Scars just make your soul more interesting

I will never be a grown-up. Sometimes I fake it well and sometimes not so well. I’ve always liked the CCR song “Someday Never Comes.” There are no grown-ups. There is never a “someday” in your life when you suddenly say “I understand” and the world starts making sense. The world only starts making sense when you start ignoring all the things that hurt you so deeply that even the scars mark you as a member of the tribe of walking wounded who survived that particular awful something. Scars just make your soul more interesting. But, being a grown-up is acting as if the scars were not there in situations where acting as if they were would only make things harder. We have to hide the scars often in order to get our needs meet in the big world of pretend adults outside. Intimacy is dropping the mask and telling where it hurts. At some point, it is necessary to stop comparing resumes and start playing show and tell with the scars any “we” will have to deal with together, when the doors are closed and no one is pretending to be a grow-up. We eternal children call this “playing for keeps.”

The Shaman

The energy is very real which, in the process of working itself out, created religion as a trace. On the other hand, the process that creates every religion turns the free-play of signifiers that was in the beginning into a game with rules and boundaries. One is not allowed to edit and revise those rules or redraw those borders once the game is in progress; seeing any gap between the map and the territory strips the emperor naked, un-tunes the sky and makes it harder for the simply devout to properly digest their food, whether we are talking about material bread or spiritual sustenance.

A shaman is a visionary walking between worlds, gesturing madly in an attempt to make us see the absence of everything missing from our side of the divide. We live inside a map which is one of the worlds the shaman walks between. We call this map the real and see the other side as somehow surreal, as a dream sometimes collective and sometimes private. We think of inside information about everything we have made real by mapping as being hidden like ciphered messages or Easter eggs in these dreams. Insider trading is what most people have in mind if they pay rapt attention to some mad woman, suspected of hiding real secrets worth knowing inside a word salad of oblique allusion that never says but only suggests, making indirect reference to things always at least one link away on a chain of signifiers leading to something that is real because it has value inside the real. They are listening to a senile pirate muttering about a half-remembered map to real treasure more lost than hidden in ruined chains of tangled reference.

The shaman is no prophet. She does not claim exclusive rights to anything. She leaves no true map of things to ensnare later travelers. Religion provided the structural model for every later type of human collaborative involving enough people to make strong personal ties between everyone involved impossible. The shaman is always the mad woman hidden in the attic of every trace of spent energy, that is to say, of every organization. She remembers where all the wealth hoarded and even occasionally  nurtured within the structure came from. She knows the actual un-retouched or photoshopped behind the creation myth. She is an embarrassment, a resource and a threat. She is the secret weapon and the Achilles heel. The treasure was not made tinkering in a garage. It was born illegitimate in a flash of passion gift-wrapping an insight into the nature of the game. Sometimes the game is poker and the stakes of the game are the right to play law-giver but only the way a child plays enraptured at being king, wishing his magic to be real for now, for as long as free play continues, but then gone for good and quickly forgotten. It is not good to leave the world littered with the dry bones of dead play. Better to write the rules of a game yet to be by playing, just playing beyond and outside any game in the place where games wait with endless patience to be born and play dies in the very first moment the rules are spoken.

Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be Privatized

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEFL8ElXHaU

 Peter Brabeck-Letmathe speaks for himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEy4aT9Rd4g

The response

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/03/27/18770528.php

Protest in California shuts down Nestle

The same thing is happening in Florida. 12 different companies hold permits giving them the right to drain as much water from our aquifers as they want. The price of this permit is all but nothing. This is not happening because anyone thinks it is good for the citizens of Florida. This is happening because the corrupt demagogues who keep conning their way back into office year after year in Florida with ads about God and how their opponent is a pedophile, closet Muslim terrorist or philatelist are getting fat on graft (the unscrupulous use of a politician's authority for personal gain). I am not exaggerating. The late Claude Pepper, running as an incumbent, lost his US senate seat representing Florida to an opponent, George Smathers, who accused Pepper of being a philatelist (someone who collects stamps) and a flaming heterosexual who practiced celibacy before his marriage to a woman who was already well known at that time as a thespian (someone who acts in plays).

         As we speak, many of the winners in the last election have already transferred their winnings off-shore while laughing at the stupidity of the deluded little dupes who put them in office. If you voted for Rick Scott, I am talking about you and the people you voted for last election and the election before and will keep voting for again and again until you die of either thirst or the long-range effects of drinking tap-water that will light if you put a match to it.           

The CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, thinks that phony people (corporations motivated exclusively by greed) and not real people (who live with water around or under them that they need to survive as much as the air around and above them) own all the water. In Florida, he is right thanks to that permit I mentioned earlier. Why does a phony Swiss citizen (Nestle) own the water under your feet? Because the people who get elected in Florida sold him (Nestle) a cheap permit that allows Nestle to make billions draining as much water as they can sell anywhere in the world from Florida's aquifers. This was a horrible deal for Florida and a very profitable deal for Nestle and, I am quite sure, for the fervent apostles of tickle-down economics that sold a permit worth billions for peanuts.

         Soon, Nestle will buy a license to hunt and fish. Ten years later, there will not be a fish swimming in fresh water or an edible beast left alive in the forests of Florida. Anything is possible in a state where politicians will sell the water right out from under their constituent's feet. Maybe Rick Scott and the whole sick crew will move to Switzerland after Florida becomes uninhabitable. That is probably where the money has gone already.

Why one autobiography is not enough

            Many years ago, when I was taking Survey of American Literature as an undergraduate, Dr. Howard Creed, our instructor, mentioned that Sherwood Anderson was quite arguably the most influential minor writer in the history of American literature. Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio, a novel that was the first book written by an American which could not have been written at all if the author had not read Freud and, for better or worse, been so powerfully influenced by Freud that it could be truthfully said that, without Freud, the author would never have written that particular book.

            Anderson's novel sold well and was much better than most novels that were selling well at the time. It was especially popular with and widely discussed among those younger readers who fancied themselves "literary" and day-dreamed about novels they might write themselves someday. Winesburg, Ohio is not remembered today as a great book or remembered at all very often. But, it was an influential book in its time. Specifically, Its influence made Freud more important to American writers by showing how psychoanalytic concepts could be used to develop complex characters and plots that unfolded to reveal those complexities. Anderson also wrote six different autobiographies. All were well written and seemed plausible as revelations of Anderson's character. But, each contradicted the other five in key ways that went far beyond just getting some of the details wrong. The six books each candidly revealed the values and needs of a different personality and explained how exactly that personality was shaped by a lifetime of experience, Sherwood Anderson's lifetime of experience.

            What does any of this have to do with how exactly my personality was shaped by a lifetime of experience, not Sherwood Anderson's but my own? This was the question being asked here and I'm fairly sure that you, gentle reader, wish ardently that I would cut the "literary" posturing and answer it. I can sympathize with Anderson and his several mutually exclusive autobiographies. I cannot help but be aware that my past as I remember and retell it is a revisionist history explaining how I came to be the person I think I am as I sit here trying to get something written that will accurately reflect this writer's sensibility and point of view. Episodes will be recounted that I think will do so and those which do not will not come to mind. The result will be a brief character sketch that will have coherency, closure and ring true as a real story about me, but only because of everything that was left out. There is no one true history that reveals the character of the person who lived it. Any number of life-stories can be told about any one person, all of them true but none of them capturing the whole truth all at once in one story.

            I was born in rural Alabama to a farmer and his wife. I was their first and only child. They divorced when I was four and the court awarded custody to my mom. This was pure sexism. Any woman who had not sacrificed an elder infant to Bal would have gotten custody. I remember standing by the fire with my dad in the mornings while I watched Captain Kangaroo and my dad complained about Mr. Green-jeans. Mr. Green-jeans was supposed to be a farmer but was nothing like my dad or any other farmer I or my dad had ever met. My dad thought it was wrong to lie to kids like that.

            Divorce was rare in this time and place. I was the only child from a "broken home" in my first few grades of school. Now, about the same percentage of children in that school come from 'broken homes" as you would find in any other grade school.  I can't recall any episode that would neatly sum up the difference this made at the time but I cannot believe it made no difference at all at a time when Stand by your man and D-i-v-o-r-c-e were two big hits, both by Tammy Wynette, that were played endlessly on the radio. I feel it must have made a difference so I tell you a story about Tammy Wynette to fill a hole in my story where a recalled episode should sit providing the perfect example illustrating the difference it made.

            I am the product of one of those segregation academies that sprung up like mushrooms after a summer rain the year after the Alabama schools finally desegregated. I was embarrassed to be there at the time but, looking back, I think I was probably better off there. Academic standards were about the same at both schools and not terribly high at either. My grandfather was on the academy governing board. His grandfather, James Monroe Roberts, was blinded fighting for the Confederacy at the battle of Atlanta. Another ancestor, Richard Roberts, fought in the revolutionary war. One fought to be an American and the other fought not to be. My great-grandfather, Carlos Roberts, was a school superintendent who believed in flying saucers. He was a break in the chain. My grandfather often mentioned to me that I reminded him of his father in so many ways that it was a bit spooky. The academy gave me more of what I needed to be another break in the chain than a desegregated public school could have. The academy did not reproduce the all-white public school that no longer existed. It produced a parody of that situation that magnified and exaggerated all of the more negative aspects of the culture that resisted desegregation so stubbornly, of my culture of origin. I felt more out of place there than I ever felt in the public schools either before or after desegregation. This made me look around and notice that no one I wanted to be in 20 years time was a part of that culture. This gap between where I came from and where I wanted to be was more obvious to me because I attended the academy.  

           

            Very early on, I found that reading books gave me a satisfying sense of knowing what was going on and why that I never got from participating in the way of life I had been born to. I used resources found in books to understand my self and my world much more than any of my peers. I learned early to walk between worlds and still do. One world is the world where my own life unfolds and the other is the world of books. Should I mention discovering the novel Steppenwolf  at age 14 as an important event in my life? Naturally, I wanted to be a writer when and if I ever managed to grow up. I also wanted to know the meaning of life and to understand why the rest of humanity did the things that humanity has been doing for thousands of years now. Once I figured all this out, I was going to get rich and famous by writing it all down in a book with a boy meets girl sub-plot and maybe a car chase or two thrown in just to make the movie rights more rewarding. This work is still in progress.

            In the meantime, I've earned degrees in philosophy, English, educational psychology, instructional technology and won the Betty Crocker Future Homemaker of America award. I am now working on an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies with ESL and plain old psychology as my two majors. I am doing the psychology major just to find out what had to be left out of my degree in educational psychology to make room for all those courses I took in research design, statistics, qualitative methods and testing theory that were not taught in the psychology program. Once I am done, I can die happy knowing that I did not cheat myself out of anything by graduating from an education school rather than a psychology department. I will, unfortunately, be too old to do much of anything with that vast body of knowledge but, then again, my quest for knowledge was always more about pure, damnable curiosity than about the desire to learn to actually do anything in particular. I've taught or tutored psychology, English, research methods and a few other subjects over the years. I am mostly a distance educator now but still occasionally teach or tutor on-ground. I am serious enough about animal rights to be vegan. I play several drums and a few different stringed instruments for fun. Kristoff, my cat, is curled up asleep on my desk as he usually is when I am trying to get some work done.

           

            I'm watching this text appear on a sixty inch screen. I am not legally blind but I am blind enough that I was able to write the screen off on my taxes as an adaptive required for work. I grade a lot of essays and do get headaches when I work with a smaller monitor. I also watch a lot of subtitled movies. I am not married and have no children. I live with three other adults in what will eventually become a naturally occurring retirement community for old hippies if we really have come to final rest here.

           

            From the beginning, I have been fascinated by words. Over the years, my emphasis has shifted from literature and creative writing to teaching English as a second language. Doing a degree in ESL so that I theoretically know what I am doing has been a wonderful excuse to learn more about linguistics and to think and write about language, how it is acquired, how it is used and how one can best facilitate the acquisition of a second language. I say "theoretically" know what I am doing because I, more and more, see language as a kind of magic we learn how to do as we grow up without ever learning how the magic actually works.

The Shaman

The energy which created religion as a trace in the process of working itself out is very real. On the other hand, the process that creates every religion turns the free-play of signifiers that was in the beginning into a game with rules and borders. One is not allowed to edit and revise those rules or redraw those borders once the game is in progress; seeing any gap between the map and the territory strips the emperor naked, un-tunes the sky and makes it harder for the simply devout to properly digest their food, whether we are talking about material bread or spiritual sustenance. A shaman is a visionary walking between worlds, gesturing madly in an attempt to make us see the absence of everything missing from our side of the divide. We live inside a map which is one of the worlds the shaman walks between. The shaman is no prophet. She does not claim exclusive rights to anything. She leaves no true map of things to ensnare later travelers.    

Ferguson for Thanksgiving

It was almost sadistic to release the grand jury's findings just before Thanksgiving. For many of us, Thanksgiving will be something to get through rather than something to enjoy because that elephant will be in the room with us. The divide on this issue is not between black and white but between people who are essentially decent and people who are not. The most disturbing aspect of the situation is how accurately one can predict which side of that divide someone wearing a badge is on knowing nothing more about them than that they are wearing a badge.

The officers threatened with termination unless they removed the "I am Darren Wilson" bracelets they had previously worn, on duty, in Ferguson, while working crowd control at protests triggered by Mike Brown's murder, were not "bad apples"; they were good cops as cops themselves define that term. Their only fault was being honest about who they were and what their values were in a way and in a situation where doing so was less than useful to Darrin Wilson and all the other fine people who were doing their best to see that Wilson got away with murder the way cops normally do. When Darren Wilson says that he was just doing his job, more cops believe him than not and further judge anyone who does not believe him as having issues with authority, wanting an excuse to do some looting or being otherwise motivated by something much less respectable than a simple desire for justice. 

2+2=4. What happened to Mike Brown was murder, a hate crime and the most heinous possible example of causing death while violating civil rights under color of law. The second statement is as true and obvious as the first. The horror of what happened in Ferguson goes well beyond what Darren Wilson did. The full horror of Ferguson is the personal, gut reaction of almost every other cop in America to what he did; most cops would agree with Darren Wilson that he was just doing his job.

Darren Wilson would not stand out in any way in a large room containing a random sample of cops. Most cops are Darren Wilson. Michael Brown is dead not because of a bad apple but because he encountered a cop who defined doing his job about the way most cops do. This is how policing is done now. What passes for "law enforcement" makes a mockery of the claim that America is a democracy characterized by the rule of law and respect for the rights of citizens; anyone who could make that claim with a straight face is either in denial or has no idea what cops do all day to earn their pay.

On learning to teach English as a second language: first comment

         The contrast between the descriptive studies of various languages in use done by linguists and the prescriptive approach involved in what most people mean when they say “grammar” could not be greater. Over the last three decades or so, I've taught this kind of “grammar” as part of my official job description as an instructor of Rhetoric and Composition at various community colleges. When I first started teaching those classes, I had to learn prescriptive English grammar so that I could teach it. Many people learn to speak something that is close enough to Standard English to pass for it in most settings without learning the formal rules well enough to pass a really rigorous grammar test. Some even learn to write well enough to practice law or make a living in journalism without being able to state most of the rules they do obey many more times than not in writing their legal briefs or newspaper articles.

         On the other hand, I speak from many years of experience in asserting that teaching someone who writes badly enough grammar to pass a really rigorous grammar test will not always improve their writing all that much. Some people can understand grammar at the level of abstraction without automatically following those rules when they compose text; others consistently follow abstract grammar rules they could not state clearly if asked why the words of their text are strung together the way they are. Many people know what is “right” well enough to communicate very effectively in both speaking and writing but could not tell you what exactly most of the spontaneous choices they make in the process would appeal to in response to a question about why they are right.

         I'm writing a lot about the written form even though linguists more often than not mean the spoken form when they speak of language and see the written form as an attempt to transcribe the spoken language. The great “aha” insight that came to me only recently was the realization that my own engrained and habitual way of thinking about language amounts to seeing spoken discourse as text performed under conditions that severely limit the quality of that performance.  This is natural for a person whose pattern of thinking and feeling was shaped at least as much by the vicarious experience provided by reading as by his own immediate experience participating in the particular way of life that socialized most of his peers. I've only been tutoring ESL for a few months and, thus, still think like someone who read constantly as a kid, later decided he wanted to be a writer and ended up as a teacher of writing and literature.

         On the other hand,  I'm noticing for the first time how little help knowing how to spell English words gives someone who is trying to say the word rather than to read it or writ it.  My first few students were all Puerto Ricans who amazed me by being able to read anything in English they wanted, enjoy American movies without needing sub-titles and understand me pretty well most of the time when I spoke to them. What they could not do, at first, was to get their needs met here in Florida without great difficulty. In many different settings, they faced the maddening frustration of understanding what other people said in reply to their attempts to communicate well enough to be absolutely sure of the failure of these attempts.

         The pronunciation of a word is not a fact that one comes to know but something one learns to do with one's mouth. That is what I need to learn to take for granted to be really helpful to my students, but it goes totally against the grain of how I have thought about words up until now. Knowing how a given language works both as sounds made in a particular way and as a process whereby these sounds come to mean more than they are is the goal of linguistics. It is also a habitual way of thinking about language. I need to acquire that habit in order to be more helpful to persons who are trying to learn a second language.  I need to learn to describe what I do, with my mouth and otherwise, in speaking English in order to teach anyone else to speak English. I've decided that the main difference between a very patient native speaker of English and someone who really knows how to teach English as a second language flows from this capacity to describe what you are doing when you speak English in the way that a linguist would.

         When I started volunteering as an ESL tutor I thought that tutoring ESL would be very similar to teaching college-transfer or developmental English, as I have already been doing for years. I've enjoyed tutoring immensely more than I expected because tutoring ESL has turned out to be fundamentally different from anything else I've done before. I'm learning things about how language is used and acquired that I did not know in spite of years spent being obsessed with language and determined to acquire greater skill in the use of language. I've learned enough about how teaching a second language ought to be done to be amazed at how turnip-witted some of my previous assumptions were. I'm muddling through and getting better and realizing that there is so much that I haven't learned yet about how to do this that I can almost certainly expect to be much better at something very much worth doing even just a year from today than I am right now. I had said for years that, even though I had never officially taught an ESL class, I had in practice taught a lot of ESL just given who shows up for your classes if you agree to teach developmental English in Houston, Texas, especially at a satellite campus in the inner city. I always enjoyed those classes and my department chair always made it a point to be nice to me. He knew that he would someday need someone once again to teach a developmental course in a “bad” neighborhood that was fully enrolled to the cap but would cancel anyway for lack of an instructor if I did not take it. I like teaching ESL better than anything else I have ever done and genuinely regret that I did not discover ESL sooner.