A Return

I have been away from Living [Maxine] Greene for a while now. It had been my intention to continue with this inquiry long after the completion of the dissertation. I was teaching a course on aesthetics and surely the discussions and connections that my students and I were making should have provided content for additional inquiry. But my discipline waned and I have been remiss.

This past spring certainly brought cause to revisit this site. Maxine’s death warranted reflection on her impact on me and the worlds of the arts and social justice. But I am flummoxed and can’t recover the language to unleash my gratitude.

But this fall I have found direct occasion to re-up the discussion of things aesthetic. I am teaching a capstone course for students engaging in their honors thesis work. As Living [Maxine] Greene furnished me in my research, my students are starting their own reflexive blogs to ponder the influences of their research interests. It is incumbent on me to join them in their quest by re-establishing my queries of embodiment, situatedness, and the primordial.

Hello again, L[M]G!

Above all else, have a chorus

Numerous media sites have been paying tribute to the late Pete Seeger. In the car this morning I was listening to NPR whose memorial compelled to me sing along with the choruses of "Goodnight Irene." The broadcast included references by Tom Paxton who shared the following:

Not just through his books but also through his sheer force of presence, Seeger became a model for younger folk musicians. Singer and songwriter Tom Paxton said he learned invaluable lessons from Seeger about how to reach an audience. "Look 'em in the eye. Make a gesture of inclusion, which he did all the time. And above all, have a chorus," Paxton says. "So I learned from Pete to have something for them to sing." (http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2014/01/28/267488551/american-folk-singer-pete-seeger-dies-at-94)

It was upon hearing the recommendation to "have a chorus" that I was inspired to return to Living [Maxine] Greene after a long, dormant phase.  This gesture--or charge--for people to engage in the musical experience to create change can be viewed as a means of the transcendental/existential project that Sartre proposes and Greene picks up in her own writings.

And so I was thinking about the power that can be found in choral music, singing, chanting, text. I was reminded of a rehearsal I attended at the bequest of a director back in the early '90s. Clay Shirky asked me to visit him in Chicago where he was rehearsing A Preliminary Inquiry Into the Methods Used to Create and Maintain a Segregated Society. It was billed as "a theatrical collage about life in America`s most segregated city: Chicago, Illinois." One of the devices that Clay used in his theatrical work was choral text: actors speaking in a clear, unison voice. The power of the device is moving, to the point of being unsettling. I remember the Chicago actors moving me to pay attention, to be present, to be wide-awake.

It is this wide-awakeness that is consciousness in Greene's writings. It is the demand to pay attention and to consider other alternatives.

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My dormant phase with this blog came about after completing and successfully defending my dissertation about Greene's use of lived life in her writings. In the interim I have started working for a university where I oversee a  new general education program while moonlighting as an adjunct teaching philosophy to artists and educators. I have been yearning to return to Living [Maxine] Greene knowing that it can help me keep the wide-awakeness burning bright in my work with students and colleagues. It took Pete Seeger to look me in the eye and get me to sing along with the chorus.