April 24, 2005

another 3-part blend, this time of voices

one's branaugh's; the other two i'm not giving away.

below is the complete text of a short paper for lwp's 720--i finished it today, but i started it yesterday, & i'm keeping the part about it being the bard's birthday, because it was when i wrote it.

i'm posting the paper here for 2 reasons: 1) because it's possible that someone other than me will get either enjoyment or enlightenment out of reading it, and 2) because i like it. it probably won't do so well as a class assignment. it breaks at least one of the assignment's spoken requirements and probably defies a few un-specified expectations; i won't go so far as to say that's why i like it, although perhaps it's an influence. i will say that, in general, defying expectation might be a prerequisite for enjoying the things i write. in a better mood, i'll find a way to make that sentiment productive and career-defining.

for the time being, i'll settle with this: i managed to do my homework by writing about a) aim conversations and b) shakespeare. in a literature-free department.

A few nights ago, a friend and I were having a late-night onscreen computer chat that took a turn towards Shakesperean monologues. I was scanning through the scripts online, making suggestions; he was reading them aloud in the empty room he was in and reporting to me about how energized this made him. It was midnight, one in the morning. At one-thirty, unable to stand being left out any longer, I got him on the phone and made him read one of the monologues to me. It wasn't the most compelling or dramatic reading ever done—he made me admit to that, and in the moment I could do so honestly, especially given the obstacles the performance was up against—the hour, his relative unfamiliarity with the material, the ridiculous incongruity of delivering a Shakesperean monologue in a flourescent-lit office into the impersonal mouthpiece of a hunk of beige plastic with your physical inclination towards embodiment, towards movement, restricted by the cord. But it was resonant. Is resonant. Days later I'm still compelled, hearing his voice in my head conflating with that of the last actor I heard give the same speech—and the first--and find myself walking wide swaths through the living room to avoid being diverted from my work by the siren-call of my battered Pelican Shakespeare—much loved and margin-noted in pencil-scrawls some ten years old already—resting on the fireplace shelf.

Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotions in the Making of Consciousness, outlines an admittedly simplistic categorization-system for the body-processes—and he makes no apology for that pragmatic but potentially unsettling affiliation—that facilitate the consciousness we experience, that allow me to respond to the monologue in the moment it's being read, to react to it and appraise its attributes immediately thereafter, to frame and categorize the experience for later retrieval; to remember days later my reaction, my appraisal, and my categorizing; and to continue forming new connections based on each of those experiences as I experience other things slightly differently than I would have done without the monologue.

Damasio's system divides selfhood—too loosely, the thing of which we are conscious, when we are conscious—into three levels. At the most basic is the proto-self, the "nonconscious collection of representations of the multiple dimensions of current organism state" (199) where neurons fire, chemicals interact, and muscles respond to reflex. While I held the phone, my proto-self kept breathing, pumping blood, regulating my internal temperature despite the dropping mercury in the room, maintaining the homeostasis required for consciousness to occur—all of which it would have done just as faithfully were I running a race, playing video games, sleeping, or idling in a coma.

At the next of Damasio's levels is what he calls the "core self," roughly corresponding with what he calls "core consciousness," the "transient but conscious reference to the individual organism in which events are happening" (199). My proto-self might not distinguish between a coma and a race (not because different reflexes aren't functioning or neurons firing—in some cases they certainly are), a video-game and a monologue, but my core self, being a conscious "I," very much can. At the level of the core self, I was aware of the dark of the room, the phone in my hand, the voice-sound emitted by the sound-technology, the shapes of word-sounds—all of these are what Damasio calls "objects," and the interaction of my organism, or proto-self, with these objects affords the "construction and exhibition of new knowledge" that continually charaterizes core consciousness (169). In addition to being aware of these "objects," and creating conscious awareness out of my interactions with them, in the ever-present "now" of core consciousness I was also aware of being aware. This is not a spiritual distinction for Damasio; the first-order neural-mapping he identifies as being the work of the body to respond to environmental changes in order to maintain the biological homeostasis of the proto-self is part of a larger pattern which includes the second-order neural mapping of the core self, mapping that enables the body not only to respond but to make and respond to imagistic representations of its own responsiveness. Neurons fire, connections are made, knowledge is constructed. Damasio describes these second-order maps as a kind of non-verbal narrative we use those images to tell ourselves; they're how I understand that right now I'm typing at a keyboard, sitting on a sofa, hearing the fishtank burble and a car-horn honking out on the street. They're how I knew I was in a chair in the dark on the phone hearing a monologue. But they aren't how I know, sitting at this keyboard now, that several days ago I heard—and was moved by—a monologue. The core self is, as Damasio notes above, transient. In terms of its functioning, it changes little over the course of a lifetime; awake, not clouded by medication or emotional overload, I am always aware, in moments, of my own awareness of the moment I am in. But the moments it is aware of are always new moments of processing and constructing knowledge, new imagistic narratives of the present-tense. In order to know that the monologue happened—and, more importantly, that it happened to me, what Damasio calls my "autobiographical self" and its ability to construct and exist within my "extended consciousness" must be enacted.

The extended consciousness is not bound to moments and non-verbal narratives; it exists as a realm of connections and re-connections that make possible meanings and interpretations. It is aware of its own "autobiographical memory," the "organized record of past experiences" (199) that, in my case, among an uncountable number of other interconnected experiences, includes having the sheet pulled over my head so the doctor could isolate and carefully weave the stitches I had in my chin when my brother tripped me on my grandmother's patio, gazing into the face of a boy I danced with at my high school prom, and listening to the other night's monologue. It is the extended consciousness, which Damasio identifies as a "prerequisite to" our ability to "behave intelligently over vast domains of knowledge" (199) that makes it possible for me to remember and write about the monologue now, and not just in terms of my own experience. Extended consicousness allows me to recall now that the monologue was read to me earlier in the week; it is also how I know I first read the monologue contextualized within its scene, act, and play as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, how I remember lying on the floor with 8 or 10 close friends to watch Kenneth Braunagh's movie-interpretation of Henry V (because that's the play in question) on the floor of my mother's house, how I know I've seen the film many more times than that, how I remember the dark, almost-empty high school auditorium where I watched a friend under a single spotlight deliver the same monologue as an audition piece, how I know Braunagh directed other movie-versions of Shakespeare's plays, how I can name a few of those, how I know who William Shakespeare was and that today is his birthday. The complex web of connections the autobiographical memory relies on and its inherent fallibility is also why, although I'm sure I knew at the time, I no longer remember what my friend was auditioning for—it wasn't a stage production of Henry V, which I know thanks to one of the most peculiar quirks of human memory, one Damasio doesn't take up: I can't remember a complete list of the productions my high school theatre staged, but I can still identify with confidence items that aren't on the list I can't remember.

In Damasio's words, the study and enactment of consciousness aren't just about what neurological events happen when my heart beats while my body rests obediently in a chair, when I hear (and by responding to my own image-mapping know I'm hearing) a friend read me Shakespeare, when through memory and interpretive connection I can understand the content of the speech, know from that content when to expect my friend's vocalization to rise and fall in pitch or volume, and remember other voices rising and falling; consciousness is about the feeling of what's happening. From the first, he describes consciousness as being made by both "body and emotion," and at first glance, this seems a viable enough distinction: it's not difficult for me to conceive of my being physically tired and chilly during my friend's monologue while at the same time being emotionally—a word we use in common conversation that aligns more closely with what Damasio calls the "state of feeling made conscious" (37)—alert and delighted. As he describes them, "emotion" and "feeling" are both themselves unconcious states. Emotions are biological, are "complex, stereotyped patterns of [neurological] response," "at their most basic…part of homeostatic regulation," and are, as repetition and experience teaches us how to categorize and pattern them, always "inseperable from the idea of reward or punishment…pleasure or pain…[and] the idea of good and evil" (54-5). Feelings are the images of these emotions we make as part of the second-order mapping strategies our core selves use to bring us to awareness of what we're experiencing; only when this awareness occurs does Damasio describe us as conscious and capable of "feeling a feeling."

Here is what happens when "emotions"—whether by our common understanding or Damasio's specifically biological one—are set side-by-side with characteristics of the "body" in Damasio's formulation of consciousness: the tiredness and chill my physical body experienced were things my proto-self knew about and was working chemically & neurologicaly to respond to. My core self neurologically mapped imagistic narratives of these experiences so that I was conscious of them and knew in the moment that I was tired and cold. Through its neurological storage-and-retrieval and association systems the extended consciousness of my autobiographical self allows me to remember these now. Rather than contributing to and/or constructing consciousness in different ways, however, as his title might suggest, my what-we-call-emotional alertness and delight are part of this same formula to Damasio: my proto-self was balancing the objects "alertness" and "delight" alongside "tiredness" and "chill" (56), my core self was making nonverbal narratives from and so affording me conscious awareness of these objects and my responsiveness to them, and my autobiographical self remembers them too. Using his more basic conception of emotion as a pattern-able biological response instead of making an already-patterned and so recognizeable respose an emotion-object makes whatever difference his title implies even less discernable: emotion is part of what the proto-self is already occupied with handling, is part of the map of images we become conscious of in the transience of our core selves, and is part of what remains retrievable to our autobiographical selves. Regardless of what our first category-making responses to the split might be, Damasio's own theoretical work defines emotion as already biological, already of the body, and "body and emotion" is a nonsensical distinction.

Shakespeare knew this. At the turning point in the monologue, when the king shifts his focus from exhorting the devotion of his men to promising them their reward—for if emotion is always about punishment and reward, and you're trying to convince an army to face the probable punishment of death, you need a nice reward to offer those who beat the odds—he calls them to look into the future and imagine themselves remembering, and in that moment of projected remembering he describes their bodies as unwitting actors-out of emotional response:

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is namèd
And rouse him at the name of Crispian. (4.3.41-3)

The old men Henry describes—the projected selves of who the morrow's battle will become—do not decide to "stand a-tiptoe," presumably not the easiest task for the agèd and war-wounded; their response is an enactment of the (becoming-conscious) feeling of the (unconscious) feeling of their neurons making second-order imagistic maps of the first-order emotional response their proto-selves respond biologically to when their eardrums vibrate to the sound of the word "Crispian" spoken with a countryman's crisp pronunciation. Although I imagine the Bard, given his apparent interest in consciousness, psychology, emotion & human motive, would have been intrigued—if not utterly captivated—by Damasio's work, he'd probably have called it something else.

Posted by ttobryan at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2005

amalgamation

i posted this (xp to lj) a handful of days ago, when i was starting to think about these things i didn't read nearly enough of for lwp's class. i still haven't--instead i've read the whole next book too quickly, and already gotten too far behind to take a reasonable stab at the one supposed to be coming after that. it's too fast, and too dizzy. before i lose our entire conversation about blending, though, i thought i'd move this over here, record it where the nerdspeak's meant to live. i'm not sure it says much of anything at all, but i hope it will remind me of the pictures these ideas make in my mind, of the monk's journey, of what i almost understood and might have made use of if we'd stood still to look at it for longer than a glance.


sometimes for no particular reason you remember something. like you take three steps out the front door, and you're on the sidewalk, passing by budding tulips, between two wooden houses, and you have this flash back to somewhere else, somewhere with nothing at all to do with front doors, sidewalks, tulips, wooden houses. this time it was a slightly dark room with a bright world outside, a counter someone stands on the other side of to find things for you, show you things, take your money. a counter with brochures and maps on it, as at a travel plaza, and small stands or baskets with other things--sunscreened lip balm, mini-mag-lites, mosquito-repelling wrist-bands. i glanced around quickly, before the picture faded, before my next foot touched down, but i wasn't fast enough; this morning's world came back and left me only with a blend.

possible memory 1: the camp store/rental place at pohick bay regional park where paul scored roger & i a pair of canoes to take us & some gypsy's dog on a bald-eagle-sighting cruise in 2000(?)
possible memory 2: the park store/rental place at kejimkujik national park in nova scotia where brian & dave & i went paddling around the mist in search of islands in 1999(?)
possible memory 3: back at the camp store/rental place at pohick bay, where terry and i were sent to check out the park's goodness-for-camping-parties potential for meg and scott in 1997(?)

in the blend (Fauconnier and Turner's terminology), the counter is the same (matching connection). the maps are different, but look the same from several feet away (counterpart connection). the light through the windows should feel different but doesn't stand out clearly as different enough (generic space)--it was colder in nova scotia, physical-climate anyway, although the mental was warm enough. the doors are different--the one that in woodbridge leads to the back room with the piles of paperwork and keys on hooks in jakes' landing leads to some visitor-center room with birds' eggs on display (completion). what makes it impossible for me to separate them now, in addition to not turning fast enough in the memory-flash to see who i was with, is (the emergent structure of) what they had in common, the sense of adventures pending, of being in safe but uncertain hands, of being a little lost a lot too far from home.

listening to: placebo | twenty years

Posted by ttobryan at 02:57 PM | Comments (1)

March 12, 2005

felt-top calvinball: house rules

for my project in 611 on collaborative writing, one of the things i'm reading is kenneth bruffee's 1984 "collaborative learning and the 'conversation of mankind,'" which i'll be summarizing elsewhere in a bit, but i'm not done with yet; i'm still extracting gems, & here's the current if-too-dark sparkle:

bruffee doesn't surprise me--i've had way too much education training not to have heard it a hundred times already--when he says "most of us [teaching in the humanities] believe that 'class discussion' is one of the most effective ways of teaching. the truth, however, is that despite this belief the person who does most of the discussing in most of our discussion classes is the teacher." what's so pivotal & immediately relevant to me about this, though, is the reasoning he gives & the things i hear it speaking to (all of these lines are in immediate succession, by the way):

on what's still too true about how we (& i'm shifting the "we" here to mean "grad students," because that's what he's talking about, even though he's looking at graduate education as a now-finished contributor to a current situation, and i'm still in a place to see it as an ongoing influence on both our now-and-future teaching and our now-and-future contributions to the field that we, ourselves, will be perpetuating) position ourselves and our work, no matter how much we might wish to believe otherwise (& work our assess off to make otherwise, or at the very least work in ways we honestly believe ought to make otherwise):

behind our enthusiasm for discussion lies a fundamental distrust of it. the graduate training most of us have enjoyed—or endured—has taught us...that collaboration and community activity is inappropriate and foreign to work in humanistic disciplines such as english. humanistic study, we have been led to believe, is a solitary life, and the vitality of the humanities lies in the talents and endeavors of each of us as individuals.

on how this positioning plays out too often in our face-to-face attempts to come together to talk about what we're reading & learning:

what we call discussion is more often than not an adversarial activity pitting individual against individual in an effort to assert what one literary critic has called "will to power over the text," if not over each other.

on networking & wovenness--in simplest form, what plays out on the pool-felt as a cooperation vs. competition-based approach to playing (with) the game:

if we look at what we do instead of what we say, we discover that we think of knowledge as something we acquire and wield as individuals relative to each other, not something we generate and maintain in company with and in dependency upon each other.

when j and i play pool, we start the game like everybody else does--taking turns, designating colors, following an agreed-on set of rules about what happens when somebody scratches--but it doesn't end that way. when somebody "wins" (assuming we've gotten that far without starting to replace off-shots with do-overs and the like already) either by virtue of a brilliant move (usually not me) or by default (much more often me) when someone else's brilliant move goes astray, we pick new rules & play on for as long as there are balls left on the table.

our surface-level justification for this is simple: we've payed to play with the toys; we may as well play with them for as long as the money down covers the activity. (and economics is definitely the easiest way to explain this to other people.) the underlying truth seems to take many more words, and be much more confusing to explain, although to my way of thinking it's simpler still: we play to play.

neither one of us has a thing to gain by winning; "winning" at pool, as far as i can tell, just means quitting while there's still something left to play with, some other physics-stunt to try, some playful backwards shot to laugh at trying to bend over the table for. competing--creating "winner" and "loser" categories--doesn't make either of us better at the physics, more likely to control the ball next time around, or better-pleased by the activity as a whole, whereas cooperating at the task--whether the task (and maybe here's where i'm such an oddball--for a lot of people i suppose winning is the task) is clearing the table, improving our hand-eye coordination, or amusing one another--makes all of these things far more likely to happen.

we play to play. we play to learn--but not to learn how to "win"--we play to learn how to play, to learn how to learn more from playing. and the best, most productive, most learning-centered conversations about rhetoric & composition that i'm involved in--the ones that happen almost exclusively after hours, over the back of the break-room couch, or across the table in chuck's, or trooping through the snow on my walks to school with ty, or in cordell's living room, or on IM at 1 in the morning--the ones that made me want to be in grad school in the first place, the ones that (sometimes are all that) make me want to stay--play just like those pool games.

Posted by ttobryan at 12:22 PM | Comments (1)

March 06, 2005

inexplicable, not unexplained

like genes before we had
a way to see them, these things
only exist as metaphor: the way
we speak of "melting," Velveeta
in the microwave, our hearts
are ice-cream forgotten on the picnic-table
for too long. we don't know what it is
that softens when the color
a voice blooms shivers us from inside out;
we don't know what it is that loses
structure, becoming both
more malleable like clay
to sculpt our worlds with and so
liquid as to disappear
between the cracks.

it's only what we mean because we
mean between things, triangulating
three untruths or more to find
the wordless, resonating source.

before the microscope, when science was belief
we knew this representing was an art.
helixes were beautiful. the melting-point
between what you resist and what
you've already dived into
is beautiful.

02.01.05

Posted by ttobryan at 08:47 PM | Comments (1)

March 02, 2005

oh, hell.

after shaking my head at derek for the past week insisting "don't derail me, don't derail me, i have to make everything i do work toward my thesis!" i just realized that the thing i want to study & understand in many ways already is a network problem, a networked site, and inherently networky rhetoric (as if there were any other kinds).

i've been pretending blogs are peripheral, as if they didn't somehow end up damn near the center of that brightly-colored web on becky's door. i've been pretending that because of the medium's restricted access and its newness & its in many ways functional remove from the rest of what composition pedagogy denotes it was somehow a separate or at least separable entity.

it isn't.

i wrote "weaving" in that imaginary prospective diss-title just today, & didn't even notice that i had six degrees face-down on the desk, with watts doing whatever he was doing then with threads and woven metaphors.

blogging (ring the duh-gong) is writing. its features, despite the way the specific medium of the blog is to varying degrees unlike the other media in which writing is conducted, are more or less pronounced, articulated, stretched into prominence & interconnection... but the features of writing it makes more visible, more evident, more study-able are still features of writing.

and weaving, in the context of collaboration & bringing together voices both deliberate and unacknowledged, both identifyable and unrecognizeable, means writing not in a cell (hit the gong again) but as a point among points in a loosely-woven--nothing at all like a fixed-ratio lattice--matrix of interconnected voices.

Posted by ttobryan at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2005

do gnats dream of electric clowns?

i have all the focus of a gnat this morning, but i dare anybody trying to make coherent connections between quantum leaps & transactional reading theories to do any better.

quantum leap: the moment the both-possible solidifies, actualizes, becomes one, not both, & makes the other impossible... or maybe it's the many-possible (all-possible?) becoming one & thus denying all the others.

there aren't (are there?) any quantum leaps in network theory; possibilities increase or decrease the likelihood of other possibilities, but they don't eliminate one another. there are critical points, places from which movement, likelihood, & connectivity increase exponentially, but they're still arrays of options; there may be points at which one or another possibility is denied, but all the others remain open, creating instead of a yes & a possibly infinite array of nos, one or another no that actualizes, having little bearing on the overall array of possible yesses.

listening to: one a.d. | dubometer

this song has a repetitive electronic noise that sounds like maniacal clown-laughter in it, which is not helping solve the gnat problem. tricksy association games come full circle: quantum leaps are impulse-gnats, laughing like electric clowns. i'm blogging theory at 11:30 on a saturday morning. i think i hear the big white padded van turning onto the end of my street...

EDIT: theory-genius husband-person, while reading over the short paper the above puzzle was a part of, said "where'd you get 'both-possible'? who is that?" i'm sure i looked very sheepish when i said "it's me. i don't know. i didn't know what else to call it." i'm still sheepish about this. am i allowed to do that? make up terms? are the theory-police going to lock me up? rhetorical giants come after me with their thumb-wide sticks?

excuse me while i scurry back to the safety of the six degrees of kevin bacon.

Posted by ttobryan at 11:02 AM | Comments (2)

February 24, 2005

"if you want to know what the man believes in, look at his metaphors."

--becky howard, specifically in reference to bob connors, but highly generizeable.

Posted by ttobryan at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2005

balancing acts?

rhythm, intention, networking, keeping (nod to derek here) all five fingers in the weave, the physical logistics of being at the machine, connected to a functioning wireless port, having or forcing time between other tasks, obligations, ideas, distractions, the phone ringing, the knock on the door, the clock's insistence on rushing ahead

my last post was not about what i sat down to write about. it was not about what i originally titled it after i'd already changed direction from what i sat down to write about. i've lost those things already; i might find my way back to part of one or both; i might never see the flicker of their idea-bulb resurface (& how mixed is that metaphoricity?). fortunately, in with the loss, an unexpected (& now a nod to madeline) creative gain.

Posted by ttobryan at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

the house of network?

today class was good. this is not an informative sentence, really, although we construct it & sentences like it in the halls all the time; it doesn't convey anything other than that it was the opposite of "bad," an almost equally neutral term. "good" classes are classes in which nothing "bad" happened. & yet we--the teachers i pass in the halls and i, in these halls, in the halls where i used to work, in the halls before and before and before that--keep asking.

perhaps the value of the exchange is an overall climate-indicator; when most people are saying "class was good," then the program's okay, the curriculum's okay, the students are okay. or at least not "bad." when we hear "not so good" once in a while, it's a conversation-piece or a problem to solve & a learning opportunity, but when we hear it often, we have to start looking for thematic distress. & if we hear it often from the same person, we have to look there, because either that particular group of students, or the text they're working with, or the unique outline of the assignment, or the teacher him/herself isn't okay, and because the rest of us presumably are, we can pitch in. offer ideas. observe a class. listen to an anecdote and relay one of our own.

what started this:

here's what mike said:

[C]onsider the way news was read and disseminated in the 19th century. Men (and some women) would stand around a news print. One would read, the others would discuss, all would break up and go on to share that information with others. A network literacy?

i understand that institutions need structure, & so that's why we have structured 670 as a set of scheduled meetings to make sure that inexperienced teachers--whether inexperienced at teaching in general or just teaching in this climate with this curriculum--have a chance to hear from and share with more experienced teachers. but there's too much structure, or at least too much on our agendas. and too many people listening when one person's talking, when we could each be doing one or the other, when we could be getting enough grading done that we'd have time to stand still when a hard question arose in the hall that warranted a decently thought-out answer.

i learn so much more from hallway lore--from those temperature-gaguing questions, from the anecdotes, from the euphoric & exhausted & anxious & puzzled looks on my colleagues' faces on their way back from class-meetings. & it seems so much more germane there in the moment of joy or confusion, there in the place where so much of it happens, the halls between offices & classrooms, between conferences & copiers, the desks at which we grade & respond to student e-mails, rant & overhear others' rants, crow & commiserate.

i'm uninterested in war metaphors. these halls are not trenches, & although we use the word "dungeon" when kidding about the poor lighting, lack of ventilation, unreliable cell-reception of our over-heated window-less basement, its here that we do our networking. it's here, not in the most well-intentioned of organized meetings, that we learn first- & second-hand what goes wrong, what goes right, what ingredients & influences contribute to those wrong & rights. what we huddle over isn't the newspaper, but the stories we share are more relevant to what we're doing daily than they would be if it were.

Posted by ttobryan at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)