Another keepsake at St. Olaf

Para-pillars: all rights reserved, so no photo here.  But . . .. if you follow the link, you will see an example of a "keepsake" ruin on the St. Olaf campus.  There is a story (or two or three or more) that goes with this sculpture.  Try entering into the piece yourself, by putting your feet in the footprints.  Consider what the horizontal figure might be doing: dying? rising? resting? dreaming?

Keepsakes in Ruins

 

Archibald Mill, Dundas, MN from the city web-site 

John Stilgo writes in his Common Landscape about the presence of ruins.  While we have some rather near to us, just up-river (or along the bike path) in Dundas, as Americans we have rather fewer ruins that in some other nations.  When students and I travel to Greece and Turkey some Januarys, there comes a point when even the keenest historian feels a bit "ruined out."  So, while I'm interested in his assertion (p. 342) that "The surviving keepsake together constitute the vestiges of landscape that still serve Americans as the standard by which new form is judged,"  I also think that we are enamored by novelty.  There are exceptions, but very often we'll tear down the old and build something new in our pursuit of something better.  Perhaps also as a mode of self-expression.  Certainly we learn to "read" one another's houses, yards, etc.

That said, I also notice that Stilgo dwells on a some what different impulse, namely to modify.  On this point see my post from August about my trip to Southern California.  Yes, I had read this piece before my trip, but no I didn't realize that my observations were in line with it.

I'm left wondering about this American Dream of a BETTER life.  How often is better a matter of modification or improvement and how often of replacement?  This question is not exhausted by attention to houses; it also encompasses jobs, communities, hobbies, and relationships.  Listen to campaign rhetoric.  

Only a dream?

An ABC News/Yahoo News poll revealed that today, only half of us think the American dream — which the pollsters defined as 'if you work hard you'll get ahead' — still holds true, while 43% said that it had once been true. LA Times article

Of course a radio news report of this poll caught my attention as I drove to school this morning.  I was curious about the content of the "dream" people say is not true.  This article tells me: work hard and you'll get ahead.  This is more-or-less how historian Arthur Mann accounted for the fact that there has never been the same sort of socialist movement in the USA as in much of Europe.  I think he called it the roast beef principle, or some such thing.  His point was that Americans believed that they would rise above the limiting conditions and achieve their dreams including having roast beef for dinner.  Both Mann and this poll appear to ground the dream in Eric Foner's notion of economic freedom.  I wonder if the results would have been the same if the definition had pointed more toward moral or personal freedom?

 

The article suggests that lack of faith in the dream is not merely the outcome of the current economic situation, but that it has been coming for sometime.  That suggests that something beyond economic freedom and financial opportunity is essential to the dream, even stated so baldly.  

knit together

This image of how a community is formed by being knit together appears in Winthrop's "Models of Christian Charity" in his conclusions about the nature of love and two sorts of laws.  Of course it is an image drawn from a particular craft, knitting.  And we can learn much from that reference.

This poem, that is today's from the Writer's Almanac, offers another glimpse into the connections that "knitted together" suggests:

Picking Pears

by Gary J. Whitehead

I stand on the top rung and the step ladder

   shakes; above me the winter pears just out

of reach, clean and strung heavy along limbs

   and swaying like my grandmother's aprons

hung on the line to dry. I drop one into

   the bag she holds open below me. She grins,

and I'm drawn into the embrace of her gaze—

   down into handfuls of earth, seasons, the empty

cup of a lost daughter, a lost breast.

   I'm stitched into miles of quilts, curtains,

tablecloths, hems of pants, skirts.

   I'm held to her like a button on a shirt pocket,

and I smell soap, tomatoes, chicken soup,

   Portuguese sweet bread, goat cheese, pears...

and I lower myself out and around the gnarl

   of branch, down the ladder to take the full

bag of the fruit I love, warm from

   the sun and spotted like her hands.

"Picking Pears" by Gary Whitehead, from The Velocity of Dust. © Salmon Publishing Ltd., 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Dream Work

"But it is precisely the willingness to do something difficult, painful, unintentionally mischievous, or finally impossible that gives purpose to individual lives, both as they are lived and as they are remembered."  Jim Cullen, The American Dream, p. 34

Although Cullen never uses the term "vocation," this sentence sheds light on that notion so often used here on campus.  The light falls upon an aspect of vocation that is easy to overlook, namely that responding to a call, as understood in a theological, Christian way,  is likely to be hard work and perhaps will involve agony.

This the Puritans knew.  They were not looking for an easy life, neither a spiritually easy one nor a physically easy one.  If the later had been on offer, maybe they would have accepted it, but not if that ease brought with it harm to their spiritual life.  They were looking for freedom from the obstacles that would prevent them from engaging in struggle to live godly lives.

So, if we think that having a dream is just a matter of falling asleep and then waking up to a new world, we are sorely mistaken.  From dream to reality is hard work.

Reading Poetry

A Teacher Considers Why She Includes Poetry

I am a lover of poetry:
for the sounds,
for the shape on the page;
words turned to images
or a shaft of light.

A poem read aloud first thing:
a bell to invoke the spirit,
a bouquet of roses for beauty;
water in a pump
or a new pair of glasses.

The work of poetry:
to open the heart,
to stimulate imagination;
waves against walls
or an angle of insight.

LDL


From the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project  Billy Collins on how to read a poem, not instructions, but analogies that evoke other experiences.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

This is NOT how American Conversation students responded to the poems they read for today!

Some images of common place books

From Thomas Jefferson.  Click on view image for source.

A contemporary example from the Moleskin page.

14th century example.  Click view image for source.

Freedom of WHAT religion?

A news story LINK about the interplay of various freedoms and rights in a North Carolina school.  This time the issue is not textbooks, but rather a dress code.  That code has been interpreted to prohibit a student from wearing her nose ring (really a stud, not a ring) to school, but the student and her mother contend that the nose ring should be allowed as an instance of freedom of religion.  Those who heard Prof. Schillinger on minority and majority views of freedom of religion, at the Constitution Day panel, will now hear echoes of his remarks.  Is this practice, body piercing, a form of religious expression?  Who has authority to decide? At the center of the case is a question about the equal treatment of all religions.

In view of our discussion today in Section A, those students may be interested in the notion of hybrid rights described in this news article.  While noting that freedom of expression may be limited in certain settings, the student and her mom argue, with the ACLU, that freedom of religion trumps those limits.  The legitimate limits may be analogous to the locational barrier we discussed in class.

From Yahoo News.

Fighting Freedoms

Today's discussion of Amy Tan's essay, "To Complain is American," and the American Radio Works documentary, "Great Textbook War,"  pushed me to think more about competing freedoms.  This is not quite the same thing as Foner's notion that freedom is a contested concept.  Rather, I have in mind situations in which two people's, or groups of people's, freedoms seem to compete or even when one person experiences one freedom limiting another.

In the West Virginia textbook "war" some parents wanted a sort of moral and personal freedom to follow their own beliefs and to decide what their children would learn without an coercion from the school board.  At the same time, public education in the USA is intended to prepare students for their responsibilities as citizens who have political freedom.  Thus the civic community has a stake in those students' learning.

Matt's introduction of the federally mandated observance of "Constitution Day," elicited some of this same dynamic.  Who said, "If the government pays, the government can make regulations?"  In order to have access to resources (economic freedom?), the institution, its employees and students submit to a bit of coercion about our programs.

This raises the related, crucial question: What is freedom for?  How is it to be used?  Tan's essay highlights these questions as she wrestles with the American right to speech, even to complain, the writer's responsibility to speak, and the likely consequences of doing so.  She hints at the distinction we have heard in the news about the proposed mosque/community center in Manhattan.  While the community has a right to build there, that right does not necessarily make doing so a good idea.

Freedom from want

Both the Rockwell poster and the Burbank mural portray "Freedom from Want" with food.  Not surprising, I suppose, since without food, one dies.  But also surprising because food is a "lower level" need in the classic Maslow' hierarchy.  This leads to wonder if in the early 21st century, at least among middle class Americans, we might chose to portray freedom from want with something closer to the top of the pyramid.  Are we content to have our basic physiological and safety needs filled?  This question may come back to us when we take up The Pursuit of Happiness.

Beauty is not optional

In the open space of democracy, beauty is not optional.  Terry Tempest Williams "Grounding Truthing", in Open Space of Democracy (Orion, 2004), p. #

Through out this essay and its two companion pieces Williams makes frequent use of allusions to the senses.  She writes of "...sensory impulses of eyes and ears alert toward justice."  Again, "... knowledge is another form of democracy, the freedom of expression that leads to empathy."  Over and over, she invokes hearing and seeing and also other senses not associated with organs: imagination and empathy recur.  Because I'm convinced that our intellects are strong, necessary, and yet limited tools for understanding and living in the world and with each other, I'm drawn to Williams' approach that makes room, in the open space of democracy, for these other ways of apprehending.  These give us access to what is outside us, beyond us, and inside us; they also foster appreciation, perhaps even love.

So, what about beauty?  Why lift that statement out of the three essays?  Perhaps because beauty, as illustrated by the poppies Williams describes in this essay, is vulnerable and precarious and in that way like the "perilous liberty" Jefferson preferred to "quiet servitude."  But, vulnerability and perilousness are not quite equivalent.  Are they?  Isn't there sometime potentially subversive, as well as fragile, about beauty?  Perhaps I'm drawn to this statement and this valuing of beauty because beauty has the power to unsettle our rigid, fiercely held absolutes and, as Williams says, open our hearts.  And this suggests a link between recognizing beauty and responding with mercy.  And, this is why Barbara Boxer held up Subhankar Banerjee's photos of the Arctic.  [His Land in Home project.] She hoped that the beauty would move her colleagues' to see more clearly and respond with mercy and empathy.

Here I should have a link to a recording of "For the Beauty of the Earth," or at least to its lyric.

9/11, Religious Identity, Religious Freedom

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/3301/%22you%27ve_never_met_a_muslim%22/  {Be SURE to check out the photo!  Remember to look at it again when we come to the Statue of Liberty in a later semester.)

I think that these accounts of New Yorkers' Muslim identity are illustrations of Foner's notion of Moral Freedom as well as FDR's Freedom of Worship.  At the same time, recent uproar about plans to build a mosque near New York's ground-zero makes evident that not all Americans are willing to extend this freedom to their fellow citizens.

Foner posits that extension of freedoms has not been merely a matter of including more sorts of people, but also a matter of expanding understandings of the freedom itself.  Surely this is the case for freedom of religion which has expanded from tolerance of some varieties of Christianity to an embrace of the notion of religious plurality, at least by some.

Fram, Fram, Free!

At opening convo today I was struck, as I have not been before, by the final line of the college hymn: "Fram, Fram, Free."  There it is, embedded in our corporate song.  Freedom as the goal toward which we march (or waltz).  A close look at the lyrics would be useful, for what we learn about St. Olaf College's quest for freedom and our notions of freedom and for what the song, as a dense fact, reveals about the context of its being written.  

Things I'd want to explore:

• the odd parallel that St. Olaf's battle in Norway is reenacted every July (really, I've seen it) and the Defeat of Jesse James is reenacted in Northfield every September.
• the use of the term "race" in this song--what did the term refer to in the 1920s when it could be applied to the Nordic race?  What did it mean to Oles of the 1920s, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants, to sing about their race?
• the appropriation of the native American term Manitou for so many things on our campus that it seems to be a Norwegian word--is this use more or less salutary in an era when "race" has a different meaning and we (Americans in general and Oles in particular) are more attuned to the difficulties inherent in borrowings from one religious tradition to another?
• the very notion that there should be a college hymn as an early 20th century practice; how does this one compare to others? 
• ritual use of this one: when do we sing it?  why?

And, now I show my agenda: who in this 2010-12 cohort of Am Con will fulfill my long held longing for an early 21st century college song to add to our repertoire!!!!!!!!