Monday, December 12, 2011

Logically Unimaginable, Yours Truly

I began this blog as a way to jump-start my dissertation proposal.  I was frozen up in fear and worry and the fecundity of my mind seemed a cacaphony.  I thought--true to my methodological commitments--"I'll use some photos to both capture some ideas that are mutli-layered and in danger of being lost AND to puctuate and catalyze the writing I need to do."  It has worked.  My advisor on psychoanalytic theory--Mari Ruti--shared a CRUICAL tidbit on on to survive the amputational process that is writing:  Put the deferred ideas elsewhere and let them be your next books.  That, too, has worked.

Hence Imaginary Logic.  I named this blog because I was buried deep in discerning my philosophical influences.   The name simply came to me.  As a poet, I know that little "ka-chnk" when some phrase or thought finds its momentary home. So sweet. So good.  I know to keep it simple and move it on in with as little fuss as possible.  I tend to mess with these later, after I live into them.  I did "mess" with this name only in researching it... and I found two incredible facts when I conducted a quick search on the name.  First--there's a lovely poet named Rodney Jones who wrote an award nominated chapbook by this name.  Here's from a review from Poets.org:
"The Art of Heaven" opens with a parody of Dante and a down-home, twisted humor that Jones’s readers have come to rely on: "In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, / the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. / Not deep depression. This nice hell of suburbs. / Speed bumps. The way things aren’t quite paradise."
Frighteningly close to my own poetry style, I might presumingly say. 

Poignantly:  I cannot be sure this is the guy.
And then an even more spooky discovery, given that I can trace familiar roots spiraling rather close to Eastern Europe: A small treatise praising the prescience one "Nicolai Alexandrovich Vasiliev (Russian: Николай Александрович Васильев), also Vasil'ev, Vassilieff, Wassilieff (11 July [O.S. 29 June] 1880–1940) was a Russian logician, philosopher, psychologist, poet, the forerunner of paraconsistent and multi-valued logics."  (Wikipedia)  The paper is by Valentine A. Bazhanov and basically states that this gentleman was painfully far ahead of his time, anticipating the the post-modern understanding that what can be defined is temporary in definition and--to put it over-simply--open in odd and important ways. Logic folds back on and into itself.  These notions dovetailed rather neatly with my Wittgenstein obsession, and carried me beyond it, as well.  Ah bliss! 

All of this is to say--one cannot orchestrate such "accidents"-- such coincidences.  I am humbled and a little baffled and a lot inspired.  I shall take this all further, I promise.  Buy the book, okay? 

Vigna-caracalla-bean vine
But, for now, I see why my blog statistics show a strange pattern of site visits from Russia.  I'm sure my visitors are disappointed; this is my notepad, not my thesis.  But, dear ones, stay tuned.  I shall give tribute where tribute is due.  Who's to say that lines of thought don't ride our DNA?  I shall endeavor to be one small blossoming on the forgotten genius Vasiliev's vine.  Thank you weird universe, for my Imaginary Logic.  Better than logic alone, this poetry of logic, this synaptic leap across tradition allows the small petals of synchronities of idea and insight to unfold from an old, much abused and mysterious calyx. 

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Bite and Suck

I once got to interview Deborah Britzman...yes of  Practice makes Practice but really, in that moment at Bergamo, she was of Novel Education.  Like any good analysis, I walked away with two distinct koans to beacon me through the rough waters of trying to write my prospectus, proposal and research. One was an aside...or maybe a culmination of a long and vastly erudite exploration of a fine point of Freud's.  (The only other time I've been so in awe and in over my head was when I met Borges and he recited his poetry from memory.  But I digress. Analysts may now smile wryly.)  First this "aside" was "I worry about torture."  I will write more about that later. But yes, I worry nearly obsessively about it.  It is my chief concern, oddly enough.  But when you consider that I did indeed have a teacher that required students to stand in corners holding stacks of encyclopedias, this may not be so surprising.  But yes, I worry about torture; I think it is, in fact, our central concern in living together.  And genociede, too while we're at it.  And fascist regimes that disappear people.  These were the terrors of my maturing years and they remain the hauntings that drive my efforts.  I simply concluded that the best attempt at redress was to address the beginnings.  Sometimes, now, I am in despair.  I feel trapped in a system that neatly herds us all, critics included, towards the truck, the train car, the uniform.  I think Deborah was musing upon that, maybe.  How sneaky the disaster is, how torture sidles in on little token economy feet.

The other thing she said that stayed with me was "bite and suck, bite and suck"...chuckling at the universal dialectic of the love and antagonism tango that operates through virtually all human interaction.  THIS phrase has been popping to my mind's surface like a cork in a washtub, a bobber where the fish got away.  I nursed three babies so I'm acquainted with the bite and the suck and one thing that occurs to me is the varieties of both that a nursing mother experiences.  Most of us can relish and say "awwwww" around the sweet sucking notion.  It's the bite we like to avoid considering.  But, as an early childhood person, I know that the bite cannot be avoided.  Babies bite.  And they do it for an amazing array of reasons in an amazing array of ways.  Biting is the bane of a Nursery School director's life, I can tell you. 

But I'll speak as the mother, here. I'll put my well-nursed breast on the line, so to speak.  Biting in that nursing situation has been oversimplified, I think, yes, even by the psychoanalytic folks. I need to read up more BUT I think that to portray that bite as only antagonism, of the wrestling aversion to utter dependence and the feasone growl of "why am I here?!"....it leaves out another bite that most nursing mothers know quite well.  First, on the classic bite--oh yes, ALWAYS happens--at least once.  Usually, only once or maybe twice and boy howdy, the wearer of the breast's reaction pretty well ensures that particular bite doesn't happen again.  It's a moment, for sure.  And bears much consideration and decontructing.  BUT

There's another bite and it's the one that the more mature nurser masters--it's the pulling bite that doesn't QUITE become chomp but is instead is a press for "MORE."  It's what that classic kitten paw dance does--it's a fierce and effective effort to get MORE, c'mon MORE milk to flow.  Most mothers do not pull away from this one.  First of all, it usually arrives gradually so we build a tolerance. Secondly, some part of us knows what's going on, that our nurser is coaxing our body to step it up, send out a call  for more, yet again more--both this time and from here on out, because that's how the system works. 

This bite, too, is in the bite and suck only it's not the same bite as the other bite.  It is still painful, let me tell you, but it is not the chomp of "eat you up" or the roar of "what are you that I must have you always?!"  It is the mmmmmmmmMMMMMMMOOOOOOORE bite....I don't think bite is the right word; that word has too much chop to it.  Maybe "gnnnnuck" for gnaw and suck. 

But my point is that there is this third way.  There's another step in the tango--it's not just bite and suck--there's a blend in there that 's made of pure pragmatic effort, yes with a strain of "me--I want" but tempered with continued connection and sustained enjoyment.  It's a hybrid--a embracing beast.  There are implications here, I think, for the roots of sublimation.  For the beginnings of communication beyond and through communion.

Just watch the teeth, dear one, watch the teeth. 

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Grief in the Nursery

I do beleive that all education, in the tradition of currare, is elegaic.  It is an always "becoming" and so must mourn, in a somewhat (but not entirely) Derridean sense, the past, the present, certainly, knowlege and the hopeful space of the ineffable.  But there is a different chapter I must write someday soon and it is that of the Grief of education.  In particular, the grief of early childhood care and education.  The last of the childhood territories to be colonized (with infancy's raw, uterine tissue being cognitized and marketed even in the moment)--it is worthy of a ululation, a Ginsbergian HOWL. Early Childhood teachers are nearly mad with the denial of this greif but they are a strong set and persevere like every colonized first peoples--Fanon will explain, I need not.  Like a woman in labor, they cannot interrupt their work because it will kill them to do so.  (Those of us who have stepped back from the work feel as if we might be dying, indeed.  But we are hoping to shift to midwife and doula.) 

The commodification of babies represent a trespass akin to rape.  It is perhaps no coincidence that, as I attempt to write my own step toward midwifery, I must remember anew, understand with a compassion I had not allowed before, my own rape as a young woman.  Several, in fact. At some level this is the truth I can speak to my own pyschic journey and to the colonization of the psychic space of early childhood:  Rape is rape. I suspect the hysteria 20+ years ago around molestation and abuse in day cares foretold our psychic knowledge--we knew our babies were being abused; we just didn't want to acknowledge that we were complicit. Violation of our being at this unique level--violating our youngest in the name of material avarice and fear--is akin to the much-discussed rape of the environment (no mistake in that conflation). Strong feminist voices from Mary Daly, to Carolyn Merchant to Susan Griffen to Riane Eisler have consistently pointed out the link between the oppression of the "feminine" and the despoiling of our planet. A deep, raw wound exists here--and the pledge to further enshrine this violation by "husbanding, stewarding" or any of the other euphemisms for consolidating and attemping to bury the sin only make this relationship all the more clear. 


This goes further to what Wittgenstein was asking for, I think, when he tried to point to the limits of language: We can only language the moment and to language beyond that, to totalize it into a system of surety, betrays the possible, forecloses the open hope of time, embodiment, instantiation ever becoming.  Of course, we must speak into the moment, but to demand the baby utter Truth is to lock our very being into a hubris that will betray our possibilites.  Colonizing the newly born forecloses upon life-force.  We have rooted through our psychic spaces and found the last, now--the womb. And the law is closing swiftly upon it.  Good luck, poor fools.  This is where we must, as W says, become silent.  To babble here is fruitless--in all meanings of the word. 

Friday, December 2, 2011

Sonneting about un-sonneting...so to speak; composing decomposition


Art and photo by Katie Scott

My Small Envy of the Russet Leaf
The sweet tidal tongue of sap recedes
and this emanation—oak’s slow poetry—
gentles with a last bright flare of
dénouement, then sighs, secedes.

Leaf does not haul fleshy knots of artery
to dirt, requires little of rot’s muscle to exhume
its double-helixed hive.  Like shakuhachi
to Shostakovich, thin leaf to thick human.

 Yet, despite and within strange différance
 silence unspools relation—listener-musician,
 musician-listener:  in the end,
 breath, no breath,  coda , no coda,

undoes the lie of revelation we call life
from the indifferent benevolence of light.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

The Dream's Navel


I'm ecstatic at finding this moment of no-can-do in Freud: The dream's navel.  The place where there is such a confluence of imagery and idea that sorting through it, finding the analytic key, is stymied.  Is it a verge on the ineffable?  The immanent?  Most writers on this point say he was marking a limit on his own ability in a given analysis, noting that some dream mysteries need time to ripen into meaning.  Either way, this is a happy find for me.  Especially as my mate moves into this new phase of drawing these lovely singular visions of flower/plant unfurling.  He tends to depict that place the blossom began--the navel of the blossom?  It's beautiful, the vibrations of the plant's being and the air around it and the apprehension of our gaze falling upon it like light but then not like light.....The navel of the dream.  Dave once asked me, not in quite so specific terms, when/how my approach stopped being "navel-gazing" and my answer was a story.  I don't remember the story!  But I remember that all I could do in that moment was illustrate the bridge between self-understanding and understanding itself. 

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Martha My Dear



I am having a very troubled time shifting today, Thanksgiving morning, into to baking pies for the family gathering. I'm in the middle of dissertation formation and I am I not feeling friendly towards my kitchen.  One might say I am actually enraged. I fear these are going to be some angry apple pies.  The Buddhist in me is aghast. I should be feeling like I'm getting off easy as this is the first T-day in several years I haven't been the hostess.  Three years ago, I had my whole family PLUS my office room mate from grad school and our newest grad colleague from Cameroon and his three children.  It was a fun, food-filled, funny day.  (The moment Michael from Cameroon pulled in and my son shouted "he's got kids in his car!" was a moment of hilarious scramble as we unearthed the card table, adding 3 more seats.)

Right now, despite my love of pie and the usual relative ease with which I cook-- finding joy in the smellsm textures and tastes of the foods, extemporizing with spice or form, anticipating delight of my loved ones--despite all that, I could give a flying...well you know.

I feel like Martha Stewart might have felt upon being booked into prison.  I barely tracked that whole drama but have always felt pretty certain that she got gigged simply because she was a woman who dared to become a mogul.  Do you think it maybe made a difference that she snuck into mogul-dom on little domestic design feet?  I do.  How dare she build an empire by marketing the sacred sphere of the domestic.  We can handle Ikea building it's Nordic base upon domestic furniture, we can even handle that crazy Julia Child bringing the hearth and it's crockery into the public and the marketplace (though, I daresay, she didn't quite make it to mogul status).  But Martha?  My God!  She took all the sweet little flourishes of decor, problem-solving, flower-arrangement, holiday cooking and patio play and she did them better and then make bunches of money through being saavy, driven and, I guess, a bit sloppy in sharpshooting the marketplace.  Or was she just an easy target for some other sharp-shooter?  Who gained ascendance while Martha sat behind bars? 

Vermeer's version
I can't help but think, given all the egregious sins of the many other moguls with penises out there, that there was some jealous spirit gnawing away at the process that busted Martha.  Maybe it was just that she had that new testament name.  Martha was the one, after all, in the Jesus story, that was the steady homemaking sort, obeying the dictates of of time and place, preparing the food for the illustrious visitor and his coterie.  And she is a bit cranky with Mary when she goes to sit in on the teaching.  When Martha heads out to fetch Mary back to the kitchen where she belongs, Jesus says 41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, 42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one.[a] Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (NIV, Luke 10:38-42)  


My mother the feminist theologian used to teach on this one.  The rooms would be full of "Martha"s (sometimes quite literally) and, after years of keeping both the church dinner and the church accounts balanced, they not just a little perplexed in their hearts by Jesus' admonition.  Mom had both good news and bad news for them.  She would gently point out that she thought that maybe Jesus had a point--if we pass up the chance for a profound moment because the kitchen needs to be swept, we might have our priorities skewed.  Also, we might be worrying about minutiae while the very the mountains are moving.  Then again, it was that same Jesus who fed thousands, who admonished his followers to "give the coats off [their] backs."  



Was it a bunch of misguided Marys bringing down the house of Martha? That was one weird blogger's accusation--that feminists brought her down. (1)






I can't believe, especially now as the ridiculous wrongs of the marketplace and their moguls are made so clear in the glare of the OWS objections, that she actually served time.  



We sure did put her in her place, no? Did "someone" see her contaminating our domestic interior by bringing with capitalist--not initiative, which can be downright cute, as long as it stays small--but with capitalist success, success on the guy's terms in the guys' world using the girls' world and the girls' dollars. (2)  I think someone, and I (along with Ms. magazine)  really suspect a male, wanted to see this picture:




So here--the apples are unpeeled and the pumpkin still in cans--have a lil' piece of psychoanalytic pie, instead.  






(1) To redress that absurd and badly argued point check out this wonderful examination (pre-arrest, I believe) of the positioning of Madonna and Martha. Cool feminist analysis that concludes "an examination of Stewart's performance of domesticated femininity reveals that she is readily appropriated by queer cultures, who welcome her as an Other figure who reinvents rigidly defined social institutions, such as the 'family' and particular holiday occasions."   (http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/viewArticle/thrift/112)

(2) (To get a complete--and I mean complete--picture of how the domestic and public spheres are not only fluid but became defined as such, check out a The Secret History of Domesticity by Michael McKeon). 

 

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Min(e)(d)

(Photo by Nadia Rej)

As a poet, I sometimes am too ambiguous. It is hard to hold a thought in "solution"--not crytallized into lock-down yet present enough to be apprehended. Indeed, today's thought is too simplified by the image. And yet. If my womb cannot be "mine"--and yes, it is and isn't in a Buddhist sense--then what hope have we of offering any freedoms to the rest of our bodie? The fear of the fascist mommy has so overwhelmed some aspect of our community politic that we fiddle with pizza while the artic burns. How much of Education is a thinly veiled attempt to wrest one final managerial muscle from the mommy? Pestalozzi idealized the mother (and needed her badly to manage his farm) and Froebel recruited her to tend his gardens.  

It is the invisible hand outside of the picture frame that is the fascist. The one that holds the knife, the pill, the tract, the photo of the embryo, the flimsily drafted law, that points the finger but refuses to lift it. Fascism begins in how we frame the womb, how we think it.

Devolution of the Solution

This picture (composed and shot by me) was a "hit" on my Facebook page.
When the expanse of the earth allowed for a different way of being peoples, many groupings called themselves "the people" and viewed other humans as less than, worse than, scarier than, or simply worthy of fierce and ongoing engagement or various kinds.  So then the solution was needed for those "other" beings-- four-legged or two legged--they were not us and therefore received the castings of our aversions and desires.  They would not go away, though, so we started trading,\; the verge became a demilitarized zone, and the solution was needed for the new arrivals, uncouth and perhaps breaking the codes. 
Then the verges clashed and meshed and empires now wax and wane like tidal flows across this swirled marble.  Ah then, wherefore the dilemma?  It is the grand notion of population--the solution is needed for those other nations as we appropriate them or they appropriate us.

So Next? We must turn to our own, as the border has been breached they are us and us are them. The solution is needed for the groupings within our groupings and social work is born.  We shall help those who are not up to spec.

But wait, there are interiors to those groupings--bodies containing oceans of being that we must harness like so much river into the Tennesee Valley Authority of our hopes and dreams.  We need your jouissance in our resevoir and so we shall counsel you...but wait!  It begins early--the answer is education!   Ah yes, channel that fiercely unfathomable being of the child into the river of our good.  The solution is education of the youth, no wait! the child and now finally the infant.  But still...the embryo!  The womb!  The eggs await our solution.  We manage eggs now--IVF and multiple births and critiques of fertility and fucking beckon to our urgent need for solution, solution solution. Back to you Mother, always back to you and your bloody flow and your interior constellation.  We pass laws and pills and judgment but cannot yet find the solution.

Solution.  It is math.  It is Hitler's final one.  It is chemistry. It is from the ancient meaning "to disperse, lose, to loosen" combined with an ancient refexive pronoun--as in myself, ourselves.   All solutions are this in the end--a losing, the solving in the dissolving.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Imagined Time

December proposal defense
and Human Subjects approval
January invite participants
Febrary 1/2 day workshop 
One full day retreat
April  1st week
Introduction and Overview of the Study
Guiding Conceptural Frameworks and Empirical Foundations 
Research Methodology and Methods
The Participants and their Insights
June 3rd follow up contact/exchange with Participants
June 30th
Analysis and Interpretations of Data
July 15th
Summary, Implications and Recommendations
August
Defend

Immanence and Experience; The Irony of Writing What Cannot Be Said

"Now worry about how this emerges from mouths
and pages.  Fret on the exact order and precision.
There is still blood, bones and ash on the
move.  Restless and subterranean vowels,
eye contact, what isn’t said and the position
of the speaker
behind the curtain—these
spin the coin of our children-- round
sweet faces--
on a distant table.


If we stutter or drift, something terrifying

settles upon the sentence:  poetry perhaps,
demanding doubt, confusion, an apprehension
of meaning that refuses to be spoken."

(me in "The Grammar of Panic" from Working in the Emptiness)

"Every ancester sleeps in our moving bodies,
mine, yours, all of us descendants...
...bulbs,
laid them gently into their cold grave socks, singing
hyacinth, tulip, narcissus, crocus.  They're dumb
as bits of coal
and descending inward. Descendant. This trap door

we drop down every day, waking, say,
to no apparent history
but a simple room: edge of windown, a shirt
flung over a high-backed chair, the absent, usual coming
of winter light." (Marianne Boruch, "Thanksgiving" in Descendant)

What the Interior Tells

What the Interior Tells--The Maeutic begins at the beginning.
How can we be Seeing Things Hidden. What's hidden is not absent--it's here, just nascent--unrevealed but operational.   So to see something important sometimes we have to peek?  Maybe we need to acknowledge a beast or two along the way, know that all stories are fiction--even the true ones.  Maybe we have to dance across territory inside ourselves that seems to have been mapped by someone else.  Maybe it's a bitter thing at times, to realize that we've been framed and the by ourselves, no less.


Here's where it gets dicey.  Why something as scary and, well, Freudian as "psychoanalytic theory"? Because we have to start with our own damn self, eh?  Modernism caught on and gave birth to twins (fraternal)--Critical theory and psychoanalytic/pyschological theory.  The U.S. has biologized the psychological in such a way as to render it either micro (cognitive studies) or macro (sociological study).  But the middle path, the third way, whatEVER you want to call it--but a way for an individual interested in reflection to inform herself about her own thinking's situation (something critical theory does offer through auto-ethnography combined with any of the critical stances one would like to apply)--it's missing.

[Sure, we're goverened largely by the presses of social context, our behaviroal hits and misses, the feedback loop of being in the mileau. But to go inside and try to find a new angle on our own thoughts?  We get shunted to religion (which I have no quarrel with but it needs translation and "bridging" into the secular world we must navigate) or the counselor (implying that only a specialist can help us with our own minds).] 

The pantheon?  A World of Fragile Things (Ruti), Gender Trouble (Butler), Practice Makes Practice (Britzman), Novel Education (Britzman), Reinventing the Soul (Ruti), The Beast in the Nursery (Phillips), The Colonization of Psychic Space (Oliver), Bitter Milk (Grumet), Empire of Signs (Barthes), Blood Orchid (Bowden), When Learned Men Murder (Patterson), The Semiotic Challenge (Barthes), More Than Cool Reason (Lakoff and Turner), Semiotics (Innis), Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff and Johnson), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Lakoff).  Hidden: Therapeutic Action (Lear), Problems of Art (Langer), Sublimation (Loewald).  Not in picture: in press book The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (Ruti),

Context--the balancing act

It's a balancing act--To situate my specific cares within a context, in this case--foundations (philosophical, sociological and political) of curriculum.  Hidden from view: The Ideology of the Aesthetic  (Eagleton) and Introduction of Semiotics (Cobley and Jansz) along with my art display in the neighboring window (see post "So much beauty...") also hidden in this picture. 

The context: (Flinders and Thornton) The Curriculum Studies Reader, Beyond Critique: Exploring critical social theories and education (Levinson et. al. including yours truly), Democracy and Education (Noddings), Duino Elegies (Rilke), Happiness and Education (Noddings), Curriculum in Abundance (Jardine, Friesen, Clifford), Theory as Prayerful Act (Macdonald), Tractacus-Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), Curriculum: a river runs through it (Reynolds), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans), a thousand plateaus (Delueze and Guattari), Philosophy of Education (Noddings), Methodology of the Oppressed (Sandoval).

Reflection Reflecting Reflectively


This is my all-time favorite picture of me.  Not me, really, of course…but this greeting card is evocative enough of a pivotal meaning for me; I’ve kept track of it for over ten years.  It is the haircut I had as a five year old. I’ve learned to respect the idea that I’m very likely researching what I cared about as a five year old.  My commitments and interests begin that far back, I’m sure; I posit they do for most of us.  Certainly psychoanalytic theory posits this--Madeleine Grumet, Deborah Britzman, Alice Pitt, Anne Phelan among others, propose that teaching and teachers can benefit from psychoanalytic ideas-- that they cannot escape them, in fact. “Impossible Profession” says Britzman of psychoanalysis but also of education.  The metaphor here?  We try to see who we are. But such work is a kind of koan--the "answer" is as much in the effort as in the vision.  Just look at the picture’s environment—an intimate place of industrial design meant to catch our waste and let us then sanitize and clean,  get a dirty job (one surrounded by all kinds of taboos and rituals) done, check ourselves in the mirror and go back into “the world.”  But what if this is the world, or, at least a world? 
Our subject's view is chancy--scaling multiple barriers. This gaze was not designed for her but she’s claiming it anyway she can. Improvising.  Can she make it?  I am amused to see that I inadvertently cut off the bottom of the picture which shows a pile of dirty towels beneath the child. (A strategy that failed?  The leftovers of others’ mess?  The intermediary step?)  Lastly: The reach of one cloth from the sideline is salient. Is this a help?  A random draping left from cleaning up? The ambiguity of it is poignant, I think.  Perhaps it’s both!  Perhaps it’s neither.  That cloth is "X" edging in from the margin and that feels freeing—like there is a way out, an after to this moment. 
The views are multiple:  my picture of this picture is a view, as well.  The frame of my office window holds up the card and the window holding the weather outside--interpreting, enhancing, disturbing and rendering (as art?) one moment in one day of one year of one life….like a snapshot, but better: a snapshot of a snapshot bridging times and places and, after all is said and done, ideas.  I like how this bad photo fades into the page in the upper right corner when place on a blank white page.  Where are the edges? 

W/F r(u)iting Tools.


 Writing Tools/Fruiting Tools Need I say more? 

Art as Philosopy as Education as Experience

So much beauty held to gether with such a thin line. Art is my immanence.  What would Wittgenstein say? It's taken me so long to get here--back to where I began. Small lights edge this randomly.  My son now 18 is a toddler in a silky nightie--he's always had strong aesthetic sensibilities.  His teacher's collage titled "In the Art Room" has always make me happy with it's depiction of all kinds of people (and their reflections and portraits) making art.  Buddha meditates in the corner with a peace crane his his lap.  Some things are hard even to paint.

Making stuff up from what's been done before and from what works for me


I should be to the methodology part. So I took a picture. Worth a thousand words? Perhaps not in the academy.

The Let Women Die bill was passed as wrote these words

Sometimes the reality of what lands on my desk is poignant beyond words.  I mistyped that as "beyond works" the first try.  Slips tell on us. Desktops, too?

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Ideas that matter become matter? Then become what's the matter.

Reification:
My waking self is a reification of my dreaming self and my dreaming self, the same? 
The umbrella is upside down and it is raining outside. For now, this is a fine state of affairs.  Later, I imagine not. But that is only an imagining, like a dream.  Lucky me--to have an umbrella, to have a rainy day.  How's your umbrella today?

Wikipedia:
Reification in thought occurs when an abstract concept describing a relationship or context is treated as a concrete "thing", or if something is treated as if it were a separate object when this is inappropriate because it is not an object or because it does not truly exist in separation....This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

With Feminisms you can't tell the time. The time keeps telling you.

You can't tell the time. Galindo is always carrying her basin of blood, leaving footprints outlining the trail from court to bank to school to jail to home to town square.  When will we let Her free?

Early Childhood Care and Education radicalized me

The fanstasy of bootstraps has become a nightmare of ensnarement. How often do I say, when struggling, "what bad luck I've had" or conversely "what a messed up person I am"?  How often do I say, when revelling in well-being "Isn't it good I worked so hard for this?" Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and a crying into the wind. (Ecclesiaties)  There's more in this picture than meets the eye. Can it meet our heart?

Friday, October 14, 2011

The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge

The book's title says a lot.  It's a big book, too--858 pages, some of which I've read.  What mood is here?  Which objects speak the loudest, for you?  It's a bit busy.  But then, so is domesticity.

All Education is Elegaic


When I first posted this, I called it Literary Hedgehog All Out of Time.  Now I actually think it would be a better picture with only half of the sand run down.  What would you title this one?  And where should the sand be?

Right now Occupying Wall Street--gambles made/lost. A "son" Occupies Bloomington.



You can't roll a 7 with one die, eh?  Nest on its side on a widowsill overlooking the trees where hawks circle daily.  My nest empties out.  I'm still rolling.  What about you?