No.26 - Don Maclennan, music and poetry

Poetry in performance, often in conjunction with music, seems hugely popular.  Written poetry, on the other hand, struggles.  Hardly any major publisher in South Africa even accepts poetry submissions now; the small magazines battle to keep afloat.  It’s not for lack of people writing: that wonderful, humorous poet and publisher Gus Ferguson once joked, not entirely inaccurately, that there are 523 poets for every reader.  Even poets seldom buy one another’s volumes.  Young poets, even those doing creative writing courses, often seem to think that reading others’ poetry is unnecessary.  Hence, for all their frequently courageous exploration of new and urgent themes, a lot of it is simply mediocre, a recycling of phrases sucked up from the banal swamplands of popular music.

Try being an ageing white male poet steeped in the textuality of previous ages.  Even worse, try being dead.  Don Maclennan, one of our finest and most prolific poets, passed on some eight years ago now, and despite some lovely reviews (see P R Anderson's in the latest issue of English in Africa) and the publication of both his Collected Poems and a volume of essays on his work, No Other World, he is yet hardly a mainstream figure.

This is grossly unfair. (OK, OK, he was my teacher, mentor, and great friend, and I had everything to do with producing the two aforementioned volumes – but it is still unfair.)  He is a phenomenally lucid and humane poet who, whatever walk of life or age you might be, has a great deal to teach and, just as important, to think about.  He may not seem to address some of the Big Issues of Today, like race, politics, and rape – but he does, just from a different angle.  He sees those issues as embedded within even larger ones; he obliges us to reassess our politics by revealing the beauty that persists despite politics’ griminess; he addresses rape by exploring its difficult opposite, love and ecstasy.  There is no difficult question of being, relating, writing, dying that he shies away from.

I mentioned music earlier.  Don lived with and within music always.  He played the violin, he listened to and understood a great deal of music, and he often wrote about it.  One of his very first volumes was a collaboration with music lecturer Norbert Nowotny, entitled In Memoriam Oskar Wolberheim.  Some of his poems were memorably set to music by South African composer Michael Blake, and Don conducted a spirited conversation about music with Blake’s wife, Christine Lucia.  His poem “Autobiography” is all about his playing music.  He had been raised on music by his Scottish father, as he wrote in an early poem, “To my father playing his bagpipes”.  Don imagines him playing the instrument across the veld at sunset, as after a battle, “with a sense of sweet massacre” yet somehow taking possession of “the tilting planes of light”.  Music fills the world.  Don then compares that braying instrument to a captured bird, trapped under the player’s armpit:

You clasp under your arm

a giant northern bird

one wing lame

the other hugely spread

like fingers of some universal hand.

You hold this creature

solicitous and afraid

for reasons far too ancient to express

coaxing him to utter his distracting cries.

Proudly and with military care

you have begun to strut bird-like

protecting the wild creature

and yet twisting his lame wing.

Out of his long black beak

pocked as branches in the sea

wail the ebony endless cries,

bird music ancient as stones.

There’s so much one could say about this, reading from various perspectives.  But if Don wants us to see the musician as a kind of poet, or a model for the poet, as I think he does, it’s especially interesting.  Music and poetry, Don used to insist, had evolved together, from social and biological origins too mysterious now to really comprehend, for “reasons far too ancient to express”.  He wrote to Christine Lucia:

I have never bothered to ask where words come from.  Language is quite mysterious enough. ... In this respect poetry is like music.  Where do melodies and harmonies come from when you sit composing at the piano?  From all the other music that was ever written, of course, but from deep inside you, at the root of the ear’s Venetian canals, at the roots of the tongue.

At the same time the bagpipe music’s funny and weird, both proud and distracting, both protecting and twisting – not an easy or simple process.  It’s also self-deprecating: unlike some of our heroically noisy and self-promoting youngsters, Don knew that poetry is a fragile defence against the depredations of the changing world.  He ends the poem: “It is the end of a time ... It will soon be dark/ and that will make an end of it.”  The poem is its own elegy.

Don hints here, too, that the origins of music are even pre-human.  Perhaps in the earliest stage of human consciousness we first imitated the primordial music of birds: the “mourning” of owls, the “conversation of the pigeons”.   His poem “Bokmakierie” reads, in full:

Rising liquid

he repeats his phrase

to the rising sun.

Can we estimate

whether he’s begun

loving the fresh day

from a broken bit

of future tense

stuck in his throat?

Take each note,

its originality –

can we say?

Rising liquid

he repeats his phrase

to the rising sun.

The repetition of a phrase: that’s it, that’s the first step of music.  Its provenance is simple but mysterious, even if we accept David Rothenberg’s theory, in his book The Survival of the Beautiful, that beauty is intrinsic to such displays as birdsong and vivid feathers, that the pursuit and appreciation of beauty, even amongst non-humans, was always necessary to evolution.  And by writing another poem, we repeat the note.  Only in that way does it outlast its own dying into silence, as every musical note must.  It might even survive the writer.

On crucial occasions, then, Don connects music with death, too. There is the music that is played at funerals, for instance, a music laden with both tribute and loss.  This is clear in various poems about his sister, who herself was truly musical.

In the end, Don humbly thinks, poems – or the musicality, attentiveness, challenge, humanity and craft intrinsic to good poetry –

... might just do

 – reveal the arc of light

that touches earth

and makes us sing.

Don seems to me to be asking: What leverage do we have against the world’s self-evident ills if our response does not embody what we love, if we do not sing praises to the beautiful even as we labour and dread?

Moreover, there are not just poems about music: there is the musicality of poetry itself.  The echoes of birdsong within words and combinations of words.  Despite the apparent conversational simplicity of Don’s characteristic short lines, many poems are subtly rhythmical and musical.  Of course, if rhythms and patterns get too rigid, you induce a head-banging numbness.  Don sent this up in one of the pieces in Oskar Wolberheim.

A la marcia      With military gestures

1          2          3          4

1          2          3          4

1          2          3          4

1          2          3          4

bang    bang    bang    bang

bang    bang    bang    bang

bang    bang    bang    bang

bang    bang    bang    bang

bang    bang    bang    bang    it goes on   you see

bang    bang    bang    bang    steadily      orderly ...

And on it goes, until “the damned thing gets a hold of you ... stoppit ... stoppit”.

Compare that with the wavering and nuanced effects of “Funeral I” from The Poetry Lesson:

 

Don Maclennan's own carving,
"Poet Declaiming"

From the tired sky

the low-angled sun has burned

a dead robinia to gold

and gold a mulberry tree.

Two owls that laboured

through the failing light

are mourning in the folds

of darkness out of sight.

I, too, in the dark mourn

the death of my belief,

my small, uncertain faith that life

is proof against its own defeat.

It is just beautifully done.  Neither mechanical nor meandering, lightly stitched together with lines balanced against each other (“robinia ...gold / ...gold ... mulberry”; “mourning ... darkness ... dark mourn”), occasional rhyme (“light ... sight”), vivid contrast (“gold ... dark”; “faith ... defeat”).  The owls and the speaker are fused into a single feeling of complex loss, the loss of the nameless person of the funeral seeping out into something existential that anyone can identify with.

Don Maclennan wrote some 600 poems, all included in the Collected Poems, published by PrintMatters.  The book makes a wonderful gift, even for people who might not normally read poetry, but who could hardly help responding to these lucid yet elusive, questioning explorations of issues we all know, in some form, in our very souls.

No.25 - The dogs of Dante's Inferno

Dante and Virgil watched Dog-face and fellow devils harassing the sinners of Hell.

In preparation for an Honours course, I am re-reading Dante Alighieri’s astounding epic poem, the Commedia Divina, in which Dante depicts himself visiting Hell (Inferno), and eventually Purgatory and Paradise – the archetypal religious journey.  I’ve taught Inferno before, but it feels like a new piece every time.  Partly that’s because it’s so complex and layered that I forget a lot of it, and partly because I keep reading new translations, each of which feels quite different. 

The edition I’ve set this time is a wonderful compilation of various poets’ versions, including such luminaries as the late Seamus Heaney, Sharon Olds, W S Merwin, Amy Clampitt, and others, edited by Daniel Halperin.  So every couple of cantos, or chapters, you encounter a subtly different way of dealing with the compact resonances of Dante’s fourteenth-century Tuscan.  Some try to follow the tight interlocking rhymes of the original; others adopt more free-flowing ways of capturing the vivid drama rather than a more literal rendition.

Because I’ve lately become more attuned to animal presences in all kinds of literature, I started noting the quite numerous animal references in the Inferno.  There is lion and leopard, elephant and whale, donkey and horse, frog and mouse – even a falcon losing touch with its falconer (the source of the image in W B Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming”).  There are real animals and allegorical animals and wholly invented monsters like the dragon-ish Geryon, who grudgingly carries the pilgrim Dante and his guide Virgil down the cliffs of Hell’s seventh circle.

And quite a lot of dogs.

What are they doing there?  What can we make of Dante’s underlying attitudes towards animals in general, and towards dogs in particular?  Apart from certain specific instances which every critic comments on, the question doesn’t seem to have been thoroughly studied since  Richard Thayer Holbrook wrote his book Dante and the Animal Kingdom – in 1902!   Though he feels a little dated, Holbrook is richly informative.  In his view, by the 1300s in Europe

the few approaches of Aristotle and some other great minds of antiquity to a true knowledge of the animals were almost forgotten, or converted slowly into fabulous shapes by fantasies unchecked by observation, by a credulity without bounds.

Hence Dante had a long history of fantasy on which to base his monstrous creatures in Inferno.  This was intensified by a theology that denied animals souls, intentions, capacity for abstraction or reason – that which distinguished humans from ‘lower orders’ and gave them access to God.  As for the animals themselves, Holbrook says,

their existence interests him only in so far as it furnishes him with imagery to make us comprehend the actions of men, of devils, and of angels, or in so far as the animals furnish lessons for the guidance of man.  He neither loves nor portrays them wholly for their own sake.

Dante, like our own Shakespeare, had small fondness for dogs.  The great intelligence they often possess, their loyalty even to a bad master, their obvious delight in kindness, their gratitude, their histrionic qualities, their wistful interest in human affairs – not one of these qualities appealed to Dante.

Almost all the associations are negative.  The first canid the pilgrim Dante (he is the main character in his own fiction) encounters is a she-wolf which, along with a lion and a leopard, harries him to the edge of Hell itself, where the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil begins his role as guide.  The wolf is usually interpreted as representing the carnal appetites: she is “so thin she looked/ as if all her appetites were gnawing at her”.  Virgil explains:

Because this animal you are troubled by

            lets no man pass but harasses him

            until she kills him by her savagery,

And she is so consumed by viciousness

            that nothing fills her, and so insatiable

            that feeding only makes her ravenous.

There are many animals she couples with

            and there will be more of them, until the Hound

            shall come and grind her in the jaws of death. (I. trans. Heaney)

One canid overcome by another: in the Christian narrative, unbridled carnality will be eventually banished by the apocalypse and the Final Judgement.  This “Hound” is usually read as the “Hound of Heaven”, a precursor of the Second Coming.  Dante’s word is veltro, which is a boar-hound, something between a greyhound and a Great Dane, used by the aristocracy for hunting.  While Dante may have had the real veltro in the back of his mind, this Hound is, as Holbrook says, “denatured by excessive allegory”.

This kind of divinely vengeful hunting-dog motif is repeated in Canto XIII, where Dante finds himself in a forest, whose branches are actually the transformed bits of human suicides.  Weird!  It’s also a good venue for hunting, and sure enough along come hurtling two misbegotten souls with a “roar ,/ Such as the hunter hears when he keeps his stand,/ hearing the wild boar and the chase itself” and “Behind their backs, the wood was growing full/ of black she-dogs, as eager and as swift as greyhounds just unfastened from their chains” (trans. Charles Wright).  The dogs tear the miscreants apart and carry off their dismembered limbs.

So in this phantasmagoric terror-scape the dog images are derived from real life but are given religious symbolic meaning, too.  Dante had also obviously taken note of dogs in the streets of his native Florence and other towns he was exiled to.  Some people kept guard dogs, so at one point Dante describes the pursuit of a guarding devil: “never was a dog set loose/ in such a hurry to catch a thief” (XXI).  Indeed, a couple of these rather comical devils are compared to guard-dogs, being named “Dog-Face” and “Dog-Scratcher” (or “Dog-Grabber”). 

William Blake's illustration of Cerberus

This echoes the earlier depiction of Cerberus, the guardian of the third circle of Hell: this three-headed monster out of Greek mythology barks dog-like from his three throats, presiding over tortured souls who themselves “howl like dogs” (caninamente, in Dante’s coinage).  Virgil distracts the monster by flinging gobbets of mud into its gullets: “Just as a dog which yelps when it craves/ becomes quiet when snapping up its food,/ straining and battling to devour it” (VI), Cerberus is momentarily subdued.

 Unlike the hunters’ hounds or aristocratic pets, most mediaeval Italian dogs probably lived unrestrained, impoverished, vicious and scavenging lives.  So sinners suffering the punishment of being buried in burning sands, Dante compares to

                                    dogs in summer

            afflicted at the muzzle and the paws

            by gnats and fleas, the gadfly’s bitterness. (trans. Stanley Plumly)

The nasty voraciousness of this dog-life Dante also uses when he describes some souls condemned to tear each other to pieces.  One of them, Ugolino, ceases speaking to the pilgrims and bites into the head of a sinful Archbishop: he “sank his teeth into that wretched skull/ And held on, as strong as a dog on a bone” (XXXIII, trans. Robert Hass).

Animals being regarded fundamentally as inferior to humans on the “Great Chain of Being”, Dante often reduces punished sinners to a bestial level.  For example, the pilgrim Dante comes across the souls of Greek mythological characters (whom he treats equally as real and un-Christian as actual humans), amongst them Hecuba who “began to bark as though she were a dog,/ her mind undone by sufferings she had borne” (XXX, trans. Alfred Corn).

But as Holbrook points out, Dante in the end has little compassion for the suffering sinners, and none at all for the suffering of dogs.  He may have closely observed them, but did not feel for them.  Since animals had neither souls nor reason, they certainly did not enter Heaven.  I haven’t yet sought animals in the next two books of the Commedia, but I suspect that dogs will fade from sight through Purgatorio into Paradiso, except as opportunistic metaphors.

Artistically magnificent though the poem is, I confess I struggle with the more vicious dimensions of a world-view so condemnatory and ignorant of animal lives.

No.24 - The moss on the tractor tyre

I can imagine the scene.  The boss is away in town, his young son is momentarily in charge of the workshop perched on the side of the hill.  He and the equally boyish workers combine in an unusual  spasm of communal hilarity.  It takes four of them to hoist the massive tractor tyre, nearly five feet across, upright, and to roll it slowly through the double doors at the back of the building.  For a moment it teeters on the edge of the concrete ledge; they give it a last concerted heave, and it bounces down a short slope, across the grassy terrace, and disappears over the bank.  The boys whoop as they listen to it crashing down and down through the forest, smashing yellowwoods and draesena palms, sending robins and louries startling into the air, setting even the baboons on the next ridge barking in alarm.  Then silence.

The lads high-five triumphantly and turn back inside the oily booming barn that houses Ocean View Motors, to decide what to do with the rest of the tractor.  Most likely, once they’ve stripped it of useful parts, they’ll shove the wreck into the bush somewhere, too, as with other carcasses of worn-out Holdens and Morrises and Mercs.

           

I imagine this all happened the same day as I was born, a thousand miles to the north.  It’s at least possible, since the lid of the dustbin I inherited from the workshop and still use today is stamped with the year of my birth.

           

And the tyre is still there, a hundred yards down the hill from my flatlet attached to that same, now empty, workshop.

“The abandoned car body rotting quietly in the landscape is alive with the activity of corrosion, it’s become a habitat, it looks perfectly at home, it’s both organic and machinic.  The shifting and contingent meanings for waste, the innumerable ways in which it can be produced, reveal it as not essentially bad but as subject to relations.  What is rubbish in one context is perfectly useful in another ... disenchantment stories deny the complexity of waste...”

That’s from Gay Hawkins’s provocative book, The Ethics of Waste.  One of our Master’s students is also working on a literary angle to waste, focusing on American novelist Don DeLillo’s gargantuan, sprawling, bewitching work, Underworld.  This teeming, Dickensian novel is largely populated by characters who work in the USA’s massive waste-disposal industry: a landfill designer at Fresh Kills, New York; a painter turning discarded B-52 bombers in the Arizona desert into artworks; a restaurant owner dumping excess food.  Nuclear waste seethes in secretive silos; a freighter loaded with toxic sludge wanders the world, rebuffed by every port.  All this, in DeLillo’s depiction, constitutes the underworld of our modern, shiny, capitalist enterprise, our adoration of machinery and bling – junk everywhere, threatening to overwhelm us.

One of DeLillo’s waste-disposal characters is Nick Shay, who deals with, amongst other stuff, radioactive waste.  Of burying nuclear waste in a Mesozoic salt-bed in Texas he says:

We were waste handlers, waste traders, cosmologists of waste. ... It was a religious conviction that these deposits of rock salt would not leak radiation.  Waste is a religious thing.  We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread.  It is necessary to respect what we discard.

No respectful religious fervour amongst my imaginary tractor-tyre boys, I warrant.  But DeLillo seems to be saying that if we don’t learn to re-value our waste, we will likely be buried by it.  Many creative people turn waste into art these days  And of course the poor have always valued and re-valued waste.  Most of ‘my’ car-wrecks have been hacked up and carried away on donkey-carts to be sold on into the Far East’s scrap industry.

But – along with the bits of rubber door-linings, the broken glass, the twisted shards of chromium fenders left behind – that tyre is still there.  With its robust metal hub, it probably weighs half a ton.  One would have to carve a whole road through the forest with a front-end loader, uproot a hundred trees, to get it out again.  It is destined, in short, to remain there forever.

With Hawkins and DeLillo in my mind, I look at it again.  I sit and just watch the sun-dapples shift across it as the day rotates above the thirty-foot treetops.  It may not look “perfectly at home”, in Hawkins’ phrase, but it has certainly become a habitat.  Half a dozen different species of plant have taken root inside its hub, each with its differently-shaped leaves.  Some have the tiniest mauve flowers, around which flit a couple of interested butterflies, nondescript brown until sunlight sparks a royal purple sheen off their forewings.  Tiny reddish ants, translucent in sun, are journeying purposefully back and forth along the stem of a creeper with trifoliate leaves that hugs the tyre’s edge.  On rhoicissus leaves nestled against its side, caterpillars are designing new Le Mans racing circuits with their jaws.  And in the two-inch wide chasms of the tyre’s treads, miniscule spiders have engineered their webs and snares; one has already wrapped in silk some unidentifiable prey, probably an embalmed larder for its eggs.

Brown-and-white droppings mark the tyre as a staging-post for certain birds.  And it’s a handy perch for a fastidious cat.

And there are still more subtle inhabitants.  Multiple species of mould breed in the slushy leaf-litter, vital fungi that will serve to transport fluid from earth to roots.  Even on the orange paint of the hub, algae have established tiny unexplored continents of green.  Little rosettes of blue-grey lichen fleck the rubber surfaces.  And some kind of moss has found congenial the miniature pits in the rubber, frosting almost the complete tyre with a patina of luxurious green.  Were it not for the unnatural symmetries of the treads, the thing would look almost like it belonged.

Another odd thought occurs.  Unlike other loose tyres I’ve found in the forest, this one’s still locked to its hub, and so cannot harbour rainwater, breeding-ground for mosquitoes and sundry other creatures.  Perhaps it’s still full of air.  Perhaps that air is as old as I am: fossilised breath.  Stashed in the hub are some old bottles, green beer-dumpies – and also a small pharmaceutical phial.  It’s slightly distorted, as if it had been blown by hand; there’s a smudge of russet residue of the original contents in the bottom; and its screwtop is still solidly sealed.  Maybe it, too, contains air from the year of my birth.  What would happen if I opened these decades-old vessels, and gulped their contents?  Release into the world some lethal toxin we are not ready to fight?  Or might I regain the youthfulness of my own first breaths?

The tyre’s foreignness still bulks ineradicably in my mind.  There is no embossed writing on it to identify its maker, but it could be, say, Massey-Ferguson, or Dunlop.  I wonder, then, about the origins of its components: steel from Pittsburgh for the hub; rubber from Brazil; chrome oxide in the yellow paint mined in the Congo; lead from Canada.  My forest has been internationalised – but is also re-wilding and re-valuing the invader.  Nothing will be quite the same as it was before, but the natural processes also move on, enveloping it, just being themselves.

We can no longer be complacent about the effects of the waste we daily generate.  I am suspicious of the retort that “Nature will eventually take care of it” – that’s an ethical cop-out.  But in this case?  Nothing to be done, really.  I call the cat, and we head for home.

No.23 - Rapists, rage and responses

Wow.  I take leave in the hills for a few days and everything goes crazy in my absence.  I return to a university jittery in the aftermath of yet another upheaval on yet another issue – this time rape and sexual harassment.  I’m picking up the echoes.  Demos, barricades, interdict, closure.  Some students and/or outsiders behaved badly as usual; the police behaved heavy-handedly as usual.  The Vice Chancellor shoved down stairs; an arrested student having a panic attack in a police van; another hit in the chest with a rubber bullet.  Letters in the press; sundry viewpoints aired on the university Confessions Facebook page.  It’s so complex; no one has a complete view.  Lawsuits threatened in every direction.  Trauma layered on trauma.  Some lecturers, especially male, declined this week to give lectures for fear of being invaded, interrogated and labelled the enemy unless they went out and toyi-toyi’d, too.

Indeed, any whiff of criticism of this wave of protest runs the risk of being simplistically characterised as support for rapists.  A new orthodoxy; no subtlety allowed.

So let me be crystal clear on my own stance here.  I condemn without reservation sexual harassment in all its forms.  Rape, along with other kinds of sexual harassment, is a national, indeed, global scourge.  There is no question that it ought to be eradicated, its patriarchal roots expunged, its perpetrators punished, and its victims protected and helped.  There is no question that judicial systems the world over have failed signally to rectify the situation, and that decades of public critique have substantially failed to persuade sexual predators of the damage that they do, and to deter them.

What to do about it now, is of course the question.  We are dealing with an ancient and many-headed hydra, pervasive in a multiplicity of forms, from international slavery networks to crass teasing at the nearest pub, across a vast range of social structures and individualised experiences.  It follows that solutions will have to be equally multiple, tailored to local nuances and conditions.  Globalised legislations and idealistic mantras, while necessary and already in place, can go only so far.

Local responses are already well-established.  Annually, I am honoured to join a march or other event in support of women’s rights or in opposition to sexual harassment and inequalities.  Raising awareness and sensitivities amongst men, and empowering women, through demonstrations, educative displays, media exchanges, lectures, support groups and so on, gets my total support.  In principle, then, I applaud student initiatives to address the issue as it impacts upon them in the here and now.

All that said, it’s tricky. The university is a locus for both new freedoms for the young, and new disciplines.  It is both an erotically charged space, and a venue for challenging the status quo. We have a communal responsibility to challenge the status quo, even as we try to maintain a certain stability and respectfulness.  The recent paroxysm of rage has raised some troubling questions.  Righteous anger has always been a necessary element in compelling change; and – as usefully outlined in Stacy Hardy’s article, “A Brief History of Student Protest”, in the latest edition of Chronic-Chimurenga – students have often been at the forefront of such changes.  In this case, it seems to me, some the modes of anger and rhetoric have spilled over from last year’s protests, and have become a little misdirected.

Firstly, there has been intense debate about the event that sparked the upheaval: the anonymous posting of the euphemistically-titled “ReferenceList” of alleged sexual offenders.  It’s controversial enough publicising neighbourhood lists of convicted paedophiles or rapists; this is doubly shaky stuff.  Women I’ve spoken to, despite being strongly feminist or victims of abuse themselves, have termed it an unacceptable act of vigilantism.  One writer claims that 96% of claims of sexual assault are well-founded and honest, implying that the ReferenceList must therefore be 96% accurate.  This can’t by definition be shown, since that figure cannot include the huge number of claims that never get proved in court, let alone the many instances of withdrawn charges. Pontsho Pilane, who makes some good points in her recent Mail & Guardian comment, supports publishing the list, arguing that women have been left with no alternative. If there is “collateral damage” to the innocent, that seems acceptable – as long as it’s men.  Hmm.

This view is closely connected with a second problematic aspect: equating the legally-binding ‘presumption of innocence until proven guilty’, which is written into national and constitutional law, with somehow deliberately “protecting the perpetrators”.  That this seems to happen in practice doesn’t mean that presumption-of-innocence law is wrong.  It’s partly a product of the fact that a) many victims are understandably reluctant to lay charges openly or immediately; b) it is in so many cases very hard to prove and prosecute the assault; and c) the burden of proof is automatically, regardless of the crime, on the charge-layer/victim.

I’ve experienced this tough situation in a minor key.  Maybe twenty-five years ago I was stabbed and robbed on a staircase leading down into Joburg railway station.  It was over in a minute of frenetic struggle; though I was bleeding, the first and only security guard I found was uninterested.  The attackers were gone; there was no one to arrest or charge.  Obliged to prove their guilt, I would likely not have been able to recognise them even if they’d been caught.  The law could do nothing for me.  So I patched myself up and walked away from it.  Yet even now I still sometimes run over the scene in my head, wondering what I could have done differently, whether I’d been too naive, too slow, too weak.

I suppose I should have made a fuss and demanded that station security be enhanced.  This, in one facet of the demonstrations, is what our students have demanded of university management.  I don’t know how much practical and legal wiggle-room administrators have, since they cannot (as some seem to be demanding) act outside the parameters of national law.  I do hope that the newly-formed task-team can at least make it more possible to humanely receive and pursue harassment cases (I understand a number are already under prosecution, but are strictly sub judice, for good reason).  For victims, no strategy – silence, court, therapy – is ever going to be easy.  But it will not be made easier if the anger is directed at the wrong people.

Of one thing I am fairly sure: the scourge will not be mitigated by drawing yet more unnecessary divisions – between students and management, or between students and lecturers.  We can only do it together, over the long term, by increments, by every available channel and strategy.

Hence, for example, the study of literature is not irrelevant, even if it’s not happening spectacularly on the barricades.  Once the spectacle of the street demo passes, as it must, the skills our lectures and studies develop remain vital: the deepening of empathetic imagination, better understandings of what drives human relations, the transcendence of damaging stereotypes and generalisations, sensitisation to one another’s needs, tolerance of different voices, the enhancement of self-confidence, the mental wherewithal to make more intelligent decisions in one’s daily life.  Later in the year I will be presenting our first-years with Ursula le Guin’s fascinating science-fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.  Sci-fi?  Irrelevant!  On the contrary.  Le Guin’s novel is all about cross-cultural understanding, identity and otherness, truth and governance – and gender.  Le Guin imagines a largely de-gendered physiology which makes rape impossible, and gender inequalities non-existent.  It’s a thought-experiment: What kind of society would we have if that were the case?

We will get nowhere without such imagination, the power to envisage alternatives, and the hard-won maturity and wisdom to work together across all other perceived distinctions.  Whatever we might achieve might feel a bit like the cap about be placed on the exploded Chernobyl nuclear reactor: a huge effort of international cooperation, thirty years late, so much damage in the interim, and hardly addressing the root causes of radiation itself – but an achievement nevertheless.  That’s our job: to do what we can to take our sad song, and make it better.

No.22 - "Brindisi, 2072"

Some view Europe's current treatment of refugees as horribly ungenerous.  Have Europeans forgotten that, just sixty years ago, millions of them were refugees themselves in the wake of the Second World War?  What if, another half-century down the line, the boot were once again on the other foot.  This is the sketch of a story...

BRINDISI, 2072

She looked half-starved, grey beneath the skin, shaky – and she was the charity worker dishing up thin soup at the head of Brindisi dock.

            As her spoon clanked against his enamel bowl, Garrett Miller found his thanks catching in his throat; being a “refugee” still shamed him.  But he was moved that at least some locals turned out in support, where most Italian residents had barred their doors, barricaded streets, and called on riot police to keep the ragged influx contained.

            He settled against a sun-warmed wall next to Lynda, helped her to some gruel.  He twitched aside the grubby blanket around her to reveal Deborah’s tiny face.  She seemed terribly still.

            “Is she still breathing?”

            “She just suckled,” said Lynda.  “For what it’s worth.”  There was a bitter edge to her voice now; the flight from the war had somehow rapidly changed this quiet, introverted inoffensive wife to one bordering on the vindictive and accusing.  As if the whole conflict had been his fault.

            They were surrounded by a forest of parti-coloured tents and awnings strung from the fences, a glum hubbub of exhausted faces and slumped shoulders, children too weak to play or wail.  On the shoreline where they had come to rest the previous evening, a little way back up the coast, a tiny child had lain, face down in the surf, dead and bloated up tight in its orange lifejacket, ignored.  People feared radioactivity or some other contagion, and walked on.

            He had scribbled down a note of it.

            “Why are you bothering?” Lynda had snapped.  “There’s no one to sell your stories to now.”

            He had tried to smile.  “Once a journalist, always a sucker for a story.  And the stories have to be told.  Everyone has a story.  We’ll look back on this one day and want someone to know our story.”

            “Look back from where?”

            That, he couldn’t answer.  Everyone was talking of vast plains in Ethiopia, fields of green along the Euphrates, cities of golden peace in Syria, but you couldn’t tell how true these visions were, or where the implacable streams of history might carry them.  For himself he envisioned African mountains, the liberation of clean air, and water running in spectacular valleys, and birds.  Just a patch of arable land, and a circle of friends, swapping their tales of horrors gone by.

            The horrors played themselves out in his journalist’s mind as headlines: BREXIT DESTROYS EURO; RUSSIA INVADES TURKEY; SHADES OF 1945: BERLIN FIRESTORM; NUCLEAR FALLOUT ENVELOPS BRITAIN; EIFFEL TOWER TOPPLED BY WARLORDS.  It had become almost impossible to follow, let alone believe, the sequence of events that had reduced so much of the continent to radioactive rubble.  Maybe it had been like that in 1914: a mush of ill-conceived treaties, undercover monetary loyalties, here a tyrant showing too much muscle, there an assassin pulling his trigger at just the wrong moment, elsewhere a billionaire profiting from weapons sales to all sides, populations on the edge of starvation coaxed into battle as their last resort.  Sit and die – or fight, maybe die maybe not.

            Or run.

            Garrett had chosen to take his wife and baby and run.  For the baby’s sake, mostly. Crawling out of the Underground after their fortnight’s emergency supplies had run out, they’d found London all but flattened, afire from horizon to horizon – H G Wells’ War of the Worlds came absurdly to his mind.  But here it was humans themselves who were their own aliens, their own destroyers. 

Garrett had had the foresight to liberate some cash the moment the first missiles from Germany had headed for Britain, and they were able to pay a boat-owner – a surly, scowling man they discovered was a Slovenian well-versed in fleecing the needy to ferry them through dangerous waters – to get them from Lambeth to Calais.  The Chunnel was choked with exploded vehicles, the Thames cluttered with oily hulks, like something out of Dickens, and the Channel crossing itself swathed in blue-grey smog and haunted by patrol-boats of random allegiance.

And they had to pay the Slovenian pirate again just to get off the boat.

The Red Cross had set up a temporary camp near Calais nicknamed ‘The Jungle’, where they were able to get at least a little warmer, October cold beginning to creep in off the Atlantic.  Here, discomfitingly, they found themselves jostling at the food lines with nationalities with whom they, the English, were technically still at war: Germans, Danes, even some Russians who had fled their own corner of Hell.  Like any other sane human.  Indeed, the Miller family were rapidly being reduced to the essential humanity they all shared: hungry, dislocated, malodorous, shitting in ditches.

It took mere days to lose even the dignity of animals.  And it wasn’t long before they learned that even amongst the destitute moved marauders and false friends, that those best equipped to handle all this were those who had travelled furthest, with least conscience, with sly weapons, those who would before the war have been dismissed as tramps and gypsies, gangsters and ex-cons, deluded survivalists and wacko woodsmen.  Pampered City journos like the Millers, with softened feet and homey values, limited resources and a baby, were poorly equipped, to say the least.

Within hours of flopping down in The Jungle, a few minutes’ inattention saw the theft of their little plastic baby carrier and her blankets.  “Who would do something like that!” Lynda wailed.  And then, in the first of such startlingly intemperate outbursts, she yelled out randomly over the clustered, miserable refugees: “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

It injured Garrett’s sense of propriety, and he wrapped her in his arms just to quieten her.  But no one even raised their heads.  The gentlemanly virtues, quintessentially English, that Garrett had been taught by his father, grandfather, great-grandfather even, seemed irrelevant here.  His great-grandfather, over ninety when he, Garrett, had been ten, had muttered endlessly about 1914, and 1945, and how he saw that every generation had to suffer its own great war, as he had as a child.

“You’ll get your war, too,” the ancient man, the retrograde imperialist, had growled.  “Up to you to save our way of life, if all these black-faced immigrants haven’t trashed us by then.” 

Now those values appeared always to have been illusory; yet Garrett had not been able to bring himself ever to abuse another refugee.  He paid, in money or kind, rather than filch or bully; but such resources were dwindling.

It had become clear to them all that they couldn’t stay at Calais long: the Red Cross were in dire straits themselves, there were rumours of a local warlord’s bands moving closer, and such residents of the town as remained were themselves turning hostile.

Italy, it was said, was more hospitable.  Thereafter, the Middle East – having weathered its own wars half a century before – beckoned as a haven of peace.  Africa, too, the region that had powered itself to prosperity as the West fell into decay, self-recrimination and directionless war.

But those places seemed to them like evanescent dreams – dreams that nevertheless had to be chased.  So they had lurched in trucks to the Italian border, where more money had to change hands to cross the makeshift barriers; then it was on foot, across the southern Alps, in the footsteps of Hannibal, it may have been, Garrett wryly wondered as they trudged past bodies half-buried in snow-drifts.  At times troops chased them with teargas and rubber bullets.  They were barely able to stagger onto a train that collected them in Milan; the Italians’ mission, too, was clearly to get rid of them as soon as possible.  Now, the clash of gates behind them underlined their entrapment at the toe end of Italy.

There were boats, it was said, which would take them from Brindisi across the Mediterranean to – wherever it took them to.

And even as the Millers scraped the bottom of their bowl for the last lick of soup, there was a ripple through the crowd assembled on Brindisi dock.  A boat had been spotted approaching out of the sea-murk; there was a surge amongst the people towards the end of the docks, trampling tents and women, with bellows and optimistic screams.  The boat appeared silver, a chip of quartz, bright as a promise.

“We need to get down there,” yelled Lynda.  But Garrett held her back; she thrashed in his arms, stopping only when the baby fell and whimpered feebly.  “We’ll get trampled,” he shouted at her.  “They’ll restore order, they will.  We’ll find who to organise this with.”

But he scarcely believed himself; he knew the numbers were too great; their only hope lay, probably, in the enfeebled apathy of the majority of the refugees.  But he wasn’t confident any more of his own strength, either.

Then the tone of the crowd changed subtly; it was like a swarm of bees turning from enthusiastic hive-making to anger, a deepening of tone amongst those who called out to each other in a Babel of languages, none of which Garrett could understand.

But a pair of binoculars was circulating nearby; through them Garrett could see what had caused the change.  A dark grey military vessel, clearly armed, was turning the silvery boat away.  And the word was surging back from the dockside, whether true or not seemed immaterial: the word was that Africa was closing its borders, it had taken in enough refugees, no more would pass this point.

“What?” screamed Lynda.  “How can they do that?  There are millions of acres of land in Africa! How can they be so bloody ungenerous?”

The two boats in time disappeared into the mist; the refugees slumped back into a low, dispirited hum.  Lynda and Garrett retreated to their little spot against the wall, a spot that felt almost, now, like a home.

The baby was very quiet.  Garrett ran his fingers around her tiny bobble of a chin.  “Hey, is she still breathing?”

****************************************************************************

No 21 - The Terrace

Late afternoon light slips across the treetops on the edge of the terrace, more lucid than nectar, sadder than gold.  The tips of leaves lift as if to meet it, like the mane on a cat’s back.  It’s autumn, the sky is cool with the frailest of high mares’-tail clouds, the erythrina tree at the east corner is beginning to shed its first leaves, yellowing like coins worn to the thinnest of memories.

I’ve come to love this little terrace.  I don’t own it; it’s not even on the tiny property I rent.  Like light, I prefer to pass over and through this life, not attempt to possess it.  The view is astounding.  The Southwell road curls away across the shallow ridges of the coastal plain, the promise of a discovery following its own nose to the sea.  I can see the sea, cerulean plate with a single white chip on the rim: a ship.

Over the years I have worn a wavering path through the grass from one end of the terrace to the other.  Sixty-six paces, good to think along.  I talk myself through problems and poems and practice lectures. It’s automatic now to duck beneath the thorny branch of the acacia tree at one end, step over a slightly protruding stub of Table Mountain sandstone in the middle, and the tip of a buried rib of rusted metal at the other. 

On the bare patches of this little path I’ve worn down, other tracks appear.  Bushpigs’ heavy chevrons; bushbucks’ smaller sharp Vs.  They move through unseen in the night, hoarding their stripes.  In the day, sometimes, baboons shamble through, overturning rocks in search of insects, tearing out the side of the termite mound on the slope.  Now and then the big male comes up the cottage steps and takes an interest in the TV through the glass door. Vervet monkeys sun their silvery bellies on the treetops in the early mornings, their little black faces pert as buttons on a tux.  Now and then a slender mongoose, searching for the guinea-fowl nest with the thirteen speckled eggs.

And once every couple of years, a great tortoise, thrice the size of a rugby ball and looking as old as the slabs of rock he stumps across, pursues precisely the same circuit through the garden and vanishes into the forest, for a moment having encompassed me in his incomprehensible aeon.

I walk a blurred boundary between the wild and the conquered.  I face the setting sun.  To my left, big Wild plums with their fans of symmetrical leaves and cerise round fruits.  One of them is thick, robust, with anaconda curls to its branches; the cat and I like to climb it and feel we have transcended the toils of mortal ground.  On my right, a tall Black wattle, Australian invader, as alien as I am, an uneven ladder of horizontal branches we also climb until we are taller than giraffes and silly with wind.  I pull up the persistent seedlings, since the ecologists tell us they do not belong; but they too have their little miracle: each night their long friezes of leaflets close up, like a hundred feathered hands closing in prayer along each of a thousand pews.

I no longer know what belonging means, if it is not to attend to such details, each one sacred to its own being.

Muscling up through the twenty-metre strip of shelving rock between the terrace and my buildings are any number of aliens.  English rambling rose wreathing the lean-to garage; North American pines waiting for Christmas; Scottish thistles prickling up through the local helichrysum; a single graveyard cypress alongside the king proteas.  Always, the sun especially vivid through their blades, Australian long-leafed acacia, aka Port Jackson wattle – the most 

persistent menace of all.  Swarming across neighbouring slopes, especially in the wake of an intense bushfire a year ago, the Port Jacksons overwhelm almost all other species, creating a whispering militaristic monoculture.  I root them out as best I can, feeling a bit like that lone protester in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square, but revelling in watching the indigenous diversity reassert itself where I’ve cleared.

Life is strongest when most diverse: that’s my mantra – and the mantra sung by all the birds that skitter and chirp through the forest trees skirting the southern edge of the terrace.  The slope drops away steeply there, propped up by yellowwoods and rhus, boerboen and wit-hout; I can look down into complex continents of cavernous greens and cross-hatched shadow, white sparks of rock and shivering concentrics of spider-web.  Green-painted turacos run like squirrels along the branches before launching themselves on wings of livid crimson; Bar-throated apalis and lisping canaries thrilling through the thickets; cheerfully whistling greenbuls and Fork-tailed drongos and the hoodlum mousebirds mobbing the fringes.

And somewhere amongst the rhoicissus creeper a robin-chat is trying to impress with an experimental mix of sunbird song, human gardener, and Crowned eagle, linked with playful trills and tripples of his own invention.  That robin is biodiversity all in his own hidden self.

I stroll to the east end of the terrace, where Siberia is crouched fixedly over a hole in the ground, led to it by a runnel of tamped grass smoothed by the bellies of mice. That cat has taught me a lot about local species, by methods usually fatal to the rodents: the ghastly Asian Rattus rattus, but also sweet Three-striped mouse and Grey climbing mouse, House mouse and the cutest of all, the fluffy-tailed Spectacled dormouse.  Nothing doing at this hole today, so Siberia follows me along the terrace, gathering herself with a thoughtful and cunning expression into a mock-chase across the grass, all jubilant flexing stripes and rabbit-heels.  She seems to know how funny she looks from behind.

At the other end of the terrace we contemplate that nub of metal.  Someone has left a scent on it that Siberia explores carefully before rubbing her face on it. Olfactory territories.  It’s the remnant of a car chassis, I guess.  For decades the buildings I live in were occupied by a succession of auto-repair businesses.  I soon discovered that the old method of getting rid of a redundant car-body was simply to shove it down the hill.  So over hundreds of square metres the forest is littered with car parts and massive tractor tyres with trees shafting up through the middle, seat springs and hubcaps and suspension-leafs and gearboxes.

For a certain period, when scrap metal was relatively lucrative, a band of men and youths with donkey-carts would trundle out from town, dismember the wrecks of the ancient Holdens and Morrises and Chevys with axes and crowbars, and cart the mangled pieces off.  Amazingly quickly, the carcasses were thankfully gone.  At one point the guys lit a cooking-fire on the lip of the terrace; coals fell into cracks in the earth; next thing we knew an underground fire was belching clouds of oily smoke and a gritty stench into the air.  I began to realise that my little paradisal terrace was actually built on car-wrecks, that beneath its coat of fragrant earth, kikuyu and heather remained a noxious reservoir of metal and rust, oil and paint and flammable rubber.  That ‘airborne toxic event’ persisted for days, scratching at the lungs, until a lucky thunderstorm doused it.

And down the forest slope remains an ineradicable swathe of tattered plastic and shattered glass, shards of chrome fittings and flakes of paint, mixed in with beer bottles and medicine jars, rims of tin-cans and all the rest of our modern detritus.  I remove what I can to the city dump: this is what our profligate civilisation has come to – the shifting of our rubbish from one locale to another, none of it ultimately going away.

But for now, I am light in the light, levitating in the peace of evening as a nameless flower collects in its mauve petals the pollenated sun, frailest and most precious gift on the edge of encroaching night.

No.20 - Emotion and Reason: Universities’ dilemma

#HistoryMustFall

The turmoil at South African universities over the last few months has raised so many areas of concern it’s hard to get one’s head around any of it.  So many sub-issues splintered off the initial drive for better funding, and so many external party-political opportunists weighed in, that central issues rapidly got obscured.  So much angry over-simplification was aired, as always happens at the barricades, that it’s hard to know where to begin a response.  Since I’m an ageing white male academic, anything I say is likely to be dismissed immediately as irrelevant and defensive, if not intrinsically racist.

One is tempted to follow the suggestion of my lovely philosophical colleague Samantha Vice, a couple of years ago, that whites no longer have the moral right to do much other than subside into “humility and silence”.  After a storm of protest and misreading, she explained that she didn’t mean that whites should withdraw entirely from public life, but that they should no longer regard themselves as automatically speaking from a position of authority and control.

I agree – so anything I might add is offered from a desire not to harden the lines of debate, but to transcend them; not to negate the critique of academia, but to see what positives might be drawn from the situation.  I certainly have no solutions – only perspectives and ruminations on one or two aspects.

 

#ComplexityMustFall

Trouble is, of course, that any one aspect instantly feeds into a gazillion others.  It’s neither easy nor entirely satisfactory to tease them apart – but developing a more holistic response to the whole crisis is complex and takes time.  Revolutionaries by definition don’t have time to take their time – so their temptation is to try to make quick, spectacular gains on the back of stark dichotomies: black/white, young/old, colonial/indigenous.  Whole institutions, even governments, are pressured to follow suit.

 

#OversimplificationMustFall

We academic scholars, on the other hand, suffer the opposite impulse, which is to say, “Hang on a bit, it’s more complex than that.”  This is almost always true, but it can also be a defence mechanism.  We have a natty way of taking real issues and wrapping them up in so much discussion, theorising and qualification that nothing gets done at all.  This can be seen as a way of preserving the institutional status quo.  The resort to “complexity” and “reasoned debate”, as Ra’eesa Pather has suggested in a recent Mail & Guardian piece, can even be experienced as part of a “chilling”, oppressive and exclusive “white”, “colonialist” machinery.

I witnessed an example of this among responses to a recent talk at Rhodes University.  The talk was delivered by William Beinart, a hugely respected historian of Southern Africa, two decades at Oxford University.  He was reporting on a debate held at Oxford’s Oriel College about the proposed removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the college façade.  Beinart both supported the removal and applauded the activists’ win at the debate (though the college itself elected not to remove the statue).

One of Beinart’s respondents in question-time argued both furiously and eloquently that the form of the debate itself was the problem.  In such debates, she was not recognised in “my black female body”; the British parliamentary rules of such debates, she stated over and over, “are so reasonable that they are unreasonable”.  They made no space for her emotions, seemed to be the issue.  I was reminded of a scene, televised during last year’s protests, in which a large black female student faced up two bemused-looking white-haired professors, literally shrieking and shaking, “You tell me to put down my emotions, but how do you ignore my emotions, I am my emotions, I can’t study here because of my emotions, I can’t breathe in this place!”  (An oft-used phrase borrowed from that poor man killed by US police a year ago.)  As a rather bemused white-haired professor myself, I’m not sure how one might even begin to respond to such outbursts; they open no doors to conversation.

 

#EurocentrismMustFall

So here’s the interesting thing: the perceived conflict between “reason” and “emotion”. Is “reason” itself a “colonial” imposition?  Is the opposite or antidote to reason or rationality unfettered emotionalism?

It’s understandable that “the West” is seen as governed by rationality – it’s the image it has often projected of itself.  The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century – the “Age of Reason” – gave birth to both a scientific revolution and to modern democracy.  These things are closely tied by ideals of objectivity, reasonable debate, persuasion by evidence rather than prejudice, laws forged by impeccable logic.  And it’s understandable that the university is seen as governed by those principles, and therefore as the flagship of an imported “Western” world-view which is fundamentally un-African.  Yet as I write, our Vice-Chancellor in his Graduation Address urges our graduates to be – amongst other unimpeachably virtuous things – “the voice of reason”.

Poor old René Descartes is often blamed for the Western mindset, since he wrote the following in 1640:

The true function of reason, then, in the conduct of life is to examine and consider without passion the value of all perfections of body and soul that can be acquired by our conduct, so that since we are commonly obliged to deprive ourselves of some goods in order to acquire others, we shall always choose the better ... It is enough to subject one’s passions to reason ...

Emotions are not quite banished, but are reduced to mere instruments of reason.  Descartes’ goal of the “mastery of nature”  and “better goods” also translated into mastery of other peoples, with some appalling consequences.  It’s not popular to point out that the legacy is nevertheless mixed. The scientific rationalism that produced the cellphone and the heart transplant also produced the Gatling gun and the atom bomb.  The capitalistic profit-motive that operates hand-in-hand with democracy is responsible both for fantastic advances in human well-being and for irreversible damage to our global environment. 

Descartes wasn’t the only philosopher on the block.  The wrestle between reason and the “passions” or emotions goes back at least as far the Stoics of Ancient Greece.  And it has never stopped.  “The West”, it might be more accurate to say, is characterised by that very struggle.  There have always been voices disputing the primacy of rationalism.  The poet William Blake thought that an over-dependence on reason would just lead to “the Ratio of all things ... the same dull round over and over”. And in last week’s Sunday Times, the novelist Yann Martel (The Life of Pi) is reported as saying:

 

#RationalityMustFall

I realised that reason and rationality had become a disease.  It scours and scrapes away at things and I felt that I was drying up.  I was equating truth with factual truth.... Magical thinking is shared not only by religion but by art; both are preoccupied with a greater truth that goes beyond factual truth.

In between, there have been countless thousands of other writers, artists, musicians, and philosophers who have made it their business to valorise the spontaneous over the arithmetical, imagination over logic, quality over quantity, beauty over utility, the feeling over the cerebral.  Whoever thought Western society is ruled by reason alone, anyway?  Been to church lately? Read a horoscope? Fallen in love? Watched Donald Trump?

In short, there is no single “The West”, rather a bundle of conflicting views, some of which are notably compatible with certain “African” ideas and ideals.  (Nor a single “Africa”.)  And perhaps the reason-emotion conflict is illusory anyway: neurologist Antonio Damasio, in his fascinating books Descartes’ Error, Looking for Spinoza and The Feeling of What Happens, discusses research that shows how reason and emotion almost always function together inseparably at the neural level.  These ideas might lead us to some ground-breaking and magical thinking.

Finally, what about the place of emotions in the work of the academy?  As a scholar of literature, my subject-matter is almost wholly the emotional life.  Poetry is largely about beauty and the immeasurable inner life; stories are about individualised feelings of love and hatred and fear.  Literature and the arts are humanity’s way of exploring our emotional lives, lives that even the most rationalistic of scientists or accountants can’t escape.  Yet even in this discipline we examine our students’ responses through the essay, formalised into coherent and rational argumentation (“Your claims must be supported by evidence from the text”); and finally our assessment is collapsed into a simple number (“You got 68%”).    In this sense, the university and its structure is still profoundly Cartesian, scraping and scouring away.  And yet, such liberation of thought occurs, too ...

 

#EmotionalismMustFall

My feelings about it all are, well, complex.  Damn, there’s that word again.

(This is just me thinking; it in no way reflects opinions of my colleagues or my institution.)