Beginning’s end

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
–Semisonic, Closing Time (1999)

Response: Today is the last day of the class that I teach. My life is punctuated by beginnings and ends and it is always kind of sad to say goodbye to the students, let go of my teaching and prepare to begin anew. And yet, I also look forward, like my students, to the change in pace. I get to focus these next few months on my “own” work (as though teaching is something separate from that). The semester ends, but the farmer’s market opens, the days grow bolder, and I get to begin again.

Making progress

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
–Richard Rorty, Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

Response: I like the idea of philosophy. But lately, I have been frustrated with the ways that, instead of embracing philosophy as a flexible exploration of truth, it becomes the truth. Even if an idea resonates with us deeply, it should not limit our abilities to see beyond it. Philosophy should act as door opening into the world of thought, not closing it. Or maybe I just have not found a particular philosopher inspiring enough yet.

So many particulars. So many questions.

A Worker Reads History

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.
–Bertolt Brecht

Response: We little people get lost in history and yet we are the ones that make it with our own hands. Great monuments to human achievement make the individual worker invisible withing the mass. But as a member of the mass, we experience our individuality different. We are not a nameless maker of the world. Thank you to all the people beyond our scope, our imagination, for all their lives, the little parts that make up the whole.

Chaotic, confused vulnerability

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.
–Timothy Leary, How to Operate Your Brain (1994)

Response: During most of our lives we continue on the paths of thought that we have either been taught of laid out for ourselves at some point. But occasionally, struck by moments of something profound, we are able to open our self and question those things that we think we know, questioning the very basic understandings of our own truths. While always questioning yourself might be maddening on a day to day basis, we can learn the practice of being vulnerable to variable truths. What things do you take for granted?

Peace of Wild Things

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry

Response: Nature shares a paradoxical place with humans. We are part of it, but at the same time we separate ourselves from it. We try to control and tame it, but also seek solace in its rugged beauty. Nature helps remind us of our place on this earth. A little late for Earth Day, I know, but take time to enjoy the beauty of the world today. Listen to the sounds, watch the light and use it to find a place of peace.

I AM the people–the mob–the crowd–the mass

I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB

I AM the people–the mob–the crowd–the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then–I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob–the crowd–the mass–will arrive then.
–Carl Sandburg

Response: It is we, the people, who make society. Dictatorships and democracies are both reliant on the acknowledgements of its people and yet, both often seem so hard to change (and often dangerously so in dictatorships). Still, often we get consumed by the day to day, we make noise by ourselves but no one hears it, or we cannot agree on a general direction. But together, all our actions, resistant or encouraging, help shape our world; we are the people.

Curiosity throughout our lives

“In my life experience, it’s not that bringing kids to the museum, taking kids to a museum, makes them interested in science…the goal here is not to make everybody a scientist. That’s not the goal. What a boring world that would be. You want artists; you want musicians; you want poets, novelists, comedians, actors. You want the rest of this. What matters is if they’re scientifically literate and maintain that literacy and curiosity throughout their lives, no matter what becomes their profession.”
–Neil deGrasse Tyson

Response: Science, in English, invokes what we consider “hard sciences” – chemistry, biology, physics, and other natural sciences, but in other languages (like German) the divisions are not so clear. Instead, of seeing science as separate from everything else, let us blur those boundaries too. Science is about learning, exploring and thinking. Science asks us to be curious about our world and the nature of truth.