McBride Reunion '06

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Exploring "Negative Space":
My Writing Conversation with the McBrides

Remarks on the Occasion of the May 2006 Reunion

Look at this photograph.
What do you see?
Write for a few minutes:

Re-create, verbally, this visual artifact.
(a.k.a.: describe what you see!)
What do you feel, about what you see?
What do you think, about what you feel?

Do the same thing for this photograph:
describe what you see, and what
you feel and think about what you are seeing.

I start with these images--
and with your writing about these images--
to sound the keynote of our conversation this morning:

Exploring Negative Space-->
Turning a Negative into a Positive

Classic "ambiguous figures" play with an exchange
between positive and negative space.
We can learn, from looking @ them,
and revising our perceptions,
to see what we have not seen.

An explanation of what negative space in a painting is,
how and why to use it:
By changing your focus...to the negative spaces...
rather than focusing on the object, you end up with
a much more accurate painting....Negative space...
requires you to concentrate on the space
around the object rather than the object itself.

My 15-year-long writing conversation with McBrides
has been a move into negative space,
an exploration of the edges of light,
a revision of the hardness and softness
of the edges of what I thought I knew.

That's (some of!) the territory I'd like
to cover with you this morning...

Those of you who studied with me during
the 10 years beginning in September 1991 will remember
Clifford Geertz's story about "turtles all the way down"
as a touchstone of our class.

Those of you who landed in my arms 10 years later
(from September 2001 on) will remember, instead,
an image of the "puzzle pieces moving in both directions":

What I want to talk with you about this morning is how I/we got
from A) to B),
from (using only) texts to (starting conversations with) images,
from being "linear" to being "loopy"
(yes, the puzzle pieces move in both directions...),
from increasingly incomplete to increasingly generative,
from "infinite regression" to infinitely productive....

Let's begin with the turtle stack:

There is an Indian story--at least I heard it was an Indian story-- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked...what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? "Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Nor have I ever gotten anywhere near to the bottom of anything I have ever written about....Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is....to commit oneself to...an interpretive approach...is to commit oneself to a view of ethnographic assertion as "essentially contestable." Progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other. (Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," 1973, my emphasis added) "Turtles all the way down" became a cliché among McBrides
(and I acquired quite a collection....)
But (back then) I didn't understand the edges of this idea at all.
I think I understand a little better now where it might take us.
Let me see if I can explain....

According to Wikipedia, "turtles all the way down" refers to an infinite regression myth about the nature of the universe: An infinite regress in a series of propositions arises if the truth of proposition P1 requires the support of proposition P2, and for any proposition in the series Pn, the truth of Pn requires the support of the truth of Pn+1. There would never be adequate support for P1, because the infinite series needed to provide such support could not be completed.

The most widely known version appears in Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time: a scientist gives a public lecture on astronomy (the Earth orbits around the sun, the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy....) and a little old lady in the back of the room responds, "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down." There are multiple other versions, inflected for multiple other contexts, including a 1967 linguistics dissertation in which the scientist is William James, and the story is evoked because of "its bull's-eye relevance to the study of syntax."

The different forms of the anecdote give it different meanings. For Hawking, the turtle myth is one of two accounts of the nature of the universe; the turtle theory is patently ridiculous, but his own theories may be just as ridiculous. "Only time will tell," he concludes. For Geertz, however, the myth is patently wise, teaching us that we will never get to the bottom of things. This is the difference between a positivist and an interpretive approach. Positivists read myths literally and find them false and foolish; interpretivists read them metaphorically or allegorically and find them true and profound.
With the help of all of you,
I have been stumbling my way towards the edges of both these approaches,
towards another sort of understanding,
one that "loops" between what Wikipedia calls
the "positivist" and the "interpretivist,"
between the "literal" and the "metaphoric,"
between the the "wise"and the "ridiculous,"
between asserting and questioning,
between believing and doubting.

I've traveled with the McBrides over the edge
into "negative space,"
into a strange-but-familiar landscape,
a place where we find ourselves crafting stories
that surprise ourselves--stories we find useful
precisely because they surprise us.

The trajectory of my writing conversation with the McBrides
has been from something that worked (though I didn't quite know why)
to a much more explicit understanding of what was happening, and how.

(To whet your appetite for this story:
what do you see when you look @ THIS image?)

Sharon Burgmayer, "Safe Haven"

(or: Womb/rain...Om/brain...?)

I use this image as pre-figure for

The story of my learning-from-McBrides' writing,
which began with the call, in
Ursula LeGuin's Bryn Mawr Commencement Address (1986),
to combine "male" and "female" languages,
the "objective" and the "subjective,"
the "distanced" and the "up close,"
into a new "baby language," of art.

This was followed by Virginia Woolf's call for "brain copulation": anything written with...conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness. He must not look or question what is being done. Rather, he must pluck the petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly down the river. (Chapter 6, A Room of One's Own, 1929)

And this was followed by years of "two cultures" learning, both
from a neuroscientist about the "neurobiologic reality" of the human brain,
and from a chemist-watercolorist about multiple forms of representation.

Frog Brain (not to scale!)
Anne's Brain (from the inside...)

In brief (courtesy of Paul Grobstein, "The Bipartite Brain...): The human brain consists of a "frog brain" surrounded by a large amount of neocortex.
"It is an 'idealist' sitting on the back of a 'pragmatist.'"
Sensory inputs come into the unconscious.
They are turned into stories (=awareness, experiences, emotions, thoughts) "upstairs."
Who knows what's going on down below??
We can only "get to it" obliquely, by conscious deliberation.

This is the "negative space" of--
and rich resource for--all academic work.
And there are multiple ways of representing this process.

Paul Grobstein's "Bipartite Brain" and Sharon Burgmayer's (rotated) "Interface"

My own version is more "architectural;" it involves an image of

an elaborate Victorian structure, with the sort of upstairs my grandmother had: rooms crammed full with God-knows-what, each fulfilling some "quasi-independent parallel" function and the sort of basement she had, too: where everything got dumped, wherefrom everything was delivered upstairs (canning jars full of produce, coal for the furnace...). It was a dusty, musty, unfinished place, with dirt walls and floor, hard to see into, hard to find things in, filled with snakes....Not a place you'd want to go into...

What the McBrides and I have done, over the past 15 years,
is keep one another company, as we go down into that cellar,
digging up and bringing together what Woolf calls "female" and "male,"
what Paul and Sharon call "unconscious" and "conscious,"
what I have come increasingly to understand as "playful" and "disciplined,"
and what (in terms of writing) I understand as the
interactive processes of "free associating" and "editing."

My 15-year-long writing conversation with the McBrides
has increasingly acknowledged, explored and celebrated the first half of these pairs.

Pregnant title waves
Topple these temples,
Pounding them to sandcastles
From which one lone turtle tracks toward the sea.

A gentle breath.
Another surge--urgent,
And firm hands
Cradle sure this temp'st borne surfling
Emerging from the sea in me:

my self.

Sarah Campbell. Emergen/t/cy. (Fall 1994)

Picture turtles being flung at you from every direction, some knocking you on your head. Kamikaze turtles diving at you. And there you are trying to catch them. But you can't. They're too heavy and there are too many turtles for your eyes to target one....at Bryn Mawr we come in contact with turtles that travel in large numbers and at high velocity. Bryn Mawr is in the turtle flinging business....

I wonder why my contact with turtles has to take this frenzied form....Bryn Mawr is acclimating women to the type of schedule they will be expected to run on in the work world....all this high volume turtle catching is in line with....the mass production ideology of corporate America....Bryn Mawr students going out into the work force will be well conditioned to make the sacrifices that employees are expected to make for their jobs....We need to question the value system....What is the value of giving more reading than a student can possibly do? Or asking students to churn out papers in assembly line fashion?....Education shouldn't be like mass production....I am disturbed by the bombardment....I'm being challenged by the turtles. I don't want to turn away from the challenge....

Belkys Lopez. "Turtle Storm." (Spring 1997)

In the past 5 years, as I found my way to the
limits of the metaphor of "turtles all the way down,"
McBrides began exploring other images:

"The Science Fiction saga of Princess Krispie" (Fall '02)
(assaulted by aliens and saved by a prince who later assaults her in turn)
--as described in Story-Telling in (At Least) Three Dimensions:
An Exploration of Teaching Reading, Writing, and Beyond

Greensleeves' Lament, by Kathleen Myers (Fall '04)
("I have not gone anywhere. I am here.")

Da Bes Ninja Beast Freakin' Story of a Time that You Eva' Heard FOR REAL
Which Only Exists in Your Imagination but
Actually Might Have Something to Do
With What You are Doing Here
By Jessica Brody, Joanne Bunch, Leslie McTavish,
Sarah Placke, Amanda Root and Virginia Tseng (Fall '05)
(in which a legion of Owls peck their way
through the surface of the bubble surrounding
and protecting Da Bes School for Girls and--
in the shock of fresh air--the girls find they can think clearly).

Just as important as mining the riches of the unconscious
is taking the time to revise what comes up.

My own recent writing experiments in this vein:
Let Me...Revise
Emerson Fibs

To conclude:
I invite you to write your own "fibs,"
emergent from the prose you wrote
about the photographs with which we began.

Read 'em aloud. Pass 'em in.

How might this writing be of use,
as we work together on the continuation and
extension of the McBride program?

For me, the practical use-value of "negative space"
is the recognition--following Dr. Seuss--that
a turtle stack can be upended:

Dr. Seuss said that Yertle the Turtle was modeled
after the rise of Hitler. That story ends,
"And the turtles, of course...
all the turtles are free,
As turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be."

|Ekphrasis (= giving "voice" to a work of art)
|The McBride Scholars Program
|The College Seminar Program
|"Questions, Intuitions, Revisions" (F05 CSem Syllabus)
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