Imaginative literature

One of the themes of Maxine Greene's teaching involves the primacy of questions. She states often that she prefers questions over answers and this is why she uses imaginative literature in her teaching. Literature gives us the questions; for the answers we can go to psychology.

A dissertation committee member chafed at the term "imaginative" literature. He rightly asserted that the imaginative quality of literature is in the encounter. It is the reader who is the trigger for the imaginative. Nevetheless, I continue to use the term because Greene and others do. It seems to be accepted in the field of "Greene studies."

Perhaps the term "imaginative literature" is a description of that encounter between reader and text whereas "literature" is merely the text?

Nevertheless, one of the perks of using imaginative literature in teaching is in the glory of that encounter with fiction, with poetic narrative. I am using Toni Morrison's Sula for a philosophy and ethics course I'm teaching. As compelling as Dewey and Greene may be in their writing, the experience of opening the first page of Sula and engage in the description of a place known as the Bottom is exhilirating:

The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees whter children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene's Palace of Cosemetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothers will pry loose the slats of Reba's Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn't remember the ingredients without it.

This rich description is such a blessed break from the typical academic reading that students and their professors must engage in. This writing compels the reader to enter the world of the Bottom, to turn the page, to learn more. This is what my dissertation writing needs to achieve.

One of the proposed rationales for my dissertation concerns my own teaching practice. The hope is that through my inquiry into Greene's writings that my approach to teaching will transform. The aesthetics of both the inquiry and of teaching will move into a new realm that might create an aesthetic of learning--for both student and teacher.

Reconciliation and disembodiment

I'm trying to reconcile some of what I teach with some of what I have written.

The other day I showed my students a favorite TED talk. It is with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert who speaks with eloquence, ease, humor, and self-deprecation about our post-Renaissance ideas regarding genius. Remarking on the recent--as in post-Renaissance--history of artists who are considered geniuses and their tendency to die at their own hands (or bottles), Gilbert advocates for thinking of genius, and creativity, as something that is sourced outside of our beings. It is the ancient Greek and ancient Roman framework of having genius, a person who is visited upon with genius, as opposed to being a genius. She sees this framework as addressing the need to provide distance between the work and the artist in the interest of preservation.

Gilbert uses a wonderful example of this visiting genius in her description of an

Encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.

It is a marvelous image of inspiration as a "thunderous train of air" barreling down the landscape.

My students and I have been looking at the definitions of creativity and transformation over the last few weeks. Gilbert's talk about the source of creativity and the need to disembody oneself from it follows a similar framework used in the communication and self-help fields (Eckhardt Tolle and the other PBS-pledge-drive ilk). It is a framework that differentiates between being and having. For instance, effective communication can happen when the parties move the sense of being angry to a sense of having anger.

I understand this perceived need for preservation and the drive to create distance between the inspiration and the self. I did it myself when I left acting. But at that moment of inspiration, the genius is embodied. Stone is possessed by it when she races to a paper and pencil. It is the creative act as aesthetic experience. While artists may be made vulnerable in their inability to distance their selves from their work, I think that for others another vulnerability may take hold in the form of Dewey's anaesthetic. In the form of the unlived life.

Of course, the sense of being a genius as opposed to a sense of having genius is a linguistic trick as well. We are how we express our ideas in language. We can preserve our creative livelihood through language while denying ourselves the unlived life.

Mouth feel, Pt. II

I have been using speech recognition software to transcribe the oodles of citations that I have highlighted in various texts regarding Maxine Greene, existentialism and phenomenology. I'm presently attempting to organize the pages of citations into data fields using a framework that assigns to them subject areas of situatedness, embodiment and aesthetics.

Not surprisingly, the speech recognition isn't perfect in transcribing what I think I'm reading aloud into accurate text documents. This is due to a number of factors: my misreading of the text (some of which includes Greek and French references); my increasingly twangy speech patterns (the western twang I was born into is intensifying with age); and the unreadability of the text itself.

This "unreadability" is embedded in the fact that some of these texts were not written to be spoken aloud. You may think that this then makes the texts "unspeakable." But I think it ultimately makes them unreadable as well. Shouldn't all writing take into account readability and speak-ability? Shouldn't writing have an awareness of where the breath should occur? Shouldn't writing take into account the "mouth feel" of the language? Shouldn't writing be a soliloquy?

Interestingly, the speech recognition software accurately transcribed all of the Greene references within the citations I dictated. Greene's writing can be spoken. This comes as no surprise as I had recently unearthed from the cellar my notes from the graduate courses I had taken with Maxine. Reading those notes from 1994-96 was like reading a draft of "Releasing the Imagination," which was published at the same time. Her lectures are readable and her writing is worthy of a soliloquy.

In my prospectus for my disseration I wrote that I wanted my work to be readable. That determination has not waned!

Mouth feel

The other morning as I waited for the espresso to make its gravity-defying journey into the upper chamber, I paced the kitchen in despair. My literature review was allowing me to delve into many pockets of insight regarding Maxine's work but not one bit of the reading mentioned the "lived life." I've been making my own connections with terms like "life world" and "situatedness" but the "l-l" grail was out of reach.

In a recent comment to Allan DiBiase, I noted that I have found myself "linking arms" with the word "embodiment." Likewise with "situatedness." As with the "lived life," these are words/terms that prick up my ears (to borrow from John Lahr and Joe Orton).

This past summer I had a theatre artist in a graduate arts education course that I teach. In my teaching--which utilizes an approach developed by the Lincoln Center Institute based on Maxine Greene's philosophy--there is lots of reflection and sharing. When words or phrases emerge that prick up my ears, I write them down on the whiteboard, or chart paper. It's not unusual for the walls to be covered in words and phrases by the week's end. My student was excited by the word tent we were living in. "It's because I'm a theatre person," she explained. "I LOVE words."

As my roommate in Queens (and now a philosophy professor in the Midwest) used to say, "mmm, texty!"

"Lived life," "embodiment" and "situatedness" are mmm, texty. They have mouth feel for me. It may indeed be a theatre thing, but they represent a sensibility that can be physicalized in my mind/body. While "embodiment" is low in my anatomy, around the hips and my center of gravity, "situatedness" is all about the mouth and its articulators--the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue.

I have decided to use "embodiment" and "situatedness" as part a framework for how I will present my review of the literature. And because odd numbers are more interesting than even ones, I have added "aesthetic." This third term is important given the uniqueness with which Maxine approaches the term.

And while imagination is a theme that comes up over and over again in the writings of others on Maxine's work, I want to make sure that my work on Maxine Greene is aligned with "aesthetics." There has been a tendency to equate "imagination" with "aesthetic" and it is simply wrong.

Besides, "aesthetic" has a far more interesting mouth feel than "imagination."

The lived-through versus the lived life

I am scouring Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" in an attempt to understand Maxine Greene's development of the "lived life." Though I haven't come across the "l-l" paradigm, I have used the occasion to try to find the origins of le corps vecu or, "the lived body," as mentioned in Baldacchino. After running around in circles, I have come across discussions in papers posted on the Internet about Merleau-Ponty and Husserl and their views on "le corps vecu" or in the case of Husserl, "Leib." I will now take a look at Husserl to try to come to terms with "Leib." (Thank goodness for holiday gift cards redeemable at book retailers.)

In my quest for "le corps vecu" in Merleau-Ponty, I came across instances of the "lived-through." In closing the mind/body split, Merleau-Ponty proposes that it is a synthesized and unified body that grasps meaning and that the body is a "grouping of lived-through meanings."

Later in the book, the "lived-through" takes on qualifiers such as "purely" and "merely." Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the lived-through in and of itself is not an experience without the possibility of expression: "Moreover, there is no experience without speech as the purely lived-through has no part in the discursive life of man."    

So now I ask, is the "lived life" in Maxine Greene a more fully realized concept of experience than the merely "lived-through"? Is the "lived life" a fuller embodiment that takes into account expression? Time will tell...

Embodiment

I'm reading, reading, reading. Hoping that the reading, reading, reading is going to elicit a literature review. A literature review of what? I'm still not sure. I have written about using the review as an opportunity to investigate the writers who have impacted Maxine Greene as a means towards defining key concepts/words/ideas. I liked that idea but somehow it seemed overwhelming to me. Readers and students often respond to Greene as being extraordinarily well-read, extremely literate. And as readers and students we often feel incapable of matching such an well-read, literate mind.

Another idea is to review what others have written about Greene in an effort to get a glimpse from elsewhere as the origins and meanings behind my search of the "lived life" in Greene's works. Naturally, I am having difficulty finding anything that touches on the phrase either within Greene's canon and elsewhere in philosophy, literature, education.

But I did come across some essays that explore Merleau-Ponty's le corps vecu in Baldacchino's "Education Beyond Education." The lived body or "embodiment" was the existentialist reconciliation of the mind/body split. It promotes an active stance towards philosophy and knowledge and helps us to understand Greene's promotion of doing philosophy.

In thinking about this, I was reminded of my own corps vecu training in acting. Training at the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU, I encountered a number of physical approaches to creating and doing theatre. Jerzy Grotowski was a god on the 2nd floor of 721 Broadway. Grotowski wrote:

"The rhythm of life in modern civilization is characterized by pace, tension, a feeling of doom, the wish to hide our personal motives and the assumption of a variety of roles and masks in life (different ones with our family, at work, amongst friends or in community life, etc.-). We like to be 'scientific', by which we mean discursive and cerebral, since this attitude is dictated by the course of civilization. But we also want to pay tribute to our biological selves, to what we might call physiological pleasures. We do not want to be restricted in this sphere. Therefore we play a double game of intellect and instinct, thought and emotion; we try to divide ourselves artificially into body and soul. When we try to liberate ourselves from it all we start to shout and stamp, we convulse to the rhythm of music. In our search for liberation we reach biological chaos. We suffer most from a lack of totality, throwing ourselves away, squandering ourselves."

There was a great deal of shouting and stamping in those ETW studios. As actors we were embodying the text, the action, the story. Nancy Lesko in "Feeling the Teacher" writes about her own embodiment of Greene's teachings as a result of her sabbatical sojourn to Teachers College in 1996. As a yoga devotee, Lesko felt a lightness in her step and a realignment of her body every Monday evening as she exited the lecture space in Main Hall to return to her student family housing in Morningside Heights.

The lived life versus the lived body? I'm sure where this may be taking me but le corps vecu is very attractive to me as an Odin Theatre/Grotowski trained/Bogart influenced actor.

The journey continues...

How do I summarize?

I have an opportunity in the next week to teach a session of undergrad students enrolled in a historical and philosophical perspectives of education course. It will serve as a demonstration of my teaching abilities for a search committee looking to hire a new faculty member. I will, of course, devote the session to Maxine Greene.

In doing my prep I found myself running in circles. Not twisting in productive spirals, but re-meeting myself every 360 degrees in repetitive loops. Why? WHY?? The "why" is waged in a quandary with "how do I summarize Maxine Greene's philosophy?"

Well, there is the "doing philosophy" which I find to be incredibly helpful, especially for newbies encountering philo-speak for the first time.

There's Maxine's particular take on aesthetics and how it differs from the more pragmatic approach of Dewey.

There's the sheer difficulty of life with its exclusionary impulses that shapes her approach to phenomenology and the ideals of social justice.

There's the "without answers" quality of the arts which provide timeless questions for both students and teachers to ponder.

There's the wonder of a 93-year old, female Jewish intellectual living across East 89th Street from the Guggenheim Museum who has stated that "Consciousness doesn't come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious."

And there's the value and richness of the "lived life."

It comes down to doing and being. Not an easy conceit for most college juniors especially within a 45-minute span. But the doing part is incredibly important and accessible. The being aspect can be a prompt or challenge at the conclusion to take a later moment to reflect.

Be present. Engage. Find questions.