Bluegoose on the Brazos

The body and the land in literature. I heard a good paper at the Computers and Writing conference by a bright young woman from Tennessee. She showed some transcripts of chats among students in her writing classroom, a few of which seemed to her to be attempts to represent the absent body in this strange medium. Aside from photos. how is this done? I don't mean things like saying I'm six foot four and weight two twenty or some variation of the pornographic drift of the internet. I mean how do we stimulate interest in ourselves as embodied beings in this seemingly disembodied way of "talking" to each other? Even with photos, actually? They are flat and still. Movies? Getting closer, but the effects of the sensorium remain limited. You can never smell a movie after all, and I think the current rage for aroma therapy suggests that finally people are realizing the importance of smell, which goes unspoken unless it's strikingly unpleasant or overwhelming even in face to face encounters. Can I awaken the senses with my writing and pictures? How? As with the body, so with the land, the earth. Can I make it feel close in my writing?

In a recent talk I heard the novelist Larry Heinemann say that people in the US are more likely to speak of Vietnam as a time, an era, than a place, a country with a history and a people. Heinemann dramatizes the difference himself. In his novel Paco's Story, Vietnam in an event in a character's life. Its voice is a ghost witness of the war who saw Paco barely survive a bombing that killed the rest of his unit (including the body that once housed the voice of the ghostly narrator). In Heinemann's recent memoir Black Virgin Mountain--with its title bearing a place name and geographic feature of the country and culture of Vietnam--he tells of his visits back to the land of his wartime experience. Now the land has a voice, the Vietnamese poets he meets. He himself is the ghost who discovers the land and the people of Vietnam. He can go back again and again. He is not returning to the time but to the place.

Besides providing a nice illustration of the rhetoric of time and place I tried to work out in the book Appeals in Modern Rhetoric, this episode takes about the persuasion of place as a kind of growing faith, something to get to know and believe in, to form some kind of identity with. Persuasion means not only the act of convicing but the form of believe. Hence the old usage "the Christian persuasion." The late Jim Kinneavy was the one who taught me that the Greek word pistis means both faith and persuasion. It's also the word that Aristotle uses for the means of persuasion, which some people call "appeals" these days.

I've been reading Doug Peacock's papers at the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University and thinking about Vietnam. When Doug was in Vietnam he carried a map of the Rockies with him and in his private time would open it up and dream about the places where he wasn't. Those places were real to him. In Vietnam, as he tells us in his book Grizzly Years, the war kept intruding on his sense of that land as a place. Like the other soldiers he began to measure his time there rather than immersing himself in a growing knowledge and affection for the Hri Montegnard people that he fought with as a special forces medic. He tossing of the mildewed map of Montana coincided with the loss of his friend, a chieftan of that people, to the VC, his decision to take revenge on the man who killed his friend and cut off his head, and his realization that, as "everyone" else already knew, he had been too long in the "boonies," the backwoods of the war. Place and time have a complex relationship in Grizzly Years than in Heinemann's books, but they do seem to be at war with one another.

Time requires a different form of persuasion than place does. I got this idea first from the Sioux writer (recently deceased), Vine Deloria, Jr., his book God Is Red.

It's a lot to think about this Memorial Day weekend, you know?

Consider the image that some of us might claim as a self-representation today: the professor as prosthetic demigod. Armed with your technological extensions, you can sit at a home computer and do what used to require a far greater expenditure of time and effort. You can write faster and more accurately than you could with a pencil or a typewriter. You can do research by consulting online databases instead of going to the library. You can teach and grade papers without going to the classroom. You can confer with students and colleagues without going to the office. You can attend conferences without getting on the airplane. There are certainly costs for these powers: your back may ache and your eyes may hurt, and you may feel deprived of human contact. But with the right physical and mental therapy, you can cope with these inconveniences, these resonances from the lifeworld that register in the body. It's worth the cost. Your university administration loves you for saving travel money and classroom space. The librarians love you because they can realize their ancient but necessarily unstated ideal of keeping every book on the shelf and out of use at all times. Your students love you because they don't have to get up at eight a.m., or ten, or even noon to meet with you or come to class. Of course, there is the nagging fear of system failure or electrical outage or terrorist attack—any of which would bring your heightened productivity to a sudden halt and would severely diminish if not totally disable your extended power.

But, even with the power on, all is not well in the life of the prosthetic professor. In the writing programs office, we often take complaints from new teachers in web-based courses who say that they spend too much time answering questions about how to make technologies work and less time addressing how to write effectively. Some colleagues who advocate a technological version of literacy say, "That's just the way teaching feels in a computer-mediated environment." But the frustrated teachers say, "It doesn't feel like teaching. It feels like maintenance work." One suggested that for every hundred or so web-based writing students, we ought to have one teacher and three or four technicians.

It's stupid to treat the body in pain like a broken machine, but I still do. I try all the mechanics--doctor, chiropractor, massage therapist, acupunturist. All the additives too--medicine, herbs, "lots of fluids." It still hurts. The animal in me knows what it needs most in rest, time to heal. It needs to crawl up in the cave and lick its wounds, roll up in a protective ball. If you leave a broken machine alone, it's unlikely to get better, but the animal just might.

But rest is interruption to life when life has become an act of work, of doing, of acting. When it becomes a machine, that is. When it doesn't work, it's broken. It's either on or off, 1 or 0. Fix it or throw it on the dump.

Do I still know how to be an animal?

Funny that I was just writing that stuff about the "prosthetic god" and all his powerful organs. Freud mentioned that when the extensions break down, how hard it is, but when the body has trouble, the dependency becomes all the clearer. I've had a bad neck and back for almost two weeks and sitting at the computer has bordered on excruciating. I found a way to make it work well enough to get some writing done, mostly necessary stuff, but wow! I had to borrow a lap top and scrunch down on the couch to make it feel ok to write. Ick. Ouch. Anyhow, I'm better after doctor, chiropractor, and acupuncture, and I brought the lap top to west Texas with me on a research trip and the Computers and Writing conference. So I'm plugged in again, at least in small doses--and humbled, oh yes.

McLuhan's most obvious theoretical source is Freud's 1930 book Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud understands technology as an attempt to extend the power of human organs and thus address people's anxieties over the inadequacies of the body. In earlier times people saw themselves, in Freud's words, as "feeble animal organism[s]" and "formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience" that, being denied to humanity, could be embodied in the gods. "Today," however, "[the human being] has come very close to the attainment of this ideal"—"he has almost become a god himself" by the power of his technology. He builds "auxiliary organs" to extend his powers—microscopes and telescopes to extend his vision, communication devices to send his voice around the globe, airplanes that allow him to fly, clothing, armor, and then fortresses that add layers of protection to his tender skin: "Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent." (Freud 44-45).

But Freud was not willing to stop with this image of power and productivity. For him, every gain has a compensating loss. At the time he wrote these famous lines, Freud was suffering from mouth cancer and was forced to wear an ill-fitting prosthetic jaw, so his awareness of the shortcomings of technology were all the more acute. He was forced to admit that the "organs" of the "prosthetic God" "have not grown on to him and . . . still give him much trouble at times." Though "he is entitled to console himself with the thought that his development will not come to an end" in the present time, for now we must not forget that "present-day man does not [always] feel happy in his Godlike character" (44-45). Sometimes the prosthetic extensions don't work, and what's worse, when you come to rely upon them, you doubly enfeebled when they fail, leaving you exposed and reduced. Think about the controversies today over devices like the calculator and the computer. The calculator allows math students to work faster and more accurately than ever before, but the persistent worry is that students are losing the ability to do simple math without the aid of the machines. This line of argument is very old. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates expresses the same worry about writing. If we write everything down, will we ultimately lose our powers of memory?

For those of us interested in media theory, a possible alternative to body-environment dualism centers on the concept of extension. We might say that Wendell Berry's family farm is an extension of himself, for example, a layer of experience connecting the body and the mind to the lifeworld. One of the most provocative treatments of the concept appears in Marshall McLuhan's now classic collection Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which includes essays like "Clothing: Our Extended Skin." Clothing could be considered an environment that envelops the body, but generally it's too close and too portable—it sticks to me and goes with me everywhere (in public at least)—so it seems instead an extension, my public skin, a counterpart to my mental persona. Likewise, my published writing is an extension of my voice, a way of projecting my lectures around the world to other specialists and students in my field. My field in this sense is something like Berry's family farm, an extension of the writing program at my university. And so on.

(to add to yesterday's thoughts on environment as an alienated space): As we move from spoken language to writing, the exchange of not only face-to-face interchange with interlocutors but also the act of using breath to make language is lost. So it is that writing, for phenomenological ecologists like David Abram, represents the first step toward virtuality, the creation of a space in which we can seemingly dwell apart from the places that more directly sustain our lives. Such a notion is the foundation for much more than the cyberpunk dualism that transforms the old body-mind duality into a tense division of cyberspace and the "meat world," as William Gibson's protagonists are fond of saying. It is also the aesthetic of escapism in popular literature and cinema. The point is that in pop theory as well as in phenomenology, the feeling persists that technological mediation enables a special kind of forgetting that separates us from the lifeworld and renders it an environment.

I'm lurching toward a paper and posting some of the paragraphs. The following follows on my earlier post today on "environment." In other words, I'm looking for an alternative word for "environment."

What's the alternative [to using the word "environment" to describe the world we live in]? Lifeworld is a good one, the place that exists beneath any conceptual framework we might impose upon it. Air and water from the lifeworld constantly circulate through the body, making it a part of the elemental exchange known as the ecology or more simply the life of a place. I think that's what Berry is getting at. Here is one way that natural places may be distinguished from artificial and virtual. The latter add filters of various kinds to the processes of circulation. As much as air conditioning and computer monitors, language and culture are filters of this sort—or screens, as Kenneth Burke would say. They are all media through which the exchange between the lifeworld and the body takes place. The more complex the media, the more distant the lifeworld comes to seem. The philosopher Niklas Luhmann goes so far as to suggest, in his book Ecological Communication, that the human world is a linguistically mediated system. The natural world is a distinct system. The catch is that communication only occurs within systems. Between systems, there can only be faint resonances. In this view, by the very act of using language, we become alienated from the lifeworld. We feel it only as a curious pressure upon our being. With each new layer of mediation, moving from language to media that not only filter but seemingly replace the natural or social world, we might expect further alienation.

People I know speak rather blithely of computer environments, writing environments, and classroom environments, as well as natural, artificial, and virtual environments. But what do they mean, and what do the characteristic experiences of computers, writing, classrooms, nature, artifices, and virtual spaces share that would allow anyone to use the same word to name them? Environment literally means that which surrounds. The word and the corresponding phenomenon have been nicely problematized in the ecocritical literature. Wendell Berry has argued, for example, that his family farm and his favorite outdoor places are not environments at all because they do not surround him so much as support him and feed him and make him who he is. In his view, to call a place an environment means already to be alienated from it. In this sense, the body is the only true home or dwelling of the person. Beyond the skin lies the environment, natural, artificial, or virtual.

I was walking across campus the other day with my deaf colleague. A mockingbird was blasting a huge and varied song from a little tree barely above head height. I paused ever so slightly to watch. Only when she asked me why I stopped did I remember that she could not have heard what I did. I told her I stopped to see the mockingbird. "What's a mockingbird," she asked, and I felt like I had dropped into Whitman's "Song of Myself," the part where the child asks, "What is the grass?" I pointed to the tree and she looked closely and said "oh yeah." She had seen them before. But what IS a mockingbird without its song? It's a relatively dull colored gray and white bird with a long bill and tail, very curious seeming and very protective of its territory (hence the wild song). The first English people to come to America were totally impressed by the mockingbird. It may be because back in the old country they liked to train tame finches to imitate their songs. They worked at it so hard that the English flute came to be called "the recorder." "Recording" was the practice of playing a sequence of notes for a bird to see if it could render them back as played. (The tape recorder and other recording technologies arise frm this practice, at least etymologically.) The Scottish scholar who told me about this tradition said he played the recorder with a mockingbird for about an hour in his yard in Virginia. The bird apparently got bored with his simple sequences and started to vary them with trills and arpeggios that he could not begin to replicate on the straight wooden flute. The old fiddle song "Listen to the Mockingbird" is used as a show-off piece in fiddle contests and the most famous fiddlers vary it wildly and make the strings and bow sing like a bird. Whitman himself made the mockingbird the operatic star of his poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." On the radio, I heard a woman say she knew it was time to move back to Texas from Los Angeles when she heard a mockingbird imitating a car alarm. A relic of the fascination of the English settlers with the mockingbird appears in the number of states (including Texas) that have the mockingbird as their state bird.

What is a mockingbird without its song?

I'm not sure how all this fits into this blog, but I thought of it while reading that Abrams book. The part about nature withdrawing from us. I felt so sad that I could not really answer my deaf friend's question. There may come a time when this experience is all too general.

In the book The Spell of the Sensuous, one way that David Abrams solves the complicated problem of how we human beings in the modern world have our perceptions cut off from nature, when it is those very perceptions that make us most human and most natural, is to say that writing did it, or in particular, alphabetic writing.

It's a complicated argument—much more complicated though not unconnected to other arguments about what did it, like agriculture, the answer in Daniel Quinn's Ishmael—that I'll summarize if anybody who comes into this blog is interested.

It's based on phenomenological philosophy, literacy theory, and anthropology. But it comes down to this. In spoken language, we are still largely connected to the earth through our bodies, especially as oral speech is used in preliterate societies. But when writing comes into play, we learn to participate in the world that it creates on the pages of books and ultimately inside our heads in a way that would not be possible in speech. More and more we live in this—what else?—virtual world, and more and more we learn to ignore, shut out, remove ourselves from the life world (the world that exists prior to our linguistic experience, that becomes a background for life in the literate world rather than a pool of life in which we are immersed).

In an interesting shamanistic twist, Abrams says that as we withdraw from the world, it withdraws from us. Trees and insects and birds—and finally even our own bodies—cease to approach us with their inquiries and songs.

Think about this and feel the world tremble beneath your feet—or is that traffic or the air conditioner? What Abrams is really talking about here is not writing per se, but mediation, anything that can come between you and the earth. Like riding in a car rather than walking on the ground. Computer-mediated communication is not only based on writing and other exclusively human sign systems ("exclusively" is an important word since the nonhuman world as well as much of the indigenous humanity on this earth gets left out in these sign systems, and remember that Umberto Eco defined a sign as anything that can be used to lie), but it is also obviously a way of getting away from, ignoring, avoiding the call of the earth and the body. It's a form of mediation.

Abrams' idea that the things of earth withdraw as we withdraw fascinates me. And creeps me out.

Another implication of his thinking: writing as an artificial system based on a natural action (speech) already implies virtuality. The new media are still media after all. Maybe their big claims amount to a greater power to take us away.

In the article "The New Wisdom of the Web" (Newsweek 4/3/06)—the cover feature on "putting the 'we' in Web" or Web, Version 2, about user-driven web sites—Steven Levy and Brad Stone conclude thus: "Less than a decade ago, when we were first getting used to the idea of an Internet, people described the act of going online as venturing into some foreign realm called cyberspace. But that metaphor no longer applies. MySpace, Flickr, and all the other newcomers aren't places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your horizons. Cyberspace was somewhere else. The Web is where we live" (p. 53). Interesting to me is that the quotation starts by denying the metaphor of place and ends by using metaphors of place. Wildly incompatible ones in fact: "extend your horizons" versus "where we live." Sorry, transcendence incomplete.

My correspondent MT gave me permission to reproduce this email reflection on memory: "I was thinking about your presentation on globalization and your current project regarding natural, artificial, and virtual places. I was wondering how something like an imagined place/space(?) would fit into the discussion. For example, the way I think about former Yugoslavia: the place as I know it physically, culturally, politically, and socially no longer exists except in my memory (and there is a vague consensus in others‚ memories of what the place used to be). This might have no bearing on your discussion depending on where you want to take it, but it offers an interesting perspective on the experience of virtual places. There are nostalgic websites about former Yugoslavia that do in fact invoke a visceral reaction in me; so, Dr. M's question about sentiment no longer being the same in virtual places becomes complicated. The internet also seems to be a place where we seek the record of our existence. Everyone I know, including me, has typed in his/her name in Google to see what they would find. When research results retrieve information about you, that seems to validate that you are in fact alive and doing "important stuff," and on the other hand, if no record of you exists, it tends to be disappointing, as if your nonexistence in cyberspace somehow takes away from your worth. Of course, this is all from a wealthy, Western perspective."

In an interview in Acoustic Guitar magazine, the rising young guitarist Kaki King reflects on the pastoral mode, which has been one of the conventional ways of representing nature in poetry and in music—pastoral referring to "pastures" and suggesting the lost peace and quiet and solitude supposedly enjoyed by shepherds, the serenity of nature as recalled in a largely urban world. She says, "The pieces I write are a little more urbanized. Solo guitar music is often really pastoral and associated with nature—the whole new age movement, which is kind of phony at this point. I've been able to disassociate myself from that kind of thing, so different people are attracted to it." (December 2004, p. 64)

There's an interesting tension here: between the authentic "urban" and the "phony" pastoral.

Here's a snippet from an old essay I wrote about how people study workplaces:

As a memorial to the recently departed Fred Rogers, who after all created a virtual neighborhood for millions of young TV viewers, I invite you to join me in a thought experiment. Imagine that before he died, Mr. Rogers made two more of those grainy little films he sometimes showed about where food comes from or how rubber is made. The first would involve a split screen that would show how two professional communicators on different sides of the world make their way home from work. Mr. Li in Beijing and Ms. Lee in New York would each shut down the computer for the day and leave the office. I suspect that we would see the differences begin almost immediately, from the moment the workers gather their things together to head home. The second film would show what happens when you plug your computer or cell phone recharger into the wall, how the path of energy leads inexorably back to some coal-fired or oil-fueled power plant, or to a hydroelectric or nuclear facility. It would finish by showing how smoke molecules from one of the big coal-fired plants in New Mexico probably reached the nostrils of people walking around on a fine Spring day in New York City so that somebody in southern California could recharge a cell phone.

The entry "what's cool" has got a lot of comments, which is a bummer to me because it's the least important to me of everything I've written, but since it seems to have struck a note, I'll write some more. I wrote it right after I read James Paul Gee's hopeful book on literacy and learning in video games. He made a great case that video gaming involves and enhances several kinds of advanced thinking. What he doesn't consider, though, is the possibility that video gamers are drawn to work so hard as a form of rebellion against traditional learning, so that to suggest that "technological literacy" of this sort is like all other kinds of literacy (reading and writing being the usual definition of the term, but also competence in the sense of social or scientific or ecological literacy), as Gee does, is to suggest that technological literacy is somehow transferable to other forms of literacy. But wait. Don't we have to consider motivation and emotion in the mix? Isn't there a rhetorical situation involved in education?

So here's another try at what I'm saying: You can't make people love to study Shakespeare as much as they love to play Grand Theft Auto by turning literature class into a Hamlet video game (even one where everybody dies in the end like the play).

A colleague told me her parents gave her a Bible video game when she was a child, and she and her sibs ... well you can imagine how that went over.

Passage from a handout for a talk I gave today on theories of place and globalization:

"Place is security, space is freedom," writes the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), "we are attached to the one and long for the other." "Geographers study places," he goes on to explain; "Planners would like to evoke a 'sense of space'" (3).

The talk stimulated a side conversation with a colleague who had asked about the sentimentalization of place in concepts like home. The discussion drifted to electronically mediated places, and she suggested that virtual sites could never be as invested with sentiment as places with the old associations (real or idealized in memory).

I recall reading some place that smell triggers memories more strongly than any other sense. Virtual places as yet have no smell. My colleague said they are "sanitized." So you don't smell the sewage and garbage and rot. But you don't smell the cookies baking either, or the gardenias, or the inside rim of your father's old hat.

Last night I bought one of those plastic boxes of raw "baby" spinach washed and table-ready for the busy consumer. As I was eating a salad of it tonight—January 24, the middle of winter in Texas—a live ladybug crawled up on the lid of my bowl and over onto the table. I watched it crawl away and then checked the place name on the plastic box. The spinach was washed and packed in Salinas, California.

Natural, artificial, or virtual?

I was flying into Dallas at sunset from the east. Over a thin layer of clouds the sinking sun cast a hazy orange glow. Through the faint orange filter of clouds-light-air, I see the expanse of Lake Texoma (maybe) surrounded by a landscape of farm and ranch country, sketched out by roads and fence lines like a living map. Is the phenomenon natural, artificial, or virtual?

It is natural. The clouds-sunlight-air-water-and-land would be there whether I watched them from the airplane or not. I happen upon them just as surely as I would happen upon yellow sunlight breaking through the pine boughs in an opening in a forest on a long walk.

But it is artificial. I could never see the water and land through the orange filter from this height without the boost I get from the mechanical means of travel. I look from a height twice as high as the peak of the tallest mountain on earth. It's just possible that orange light never looks this way down below.

And it is virtual. I arrive in time to take the view thanks to heavy mediation. The forces that bring me here—the schedules, the linked computers, the human and mechanical networks that keep the plane in the air from colliding with other planes and arriving at this juncture of light and air and evening—have all the qualities of the New Media. They are digitized, networked, and converging.

The categories have meaning only in analysis or as occasionally dominant trends within a world in which they regularly combine to produce effects like the fleetingly sketched map of north Texas through a gauzy orange filter.