Decline and Fall

Christian, our son, and I were talking about education and its decline as its institutions are besieged by business metaphors and economic accountability and as, from within, obsessed by external perspectives, they become in response so prescriptive and unfocused that they no longer seem capable of action. We were concerned that their workings will simply clog up and they will become monuments reminding us of a lost time. I talked about how we were feeling the effects here in Rural Pennsylvania, and he felt that Massachusetts, where he lives, might be insulated from the worst of the destruction for a while, and he explained this idea by invoking Trantor, the center of Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire, much of whose fictional history is reported in the Foundation Series.

Since I care about my university and by extension the whole educational matrix it is part of, I fret about the future. But Christian's reference to Asimov's world immediately put my concerns in a productive new frame of reference. Hari Seldon's psychohistorical analysis of the future and the establishment of the Foundation were designed to reduce the period of inter-Empire chaos from 30,000 years to 1,000. The university as a social institution is nearly 1,000 years old. On the one hand, it seems to be a durable institution; on the other hand, it does have many miles on it. Maybe the university has outlived its usefulness and is beginning to collapse toward the center. Institutions that seem inevitable from the inside can, from the outside, reveal themselves as fragile while the world changes around them and they fail to adapt. Some aspects of the Foundation series are based on Gibbons' Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Republic lasted for only about 500 years and the Roman Empire for another 300 years. The university has already outlasted both the Republic and the Empire, yet they shine in our historical memory as signal accomplishments. Of course, the City of Rome still exists, though nothing like what it was. Perhaps the university—from the Latin universitas*—is also no longer what it was. The university is an already irrelevant institution, but those of us on the inside, in the center of one of these institutions, have not noticed yet, and it will be a decade until it becomes so apparent that even a highly educated person can see it. But before that happens in an effort to adapt, universities will twist themselves into many unsustainable mutations. But I suspect that whatever replaces the university dinosaurs will not be their offspring, but something smaller and more agile, something easy to overlook at first.

*"In early use post-classical Latin universitas denoting an academic institution was modified by the genitive plural, as in universitas magistrorum , universitas magistrorum et scolarium (both 13th cent. with reference to the University of Paris)" ("University." OED). The modern university—tangled in elaborate rules of matriculation and hemmed in by accrediting agencies hoarding power and boards of trusties hoarding money—is hardly a community of teachers and students any more.

Post Hoc

During the day as I think about things, I sometimes think about writing them down or exploring in writing what I am thinking about. When I actually sit down to do that, a barrier between what I thought earlier and words on the page forms itself like a fog out of the gap between my ideas and my words. This is a cliché, of course. I become aware that the ideas in my head are abstractions with emotions of the moment adhering to them so they seemed to have some substance at the time. But to write about them, I must translate the ideas into substantial statement constructed of images and events and metaphors and direct experiences with their root systems intact. This is so formidable an undertaking that I give up before I start.

To ferret out the underpinning of that laziness, two questions would be worthwhile:

1. Do I believe that it is possible to make those connections, that by trying to, I could create something true and moving?


2. What will it accomplish if I do make the connections?

The answer to the first one is a resounding, "Yes." I believe in the magic of words since I have experienced the way that, as I handle them, they talk back to me. All those people who lived before me and shaped the language I inherited from my culture in expanding circles around my family, the collective experience of millions is captured in the delicate attraction and repulsion in the spaces between words that create the linguistic network, which reflects the neural network that both shapes and contains it. So the language itself sheds light on what I try to put into it. That may be part of the thrill I sometimes feel when I find the right words, which at once embody and clarify my thoughts, moving the meaning that crucial one more click so something is unlocked. All that takes effort, but I have no doubt that with effort it can be done, and though starting the process can require great energy, the process itself is regenerative and exhausting both.

The second question is more complex and it is there that I am vulnerable. I have often gone back to John Fowles' The Tree to be reassured that the act of creating art is the important thing; the art itself is a kind of souvenir of that act (perhaps in the way vacations should be about the experience not the photographs). And while I still cling to that in the face of my rejection slips, I still wonder if such a rationale is enough to sustain the effort. Perhaps—despite Johnson's "No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money"—perhaps the best motivation for writing is to discover something, use language to explore the world.

But still, it would be good to share it, to have others read what I have written and have them tell me they found it, they found it what? I suppose anything, that they learned something from it. I was wondering today whether I want to inspire people to action, and decided maybe I did not want to. Burke says, I believe, that an idea is an incipient act. I want to write things that give people ideas, complex enough so that they do not convert directly to action, but will engender action, will influence it, will be input into a process. When I wrote for Mountain Home, however, though I was pleased when people commented on what I wrote, the writing did not feel that much different from all the other writing I was doing that went off into a dark hole.

So that second question needs some qualification. Perhaps what it needs is a list of what I might accomplish, and then an evaluation of how likely I am to accomplish it: I may build a good character as a person by writing, but no reputation as a writer.

Maximizing Time

A Maxim:  gen. A proposition, esp. one which is pithily worded, expressing a general truth drawn from science or experience. OED.

One appealing aspect of fairy tales is the magic word, the fantasy that simply by speaking it we get something done, like Yahweh making the world.

* * *

Our younger selves schedule our days in the morning and dream of what we will accomplish. By evening, we can recapture only vaguely that naïve vision of clean stables in just one day.

* * *

A word is a metaphor: it is both the thing and not the thing. Language simultaneously brings us the world and holds it at a distance: we float in the balance.

* * *

Self-pity is comfort food for the inert mind, the pity-patty of little feat.

* * *

It is not so hard to set priorities within a frame of reference—which vegetable to plant first, which book to read next—but since we do not plant books or read vegetables we need a frame frame in which to set priority priorities.

* * *

Fleeing to imaginary worlds or imaginary futures or the imaginary past—where we can do nothing—we create gardens where over and over we cannot eat of any tree.

* * *

We make lists to remember what to do in the complex web of the present; we keep journals to remember what we have done in the simplifying web of the past.

* * *

Sometimes I write in my journal about writing in my journal. Here I write about writing about writing in my journal. But it's turtles all the way down.

Tyranny

This passage appears in an article by Andrew Crumey referring to a statement by Walter Benjamin, "in an oppressive regime every day is presented as a new emergency." In response to a comment, Crumey quotes the relevant passage from a translation of Benjamin's original essay:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "emergency situation" in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.

According to the administration, the university where I teach is in a constant state of crisis, a crisis which precludes our reflecting on what we are doing in any meaningful way. We must spend all our energy bailing out the boat to prevent it from sinking so that there is no time to consider the direction it is heading in. I had not realized before that "the emergency situation" is itself a tool of oppression. It is even more effective when a crucial cause of the emergency is articulated as too many faculty, and the current round of crises is announced by saying that it is hard to see how we can deal with it without the retrenchment of faculty. This emergency may well be real, but we have had false alarms in the past, and over the past five years students have declined by about 5% and instructional faculty have declined by almost 20% (full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty by 11%).


Ultimately, however, the association of a state of emergency and an oppressive environment, one that inhibits the free flow of ideas, is an evocative perspective that suggests that rather than focusing merely on the emergency at hand, we must come to understand why we are formulating the current state of affairs as an emergency.

Letting Go

Yesterday, we sold the cheese board that had been given to us forty-three years ago as a wedding present by two people we knew casually in graduate school. It spent at least half the time we owned it in a plastic bag in the basement. The tray itself was a thick, walnut-stained piece of wood with a circular ceramic cutting surface—white with a golden rooster printed on it—with a glass dome on one end and, on the other, a cracker holder that looked like an extended v-shaped manger from a crèche scene. A knife with a tip like a forked tongue was attached to the tray by a chain. I remember using cheese tray once, though I fear it may be a manufactured memory. In its life we have packed it up and moved it seven times. After two days of our moving sale, yesterday after it had officially ended, still no one had taken it. We called someone who was willing to pick over what was left, and they took it as part of a pile of random stuff for $20. Our parting was unsentimental.

Why did it take so long for us to get rid of it? How do we get rid of such things? We could not just throw it out because it was not damaged. Who would we give it to?  We are not cheese-board people, and if any of our friends were, we would know it because they would already have a cheese board. Besides giving one as a gift would imply we believed in them. But we have had garage sales before. Why was this not part of one? Why did we wait until now to get rid of it?

The difference is that now we are moving to a place that will force us to make decisions about what objects we have. Up until now, we have always had houses with places where we could store things we never used without interfering with daily life. Now we must be more deliberate. It is not just about enough space; however, it is also about time. Over the past weeks many of our decisions about objects have forced us to admit we can no longer harbor the illusion that someday something will be useful to us. We have limited time left, and the aged perspective makes clear how quickly time is moving, how few things will fit into the boundary of a day, and how rapidly one day replaces another. This moving sale was less about making money than about settling up with the limits of space and time.