English

Since I wasn't able to be in class yesterday because I was sick, here are some of my thoughts about The Hungry Tide in response to Anne's class notes.

“It is as though the word itself were an island, born of the meeting of two great rivers of language…” (69)

“…the Bengali language was an angry flood…” (79)

“river of words” (83)

“…her words have come flooding back to me in a torrent.” (134)

So far, I have really enjoyed reading the Hungry Tide and I keep thinking about how the novel ties back to our overarching English/360 conversation of home and exile. The themes of home, belonging, and exile come up quite frequently in the text--Piya, who's heritage and physichal appearance make her look like an insider still feels somewhat siloed from the Indian culture and way of life, and seemingly feels more at home when searching for the rare species of dolphin. Kanai, who is more of an insider than Piya, also plays the role of an outsider as he reads and learns more about Kusum's story. Another way in which home comes up in the text is when Piya recalls the memory of how attached her father was to a towel that had become an old, tattered piece of fabric. "In general, the least sentimental of men [... the cloth] was almost like a piece of his body, like his hair or nail clippings; his luck was woven into it" (73). These themes of home/belonging/exile in the text raise the questions: can one feel like and be an insider and outsider in a space that is supposed to be his or her home? Is it possible for an object to represent home? Can such an object (natural or unnatural) feel like it is a part of us? 

How much latitude can you allow?

In my own words, latitude, the ability to allow yourself to immerse and dance around as far into the open field as much as you allow. Latitude, a force field as strong as your beliefs, your morals, and your drive. Latitude- as expandable and malleable as you want it to be. Latitude- what I have total control over. Throughout our experiences, there will be individuals sailing through several waves, facing different tides, and walking into different territories. As individuals, we can’t all be compatible and we see that with the character Lloyd Fuller in All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki and Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee. They expand their latitude as far as they allow themselves to share their beliefs, but never bursting their force field by the harmful words of people who are against them. Latitude, unlike the scientific use, which gives an ideal measurement of a geographic coordinate, is the stretchy floating hula-hoop I as well as Costello and Fuller walk in.

Latitude can’t be measured. It’s like trying to measure how many tears you have cried- ridiculous. It’s not something that takes a form and turns into stone; forever keeping it’s shape until it is broken. The latitude an individual creates for one self is strong like rubber, to keep all its beliefs from being attacked, but also stretchy to allow yourself to stretch as far as you’re comfortable with in sharing what you believe in. Latitude is controlled by the tolerance one allows.

"God holds the only patent! He is the Engineer Supreme! And He has given up His seeds into the public domain!...Our seeds contain our beliefs. That's why we urge you to continue to save them and propagate them and pass them on to others to do the same, in accordance with God's plan. In this way we chose to praise our Lord and to fulfill His design - of which mankind is just one small part." (Ozeki 302)

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Our class has sort of latched on to this idea of ‘porosity’. It’s become a catchphrase, an exclamation, and a stand-in for many other words on when talking about complex and/or connected things. So I’m calling us out. We’re using porosity in the same way that we’ve resisted using words like ‘nature’ and ‘environment’, in the same way that it is problematic to use words like ‘gentrification’ and ‘radical’ (and still I and many others continue to use them, perhaps out of comfort and habit, perhaps for lack of a better word).  The idea of porosity has brought us a long way, given us new and interesting ways to look at common concepts, AND/BUT there might be areas where it’s holding us back from defining what we really mean. I’m still not sure I completely know what the word means. It could be that I’m the only one, but I don’t think so.

 empathy—the ability to understand and share the feelings of another

            Empathy is one of those qualities that we’re constantly told that, as “good” people, we should possess.  From elementary school character education to high school literature classes, one purported purpose of education (at least in my American public school experience) is to teach us how to care about and understand the feelings of other people.  I’ve always considered myself an empathetic person, someone who cares about and understands others’ feelings, but lately I’ve been questioning whether this quality I’ve prided myself on even exists.  Is it ever possible to truly “understand and share the feelings of another”?

When I was younger, around the age of 10 my mother told me a lie that made me question my ability to make my own decisions and put constraints on me via my family identity. I was conversing with my mother and the topic of tattoos came up and I told her that I wanted one. Her immediate response was, “If you get a tattoo you won’t be allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Is that what you really want?” At the time I agreed with her and put the tattoo idea behind me. A few years later I decided to do a google search of “Can a person with a tattoo be buried in a Jewish cemetery?” The answer I saw wasn’t what I expected. The answer said that there is no such Jewish law about a Jew not being buried in a Jewish cemetery because they have a tattoo. However in some cases a person already laid to rest might have requested that no one with a tattoo be buried next to them. Other then that it is acceptable for me to get a tattoo and I felt betrayed by my mother. My mother was forcing me to be on this path that I didn’t want to be on. A path filled with her making all of the decisions for me. However this made me think about other cultures and religions where people are forced to stay on a particular path and have different ways in which they respect the dead. Whether your culture or religion buries a person the day they pass away, not using a casket for burial, or not having upright tombstones.

            In Ruth Ozeki’s Eco-novel All Over Creation, education, learning, or in other words, “consciousness-raising”, occur in different ways for several characters as the story unfolds. Frank Perdue, a janitor from the Midwest inadvertently gets involved with a radical environmental activist group, the Seeds of Resistance, and spends much of this time feeling skeptical about their work; feeling that people were not “ready to have their consciousness raised quite yet” (86). This statement begs the question: what does it take for people’s “consciousness to be raised”? Who is ready and how do they become ready? How much latitude in conversation and dialogue can there be for the maximum amount of learning to take place?  Can there be productive dialogue between two people who hold different perspectives or who are not ready to have their consciousness raised? In order to answer these questions, I will look at how learning takes place in All Over Creation—specifically for Frank and the individuals who the Seeds of Resistance reaches out too, and will conclude by bringing in The Lives of Animals and Radical Presence, other texts that touch on these questions.

Everything that any living being does, thinks, and feels is unchangeably its own perspective. I exist only within my own reality, only able to read and interact with the world through my own senses. My perspective is the most constant factor of my existence – ever-changing and developing, but solely my own. I am always drawn back to thinking about our universe: “the totality of known or supposed objects and phenomena throughout space”. Not “the totality of all phenomena throughout space”, but the known and supposed. Humankind has ‘claimed’ the universe as its own. We have established ourselves as the focal point of existence. And just as humanity has claimed the universe, I like to believe that us people all exist within our own ‘personal universe’, for the totality of our own existence is comprised of what we know or suppose. This sounds like a very individual-centric approach to thinking about people, but it is because of this truth that our webs of porous connections and togetherness are so powerful. Everything we do is a choice, what we ourselves decide to do. And despite the fact that we exist in our ‘personal universes’, it seems to be a common link of humanity to constantly push ourselves to escape from our own singularity and choose to share, combine, connect, understand, and feel the perspectives of others. We have the choice to be selfish and self-centered.

If the link for the Tim Burke speech is down for anyone else (I know I can't get to the site right now for some reason) I found a back-up here