I covered the last of the basil & peppers with a tarp last night, then brought them in this morning. The weather was clear this morning, with a mist over the river that burned off early & we had a couple of hours of sunshine before the clouds moved in. Raining now, temperature in the 30s. Many of the maples are completely bare of leaves, but the oaks are still green, with other species ranging through all the reds & yellows. Leaves fall in numbers as I write this. Filled the bird feeders yesterday & I’ve seen nuthatches, chickadees, a harry woodpecker & a few finches. There are still a few Canada geese hanging around & the crows are setting up winter quarters in the woods. We’ve had a few evening fires in the wood stove over the last couple of weeks, but yesterday was the first time we built it back up in the morning. The stove will be going pretty much continuously now until mid-March.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Congratulations to President Gore
If only. Instead:
Even before Mr. Gore won an Emmy for his so-called “user generated†cable television network, Current, or an Oscar for his film on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,†he was growing in stature for another reason: his early opposition to the Iraq war.
He had initially voiced it in 2002 in an address that his newly galvanized supporters now describe as uncannily prescient and unfairly dismissed, though it was seen as a politically off-kilter at a time of great popularity for President George W. Bush.
Gore, of course, was right about climate change; he was right about the war. There were quite a few of us who were “politically off-kilter” in 2002, opposing the war party as it prepared to take the nation into the bloody quagmire of Iraq. Instead of the proud ignoramus George Bush, the thoughtful & reserved Al Gore might have been leading the US for the last seven years. It would be a different country, a better country. Too late now. The Gang of Five on the Supreme Court has a great deal to answer for. The American people have a lot to answer for, having confirmed the 2000 coup with their votes in 2004. If only.
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Josh Marshall’s eloquent response here.
Pattern
I tell my poetry-writing students that art is about pattern. That human beings are pattern-making & pattern-recognizing animals. That playing with patterns is what we do. It turns out that we have been making patterns for a long time. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could hear the songs that were sung when that wall was being painted?
C.K. Williams on Emily Dickinson
One of the functions of criticism is to let us read familiar poems with new eyes / ears. I was reading C.K. Williams’ essay, “Poetry and Consciousness” yesterday for the paper I’m working on and was deeply affected by his treatment of this Emily Dickinson poem:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
This is poem 280 from the Collected Poems & I have known the poem since I was a teenager. Known it so well I didn’t know it anymore. Here is what Williams writes about the poem:
What is it that Dickinson knows, and finishes knowing, at the end of the poem is almost too frightening to consider. She has confronted, in her investigation of a single emotion, the annihilation of consciousness, the loss of reason in its harrowing proximities to nothingness. She has enacted the terrifying closed system of depression, in which content, sense, reality all became functions of that closure. The images that occur, once the system has been impelled, after the vehicle of the funeral has been established, still partake of the kind of arbitrary mental event that I tried to sketch before, but their apparent arbitrariness only contributes to the tension and despair of the mental experience. A “Service, like a Drum”: there is no drum in the funerals of life, only in the rituals of depression, in which the heart itself seems to become the enemy of the organism and of consciousness. [. . .] And the plank: is it the plank that a pirate’s victim must walk, or a plank covering a dry well, the well of inexistence? The ambiguities are as crucial as the precisions: the layering of meaning and potential meaning in the poem are the very layers of consciousness. That this dire experience could be put into words, that the voice of the mind could make it cohere, that the language of the experience could, what’s more, be organized into rhythm patterns, that there could even be rhyme, all the while upholding the dark integrities of the experience itself: this is not the product of mind, this is mind, and emotion, and the human soul alive to itself. [Poetry and Consciousness, 1998]
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Useful Dickinson resource page / research project here.
Reading for Pleasure
Note: I began this post back in May, but just looked at it again in the context of the paper I’m writing on teaching Intro to Lit. I’ve added the second paragraph, which is mostly John Dewey, to the first, written earlier.
Timothy Burke taught a course called The History of Reading last semester & has drawn insights out of that experience that are relevant to all of us who teach in the humanities. At the heart of Burke’s essay are two questions, one developmental, one causal: 1) When do students who would otherwise take pleasure in reading begin to find reading a chore? 2) Why does that happen? (And is “education,” broadly defined, responsible for the loss?) Interestingly, my colleagues in Clarkson’s Department of Humanities & Social Sciences have been holding a series of meetings & workshops over the last few days dealing with our new first-year course, the Clarkson Seminar. I haven’t been able to attend all the meetings because I am still wrestling my Understanding Vietnam into an on-line version using Blackboard for the coming summer term, which starts in ten days, but these are questions we need to ask & keep asking.
Dewey’s notion of thought as being “awake” & “alert” is relevant here. Burke talks about teaching as an art, as does John Dewey. In How We Think, Dewey addresses teachers directly & asks them to bcome artists:
That art originated in play is a common saying. Whether or not the saying is historically correct, it suggests that harmony of mental playfulness and seriousness describes the artistic ideal. When the artist is preoccupied overmuch means and materials, he may achieve wonderful technique, but not the artistic spirit par excellence. When the animating idea is in excess of the command of method, aesthetic feeling may be indicated, but the art of presentation is too defective to express the feeling thoroughly. . . . That teaching is an art and the true teacher an artist is a familiar saying. Now the teacher’s own claim to rank as an artist is measured by his ability to foster the attitude of the artist in those who study with him . . . (John Dewey, How We Think, 219-220).