To briefly interrupt this on-going discourse on decision making, 3 Scenes from Indiana:

1) The corner of Perrin Avenue and Main Street that my porch overlooks has recently developed a puddle. I noticed it a couple weeks ago and thought it was strange that water was pooling on a single square of sidewalk. I rode my bike around it and went about my business. Last Wednesday I noticed from the porch that some utility people had painted some lines on the street around an area near the sidewalk, blue lines that I suspect map where the water mains are located beneath the pavement. On Thursday there were even more lines, and a few words: OK, OK, OK, OK. On Friday morning, standing with a cup of hot tea I saw a water utility truck parked across the street and I looked at the man at the wheel and he looked back at me. When I came home that evening I found that they had dug up a little patch of street and refilled it with black top. Now there is a crack extending from the patch of blacktop to the curb, and it oozes water constantly. Clean and clear water, and in the street light I can see ripples, quarter inch waves covering this small patch of street.

2)

Little plane! You move
so slow it seems like you might
fall out of the sky.

3) Since July of this Summer, I've been hiking the same stretch of trail on a semi-regular basis. For a while it was hot and full of bug noise. By late August the weeds growing on the East side of the river all of a sudden shot up ten feet high. During the last month I've been looking for signs of Fall and until this weekend hadn't seen much. Tracking progress gradually, over the rusty bridge that crosses the Wabash, though the canopied valley where Burnett's Creek flattens, crossing the creek on the mix of concrete and rock stepping stones, passing under the highway, and climbing the little ridges on my way to the trail's end. I usually bring a snack and book and a notebook, and sometimes I bring some music, and sometimes I bring a friend. The leaves have begun to drop from the highest trees and but most of what I saw was still green. I noticed that the chest high foliage that makes the canopied valley so pleasant was beginning to droop, and as I was walking imagined them gone. I imagined mud, and rain, and eventually imagined snow. I imagined that I would continue walking this patch of trail, and I imagined changing too.

There have been two times where I have had a real decision to make. Of course I make decisions constantly, hundreds, maybe thousands a day. Little ones about when to get up, what to wear, what to make for breakfast, to run a red light on my bike or slow down and stop. Or even smaller, what word to use when I write, what to say to a student who hasn't been to the last couple of classes, when to turn over in bed, or in what order I eat an assemblage of lunch items. Some of these are so small I wonder if they can considered choices or inevitabilities, habits and reflexes of deeply ingrained preferences, petting my cat absentmindedly as I read an article for class or staying in the hot shower for an extra minute or two. Most of the moderate size choices, when to head up to Wisconsin to visit family or replacing my computer's hard drive, seem like choices that have already been made, opportunities that present themselves as one way trips to a now or a never without too much consideration of an alternative. Or even bigger choices, the decision to come back to grad school for example, or move back to Oakland from an unaffordable San Francisco, presenting themselves as logical next steps in the social and economic momentum of the moment.

But there are two decisions I have made that I have always wondered about. The first was when I was living in Seattle, about a year out of college, working at the accounts and distribution office of a small publisher named The Laughing Elephant and doing an intense but satisfying long distance thing with Amy. My father had been diagnosed with his dementia a couple years previous, and every Sunday since then I had made it a point to call and try to have a conversation with him in his increasingly fractured English. My motivation to call was tied to a deeper motivation to do the right thing, to "do unto others," to be a good kid, as much as it was a desire to engage with my dad or share the details of the life I was living. Susan, his wife at that time, offered praise, that my dad really appreciated the attention, and Amy and Joel and others commended me for my efforts (these were the days before ubiquitous cell phones, making a phone call in a house full of people more of a public event). Feeling bored with my job, and wanting to devote more time to writing, I decided to leave Seattle and move out to the farm to help Susan take care of my dad. It seemed like his mind was going fast, and my twenty-two year still developing adult self still didn't really know much about him. I figured that if I was going to I had to do it before he slipped further down hill.

About three weeks before I left, and a week before I was going to give The Laughing Elephant my two weeks notice, my boss offered me a position managing some of the accounts in addition to my shipping and filling duties. It was a family business, a small publisher that specialized in "gift books" (books that are given for occasions like weddings, or new borns) and atypical greeting cards. There were five of us who worked at the business office: Skip, Brady, Susan, Binder, and me. They were all implants to Seattle via San Diego, proto-punks who settled into jobs as they got older. A group of friends ranging in age from their early thirties to their early forties. They were cool and smart and funny, and I looked up to them. But I had already decided what I was going to do, and when Binder offered me the job I had to say no, and explain the plan. When word got out, Skip asked me if I was close to my dad, and I had to say no, not really. And I could tell by the expression on his face that he thought it strange I would leave Seattle to go back to Wisconsin. Part of me at that time thought it was strange too, not entirely comfortable with the story I had been selling: the good son doing the right thing. It was also for selfish reasons, I thought to myself, so that I wouldn't have to get up and go to work, to have more time to write, and even more so, to gain the experience my father's illness as a subject to write about. In every story that I ever told about being back on the farm I could claim righteous motivation. 

I could not admit to myself at that time (or maybe even in the present) that it was much more comfortable to be the sweet boy I saw on the TV of my mind than to forge a new and uncertain way forward. The thing is, I was never asked to help take care of my father. There was never a real need for me to be there. Susan had been watching after him, and I was the one who suggested coming out there. Some of my other friends were confused about what I was doing; not entirely buying the caretaker angle or seeing the value of gathering poetic experience. Regardless, I spent three months with him, futzing around the farm and Mineral Point, doing some writing and making sure he didn't light anything on fire or kill himself. And then Susan, more or less, asked me to leave and I went back to Seattle, depressed and broke, but proudly in possession of having done "the right thing." Unfortunately the right thing didn't help me find a job when I got back. I broke up with Amy and started dating T. T went back to Japan and I tried to date Amy again, and then there was nobody. I found work making minimum wage as a business card delivery person and lived in a cruddy little studio apartment in an old drafty building. etc. etc. It was a confusing time. 

But I have always wondered what would have happened if I had taken the promotion instead of leaving Seattle. Maybe I would have gone into business, or at least I would have learned the ins and outs of managing accounts and getting book sellers to pay up. Maybe I never would have moved to Portland or gone to poetry school. Maybe I wouldn't have broken up with Amy and we would have followed through on our plan to move in together. One never knows. Or maybe that decision became a kind of regret because I had so much time, underemployed and relatively isolated, to think about what went wrong. Maybe its value as an event arises not intrinsically, a two paths diverging in the woods kind of thing, but maybe its a product of the kinds of attention I gave it sitting alone in my green chair, and have given it, in retrospect, through the silent analysis of fossilized sentiments. As if anything could have turned out other than the way it is. It's also possible that no matter what I would have found something to regret about that time. And I know, it's unfashionable to talk about these things, to dwell in the past. Instead we should concentrate on the present, etc. etc. But goddamn, this is just one of those things I've always thought about but never articulated. Thinking about decisions.

Last night I went to dinner with a friend. He was telling me about a class that he was thinking of dropping, about the difficulty he was having with the material and how much time it took away from his other classes. Plus he was running, at present, a high C, and didn't want that kind of mark on his transcript. He told me about this ongoing debate he was having with himself, where on the one hand it was a class that he should take and besides, at this point in the semester he was already half way through. On the other, he could take it later, another semester where he had more time to devote to learning its concepts and performing well on the tests. After he finished speaking he asked me what I thought, and I told him that it seemed like he wanted to drop it. He asked what gave me that impression, and I said that it just seemed like he did from the way he was speaking. Who am I to tell another person what they are thinking or feeling? But that was the impression I got, and I reported my impression. 

There's a concept in Eastern philosophy that has some analogs in Western thought and philosophy about the three "minds" that help us make decisions. The first is our thinking mind, the mind that reasons and analyzes. It makes lists of pros and cons, listens to or disregards advice, it plans birthday parties and balances budgets. It works hard to find words to explain, usually in the past tense, why we do what we do. The second is our heart mind, or moral mind, the place that tells us an act is good or bad. It is the voice of should or should not. It's not so much reason as it is a disembodied presence that affirms or gives us pause. I should prepare for class and I should clean my cat's litter box. I should not stay up all night watching Breaking Bad and sleep in tomorrow. It is love in a universal sense, love for others including oneself. In a sense it is our social mind. The third mind is our body mind. It thinks in terms of feeling, of hunger or sleepiness, or fear or desire. It tells us we are uncomfortable or warm, that we need to move somewhere else, or are happy where we are. It dances, or feels terrible when everybody else around it is dancing, and it is not.

All three work in tandem, and people tend to rely on one more than the other. There are analogs in Freud's concepts of the ego, super-ego, and the Id (respectively, in the order presented above); in the concepts of logos, pathos, ethos in rhetoric; and more recently in neuroscience, where a group of scientists diagrammed every single synapse and neuron in the brains of round worms (which are much simpler, but considered to be a reliable analog for the human brain) to discover that there are three systems of synapses constantly interacting, rewriting, and changing each other i.e. three minds. Further, all three are located in different places: the head, the chest, and the pelvis. In a more popular application, when people say to "follow your heart" it might be more accurate to say, like G.W. Bush, to follow your gut, or what feels right. But what feels right is complicated, like the round worm's mind, by the other two minds, and it's easy to get confused as to "who" to listen to, all three changing and influencing each other.

Cultures too, have preferences. We could say that certain parts of the United States and most of "The West", at least historically, has been a logo-centric / ego-centric / thinking-centric culture, governed by laws derived from reasons. A country like Iran, where the laws come from Islam (Sharia law) could be said to be governed by morality, or the heart. I think it's very difficult for one mind to understand the other, simply because other minds function through an entirely different "language," though language isn't the right word. How do we compare feeling bored with what the word "bored" signifies? How do we compare what's "right" in social situations with what's "right" in logic (linguistics is a kind of attempt to solve this problem)? Not that it's not worth trying to find the answer to these questions, and the humanities have made their living mashing different modes against each other in a logo-centric framework.

But back to my friend's dilemma. We talked about all this because he said that he was told to "follow his heart" but didn't know which part of him was his heart talking. It's a good question. How do we know and is it even possible to separate these minds? In my opinion, when we can somehow come to a place where all three centers of thought align, we feel good about our choices. (Though this idea too could be seen as a cultural construct rather than a universal principal. In Japanese culture for example, from what I've been told and from what I've experienced, one's ability to hold these contradictory minds together is seen as desirable and as a sign of strength.) Of course, this rarely happens in important matters. Sometimes we run out of time, and are forced to make decisions. Sometimes we make a decision and come to feel good about it afterwards. Sometimes we regret decisions we made. Sometimes we just know, and sometimes we never do. Sometimes we are sitting on a ferry, coming back from a long day, watching the sun set and the other boats find their way home. Sometimes we are so caught up in the process we don't realize a decision has already been made. Today I saw my friend, and he decided to drop the class. He seemed to be happy with his decision.

 

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

 

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

 

                                                 -Walt Whitman

Fall. The leaves are turning and last night it was cold. The old radiators in the apartment have kept Jinx and I warm and right now as I write the living room window is open. It rained this morning but the skies are supposed to clear by this afternoon, maybe by the time I get done writing this. This morning I got up relatively early for a Saturday, put some clothes on, shuffled through the wet leaves and got some breakfast at a diner down the street. Read the paper. On the way back I stopped by the farmer's market to pick up some apples and some cider, and came home and cleaned up the kitchen. Last night Corey and Eric came over to play music and we did, and drank some beer and later played Sheep's Head, a complicated trump based card game late into the night. 

School has been incredibly busy but this weekend is the first weekend for about a month that I don't have a crushing amount of work to get done by Monday. Of course I could spend the entire weekend working and still not be done with everything I have to do, but I can put some of these things off. The sun is starting to peak through the clouds as I write. I finished a paper last weekend for writing assessment, trying to answer the question of what can't be assessed in writing, or in other words, cataloging some of the unsaid expectations we have for our students that are difficult to justify to the administrators who determine our budgets. Things like "critical self-reflection" or "creativity" or "empathy." As it's said in the world of writing assessement, what doesn't get assessed disappears from curriculum, or more broadly, if you are one of those who believes that young people can't write, look no further than programs like Bush's No Child Left Behind and Obama's current Race to the Top initiative and their focus on testing the surface features of writing (grammar, structure) for an explanation.

This coming week I'm writing a proposal for my first ever conference, a paper about Purdue and Mitch Daniels and what is being said and done here at Purdue, on the front lines of Higher Education Reform. I'm excited to get started working on it. Speaking of Daniels, he came to the Writing Assessment class on Monday which was kind of amazing. Props to Daniels for meeting with us, though much of what he had to say about writing assessment and assessing the humanities in general was predictably the polar opposite of what much of the literature about effective and meaningful writing assessment has said. Time and time again, people like Daniels make it clear that the interests of those at the top are not the same interests of those who keep their institutions running. While there is much in theoretical rhetoric and Second Language Studies that are interesting to me, political issues like these are still the only thing that can compete with my creative interests.

Everything else, Modern Rhetoric, teaching and tutoring at the Oral English Proficiency Program are going well for the most part. Busy busy, but progress is being made on all fronts. Personally, I am finally crawling out of the depressive/anxious hole that I had been in since August, and finally starting to reinvest, and relocate a sense of self independent of she who will not be named. Finally starting to realistically imagine a way forward. There are trade offs from this perspective, where on the one hand, getting away from a desperate need to confess and explain and communicate with the ether of her possibility impacts my output in terms of poetry like objects, and it feels like I am writing into a void. No taters. No sop. However how I had been oriented, entirely towards her, wasn't healthy. Now that I am shifting out of crisis mode the impulse lessens and the river slows. I haven't reached its banks quite yet, but at least my feet are touching bottom. Of course I still miss her, still can't look at the moon without thinking of her, and still hope, but now I'm also hoping for other things as well. And I could dwell on this, tell a few stories, but I have work to get on with. I'm going to close the window, pour a cup of cider and get started.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

                                         -James Wright

Today was a good day because I finally discovered how to get a better signal from the small radio that I keep in the kitchen: hang it from a cabinet knob, twist the antennae back inside the cupboard, and let the wooden door hold the rig in place. In the mornings, and when I come back from work I like to turn it on, though before, I could barely hear anything the news people were saying because of the heavy AM static. If I held it in my hand, the static would stop, but when I let it go, it would come back. My body must be conducting radio signals. Something about the air, my blood, the saliva in my mouth, nervous system, picking up signals from wherever signals come from. 

When I first got this radio and set it in my kitchen, I was just happy to have a radio. Over time I became dissatisfied with the signal and stopped turning it on. I think I also stopped spending as much time in my kitchen. Occasionally I would listen to some very earnest Christian radio because at least I could get a clear signal. One night on the Christian station they played a public service announcement about how they found pieces of an old boat high up in a mountain, evidence of Noah's Ark, and went on to say that the world actually wasn't that old. Or at least not as old as the scientists say it is. They might be right about a few things, those Christians on the radio, but I'd like to hear them explain dinosaur bones. 

For awhile I was thinking of getting an internet radio for the kitchen, something better than the radio that I have, one where I could listen to NPR back in the Bay where they play the talk news shows all day long. Forum with Michael Krasny from nine to eleven, and Fresh Air would come on at two. But I didn't. Never even looked up internet radios on the internet. I don't even know if they exist. But I also think that eventually, I believed one day the signal would change. Hoping a little, but doing what I could: picking it up, moving it around, shaking it, attaching wires to it, and turning that little black dial trying to get everything lined up just right. Maybe this all seems like wasted effort, but I'm satisfied with the way things have worked out.

2 poems by Lorine Niedecker, as found in Collected Works,

Fog-thick morning—
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
            my clarity
with me.

 *

                                     To my small
                                     electric pump
To sense
and sound
this world

look to
your snifter
valve

take oil
and hum

Hi. It's Thursday evening. Today it rained heavily around one o'clock, right as I was getting on my bike to ride back from the pool to a workshop about teaching pod casts. My pants got soaked in the front and when I walked down the hallway my comrades said either "awww" and frowned, or laughed. My shoes were also untied,which probably didn't help the cause of dignity. This weekend is the Fall Break, which means two days off, Monday and Tuesday. The break is not going to be much of a break as I have eight things that I need to work on. Eight. I counted them. I won't list them off here, because that's boring. Like a grocery list or a list of parts that somebody might need to fix a ceiling fan. Despite all that, I'm still looking forward to the break, sleeping in a little, playing some music, and watching Breaking Bad at the end of my work days. 

Fall is here and the leaves are beginning to turn. It might go without saying, but school has been busy. Lots of storms passing through my mind these last two or three weeks, but everything seems to still be here, and the surface is calm at the moment. I have about two hundred pages that I need to read by 11 AM tomorrow, and there's no possible way that that will happen. Not because I'm lazy but because my mind just doesn't have that kind of endurance, and at some point it stops being able to intake words. As my friend Aric said, "you're going to be really really really really really really smart when you finish." Yeah. In the last twenty four hours I've read a good chunk of David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A highlight, to illustrate what I'm up against, completely out of context:

"A picture naturally leads our thoughts to the original. The mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry of discourse concerning the others, and if we think of  a wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it." (Section 3, Paragraph 3)

I read this out loud to my office mate, and she said, wow, so now that you've discovered the meaning of life, what else are you going to do? I guess I'll keep reading. But it is quite interesting stuff that we're looking at in the Modern Rhetoric class, starting at the beginning of the enlightenment, the printing press and the religious wars that contributed to a cultural and institutional shift away from god given truths to the systematic development of analytical knowledge. The roots of science as well as our modern education system all beginning during this period, and for the most part, not too much has changed as far what counts as truth as Hume and others talked about it back then. But that's a long story, and one that I only have a vague grasp on. We're reading not books about this time, but writing by Bacon, Locke, Hume and others. Primary texts. Old books that have been scanned and put on the internet, where the letter 's' looks like 'f' and every book begins with a dedication to the noble sponsor who published it. I'm surprised by how contemporary their ideas are, and that I truly learn "new" things as I read.

On an entirely different note, here's an old poem that I wrote almost ten years ago that for some reason the Hume has made me think of. Back to work:

Window

Because everything is right here an ending is right here. I snap my fingers and listen to the aftershock. I pick my head up to hear the sounds of traffic. I don’t mean to be obvious but I stop for a second to think, and air goes out the window. And I hear somebody driving by. There was an idea to work through, to not stop until something happens.

Lorine Niedecker, from New Goose:

A monster owl
out on the fence
flew away. What
is it a sign
of? The sign of
an owl.