Recently while teaching I was reminded how pervasive the desire for "a point" is, as in "Why can't this author just get to the point." Now certainly I am not going to suggest that writing be pointless - I am writing this because I have a point. What I am suggesting is that what is beautiful in thinking is the path a thinker traverses, which cannot be reduced to the end point of an argument.
When reading someone that can really think - recently Judith Butler did this for me - I am disoriented and reoriented, concepts that were familiar become alien and vice-versa. What is essential to experiencing the thinking of another is taking pleasure in the path, finding joy in the way a thinker uses concepts to create new space out of old.
This clearing of ground cannot be reduced to "a point." Reducing thought to a power point version of itself is the death of thinking, the denial of the poetic. Thinking is difficult and it is slow. It requires stillness, waiting and awaiting, hoping that the gods will grant a moment of insight where none had been before. This is the meditative way and it is difficult today because we live in a noisy, amphetaminic world. To think in a world that moves so loudly and so quickly we have to find a moment to be still and slow down. Reducing everything to a "point," a calculative summation, is seductive because that allows us to feel like we are keeping up with the world, when in actuality we are giving up, giving in to a world that feels less and less profound.
To be continued.
This brings to mind the idea of "places of solitude". From adolescence to adulthood, I often found myself searching out places where I could sit silently and ponder, and if I was lucky, think. The setting doesn't have to represent complete solitude (it's hard to be completely alone, free of stimuli), but rather a place where you shut-out distractions, focus on a distant object and search inside yourself.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was 18, this was a hill top beside this industrial yard, which provided a clear view of the Raleigh skyline, framed by the belt-line. When I was Boone, this could be any of the beautiful overlooks within a 30 minute drive (Howard's Knob, for instance). Since I moved to Chicago, it is a park on the south-side that juts out into lake Michigan.
I agree with you that it is essential for people to find those modes and means of being meditative, as the world seems increasingly full of static.
This is fantastic. And I found it to be one of the harder things to teach. After all, I wanted students to make a point. But, at the same time, I wanted them to have that point be their way of traversing a text. Maybe what we're talking about, then, is not a point but is a trajectory: from geometry to calculus, from stasis to motion.
ReplyDeleteWhat's nice about a trajectory is that it offers stipulation, a binding or hedging of chaos. It is a particular way of linking ideas and of moving.
I used to do an exercise in which students has to read their papers as if the paper were a tour of a text. Where are we, as your readers? Where are you taking us? And then where? And so on.