By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
—Confucius
“We do not have to think the world in order to live in it, but we do have to live in the world in order to think it.” Tim Ingold`s (1996) words from Key debates in anthropology articulate that imagining is an activity that dwells in actual world. No matter, then, how much one is wrapped up in one’s own thoughts, the thinker is situated in a time and place and therefore in a relational context. Imagining, therefore, is the activity of a being whose puzzle-solving is carried on within the context of involvement in a real world of persons, objects and relations. My observations draw from the idea that there exist a thing called “intelligence” installed in the heads of each and every one of us that is ultimately responsible for our activities. Hence, my imaginative reflections will resemble blog like deliberations against a backdrop of involved activity.
Reflecting
Part of the great benefit of being an educator is witnessing the animating impulses of current young students shift from how society defines them to the ethical and moral agents that they desire to be. It is wonderful to watch learners make their own choices as individuals. They occupy spaces in confidence and have the ability to transcend generational categorizations. They defy limited expectations, in order to help rewrite this history of the world with a positive and progressive chapter. They are primed to assume positions of leadership in all fields of human endeavor at a time when our planet needs innovative minds, hopeful optimism, and socially connected worldview like never before.
Now, of course, preceding generations have not bequeathed the best of conditions. The extreme heat of privatization and pursuit of maximum profits margins have scorched the globe. This has exacerbated the already violent and volatile conditions of growing injustice and unequal access. The spreading inequality in education, housing, employment, social services, and neighborhood conditions, continues to prove to us that we can no longer be deniers of the impact of such a cultural climate.
Regardless of political orientation or social philosophy, our planet cannot afford another generation who place profits over people and a “greed is good” ideology over global sustainability. Our students, our children get this. This is why so many of them dedicate countless hours doing voluntary community service, and march with strangers for the cause of justice. They are helping to push the pendulum from a culture of excess in which they were born at the beginning of the 21st century, toward a culture of altruism, and use their privilege and power to help shift the cultural climate. We need thermostats, not thermometers. We need to dictate and determine culture, as opposed to just reading it and reflecting it. We need to imagine cultural alternatives and bring them to pass.
Function in peace. Speak the truth. Give thanks each day. Be quick to compliment liberally and love out loud. Be slow to speak words of judgment and do so discreetly. Love yourself, because is a precondition of loving your neighbor. Realize each one of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. Yet remain humble in realizing that we are not as good as the things we have accomplished. Live simply, be aware that you are a major—and uniquely self-reflexive—geological force. Live in service. Lose yourself to a cause bigger than yourself. For this is what it means to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before your Maker.
SARS‑CoV‑2 hits home:
There is nothing good about COVID-19—fear is its main companion. Epidemiologists demand “social distancing” to stop the spread. In an odd way, in the era of comparative isolation and epidemic loneliness, the prospect of forced confinement may lead us to embrace a bit more gregariousness when the virus relents. I can somewhat imagine what is it like to be penned up in a place in Italy, say Milan or Venice (will Rome fall?), or in a posh cruise ship, but I can`t fathom being stuck in a Wuhan apartment.
A hazmat suit with clutching temperature gun will be the norm at most borders—a reminder that the world is a very physical place. Biology created a simultaneously horrific and entertaining element of fantasy in the panic—apocalyptic bug-in plans: antibacterial soaps and hand sanitizers long gone before any of us had set foot in the store. Empty shelves skewed by the endless abundance of Corona (Extra) beer bottles; denuded panic shoppers stopped buying them. The inclination toward magical thinking finds the bottom in the allegedly bottomless pit. Reality is capable of biting, and biting hard, I guess.
The narrative unfolding thankfully does not (yet) forewarn Boccaccio`s “Decameron”—epidemic disease as collapsing into chaos, violence, and the rupturing of social bonds. Perhaps reflects (for now) Thomas Mann`s “Death in Venice”—the owners of the hotel do not flee the cholera epidemic, have no choice but to stay.
As anxiety levels rise and economy sinks, our social order should rest on good humor, patience, flexibility and inventiveness. Let us stay healthy and vibrant!
I choose to end this segment of reflection with Muriel Rukeyser`s (1949) “Elegy in Joy” as she superbly suggests the feeling of possibility we might experience when desperate stasis may be overcome and hopes may be raised. It offers discovery; it offers light.
Elegy in Joy, by Muriel Rukeyser
Out of our life the living eyes
See peace in our own image made,
Able to give only what we can give:
Bearing two days like midnight. “Live,”
The moment offers: the night requires
Promise, effort, love and praise.
Now there are no maps and magicians.
No prophets but the young prophet, the sense of the world.
The gift of our time, the world to be discovered.
All the continents giving off their several lights,
the one sea, and the air. And all things glow.
Pre-pandemic holiday drift:
It wouldn’t be Christmas without the “things.” How they came to mean so much, and to play such a prominent role in our central holiday season, is the untold tale of many families celebrating this time of the year. Christmas has become the outsize spectacle, showing us the provenance and significance of each of its essential parts: the decorated trees and holiday lights, the cards and gifts and wrapping papers, the PS4 Fortnites and store displays and the downtown holiday parade. How Santa Claus lost his provincial Dutch character and turned into the jolly old soul we know? It`s a myth. Only to morph into the beloved attendant of our beloved Christmas tree around which we cozy around every December. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and his imaginings of what Christmas must have been like in Merrie Olde England offers captivating evidence of how far we have come with this secular celebration of abundance, goodwill, and familial identity, expressed in a multitude of material ways. Let us remember, Christmas, and the Advent season preceding it, is a time of remembrance and anticipation as we reflect upon Jesus’ birth. The impending becoming pronounces involved sensibility.
A magical solstice and festive greetings to you all.
Imagining
Vast imagination and steely determination is needed to whatever we lay our hands upon, as we attempt to leave this pandemic ridden world better than we found it. We have to imagine new possibilities. Dream big. And then act boldly. And when we do this, we will be able to declare with the poet, Daisy Rinehart:
I am tired of sailing my little boat
Far inside the harbor bar
I want to go out where the big ships float
Out on the deep where the great ones are
And should my frail craft prove too slight
For waves that sweep the billow o’er.
I’d rather go down in the stirring fight
Than drowse to death by the sheltered shore.
Imagine. Imagine a world where we understand that it is not enough to give charity. But rather we assume as our duty to see to it that we build a society where charity will not be necessary; where no sick person will go untreated; no hungry child unfed; prisons will not be passed off as schools; and no able-bodied person will be under or unemployed.
Imagine. Imagine a world where all people, whether in Syria, Uganda or Israel, Romania, Nicaragua or Nigeria are able to learn eagerly, love safely, worship freely, live peaceably, and prosper intentionally.
Imagine. Imagine a world defined by random acts of kindness; senseless compassion; unbridled cooperation; indiscriminate education, and loving legislation.
Imagine. Imagine education that is not simply a place to learn, but a place to think great thoughts, to dream, to build air castles furnished with hopes and aspirations of a future.
Imagine. Imagine this is who we are. Flesh and blood, body and mind, bones and muscles, nerves and veins, lungs and liver; yes. But we are so much more. We are what our dreams are. We are what we aspire to be.
This is why the tragedy in life is not in our failures. Failure is a prerequisite of success. The real tragedy of life is in our complacency. It’s not trying to do too much, but rather our doing too little. Not living above our ability or means, but in living below our capacity.
Encounter difficult moments? Yes. Make mistakes and get weary in our well-doing? Absolutely. But in the words of the great educator Benjamin Elijah Mays, “The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream...It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin.”
When particles hostile to us begin to move, confusion stirs the habitual and changes are enforced in our familiar quarters. Something strange happens to the world we thought we so intimately knew. Things that enable existence come so deeply threatening and disturbing. Small wonder that gloom descends on people`s faces, and minds become unsettled with melancholy and angst. Rome has fallen. The microbe is doing its job. Spreading and staying alive. The pandemic tests us in unique ways. It ruthlessly takes measure of our lives, calls into question our familiar assumptions, and shines a pitiless light on our social, political and religious order. This is the existential challenge any society worth inhabiting and any philosophy worth embracing must address—the notion that everything is not going well at the moment and mutations may bring further seeds of disease. Only if we could face the invisible “bullets” around us, and keep calm. And remain rational (when governments keep us national) and somehow find it possible to take pleasure in life.
When everything is going well, it is easy enough to contemplate our place in the material world. We seem very far from the Epicurean achievement—the greatest good is to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear. Humans should not cower in fear—we learn from Boccaccio. His fellow Italian quarantined citizens are standing out on their balconies and singing in the midst of plague. This should give us hope. The sound of national anthems, arias and concertos are a reminder that the realm in which human resilience and inventiveness are at their height is art. Aesthetic experiences, as Hanna Arendt notes, combat thoughtlessness and hopeless confusion.
In Camus` Plague (1948) the pestilence that strikes the town of Oran thrusts most inhabitants into resignation and isolation. The disease freezes people into place while gradually revealing the inexorable and incurable. At first, Dr. Rieux fights the plague for the most abstract reason, because it’s his job. It is as logical as two and two equaling four. Then, when he witnesses the unspeakable tragedies he reconceives his practice: he does not accept the pestilence because that means that he is to be complicitous with it. Tarrou, the wanderer of Oran, and the “saint without God,” goes one step further however, and finds wit, and yes, the imagination to organize people into sanitary communities to resist the microbe and, critically, makes the pandemic a moral concern of all. He means what Arendt meant: health, integrity, and care are characteristics of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.
Merleau-Ponty reminds us, it is important that we insist on what we know through our own situation. Considering this, the Incarnation story made me realize about the meta-narrative implicit in it—we have to resist a society that has lack of care and concern. When we see more and hear more, it is not only that we wobble, if only for a moment, out of the familiar and the taken-for-granted but that new avenues for choosing and for action may open in our experience; we may gain a sudden sense of new beginnings, that is, we may take an initiative in the light of possibility. Finding a thread to the Known Divinity, even in the most formal academic manner, requires an ability to notice what is there to be noticed. In other words, entering the narrative perceptually, affectively and cognitively.