Let Us Now Praise High School Friends
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/18/2012 - 21:16Life is the process of gathering an intricate mosaic of emotional scars. Reunions can be times to pick at the scabs and develop new scars, or to find the beauty in some of the patterns. For me, my thirty-fifth high school reunion fell more into the later category.
I've always worried about how much I can say in my blog posts about family members, classmates, and coworkers. Will my words upset some? Am I saying more than I should? I self-edit my comments, and so some of what happened at the Williams Inn will stay at the WIlliams Inn.
Prior to the reunion, I agreed to go on a hike in Hopkins Memorial Forest. As I waited for other classmates to show up, I looked for some reading material to help me enjoy my time waiting for the hike to being. I stumbled across Look Homeward, Angel and started reading. I've read parts of this and other works by Wolfe at other times, it it seemed somehow appropriate.
The walk ended up being just a classmate of mine and myself. Both of us had recently had a parent die, in very different circumstances and so our memories were intermixed with grief. We talked about other classmates that had been mutual friends that were not going to be able to make it to the reunion. The emotional scars of these recent losses were still bright, and yet we were able to find some beauty.
At the reunion, we all soon broke into our traditional groups. Popular students gathered boisterously around the bar. Others, oblivious to some of these dynamics sat quietly at tables and talked. One of my classmates spoke about how her husband had been oblivious to her overtures to him in the early days of their courtship. Another spoke about how he didn't really think there were cliques in our class. I sat amongst the oblivious, looking for patterns.
Perhaps cliques are too strong a word, and I spoke about stratification. We all tend to self-select people that we are most comfortable being with and this self-selection stratifies a population by various factors, interests, socio-economic status, which town we lived in when we were young, and many others.
As we get older, we experience more losses, we develop new emotional scars and hopefully, we learn a little bit along the way. These losses in our later years can be very profound, but often those emotional scars from our high school years can be much deeper and hurt much more.
I was timid in my youth. I didn't share my thoughts or feelings readily, out of fear of being laughed at or ridiculed. Then, I would be hurt because no one seemed to be aware of my thoughts of feelings. In retrospect, my folly is obvious, but at the time, all that was obvious to me was my own hurt.
Another thing that was not obvious to me was that others had similar suffering. Even those, whom to me seemed the happiest and most popular, I later found had similar pangs of self-perceived inadequacy.
With thirty-five years of emotional scars layered upon those of my high school years and the revelations that come along with it, I was less timid and more open to listening to my classmates. I found I could move beyond the group of people I was most comfortable with and talk with a wide array of classmates.
I found the stories of my classmates beautiful and moving, fitting nicely along side the great writings of people like Thomas Wolfe, James Agee,William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I found the beauty in the patterns of intricate mosaics of emotional scars of my classmates.
It was a wonderful reunion and I thank all the friends from high school, especially those whose friendships I had never really recognized or appreciated.
Messages from a Future Biographer
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/17/2012 - 09:22The other day, I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR and heard an interview with the screenwriter for the new movie about Lincoln. He talked about Daniel Day Lewis getting into character yet at the same time still texting with him. He referred to himself as Lincoln's metaphysical conundrum. Not only did texting not exist back then, neither did movies. Perhaps the best analogy for Lincoln would have been receiving messages via the telegraph from a playwright.
Yet even with that, there issues of communicating across time remain puzzling. When we write, it is people in the future, thinking of time as an ongoing sequence, that will read what we wrote, not people in the past. Texts somehow made available to an earlier time present interesting issues. Could someone from the future, somehow, share with us text that we will write in the future? Perhaps a biography or some literary criticism of something we are yet to write?
Really, this isn't that new of an idea. There have always been fortune tellers, but they are rarely thought of as bearing messages from a future biographer or a future literary critic. There is the whole realm of the unconscious. Can we learn something about, or perhaps possibly shape our future by discovering or exploring what is in our unconscious?
I wrote the other day about the unconscious that perhaps exists in our Facebook groups. Are there messages from the future somehow contained in our Facebook walls?
To bring this back down to earth, yesterday, Kim asked if I wanted to see Neil Gaiman at the CT Forum in a couple weeks; a message about the future. I went and checked out a YouTube video of Gaiman giving a commencement speech at the University of the Arts. He was speaking about the future, "Make Good Art".
Of course, the question of how we make good art remains. Where does inspiration come from? How do we better incorporate creativity into our education system or our work lives? Perhaps a future biographer or critic can give us insights.
Facebook, the Analysand
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 07:48It has been a rough few weeks, so I thought I'd unwind with something a little different last night, so I ended up watching the video embedded in the article Jacques Lacan Speaks. My French is rusty and my knowledge of psychoanalysis as well as of the sixties in France is limited, but it really got me thinking about things beyond what has been going on more immediately in my life.
My thoughts drifted to the Open Yale course, INTRODUCTION TO THEORY OF LITERATURE, as I thought about how I was understanding what Lacan was trying to say. My thoughts drifted to Geert Lovink's new book, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media.
The article with the Lacan video has the line, "Lacan still has his fans, notably the 'Elvis of Philosophy,' Slavoj Zizek, who dominates YouTube the way his predecessor once did salons", and it made me wonder about the discourse Lacan would have had with the Internet.
I've always been interested in how groups interact online, back years ago when I worked with a management coach whose specialty was the psychoanalytic study of organizations. My thoughts wandered back to reading many articles from the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations as well as attending experiential group relationship conferences organized by the The A K Rice Institute and the William Alanson White Institute.
My mind returned to the old question, if groups have a persona and with it, an unconscious, what can we say about online groups, or, to put it another way, how would we understand Facebook as an analysand?
Now, most of us experience Facebook, not as something completely other. First and foremost, it is, very much, a social construct, coming out of a specific time in American history. That, in and of itself, is worth extensive study. Even more so, our experiences with Facebook are typically with a set of people whom we have designated as 'friends'. In many cases, this is a self selected group, of a similar size to a Group Relations, or perhaps Lacanian Large Group of around 150 people. In my own case, it is a much larger group, the size of a small town of over 2,500 people.
It is further complicated that the boundaries are much less clear. Everyone in my Facebook Large Group belongs to their own Facebook Large Groups which have different sets of members, and content from one group easily gets shared from one group to another. In addition, Facebook is 24x7. For many of us, there are now time boundaries on the group. Lacking these boundaries, the group does not have the same sense of safety that a normal group might. However, that sense of safety may be promoted by the disinhibition that often accompanies online interaction.
So, if my Facebook Large Group is an analysand, does that make me the analyst? Am I approaching this group like an analyst would? Where does transference and counter-transference fit in? What can I learn, about myself and about my society by looking at my Facebook Large Group through the lens of an analyst?
With this, I come back to Geert Lovink's new book. If Facebook a network without a cause? Is his question "at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives", construed too narrowly to think only about the conscious information that is saturating our lives, or is there room for exploring the group unconscious information that we might be able to tap into via social media. For that matter, how different is the group unconscious of a Facebook Large Group from that of other very large groups? Yes, we can talk about persistence, searchability, reach and scope, both are they really a difference in magnitude or a difference in kind? Was not the information of early villages also persistent and searchable, through the town elders, historians, mystics and artists?
So now, I need to post these thoughts on my blog. They'll be shared on Facebook, and perhaps discussed a little there. How will it change my interaction with social networks? How will it change the interaction with social networks of others in my Facebook Large Group?
Maybe that will be a different blog post and Facebook discussion.
Getting Ready for High School
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 11/14/2012 - 07:37They say that time heals all wounds, yet I sometimes wonder if that applies to the wounds from the high school years. Those wounds are some of the smallest, but also some of the deepest.
I remember going to a high school reunion decades ago. Maybe it was ten years after high school. All of the old feelings came back, all of the old hurts, inadequacies, and old patterns of being. Yet high school wasn't really difficult for me. I wasn't really bullied, at least as far as I was aware or could remember. Sure, I wasn't part of the cool kids table, but I had my fair share of friends.
Now, a quarter of a century after that reunion, I'm heading up to Williamstown for another high school reunion. Things that would bother me back in high school, are now minor things that I probably wouldn't even notice these days. It will be difficult. The past few weeks have been exhausting, between the storms, the election, and my mother's death.This will be my first time in Williamstown since her death.
Yet this time, I am going to relax. Kim and I are going to stay at the Inn and not at my mother's old house. We're going to enjoy dinner and discussions. I won't be as desperately seeking approval as I did during the high school years, and if I don't get noticed by one person or another, it won't hurt the way it did in high school.
I'm older now, hopefully much wiser too. I realize that much of the pain was self-inflicted. I suspect that most of the slights that hurt me most in high school were probably unintentional. Most likely, most of them were unintended and the person that so aggrieved me didn't even know it.
Perhaps this time, instead of remembering feelings of inadequacy, my friends and I from high school will be able to remember some of the best parts, for they really were wonderful magical years.
It is often said that youth is wasted on the young. If I could relive those high school years without the traumas and dramas, they would have been so joyous. Yet, perhaps it is the painful growth and transformations of those high school years that also allowed for some of the most spectacular moments.
Maybe, I'm finally ready for high school.
American Exceptionalism: A City Upon a Hill Lit by Golden Arches
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/10/2012 - 11:16“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
This passage from the Bible has played a key role in our American experience. This idea of a city upon a hill was used in Governor John Winthrop's famous sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity" which he delivered on board the Arabella in 1630 on his way to Massachusetts. It has been used as the basis for the idea of American Exceptionalism, a recurring theme in American politics.
Because of God's blessing, the theory goes, the United States is exceptional. It is exempt from historical forces that would destroy other nations. It is an appealing theory, we all wish to be exceptional, to be blessed in some special way. Yet the way the theory is presented in American politics today seems very far from the message of Governor Winthrop nearly four centuries ago.
The sermon was about Christian Charity. It starts off talking about how there are always rich people and poor people and that a reason for this is "that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection". Yes, the key idea here is that we SHOULD be dependent on one another, even though many of those arguing for American Exceptionalism are the same people that argue against social welfare programs that promote 'dependency'. These people seem to have missed the key point of the sermon. This is a sermon about charity, about giving to others.
Then, there is the final part of the sermon where Winthrop speaks about the city upon a hill.
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.
In the passage from scripture, the city on the hill is linked with the light to the world. Yet have we replaced that light with the light of golden arches? Have we replaced the golden calf of yore with golden arches? Has our consumerism and neglect of the poor dealt falsely with our God causing God to withdraw God's help from us and making American Exceptionalism a by-word through the world?
Yes, we should embrace American Exceptionalism, the pure American Exceptionalism that is based on love of our fellow man, rich and poor, and not on love of profits.
