Powerlines
The powerlines up above the place where I'm staying in Endicott, NY is one of those torn up places that give off an odd mix of sense of desperation and possibility. You know the sort of place: wheel ruts dug deep in the clay from stuck jeeps, small pools of tepid water, green bursts of opportunistic weeds surging up in the margins. It's the sort of place that makes you want to toss your beer bottles against rocks or the horizon. The sort of place that attracts teenagers and pigeons. It’s a broken place where anything can happen. And it’s hard for the cops to get to.
I always appreciated such places for their moon-like beauty. My S.O. said she once went up to these same powerlines and punched a guy in the face when he dared her. Then he dared her again and she hit him again. I guess he hadn't worked out the nuances of flirting quite yet. She's not a teenager now, so that must have been...a long time ago. But the powerlines haven’t changed much, she says. I suspect it’s one of those permanently scarred places that will always elicit a sense of poverty so powerfully that it almost makes you giddy. It elicits blunt force trauma. I imagine my S.O. and this guy taunting each other near the fence at the top that surrounding the buzzing electrical exchange station. It hogs the best view, but you can stand with your back to it and look down on the whole city to see the distant, symmetrically carved hillsides that slope down to the rivers like the keels of capsized boats.
This must have been an invigorating place a hundred years ago. Imagine overlooking the confluence of the Chenango and the Susquehanna rivers and the long undulating wooded valley they muscle through. The possiblity! The exotic distances brought close! The fecundity of 10,000 trees!
It's still beautiful here though it's a rust-belt city that’s been exploited for jobs, polluted, and ditched. We have a brownfield down the hill from here where IBM dumped trichlorethylene for years, creating a carcinogenic plume under the city. The New York Times says the case is now to the Supreme Court, but regardless of what happens there, people aren't going to move. Where do you go? Hawaii?
It's sort of numbing to see how the place has been torn up and how people have been treated. We’ve lost a sense of possibility here, of futurity. It's hard to imagine this place supporting people (much less indigenous creatures and forests) in the future. My dad says that Michigan, where he grew up, used to be a vast woodland; now it's mostly an interstate with some nice ranch-style houses. Oh, and there's Flint and Detroit, making the pollution of Endicott and Love Canal look like nothing. Yikes. Now that GM is bankrupt and they've closed the plants in MI (highest unemployment in the nation, the web tells me), I suspect powerlines all across that state will be teeming with teens.
It's hard to overestimate the weight of the American Dream when it breeches and capsizes on a city. Cortland, where I teach, has been waterboarded for years as various industries left or died (Smith Corona and Corning Glass chief among them). Here we have the abdication of IBM, Endicott-Johnson shoes, and many others. The effect is not only on specific companies and the network of tangential organizations connected to those companies (restaurants, parts suppliers, public works projects, schools and on and on), but it's felt in the heart as well. When we lose communities and neighborhoods, it's vastly alienating. It tends to strip those who remain of any sense of shared enterprise. Thus there's no speed bump that slows your thinking as you sit in your car contemplating the erection of yet another Walmart in the last green lot left. It doesn't matter anymore. The fact that what seems like a good idea today will be a tax-barren empty shell in 20 years literally isn’t conceivable.
As the economy dies down, daily life is eventually lit only by the blue flickering of our own individual desires, which sometimes can be stoked enough to illuminate our immediate family, sometimes not even that. When you're only worried about surviving day to day, you can’t notice ugliness of culture, architecture or food. When you're in it for yourself, you lose your senses. We become inured to the needs of others and the inner lives of other people. People and events that stand outside our lifetime fade like photographs and atrophy. Family disappears from our stories. We lose a sense of our grandkids and great grandparents. Reviving receding phantoms is a hard sell for a culture that has trouble meeting the demands even a short book represents to the imagination, for a culture that can’t picture what hundreds of gallons of trichlorethylene does for generations of kids in your hometown.
Sometimes I think we're spiders. We're in a web, a net of relations that ties us together in various forms of cooperation, even in the midst of competition. What's easy to forget when things are going "well" (that is, when we can ignore the fact that everything changes), we can also ignore that we depend on each other. The irony of a working system is that the very systemicity that gives it identity tends to fade from view, the way a novel or movie can lose its material immediacy when we're caught up in it. It's ironic when that happens, but it's also unreal. Problems bring us back to our fundamental interrelation (Kenneth Burke talks about this irony in the context of war).
So I'm up at the powerlines that day, stone cold sober but not bitter. Looking at the city I see a lot of desperation. I told a friend once that driving into Cortland (also in central New York) and seeing the thick opaque plastic over the house windows gives me a feeling like I just took a big hit off a cigarette. The depressing rush. The wave in the pit of the stomach.
So we tend in teaching to be too territorial. We are so busy building careers and speciality knowledge that it's hard to think big, to solve real-world problems. This is hardly a new complaint, but it's newly acute for me.
The discipline of rhetoric, though, is a pretty strong solvent, and hard to keep walled up in the academy. It was never meant to be an academic discipline, anyway--it kept failing to meet the standards of rigor and rarity that astronomy or geometry might. Rhetoric is cross-disciplinary, as is a student’s experience. We don’t have enough models for using rhetoric is high school or across disciplines, though I was thrilled to read Steven Johnson's new book and hear him discuss ecology as a cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary science, using insights from physics to farming, a practical and somewhat transgressive move discussed also by Jim Zebroski ("Rewriting Composition as a Postmodern Discipline: Transforming the Research/Teaching Dichotomy." Ronald and Roskelly. 168-182). What are the problems that we face, and how can students pull from their education to address the problems of their lives? I'm the first to say that in some ways we adults know more than kids do about what might be a valuable resource, so I'd argue that Shakespeare, as "useless" as it seems, is in fact useful for solving problems of understanding character and developing a sense of the beautiful and eloquent--ditto physics. But we each have a responsibility (literally response-ability) to find our own topics and audiences.
To look down from the powerlines and see, with "open eyes and open hands" the city one lives in can be terrifying. I'd rather get hit in the face (twice!) than flirt with the idea. But kids know what hurts and deserve a sense of interconnection and promise. They deserve a chance to tell their stories. Schools can give this to them much better than they do. I'd like to see schools provide kids with a chance to ask the hard questions about the difference between what is and what should be, and not lavish too much respect on the tidy divisions between disciplines ("content areas"). I'd like to see schools as places where kids and adults work together to make shared sense of shared problems--which automatically implies a rhetorical, problem-posing, and community oriented learning. It implies a different way to think about the center or coherence of a school in its practice.
One of the models we can use for this is both ecological studies and composition studies. Why not invite (and support!) teachers--who tend to be disposed to interdisciplinary study already--in the practice and inquire into these questions? Here is a really radical question: why not have them work together across levels, districts, and subject areas? Now that would be powerful.
--David
revised 7/16/10
No comments:
Post a Comment