The Optimism of Teaching

Canadian designer Bruce Mau begins his essay "Imagining the Future" by observing "I am a designer, which means I cannot afford the luxury of cynicism."  The language is loaded, I know; I'm not sure I would ever suggest that cynicism is a luxury, as if it were some kind of warm, deep bath that we'd all like to immerse our aching bodies in from time to time.  If I could imagine cynicism as something available to our senses, it would be sour lemonade or lukewarm coffee.  All the same, I take his point:  there are some occupations that don't mix well with cynicism.  First, Mau's historical horizon is something he calls the "Long Now."  If we don't make our judgments of the current moment simply based on our impressions of that very moment and the few months leading up to it,  but appreciate the way our own time is simply the crescendo that's been building for quite a number of years, we can see how much life has improved.  As he points out, fewer people in the world are either hungry or sick from preventable diseases; child mortality rates have dropped while life expectancy has grown.  Second, as a designer he solves problems, perhaps with air traffic control systems or with machines that make kidney dialysis possible at home, and there is something inherently optimistic about solving problems and building new things.

I am a teacher, which means I'm not inclined to cynicism:  that's how I'd revise his sentence to fit me.  There must be some cynical people who teach; or people who teach may have parts of their lives that they're cynical about.  I can easily get cynical about politicians and about the whole political process.  I can certainly be cynical about how capitalism is shaking out in the early twenty-first century, particularly when "free (and hopefully unregulated) markets" are touted as the cure for everything.  I'm with Mark Kingwell on this one:  we're happier with more time to reflect, to spend with friends, to form supportive communities than we are with the latest gadget or fashion.  I'm not so much of PollyAnna that I don't realize that some students will try to play me, which is okay because there are natural consequences for missing classes or missing deadlines:  those students won't do well in my class, though the next time I see them in the hallway I'm still a friendly face.  I've just let the universe unfold as it will.

In some ways, it's particular groups of students who inspire my optimism.  Students in writing classes, whether it's "Introduction to Creative Writing" or the seemingly more drab "Expository and Persuasive Writing" always make me feel hopeful.  I've got fourteen remarkable young people in my Expository and Persuasive Writing class, which I I began by telling them that I want them to develop their own "credible voice." This means creating a voice that sounds like them, with its own individual cadence and vocabulary and world view--but that's just the "voice" part.  Being credible also entails paying attention to details like learning to use semi-colons rather than simply and blithely committing comma splices.  Being credible means using precise language and getting your Works Cited page right. They're more than willing to work to achieve this kind of credibility.   In this class, I have students who make films and students who are involved in dance.  I have students who do volunteer work with people with disabilities, but who can see beyond those disabilities to the spirits and wisdom of their clients.  I have students who work at Dojack because it makes them feel good to help others.  I have half a dozen people, at least, who should be in creative writing classes:  so vivid are their ideas about anxiety or happiness or depression.  I have students who are intensely curious about how society works, students involved in the political process.  I also have young people who are simply cheerful and curious.  Every day is an adventure with them, and rather than dreading my marking, I look forward to it:  spending time with their minds and words is an adventure.  How could I not be optimistic about a world where young people care about ideas--about exploring and expressing ideas?

The other class I'm teaching is Jane Austen.  There, my 24 fellow travelers will read 1,663 pages of some of the clearest, most exquisite yet workmanlike prose in English.  They will all write better after they finish the class.  They are curious about the historical period that gave rise to Austen's novels, yet they see that some elements of those novels echo their own circumstances.  Elizabeth Bennet and Catherine Morland and Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood are caught between two ideas of marriage:  the older generation believed that marriage ought to be a contract that improves the position of the family as a whole either economically or socially, while the younger generation hoped to marry for love and companionship.  Similarly, my students are aware of the way in which a particular historical moment limits or shapes the possibilities of their lives.  History isn't something "out there," visible in battles and elections.  The individual is often strangely and inextricably touched by it.

We have just begun Pride and Prejudice, rightly everybody's favourite.  I've taught Austen enough to know that once they've waded through Sense and Sensibility (we begin with Northanger Abbey, which is simply a fun spoof but gets us used to Austen's language and syntax), they seem to simply understand the rules of Austen's plots and worlds.  We proceed mostly with questions and answers, and create a lively conversation in the classroom.  Today, as a prelude to a discussion of the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, we talked about the world views and moral assumptions of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and dear generous Jane. My students are insightful about the way such worldviews blind or betray some of the characters both morally and practically.  Were Austen to suddenly appear in my classroom, ready to chat with them about her novels, she would be delighted with their observations.

The first batch of essays is due in the Austen class tomorrow, so the romance may wane a bit.  I may grit my teeth over paragraphs that aren't coherent or my 23rd comma splice over the last hour.  But I've often thought that it's just as rational to think the glass is half full as to conclude that it's half empty.  That seems about right to me:  there just about as much stupidity and greed and cruelty in the world as their is generosity, curiosity, and happiness.  I'm lucky, though.  My students make it much more difficult to just give in to despair and hopelessness.  Yes, much is wrong with the world, but I see the growth of a generation that is insightful, thoughtful, and compassionate.  I want to spend as much time with them as I can.  Fortunately, they put up with me.

The "Power of We" Blog

I usually climb on my soapbox in what I hope is a sort of sly, sidling movement that the readers of my blog are just learning to detect--and perhaps avoid.  Frankly, I try to soften you up with either beauty or craftsmanship--the pleasant cadence of a well-turned sentence or an evocative image--before I circle back round to the things that matter to me:  beauty, craftsmanship and its satisfactions, all art, all play, the importance of conversation, reflection on our goals--all leavened by my reading and thinking.  But I've found myself doing something rather surprising.  I've joined in "Blog Action Day" in which committed bloggers are writing posts on the theme "The Power of We."  Are all artists independent folks who just want the time and solitude in which to create?  But of course, for me that desire for solitude is mingled with a desire for the kinds of conversations I have with my students, for the kinds of learning both my students and I do during a term's exploration of Jane Austen or creative nonfiction.

Yet my Facebook page and the friends who check in there have certainly changed my behaviour--as has my own sense (seconded by the vision of thinkers and observers like Chris Hedges) that we are possibly facing a twenty-first-century dark age, a time when economies are in tatters, when we try to re-think whether we value wealth or art/conversation/friendship, a time when climate change is threatening the world in which we live and questioning what it is we value:  the profits from oil sent to China or the pristine environment of The Great Bear Rainforest.  Daily I find myself signing petitions or following links to organizations like Leadnow or Ecojustice or to Occupy Regina. 

Using the language of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, somehow the "hive switch" has been thrown for me.  At this particular historical moment, I do not think I can say, with W.B. Yeats "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" ("The Second Coming").  I am more hopeful.

Right now, the worst that Yeats speaks of are the cynics, those who, in Oscar Wilde's words, "know the price of everything and the value of nothing."  They have the most power; they now dominate the non-conversation about what we value, wherein free, unregulated markets are the answer to every problem.  Do you have common land in Saskatchewan that the Federal Government has given back to you to do with what you please?  Biodiversity and protected habitats are much less important than simply selling this land off to the highest bidder.  Do we know that adequate housing not only saves misery, but saves governments money?  But who will profit?  Are we putting our intelligence into figuring how to get oil to China, which is happy to fuel its own economy?  Why aren't we exploring solar and wind power?  But how can we charge for sunlight and wind?

Most of what we value is what we share in common.  Educational institutions.  Green spaces.  Justice.  Clean air and water. 

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt acknowledges that chimps never cooperate, partly because they can't conceive of or communicate goals they might share, and that we resemble chimps in this respect more than we'd like.  But he also talks about how "the hive switch" can be turned on.  Interestingly, both Haidt and Netta Weinstein, Andrew K. Przybylski and Richard M. Ryan have done interesting work on the way immersion in the natural world leads us to be more generous. Haidt writes "Awe acts like a kind of reset button:  it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns.  Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life.  Awe is one of the emotions most closely linked to the hive switch, along with collective love and collective joy...precisely because nature can...shut down the self, making you feel that you are simply a part of a whole (Haidt 228; italics in original).

On Friday I was talking with one of the students of my Expository and Persuasive Writing class about mob mentalities.  Obviously Haidt's description of the elephant came into my attempt to explain why and how people

Despair and Thanksgiving

Saturday mornings, Bill and I have a comforting, settled routine.  We begin our day as soon as Tangerine opens and take in the spirit of the wonderful jazz they play along with our coffee and scones or hot chocolate and muffins.  Then, because we're only three blocks from the Farmer's Market and because finding parking any closer is difficult and because we've had a miraculous fall, we get our shopping bag out of the trunk and walk up Lorne to market on Twelfth Avenue.  We may not even need very much, but we go anyway  Partly, we simply like the atmosphere:  the friendly, funky, chaotic atmosphere you create when you turn a street into a market space without restrictive aisles.  You have to negotiate other people's paths, which leads to eye contact and smiles.  If I do need anything, I like to buy it as close to home and as low on the capitalist food chain as possible for environmental and political reasons.  I'd rather pay a local farmer I can smile at than an anonymous Mr. Safeway.  Also, we're likely to run into someone we know for a little weekend pinch of sociability.  Gail Bowen and her daughter Wendy are regulars.  Sometimes we see Katherine Arbuthnott leaving as we arrive.  Last weekend we ran into Jennifer Arends and Justin Messner with their new baby, Malcolm.

As we stand in the middle of Twelfth Avenue, letting the market flow on around us like water around a quartet of boulders, it's like being at the still centre of a carnival.  Or of impromptu theatre.  Somehow when you're forced to look someone in the eyes and figure out what path they're on, you're struck by the sense that just that moment you've had a walk-on part in someone else's drama.  Quite often they are quiet dramas:  an older woman trying to figure out how to load her granny cart, a family trying to give a six-year-old some freedom without losing him; an anxious but very hip young couple trying to figure out how they want to live, negotiating what they value as she heads for the organic gardener while he eyes the jam in the stall next door.

Last Saturday morning at Tangerine, I'd been reading Chris Hedges' Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.  I'm a child of the sixties and anti-war and civil-rights marches, so I gave a miss to the chapters that talked about how we got here.  His last chapter, largely on the significance of the Occupy Movement, was what I was curious about, since that movement has winkled its way into Soul Weather.  Hedges argues that we have arrived at an age of ultra-capitalism, when CEOs shape our lives with a defining vision of the developed world:  we will all be making and buying widgets.  We should be educated to provide capitalism with self-sustaining skills and we should buy into the idea that the fulfilment of our lives is to have more stuff than the person next door.  Hedges either sees this vision as a given that no one questions or as a world-wide conspiracy that even President Barack Obama is implicated in.

I know enough people from different walks of life--and I know Althusser's theory of interpellation--that I can easily believe that a distressing number of people (some of them the parents of my students) have accepted this view of the world.  We have all heard too many times that an unfettered, unregulated market will solve all manner of ills.  But the psychological research suggests we seldom derive a sustained sense of well-being (notice I'm avoiding the word 'happiness,' which I think it problematic) from the pursuit of extrinsic goals. If beauty is our ticket to happiness, we will have to face the fact that we age.  If wealth is the lottery ticket we've got in our hands, we're doubtless going to find out that someone else is wealthier.  Fame subsides very quickly in a Twitterverse  always hungry for the next big story; ditto power.  But if what we seek is our own very personal satisfaction in something crafted, some injustice righted, some kindness given, some good food offered, intense and challenging friendships fostered, then a sense of well-being is with our reach.  The caveat, of course, is that you need a modicum of comfort and security before you can turn to these goods.  It is hard for someone on the streets to get inspired by the thought of making a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner for friends, which is one of the Occupy Movement's concerns,. 

But Hedges' sense that in North America at least--and perhaps in much of Europe--capitalism is the order of the day disturbed me as I went about my business.  I looked up from one paragraph to see an older man across the street from Tangerine, just in front of Lorne Drugs, standing next to a car for a full five minutes, looking up and down the street, his chest visibly heaving even from my perspective.  I wondered if he was waiting for the ideal moment to break into the vehicle--and older car that didn't look all that promising--when he opened the passenger's side door, lifted up his respirator and put it in the passenger's seat.  He walked around the car, got into the driver's seat, attached himself to the respirator again and then sat there for another five minutes before driving off.   Was there no one who could have run his errand for him?  Was this his declaration of independence, a deep need to get outdoors in the sunshine on his own to enjoy the last crisp but sunny September Saturday morning?

I have already told you about our visit to the Farmer's Market.  On the way back, in one of the graveled parking lots on Lorne between Fourteenth Avenue and Thirteenth, a lot where I have seen half a dozen rabbits out to nibble weeds in the dusky light, about fifteen people ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-seventies were doing Tai Chi.  It is an unprepossing place for people to join for this meditative practice, but their smooth musical movements didn't suggest that the gravel underfoot and the weeds at the edges of the stalls concerned them at all.

Hedges' powerfully critical generalizations don't take into account the number of us who do our best to live "off the grid," as I have come to put it:  to live outside or on the edges of the capitalist system he derides.  Hedges is not the only writer who depends on over-generalization to make his case.  In his critique of the oil industry and our dependence on oil for the texture of our daily lives, Andrew Nikiforuk has written The Energy of Slaves:  Oil and the New Servitude; as its title would suggest, he argues that we are all enslaved to oil.  Alanna Mitchell, in her review of Nikiforuk's book (I'll admit the review is all I've read),calls Nikiforuk "an impeccable, wide-ranging researcher and prolific writer" and points out the number of significant awards he's won.  All the same, she writes that his basic analysis isn't incorrect, but that the situation "is not as one-sided, as paranoic or as clearly demarcated as he makes it seem.  I fear that just as our society is disfigured by dependence on cheap oil, his analysis is disfigured by rage.  Can you really believe that modern cities are simple human feedlots [for keeping oil's slaves alive]?  It seems to me that there is more here than that.  I look around and see art, joy, neighbourhoods, bookstores, communities, families, gardens, thriving local businesses and parks.  Plus, for the record, people who live in modern industrialized cities use less carbon per person than people who live on farms.  Just saying" (Literary Review of Books October 2012 page 13).

I can see that Nikiforuk's and Hedges' views might be coloured by rage.  I also suspect they are trying to get our attention.  And perhaps even more, their books are tinged with despair which I sometimes share with them, particularly in a time when governments are cutting funds to arts and to universities--the very places and people charged with creating thoughtful solutions.  At the same time, this morning I opened up my Facebook page to find Deborah Morrison's wonderful litany of the people she's grateful for:  from the young man who fixed her furnace to the workers in her mother's care facility who dialed Deb's number so they could have a Thanksgiving conversation, to friends who listen and support and feed.  This, along with my farmers and the group practicing Tai Chi and the man whose mortality is with him daily, create networks of care and creativity and perspective that speak to a very different world than that of oil barons and powerful CEOs.  Perhaps besides being grateful this year, we could all put our own creativity to work and figure out how to make the thankful vision we have a more creative force in our societies.

Who do we create for?

As I worked on my Sunday quota of four blocks for Veronica's quilt, I thought about one aspect of craft that I haven't often reflected on:  that the craftsperson most frequently makes things that will be used in other people's everyday lives.  Although I'm having fun trying to make interesting blocks when faced with Veronica's idea of the quilt she'd like to have on her bed, I am not driven to make this quilt the way I was driven to make the New York Beauty that is now on the spare bed.  I had this theory about colours:  that all colours could go together if they were arranged or grouped in an effective way, if you paid attention less to the colour than to their level of saturation--the amount of black or grey mixed in with a pure colour, and if you created a rhythm of saturated and unsaturated colours.  I made the quilt, then, as a way of learning something I really wanted to know, as an experiment.  It didn't need to satisfy someone else's hunger, to speak to someone else's sense of who they are, the way something beautiful and well-crafted is able to do.

I seem to be managing this with Veronica's quilt; she looked at all the blocks I have pieced and said "That's it.  Understated with a bit of red.  That's me."  And in a way the need to understand someone else's desires and vision is a gift:  it stretches me as a craftsperson beyond my comfort zone.  I find that some of my principles still hold, though in different ways.  Many quilters, for example, talk about encouraging the viewer's eyes to move around the quilt.  What we're trying to do is to build in surprises that urge you to explore, or to build in echoes that you seek out.  I'm still doing that here, but in a way that's much more subtle. I have to intuit what Veronica would like, and that imaginative act is, in itself, exciting.  She's found a cream print with simple grey butterflies and moths on it, and I'm going to "fussy-cut" pieces and make a slight change to the block so that, perhaps three times in the entire quilt, there's a large moth or a butterfly right at the centre of the block.   

Thoughtful craftspeople imagine the person who will use their work all the time.  Randal Fedge, who tried to teach me to work on a potter's wheel, often took the lovely edge of a bowl and gave it a twist with his thumb.  He was anticipating the bowl's owner picking it up right by the comfortable, inviting divot he'd made.  Jack Sures makes inviting thumb-rests on the top of his mug handles.  I have a very flat porcelain bowl made at Chosin Pottery by Judy Dyelle.  She has made a tiny pleat on the edge of the thin porcelain that always makes me smile, perhaps because it made her smile when she created it.  

Thinking about craftspeople making invitations to future users or attempting to anticipate what would give their owners delight made me wonder whether artists do something similar.  Who do artists create for?  Other artists?  Past masters?   I had a chance to put that question to three young writers last weekend.  "Who do you write for?" I asked them.  Sarah Taggart gave an answer that moved me.  She writes for her characters.  Then because she messes it up, she says, she has to go back to write for herself--for her sense of self-respect.  And then for future readers. 

Brenda Schmidt launched a very interesting book of essays, Flight Calls on Monday.  All of these were prompted by rather enigmatic epigraphs sent by her Saskatchewan Writers' Guild mentor Gerry Hill:  clearly at some level she--like many of us--wrote for a mentor who perhaps temporarily comes to stand in for the audience we would like to have, an audience we respect and trust.

Adorno has a lovely phrase about a successful work of art.  He says it is the equal of itself.  In other words, what the artist has accomplished actually comes very close to the artist's vision.  Faulty craftsmanship, a simplistic world view, inattention haven't crept into the work so that it fails to reflect that Platonic ideal the artist had.  I kind of like Adorno''s notion, except that sometimes I suspect I don't grasp that complex ideal until I'm nearly there.  If I could articulate that ideal in words, I wouldn't have difficulty writing the poem or realizing the character, would I?  Yet I still believe that in the early stages I write for the work itself.  There's some complex aesthetic whole which speaks to what it means to be human that I strive for, even if I only imagine it at some level of abstraction.   It's only as I get closer to this hazy idea that I begin to think about how I'll create a bridge between the work and the world I want it to live in.

Autumnal synaesthesia

I enjoy winter.  I find something appealing about the aesthetic minimalism of winter, of a world stripped down to basics.  I suspect I also enjoy the excuse to hibernate, to pare my own life down to the things that are important necessary:  family, cats, friends, reading--all in the "yes" column.  Floundering around on FB or wandering Cornwall Centre after Christmas--not so much.  Baking bread, yes; baking cookies probably not.

But I also love the way fall, with its riotous effect on our senses, gets us ready for that minimalism.  Just before last weekend, I thought that fall was very much about colour and about the way that colour changes daily.  You have to watch carefully, earnestly, or you find that a favourite tree has suddenly lost all its leaves and you didn`t even notice it turning.  The light also changes quickly, particularly in the early evening, so you realize that you need to watch that sunset down the back lane or you`re not going to see it at all.

Fall is, perhaps, the season when all our senses are tangled together.  The sussurating leaves sound golden.  The crisp mornings taste like heirloom tomatoes and freshly pulled carrots. The particular smell of fallen elm leaves evokes also the smell of apples, of fallow earth, of planting tulip bulbs.  You associate the late afternoon golden light with long nineteenth-century novels or with some other mad undertaking like re-reading Dante`s Divine Comedy or the latest translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey.  Strangely enough, paradoxically enough, for those of us who are the perpetual students that teach, it is a season of new beginnings, a time to re-envision an undertaking you`ve been doing for thirty-six years so you can (in Ezra Pound`s words) "make it new" in this time of the turning, waning year.

Craft and Art--again

 

I made Veronica a going-away-to-university quilt when she left for McGill, in 1997.  It's traveled quite a lot, even catching a plane for Cambridge, and has become rather worn and faded.   So she and I had been on the lookout for a quilt or a block or a fabric that would suggest a skeleton for a new quilt that I hope to have finished for Christmas.

Foolishly, while I was on sabbatical I worked on Barbara Brackman's block of the week quilt that marked the 150th anniversary of the civil war.  She created a wonderful website for quilters that included lots of history, photographs of many primary documents, details from women's lives, and information about decisive battles.  Each of the blocks, like one called "the underground railroad," which had a strong visual diagonal, was tied to the war in some way.  Perhaps the block had been published under a particular name, like "the battle of Sumter," in a ladies' magazine.   More than that, perhaps, the naming of quilt blocks after events or songs (there's one called "the grapes of wrath") or ideas shows how close the war was to the domestic lives of women, how it had become a part of their self-expression in quilts. The fabrics Brackman was using for the sample blocks were all made with reproduction fabrics--fabrics designed to look like they might have come from the Civil War period.  Strangely enough, there's a whole cottage industry devoted to "reproduction" fabrics.  I'll admit I can't resist buying them because they're so interesting.  They have a different visual language and a different mood from contemporary cottons.

These two blocks, in a pattern called "blockade" "spoke" to Veronica.  She liked something about the calm square in a square in a square, but also liked the secondary pattern of the pinwheel that emerges when you put the blocks together edge to edge.  The next step was for her to begin to go through my fabric stash to find the beginnings of a colour scheme and the visual language of the fabric she liked.  She decided on blacks, dark blacky-blues, grey blues, greys, creams--and a dash of red.  I've made about fifteen blocks, which you see at the top of the post.  Of course, Sheba had to put herself in the picture.  Where there are quilts or quilt blocks, there are cats--or at least Sheba.  We've chosen lots of batiks along with quite a few Japanese fabrics to give the quilt a modern look.

This weekend, in order to get myself organized to simply sit down and begin to piece, I pulled fabrics for blocks, combining them in groups of fours, and started cutting up perfectly good fabric into little pieces so I could sew them together again--a non-quilter's bemused definition of quilting.  And I studied the blocks I'd made, which were spread out on the quilt that opened last week's post. 

For me, quilting is very much about play.  But I also find that when I am working on a quilt some other layer of my mind rumbles away like a woman's foot on an old treadle sewing machine.  One of the questions that popped up for me, perhaps because I was looking at the juxtaposition of two very different quilts, was "Is there such a thing as a 'Kathleen Wall quilt'?  My immediate answer was 'no.'  Perhaps you could recognize my quilts by the careful craftsmanship and the size of the quilting stitches if I had quilted it by hand.  No matter how many triangles I have to coordinate, all my points meet.  But my quilts share this quality with those of hundred--if not thousands--of quilts made by other women.  I could also say that my quilts aren't what quilters derisively call "matchy-matchy."  If I'm using blue in a quilt, I don't make sure that all the blue fabrics are exactly the same blue, with the same amount of grey or green or purple in them.  I interpret my colours widely.  But again, you could say this of many, many quilters.  While there's something very calm about a quilt whose colours are uniform, lots of quilters chose instead to surprise you into thoughts about colour and mood.  So that the quilt I posted last week uses almost every shade of blue or green there is, trying to create something both harmonious and surprising.

Perhaps, my bubbling mind considered, I've stumbled onto one of those distinctions between craft and art that I'm always thinking about.  Craft, like quilting, is very much concerned with traditions.  Why else would thousands of women around the world (these women included their comments on Brackman's website and sent in pictures of their blocks ) be making quilts in the twenty-first century out of fabric designed to look like it was made in the nineteenth?  Craft also speaks to a collective vision or preoccupation, so we were making blocks that women had designed about a hundred and fifty years ago when they wanted to articulate the connections between their intimate and domestic lives and large historical events.

You could catch the glimpse of one of Van Gogh's paintings and know that it was a Van Gogh.  Likewise, you could probably identify a couple of sentences as Shakespeare's or Virginia Woolf's.  But this is not always true of craft.  We expect artists to express their unique vision of the world, of life, of our experience of being human,  a vision that colours every aesthetic decision they make.  Certainly some people who are working in media that we usually associate with "craft," like ceramics, nevertheless bring their own vision of their practice and their world into everything they create.  But we call them artists.

I could think of my quilts as studies in mood--which is also how I think of Mark Rothko's paintings.  But he has found an entirely original, idiosyncratic, challenging way of embodying mood, while I use the visual language that women have spoken time time out of mind.  Together we create two things all human beings need to thrive:  the unfamiliarity, the challenges, the questions posed by the work of art, and the comfort of the familiar, of tradition. 

Early Fall: Only a Promise of Happiness

In his book Only a Promise of Happiness, art critic Alexander Nehemas suggests that one of the promises beauty makes is that it will repay our attention.  We have the sense, he argues, that we can return to something beautiful over and over and never exhaust what it might tell us about the human body, about the natural world, about the expression of an emotion or an idea, about the creation of form or the perfect correspondence between form and content.  Perhaps he explains my own watchfulness over the last couple of days as summer draws to its ecstatic, golden ending and as I move from the isolation of writing back into the community and conversation of the classroom.

Mornings are different:  there's a relieved, happy tang in the air that is reflected in people's spirits and in the wind.  Saturday morning after our weekly breakfast at Tangerine, Bill and I walked from there to the Farmer's Market.  The wind laughed and tumbled a piece of newspaper along Thirteenth as if its tattered edges were made of crinoline.  People had come with their wagons, their children, their granny carts to the market where we are both more sociable--catching one another's eyes in shared delight in a child's determined march across the park--yet sometimes less aware of one another as we turned inward to recover our shopping lists or simply feel the air on our skin.   This is nothing like our decorous shopping in the supermarket where we move down the aisles in straight lines, respecting one another's sense of purpose and avoiding one another's faces and shopping carts.  There is simply something about the ripeness in the air--the fragrance of tomatoes and falling leaves--that captures our enlivened attention.

The mid-day heat is also different, Janus-faced.  It looks back to  summer, but its dryness and its promise of cool evenings face the fall.  Even on these warm afternoons, there's no fooling yourself into believing that it's midsummer.  Perhaps that's because the trees sound different; they rub their dry edges against one another the way an old woman rubs the dry palms of her hands.  Our hot humid summer created a landscape that was boldly, brilliantly green.  But gold has crept into the palette.  You may look up on a country road to find an entire field swathed onto its side, the grain gone, the straw inert; it no longer cares about the wind or the sun.  Golden fields on both sides of the road wrap you in the warmth you will need for the winter ahead.   Or you may find a sudden streak of yellow through the small birches in Wascana Park or see a single branch of an elm turned golden.  No matter how much water you give your lawn, it won't return to that pure midsummer green.

There's an openness about the house, now that we no longer close the windows and the curtains against heat that won't abate in the night.  Yet that openness comes with a strange price:  the tapping of the blinds against the window frames sounds like time itself, with its uneven rapping on my knuckles.  My first inclination is to rush headlong into time, and I make lists furiously; then I refuse to hurry the moment and nevertheless find that everything on my list is done.  Am I getting sensible and realistic in my old age, managing my relationship with time in a way that is both friendlier and more productive?  The contradictions won't resolve themselves.

I am intensely here, here right now.  Yet at the same time I have a powerful sense of a past that won't return and of a waning future.  Perhaps there are simply practical reasons for this.  I have finished my last sabbatical and on Thursday I begin my final four years of teaching.  I so look forward to conversations with my students, to the adventure of the classroom.  Yet I also find myself keeping a list of things I'll read and do once I've retired.  Perhaps even more, for my work on Woolf has thoroughly worn me out while it has also filled me with wonder, I look forward to when I'm not juggling contradictory demands on my time.

But these practical changes coming in my life do not explain why the golden light of early evening fills me with quiet delight and deep sadness.  I cannot help studying it with the kind of sustained attention Nehemas tells us we need when we are faced with beauty.  Yet somehow it manages to stare me down, to confront me with its waning, as if it is reminding me that it is only a "promise of happiness," as Stendhall noted in his book On Love, from which Nehemas borrowed his title.  I am indeed in love with life, yet that later afternoon goldness seems to speak of the fact that I will never study it long enough to exhaust my sense of its beauty--which is why I need to pay such careful attention now.

And now for something completely different

This week, I've been speeding up and slowing down, trying to create a bridge for myself between a sabbatical year with its intense yet flexible demands and the coming academic year which is in some way less demanding and yet less  forgiving if you get behind.  If my discussion of Lily Briscoe's aesthetics didn't flow as smoothly as I liked, I simply revised my expectations (again) and worked away at it until I'd expressed what I was seeing in her work and the relationship she created between that work and the world before her.  Though the publisher wants the manuscript "soon," "soon" hasn't been assigned a date.  On the other hand, I simply can't walk into a class anything less than over-prepared; only if I feel fully in control of my subject can I give up that control to student curiosity and the very different vision of, say, Jane Austen's novels, than the one I have.  So, fast, and slow. 

In the fast lane, you can see that I've finished another quilt, one completely unlike my poppies.  It is meant to go where you see it here, on the spare bed in my workroom.  It is as serene and understated as the poppies are vibrant and raucous.  Once the term begins, there simply won't be time to do the kind of planning and pulling together and searching for border fabric required when you finish a quilt.  I'm hoping to get some piecing done on a quilt for Veronica, but that's about all I'll accomplish, other than picking up hand quilting.

In the "slow" department, I've been taking long pulls at Charlotte Gill's remarkable Eating Dirt:  Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe about her work planting trees, mostly in clear cuts in British Columbia.  It's a curious book, part visceral evocation of the tedium and back-breaking labour of planting trees, part ode to the natural world's variety and wonder.  In between there are sometimes brightly-written snippets of history or biology, like her history of the implosion of Mesopotamian and Roman societies that came on the heels of their exhaustion of their local supplies of timber.  You suddenly see how crucial trees are to the human endeavour of housing ourselves and heating those houses.  The prose is always both clear and poetically exact so that the exhaustion, the weather, the tense muscles, the scent of bear, the feeling of weighlessness when crazy Adam takes a hill so fast that the jeep keeps ascending after the hill has dropped away, become part of the reader's experience.  I've taken the book in  with great gulps, Sheba in my lap making sure my attention doesn't wander.

Gill's book and Sheba's quiet weight and the need to slow down before the term shifts into gear have made me aware of the turning away of August toward September.  In the mornings, I read in the living room, close to my supply of coffee, looking out on our well-treed back yard.  I noticed so many things when I looked up from whatever I was reading (I've also been loping through Ford Maddox Ford's Parades End).  The sun falls quite differently.  The leaves in the trees are just a little dry around the edges so that there's more sunshine in the yard and more whispering when there's a breeze.  In the late afternoon and early evening, the light is golden, probably from newly-harvested grain.  Even if I only glimpse quickly up from the page, I can't help notice that September is coming soon.

Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is also building a bridge for me.  It's made me aware why this past year has sometimes been frustrating and exhausting.  Kahneman talks about the two speeds of our brain, which he labels system one and system two.  System one is, of necessity, speedy, taking a quick inventory of threats and opportunities, making decisions based on intuitions--though some of these are the result of our experience and developed knowledge.  System one is pretty cocksure, rather too certain of its conclusions.  It makes up stories and assigns cause with alacrity, but sometimes without the necessary evidence for drawing solid conclusions.  System two partakes of deliberate thought.  It can be a little lazy, a little slow to come on line, and when we do employ it, we often feel uneasy and unsure.  Here's his description of the two systems:  "When you are in a state of cognitive ease [using System one], you are probably in a good mood, like what you see, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, and feel that the current situation is comfortably familiar.  When you [are forced to use system two you] feel strained, you are more likely to be vigilant and suspicious, invest more effort in what you are doing, feel less comfortable, and make fewer errors, but you are less intuitive and less creative than usual" (60).  You are also less confident of your System two knowledge, though it's more reliable.

Kahneman's work has taught me that this year has been an intense, deliberate dance between these two systems.  I have enough knowledge of Woolf's work, her diaries, letters, essays, and novels to be comfortable situating her aesthetics and intuiting what she's up to.  But sometimes finding the evidence, structuring an argument other people will find clear and convincing, and thinking through the implications of what I see happening in her texts is hard work.  Moreover, it's hard work involving two handicaps.  One is that the lack of ease prompts you to distrust yourself--even though you're more reliable and thinking more deeply.  The second is that you're less creative, and you need all your creativity for negotiating Virginia Woolf.

Kahneman's work also has implications for my teaching.  I have a sense--just an intuition, mind you, provided by confident system one who likes causes and effects--that students come out of high school having mostly used system one.  Consequently, they're sometimes shocked and intimidated by the way we ask them to think very differently than they have in the past.  I've been thinking about how to put this knowledge to use, perhaps even emphasizing more than I usually do the importance of revision that literally re-sees your argument and the evidence you've based it on.  When you revise, don't trust yourself.  So while Kahneman helps me see why this year has sometimes been frustrating, he's also got me excited about helping my students learn about how they think and helping them to get lazy System two to cooperate.  Because I've missed my students and the daily challenges and reactions and interactions that have filled my life as a teacher.  I want to get back into the fray.  But not too quickly.  Another two weeks before I really begin teaching will be put to good use on The Waves.

The quilters among you should know that this quilt is based on one called "Moody Blues" in Kaffe Fassett's Passionate Patchwork.  It's essentially many two-fabric,  four-patch blocks with little triangles sewn to the outer corners of the lighter of the two fabrics.  When these come together, they make little darker squares on point.  Fassett's quilt is, predictably, wildly blue, edging sometimes toward purple, sometimes toward turquoise.  I chose to work  with colours ranging from yellow green through grey green, blue green, blue, the occasional grey, and cream.  The fabric for the border was the perfect colour to pull the whole together, except if I put it right next to the four-patches it sometimes nudged uncomfortably against a bright yellow green.  So I included a narrow secondary border.  But because I didn't want to buy yards and yards of fabric for a one inch border the longest piece of the tan I had was about forty inches.  So I eked it out with more triangles before attaching the next forty inches.  Working within constraints can make you creative, I find, and I'm happy with the unpredictable little clusters of triangles.

Aesthetics 101: When the whole is WAY more than the sum of its parts

Bill and I just stretched my newly-finished quilt top along an empty wall in the living room and he said, with dismay, "It's a little loud."  That might be taken for tactful understatement.  We thought just maybe it might look cheerful in the hallway leading upstairs in the dead of winter, but I'm really not sure about putting it on a wall at all.


I have been taking this week off to re-set some habits.  I've been knitting too much and quilting too little simply because picking up a piece of knitting where you left off is much easier than getting out your sewing machine and ironing board, choosing fabric, cutting it out, and beginning to piece.  But knitting is also much less satisfying.  So I thought I'd get this quilt finished and basted up so that sitting down to quilt is as easy as picking up a sock.

Sheba quickly got the drift of the whole "new habit" thing and concluded that my spending  three or four hours in the morning and a couple more hours at night reading had been arranged just for her.  She's been a limpet.  So today when I wanted to put the borders on the quilt, I had to bribe her with the good end (the wide end, that is) of the ironing board which I put under the "sun" of a task light.  Otherwise, she wouldn't stop demanding attention, kneading the quilt and pushing her nose under my hands as I tried to pin on the borders.  The wide end is the good end because she so frequently stretches out to arrange herself and falls off the narrow end.  Laughter ensues and her dignity is in tatters.

I plan a lot of things in my life.  I even had plans for my week off that included finding reading for the Literature and the Environment 110 class I'm teaching in the winter term and making good headway on Ford Maddox Ford's very lengthy Parade's End.  I also wanted to find a home every day for something languishing in the basement--clothing or kitchen equipment I no longer needed, books I've read, so I've made trips to the Mennonite thrift store and a bin where Canadian Diabetes Association collects clothes, as well as bringing more books into the university.  I'm into the aesthetics of minimalism these days, thought you wouldn't know it from my quilt.

As an over-planner, I don't necessarily want to completely plan out quilts.  I had fallen in love with the cheerful blue chintz with its red poppies and simply took my cues from that, making small basket blocks, each of which is different.  Quilters must have a dozen ways of representing baskets.  (Sorry these are sideways; my computer's software doesn't "know" it needs to turn them 90 degrees, and I don't see an option for doing this.)

 So each basket was an adventure with colour and design.  Then I'd wanted to make a "strippie" quilt which is an important part of the North American quilt aesthetic and has been picked up by brilliant quilters in Japan.  A strippie is organized vertically and each strip can be made of different blocks.  Following the Japanese examples, I thought I'd alternate appliqued strips with blocks on point. It seemed like a good idea as I worked my way through my casual plans.  The blocks were lovely and fanciful; the applique panels, based on flowers designed by Nancy Pearson but arranged by me for the space I had, had a kind of music about them.

What I hadn't fully accounted for was how much wider it would be than it was tall and the effect of all that startling red and the intense robin's egg blue.  I could cut it back to two rows of baskets and a single applique panel.  What do you think?  I have a photograph of 3/5ths of the quilt, but my computer wants to put it in upside down, so just put your hand over a couple of rows and see what you think.

Since the ancient Greeks, unity has been a quality we look for in a work of art.  Hence we sometimes say "That book (or movie) just doesn't hold together."  Or "I can't see how it all works.  There are too many pieces unaccounted for."   But I'm not sure aesthetics has any principles to deal with something simply being too much.  Ads on TV this week for the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie reminded me that I thought somebody was over-fond of the special effects of the sea monster's tentacles invading the ship and pulling out people and the movie simply became boring for me, in spite of Johnny Depp's cute self-irony.  This isn't boring, or is it?  Is there a boredom of surfeit, like too much chocolate?  That's what this quilt is:  too much chocolate.  I think, though, that in mid-winter, two people could share it over their laps while they read.  A cat could join then and eventually a lovely patina of cat fur would soften the colour a little.

All the news that's fit to....

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, in which he uses some very persuasive experiments to illustrate the fact that most of the time we don't make rational decisions.  Here are the terms of his metaphor:  we're 90% elephant and 10% rider.  When we're faced with a decision, our first response is probably coloured by our feelings at the moment and by our intuitions.  Using evolutionary psychology (along with many other methodologies and points of view), Haidt explains that for most of humanity's history we have had to evaluate threats or benefits in our surroundings very quickly, so most of the time we go with our guts.  Sometimes this is literal.  Experiments have shown that when we are asked by a clever  graduate student to take a brief questionnaire that asks us to respond to stories with moral dilemmas, we will make a much harsher judgements if we belong to the half of the subjects who stood next to a trash can in which "fart spray" had been released.  In an attempt to measure the way our feelings colour our judgments that was a little less sensational, experimenters showed subjects pairs of words like flower-happiness, hate--sunshine, love--cancer, cockroach--lonely.  Subjects saw the first word for about a quarter of a second before the second word appeared.  Our task was to say whether the pairing was "good" or "bad."   The first word essentially primed us, so that we turned our elephant in a particular direction.  In the case where the second word had the same valence, we responded very quickly.  When the second word changed our affective response, it took us longer to make decisions.  Our elephants are easily led by fart spray (or our olfactory responses of disgust) or by the affective charge we prepare in a quarter-second glimpse of a single word. 

Insofar as "reason" takes part in these decisions, it is largely put to work defending and justifying the affective reasons for our elephant's decisions. But there are three main ways that the rational rider can gain control.  The least used is reflection:  sitting down with ourselves with the express purpose of examining our beliefs and seeking evidence both for and against their effectiveness, their accuracy, their rightness. The second way the elephant's path can be influenced by riders is through the questions and challenges of friends for whom we have affection and respect.  The third is through subtle social pressures at large in our culture.  While few of us undertake the route of self-examination very often, most of us are influenced by the wider culture in ways we're not really conscious of.  It's those passionate conversations with friends (and perhaps even with books or art, if we also consider them our friends) that have the most meaningful effects on the growth (or stagnation) of our belief systems.

Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in behavioural economics, has essentially spent his life studying the elephant. Among his many accomplishments, detailed in Thinking, Fast and Slow, has been the elucidation of heuristics--procedures or habits that help us identify simple, seemingly adequate but often imperfect answers to difficult questions.  The first heuristic that he names is substitution.  Faced with a difficult question we can't answer except with quite a lot of time and more information than we have at our fingertips, we often substitute an easier question.  For example, faced with the question "How much would you contribute to save an endangered species?" the intuitive elephant instead asks our lazy brain "How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?"  If circumstances in our lives confront us with the question "How happy are you with your life these days?" and you are in the car driving four kids to soccer practice rather than taking a long solitary walk, you are more likely to ask "What is my mood right now?" 

I'll admit that I haven't finished Kahneman's book, which is much dryer than Haidt's, but which also seems to crucial to a society that wants to make better public policy decisions.  (I will finish it, I promise.)  But the heuristic that grabbed my attention is called the "availability heuristic."  Using this heuristic, we judge the frequency with which an event will occur by the ease with which our lazy minds deliver up examples.  If, like me, you can't resist reading the headlines on the celebrity magazines and the tabloids while you wait to buy your groceries (even to mock them), you probably think that the divorce rate and the amount of sexual scandal is higher among politicians and celebrities than it is in the general public.  News coverage of plane crashes might make you fear flying, even if you know are safer in a plane.  Reports of car crashes in Saskatchewan during the slow news month of August make you wonder about the safety of driving on your holiday.  Between these two fears, plus the uncertain economy, you decide to have a staycation.

For a whole range of improbable reasons ranging from visits to family and riding the elliptical bike at odd hours, I've been watching an unusually large amount of (non CBC) news.  One night, chained to the elliptical for another twenty minutes, I witnessed horror story after horror story.  Hands and heads found in Toronto.  Burst pipelines.  Automobile accidents.  Strange diseases.  I realized that the news media, purposefully or not, was creating an availability heuristic whose main automatic conclusion was "This is a scary time."  Stories about car crashes and bizarre murders actually have political implications, as Haidt points out.  When we are fearful, we tend to vote small c conservative, regardless of the particularities of their platform of the day.  We just think that people with conservative tendencies are the ones who will stop all this craziness.

The availability heuristic can also snowball into an availability cascade.  If a relatively minor event is over-reported, it can lead to public panic which becomes the story itself.  Think of how many times a "news report" consists of sticking a microphone in the face of a bystander and asking them how they feel.  As a result of the media's exaggeration of danger, politicians can feel bound to address the issue with multiple, expensive  inquiries and with funds.  We might become fearful, for example, after two gory stories on murders that involve decapitated bodies.  This might prompt us, especially now that the days are getting shorter and the sun sets earlier, to give up our evening run when we can't get out on the street before dusk.  But the availability cascade has prompted us to reset our priorities in a way that isn't good for us.  We're more likely to die of heart disease because we've given up exercise than we are to be murdered.  We're seeing some of this heuristic affecting the lives of our children.  Because parents are worried about their children playing outside without adult supervision, but feel that they're safe if they're indoors attached to a computer or a TV, we're seeing more and more obesity in our kids.  We're also seeing much more nature deficit disorder--an inability to concentrate that comes from childrens' lack of time in an environment that asks for or invites their engagement rather than demanding it.

Here's my hypothetical availability cascade.  First let me say that Kahneman admits that the science on availability cascades is relatively new and still open to debate.  We aren't sure, for example, whether "experts" make more informed decisions than citizens.  Nevertheless, I don't think my concerns are entirely silly.  In a blog post written in January of 2011, after John Allemang reported that more people had died in 2010 of "weather events" than had died of terrorist attacked since the late sixties, I wondered why we were putting so much more money into airport security and so little into finding ways of reducing the level of CO2 we spew into the air.  The availability cascade might explain our decision. Terrorism is always a big story, particularly after September 11.  While I don't mean to belittle the lives of those people who died that day, or to mitigate the horror we all felt, I wonder if we've made some policy decisions based on the perception of threat rather than on the likelihood of it.  In Canada, we're used to crazy weather events, and to complicate the issue honest scientists remind us that while we can't blame a particular event on climate change, we can infer that the rise in the number of floods, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes is caused by global warming.  Yet we continue to take minimal steps, largely because our government argues that doing so will harm the economy.  The weather isn't already harming the economy????


On our return from a visit to Bill's family in Calgary, in a very grotty restroom in Swift Current, my mother's voice began to repeat all the things she said in the fifties about the diseases you could get in dirty bathrooms.  And then tumbled out all the warnings and fears of the time:  the atomic bomb safety drills we spent huddled under our desks, the TV programs that explained how to build and provision your bomb shelter, the warnings about crowds and polio, the less articulated fears about dirty old men.  And suddenly I realize that the fifties and early sixties were times of fear. We feared the Soviet Union as much as we feared McCarthy's HUAC hearings, and writers like Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible about our fears.

Over the next couple of days, I attempted a kind of "fear index," thinking through the last sixty decades and trying to see whether fear was in the ascendant.  Historians would be horrified, particularly since I was lazily thinking in decades.  And of course the availability heuristic played an important role.  What I had seen and thought and witnessed was, in all probability, not reflective of the zeitgeist.  Nevertheless, I could see moments when we were less fearful, sometimes wisely, sometimes stupidly.  Anger and irrational joy seemed to infuse the sixties and seventies--sometimes, as in Beatles' songs--in the same moment.  We got excited again when the Berlin Wall came down, and  perhaps celebrated prematurely when the Soviet Union disintegrated.  The nineties brought an economic reality check, but not as brutal as the one we are now coping with.

Because there's no doubt about it:  we are in a fearful time.  The economy, unless you live in China, is in tatters world-wide, our generation having over-extended its credit.  We are embroiled in a guerrilla conflict that bursts out now here, now there, with Muslim attitudes and ways of life--neither of which we understand adequately.  (In turn, Muslims are horrified, I suspect, by post-modern life and are desperately trying to turn back the clock.)  We are enthusiastically adopting a whole host of technologies without any clear sense of how they are going to influence our social practices and social institutions.  But the media is, particularly during the slow news month of August, exploiting our anxiety and grabbing our attention by offering us a vision of a frightening, threatening world where danger looms and disaster is impending.

What we need to recognize is that playing to our fears disempowers us.  Rather than being given information that allows us to make informed decisions, the evening news is prompting us to huddle in our caves in front of a smoky fire.

And then, on the other hand, citizens are joining together to gather the signatures necessary to force a referendum on a new stadium for Regina.  The Occupy Movement, regardless of where it is manifested now--perhaps in Quebec over tuition or in Regina over a stadium and affordable housing, has inspired us to find ways of showing that we are committed to democracy.  (Do we think the local nightly news would offer a Friday night tally of the number of signature we've attained so far?)  My friend Katherine and her various crews have a garden at the university that will provide fresh food for Carmichael Outreach and are busy picking fruit off trees in Regina to preserve or donate to the Food Bank.  Good things happen.  Good people go on making good things happen.  And no historical period, in spite of my attempt at a fear index, is uniform.  But fear is a far less effective rallying cry than the hope that leads to creativity, innovation, and justice.  Guess I'll have to quit watching the news.  And you're welcome to stop by my office next week to sign the referendum petition.