A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

- William Stafford.

Working towards God

After a long and dreary day of work, and really, a long and arduous week of Arbeit, I read this, and it was good.

"Work puts human beings in the world of things. It requires achievement from them. Christians slep out of the world of personal encounter into the world of impersonal things. the It; and this new encounter frees them for objectivity, for the world of the It is only an instrument in the hands of God for the purification of Christian from all self-absorption and selfishness. The work of the world can only be accomplished where people forget themselves, where they lose themselves in a cause, reality, the task, the It. Christians learn at work to allow the task to set the bounds for them. Thus, for them, work becomes a remedy for the lethargy and laziness of the flesh. The demands of the flesh die in the world of things. But that can only happen where Christians break through the It to the You of God, who commands the work and the deed and makes them serve to liberate Christians from themselves."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p75.

Resolution

Today I read through and marked 10 uniformly uninspired and insipid essays. I then resolved to never write a boring essay, ever again. Even if it's just to give my marker half an hour of happiness. My essays, shall, henceforth, be either entertaining under-researched, or spectacularly inaccurate, or grammatically imaginative.

Just. Not. Boring!

The Humanities: A diatribe

A recent post by the admirable and eloquent Terry Eagleton:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/17/death-universities-malaise-tuition-fees?INTCMP=SRCH

has sparked some discussion amongst my facebook friends.

It sent me on a veritable verbal diatribe, some of which I'll replicate here, for your thoughts:

... Much as it pains me to admit it, the nature of the academy/public education, and how they handle the humanities degree (and especially the higher Masters & PhDs) need to change. The university was set up in a completely different culture and designed for a different age; with a different economic imperative, and a particular view of the mind.

Universities need to train "humanists" (for want of a better word. Is moral, critical, creative thinkers/actors a better description?) for the larger world - we want humanistic lawyers, engineers, doctors, street cleaners. We do this by connecting knowledge and skills for a continuously changing world. But currently, doing advanced training in a humanities Masters/PhD relegates the student to no other alternative except academic professorship (not that I have anything against that!). But there are no other jobs that respect someone with training in the humanities.

You can find a good article about this here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/05/24/krebs

Ultimately, what bothers me, is the dastard vagueness and confusion that characterises most humanities centres/departments. No one is really sure what the POINT of the humanities actually is. Talk to a English professor, a historian, a sociologist, or a lecturer in philosophy, and they will all give you a different answer (or no answer at all!)

To borrow, nay, plagiarise from Alan Jacobs (who got it from someone else), here is the problem in a netshell:

1) The scholarly performance of academic humanists is evaluated — by colleagues, tenure committees, etc. — using criteria developed for evaluating scientists.

2) Those criteria are built around the idea of knowledge creation.

3) But many humanists aren't sure what counts as knowledge creation for them, since they are not able to follow any agreed-upon method for testing hypotheses.

4) This problem grows more pressing as expectations for publication rise: scholars are asked to create more and more knowledge without being sure what knowledge is.

without being sure what knowledge is. Here, is the crux of the problem. We have access to so much information; so much knowledge, so many points of contact, so many articles to read, RSS feeds to subscribe to, that I think we've lost all focus. There is, in addition, no yardstick, no set methodology. (Arguable, this could breed creativity as well as stagnation ...)

Additionally, this is a very knowledge/information-centric way of looking at the world. I wonder what happens when we look at it from the point of view of people - individuals, and communities. The humanistic Arts, in ways which cannot be fathomed nor replicated by the Sciences, shapes the heart, soul and character of a person/people. Incidentally, didn't the Greeks believe that the sole purpose of education was to teach virtues, and to create people who lived the Good Life? (Because virtues, according to the Greeks, led to happiness.)

Most importantly, how do we use, create, imbibe and revel in the knowledge that the humanities give us, in light of it being part of God's creation, and in light of our ultimate aim, to love and know God more?

(It's an exciting, if somewhat trying time, to be a Christian, and part of the humanities).

Promise Keeper

God does not give us everything we want, but God does fulfill all God's promises, i.e., God remains the Lord of the earth, God preserves the Church, constantly renewing our faith and not laying on us more than we can bear, gladdening us with Divine nearness and help, hearing our prayers, and leading us along the best and straightest paths to holiness. By God's faithfulness in doing this, God creates in us praise for God alone.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p206.

G. K. Chesterton: “Christmas Poem”

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost — how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wife’s tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Taking part in the Conversation

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

It is from this ‘unending conversation’ that the materials of your drama arise."


— Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)