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Created: May 20, 2003
Latest Update: May 20, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Back Through the Looking GlassSite Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, May 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.
Phrases I want to talk about are in green.
My comments are in blue. Unless I get confused. jeanneOn May 20, 2003, Berthena wrote:
By looking back at life's events and endowing them with meaning our lives can take on an immeasurale whole. In this our past can be measured through the present. An incident triggered my mind recently to remember an incident that took place when I was at least five years old. It stemmed from a statement I heard my father make when I was at least five years old. " I want Berthena to be a teacher like Booker T.," said my father. This statement was made by my father during the worst of times except for slavery. The depression years, the early thirties. He made that statement as we huddled aroud the wooden stove for warmth during those dreary years. Booker T.,to whom my father referred, was Booker Taliferro Washington, the Black educator who founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. This school was based on acceptance of subordination and humility as a part of a body of tactics necessary in a long campaign to win eventual cf freedom.I consider it a blessing to have lived to see that fallacy of accepting subordination and humility laid to rest. I think the demands by students for significant black studies, the 1965 riots, and the efforts made in the civil rights movement have laid the Booker T. fallacies to rest.
. . . . Now you need a transition in here to suggest that as you wamdered across six or so paths to your thesis you realized how each of these paths leads back to your apperceptive mass, links to the lifespace you were in at that time, brings back not only memories, but also an understanding born of the interdependence of all these early experiences with the rest of the mature experiences throughout your life. That affords you a mirror to gaze on your own life in a way that none of us could. You've done a beautiful job with the start. Try something like the next paragraph. jeanne
I am writing this thesis on the theory that allowing my life stories to flow might be of some significance to those who might otherwise decide to give up. Using the gaze to interpret a life differently is one of the new tools postmodernism offers us, tools that can let us see things that weren't at all apparent at the time they occurred. The technical theoretical term for that is re-interpretation. And it fits in theoretically with the constitutive theory concept of interdependence between agency and structural theory, as well as between past and present.
Narrative 1 - Looking Back
Our family was itinerant laborers. Most of the times a howling wind found its way into the cracks of our tenant housing. My two sisters and I snuggled together in one bed at night to keep warm. Quite often our sleep was disturbed by one of us who decided to empty our bladder mid the mattress. Somehow we endured the stench until morning but facing our mother's wrath had its consequences. I got the blame because I was the eldest. My mother ranted on and on, "becuz you wuz the oldest and youse shudda woke the others during the night to use the bucket." Maybe I was to blame in more than one way.
You tell the story very well, Berthena. What a memory! but I cannot follow all that's in your mind. I got it that you were the oldest, but I also gather that you weren't very old, were you? And how old were your sisters? I also wonder about that last puzzling sentence. Are you looking back through the years? It sounds like you are. Go back and see if you can capture effectively what you were thinking there.
Normally, I would suggest that you tell the story straight through, then go back and analyze it. That's so you won't break the mood, the gestalt that is essential to the gaze, to trying to get the mirror to show you other bits you thought were forgotten. Or maybe you'll want to analyze as you go. I think I'd rather you just tell the story. I'll make comments on the theory as we go through; but I think I'd hate to have you break the story-telling spell. I've read that first paragraph of Narrative 1 a dozen times now. Maybe you want to leave the last sentence as it is, because maybe you don't want to break the spell. Your story, your spell, your choice, friend.
. . . .I think this addition falls under my last report titled, "The Value Of Looking Back." Notes to Self and Other.
I did not pursue a college degree until I was of retirement age. Whoa! How did we get from not attending college to graduation? I was looking forward to graduation the following semester. Catherine, one of my younger college friends, shared a class with me: The Black Adolescent. Our instructor was a stickler for timely reports and demerits if you were late. I think he intimidated most of the students, including Catherine. However, I had the audacity to question and disagree with many of his theories. I even challenged some of them in the classroom. One I distinctly remember was that he thought children as young as seven years should be taught about birth control. My point was children should have the right to a period of innocence. A few days later I met a disheveled looking Catherine in the hallway. When I asked how she was, she sighed," Oh, MS, I'm so tired, I feel like quitting, but I thought about you, and I guess I'll keep on going.
We need a little explanation in here that tells us how much fun you were having with challenging and questioning. And you need to conclude: My point was . . . and I think I was right. We have lost too much innocence, or he didn't address the issue, but my experience tells me so . . . whatever, but finish that little story trapped within the Catherine story.
Needless to say, I could have been bought for a nickel. I murmured some sort of reply and hastily made my way to my car. There I leaned over my steering wheel and convulsed with laughter. It wasn't exactly merriment that I felt, but irony. I think I looked forward to graduation with an illusion of grandeur. Not as gray-haired decrepitude older senior citizen. I remember saying out loud to the powers surrounding me, " Ain't that a hit in the head?" Lord, you are so funny!
Work on this last paragraph to make sure that we get it that Catherine used as an example that you could keep going when you were old and gray - the image built of that old modern gaze - but you were exploring a new postmodern gaze where learning is still the joy it might have been earlier. And it is changing the reinerpretation of your life. Not these words; keep to your spell; but be sure the point gets made.
To be continued . . . . .