I Have a Scheme

To students in Dialect, Readings in Humanities,
American Literature, and Colleagues
Across the Curriculum
 
(Courses Without Border Series)
 
      To Do the Dozens  (aka: Liberal Art).
  Sustain Ability & Transformative Learning
 
   What is it to be a student, so as to study?
 
Indo European steu – as if to be struck by a  stick,
stunned to a stupor: the etymological  root for
“stunning.” “stupid,” “student,” and “study”
(all in the family: kindred spirits)
 
The Zen tradition of koans & conundrums, noetic
riddles, gordian knots and cerebral chinese finger
traps plus knick knack paddley-whacks to  stymie
and undercut one’s beliefs, prejudices, biases,
convictions, traditions and inherited structures-for-
knowing (literally, to“blow”  the mind:  nirvana-ize)
is what the Greeks called Elenchus to Aporia:  falling
into a  state of no pores, no portals or thresholds, no
openings, no exits: a stunningly stupid  bottoming- out
 perfect for the beginnings of  Liberal Art: the rehab.
 
What William James would call the “Sick Souled”
Variety of Religious Experience—ooooomygawd. .
 
My old man, a Presbyterian minister who originally
taught English at Exeter, was converted to a higher
calling by a student named “Rip” Van Winkle—an
experience of transformative somewhat excruciating
learning but what James would classify  as “Healthy
Minded.” James himself was of the sick-souled kind.
But he acknowledged both “economies” as not only
legitimate but complementary. 
 
Accusing him once of having as big an ego as any
of us, I realize now my progenitor, patron & patriarch
was somewhat a variant on The Signifying Monkey.
 
“Sure, of course, enormous ego.” he said,
but mine's  crucified.” Dead, buried, descended
into hell as it were & rose again to sit at the right
hand of god & judge the quick & the dead, so to
speak: a  transformative learning or you describe
it your way.  The more ways the better if not
always the merrier, true?
 
Here is how Lewis Hyde talks about IT: He talks in
terms of “the trickster” archetype—which in this case
is represented by Signifying Monkey. Just one of the
characterizations  (Coyote, Raven, Hermes, Loki,
Eshu, Jesus) who manifest the cerebral & affective
border-jumper,  rules-violator, shape-shifting,
mediator-disrupter, realm-collapsing  recreational
 put-IT-in play ludic-gamester who, deadly  himself,
resurrects us kicking & screaming from a gravity we
hate to love and  love to hate.  It hurts, damnit..
 
   “To dozen”—to stupefy and daze
           ” to make insensible, torpid or
             powerless” The object of the
             game is to stupefy and daze
             with swift and skillful speech.
 
A kind of verbal dueling in which antagonists publicly insult
one another with elaborate rhyming couplets. The winner
is the player who improvises quickly, who most deftly
turns the other’s rhymes around, who always responds
to wit with greater wit, and who in all  this outlasts the other
and most delights  the gathered audience, for the game is
always played to a crowd.  The loser is the player who
breaks the form and starts a physical fight.
 
The point of the game  is to play with language, not to take it
seriously, or better, to stay in balance on the line between
the playful and  the serious while trying to tip one’s opponent
off that balance, dizzied with a whirl of words.
 
The loser who starts a  [actual] fight has been 
“put in the dozens,” lured into a kind of  unconsciousness 
in which he or she grows deaf to the figurative portion of
language and takes everything at face value.
 
A game of the dozens is built on insults to family 
and to mothers especially. [[Accusing Close to home, 
where charity is said to begin ]]
 
Where the trap of such constraint is felt, the 
Signifying Monkey’santics point to a way out: Wake up, 
they say, to the symbolicportion of all cultural mandates 
and by that consciousness stop taking them all so seriously.
The Monkey of the Mind wakes us to the web of mutable
signs that shape and toys with us until weget the wit to 
shape and toy with it.
 
To climb into the Monkey’s tree is to detach from 
the bedrock categories of one's own culture and  
“signify” with them, and that means to recognize 
that they are serious (there’s no insult that isn’t 
serious) but that their seriousness can be infused 
with humor.The game demands wit and more wit
—not the Lion’s muscular response)
 
The antagonists in a game of dozens play with the 
difference between meaning  something and just
saying it, between fact and fiction, between love  of 
family and disregard, between the sacred and the
profane, ….the game requires equilibrium in the force
field where allthings join one another. It demands poise 
in the joints, as it were, balance at the threshold.
 
The person whose poise fails and who commits
himself to the culturally approved side of this
string  of dualities, slips from the signifying mind 
with its speed and lightness and falls into the body. 
The loser is overcome with gravity: he gets serious,
attached, defensive for his mamma in fact; his
sense of humorevaporates while the light-bodied 
winner stays perched in his tree, his humor intact.
 
Where there is real ambivalence then, where one can
truthfully say “I am attached to my mamma” and
"I am not attached to my mamma,” the loser is that
person  who chooses a single side of the contradiction.
The sign of such single-mindedness is contradiction 
without humorrather than contradiction with a smile.
 
To treat ambivalence with humor is to keep it loose; 
humor oils the joints where contradictions meet. If 
humor evaporates, then ambiguity becomes polarized 
and conflict follows.

We always inhabit a story that others have shaped 
but we also always participate in the shaping. 
When we have forgotten the latter portion of these 
paradoxes,  when the way we live closes in around
us feeling like a web woven by strangers, a deadening 
patter and not an enlivening one, then, if we are lucky, 
the Monkey  of the Mind  will begin his mischievous 
chatter to  wake us from our torpor.
 
In this model, when human culture turns against
humanbeings themselves, the trickster appears 
as a kind of savior.
 
When we have forgotten that we participate in 
the shaping of the world and become enslaved
to the shapings left us by the dead, then a cunning
artus-worker may appear sometimes erasing the 
old boundaries so fully that only no-way remains
and creation must start as if from scratch, and
sometimes just loosening up the old divisions, 
greasing the joints so they may shift in respect to
one another, or  open them so commerce will
spring up where the ruled forbid it.  In short, when 
the shape of culture itself becomes a trap, the 
spirit of the trickster will lead us into deep 
shape-shifting.
 
    From Lewis Hyde: the Trickster Makes This World
         (somewhat reconfigured to fit my screed.)
 
“Contradiction is a lever of transcendence.” (Simone Weil)
 
When all players are aware of The Game and voluntarily
in-play playing—as with any sport or art—call it Dialectic,
the practice that welcomes opposition, loves the enemy &
enables the philosopher toescape the Cave (culture, convention,
closet, box, bubble )
 
How the philosopher might make it back, returning to the cave
(culture, convention, box, bubble) and still sustain his or her
outside-the-box  experience... that's a course of another color,
not to be collapsed, conflated, or confused with dialectic or
signifying monkey shines..
 
xxxooo, Jane Goodall