A third line of thought I began in college, helpful in dealing with the other two, was exemplified by Dean Barnlund who taught discussion skills -- really the skills of democracy -- through the line of thinking that began to reach many through "Language and Thought" by S.I.Hayakawa. That was 1957-61, but it was what finally gave me what little understanding I have of those Algerian philosophers who offered thought scalpels suitable for rebellion. Foucault and that lot. Not quite the Frankfurt School that Aad de Gids used for reference in our discussions, but close. I remember that in Barnlund's class I understood at once, but also I remember the boy who went into a rage over it, insisting that the world was HIS world, black and white, NO gray, only one true way. The early far right wing.
The NU School of Speech, which is renamed now, had a wing of sainted people who worked with dedication to understand difficulties of speaking and hearing, everything from stuttering to developmental failures. If I had taken a degree in speech therapy, it would have been more useful to me and my students than teaching whatever version of "English" becomes trendy.
It is this body of practical thought that drives me to think past all the culture interference -- often just status quo masquerading as bedrock morality -- past human existence itself, to search for the macro patterns of what happens to the most basic dynamics of planetary evolution and what gets dragged along in its wake. I haven't been so much invested in AIDS as in why disease hits the stigmatized innocent, not so much invested in fighting disease and stigma as what drives demographics, how much does human framing derive from or contribute to what happens? Maybe at that level we could have an impact. That's religion, isn't it? Not closing it down but opening it up.
I feel guilty about all this. Why am I not devoting myself to the boys suffering from the syndrome of AIDS, exclusion, affliction -- clearly because of the breakdown of families, an essential of biological development? Why am I not putting energy into my own demographic, which is overeducated old women in rural villages? Is that also about family? Given this category, what can I do?
But I accepted this life because I think it is safe for me to talk like this. There's nothing to take away but my Social Security and Medicare -- Trump is working on that -- no children to hold hostage, nothing worthy of extortion. Maybe an atomic bomb dropped on a city -- any city -- is less likely than the village's water being contaminated by frakking, which the council is likely to conceal until we're all sick. Decline and death because of small erosions.
Before I figured out how to get into the U of Chicago Div School (1978-80) without exorbitant debt (in the end I borrowed $12,000 which I finally paid off with some of the bequest that bought this disintegrating house), I was thinking about a clinical psych degree from Portland State University, but I couldn't pass statistics. I have no organic mental system for math. Finally a gifted prof meant I got hold of the first half of the two-part sequence. Then he retired. The next prof was ESL; actually math was his second language -- English was his third. (Ministry does not require statistics or any other kind of math.) In this village my math deficit is a form of idiocy.
Politics here -- like local morality -- is retrograde: what was good for grandpa. No alternatives. No backup. Hope for crop insurance -- you'll need it this year, but that's all math. Nothing about guarding the quality of the grain or the condition of the soil. They speak proudly of hundred year farms in a place where Blackfeet life goes back for millennia. No consciousness that they are immigrants.
Judging from gossip, not much chance of sex filling the emptiness of existence. No skill, no standards, no ideas. Try drugs and drink. The fear means more than anything but obliteration.
A guiding principle, which I sometimes consider revising, is that I will not back off from thinking about or writing about anything, no matter how evil or outrageous. But I will be damned careful about what I do. No booze, no drugs, no smoking, no dancing, no chewing gum, no whistling -- but as much cussing as I can invent or remember. I try to take my meds on time. Diabetes is one of those derailments of subtle electrochemical shifts that lead to disaster. I've had too many medical people use it to try to control me. "Obey me and admire me or I will not prescribe." Always women.
The reconsidering comes from pain. It's hard to bear confronting the ghastliness of flesh-rending, mind-breaking, and then looking for the joy that's always there if you have the strength to find it.
When outrageousness increases in a system, new systems spring up -- out of control, unacknowledged, astonishing, unbelievable. I'm not imagining -- I'm witnessing. When contradictions and misfits show up, it's a chance to look for the underlying whateveritis. Paul Tillich, theologian, said the only possible solution to these binaries is to find whatever includes both of them. For instance, being and nonbeing are opposite of each other, but both are on "the ground of being." Whatever that is. So now the task is to explore what "the ground of being" might be. It's a matter of perception.
Since we know that any "ground of being" is mostly in our own heads, the complex of connections built by experience, now the thing to do is find how to feel a "ground of being" when you're standing on one. Maybe it's a song. Does a song be? Look for new senses: what is a bird feeling when it's flying on migration with magnetic guidance? What color comes after ultraviolet?
We can know that there is more than what we can know, because we feel along our limits. But we can also question what we think is reality and realize that there are so many different way of looking at it. That's the beginning.
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