The blessings and curses of technology, whether we applaud or despair, need to be understood. Especially important is what technology does to our thinking, our consciousness, relations to others and to ourselves. While we may think of robotics and computers or satellites as the current metaphor for what is high-tech, the fact is that ordinary concepts such as the idea of history, how we listen, how we judge beauty and age and the quality of life, are heavily influenced by technology.

Technology, in my view, is what extends the human body. Obvious technology, like the telephone, extends us beyond this place, outside of what is here, beyond the visual and auditory range of ordinary experience. The accompanying fact of human experience is that we do not talk to one another in the same space. “Telephonese” is a special language by which we imagine one another visually, believing that there is someone on the other end. The result is that we create a social network which stands outside of the communities of those with whom we live and work.

Obvious technology, such as writing, takes some dynamic stuff such as talk, which is a muscular vibration of air waves, and makes it appear to be permanent; outside of the time of talk, outside of you talking to me. Writing permits us to talk to everyone, even to those who are not yet born. Before writing, in the pre-literate human society from which we derive, the notion of history was also negotiated through actual people, and their memories of others, up to five generations.

Now, with writing, we have actual records of several thousand years from some here-and-now of experience, to eras, to eons, to foreverness. With photography, we have two-dimensional images of what the three-dimensional. With movies and video, we create actuality out of 35mm and video, HD, and we relate to the community of others by means of movies and television.

Sitting alone or alone in theaters with others around us, we relate to some general stories or concepts. Now with some history of movies and of videos we can study the nature of aging, and be thrust into history through the power of visuality. We see through lenses, see by artificial light, and sleep when it suits us – not when the sun goes down. We listen to radios and stereos, amazed sometimes by what we hear, but we are not sufficiently amazed to study electronics.

We do not often remember that our music is all played on high-tech instruments: that the violin string is ordinarily under several hundred pounds of tension, that the modern violin bow is not so very old. Having been 35,000 feet in the air, traveling at speeds 100 times faster than our bodies can move, we have seen the earth from afar, and it has changed our vision!

As long as our bodies seem relatively still, we do not thrill to the speeds of cars, trains or planes. Yet they have altered the size and scope of the earth. We can now imagine the entire globe, but we do not have very good ways of imagining all of its peoples. We thrill more to the animals of the natural kingdom, and seem to worry more about “all” the world’s people.

Technology: wonderful, musical. Real as the pen that I use to write, and the glasses through which I look to see. Sitting here alone, I abstract from my experience to yours, and we meet in the courting of the printed symbols, to remake them into our minds’ workings. We are together in some sense of understanding, and increasingly alone in our experience.

Here we are: all together alone.

A cold, alien chill shoots up our spines. What chill, what alien that it is a chill, frightening, threatening being? How, alien? Who am I that something not me can enter being, unwanted, unwelcome?

The body, full of spots of hot and cold and not so hot and less than cold, is alive. Food we take in our mouths becomes thermal energy, reconstructed by the body to provide heat against the colds of day and night, animating us, we move and think and be. What colds, what hots are us; which alien?

Alien? Alien! Some external notion, ever suspected or thrust away? Persons, sickness, retches, the colds of total shiverings, all me? What alien? What me? Some feelings of body I read and like. Others I don’t seem to like? Me? Alien?

Who I am, who am I not? Other persons: bodies, minds, they affect me, taking over thoughts, creating desires, fears, angers, loss of concentration. I want…I don’t…want. What edges, where is the me which is not anyone else? What love, what hate…them, my self?

Mothers’ work! All of us, all our flesh conceived by others, still imagined. The me I love, the me I love less, not so separate.

The me I am, the me which is other which is else, spinning webs of self-trap, imagining that I am hermitted in life. What family, what friends, where does love begin and fear end? What is lust, sickness, that I fear my own feelings and call them alien?

Kill the aliens; kill the fear?

The problem: my chill and rear.

The solution…?

Attending the first of a series of meetings with the general title of “aspects…” I was alarmed at once by the lack of thought and study which had preceded it, and by the sense that the organizers thought they were engaged in doing something which would surely shake the earth. Some of the best and weightiest of minds had grappled with this area of inquiry and of life’s experiences, and here some lighter weights sought to exert and to insert their presence onto the world’s literatures.

I, a mostly outsider, mostly hoping to find some thought and talk, showed up a few minutes early. The room, a chemistry lecture hall which rises from about the sixth row, was virtually empty except for the two gatherers and a few others. A silly sense of consternation reigned, especially since the organizers had expected a full house based on a previous discussion series a few years earlier, on the subject of “Structuralism.”

They had wanted – it appeared – a full room, rather than the most interested, possibly most thoughtful half dozen. Even unprepared they wanted to play in a large arena, as if their mere presence and selfness would carry the day.

After several minutes of re-forming, a geologist talked about aspects of change, geologically speaking. The talk, well-prepared and delivered, talked about geology as a theory of change, itself. It was quite straight-forwardly descriptive. It was not informed by any such theory out of some deep and I sense hopefully mystical sense of what is change which seemed to lurk in the organizers’ wonderings.

The organizers, hoping that some theory of theory of theory would emerge, seemed disappointed, but capable of being informed. Left with the problem, not of change, but of publicizing the series, they will regroup and look for larger audiences.

I, inspired somehow by an underlying spirit of the meeting that the problems associated with change are central to most everything, swallowed my cynicism and became curious. It was this experience which moved me toward the study of Heraclitus who thought “all is change,” and toward the idea that the paradox of change and permanence are central to most everything else…

The end of a long summer’s drought, a seemingly gentle rain woke me early. Steady fall, the love of the sound, like ocean’s washings lulling my sensibilities. Now, a year past the mundane worries of new roof’s imperfections, my mind is given over to the morning’s review of my recent world, much filled with life’s major events: marriage, sickness, impending death of some older members of my family.

Rain steady, the backdrop to a Vivaldi string sonata melding as planned into the droplets: gently wavering. Now, teaching, a telling to a group of world students, who is the great behemoth of the West; where we may be heading. A love of teaching…to those who want to understand. This year, a clear resentment that we are involved, even deeply responsible for: the world’s killings, for some sense of injustice, for increasing terror and terrors – all in the name of justice.

Rain, like lullabies driving me by easy steps, into a wondering about life’s visions: for me, you, all of us, and in what name? What God; what gods, of life, of death, I keep thinking that we are telling ourselves to betray some trust, sacred in the hands of humanity. Rain, steady, bringing to my mind words like: inevitable, fate, destiny. These thoughts, usually more harsh, ebb and flow with the loves of being and of being, with you.

A rainy day, soon to take a long walk around the lake of my city’s living, abandoned to the very few who will love with me, the sound, the wet, the fogs of rain-altered vision.

Big words claim too much attention (Joubert).

In high school, a Freshman English teacher whom I remember mostly for her protruding teeth and slightly sardonic teaching mode, talked frequently about little words and big words, placing a pseudo-monetary value upon them: one-dollar words, five, then twenty, up maybe to fifty-dollar words.

I wanted, I recall, to know them all, ordinary to obscure, simple to elegant. But I hated using a too-big word when a cheaper one would do as well. A question of who I am, of audience, of a too-cheap impression, a trying to take on a mantle of faked elegance, where ordinary seemed more genuine? A friend, I remember, now a physician-professor at an important university, used the highest priced word he could find to do the job. I felt jolted, cheated, trying to make something appear better than it was, the words overtaking the content, the form calling loudly: “Here I am!”

I, who have spent much time with words: translating, writing, reading Thesaurus’ entries moving from one skein to others, want the words to do the job, to work, to attract, to scream even when screaming is useful – or necessary. But too big words proclaim themselves, stand out, want to be re-read, repeated, to grow…

Big words: claim too much attention.

Aha! What you see is hardly me. I walk in certain spheres and people see this middle-aged man, which is me, yet not me.

In fact, in some places, like hospitals and colleges people say hello to me as if I am someone they know and have known. I fit, somehow, right now, smack in the middle of some stereotype that people have for what I should look like, and I do – to them. And so they say hello to me as if they knew me and know me. And I say hello back, as if it is precisely natural and correct. The appearance, the I to whom they say hello, is not exactly the I who thinks ‘I am.’ So some sinner, I, shrug and remain polite, and do not challenge, saying, “You don’t know me, really.” And I feel a bit peculiar.

Closer to home, the where of where I live, where I am known in deeper actuality, I am seen as an appearance which is more closely dialectical. The ‘who’ you see, my dears, is me, almost. Some residue, some particular strangeness in me, alone almost, is the eye which is not. A plastic disc, iris painted in the detail which was the me when it was new some years ago, is the eye into which you pierce, looking for my soul. What looks back is no more than a moistened reflection of the ambience of the room’s light.

Where I am, then, in the midst of all this looking? I see very clearly, that you see the I you think I am. For me, you see, the fact of my experience is my reality.

Carlos Castaneda said – somewhere – that the most difficult thing in life is in believing what is happening in the moment; in this moment.

Both as participants in our lives and observers of it, we all live in two modes, each with its own sense of being and of time.

Unless we sense the context, know the script of what is going on, then we stand aside, watching. Like the watchful m/other when her infant is asleep, our observing self is content beyond the time of doing.

This is usually useful, because the world of happenings and doings and occurrences is mundane; almost a sleepwalking, once we know who we are and where we have been.

Occasionally, however, something happens at a distance, or in the background, and we fail to report it to ourselves because we don’t believe it; because we are not in its time, in our own time of each moment’s doing.

We live entranced, captivated by our selves’ observers, playing out its particular surety, not noticing and…Not believing what it does not see exactly. Not seeing because one self’s observer is already committed to one’s own belief.

Life is like a course of lectures, the observer seeking the content of each lecture; no longer noting what is a lecture, nor yielding life to any thought behind the lecturer’s presentation.

These happenings which we do not note, what happens to them? Do they bump our observers’ eye, push however gently at our life’s constellations?

Do we wake up some day to find our selves outside of…ourself?

Should we struggle to see and to believe what it is we see, in each moment…and if we do…?

When I (we) was young, maturity seemed like some end-point toward which…Adulthood a place which possessed its own knowledge and meaning which would become somehow obvious; achieving, falling-into this state.

For more than twenty years we took on the mantles of parenthood, thinking it was grown-up and adult, perhaps in contrast to our children who were small, needed care and guidance, and… who then grew-up.

All these outward facets of being adult have passed. We are here, now alone, now without the others to tell: yet consultants, friends, but not as adults to anyone, certainly not to ourselves.

What will be next – post-adult – beyond the imagination of becoming mature, a category whose outline blurred; what occupation, what place in the world, what to do, who and how to be?

Past-adulthood: a time to re-think, to re-consider; new problems, new notions of activity, a more powerful sense of boredom with more time, shelter no longer a house, where is there to be “at home?”

In an article which appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, (“Waiting for Goffman” – by Michael Dirda -Sept. 17, 2010), I got excited, reminiscent; wondering about Goffman… as well as about myself.

Wondering how we study the human these days, I currently find myself wandering more into socio-political arenas (given these “interesting times”), than “merely” trying to describe and understand the world. But I’ve spent so many years trying to “see and study” the human in our most…basic terms: e.g., the human body – socially, developmentally, interacting, ageing, being and seeing others, and or via ourselves. (“Body Journals,” “Foundations Project,” “Language and Human Nature.” And I think I’ve “exhausted” those subjects.

Dirda “gets off” on Goffman’s magnificent prose, but also on the depth and breadth of his observations: as Goffman tried to explore the world as “an ethnographer of small entities.” As I now refer to myself as an “anthropologist of the Ordinary” – I relate very well to the title and ideas behind the first book: “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” – a most expansive framing of the worlds in which we all wander, but… exploring who we are “behind” our public persona.

Goffman was “some kind” of Sociologist-Anthropologist who wrote beautifully, and was one of the best-ever observers of various persons interacting in varying circumstances.

And he was my “big brother”. Big brother, because we were/are heavily influenced by the same teacher-person: Ray Birdwhistell (who doesn’t show up in Dirda – but he always was the primary base for Erving’s and my thinking about… most everything. Birdwhistell who Goffman met at the U. of Toronto; me, somewhat later at SUNY Buffalo – he was our primary teacher, model, incite/insight/excite: the “best observer” I ever met. Similarly for Goffman.

Birdwhistell sent us both to U. of Chicago where we fell under the thinking of various practitioners of “Symbolic Interaction” deriving from G. H. Mead, whose ideas seem now to be “creeping” back into a field which has practically been overtaken by Sociobiology and/or by Neuropsychology and other psychologies which don’t pay much attention to the interactional-social facts of our very being.

Dirda’s celebratory piece is excited by Goffman, and wonders why he has mostly “disappeared” from public view after a good, long run in Sociology, and currently in some parts of Comparative Literature.

Well: the history of ideas and academic power overtook Birdwhistell, and then myself. I’ve been trying to revive and extend Goffman and Birdwhistell’s ideas> (Plus, Birdwhistell was the best observer I’ve ever met – in many circumstances… all of human… life.)

While Goffman “enjoyed” quite great success, his teachers and little brother got “wiped out” in what I call the Chomskyan “revolution” in ideas – where the study of the human got displaced (still is) by the notion that the human being is centrally a mind/thinker, not a body in such complex interactions.

Goffman who was finally a “university professor” at Penn, was able to “rescue” Birdwhistell and got him a position there after he was “let-go” from his study of human-interaction at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute as support for these studies just “went away” and our careers much diluted.

The famous humanistic writer confessed that it was only last year that he bought an electric typewriter, his first movement in the direction of high(er) technology. He wasn’t hostile, he said, merely inept.

A mere inept, merely inept, the words and concepts run around in my mind’s conjurings, wondering what this comment represents: a confessional that he is famous and yet not good at the manufactured things in life? – an olive branch to the technology that has accelerated faster than he has been able to realize because he has been busy being a literary critic and the social times he criticizes are running with him, at his pace? – a mere statement because he does not do all of what he might, and we might, expect?

No mere inept. I ponder what this means, berate my self that I do not know all technologies, am tempted to dismiss this statement with a scoffing, scathing, muttering, sneering at the words in some stretching-out which conveys the contempt I think I should have – “meeere in-eept”: merely, merely; in-ept, inept!

A sudden sadness that the possibilities of knowing all there is, has evaporated from anyone’s life’s realities. I try to forgive myself; no mere inept, my fingers grasp this stem of black plastic holding metal ball screeching over paper depositing some substance, writing in lines which have gained meaning, writing which was invented, a technology of not so very long ago, to be placed upon a word processor full of plastics and refined metals and chips and connections and… A mere inept, twenty books later, pondering upon the times.

His theater, no mere inept, takes us to so many places that we are persuaded to take him at face value…

I have, I possess – I am told – a good voice for radio. Deep, resonant, full of an authority and depth which has replaced the phlegm of years spent in the smoker’s abyss.

Usually this idea of a good radio voice makes no sense to me. Talking, using my voice, it sounds regular, ordinary; just me. Listening to a recording of me, I sound, well, somewhat whiney: too much variation, a kind of uncoolness and too many edges of raucousness; rawness, maybe.

Years of practice, teaching in different classrooms; exploring, modulating have moved my voice down to what others hear as good, convincing, correct.

Sometimes when I record for a weekly program, especially when I am alone, I try to listen as I speak, hearing as others must hear with a feeling for style, a quality of voice which can convey…strength, truth, a belief in itself?

A slight relief. Temperature climbs to 15 degrees Fahrenheit…above zero. A month and more below zero Centigrade. Worse to think Centigrade: life is always below zero. Here, below zero F, hurts faces, burns feet, telling us that there is no heat here. The sun, brilliant, cold as the winds blowing on facial tissues, causing tears to freeze, noses to run like sieves that freeze on my moustache like the winter monster who tells most birds to go South…they listen!

Yesterday, walking through the city, snow piled high hiding large dogs perambulating. At each corner we walked up not so small hills between streets clasped in sand-browned ice and sidewalks packed in still white snow.

We crossed the several tracks of railroad yards which house, these days, only wrecks to be repaired, and tramped over hillocks into city woods where imaginations imagine a forest of depth, the slight deception disproven by packed path of skiers and walkers who sought the same scene, break upon the clearing into lakescape’s wind driven snow packs seeming so cold in the lowest rays of winter’s sun, bathed in light, steeped in strong shadows, sit down on bench thinking of the spring and summer and fall, all leading back to such depth of winter that we can sit there only for a few moments.

Snuggled in layers of cloth and felt, we stayed almost warm, walking in the deep of deepest winter.

Trying to understand a large, even huge, thinker or set of ideas – in each next moment. A quick study!

A person – me, for example – who (tells oneself) that I can absorb so much…quickly.

A framework for thinking well in mind, some precise or particular set of issues, questions posed, poised to be answered as…when or how…they must arise. Jump-in!

Some questions take so long to understand that their study seems to go on forever before they can even be addressed. Others do not reveal themselves and one can only guess that there are points of view, perspectives, visions, experiences, denial which underlies talk and words. A quick study fallen over the edges of possibility?

A quick study: a sense, a review, a reputation that causes me to transform thought that I may understand…in just a few minutes…or may not. I am, I do, a quick study! Am I a quick study?

Quick studies are like mirrors which reflect on me; reflect what is known already. They urge me to tell myself what I know that I do not truly know; that the logic of thinking has begun; that the words have substitutes which I will find quickly, so a quick study will fill them in.

For others or in other moments, however, with no framework, no articulated logic, no substitutes – only blanks and spaces – a quick study reveals only the emptiness of what is a study, and of the person who merely wants to swallow all of knowledge without taking a breath.

I like the idea of being (called) a humanist. I try to interpret and understand the notions of humanism and being a humanist through the outlook of being a writer-teacher.

I believe that all humans are a part, each an aspect of this world in physical and conceptual senses. I attempt to take the ideas of the human condition which all of us have thought out, and get them into the minds and lives of everyone’s todays and tomorrows.

I do not merely reject spirituality or whatever visions through which life is seen and lived, but I am sure that life’s problems must be thoughtfully considered, and new analyses applied to new times.

I don’t like everything about anyone, least of all myself. It is not my wish to make anyone feel good merely by playing with their moods. Rather, I wish to praise their confidence in being able to deal with the world as it is, and will be.

I study them as persons like myself, also urged to write and teach and study, trying to walk with them and their ideas as they would peruse today’s world.

I need a great deal of privacy and down-time to absorb what is happening in some constant epochal battles with being in the world. I like to live in the words and minds and ideas of the world’s great writers, thinkers and doers. Thus, I deal in the lives and words of persons who are mostly now dead; whose words, ideas, and products such as books and musical texts have survived. I study them to see how and why they have survived, to see what and how they said, attempting to place myself in their thoughts and times; and bring them in ours.

I play their music in order to discover what they have written in it.

All this I try to tell to others, and especially to urge their own studies that it may become a useful part of their own lives. I like the idea of being a humanist, and want these ways of being and thinking to live actively and thoughtfully in our lives: toward visions of the future.

Via Curriculum Studies— Henry Giroux on Freire’s Lessons for Now!
Dec 1, 2010 … Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich. Tuesday 23 November 2010. by: Henry A. Giroux, …

Henry Giroux has been really ranting lately, inspired by Paulo Freire’s work and thinking: especially “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” – and especially the “political” understanding of education in these times of politics bending toward money and power… and control of students’ thinking.

I mostly agree… but a good bit of Freire has disappeared in the name of politics being overtaken by economic analyses and control of the very nature of education.

Education in the Western world – perhaps most especially – is being attacked by the rich and lovers of the rich – who oppose the public schools, the teachers who tend to find solace and power in unions, life tenure, pensions, and all. Charter Schools, private schools. Blah! On public schools and on the public.

Even most liberals (Obama…so far anyway) have gone for control of teachers and teaching, supporting “No Child Left Behind” – presumably as ways to “success” for students. Do what I/we tell you, and how we tell you, and…!

Giroux’ hero – rightfully, but for at least some different reasons – has been Freire whose book has sold well over a million copies. But his ideas continue to be fragmented by the would-be powers – and his “methods” of education, particularly “dialogue” have apparently yielded to the anti-politics of Giroux invocating money – now controlling politics. “Critical pedagogy” is Giroux’s Freireian term for what is missing increasingly in the current war for our future: thinking and being.

Freire would get (especially poorer) students to study and understand the power and motivations which got them educated effectively to prolong and promote the power of the few – by not attending to the “banking” and “telling” methods which the rich and powerful imposed on most students.

“Learn what I tell you!” Never mind contexts and methods which effectively keep most students in their “proper” places: learn what I tell you – never mind the fact that I-the-teacher – am guarding the status quo by convincing you that this is “way” of the world – no questions asked. Just learn what I tell you, as efficiently as possible. It’s all politics… but the politics remain “hidden” and y’all don’t ask no questions! The world of the powerful remains “distant” and effectively hidden to the students. Increasingly efficient!

So much to agree with – especially in these times of attacks on schooling, teachers – especially as so many education systems of other countries seem much more “successful” than ours.

But much, so deep, is left-out… omitted from this particular if not exactly narrow analysis. Particularly people, persons – everyone: teachers and students – have no clear “presence” in this world. Presence: persons, thoughtful, development of the very nature of clarity over the course of the entire course, so it can enter students’ being… perhaps especially after the course is “over.”

Here I’m quoting Freire – who I invoke in my book and course: “Teaching as Dialogue.” Freire’s major way-out of the power-pinch is Dialogue. And most of the educators who Freire-ise education invoke the term: but apparently only a few of us seriously explore and apply dialogue in our teaching-being.

I want to “touch” the futures of my students – I would love to be “remembered” as “inspiring” their futures. But much about “me” – a person – much about them being and becoming who they would be. Mostly the Freireians don’t seem to be “present” – strong, memorable… characters…who “remain” some places in “their” students’ ongoing thinking.

(Can I be remembered, have power without being very “oppressive” in their thinking? Am I “good enough” to deserve having some presence in their lives? Or is this just a “different” route to power and control from the past: more than inspiring “my” students to study and develop their own personal framings of… power and control.) Whew! (If Socrates only realized that his idea of dialogue was always to know all the “answers” to his question-ing!)

So: enough to begin/continue the study of Freire, amidst the facts of his being still inspiring me, most days as I teach, and am a teacher. Growing with my memories and appreciations of his work and thinking.

But a “true” dialogue? – a lifetime pursuit… and then some.

Why do so many teachers invoke their anti-politics, even as they (don’t find themselves) don’t enrich their own teaching in the practicings of dialogue?

One day an elitist, another a maverick: what do these terms of exclusion mean that I am to understand, to change and mend the ways of my life? As a sum they say I am not right, not like I ought to be. They do not ask me who I am, or why, but hint that it would be better if I were…like them? like they think I should be?

The other day, I was labeled, called: a maverick. A maverick? Someone who doesn’t do what the others do, who should be as they are and say they are, some one who is in dissent, behaviorally but not intellectually; a renegade, an insider who wants out, an outsider who wants in?

But what is “in?” Who controls the definition, the majority opinion? Why not me? Because I am a maverick! Do I not act right, think about what they think thinking’s objects are? Have I changed so that they think I used to conform; have they changed so that they think I ought to conform? Or is it that they think I do not want what they consider desirous?

My self? I am a seeker after what there is. If I am a maverick, it is to all of life. A seeker, a wonderer… And, in my most secret places, I note: They didn’t used to comment on who I am not; perhaps this is to be seen as grudging progress?!

Yesterday, for the first time, I looked out the windows of my new office; looking out upon the Great River flowing downstream past the East Bank University, a scene of tranquility and beauty – from that distance.

The eastern sky, blue, looking forward to winter’s late dawn over white frozen river’s flowing, and brilliant morning sun. People, Lilliputian from my eighth floor view, reduced to manageable dimensions; I find pleasure in the vision of distance and the distance of vision.

I wonder, now, how that will be: whether I can enlarge vision to fill the conceptual immensity of deep river’s gorge; whether I will ponder anew the riddles of Heraclitus’ flux upon river’s surface or within its current, flowing; whether the frozen aspects of winter will cast my thoughts into some capriciousness, yearning for activity or for inaction; whether I will get lost, searching among the clouds of season’s beings and changings, for the other sides of this globe; whether my mind will drift beyond the beyond I look out upon, into the vastness of being and imagination?

We got to have lunch, yesterday, with a famous man of our time: a mystic whom some regard as the most intelligent on earth today. Peculiarly, this is his home town where his family still resides. Unbeknownst to us, this man’s brother happened to be sitting near us, and at the end of his lunch came to sit with us. (He could have known we were to be there…).

He, the brother, the younger, had rejected his older brother’s way in life – an acid-freak hippy, in today’s parlance. And he asked who we were that we had brought his brother to this Temple of Rationality, the University. When he heard who we were, colleagues in some sense, he asked me who his brother is, and why we had brought him there…where he no longer seemed to belong or to fit. I answered, telling brother about brother: not what he did, not what he is, but what is his importance, how his work and thinking had influenced ours, and what that work is.

Somehow, I think convincingly, I translated the mystic into the rational (the probably mystical into the apparently rational), telling the doubting, the rejecting brother, who the other is, in terms which made new sense. My other friends, sensing the privacy of a privileged conversation, turned away and could not watch us. I, the translator, I the broker, now of brother to brother…a magical moment. (John and David Lilly)

Why do you want to…join American Studies? What should the field be? What about pedagogy? America? Courses? Outlooks? A quizzing, an inquiry, a testing and a trying-out. An hour and a quarter, until the “Literature” contingent broke for their commuter buses (or a drink?), I was asked, pushed, pulled, cajoled, enticed, challenged…

To be privileged, to tell the world what is America, I thought that was good and wanted to do it more. An experiment, noble, I became a kind of patriot, wanting it to last. The world has changed, and our place within it. The Great Cultures, the isolated and primitive, are all now partaking of urban life; the world wants translation and interpretation. This is what I do.

The study of the city – problematizing and exoticizing what is ordinary; taking the bookish-bound beyond the edges of the pages of their texts to see and note the odyssey upon which they are bound. What, who, how…doubled back upon the city’s people(s); their seeing, seeing themselves seeing…How I hear, what I try to see…a seeing, a hearing!

Next day’s flitting doubts race through mentality’s self-wishings and wonder how wise this is to try to sell myself as if I were a believer and practitioner, and one of “them.”

{…almost any ordeal to get new material?}

Arguments, debates take place in ways which defy my understanding. A current debate on the nature-nurture controversy occurs between an old man who is some sort of turncoat, directed against the work of a now-dead woman, which she had done many years ago when she was very young.

The debate had caught-on, at least for a while, exciting those who want their own arrogance massaged, who suspect that others they do not like are inferior in some natural sense, leaving themselves superior in some natural sense. But why – in this context? Why – about the work of a young girl whose impressions may have been guided by some presumptions about the possibilities of the human condition? Why against M. Mead?

Well, she had become famous, the mother of the world, the oracle of oracles who would address all human problems and keep the lid on the world’s dangers. She did not address problems within a clearly intellective context, and she is easy to attack if the problem is shaped in certain ways, for being something, someone she never claimed.

The debater, an old man now, turned in his own life from her field, to one which seemed to locate itself deeply in nature; to be a lobbyist for the natural world, that it is clear to him what this means. He restudied her work of many years ago, and found it wanting, incorrect, of depicting the human condition in any way he considers to be natural.

She, by now mythic, beyond the legend in her own time, staring back at us from the Great Beyond, not fazed by the man, not afraid to wander into any arena where she could debate, could outshout, out-talk anyone. The great debate, and issue in world politics, fought out between personalities which attract and excite and resonate… [and obscure the issues!]