When you go through life,
Make this your goal:
Watch the doughnut,
Not the hole.
--Burl Ives
by Jerome du Bois
A corny reference above, I know, but --like the word corny itself-- it serves up a pulpy, homegrown, old-fashioned wisdom, grown by reason. Remember reason?
Ron Rosenbaum brought "The Doughnut Song" to mind with a couple of postings, and their comments, on the hollowness at the core of core studies in universities today. For example, he complained that you can earn (?) a degree in literature these days without studying Shakespeare. Then he received an email from one of my favorite people, the visionary physicist and postmodern theologian Frank J. Tipler of Tulane University. (Even as I write, I'm halfway through his new doozy, which is, in a word, outrageous.) From reading Lee Smolin's new book The Trouble With Physics, I learned that the academic physics landscape was pretty rocky; but Tipler adds that it's also barren: you can earn (?!) up to a PhD in physics without knowing a damned thing about either The Standard Model or general relativity. So, according to Tipler, there's a black hole in the center of one's physics education these days.
It gets even more long-faced and dreary.
In the comments to Rosenbaum's posting "The Damage Done (2)", a pastor named Jeff says that you don't need much to become a spiritual shepherd these days:
most seminaries have very sketchy Bible requirements, rarely require an entire semester course on preaching or evangelism, and offer nothing on basic group dynamics/leadership.
Even worse:
I have lawyer friends who talk about how little Constitutional Law is offered other than to undergrads, and I'm a history geek who gets to teach at the college level as an adjunct/lecturer whenever i want, because no one wants to teach "Intro to American History," which is often required for general bachelor's degrees, but tenured History profs run from like the plague.
Literature, physics, pastoral training, law, and history --the list thus far-- each with its central engine removed, but with the wheels still spinning --though they're only spinning in place. For example, there's a guy at ASU --the chairman of the English Department, as a matter of fact-- Neal A. Lester by name-- who has been braiding a steady career around the subject of African-American hair. Consult his web page for details, and Catherine's series Just 'Fro Stories for the real skinny on the deal.
To this list we add art training and art curating, of course, with an abundance of evidence from posts on this blog --here's a recent one-- and all the social sciences, especially teacher training, which teaches self-loathing in the name of social justice for others. Your soul is worthless, theirs are priceless. Bye bye soul, hello teaching certificate. We wrote about that --the Zombie Dispositions-- here.
Professor Tipler notes at the end of his email:
. . . this corruption of education is probably universal across all disciplines. If so, then all advanced education will have to be obtained outside of the university. If this is the case, then why should universities exist at all?
Damned good question.
Beyond the universities, and largely because of them, these frozen-hearted soulless holes grow, the very asafoetida of anti-nourishment, filling the emptiness with cruelty, sadism, and schadenfreude, sprouting like black, bleak flowers throughout the culture, suckering and then sucking in all the light and beauty and goodness and dignity. If we're speaking of art, I don't need to point across the pond to the Dwarf of the Flies, Damien Hirst, for an example. Look around, just locally: the gruesome Body Worlds 3, artists who love to touch dead things --such as Mayme Kratz, Kate Breakey and Brent Adrian (@Central downtown now)-- the dealers who promote death images, such as Amy Young and Kimber Lanning (Colin Chillag's shotgunned faces, which you can read about in Catherine's piece "What Would They Say If I Blew (Myself) Away?"), the bug-eyed, cartoon perversity --skewering human glory at every chance-- oozing out of damn near every downtown art venue.
So much of the culture has been emptied of empathy, because of an institutional erosion of the self, that we have forgotten the true dimensions of death, and how to stand before death.
I use as my example the orchestrated public mourning after the Virginia Tech Massacre. The university spin doctors made sure, in record time, that everyone understood that the attack was on Virginia Tech, and not 32 innocent, unique, unrepeatable persons. They also wanted to make sure that everyone moved right into the healing phase, so they broke out the now-standard, debased, helium-filled moony marshmallow mourning confections: makeshift memorials, white balloons, white flags, teddy bears, and ribbons. And everybody went for it --damn it!-- because they're used to it. That's how we do it nowadays. Need to mourn mo' murder? Head for the balloon shop. Closure, like the little collar on the helium flower, ready to Heaven go.
Next came the group gatherings, at which everyone was encouraged to wear the school colors. Not black formality, but sweaterwear. It was about the stamina and persistence of the . . . Hokies, they call themselves, as they did so often that week, breaking out in school chants. ("Spontaneously," the media dutifully reported.) VT has put together a website to memorialize the victims; there's a list on the right which says in a link at the bottom, "More on the fallen Hokies." As if that would be each and every victim's first self-description, if asked. And the administration couldn't resist providing a bunch of promotional links at the bottom of the page. I guess they fish for students wherever they can.
Finally came the coup de cliché of professor and poet Nikki Giovanni's prose-poem address which, again, is all about the university, as if that twisted evil asshole attacked the university. But, unlike the 32 people who would not go on to have lives far beyond the provincial confines of Virginia Tech, Virginia Tech would go on, and that's what's most important here, according to Ms. Giovanni, and to the school officials, too. At one point she refers to "the Hokie Nation." Whaaaaat?! Jesus, Professor --you institutional husk with a hole where your soul used to be-- most students, unlike you, will not be staying to suck from alma mater for the rest of their lives; they --the live ones left now-- will go on to have lives, and many of them will forget all about VT, except perhaps for that one day, long ago, when the rusty red blood briefly blotted the purple and orange.
Another excerpt from the address:
We do not understand this tragedy
We know we did nothing to deserve it
But neither does a child in Africa dying of aids
Neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory
Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water
Neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of night in his crib in the home its father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destablized
To repeat: Whaaaaat?!
Using dead people for political purposes is vampirism. Plus, she doesn't mention the victims, not once --it's all about the survivors, for her. She has a hole in her soul. I have one final bit of evidence for this claim.
Prof. Giovanni had the killer Cho in one of her classes. He was such an evil presence that this is what this "warrior poet" decided to do: if he was not removed from her class, she would resign.
Noooooooo, Nikki, nooooooo. Don't leave us!
Once we get over our shock, we begin to think of what the good professor could have done instead of threatening to retire to, say, the coast of Mexico, or a Greek island. She could have confronted Cho and said something like this:
"Two things. First: You think you're scary, but I'm not afraid of you. I've already arranged for 24/7 protection for myself; they should be here by the end of this meeting. Wait until you see my bodyguards. Second: I'm going to use every resource I can find on this campus to make sure there's eyes on you --and people in your face-- all the time until you're under some serious psychiatric care. Be prepared for all kinds of nosy campus people ringing your dorm doorbell, asking questions until they get answers that satisfy them. Look at me. Look at me. Listen: you don't scare me."
But it's my contention that Nikki Giovanni has had her backbone leached and bleached, and her minimal talent stroked beyond what it deserves, for far too long. She couldn't say something like that. She wilted, and threatened to run away, and became yet someone else --on that campus and all the way back to his family-- who could have made a difference in over two dozen lives. But she didn't, because for her, it was about her.
For the rest of us: The postmodern corrosion, the sadistic scooping out of the center of the soul, only now dwindling after thirty-plus years, must run its dolorous course. All we can do now is call attention to this quieter, though no less consequential tragedy, while we work to bury cruelty and resurrect civility.
CODA: You Can Thank Raymond Chandler
Yes, I'm back to blogging again, and I'd like to end on a higher, lighter note.
I was angry and depressed for months, and sick of my own voice. Instead of writing, I've been reading about physics and time. But I also reread some Raymond Chandler, and I'd like share a few jazzy riffs he wrote. You see, reading those lines, I saw what fun Chandler was having writing them, and I remembered what that was like.
Ross Macdonald said that Chandler wrote like "a slumming angel." In The High Window he knocked me out of my rut with his language play and wiry wisecrackery:
My face was stiff with thought, or with something that made my face stiff.
. . . From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.
And then in Chapter 17 he stretches himself (as Marlowe) and riffs out some extended jazz poetry, as when Marlowe arrives at a high-class Idle Valley nightclub:
The lobby looked like a high-budget musical. A lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail. Under the beautiful soft indirect lighting the walls seemed to go up forever and to be lost in soft lascivious stars that really twinkled. You could just manage to walk on the carpet without waders. . . .
The bar entrance was to the left. It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved mothlike against the faint glitter of piled glassware. A tall handsome blond in a dress that looked like seawater sifted over with gold dust came out of the Ladies Room touching up her lips and turned toward the arch, humming . . .
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
A cigarette girl came down the gangway. She wore an egret plume in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick, one of her beautiful naked legs was silver, and one was gold. She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who made her dates by long distance. . .
A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up . . .
And so on. Wonderful writing, no? At any rate, it was this passage that knocked me out of the rut. Chandler was having so much fun writing. . . . I felt left out.
And now I'm back, with this advice: watch the doughnut. The hole? It's old. Fill it back up with your self. It's still there, you know.
Posted by Jerome at May 8, 2007 06:45 PM | TrackBack