but downright beauty and awesomeness! of children (well, everyone, but it can be perhaps best approached and cultivated before kids fall into the homogenizing and desensitizing rye).  I forgive every kid for “acting out” or “being pains in the asses” in the classroom as they struggle to find an identity while reconciling so many shaping, sometimes antagonistic and confrontational, forces thrust on them at middle school ages.  And, per my second proverb above, I see nothing as a problem, a conflict, a war to be battled.  I see everyone (in this context, in the classroom, with me as a teacher-to-be) as members of my own family and I care about them as much as I do myself.  Confrontation, or perceiving a “difficult” classroom as a hostile environment only causes defensiveness and the closing down of students, who detect there’s something “wrong” with them and therefore the natural response is to want to hide.  We can catch more kids (before falling into the rye of phoniness and blunted authenticity caused by society’s marginalization of those who don’t “fit in”) with honey than we will with vinegar of toxic labels that focus on what they can’t do than what they can.

Bin Laden and Cheesecake

As a former anorexic person, it’s a triumph to have made a full recovery and have a positive relationship to food now.  However, this only means I feel the misfortune of sort of blending into the generalized feminine attitude towards food, imprinted by a culturally repressive and misogynistic order, which still demonizes much of what I put into my mouth, making things like cheesecake remain the enemy.  On behalf of my shadow self – told that A, B, C, on down the line – are not “acceptable” from “good little girls” worth being desired,  I’m extending compassion and love to this battered little child within, who can’t finish off the damn strawberry cheesecake (a freebee at work) without a dim shriek of opposition still making a case way down deep in the basement of forbidden urges.

A society that makes food evil, only demonstrates how relative “evil” actually is.  Consciousness given wheels through mind and emotion is the sine qua non of evil as well as “freedom” and “The Good.” (A different epistemological entry will have to be reserved for that which transcends mind and emotion, and exists in a place vibrating at a quantum mechanical frequency available to humans *not* through the mind or senses, but I’m not bringing mystical spiritual references into this conversation for now.)  To posit that the devil, demons and evil exist independent of consciousness – necessarily comprised of interdependent states of darkness and light, “good” and “bad,” activity and passivity – is to throw in the towel of our capacity to evolve to higher states of enlightened living.  In reality, all beasts and monsters we ascribe to “others” – be they cultures, individuals, races, religious ideologies, political party lines – then vociferously condemn and attempt to control, subdue and eliminate, are only projections of the parts inside ourselves from which we’ve been socialized to disassociate, and bury in the cellar, gated and guarded by ferocious defense mechanisms and opened only by an iron key held by some omnipotent arbitrarily defined God our paranoia invents to make sure we avoid all the “Thou Shall Nots.”

Philosophically speaking, who defines these terms of what’s OK to express and what must be hidden, suppressed, locked away to be feared?  We Do.  Thus, *we* code evil like an http domain and thus we can reprogram the relativistic aspect of our mass awareness -which categorize things as  objectively Right and Wrong, ontologically Good and Evil – into realizing that what we run from is not an a priori Devil, locatable outside realms of human emotion and intellect, and therefore against which we are defenseless, but nested therein.  Why do we villianize things as trivial as half and half in coffee, and in the same breath, opine righteously about military glory of vanquishing a different sort of devil?  Don’t we see we create the enemy because they’re displaced parts of our own selves much easier to condemn in a scapegoated other than it is to walk up to the unapproved of monsters within and shake hands?  If we find the courage to mediate a relationship to these buried drives within our own selves, so we don’t have to seek refuge in the glorification of violence against terrorists, or fat, or femininity if you’re a male, or masculinity if you’re a female, or whom we choose to kiss, or how we pray, or making minimum wage … we will have taken a step in the expansive direction that 2012 presages as a time to either rise or be rid of.  *We* are the ones to blame when disasters “unpredictably” strike.  We stir the pot by segregating the full capacity of human authenticity from the natures we were given.

If being American means compulsive product fetishization, unchecked consumer capitalism, celebrity deification, discrimination against the fat, the old, the ugly, the non-white, the barely-scraping-by-because-can’t-afford-private-schools-whose-status-opens-doors-to-higher-paying-jobs-so-wouldn’t-have-to-scrape-by, the heteroflexible, the gender deviant, the Jew- if you’re not Jewish, the Christian – if you’re not Christian, the Pagan – if your name for God is another name for absolutism … then I’m not sure we’re the democracy and freedom paragons we tout ourselves to be.  We may have the self control to not violently attack someone trying to steal the berries we’ve gathered or the buffalo we’ve slain, but then again, do we?  Just because we don’t legally shoot someone point blank in the head for stepping in the king’s shadow, how far have we come in terms of empathy and true acceptance of those who don’t share so many of our internally felt notions of what’s acceptable?  We may not shout from the rooftops that we, say, hate Muslims – oops, we do do that thanks to a poster child representing all the worst distortions of a particular religion, like saying we hate Catholic priests because they’re all pedophiles, or we hate gays because “God” says its immoral, or we hate women who are outspoken because it’s not ladylike – but we no more accept the presence of disparity than we did in the Dark Ages, from which we supposedly have evolved so markedly.  I say the Darkest age is the little black box inside our own unconscious piggy banks we were scolded to throw into the sea, because it didn’t match with whatever socializing agent was at work trying to control and tame a civilization, a culture, a community, a family, a classroom, an individual.  Ever notice how the biggest, longest, most important conversations come *just* as you’re putting your kids to bed?  Well, A) it’s because in the dark, the shadows on the wall do grow bigger unless they are debunked for what they are – monsters our imaginations have created and B) a barrier goes up at bedtime, a stopping point for the ferment of activity still buzzing in the dynamos of growing psyches, and they must be given voice, they must be met by compassionate, nurturing, supportive parents or caretakers, or nightmares really will result.  Enough shutting up at bedtime or in the daytime when we displace and project the censored stirrings, and we start believing those nightmares.

So we might have been told again and again that little girls don’t ask for a 2^nd piece of cake, or little boys don’t play with dolls, or those invisible friends don’t exist, or to get your hand out of your pants!, but please don’t mistake incessant straight jacketing by forces outside our own intuitive sensibilities for the truth.  A blindfold on the sun doesn’t make it blind to its brilliance.  Putting earplugs in doesn’t stop the DJ from spinning tunes nor the rapture of dance.  Subjecting cheesecake to one’s gastric enzymes doesn’t make us undesirable gluttons.  Merely human, obeying the calls of nature, which need to be celebrated, not spurned and stigmatized.  Repressive messages are like turpentine to the natural colors that inexorably stripe our core, fundamental beings.  It’s not all red, or white, or even blue.  That’s a fundamental-ism I can live with.

Emerson & Education — trust in only what the heart appoints

In an effort to “insist on myself” and “never imitate” another (Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 279), as a supplement to this essay, I am including a Whitmanian sort of song of myself that I composed (see Copula).  I believe it reinforces Emerson’s ideas of poetry being the most authentic expression of Divine Truth, lacking phony cronie-ness that can be the result of traditional systems of education.  To Emerson (and to me, I echo so many Emersonian concepts), life is fundamentally beautiful, “for the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful” … “this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of time, and its creatures, floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful” (Emerson, “The Poet,” 448-449), and it is the poet who is the “sayer” and the “namer,” the representative of this “hidden truth” of omnipresent beauty.

Emerson is a fan of education, if only it undergoes the reformation it desperately needs.  He traduces the penchant for classifying and naming things, as if we could pin facts like butterflies to corkboards, or freeze security of “knowing things” like ants in amber.  Emerson understands that, at best, all we have to work with are symbols and emblems, a “picture-language” that nature spreads before us and the mark of the educated soul, is to wield language as the proper tool it can be; to indirectly point to truth, to render it beautifully, but never to mistake it for the final destination of a thing in itself. He draws the wonderful analogy of how we constantly stand to be victimized by nature’s destructive power, including the choice we have as human beings, an intrinsic part of nature, to mis-perceive everything and draw cynical, violent conclusions, or we can see the benevolent ‘double, triple, quadruple, centuple…manifold meaning of every sensuous fact’ (Emerson, “The Poet,” 447), of life, inherent to all.  On page 949, in “Fate” he talks about how skates are wings on the ice, but fetters on the ground.  To me, he is suggesting that nature gives us abundant gifts, but often we are stuck, mired in looking at things the way we, with our biased, conditioned and mediating intellect, wish to see them and this traps us from the flow of limitless grandeur of divine energy which infuses “things with a new and higher beauty” (Emerson, “The Poet,” 452), which can only be achieved if we quit habituated ways of seeing and instead, like the poet, “take (our) direction from (the) celestial life” (459).

Emerson emphasizes our duty, “to speak always from within (since this is a means to truth) which transcends all others” (Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 395) and he cautions against counterfeit experience, being spectators acquainted with facts by dint of third party transmission. Emerson importunes us to beware of the wrong handle which all things possess (Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 14) and he both alludes to and implores of the virtue of choosing the right handle.  I juxtapose two disparate verbs (alludes to and implore/importune) because I get the sense Emerson prefers to leave traces of his own musings (to allude to their import), to obliquely put forth possibilities (he enlarges at length on the idea of truth being available only indirectly to our world of senses and intellect, “we do not see directly, but mediately” [Emerson, “Experience,” 487]) rather than feeling compelled to prove his assertions with supercilious certainty, to implore us to valorize his contributions (Emerson also chides arrogance of those who profess to have a monopoly on truth, “the grossest ignorance does not disgust like imprudent knowingness” 475).  Much of the time, Emerson’s own ontological handle on things seems almost overwrought with vicissitudes, like he is both choosing the right and wrong handles simultaneously, purposefully.  However, I assert that through such seemingly paradoxical narrative, he is dynamically making his finest point.  That education, consisting of endless indices, static taxonomies and ossified systems of classification entrenched in establishments and forms, ‘builds us coaches while undermining the use of our feet;’ it “encumbers some vigor of wild virtue” (Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 280) and we must not be too craven to insist on a return to that which “only our Maker can teach us” (279), the “immortal light…unsystematic, indomitable…(which is) young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored (that) beams over the universe” (277) and dwells in every heart.

This return to self-reliance, since “God is here within” (272), this trust in only what “the heart appoints” (273) naturally begets the critical transformation to which systems of teaching are beholden: “a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education…” (275).  Emerson suggests that we are citizens of two worlds, the absolute and the relative, and though our instruments for apprehending Truth are subjective, flawed and limited, we no less are one and the same with God, or Truth.  The truest real estate on which we stand is invisible yet right inside us, and “at every comparison must feel (our) being enhanced by (this) cryptic might” (Emerson, “Experience,” 487).  Our true identities, not the self-image deceits by which we ‘misrepresent’ ourselves in the world of shifting phenomena, is “an immensity that cannot be possessed…a light, that when breathes through (our) intellect is genius, and when breathes through (our) will, is virtue, and all reform aims to let the soul have its way through us” (Emerson, “The Over-Soul, 387).

Emerson’s richly textured, overlapping, and often time “double-speak”-type of prose conveys the dichotomy of living in the world of transient matter, that remains tethered to the changeless nature of Soul, “the soul makes the body” (Emerson, “The Poet,” 452).  I think that in noting the “right and wrong” handle all things possess, he reminds us that delusion, an incorrect perception of the nature of things, attends consciousness of most of us, and it is ok, because this, according to Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist schools of thought, twizzled through Emerson’s concepts, is the inevitable plight of the human condition, before liberation or Enlightenment.  Samsara clouded in Maya, or the cycle of life often wedded to illusion, gives rise because we mistakenly identify with external, ephemeral phenomena, “life is a flitting state, a tent for the night” (Emerson, “Experience,” 481), and we “measure (our) esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is” (Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 281), which naturally causes anxiety and fear because that which we have is, by definition, external (as opposed to that which we are, which is internal) and that which we accumulate externally, which is not immanent inside our own beings, is subject to destruction and dissolution.

We suffer from a collective case of mistaken identity, but this isn’t cause for cynicism, nihilism or despair.  Even though “our life looks trivial…and we find tragedy…and deluges of lethe…(which makes) sleep linger…about our eyes” (Emerson, “Experience,” 472), this is not a dour state of affairs, for it is due to misguided judgment, that, like the First Noble Truth corroborates, we lead ourselves into suffering.  “Our life is not so much threatened as our perception,” Emerson uplifts on page 471, adding that, through no fault of our own, “we have no means of correcting these colored and distorted lenses…or of computing the amount of their errors” (487).   But there is cause to rejoice and that provides redemption.  Emerson contends that “within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence; the universal beauty; to which every part is related; the eternal ONE.  This deep power in which we exist…is accessible to us all…perfect…” (386).

Emerson conducts a type of lyrical dialectic where he introduces the most profound education; instead of ‘selling thrones of angels for short and turbulent pleasures’ (Emerson, “Circles,” 406), instead of accumulating a “mass of facts…where everything looks permanent” (403-404), we can journey closer to our potential if we comprehend and ‘know the secret’ that “God is an invisible law” (403) allowing us to scale a ‘mysterious ladder, wherein each step…carries a new prospect and…power’ (405).  We would be wise to forsake false identification with the world below and instead ‘converse with what is above; be perfumed with power and grow young’ (412).   “In nature every moment is new…nothing is secure but transition…and energizing spirit” (413).  To be educated is to abide with eternal wisdom, like Thoreau has quipped, “Don’t read the Times, read the Eternities,” and know that “whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides” (412).  Emerson lets us consider that true knowledge may be in that which is not fixed and able to be captured with greedy intellects, always clamoring for incontrovertible answers from an elusive world: “A beauty not explicable is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of” (Emerson, “The Poet,” 454).  He asks us to engage our imagination to liberate from shackles of imitation/limitation and instead rest in the idea that “Great is the soul…It is no follower…It believes in itself…and makes what we call genius” (Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” 396, 399).

Suffusing everything in this world of relative truth is an absolute Truth to which we are inexorably anchored, though our folly is to be unaware of this immensity of potential. If we knew what immeasurable intelligence actually inheres to our mortal being, we at last could attain the unattainable, we could achieve the “true romance which the world exist to realize…the transformation of genius into practical power” (Emerson, “Experience,” 492).

…not enough without it

There are two concepts which seem paradoxically rudimentary to human understanding and yet elusive and recondite.  James Baldwin and Wallace Stevens posit each side of this enigmatically compelling coin.  On page 83 of “The Fire Next Time,” Baldwin beseeches es that “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”  This inverse spin on the Golden Rule echoes the Native American Spiritual leader, Chief Seattle: “All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.  Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand on it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” Love thy neighbor is not a radical concept. Yet, why does it seem so radically hard to come by?  The natural outgrowth of this principle, the corollary to guide human behavior, if Baldwin’s take on the Golden Rule is an axiom of justice, is revealed by Stevens on page 150 of “The Necessary Angel.” Stevens muses on the role of imagination, how it “enables us live our own lives,” having it because “we do not have enough without it.” If we unequivocally ingrain Baldwin and Stevens’s truths into the nexus of humanity, because they speak from a resonating chamber all hearts comprehend, way deep down, beneath metallic patinas of socialization and political rules of what is right and wrong, “the musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam” (Emerson, “Experience,” 484) is attainable.

It is the socially conscious and evolved reality I believe we are here to achieve.  The metabolization of political toxins and neutralization of sociopathogens.  If we were not created to evolve, Jesus would have said, “Don’t do anything until I get back” (Steve Bhaerman).  Being able to laugh and smile, to return to love and reverence is crucial, and logically necessary, even though despair is an easy temptation due the prevalence of negativity and greed borne of mistaken identities, as separate entities who must be acquisitive instead of generous.  Loving thy neighbor is not a naïve and trite aphorism: it is a fundamental necessity if we are to “end the racial nightmare, and change the history of the world” (Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 105).  Baldwin goes on to say, “Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality (104) … what is the purpose of salvation if it does not permit me to behave with love toward others (40) … If the concept of God has any validity or use, it can only be to make us larger, freer and more loving.  If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him” (47).  Intrepid and vastly sacrilegious to utter in 1962, in a Harlem taking refuge in a God destining the oppressed to a Heavenly seat after this tormented, horrifying life of hate’s victimization, and yet, Baldwin sounds his clarion call, nevertheless.  Instead of “reconciling ourselves to misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life” (39), creating just another ghetto if this crown is promised only to the oppressed and not the oppressor, he inveighs us that the church’s love, in his time, was “ a mask for hatred, self-hatred and despair” (39), enticing people to “band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love (but), releases them from personal responsibility” (81).   This is an unacceptable formula for the perverse perpetuation of the Golden Rule.  Those with the most gold, make the rules.   Baldwin is concerned that blacks not merely inure to injustice in the redemptive promise of a reward in the afterlife of heaven, but must take responsibility for their lives, here and now, and “oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them” (83).  He implores us to recognize that when we degrade others, we degrade ourselves, and we see around us everyday “the spiritual wasteland” to which this road leads.   Baldwin understands “cosmic vengeance” and, for the sake of our children, and the bills they must pay in continued cycles of violence and exploitation, unless we take action by not reflecting hatred back to those that hate, the delusion of placing value of lines of divergence will condemn us to “the fire next time” (106), and forever elude a just world.  “If we can’t love our neighbor, there goes the neighborhood” (Steve Bhaerman)!

Diversity is a law of nature, characterized by an unequal distribution of intelligence, strength, wealth and the inexplicable phenomenon of fate of providence.  Expecting everyone to be equally happy is absurd, for this is not the design of nature.  But neither is it the design for humans to shoulder the task of accelerating the inequality among ourselves and disturbing the natural peace and harmony of the world.  (Pandit Rajmani Tugunait, “Why We Fight,” 61).   A seminal shift in consciousness is in order for the world to return to the axiomatic reverence and justice on which it originally spins.  Once, we stood in an I-Thou relation to nature.  Industrialization brought the demotion to an I-It engagement with our natural world and neighbors, with the rapacious, xenophobic ideology that if something doesn’t serve us, it must be destroyed.  In the shift from I-Thou, where nature and all her beings were held as sacred, possessing a mysterious holiness which was honored, to I-It, where our moral universe asks “how can something serve us,” rather than how we may serve It, we lost the core principles on which reality actually pivots: unity, trust and cooperation.  Humans, with the definitive properties of will and consciousness – which makes us all the same and allows us to be unique – can no longer afford to “make nature the banished relative” (Barry Lopez).  We can no longer see the natural world in which we live, and the beings coexisting here with us, as commodities to be subjugated to our capricious desire for control, knowledge and superiority, founded on a false sense of identity.  Like Chief Seattle reminds, we did not weave the web, we are merely strands in it.  “We all sit in a circle and suppose; While the Secret sits at the center, and silently knows” (Robert Frost).  The Mystery will always lord over us, so perhaps a worldview which operates on the quest to solve the immanently unsolvable, to master the untamable, to control that which will always control us (has anyone achieved immortality by not dying?), calls into question the wisdom behind such a belief system.

The riotous expression of dark and light must be made room for, we cannot escape from and suppress qualities of life which we judge as negative.  Life will always come with change, a shifting between opposites (peace – struggle, hate – love, right – wrong, beautiful – ugly, motion – stillness, giving – receptivity, etc.), and this isn’t meant to be hidden from or denied. Nature is an interdependent flow of polarities and it is human mind which judges this flux as positive or negative, according to human desire, rather than according to the Divine will which attaches no qualitative value to these vicissitudes.  “It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant – birth, struggle and death are constant, and so is love…and to apprehend the nature of change, and to be able and willing to change … One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return” (Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 92).   Change in the sense of renewal is what Baldwin emphasizes, not a superficial adjustment to eventualities which, out of fear, we tolerate, even though no deep inner acceptance of change has occurred.  This is what DuBois means when we may not call ourselves “racist,” but racially segregationistic tendencies lie latent in our consciousness, as stains nearly indelible from memes of socialization.  It is not enough to merely grit teeth and bear our neighbors’ differences, thanks to great civic movements like Civil and Gay Rights, and Suffrage, we must celebrate them in our bones, to be fully human and achieve our collective potential as beings for whom the desire for reciprocity of love will always bring us much more together than the myths of hate can keep us apart. “Life needs the whole society, to give the symmetry we seek” (Emerson, “Experience,” 477).  The “parti-colored wheel” of diversity which characterizes us, inheres a nobility which “is our spiritual height and depth” (Stevens, “The Necessary Angel, 34).  Emerson and Stevens agree that our common heritage as beings possessed of a limitless imagination, make us “mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure” (Emerson, “Experience,” 479).    The “peculiarity of the imagination is nobility.  Nobility resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements and changes” (Stevens, “The Necessary Angel,” 34), therefore, to embrace the diversity of our world, by tapping the imaginative root which remembers our oneness, is to be noble and capable of renewal and healing the fractures that divide our planet.

Poetry, imagination’s keg tap, cannot be “commanded by a politician, telling it to do this or that” (Stevens, “The Necessary Angel,” 28); it’s role is to “let it become the light in the minds of others” (29), and to allow “ecstatic freedom of the mind” (29).  It reminds us of a fundamental unity in diversity, and loving nobility that colors the ways in which we are distinct.   “In the service of love and imagination, nothing can be too sublime or too festive” (154), so let’s celebrate the divine ancestry of our imagination to remember our history as a people with one race – the human race – and tell stories, through poetry, as the best safeguard against forgetting the reverence of a loving I-Thou relationship to the world and each other.  “Poetry protects the spiritual interior of each word and location in a sentence (Barry Lopez)” in the same way it “helps people to live our lives” (Stevens, “The Necessary Angel,” 35).  Poetry and the noble imagination projects the “supreme fiction … we turn to incessantly … and in which we will come to live” (31).  We must face the inconvenient truth that if we want a new deal, we, the people, must become the dealer.  The old dealer seems to have dealt a great hand to the uncommonly wealthy at the expense of the commonwealth (Steve Bhaerman).  It is not facile knowledge of policy that our world needs, exhibited gratuitously in the “tricknolgies” (Baldwin) of modern media and political pundits, but a “loving embrace of humanity” (Barry Lopez).  Zeus said to Prometheus, “Great, you stole fire, now you have technology.  But it will never work without justice and reverence.”

Please Stein By The X

Please Stein By The X

What thrills me most about Gertrude Stein’s writing is her insouciance. Her unapologetic commitment to an unorthodox writing style that confounds the mind while it simultaneously informs. This technique is intentional and embodies one of her central philosophic messages. That of the continuous present, the “groping for a continuous present and … an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again” (Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” 220). For Stein, it is imperative to keep ever anew. The moment truth is uttered, it becomes classified, ossified, no longer throbbing with the pulse of breathing authenticity; it dies the moment language, in traditional forms, identifies the thing being thought. “Talking essentially has nothing to do with creation” (Stein, “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” 309). Like Emerson talks of language being “a far-off remembering of intuition,” and therefore inferior to the absolute truth of silence – “I like sitting in the quiet of a church far better than when any preaching begins” – Stein underscores the importance of staying ahead of syntactical perversions which murder truth on the spot. In singling out ideas through expressions there arises intrinsic qualities of mind – judgment, doubt, fear, conviction – which impose on the natural purity of truth and no longer let it stand as genuine reflections of reality. So it is important to bewilder the mind out of habitual and polluting trappings and keep it ever surprised and “catching up” to original truth, rather than slamming into it with preconceived notions caused by egoistic taxonomic addictions which must label something as this and not that. This compulsive codification tendency of the mind inflicts limitations on what are pure and unbounded ideas when left unsullied my mental categorizations. “Now there is still something else in the time-sense in the composition. This is what is always a fear a doubt a judgment and a conviction. The quality in the creation of expression the quality in a composition that makes it go dead just after it has been made is very troublesome” (Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” 225).

Stein’s signature of mystifying the mind as it tries to get a handle on her body of wisdom is cheeky and effective in ousting us out of our habitual thoughtforms which pounce on truth and thus suppress its vigor in our quest to know things with dogmatic certainty. Humans are uncomfortable with confusion, with uncertainty, with a flexible approach to the world. We prefer static convictions, stable facts, which can be our folly because reality is more fluid than frozen, able to be stopped dead in its tracks to please the anxious proclivity of a mind discomfited by instability. Stein is a lexical pioneer unafraid to bemuse us out of deadening penchants of interpreting meaning. She purposefully weaves and bobs like a master boxer, swerving and vacillating linguistically to avoid the blows of hardened reason, oft the opponent of original and flowing truth, which one must arrive at fresh, not jaded with expectations which block delivery of sudden awareness and clarity. I love this helixical cross-hatching: “Yes you do otherwise understood. Otherwise understood. Yes you do. We understand you undertake to overthrow our undertaking. We understand you do understand that we will understand it correctly. Correctly and incorrectly, prepare and prepared, patiently and to prepare, to be prepared and to be particularly not particularly prepared.” (Stein, “An Elucidation,” 189). She has such fun with language and this in itself is a triumphant feat and contribution to history! She knows that truth travels beyond our avaricious desire to capture it intellectually so why not dance with it, toast to novelties embedded mysteriously in it, take it out for spins of illegal MPH limits of understanding with it, bow to the sovereign hold it will always have over our limited sensibilities to comprehend it, yet honor it with an ever-elusive semantic tango with its beautiful possibilities, which tacitly let truth know we are in communion with it at all times – “…the master-piece … has to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation” (Stein, “What Are Mater-pieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them,” 312). Our unity with truth may be in places the mindfield isn’t necessarily privy, but no less the mind can be a tool to work with and glorify truth. We need to be shocked out of our interpretive ruts and sashayed in grandeur along vistas of truth’s beautiful negative capability. “If every one were not so indolent they would realize that beauty is beauty when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic” (Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” 217).

In this age of globalization when boundaries that separate us are breaking down, we must find what is useful from any given tradition or society. We must identify the best things–the best wisdom, the best values–and assimilate these healthy values/wisdom in our daily life without rejecting the best that we have achieved from our own background. This is one of Du Bois’s central philosophical contributions to modern America. Stein, too, demands we stop looking at the world through outworn and counter-productive fragments of identity, riddled with biases we are uncomfortable to admit. It is imperative we shed perceptions which cripple on a collective level rather than unite and support. Stein suggests we free ourselves from constrictions of identity and memory, which keep us walking in place according to who we think we are because we have always defined ourselves according to recollected bits of selfhood which we cling to as our fated identities. This is delusion, counter to genuine, positive creation, antithetical to real master-pieces: “Master-pieces are knowing there is no identity and producing while identity is not” (Stein, “What Are Master-pieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them,” 314). Emerson, too, uses this dual consciousness as ammunition for us to attain the unattainable, to realize the Super Soul innate in us and inbued with measureless potential to transform the ideal into the pragmatic.

Part of the downfall of our nation is due to capitalistic addiction. We increasingly interpret ourselves through dollars instead of intuition and free will. Instead of seeing ourselves as “human beings,” uniquely significant by dint of our mere presence, we have been trained to see ourselves as human doings, valueless unless we are successful in terms of column A, B or C, which society validates as worthwhile commodities to invest in and from which to derive personal significance. This is a sick social order in need on healing and realignment. We need to reconnect fragmented parts of ourselves and experience the joy of spiritual evolution and total well-being. Without spiritual anchoring that bypasses the limits of Reason and mental consciousness phenomenological philosophers posit as means to self-definition, we are doomed to partisanship and dialectical conflict which emphasizes an either/or paradigm, with one side the supposed wielders of truth and order and the others, biologically or intellectually destined to be subservient. Like MLK Junior said, freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed. We must have courage and innovativeness to imagine a world beyond the manufactured cultural products and ideologies ruling classes offer, numbing our power of free will into the disinclination to even look for something outside these identity trappings that come with a cost. Like Emerson’s incisive pun, intuition is free but tuition (to schools supposedly feeding us truth) comes with a cost. The cost of genuine self-confidence and authentic free will to self-definition and not definition as a result of being the gazed-upon populations given rights and value according to dominant groups’ perceptions of us.

Stein asks us emancipate from either/or dualities and prefabricated notions of who we are invented by groups with the intent to subdue and control. We need to invent a new language of selfhood that tropes limits of conventional linguistics.

“Every epoch-making new insight springs from a new type of symbolic transformation. A higher level of thought is opened up by a departure in semantic … Language, in its original capacity, is a stiff medium, unadapted to the expression of genuinely new ideas, which usually have to break in upon the mind through some great and bewildering metaphor” (author unknown). Traditional language becomes stilted and inadequate in the face of dramatic shifts in thinking. The concept of a 150 watt lightbulb was unthinkable to pre-industrialized minds, but, once it arrived, it broke in upon the mind with astonishing brilliance and thus a new and important way of existing in the world was established.

Stein demonstrates that a true learning experience cannot be instant because new experience needs an open space into which it can insert itself. If we are locked in mental inflexible ruts, how can we let in the possibility of something new? We need to be open and patient. Then can we characterize what we may have gained, even if we don’t “get it” at the moment of exposure. A new epistemology is invented through Stein’s “consciously framed investigations into the evocative powers of grammatical innovation” (Retallack, “Introduction,” 9). For Stein, understanding is not only about intelligibility. In the same way one can watch a football game and enjoy it without understanding it, “what my lectures are meant to be …is that if you enjoy it you understand it” (Stein, “Introduction,” 10).

Weeeee! My word chosen for the “passionate exactness of meaning it is supposed to have” just like all of Stain’s writing which “means exactly what it says” (Stein, “Introduction,” 9).