“What remains as an excess that can’t be assimilated and what are you going to do with the gift I bestow, I who am such strange stuff?”

Today while waiting for the bus I started reading a new book and without even getting past page lowercase x I ran into CSCL 3331:

“It is more like having the reality depicted turn back on the writing, rather than on the writer, and ask for a fair shake. “What have you learned?” the reality asks of the writing. “What remains as an excess that can’t be assimilated and what are you going to do with the gift I bestow, I who am such strange stuff?”...

...we don’t think sufficiently about the fact that when we explain the unknown we reduce it too quickly to the known. That is the first problem. We strip the unknown of all that is strange. We show it who’s boss, the basic rule of a university seminar. We tolerate neither ambiguity nor that which won’t conform. The second and even greater misfortune here is that we thereby forget how strange is the known.

...Therefore the task of the writer, as I see it, is to play with this dual function of words; pretend they are what they refer to--that they do take you to the rain forests of the Pacific coast---and at the same time recognize the artifice. This I call the nervous system, one of whose functions is to make manifest the hand of the writer so as to perturb the fiction masquerading as what we call truth, which is, of course, what we call culture too.”1

One intriguing thing I am thinking about from this class is the idea that we often think we are doing one thing but we might really be doing something completely different. Here I was taking this class in order to start figuring out my plans for graduate school after being out of school for a while--planning to move ahead to some sort of social sciences degree (having received an undergraduate degree in art).

So what did I end up doing? Making pictures and Calling for Art and (soon) curating an art exhibition (do I know how to do that? Sure!….) which has social themes related to intersections of science and culture, but was not what I’d set out to do. (I was hoping for, maybe, a writing sample.) In this class, and really, in these last months outside of class as well, I kept running into art. Not that I was running away from it, but I see now that there was a way in which I had seen it as isolated from other fields--there was a Washington Avenue next to my idea of art. Sometimes art comments on or examines other fields, or is displayed in their lobbies, but there was a separateness I felt of it not reaching or connecting with people in the same way, and pulling a different cultural weight. It is hard, visiting galleries or museums, to not have a sense of art existing in air-tight rooms and not being experienced by many.

But what I kept running into in this class is that art is again and again entering these other realms and interacting and speaking and just pretty well refusing to go away--and making an impact. Whether its Michael Chricton or youtube or poetry or dance or Olympic figure skaters or activists flown here from India by the art department, or Anne Fausto-Sterling working with a playwright, it’s going on, and apparently it’s letting me know. Again and again in the margins of my notes I wrote STORYTELLING.

Tonight, for example, I went to meet this woman who emailed me about the exhibition and is making a TPT documentary about a CSA farm and was having an open studio tonight. In the meantime, I’d heard from another artist, who, as it turns out, has exhibited all sorts of places and has an impressive background of work. So I go and see the woman and her documentary and it was great and we chatted and she said, well let’s walk around the building--and who is sitting on the couch drinking wine, but artist #2 and so we have a conversation. She shares the work she has done bringing rural people’s stories to the public in their own words and images, for the last 30 years, and, as she said, public conversation has finally caught up and includes farmers, too. And here I’ve stepped into the scene to make some collection of my impression at my moment in time. Maybe it is because it is a dark and stormy night but I feel I’ve stepped into the river of the conversation of everything.

We are so lucky to have the image of Washington Avenue, with the two sides volleying thoughts and ideas and people back and forth whether they realize it or not. You can’t create science without creating culture, and most likely, these days, a facet of culture can’t exist without science trying to come up with an explanation. A woman can’t just bleed from her hand and not eat for thirty years without someone wanting to know why. (Though the bleeding woman may never care to hear your explanation, she has her own.)

And speaking of that bleeding woman, we learned about so many strange things that people do--cutting off their own healthy limbs, raising a son as a girl after he’s been attacked by a dog, making our own food supply crappy, opting out of the gender system, building misogynistic paranoia about eco-terrorists. . . . An array of things that don’t assimilate into our idea of the typical, the known. But all of these strange people did make a little more sense and feel a little more understandable when we dropped beneath the tag line of their story, and ventured into the un-assimilated parts, investigating the strange of that which was unknown…..I leave intrigued by humanity. It really is fascinating, the things that we do, and what we think we know.


_______________________________________________________
1 Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)