Category Archives: Letters

Asia, Family, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Weather +Climate

Monkey. Still. But, Making Progress.

May 30, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon

Whoa. 84. Sometimes I think of the seasons as if we were on a moveable patch of earth. On a day like today our patch got shifted on the seasonal moving belt to about Georgia. Last week we were parked above the Canadian border for a while. Who knows where we’ll go next.

I have passed the 50% mark in reading Monkey: Journey to the West. That means I’m somewhere around 1,000+ pages in. Hard to tell on the Kindle, though I know precisely how far I am in percentages. This book is funny, wise, rollicking, supernatural and just a bit cynical. Well, maybe a lot. Yesterday I bought a book that features English works on the Chinese classics. It has a lot to say about these favorites, but I’ve still found no commentary that helps me get, say, the wood, water, earth, fire, metal sequence or the names of some characters or the works referenced as if everyone knew them. Next up, probably next year, is The Dream of the Red Chamber, the best of the six, in the opinion of several writers.

While hunting for a picture to go with this post, I discovered that Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman graphic novels and several fantasy novels started, back in March, on a screenplay for a trilogy based on Monkey. Should be interesting.

If you feel like you have the time, both Monkey and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms will more than repay the effort. There’s a different culture at work here, sometimes a radically different one, but, at other times, radically similar. That’s the power of reading works from other cultures, insights you can’t get any other way.

A slow day. Business meeting in the morning. We scheduled a couple of days in July, post Kate’s second hip surgery, to go over our expenditures in the first six months of retirement, check them against our budget, see where we need to adjust. Big fun.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Writing

I Shrugged

May 26, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists … it is real … it is possible … it’s yours.” – Ayn Rand

Sounds pretty good at the start, doesn’t it? Don’t let your fire go out? Even the hero in the soul could be an archetypal reference, one that is pro-Self. Then, Rand goes completely off the rails. Lonely isolation because the life you deserved has been beyond reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists and so on. This is the most specious sort of pseudo-logic.

First of all. Life you deserve? Oh, who said? There is no metaphysical realm filled with wonderful fulfilling lives created especially for you and your desires. That’s simply a happy talk version of heaven, the old pie in the sky idea, just not when you die, but delivered now, right now. Fast food, fast destiny. Delivered to your home.

A world you’ve never been able to reach? So. If you haven’t reached it yet, why not? Because you haven’t believed in it enough? Because you don’t have the right gender, color, sexual preference? Could it be that the life you want and don’t have is one fed into the culture by vapid self-help gurus like Ayn Rand? Who says you can have whatever you want? What’s good about that? That’s the adolescent girl screaming at a rock concert or an adolescent boy watching hockey or football, pumping his fist and imagining. Is it possible that the dream you have is not your dream, but the dream of a culture with achievement as its number one value?

I’m no stranger to this thought. I dreamed of becoming a published author, admired for my prose and my inventive fiction. I wanted it. I haven’t got it. Is my life over because I don’t have what I dreamed? Far from it. My dream, and others I’ve had like it, came into my Self via a male focused culture, one that said, Be all you can be. You can do anything. B.S.

I can’t, for example, run a 4:00 minute mile. I can’t, for example solve Fourier Transformations. I can’t paint the next great American painting nor am I able to put on a white coat and figure out what’s the matter with you. Would I like to be able to do these things? Sure. Is not desiring them what puts them beyond my reach? No. It’s my limitedness, the peculiar package of skills and abilities I had from birth and have accrued over years of life experience.

We each have limitations; they make us unique. The trick is not desiring a life you “deserve”, it is finding the life that only you can live, the peculiar, one-off life you have to offer to the world and to the rest of us. The big difference here is the inward look goes toward self-knowledge, toward humility, toward knowing what only you can do. This boot-strap, Horatio Alger, American mobility notion only pulls you further and further away from self-knowledge. Instead, your life becomes an attempt to shoe-horn yourself into a cultural vessel, one not designed for you, not at all, but one designed to keep the culture moving in the direction it knows.

You are different. You deserve nothing. The hero in your soul will not perish in lonely isolation because you don’t get what you deserve. The hero in your soul perishes when it uses its power and energy to cram you into somebody elses version of what you deserve.

In summary: I don’t like Ayn Rand.

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Writing

Higher Education Does Not Need The Humanities. But, We Do.

May 25, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Waning Last Frost Moon

On a pile of essays, yet unread, sits one at the top, “The Great River of the Classics”, by Camille Paglia. She is my heroine, an outspoken advocate for the content of the humanities, the deposit of art, music, literature and theater that flows from Western civilization’s beginnings in the fertile crescent, a river with a delta now rich with islands and streams, a fan of human experience at its most intense and intimate that nourishes the ocean that is Western humanity’s collective conscious and unconscious.

Egypt’s splendor, the profundity and innovation of the Greeks, the ordered ambition of the Romans, the spirituality of the Celts, the deep feeling of the Russians and the Germans, the list is long and has depth. Gilgamesh. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. The fragments of the Pre-Socratic. Jewish texts. Christian and Muslim texts. The pyramids. The parthenon. Rome. The pantheon. Fra Lippa. Giorgio. Botticelli. Michelangelo. Da Vinci. Petrarch. Erasmus. Francis Bacon. Titian. Brueghel. Boccaccio. Chaucer. Beowulf. The poetic eddas. Ovid. Turner. Poussin. Rembrandt. Barye. Tolstoy. Dostoevsky. Singer. the Baal Shem Tov. Racine. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Haydn. Mozart. Beethoven. Brahms.

And the many, the very many left out of this brief evocation.

Perhaps the humanities do not pass the test of occupational preparedness, a test now applied to departments in higher education. Just yesterday an academic group released a study the dollar value of varying university degrees based on earnings over time and starting salaries. In many colleges and universities humanities departments look like low hanging fruit when it comes to the budget ax.

So. If humanities degrees result in less earned income over a student’s life, does this make them, ipso facto, less valuable? Obviously. If, that is, the only yardstick is dollars. No, I’m not going to make the argument that dollars are a grubby, undistinguished measure; each of us has to eat, reside somewhere, raise our children and nourish our dreams.

Even the fact that the humanities stood at the very center of the project of higher learning at its inception does not privilege them now. The needs and values of the middle ages were different from ours today. No, the humanities must stand valuable by today’s standards more than they must reflect the values of past centuries.

It may be that the university is no longer the place for the humanities. It may be that higher education’s mission in contemporary life involves primarily occupational learning, a sort of advanced vocational training. Institutions focuses change over time. Their work must meet the needs of those whom they serve or they have no reason to exist.

It does not bother me if higher education strips out the humanities. Let the music department perish. Banish the philosophers, the artists, the literati, the linguists and language crowd, let history go, too. Leave the ivy covered walls with only economics, business, pre-law, pre-med, engineering, architecture, agriculture, veterinary science, family and child psychology. Keep those subjects that inform the workers of today and tomorrow and let the fluff go. Keep the hard stuff, abandon the soft disciplines.

Why don’t these changes bother me? Because an artist does not need an art department, she needs fellow artists and places to display and sell her goods, but art departments, no matter how good, no matter how well intentioned, are not necessary to artists. Work is. Literature, too. Writers write because they must, because words and ideas matter to them. No writer writes because there are good writing programs. Of course, they can learn things in those programs, but writing does not depend on English departments. Music, too, is part of the beating heart of culture. Musicians, whether trained in universities or not, will make music. Musicians will and do get trained in many other places than higher education. Philosophers are stuck with the sort of minds that go to the root of things and they will dig deep without philosophy departments. They need other philosophers, yes, but there are books and airplanes.

The humanities are of, by and for humans. Because they are of our essence, they will survive diminished or even eliminated university and college support. Will they be poorer? Probably. For a while. But not for long. We need music to fill our souls. We need literature to grasp the many ways there are to be human. We need painting and sculpture and print making because beauty satisfies an essential yearning of the human spirit and because we need to experience the interior world of others as much as we can. We need those among us who will ask the difficult, the unpopular questions and pursue them where they lead.

We need all of these things; they do not need higher education. It will be poorer without them, less reflective, more insular, more satisfied with apparently easy answers.

What might happen is this. After the humanities have been ejected from higher education, humanities practitioners and scholars will meet, find they still need each other. An idea will occur to them. Why not have a place where the humanities can be taught? An institute, maybe. A gymnasium. An academy. Or, maybe something new. A virtual gathering space for artists and scholars, for writers and teachers.

Out of these experiment might grow, what? I don’t know. Perhaps an educational institution with its primary mission immersing its students in the Great River of the Humanities, a baptism by art. Could happen.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Memories

Externally, We Swim In the Same Ocean, but…

January 28, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Cold Month

“Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment and learn again to exercise his will — his personal responsibility.” – Albert Schweitzer

Schweitzer was a favorite of both my mother and my father, his “reverence for life” must have rung loudly in the ear of the WWII generation. I find his Christianity, though unorthodox, still too orthodox for me these days. This quote seems to lean against the interrelatedness voiced by MLK and quoted here recently and put that inflection point back on the individual. In most ways I agree with it from a personal perspective, a focus on the existential predicament decided by emphasizing personal choice rather than the web of influences from genes and nurture.

As I’ve reflected on the notion of interrelatedness over the last month or so, and commented on it by using the idea of inflection, that is a mental tick by the perspective most important at the moment, this dialectical, tension of opposites approach, seems more and more sound to me. What I mean is that, yes, we are in this together and that, yes, the fate of even the most vulnerable and neglected bears on our own, while at the same, yes, we live alone and will die alone, never really bridging the gap between our interior and that of the Other. Externally we swim in the same waters as one larger organism, a sort of super-0rganism, while internally, we paddle alone in our single kayak traversing the vast expanse of the inner world.

On a less abstruse note, well, a bit less abstruse anyhow, I did very well on my Latin session today. I’ve decided it takes me 4-6 hours to get through a Wheelock chapter and the particular grammatical points presented there, along with exercises. Greg said that was about right. So, I might as well lean into it and learn it right the first time. Then, he says I have to read, read, read. I’m thinking about picking up some Caesar and maybe some Tacitus since they write in prose and that’s easier than the convoluted word order of poets like Ovid and Virgil. I’m sticking with Ovid as my Northstar in all this, but reading some stuff where I’m not stumbling over words and phrases lines apart that belong together might be fun.

Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

Lost in Translation

December 31, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

What happens in the act of translation? After years of reading translated texts and noticing the often wide discrepancies among various translations of the same underlying words, I have wondered how such drastically different English versions can come from the same work. Understanding this, really translation as a whole, and understanding Ovid’s Metamorphosis in particular, is what led to my current project, learn Latin and make my own translation of this Roman masterwork from the time of Augustus Caesar.

Some of that learning has already begun to happen. Though I’m only 60 verses into the first of 5 books in the Metamorphosis, I have learned a complex truth about translation. There is no such thing as an exact translation, probably not even such a thing as a literal translation. Why? Several things. First, grammar has rules, sure, but the application of those rules can lead to different English. In Latin a good example is the participial phrase. Latin uses participles much more often than English and in ways we never do. One such use, the ablative absolute, can consist of as few as two words, perhaps neither of them a verb, that gets translated into a subordinate clause in English. Sometimes, in order to translate, you have to add a verb, almost always you have to add a conjunction. There is no right conjunction nor is there one way to translate the participle into a verb in the clause though in both cases you can make an educated guess from the context.

Second, the words themselves, as in English, are polyvalent. Example: nebula. It can mean mist, smoke, vapor, fog, exhalation. Again, context helps, sometimes the desired English word is obvious, often not.

Third, at the level of a sentence or a paragraph, it may be impossible to render in any exact way what the author intended. Instead, the translator has to read the Latin, understand the author’s intent as well as possible, then create an English sentence or paragraph that conveys the sense of the Latin rather than an accurate word for word translation. In other words, translation is interpretation from the very beginning, in essence.

Fourth, as Greg and I found in today’s Ovid, texts themselves vary. His text had three words in one phrase that mine did not have, one missing altogether in mine and two with different cases. This is a phenomenon very familiar to me from study of the Bible, that is, textual criticism, where judgments must be made about the authenticity of the original text. Usually, in textual criticism, it is assumed that the more difficult rendering is the older and therefore closer to the original, while the easier is assumed to be a scholarly “cleaning up” of a problematic passage. So, the text used for translation matters.

Fifth, once you’ve cleared these hurdles, in a text like the Metamorphosis, you have to deal with the difficulties the text presents because it uses poetry rather than prose. This means words may be in odd locations to justify rhyme schemes, metaphor or other poetic devices. In particular words that need to be together in English may be separated by several other words, the relationship only apparent at all because of endings.

Sixth, in the case of poetry you have to consider the challenge in creating English poetry from Latin poetry. Often the decision is to render the whole in prose, because making Latin rhyme schemes, for example, work in English may be next to impossible.

So, even though I’m still far from my goal of fluent translation, I’ve already learned, from the inside, several things that explain vast differences in translated texts.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story

An Ancientrail, Still Traveled

November 17, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Samhain Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Tracking down a quote from a Mary Oliver book led me to Plato and to his Symposium, in particular a portion dedicated to the mysteries of love. It reminded me of my initial excitement in studying philosophy, created in large part by J. Harry Cotton, a professioral stereotype at Wabash College. He wrapped tobacco in a light paper plug, inserted it into his pipe, applied a match and away we went into the history of Western philosophy, J. Harry’s head wreathed in tobacco smoke. He often quoted whole pages of Plato or Aristotle in Greek, showing us the key words on the blackboard, explaining the intricacy of their translation and how an interpretation could turn on a single word. I’d never met any one like J. Harry and my memory of him is still fond.

The excitement he stirred slowly winked out when I had to transfer to Ball State University, out of money for Wabash. There the logical positivists still reigned, even though their star had already fallen in graduate schools across Europe and the US. At Ball State I had the opposite of J. Harry, Robert something. He was the head of the department and an avowed enemy of all metaphysics and a champion of philosophy as clarifier of scientific language. What exactly do we mean by cold? Hot? Solid? Gas? Not unimportant question in a techn0-scientific age, but hardly inspiring. At least to me.

I finished out my philosophy major, but added one in anthropology because my passion for it, once lit, did not go out. This was all a long, long time ago. I graduated from Ball State in 1969, so that’s, what? 41 years and another millennium in the past.

What is truth? Justice? Beauty? How do we know what we know? What is a sound argument? What is a weak one? Why? How have ideas about these big questions changed over time? And why? What do they matter now, in our world? This was what interested me and the logical positivists had nothing to teach me in regard to them. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I ended up in Seminary, where those questions still matter and where there are answers and the history of the answers.

Ironically, of course, I have come to inhabit the flattened, anti-metaphysical world of the logical positivists, but not from the perspective of clarification and rejection of metaphysics, but from the standpoint of existentialism. In this new world, which I’ve inhabited since 1991 or so, gnothi seauton, know thyself, inscribed over the door within the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that lead to the Oracle, has been my holy writ. Rather than books full of poetry, creation myths, messiahs and anti-Christs, I have two words. They’re enough for me, though. More than enough.

Art and Culture, Hydroponics, Letters, Literature, US History, World History, Writing

Humanities

October 14, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Waxing Harvest Moon

With Latin, the Baroque and a sermon on the future of liberal thought all coming up this week and the next, plus the horticultural fall chores: plant bulbs, clean up, harvest the last of the vegetable crop and care for the bees, I react strongly to the recent closing down of humanities classes in SUNY.

There is hope, though, since the humanities are academic disciplines that can be done at home with little discernible drop in quality. Yes, there’s the problem of training the next generation in how to do the work at home. It may be time for the disintermediation of the University’s original core curriculum, putting it on the web and in personal relationships, mentoring. It may be time for Western culture to imitate the Chinese literati, the Mandarin bureaucrats who ran the country while painting, writing poetry, playing the Qin, doing calligraphy and focusing on the Tao.

Let’s get a dialogue going about how we can preserve the humanities one classic at a time, one work of fine art at a time, one poem at a time, one language at a time, one faith tradition at a time. Like the Great Work, creating a benign human presence on the earth, we must also labor to produce a humane human presence. It is no easy task and one that requires facility in a number of areas: literature, history, language, art history, the history of faith traditions. We must not let the sacred deposit that reflects on our common life wither into dusts.

Perhaps we need a new renaissance, a new enlightenment, ones that focus no longer on the application of science and technology, but instead return to the big questions: Why are we here? What is justice? What is beauty? What is a nation? Why do we fight? Who was Ozymandias? What is Baroque music? How many administrators can dance on the head of the department of science? What is life? What does it mean to be human?

This is not an anti-science rant, science is fine; let’s not, however, throw out teaching the question askers of culture, the critics of public life, the dancers, painters and poets. We need them, too, to know what to do with what science produces, in part, yes, but more to remind us that we have a past and that our big questions are similar and often the same as the big questions of that past. That thought and that art helps us today. Right now.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Poetry

Books Along the Way

October 9, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Fall Waxing Harvest Moon

I have begun to accept that I will never read everything I want to read. Books sit stacked up on the floor in my study; they lie on top of rows of other books on bookshelves; all my 6702010-10-09_0461 bookshelves are full and many have books piled on top of them. Each one I want to read. Some I want to use only as reference, but most I want to read cover to cover. The books range in topic from fairy tales and folklore to basic scientific texts on biology and geology, from philosophy to theology, art history to renaissance life, china, japan, india and cambodia to single dictionaries and the multiple volumes of the OED and the Dictionary of Art. Of course there is fiction, too, and poetry, works on historiography and works on the enlightenment. This doesn’t count the 90 books I now have on my kindle, many fiction, but many non-fiction, too.

When it comes to books and learning, I seem to not have an off button. Maybe it’s a pathology, an escape from the world, from day to day responsibility, could be, but I don’t think so. Reading and learning feel hardwired, expressions of genes as much as personal choice. So it’s tough for me to admit that I have books here, in my own house, that I may never read. A man has only so many hours in a day and I find spending any significant amount of them reading difficult.

That always surprises me. I love to read, yet it often feels like a turn away from the world of politics, the garden, connecting with family and friends, so it takes discipline for me to sit and read for any length of time. Instead, I read in snippets, chunks here and there. Even so, I get a lot read, finishing the Romance of the Three Kingdoms took a lot of dedication, for example. One year, I put the books I finished in one spot after I finished them. I don’t recall the number or the number of pages, but it caused me to sit back and wonder how I’d done it.

Sometimes I fantasize about stopping all other pursuits, sitting down in my chair and begin reading through the most important books, the ones on the top of my list. Right now that would 6702010-10-09_0460 include the histories of Herodotus and substantial commentary. The Mahabharata. Several works on Asia art. A cabinet full of books on the enlightenment and liberalism. Another cabinet full on calendars and holidays. I will never do it. Why? Because I do have interests, obsessions maybe, that take me out into the garden or over to the State Capitol and the Minnesota Institute of Arts, the homes of the Woolly Mammoths and our children. Kate and I will, I imagine, resume at least some of our SPCO attending when she retires and there will be travel, too.

This relates to an odd self-reflection occasioned by Lou Benders story of my first day on the Ball State Campus. According to him, there was a picture of the Student Body President, I reached out and touched it and told him, “I’m going to do that.” Three years later I ran and lost for Student Body President. The year was 1969. Recalling this, I wondered if my intention, my ability to clarify my direction had waned. Had I defocused, living my life with no clear intentions, drifting along, letting life happen?

Then I recalled the moment I told Kate I wanted to write, the moment four years ago when I realized I had to put my shoulder behind the Great Work, creating a benign human presence on the planet, the moment I began to pester Deb Hegstrom for a spot in the junior docent class of 2005, the time when Kate and I decided to push our property toward permaculture-the harmonious integration of people, plants and animals in a specific spot in a sustainable way. No, I’ve not lost my ability to focus. Not at all. 6702010-10-09_0462

This life, the one I’m living now, is the one I’ve chosen to live, a life Kate and I have made together. And that feels good.

Who knows, maybe I will finish these books? Who knows?

Humanities, Letters, Memories

School Days. Good Old Rule Days.

September 7, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa New (Back to School) Moon

See you in September

Have a good time but remember
There is danger in the summer moon above
Will I see you in September
Or lose you to a summer love The Happenings (see current pic, right, at EPCOT)

Mmmm. Nothing says aging like current pics of yesterday’s bands.

Hi and Lois had a cartoon this morning in which Dot presents to his class on his summer vacation: “Didn’t do anything much, but that was a lot better than here.”

Made me think. Lots of cartoons, op ed pieces, jokes, old recollections place school over against summer: freedom versus confinement, fun versus work, anarchy vs dictatorship, innocence vs real life. You can add to the dialectics.

Granddaughter Ruth’s entry into pre-school, as I said a couple of weeks ago, opened my eyes to the exceptionally long journey on which she has just begun. At a minimum for a girl like Ruth, teachers as parents, Jewish, well educated grandparents, seemingly bright, her schooling will last 4 years beyond high school. That’s 18+ years of interrupted summer idylls, broken off by the sound of school bells, announcements over the pa system (text messages?) and the scramble to buy school supplies.

Like the putative frog in the slowly boiling pot of water most students don’t realize just how long this commitment is until they near the end of it, for some high school, for others college. I was, for example, in the third (last) quarter of my senior year in college when, over a cup of coffee in the student union, it came to me. I didn’t have to go to college. It was a choice, but so little of one in fact that I only woke from the enchantment as the wicked witch of the real world was about to have me for lunch.

Shopping for school supplies. Loved it. First day of school. Eager to be there. Learning. Loved it and still love it. School and its silly restrictions, its teaching to the mean, its lack of imagination. Hated it. A result for me was a suspicion of the motivation of people in authority. They said they wanted to educate me, really they wanted to control me. I learned many lessons in school, many of them I wish I’d never encountered.

First among them was the sense that true learning was something one had to wrest from the world by main force, not expecting any real help from those who labeled themselves as teachers. This was a bad, a terrible lesson. It has not served me well. I don’t trust mentors, teachers to have my interest ahead of their institutional commitments. Still don’t. I probably could have learned to write much better if I had. Probably would have finished a Ph.D. if I hadn’t graduated from college soured on the whole apparatus of higher education.

This was a wonderful, blessed lesson. It has served me very well. I trust my own work, surround myself with opportunities to learn and apply myself to them with vigor. My thought is mine, shaped only by the minds I encounter in books or in paintings or in movies or of friends. This has lead to an independent, critical and outsider perspective for me, again, a blessing and a curse. The blessing is the necessity of creating my own thoughtworld; the curse is the lack of peer interaction around it.

Since I believe with all my heart that life is one choice after another and that we are responsible for the choices we make, no matter the influences of others or institutions, I cannot blame anyone but me for where I’ve ended up.

The educational establishment, however, still has not gotten over its early industrial template of bells, order and discipline, the true goals of the system, not encouraging inquiry, creation and craft as Paul Goodman talks about: “It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own. ” This is the job of education, to spark in us the gift of curiosity, the courage to make things and ideas of our own and to have the fundamentals of good work to polish them.

Our school system, contrary to the longing of the Asian educational establishment, does not in fact, stimulate creativity. The creativity and self-initiative so prized by Asia happens in spite of the cloak of institutional rigor draped over the shoulders of even 4 year old Ruth. It happens because our culture does allow for outliers, for outsiders, for prophets, for critics–our schools do not.

Do school bells, attendance taking, rigid curriculum, regimented class times, supervised play and little, if any, student input get to the goal, helping students grow up as human beings into a culture without losing nature, learning how to be part of a sensible and honorable community? I say no, it does not. Paul Goodman, again: “I might seem to have a number of divergent interests — community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics — but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist.”

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters

Oh, You’re So Pragmatic.

June 26, 2010 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Full Strawberry Moon

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” – William James

Pragmatism and pragmatists are an original American (US) contribution to the history of Western philosophy. Since I can’t get my hands around it well, I’ll not try to explain it, though on its on my list.

But. William James was among its founders and early proponents along with Charles Saunders Pierce and John Dewey. He was also an early American psychologist as was Dewey. So. James is an important guy in philosophy, psychology and the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

His quote above is disarmingly simple. On the face of it you might say, well, yeah. Whatever, old dude. If you took that perspective, you probably skipped over two important words: I agree. Now, I’m not going to get into the free will debate, very complicated at this moment in cognitive science, so I interpret this as our attention will go where we intend for it to go. It’s the intentional nature of the I agree that I want to lift out and underline.

Why? It reminded me of a dilemma I spoke with Kate about just this week, “Kate, there are several things, for example, pragmatism, Taoism, aesthetics, the Enlightenment that I would like to explore in greater depth. The problem is that to do it I have to have sit down time, lots of it, to read complicated material and absorb it.”

“Yes,” she said, “There are just aren’t enough hours in a day.”

Just so. We have a limited amount of time, that’s a given, both day to day, and in this finite trip, life. How I agree to direct my attention will determine the nature of my experience. If I choose to garden, I will not be reading Dewey’s Reconstruction of Philosophy. If I choose to do Latin and translate the Metamorphosis, I cannot, at the same time, read Chuang Tzu. If I use time writing this blog, I cannot use the same time to write a novel. And so on. And on.

Just using those examples I have chosen to direct my experience toward the garden, the soil and complex interactions within them both. I have chosen to fill some of my experience with Latin grammar and vocabulary and learning how to translate. I choose to write this blog and so have the experience of an ongoing journal/diary/weblog.

Is there anything bad about these choices? No, at least not in my opinion. I do, though, have to reckon with what James identifies. Each of those choices makes other choices if not impossible at least less likely, therefore directing my stream of attention and with it my experience in one direction and not another.

The point here is that you decide the type and quality of the experiences you have and those experience not only shape your life, they are your life. So, choose well. And know what your choices mean.