Looking Backward, Going Forward

As I begin to transform my old website Owldroppings into a more complete exploration of the concerns that show up in this blog (which will become a component of a newly realized Owl’s Farm: The Website), I keep running into questions about what I really want to think and write about.

After all, I’m about to turn seventy, an age I never thought I’d reach. So what does a seventy year-old former academic, wannabe political economist, sometime philosopher of technology, lapsed archaeologist, retired art and design history teacher, and compulsive writer do with what remains of her life?

Early on in my musings I realized that I want to stop being so grumpy. Even though I don’t have grandchildren, my siblings do, and so I do have a small genetic investment in the future. It might behoove me, therefore, to begin to consider better alternatives than seem to be available in the present political moment.

Owl’s Farm: The Blog has always been about utopia. It was inspired by two of the best utopian thinkers I ever ran across: William Morris and Yi-Fu Tuan. Morris was a celebrated designer and an early socialist, and Tuan is a humanistic geographer with a profound understanding of place. Both developed creative visions of the notion of home, which led to my explorations into its many meanings.

As I searched for a focus for the new iteration of the website, I realized that it still had to be about education, and should still embody the “teaching philosophy” I was required to articulate for my annual evaluations as a college instructor.  But it also needs to spend less time on the current state of education and more on locating what could improve it—especially since there are good models available.

In addition, instead of just complaining about current economic conditions, perhaps I should focus on locating bright spots on the horizon, like alternative energy solutions or promising community developments.

The website should also continue to provide resources for the curious, since former students still occasionally use it for the links. I’ll also archive my topical essays for courses I taught (not just art and design history, but philosophical perspectives on food, anthropology, culture, and the Arts and Crafts movement), and see if I can stay on top of issues relevant to them.   

All along this blog was meant to be an adjunct to my novel, More News From Nowhere. That, too, is in the process of being revised somewhat—now that I have the time to revisit its reason for being.  As a lifelong interdisciplinarian, I want to use the novel (and others in various stages of development) and the blog(s) as outlets for the results of curiosity. It’s often difficult to compartmentalize my many interests, but occasionally I can focus on a single aspect (museums, for example) and develop lines of inquiry that can be labeled. Hence: Owl’s Cabinet of Wonders. Other attempts (like The Owl of Athena, a blog on educational concerns) kept leaking into The Farm, and so were abandoned (although they, too, will be archived on the revised site). 

The ultimate aim now is fun—as much as is possible in this moment. I’m too old to keep wasting time being a complete curmudgeon. I can’t promise that I won’t ever go off on another grumpy rant again, or that sarcasm won’t sneak into my commentary on life, the universe, and everything. I am by nature a cynic, in its original sense. I’m dog-like: suspicious, reluctant to trust without reason (see my post from The Owl of Athena on the topic). But also both faithful and curious, and willing to explore new ideas and approaches.  

And yes, I can be a cranky old bitch. But I’ll try to do more Frisbee chasing and romping around in the garden, and less pissing on the flowers. I hope what I’ll have to offer is interesting, entertaining (in a very broad sense of the word), thoughtful, and educational. I also hope it will provide a sense of hope for the future, and tools for building more of a eu-topia than an ou-topia. I’d rather that we move toward a good place than continue to imagine what can only be a no-place, a place possible only in the imagination.

Wish me luck.

PS: owlfarmer.com is “live” but practically devoid of content. Design work will progress as I have time, depending on concurrent pursuits.

Image note: The photo is of Mount Whitney, taken in the Alabama Hills outside of Lone Pine, California, during our winter trip in 2015/16. Whenever I stayed with my Grandmother, I could see a more distant version of this image from her living room window.

Being and Place

I’ve been working on The Farm, here, for a bit over a year now, and I thought it might be worth reflecting on how it—and perhaps its author—have evolved in the process of posting weekly for the last thirteen months.

I began the effort almost under protest. Several colleagues whom I especially respect had flogged blogging as “the next big thing,” which is usually enough to chase this techno-dinosaur back into the cave. But as I said, I think well of these folk, and so began an effort that's become a kind of odyssey for me. A bit late in life, perhaps, but the entire experience has been both more enjoyable and more entertaining than I had ever expected.

Very early on (like day one) I realized that daily bleats would not be coming out of this sheep. It wasn’t until after I’d been at it for a couple of weeks that I started looking around at other blogs, and began linking the interesting ones to my own blog roll. I played around with design, managed to concoct a banner, and figured out that a more-or-less weekly posting schedule, involving short essays instead of quippy little daily bits was more my “style.” Every weekend (mine are currently four-days long) I’d spend a few hours over a couple of days and reflect on whatever was stewing around in the old noggin—usually in response to whatever was going on in the “real world” (as we call it on the Serenity forum). And because I was still working on More News From Nowhere, the musings would focus on what it was like being a utopian living in dystopia.

I recently started looking back over the early posts, and noticed a consistent theme: place. Not necessarily u-topian (“no-place”) or eu-topian (“good-place”) or even dys-topian (not-so-good place), but simply place.

And then I figured out why, and changed my blog-description to reflect what I had discovered.

Over my entire life I have formed attachments to a variety of places: Japan, Taiwan, the Owens River Valley in California, coastal Oregon, northwestern New Mexico, Greece, London, Long Island, Philadelphia, Chicago. And for the past thirty years I have been trying, sometimes painfully, to learn to love the prairie—specifically the particular part of the prairie in which I have found myself exiled.

While my children were growing up, I steeped myself in the natural history of the Texas blackland prairie where we live, and explored it and some of its surroundings (the Ouachita mountains in eastern Oklahoma, where I once owned a cabin I could never get to; the Wichita mountains in western Oklahoma; Copper Breaks and the Guadalupe mountains in west Texas) on backpacking and camping trips over a number of years. I volunteered at the Outdoor Learning Center for the Plano schools and at the Heard Natural Science Museum and Wildlife Sanctuary, near where I now live. I learned about native flora and fauna, led children on nature trails, taught home-schoolers how to dissect frogs, and even held a voluntary “environmental ethics camp” for my son’s fifth-grade chums (whom I’d met on a week-long stint as a counselor at Camp Goddard in Oklahoma).

Although I eventually established an equilibrium between my longing for the western desert and the realization that I would probably never get out of Texas, the pull toward the west drew me away every chance I got. While my father and grandmother were still alive, I made sure I got “home” at least once a year, even if it meant flying—of which I am not terribly fond. I relished the long, beautiful drive through west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona (or the alternate route through Colorado and Utah). I even made it by myself once, the summer I had bypass surgery—blissfully unaware of what would happen to me only days after I got back to Texas.

A two-year stint in Chicago, while Beloved Spouse worked on his doctorate and I worked on my exams and dissertation proposal in a cheesy three-flat a block from Wrigley Field, had done little to help me reconcile myself to Texas. Even getting out of the suburbs didn’t help much, because we moved to east Dallas just as the tear-down era began in earnest. We bought our house in McKinney for the acreage (.5) and the preservation district that would insulate us from rampant sprawl.

The recent renovations that now allow me to gaze out onto the back .25 acre have salved my usual summer nostalgia a bit. Plans to go west over the spring break were thwarted by mis-matched teaching schedules, and the next trip lies somewhere in the dim future: perhaps next winter, perhaps the following summer. Who knows?

Toiling away on The Farm has thus provided a path toward a kind of consilience. The word has gained currency with the publication of E. O. Wilson’s book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, in 1998. But I first learned it years ago when I was studying the philosophy of science and systems theory, and saw it as a useful metaphor to counter the prevailing notion that the sciences and the humanities amounted to separate ways of viewing the world. Consilience offered a way of using logic (inductive) to make connections among “data sets” that didn’t otherwise seem connected.

Of course, my approach is not nearly as mechanical as I’ve probably made it sound. Inductive logic, in fact, is the more intuitive, common-sensical way in which human reason works (as opposed to deduction, which is the more formulaic). Consilence is even closer to what Charles Saunders Peirce called “abduction”—which allows for instructive connections, whether or not they’re “valid.” That’s a fancy way of saying that even if the connections aren’t entirely solid, the differences can still teach us something about what we’re observing.

I insist to my students constantly, whenever I have a chance, that human beings are metaphor makers: homo translator. All learning is grounded in what we already know (which is why the more we know, the more we can know). But metaphor allows us to make connections by locating similarities and differences, exploring them, and then learning from that exploration. And herein lies the beauty of blogging, for me, at least. By essaying into a question or an observation, and by following where they lead, I never know where I’m going to end up; but when I get there, I know where I’ve been, and I can usually see the path.

And now, as I look back on this essay, I see exactly how my focus has shifted; even my metaphors are spatial. The Chinese-American philosopher-geographer Yi-fu Tuan coined the term “topophilia” (Greek for “love of place”) to describe the tendency of human beings to become attached to particular places, and I guess I've been inflicted with it ever since I can remember. It might even help explain why I've had so much intellectual trouble with living in Texas.

Tuan occupies an altar in my brain next to William Morris, because his work has so significantly influenced the way I have come to see the world. As a stranger in a strange land himself, Tuan has written cogently and poetically over the years about everything from landscape to imagination to ethics to aesthetics. Recently he mused about the experience of exile an instructive letter in his “Dear Colleague” series. In it he notes that in addition to being a disaster, “it cleanses the mind and promotes fresh ways of thinking.”

I thought of him the other day, and about this remark, when a colleague of mine echoed a sentiment I had uttered years ago, after I left Chicago. She admitted that although Dallas is a hard place to live in, that’s not necessarily a bad thing—because it keeps us from becoming complacent about the condition of the world. I once noted that living in Chicago was “too easy” and that having to survive—intellectually, politically, philosophically—in Dallas could actually build character. Removal from a beloved place does, in fact, increase one’s appreciation for what’s distant; and living in a place that tries one’s philosophical patience on a daily basis can stimulate the little grey cells in ways that a more satisfied existence might not.

The Farm has thus provide me with a way of exploring life in what amounts to a self-imposed exile. It sounds a bit silly and self-serving to think of it that way, especially in comparison to what real, political exiles suffer. Although I’m pretty well stuck here, I love my job, we have a great house, my daughter’s relatively close by, and the weather isn’t always as hot and tediously damp as it’s been these last two weeks. In fact, it’s cooler today and the A/C’s back off (it’s only 85 right now, on its way to a high in the mid-90s), so I’m not confined to one or two rooms and may be able to get some work done.

Before I “leave” (another spatial metaphor that plays with the notion of cyber-space), however, I'd like to offer my gratitude to my readers—both those who post comments and offer their views, and those who discuss the topics with me in person or via e-mail. It’s been an enlightening experience, I’ve met interesting new people, reconnected with family members, and I’m learning more with every post. The conversations have also helped to change my perspective on this particular place. I still don’t “love” it; but I’ve become more interested in it, and less annoyed with the fact that I’m here. And at my age, that’s a real accomplishment.

Photo: An old postcard view of U. S. Highway 395, Main Street in Lone Pine, California, where I was born, taken in 1947, the year I was born.

Passing Strange, and Wonderful

Desdemona’s lovely speech in act 1 of Othello, in which she describes how she fell for the guy in the first place, recounts the enormous power of storytelling. Great stories make us love people, and help us love ourselves. My version of the passage is stolen from the title of Yi-Fu Tuan’s book on aesthetics, nature, and culture (for which he paraphrases Desdemona's lines) and he’s a bard of a different kind: one of the best philosophers still alive. But I use it for a different reason: to mark the deaths of two remarkable storytellers, each of whom has profoundly affected my reading life, and (in many ways) the way I think about the world. The trouble with getting old oneself, of course, is that those older than you are, who have inspired or otherwise nurtured you, start dying off and reminding you over and over again of your own mortality. Still, one would hardly want to have done without them—one’s own personal heroes, inspirations, role models.

The first of these is Arthur C. Clarke, almost every book of whose I’ve read one or more times in my life. He epitomized the scientist-science fiction writers I admire most—those who can use what they know about how the universe works to posit truths about those who populate it. Although he lived to be ninety years old and wrote more than most people could in several lifetimes, I will miss him sorely. My memorial offering: two good obituaries (one from the New York Times, and one from Space.com) and Clarke himself via YouTube, from an interview last December.

The second is Robert Fagles, emeritus professor of Classics at Princeton, translator extraordinaire, channeler of Homer and (more recently) Virgil, and someone who could read Greek iambic hexameter aloud with the voice of an angel. His versions of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid should be on the required lists of all English-speaking schools in the world. Through them children would learn about honor, loyalty, and the frailties of humankind, and about both the glory and the folly of conflict. Having worked on my own translation of the Odyssey (in order to keep up my Greek chops) for the last twenty five years, I can attest to the difficulty of rendering Homer’s transcendent language into equivalently powerful English, but Fagles did it with both of Homer’s works. He translated plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus into resonant commentaries on the nature of tragedy. And then he blessed us, only two years ago, with the best translation of the Aeneid I’ve ever read (and I’ve read many). The last time my husband and I drove from Texas to California, we listened to Fagles's translation of the Odyssey, read by Ian McKellan, and it transformed the landscape of the trip. Robert Fagles died last week at only 74. Here’s a nice obit in the New York Times, and a wonderful audio recording of a talk on Homer at Princeton.

Both of these men helped color my view of utopia: Clarke with his apparently irrepressible belief in the positive outcome of human exploration, especially into space, and Fagels with his eloquent translation of Homer's Odyssey, and particularly the story of the Phaeacians. My heartfelt thanks to them both, for their many and enduring gifts.

Photos: Arthur C. Clarke by Mamyjomarash, Wikipedia Commons. Robert Fagles by Denise Applewhite, Princeton University.