November 1, 2016 - 23:20
i'm not sure how to reflect on class today - it seems like we've had this same conversation a million times and nothing has changed. i want to reiterate what i said earlier, that it's okay (it's good!! it is - actually - necessary) for us to allow ourselves to be wrong. people keep getting caught up in proving that they're right or clarifying that they didn't mean to offend anyone. i think we can all assume that no one means to offend others - that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. it's more valuable to accept that you said something fucked up than try to defend yourself. (i know that's easier said than done!! no one likes being wrong/feeling mean!!!) people have also gotten defensive when someone tries to move the conversation in a different direction. sometimes this is totally fair - maybe the conversation is really productive and we aren't ready to move on yet - but a lot of the time we get too stuck in what we want to happen and don't follow what the class finds productive. i don't know how much sense this makes.
i'm frustrated with having these conversations over and over again but we also need to keep having them until something feels better or the semester ends.
thinking about change always brings me to a piece of dialogue from angels in america, a 2-part play by tony kushner:
Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That's how people change.
kushner talks a lot about the painful difficulty (almost impossibility) of change. we don't seem to be willing to do this hard work. we let ourselves be cut open and expose our hurt and the hardness of the work we're doing but we don't stitch anything back up. we're all just bleeding everywhere. so how do we fix things? can we?
(maybe it's okay if we can't fix things. admitting that might be a helpful step...)
sorry for being so pessimistic. i love the book of salt and am excited to talk about it on thursday.