Changing my mind about the kid in the principal's office

Last winter, during our annual trip out of town for walks and movies and relaxation at the coast, we watched the entire disc set of The Prisoner, and I figured out (again) that other people think I'm unmutual. I was bemused (again) at this notion, considering the strain of mental and emotional effort I have always, always expended trying as hard as I can to understand and be understood. It's hard to express how important this is to me - to understand and be understood. It's a need that flows from my sternum and from my lower back, and it has caused the deepest physical and psychic pain in my life when this need cannot be met. (yes, really)

I know, right? Weird. What's anyone else supposed to do with that level of intensity in one of their friends? What were all my friends and family supposed to do with that?

Mostly, people just love me anyway, and tolerate my relentless drive for clarity and understanding. Mostly, it's a good thing I married a man who would put up with such an intensity of endless conversations that start with my saying, "I don't understand this," and he will have the conversation with me for the thousandth time, parrying with my mind, refusing to give in just to make me leave it alone. (Thanks, honey. I think this has kept me out of both the loony bin and the pharmacy.)

See, back when I was a kid, I was never - no kidding, not one time - sent to the principal's office in school, except on errands, to deliver messages in the days before intercoms were ordinary, or to retrieve the naughty student and escort that student back to the ordered, stable, mutual and socially predictable classroom. The classic teacher's pet. The good child. The natural student, in fact so naturally at home in the classroom that I started studying my teachers for methods, pedagogy, and classroom management techniques at about the age of seven. When you're a kid, no one's really listening to the kinds of questions you're asking anyway, so no one thought my desire to understand and be understood was unmutual. I was just a kid - and when I didn't get real answers, I figured it was because I'd made an error in the way I asked the question. (yes, I really thought like that, even then) And the island was not such a bad place. If you grow up in a very mutual place, the fact of imprisonment does not fully impress itself on the mind until you've been a grownup for long enough to see people escape - or try to.

Is this too metaphorical? I will try to be understood. Here is what I mean.

The parents and teachers and babysitters and camp counselors and club leaders and recess monitors who surrounded me as I grew were all people who gave me the same set of rules for living. They really did love me, and I really did trust them, and because of this, I really did believe that the kid who got sent to the office was a kid who had done something immoral. Wrong. Bad. Naughty. I thought, I mean to say, that every rebel - every unmutual - was wrong. (yes, I really thought that)

And yet ...

There was a relative or two who hinted to me that beyond the walls and beaches of the island, there was a wider world. Sometimes the parent in some other household, or a teacher who didn't stay long, or even one of my peers would let me in on a reality I'd never imagined.

And now that I'm so old all of my own kids are grown, and I've seen many, many people younger than I am try to figure out how to avoid being unmutual, and I've learned about some huge ideas like "civil rights" and "racial equality" and "war crimes" being committed by our side.

If the sign says "Whites Only," but you drink from the fountain with your colored face, you have been unmutual. Uncooperative. But wrong? Not really.

If you're a child in a school, and you hit back when someone weak is being bullied, have you disobeyed the rules? Yes. Are you very, very likely to get into trouble for standing in the way of oppression? Yes. But have you done something wrong? Morally wrong? No. Sometimes the rules are wrong.

So now I've decided that sometimes, in fact, much more often than I knew, being unmutual is the best, more moral, most brave thing a person can do. And I've even changed my mind about the kids who got sent to the principal's office. I might finally be beginning to understand the difference between being cooperative and being good. Yes, really.

From the Frontispiece

(although, it's not an illustration, so ... is it a frontispiece?)

Yesterday afternoon, between my appointment for setting up the end of my PLA adventure and the coming Mary Catherine Bateson lecture, I found the library's book sale. I found a pristine copy of The World's Great Letters (1940), and I bought it. Best dollar I ever spent. From the frontispiece,

The post is the consolation of life. Voltaire

The earth has nothing like a she epistle. Byron

As long as there are postmen, life will have zest. William James

In a man's letters, you know, madam, his soul lies naked. Dr. Johnson

The public will always give up its dinner to read love letters. George Jean Nathan

Letters, such as written by wise men, are, of all the words of men, in my judgment, the best. Francis Bacon

I forgot to say that one of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer. Byron

The need of composing letters was the earliest and most constant incentive to terseness, clarity, and exactitude of statement. R. L. Megroz

Let those who may complain that it (the Shaw-Ellen Terry "romantic correspondence") was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love. George Bernard Shaw

That Thread

Re-reading In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden. (The Loyola Classics edition that was at the library is a very nice edition. I may look for one of these to buy.) As I started to say something about it to my husband this morning, it suddenly clanged into my head ... hey! I have several favorite books that have as a central theme a woman ready to reinvent herself. I've never noticed the thread before.

In this book, the main character has decided to enter a convent rather than continue in her successful career in public service. In Elizabeth Goudge's The Scent of Water, the woman leaves a public service career to move out into the country when she inherits a house from a distant cousin (and the house turns out to have been part of the old monastery destroyed by the infamous Henry VIII). In Madeleine L'Engle's book, A Severed Wasp, the main character has retired from her career as a concert pianist, and intends to weave the threads of her life together into something she can know and love. She thinks she will have a quiet retirement in which to do this, but finds herself deeply involved in the ongoing lives of others in and around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

For awhile now, I've been actively seeking books that will talk to me about this phase of my life. What am I supposed to do with it? I have a reasonable expectation of a second career, decades stretching before me, a wider life possible because of a life so far ... what am I supposed to do? This is very much like the teen years in some ways. It's obvious that some new part of life is on the horizon. I want to get ready. I want to know. Where are the books? Who are the authors?

Well, it turns out that there are many such books and authors. Tonight I'll go to Marylhurst to listen to Mary Catherine Bateson - one of the experts answering this question. But ... this morning, I see now that I have been reading and getting ready for a long time. I just didn't know it. Godden, Goudge and L'Engle brought me Phillipa, Mary and Katherine, and they've been my friends and teachers all along.

I wonder which one it is?

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Aaahhh... good old Robert Frost. I do love him. I thought of him today, and of this poem that caught my imagination for the first time about forty years ago. I have thought of "the one less traveled by" a lot of times in my life, and apparently, it's come 'round again. Two things, here before me, unexpected, obvious, and both branching off to parts unknown. Which to follow, I wonder? Which one is the one less traveled by? (And - poetic heresy, for sure - do I want to be on the one less traveled by?)

Road the First:

• my still fascinating rock-paper-scissors model of the human person. Somehow, I still want to include it in this degree I'm composing and assembling. We are what we are (the "rock" part); we cover ourselves in socialized behavior (the "paper"); and we choose and can alter our socialized selves (the "scissors"). Our social selves can alter the very composition of our "what we are" selves -- at least, to a point. Our core selves can be used in such a manner as to bend, or even to destroy our wills (prison camps, torture, or the child raised with no limits or guidance ... of these things mess with our basic composition and can smash our will so that we have a very hard time with our choice-making).
• This idea sits like a paper weight on the desktop of my brain, waiting for the best place in the arrangement of things. I still don't know where to put it, but it's just too attractive to throw away.

Road the Second:

• I have only just this weekend discovered that there is a new literary model emerging in the academic world. It's called Darwinian Literary Theory or literary studies.

• (background: I've finally hammered out what on earth the discussion actually says when it comes to evolution and the resistance to the idea of evolution in the natural world (thanks to a class that forced me to find these things out for myself if I wanted an A ... which I did ...). I suspected I would find out that I'd been handed a straw man to defeat, and this was true. Christians really and truly need not fear anything with Darwin's name or the word "evolution" attached to it.)

• Here's are sentences that makes me just about come to pieces in excitement:

  Many literary Darwinists aim not just at creating another “approach” or “movement” in literary theory; they aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted. They want to establish a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately to encompass all other possible approaches to literary study.

• and this bit here, too:

  Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories, 2009) argues that the arts are forms of cognitive “play” that enhance pattern recognition. In company with Ellen Dissanayake (Art and Intimacy, 2000), Boyd also argues that the arts provide means of creating shared social identity. Dissanayake, Joseph Carroll (Literary Darwinism 2004), and Denis Dutton (The Art Instinct, 2009) all argue that the arts help organize the human mind by giving emotionally and aesthetically modulated form to the relations among the elements of human experience.

Is that gibberish without some kind of background or a little reading? I'm not sure I would have been able to see this even just a year ago. But I see it now.

My degree is called "Composing the Human Experience." If there are people who are currently figuring out that narrative is as vital to the understanding of humans as more traditionally quantifiable science is, and if I can get in on the discussion ... well, I think sparks have started to fly out of my scalp, and words have failed me.

So ... which road?

Or, better yet, do these two ideas converge?

Who says men can't plan a wedding?

(hat tip, Susan! This is great!)