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Here I stand, being, explaining who and that I am, and pleading my case: I am, I need, I want, I will, I will-not, I must; I seek.

The who I talk to, the you, the them…here we all are pleading, each his own case, each her own way, to the judges of days and times. The who I talk to, you, you hear me, hoping I will hear you; and I do, or I do not.

How much do I hear if my own ground is infirm, if I cannot find my judges’ vision? How much - if I need and want, need and want, need and want? Pleading my own case, now shouting, now whining and wheedling, I am homo politicus, and I am nothing beyond what I want and need, want and need.

How much can I hear if my own case, neither firm nor infirm, sits upon a bargain of my being with yours? Gathered together in some small plot of mutual existence, we are tied in some awesomely complicated fashion, into haggling, bargaining for…for myself, for your self; barely separable with boundaries of cottonwool and diffuse airs. Do I plead better when I state your case; or my own?

How to become the judges of our own vision’s progress, the upward looking critic of my judging, a judging of myself that you may judge yourself well, that you can judge me well, that we can be better and stronger in tomorrow’s resolve…and today’s doing.

I hate being taken: being taken for the jerk I occasionally am; taken for a dope, a dupe. I used to get angry, try to wreak revenge, seek retribution, until I heard my beloved say so clearly that I couldn’t avoid hearing: that the only blame that hurts, that really smarts, is the aura of self-destruct and her-destruct; that vengeance hits the air and gets reflected back into one’s self as if the world were a deliberate mirror. I could lie, rant and rave, and threaten, and curse curses, but I would do nothing!
The other day, I read a review written by a dupe. For twenty years or more he had been taken, willingly, I’ll bet. And the winds of time blew time’s ghost from pillar to the post of…a new crowd; a new insight, a next in-crowd, this cynic’s pleasure-displeasure at watching last year’s stars trying to maintain their arc in public view, when the winds change. Now, duped; now, a confessional; now, a new theory from his new camp. What’s new? A new metaphor. You don’t like the old one - try a new one! Before it was the computer as a metaphor for the brain; now it’s the brain as a metaphor for the mind: next it’ll be…
Dupe! Dope! “Should I write a letter? I wrote a letter.” Do I criticize him, his conversion, his recanting, his re-telling his re-thinking? No. I use his plight to attempt to understand my own. I used to be too young, too eager, too much in a hurry. Now, my own dupe, I have too much to confess to my self’s hearing, to worry him about his…

“Let’s define this clearly,” rings and rings in my inner senses as a teacher…but it seems all…wrong.

Say what “it” is: its parts, the whole, relationships; beginnings and the end!

Some sense, resonating still from Plato and ancient times, that clarity in definition is clarity in thinking is clarity into the truth of the world.

I, always a pedant assigning grades to everyone, want to forestall the definitions that seem to set every problem; clearly, certainly - as if we can always state what “it” is.

The world seems more complicated than mere naming or saying or thinking this is always so very clear. My students tempt me, dare me perhaps to say what “it” is. So I ask them broader questions like where we are, who are they, what time in history is this: questions which become unclear the moment they try to define them; defy more than define.

Background, context, is it even clear who their teacher is? Name, yes! Professor, the (as)signer of their syllabus. But, I as their teacher? A study in being…together. Any sense of towardness; toward their futures? Don’t definitions tend to enhance the past at the cost of the importance of the future (and the present)?

So much early effort, arriving at some apparent consensus, too early: before they know one another, too early in thinking, too gullible, too easily attached to remembering the premature definitions. Then…proceeding to bypass understanding through the filter of that definition. Or reject the definition, and adopt what seems to be its opposite. No more talk; except to talk. No more discussion; only mere discussion; surface. No depth, nor any sense that there is much deeper to go, or what paths we might embark on, or the various contexts in which any thing or idea arises.

“But, but,” I sputtered, still sputtering in its rethinking like Jacque Tati’s auto, foundering upon a chosen road, until it sputters off upon some other map of its own resolve. “But, we already agree on a host of things: we are here together, we all got here, we are here sitting with some rules of conduct and mutual treatment of where we are and how we got here and the why’s of our lives. Let’s find out who we are before we

cut life out of our definitions!”

Too easy, too liable to cut-off the paths of thinking which open minds to opening ideas to other minds, to…No, no definitions. Wonder, awe, surprise - out of these we will talk together. Teacher, students, who are we? Argue, debate, scream if we must. Clarity not in definitions, but a pursuit, a striving to be distilled from all the resonances of all the talk; near the end, upon rethinking, toward knowing, toward resolving, toward tomorrow, toward more meaning in our lives.

Definitions: more an end than a beginning.

…he asked me, that you don’t find the kinds of teacher you espouse, for which you are looking?” I looked up at him; quizzically, I thought.

Beyond disappointment, I thought there were some around, of those who taught well and inspired. By now, I understood and understand that teaching is too difficult for very long, except for the strongest to bear. Where, then, to look, to search? How much of my own time to devote to these explorations in the realities of every day? How to deal with the experiences of isolation which the teacher-I-am has to endure?

I found them many of those for whom I was searching in the texts and ideas of all of time: in the books, in the writings, in the history of how we got here. Augustine trained teachers and created the church which has endured for almost two millennia; and I have him, his thoughts and writings, in my house and in my office, and in my mind, and in my being. He is very present in my thoughts, so alive that I can talk and walk with him. And Plato, who thought and talked sitting down, and his student, Aristotle, who talked and thought while walking around; I have them, as well. Confucius, Aesop, the ancients. The seers and oracles and shamans of other cultures, they, too, are now available; at least in books, and in my active thoughts.

And the moderns who have shaped our thinking…? Maybe it is that I have already swallowed whatever the tears of my disappointments, thinking that tears should not be shed upon the ground of life. I wish to meet all the teachers of the world who live still, now that I can attempt to grapple with their concepts and histories, now that I am thoughtful and full of sufficient knowledge. Disappointed?

Disappointment: a concept that middle age cannot sustain and reach its own beyond.

It begins on the first day of teaching, now entering my thoughts as the new school year approaches…so rapidly. The course to come will be splendid, the best ever: I feel so “sharp,” so ready to espouse/spout the truth to come!

I note all the students sitting there, not merely at ease, or with various sorts of questioning appearances. Rather they are mostly staring at me, “their” teacher; rather staring “through me” looking to see…what, who? Am I, can I ever be, who they want somehow to penetrate; to be…?

In those instants, beyond the talk which I talk of the course to come, I wonder who they are, who they see in me. And who am I, runs so rapidly in my being, that I find it difficult – so difficult to grasp my own “presence” – and remain the teacher I would be, even as I am anthropologist to them and to my own being.

Writing in response to Christopher Kelty’s post on Savage Minds about Experimental Philosophy (x-phi), I am pleased, perplexed, pensive… I have lived (still do!) the life of the Anthropologist who would be doing philosophy, and imagine that we might one day find each other. Soon?! Maybe.

Trained principally, to study language and behavior and sociality/culture, I begin by including “myself” in the study of anyone’s language, culture, thought…Who am I, where am I, how did I get here, how to be the “measurer” of all things?

As a self-proclaimed “Anthropologist of the Ordinary,” I understand the temptations to study the “exotic,” but note that the ordinary human is much more exotic than we have noted. The human body which exists in the world with others’ bodies (the Pragmatism of G.H. Mead inserts itself into this approach) is a brilliant and ongoing piece of work, that we seem to want to underestimate as some derivative of the idea of mind.
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A young man, an honor’s student, bright, quick, a kind of smartness which had sought the facts which stood in the place of knowledge, squeezing out wisdom, who said that we were the first teachers he had had whose age and experience seemed important. The world of teaching become technique impresses itself upon the young as some sense of energy, which the teachers possessed in greater abundance.

The older seemed not wiser; just older. The older, tired, worn, their lives as teachers many years beyond the hold on knowledge they had themselves gotten in the schoolings of their youth. Knowledge, itself, older, tired, lacking…We, older, still seeking and searching. Older, we came upon some synergy which hinted of wisdom, of so many year’s experience in dealing with the minds of students that a hint of talk revealed the landscapes of their inner minds, heretofore hidden, even from themselves.

We, older, trying every day in every way to understand the what of what we study, sense the growth and growing lengths of the paths by which we got to here, musing that all of this is not so clear and not so obvious to the young who have no experience with experience.

Where am I? Where are we? When is now? How did we get here? Where might we be going? How would we know; or think about the paths upon which we have embarked?

The technical mind, looking out at a world which it wants to work, wants to know how…and now. How to do this or that, better, more efficiently, and with the least cost?

I said, read, think. Read the masters, the great minds. They set the problems, framed the questions, the visions which we call common sense. Their believers, followers celebrated and granted continuity to those claims and understandings.

It is a view of a reality which we think is the great reality. The response: lacking history or intellectuality and wanting, instead of ideas, some notion of proof that it will convince, and show us what and how to do…”To do what”, I asked. “Why”, I asked. “The world is not so well,” she replied. “It must be made to work better. I want, how I want, to make it work better; soon, now!”

“Work; better?” I mused. To keep idlers busy? To make us strong, rich? Because there is something so wrong with indolence that its cure must be sought? Are you doomed to be, but not to live? Hungry, desperate…to do?

Lacking history, lacking some sense of why and what, but only how, she accepts uncritically some sense of doing which her experience of the present turns into the ways of the world. Is living in the immediacy sufficient? For what? For whom?

I “told” a friend that he was in serious trouble: “on an edge,” I said. I had tried to “help” him before, to get him to take care of himself, to get some help from a knowledgeable source, to pay some serious attention; all to no avail. Perhaps it all had the opposite result. I had become a kind of conscience for him, I had thought, but really, it seems, for me. Earlier, some years ago, another friend got into trouble with drugs and alcohol, but I didn’t know that in a clear way, and went along with his gradual erosion, taking his word, his interpretation, as if it were factual…knowing better. I said nothing because I had not asked the hard questions, which were not so plainly obvious but not so obscure. I was not his conscience, did not say or ask, and watched him fall into an unsatisfactory death. It lies, still, upon my mind, uneasily like a queasy stomach. So this time, with this fellow whose gluttony is past control and just beyond belief, I tried to say in some penetrating way what I thought. Having said it all before, having talked the sickness unto death, I decided to change tactics, to reverse grounds, to not talk, to become some ultimate conscience, by setting our friendship in the limbo of silence. Now, a little later, having broken that silence, having apologized, having declared that I did what I did out of love, not out of malice, having forgiven both of us to whatever extent that is possible, I wonder where virtue resides between the persons who embody our lives.