Last year at this time, I was recording an album.  After we played the same song over, and over, and over, again my friend would say: “Ehhh, we just gotta let it gel.”  Sometimes I think school is sort of like recording that album.  We do the same thing over, and over, and over again and doesn’t always look good or sound good or feel good until after we let gel.  You have to take a break to figure out what still needs working on.  It was nice to have a break from reading, discussing, and sitting in chairs this week because it meant that there was time to let things gel.  I need more gelling time.  I suppose that this is what the future is for.  What started gelling for me this week was largely unrelated to what we were doing together.  At first, I felt a little guilty for not focusing on class.  I don’t anymore.  

My daughter-in-law, who is a psychiatry resident @ Penn (and a graduate both of Haverford and of The Story of Evolution/The Evolution of Stories), sent me this NYTimes opinionator piece on Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination. It put me in mind of some of our earlier conversations about language, and how we read it. Thought it might interest some of you, of the more poetic bent....

Well, here is my - perhaps subversive! - question - perhaps jumping the gun on our discussion tomorrow - prompted by the first two pages of the second half of the Coetzee book!! 

What is this class really about???

Is it about ecology?

Or is the real topic hiding right there in plain sight: is it really about how to be academic?

Excuse me if this is obvious! And excuse my punctuation! Dashes - and exclamation points - are probably not very academic!!!

What is the form? and what is the content?

What am I really asking?

(perhaps I alologize again: a bit punch drunk as the end of the semester approaches!)

When I was trying to come up with something to write on Tuesday night, I saw, in the corner of Ecological Imagining's homepage, the title of a new blog post that sounded interesting. It was about smoking and Bryn Mawr, which are things that I just read about in the book about Bryn Mawr, Offerings to Athena: 125 Years at Bryn Mawr. So, I was really excited to write about this, and I did. But when I went to comment on the post, I realized that it had been made on a different part of Serendip, for a class called "Walled Women." Serendip seems like a little corner of the Internet, just for me and Ecological Imaginings, but it isn't, and I wish I could meet and comment on the posts of all the lovely Mawrters who are also on Serendip. But, since that is unlikely, I will just post the link to the article I read and my response.

/exchange/smoking-bryn-mawr-colleges-campus-representing-power-student-participation-student-government-associ

A couple of days ago, we read Timothy Morton's "Introduction: Toward a Theory of Ecological Criticism." Although we discussed in class yesterday that Morton's dense and hard to read language makes sense, because his work is literary criticism, not an explanation of a theory he came up with, I still have some issues with the style of the excerpt. Mainly, my issue with the style is that it is what it says it is: an introduction. I dislike the style of introductions. They simultaneously summarize the work they preface, and their authors try to weave a separate narrative throughout the introduction. But this makes me impatient. Introductions just drag on and on, almost getting to the point, and then digressing to talk about something unrelated to fill the pages and sound impressive. Introduction just make me want to either get to the darn book, and turn me completely off of it. With this introduction, I just wanted to read the book, and get past the fluff. I appreciated what Morton was trying to do, and I'm certainly glad that I didn't have to read his whole book for class in one night. However, that doesn't mean I am at all satisfied with introductions, especially the one at hand. I just wanted to read what it was failing to summarize eloquently and actually find out the content.

I enjoyed our two shared rambles this week; thank you for venturing outside w/ me!
Next week we conclude our work together. Here's the plan for our upcoming shared events:

By 5 p.m. Thursday, record on-line your final set of weekly observations of your adopted on-campus "site."

By Sunday @ 5, post on-line your reflections about our two excursions this week. (Max, who was unable to join us today, is hoping to "experience" the blind field shuttle on Serendip, so please think of your posting as an attempt to include her in that activity.)

For Monday's class,
* srucara will select our site

* please come ready to tell me what groups you've organized yourselves into, for our final teach-in

* review the instructions for completing your checklist and portfolio:
/exchange/courses/ecolit/f12/portfolio
and come w/ any questions about the process

* please also read, in preparation for our discussion,
Timothy Morton's Introduction to Ecology Without Nature: Re-thinking Environmental Aesthetics
(it's in our password protected file: /exchange/courses/ecolit/f12/readings )

* On Wednesday, we'll do final evaluations, and then have
a teach-in, sharing with one another what we have been learning...

* My last day on campus will be the following Wed, Dec. 19.
Before then, you need to schedule a final writing conference w/ me.
Please come to that having reviewed my comments on your last paper,
as well as your other work for the semester,

I was inspired by the blind field shuttle tour that we took in class today and decided to see how far across my site I could walk by myself and with my eyes closed. I got about ten feet. Fifteen feet tops. This just goes to show how different this experience is on your own from being in a group. One thing that surprised me about my own experience was my intuition. I sensed a tree before I ran into it. It wasn’t that I saw it or felt it, but rather I could somehow just tell that it was there.

I then decided to make observations about the “Soundscape” (a phrase that Mr. Papalia used a few times on our class’s tour) of my site. The first sound that registered was the sound of rustling branches. Then church bells, distant dogs barking, and people talking. I heard the consistent rumble of a train and the flow of traffic. Car horns sounded intermittently as did the voices of students walking around campus. Visually Bryn Mawr is very sheltered from the surrounding Philadelphia area but sound-wise it certainly isn’t. Traffic is a constant, noticeable noise. The other sense that intensified when I had my eyes closed was smell. Fried food scents drifted intermittently out of the dining halls. That was really the only smell strong enough for me to smell through my cold nose.

Elizabeth Costello claims that because she was able to "think" herself into one of her fictional characters that, before, had never existed, then she should be able to think herself into any being. This claim does not sit well with me, as I find that there are many intrinsic problems that make it untrue. First, Costello's ability to think herself into another human character doesn't necessarily mean much; it would have been much easier to put herself into another character's shoes given that the character was another human being. Part of the reason she was able to think herself into the character was because she was able to empathize with human emotion. Another flaw with her statement is that she really isn't thinking herself into an entirely new being; after all, she may have invented the fictional character, but it was, essentially, of her own entity. My question is therefore, why is it more difficult for humans to empathize with animals (which is what we are in all actuality)? When answered "consciousness", Elizabeth Costello replies, "They have no consciousness, therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?" I find this to be the more important question, and statement. What is consciousness, and how are we able to differentiate between the consciousness of another human being and the consciousness of an animal?