ABlog

In his memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, Samuel Delaney uses the metaphor of parallel columns to refer to the ways in which the parts of our lives that might variously be labeled “private” and “public,” or “aesthetic” and “political,” or “erotic,” “intellectual,” “gregarious,” “oedipal”—your preferred heading here—seem to unfold as simultaneous narratives. [See my post two weeks ago for a fuller discussion of Delany’s thesis.] The parallel columns tantalize us with a sense that what they contain must be related in a more than contingent way; yet any attempt to posit a hierarchical connection—to suggest, for example, that the erotic is the “inner truth” of the public, the intellectual, or the gregarious social life—is to perpetrate a narrative falsehood.

And yet the categories, so habitual to us and so cognitively necessary if we are to tell the story of our lives at all, want to bleed over into each other. To hold them rigidly separate is the very definition of closeting.

The parallel columns idea seems particularly apt for describing the week I just had. It was a week of intense teaching and intense organizing. It was a week of beautiful weather, of walks in a Botanic Garden suddenly dense with screaming, pushing children granted a rare respite from the confines of New York public and parochial schools sadly lacking in playground and sports facilities, of a flying trip to the BBG’s “member’s only plant sale preview,” held under a big white tent set up in the cherry esplanade, that, with its hordes of desperate city gardeners elbowing each other to get at the pots of basil, felt like the proverbial sale at Macy’s. It was a week in which the aesthetic dimensions and theoretical implications of the political wave washing over me felt compelling and ungraspable as a torrent rushing in an underground cavern.

So, to describe some of the columns:

The column of literature. I continued to live intensely with Billy Budd, contemplating the marvels of reversible design within the novella’s eroticization of authority set against its doubts about the “necessary” hierarchies of war; its attempted recuperation (excuse the barbarous idiom) of Billy as an aesthetic and moral force in a transcendent realm untouchable by the “nightmare of reason” that is the good of the State. (I’m thinking here both of the sublime vision of Billy’s “ascending” body at the moment of execution and the humbler aspect of the closing poem that gives him voice, “Billy in the Darbies”: Billy yearns for human warmth; he recoils so from Claggart because, above all, Claggart’s malicious attitude cuts him off from that warmth and possibility of connection; he blesses Captain Vere with his last breath because his Captain had believed him, had embraced him like a son [a lover, if you prefer]; he wants the hand of a fellow blue-jacket to shake on the way to his fathomless tomb. “Only connect” might be poor Billy’s motto: could this be what so enthused E.M. Forster when he had the idea for an opera based on the novella?)

The column of teaching. I discussed Billy Budd with a class by turns perceptive about some of its elements and reluctant to engage with nineteenth century literary language that, as one young woman said, “reminds me of being in high school and having to read The Scarlet Letter.” I tried to engage them: what is this resistance really about? and encountered another version of what I’ve heard from students every time I’ve tried to teach Thoreau: half the time they can’t even begin to get to what’s there because—ironic as it may be, given the wildly iconoclastic intent and impact of these “classics” in their own time--all they can see is a symbol of the stranglehold of Tradition: “dead white men,” as one student put it. Well, I said, but what if we were reading dead Black men—say, Frederick Douglass? We’d still encounter the same long sentences, often unfamiliar diction, and complex structure of the text. What of the fact that we are reading a nineteenth century “classic” in a completely different context—a course called “Queer Renaissance”? My students understood what I was getting at, but for them, the power of those other lessons was still uppermost; decolonization of the mental life had not yet progressed sufficiently to allow most of them to equate readerly self-determination with taking on old texts in a new way rather than simply shunning them.

The column of job performance. My class was observed; it was found to be sufficiently “rigorous.” I attended, in my capacity as faculty shop steward, a meeting in which an administrator explained to a teacher why the teacher’s class was lacking in “cognitive rigor” and spelled out the required remedies. I considered how bizarre are the rituals of faculty evaluation—the classroom observation like one artificially extracted still shot from the long movie of interactions that is the semester’s work. I pondered the sudden ascendancy of the word “rigor” in the discourse of power at the New School; it has become the rough equivalent of “patriotism” in U.S. nationalist discourse, entirely potent (indeed, Bellipotent) yet almost without content.

The column of the aesthetic. I worked on a poem, still in the early stages, called “Ode to Rigor.” I’m trying to construct it as a sort of exploded sonnet, with fourteen lyrical lines on the left (“What shall we do with an angel, hanging father?”) and a series of infinitives on the right (“to hold oneself erect,” “to pine for the belletristic,” “to turn one’s back and elevate the text”).

The column of civic participation. I marched in the Saturday, April 29th anti-war demonstration, joining the CUNY Professional Staff Congress group on 19th street and walking down to Foley Square, much of the time beside the ACT-UAW faculty union banner. It was great to be in the middle of that big labor contingent, much of it a lot darker-complected than the overall aspect of Educators to Stop the War. On Monday, May 1, I joined the huge flag-waving crowds of mostly Latino immigrants’ rights demonstrators in Union Square. The spontaneous, surging feel of that crowd was hugely heartening. Still, at both demonstrations I kept pushing down a small scary thought: we’ve got to start smashing things, or nothing’s really going to change.

The column of active rebellion. I organized like crazy to mobilize the diffuse outrage of the New School community at the prospect of having Senator John McCain as our commencement speaker. Highlights included a student-led demonstration on May 3 (“ONE, we are the students; TWO, it’s our commencement; THREE, a little bit louder: FREE THE NEW SCHOOL!”; I carried a sign reading, on one side, “PRE-EMPTIVE WAR IS NOT A NEW SCHOOL VALUE and on the other PRESIDENT KERREY… THE GREAT DECIDER/DIVIDER), a feature in Inside Higher Ed ( http//:www.insidehighereducation.com/news/2006/05/05/mccain) and a riposte from our own resident Hanging Father, former Navy Seal and certified Vietnam War criminal Bob Kerrey, who informs the university community that the protests will not cause him to withdraw the speaking invitation, asserts that “Senator McCain is one of the greatest and most influential moral and political leaders of our age” (how can one fail to applaud the rigorous thought behind this statement); and exhorts us to “listen carefully to Senator McCain’s message to us before judging whether we [sic—the decision was all President Kerrey’s] have made a mistake.” Highlights of the coming week include presentation to Kerrey of petition signatures, a Faculty Senate meeting that will take up the commencement issue, and a press conference by anti-McCain forces. Apparently Kerrey thought a pre-emptive strike was necessary.

The column of friendship. There’s much to be said about this, but not for the instant, promiscuous readership of the Internet.

The column of the erotic. See above.