Monthly Archives: July 2013

Synchronicity II

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Being good stewards of the Earth means living within nature.

Being good stewards of the Earth means living within nature.

As if you didn’t see that title coming (with apologies to The Police).

What got me thinking about synchronicity in my last post was the work I have been doing to prepare for my Fall semester courses. As it happens, I am teaching an upper-level English seminar entitled “Nuclear Nightmares: Storytelling After the A-Bomb” and a Freshman Honors seminar on sustainable environment (this year’s Honors topic). The Honors seminars are interdisciplinary, but each of us who teaches one does so through the lens of our own discipline.

I had not planned things this way, but as it turns out there are a lot of points of convergence between the two topics, so my research for one course complements my research for the other.

What strikes me over and over, as I read things as varied as Silent Spring and On the Beach and Welcome to the Greenhouse (a terrific Cli-Fi collection of stories) and A Short History of Nuclear Folly and Flight Behavior and Fail-Safe is that so much of what gets us, and by us I mean all of us, into trouble is hubris. This isn’t a word you hear a lot about today, but it is a theme that is both as old as human time and as current as the debate on climate change: We are masters and commanders of not only our own human domain but of the natural realm as well, and woe betide anyone who tries to point out that maybe we haven’t been the best stewards of our world(s).

Which brings me to what is going on here in Maine. It seems to me that when we picture climate change, we think about the Arctic and Antarctic. We can visualize ice shelves separating, icebergs calving, as the global temperature rises. We can look at NASA’s illustration of the melting polar ice cap and, while the thought of this occurring is intellectually upsetting, it doesn’t really hit home. I mean, not really hit home, not with the sort of sock-in-the-stomach realization that things are changing for the worse.

What does give us this type of shock? The kinds of stories that have been appearing this summer in our daily papers and our local broadcast news. And even more than that, the changes that we are observing all around us.

Maine puffins, already on fragile footing, are having trouble finding the small herring that they need to feed their chicks. Higher tides, warmer water, everything associated with climate change is making it harder for the puffins to survive. These slightly-goofy, comic birds are doing a little better this summer than last, but problems still loom as the global temperature continues to rise.

Even puffins, though, are relatively out of sight for most Mainers. Chickadees, however, are a different story. Even before this article appeared in the Bangor Daily News, it was very apparent to me that something was up with the chickadees, Maine’s state bird. Bold as brass, these little birds will sit on the feeder pole or wait at your feet as you change the birdseed. For many summers, when I would sit out on our deck the chickadees would be all around me, sometimes going so far as to sit on the back and arms of my chair. (This always made me feel a little like Disney’s Cinderella.) This year, I saw one or two chickadees in early June and haven’t seen another since.

And don’t get me started on the fireflies (nearly all gone), bees (disappearing fast) and bats (dying of white nose syndrome).

So here is my challenge, as I see it. I need to help my students find the connections between “big-picture” climate change and the small, everyday moments in their own lives. And the connections between what is happening half a world away in terms of nuclear arms development and the safety of all of us on the planet. One way to do this, I believe, is through literature, by reading stories that humanize the issues involved. Another way is through helping them find the synchronous moments in their own studies, in helping them make the connections between the hard sciences and their lives, between political science and what is happening in their own backyard. Most importantly, they need to come to recognize the ways in which hubris can not only lead to personal downfall (Macbeth, Dr. Frankenstein, Nebuchadnezzar) but, when played out on a larger scale, end up causing global disaster.

Will I be telling them the answers? No. I have my own opinions about what needs to be done to help stop climate change, to end nuclear proliferation, but my task is to allow my students to come to their own decisions about what is happening in (and to) the world and figure out their own responses to what they are learning about. For that, they will need everything a liberal arts education can provide (STEM courses, humanities courses, public discourse and private studies). What we can do, as teachers, is give them the best education, the best resources, the best skills, the best ammunition we can, then keep our fingers crossed that they go out and do a better job than what has been done by those who came before them. Our students, then, embody – both literally and figuratively – the best hope our planet has.

So I guess we now have our answer to what sort of job a humanities major can have: She can save the world.

Synchronicity

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Synchronicity.

The juxtaposition of two things that appear not to be related, that seem to be occurring simultaneously by mere chance, yet are experienced as connected by meaning (rather than causality). A Jungian concept (see The Roots of Coincidence) that resonates with me when I write, when I read, when I teach.

So much of what I try to do with my students is get them to see the synchronicity of ideas. How a concept they encounter in their mathematics course can reappear when we’re reading a post-modern novel. How they might find an echo of a recent physics experiment within an SF short story. How the cadences and ideas of the Romantics find their way into the work of the Modernists. These are the connections that fuel our research, that lead us to spend an entire afternoon at the library not doing the reading we intended to complete but instead chasing a new idea from one author to another, from one discipline to another. Synchronicity is the fuel that powers the engine of thought.

And what powers synchronicity? The liberal arts. Or, if you will, the humanities.

I can hear your eyes starting to roll even now. Who needs the liberal arts? We need STEM courses so our students can get STEM jobs when they graduate — and save the country in the process because we have fallen far behind other nations when it comes to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Novels and philosophical debates have their place, but that place isn’t front-and-center in the college curriculum. You can’t get a job with an English major. This is what it has come down to: the choice between STEM courses and humanities courses, leaving supporters of the liberal arts to defend what they see as their ever-shrinking disciplines.

Thing is, this either/or is what my philosophy-teacher husband, Gerry, would call a false alternative. We need poetry and physics, sociology and history, philosophy and psychology. A wide swing of the educational pendulum that ends up with the bob firmly stuck on the STEM side means we run the risk of losing what is most human about learning. Why do you think they call it “The Humanities” anyway?

This cuts both ways, of course. Students on the Humanities “side” need to learn about and understand at least the basics of STEM disciplines just as much as students on the STEM “side” need to learn about and understand the basics of the liberal arts.

I am a poet and I am a science geek. No, I can’t explain the physics behind jet propulsion. And I’d get lost trying to untangle string theory. Heck, I usually have to use my fingers when figuring the tip in a restaurant (if I go to hell after I die they’ll make me do math). But I see the beauty in the Large Hadron Collider and the science behind it. I am fascinated by the Golden Ratio, am intrigued by the ROVs used in deep-sea exploration, and was in heaven when my husband and I toured NASA a couple of years ago. My interest in science is as much a part of me as the poetry I write. (And if you don’t believe science and poetry mix, listen to a NASA scientist explain how the gold in her wedding ring came from a distant exploding star, or Stephen Hawking talk about how the material in your right hand would have come from one supernova and the material in your left from a different dying star).

To me, then, the issue isn’t which we need more, the Humanities or STEM. The issue is how do we make sure that each of our students, regardless of her major, regardless of the discipline he is most comfortable in, becomes proficient in the career he or she pursues while at the same times becoming conversant with concepts and ideas from the other “side” of the academic aisle.

[Oh, about those English jobs. How about lawyer, librarian, public relations manager, politician, campaign manager, editor, CEO, stockbroker, archivist, lobbyist, copywriter, journalist or app developer?]

Chapter One: In which a blog is launched and an explanation proffered

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So. . .the title.

While contemplating starting this blog, I found myself thinking a lot about who I am, what my interests are, the things that amuse and enrage and downright puzzle me. About my artistic and academic work, and the places where those two parts of my life overlap (imagine a Venn diagram with rhymes).

I found that I kept coming back to the Victorian idea of the “unnatural woman.” Perhaps it’s the phrase itself. Or the Victorian paradigm of the Angel in the House and how everything (and I mean everything) that fell even a little outside of that paradigm was considered unnatural for a woman.

The list of things that made a woman “unnatural” in the Victorian Era is long. (And let’s be honest and acknowledge that we could say the same thing about today, although some items on the list have changed.) A woman who was an author was unnatural. A woman who married late, or not at all. Women who entered into a Boston Marriage. Women who worked at a job outside the home. Women who traveled alone. Women who wanted the vote. Women who wanted an education. Women who were artists. (When I discuss this with my students in class, I point out to them that I fit into an appallingly amusing – or is it amusingly appalling – subset known as the “unnatural wife”: a married woman with no children. They are horrified, and indignant on my behalf, which is kind of sweet when you think about it.)

These women who lived outside the norm were the unnatural women. The “odd” women. The “redundant” women. They were known by many names (not all of them unique to the Victorians): bluestocking, suffragette, spinster, adventuress, strumpet.

These were my sisters, the ones who came before. Not just them, of course. But in thinking about how I would describe myself for this blog, it was “The Unnatural Woman” I kept coming back to.

So. . .here I am.

I have no set expectations for this virtual journey, just an idea that there will be things I wish to write about that don’t fit neatly into either my poetic or academic lives (there’s that idea of fitting in again). Will I blog at least once a week? I hope so. Can I promise I will do so? Um, no.

However often I do post, I will be talking about teaching, about poetry, about feminism. About those things that amuse and enrage and puzzle me. And I hope that you will enter into a dialogue with me about these things. That you will join this Unnatural Women on her journey.