“Position Yourself,” He Said

(This blog has a glossary. Or it will, someday.)

When I was in grad school the second time, I signed up for a course taught by a radical queer theorist/anthropologist. Because that’s what all physics teachers need, you know?

My very first assignment in this course was to summarize the readings (three full length academic papers) on a single page and then ask three questions that had been sparked by reading them. The questions I asked were about why people are so inclined to categorize one another, whether there is some underlying biological drive to separate ourselves based on physical characteristics. His response was the most useful, if not the most traditional, that I’ve ever gotten. What he said was, “Frankly, I don’t really care.”

“Look,” he continued. “The point of this course is to explore the discourse around race. How does race work as a category? How is it constructed as a valid way of thinking about the world? I need you to pay attention to your reading practices. Don’t write response papers, I’m not interested in your responses. I want to know whether you understand, whether you have grappled with the material. Don’t rush to apply before you really know what it is that the author is saying.”

This, to a room full of graduate students, some of whom were several years into writing response papers for nearly every course. You could hear the panic building. What do you mean, don’t react? What do you mean, don’t respond? Don’t apply? I thought that was the “highest” point of development on Bloom’s taxonomy?

“Look,” he said again (he said, “look” a lot), “Your reaction, your initial response, it’s coming from somewhere, from your position in the world. If you find yourself resistant, that’s important. You need to look at what is going on inside your head, what identity you are coming with that is triggering that reaction.” I wrinkled my brow. He had been kind enough not to share whose paper he was dissecting, but I knew. Specifically, I knew that I had been reading a lot of evolutionary biology recently, and that the questions I asked came directly from that school of thought. I also knew (was able to hear) that it was the wrong knowledge tradition to bring to this classroom.

Over the course of that term, I discovered that I was white, middle class, educated. White, I tell you! Yes, I knew I was white. But I never really thought about it. I didn’t have to. This is the essence of privilege, not to have to be aware of categories, as long as you belong to the default. It grants you unearned power. We don’t have to cover privilege right now; it will be a recurring theme.

He asked us to leave our identities at the door, to enter the classroom with open minds, willing to hear the stories of The Other, willing to accept subjective realities that we had no language to encounter. He had us read Frantz Fanon’s work, and I didn’t understand it, but I mulled it, turned it around in my mind, let it sit, until one day I did understand, and I had to stop the car because I was crying too hard to drive.

Who are you?

Position yourself. How do others see you? How do you identify yourself?

Well, I’m a white, middle class, educated, English-speaking, North American. I am also a feminist, and a socialist, and a bleeding-heart liberal, and a queer-identified, male-partnered mother of three. I have a science education and can read math and source code. (This has its own form of privilege in a culture which so values the rational.) I have a tremendous amount of power and opportunity, and a lived experience of constraints just severe enough to remind me that maybe not everything is possible, that we don’t make it on our own, and that resources are not equitably divided.

But who am I? I am more than the sum of my labels, even if I could pull them all into one place. I am (you are) a time-evolving pattern in the universe, a conscious accumulation of particles, capable of feeling desire, anger, and empathy. I am (you are) the stuff of stars. I am (we are) the universe making sense of itself. One. Human. Interaction. At a time.

The Wonder of the Heavens

My entire life would have been different if it weren’t for the constellation of Orion. It was the signpost that arose in my life saying, “Astronomy! Over here!” I don’t remember much in the years before I saw Orion (I was about 10 at the time), but from that point on, every birthday and Christmas was marked by the acquisition of yet another book on astronomy or poster with a deep sky object on it. The Night Sky. The Atlas of the Solar System. A Young Astronomer’s Guide to the Something or Other. I was in love. I was obsessed.

I wanted to know it all. How did stars work? What was light, really? What was the cause of all this beauty?

Three decades later, I have The Scientists’ Stories to answer those questions. I can expound at length on the hydrogen burning that causes nuclear fusion and stellar evolution. I have given lectures on the age and scale of the universe. I have run the calculations of the equations that describe light, solved the Schroedinger equation for a particle in a box, and derived the quantum states that describe spin splitting. Subatomic physics. Newtonian mechanics. Cosmology. Optics. When I was nearing the end of my first degree, somebody asked me what I was studying, and I replied glibly (waving my hands to communicate the range of scales from femtometer to billions of light years) “Oh… everything.”

There is something deeply enticing about those mathematical models. There is a sense that you are learning the language of the universe… the language by which the particles communicate with one another across distance. The elegant dance of the heavens is, in this way, predictable, comprehensible, something to be embraced rather than feared. There doesn’t have to be an answer to the “why”, the “how” is enough.

That’s why I studied physics, anyway. Orion… beauty of the universe… elegance of mathematics… naturally.

I’m not a physicist. That is to say that I haven’t worked as a physicist since the mid-90’s. There is one route into that castle, and I stepped off the path just before the drawbridge. Other questions were haunting me.

Yet to this day, I am struck dumb by the beauty of the night sky. I feel so a part of it all, that I can reach out my consciousness and ask the sun how it’s doing. I’ve never stopped being that girl who used to lie on her back with a friend under the night sky and speculate, “Do you think that there are other kids out there, looking back at us?” “How far do you think it is to that star?” And most importantly, “Do you think any of it means anything?”

***

If you need to spend some time immersed in the deep sky and the glory of the universe, allow me to point you to the spectacular website provided by Jet Propulsion Labs.

Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner

On Writing is a wonderful book. It is a fine piece of storytelling from a fine storyteller, and full of concrete and useful advice. But I think it steered me wrong in one respect. “Don’t,” Stephen King said, “put your desk in the middle of the room. Place it in the corner to remind yourself that your art is a support system for your life, and not the other way around.”

Fine advice for a person who is wont to place their own needs and the demands of their art above that of their family. But not the best plan, I would say, for a woman who has been waiting for permission to speak for 20 years.

I come through the very hierarchical knowledge tradition of the university… last gasp of the guild network? It is not a place for radical ideas (unless you can refer them to the ideas of prior radicals). It is a place where certain questions are unaskable, fitting outside the parameters of all the existing containers.  These are the questions that require art, rather than academics. For 15 years, I tried to make them fit into the inappropriate box of one university degree program after another. Some I finished, some I didn’t. In the process, I “obtained” an absurd amount of education (as though it were something one could have). Yet I internalized the message that it wasn’t enough, that it was never enough, that if it wasn’t approved by external bodies (with funding and appointments and invitations to speak) I was not enough. The university is not a good place for a person with radical ideas and a need for permission. Those are not compatible. Actually, those are just not compatible. A university education/institutionalization simply reinforces the existing structures. You may speak when you’ve finished your degree… No, when you’ve finished your Ph.D… No, when you get a faculty position… No, when you have tenure… You may speak when you have tenure. The problem is that, by the time you have tenure, the desire to speak may have left you some years earlier.

I went to a conference on Science and Society in 2005 at which global warming was not mentioned. Some of the most innovative thinkers in the country came together to discuss the impacts of science and technology on our lives, and we ignored the most obvious and pressing issue of the day. This is the culture I was “raised” in (intellectually speaking). We are well trained to play it safe, to make sure that we don’t say anything too far out of the box. We may expand the box slightly, but outside the box? That’s for Stars. And you, my dear (They Say again and again) are no star. The ones who escape that are the ones who have the courage of their convictions… who learn to listen to the secret voice at the back of their heads that says, “Actually, I think that is important, even if I haven’t managed to convince you of it.”

That is the voice of art. It is the voice I was raised to ignore.

Our spaces and actions betray our interior lives. For me, the act of placing my desk in the corner of the living room put me at the center of the maelstrom of family life, always prone to doing “just one more load of laundry” or reading one more story to the children, or finding one more task of maintenance that must be done to the house before the writing could be allowed to take the stage. For four months this spring, I participated in the Post-a-Day challenge on WordPress (under another name). I managed to do it, but only by writing late into the evening, and only (often) by writing below my own standards, and only (occasionally) by fudging the date of a post backwards by 25 minutes. It’s fine; the whole point of it was to make my writing a part of my daily practice. What it taught me, though, was that I didn’t feel entitled to write. I didn’t feel entitled to think. And I certainly didn’t feel entitled to make writing enough of a priority that it took up actual space in my life. My art, by being stuck in the corner, was consigned to the scraps of time and resources left over when everybody else’s life was taken care of.

In starting this new blog, I am taking up space. I am taking the risk of being called arrogant. I am taking the risk of being wrong. (I will almost certainly be wrong… again and again and again. It is the nature of thinking.) I am taking the risk of being thought ridiculous. But I am taking up space. I have claimed, as my office, the very center of the room that is to become the yoga studio and classroom. I have the best view on the property. It is in a separate building, without phone or laundry or the chance for me to do just 10 more minutes of work on the kitchen. It has a place of honor.

I honor the art. For a time, my life must become the container for true practice.