#SOL17: Beginnings

Cliffs of Moher (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

“Tus maith leath na hoibre.”*  Irish Blessing

I.

A friend sent me, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, by John O'Donohue. It has become important, as it is so wise and I am in need of such wisdom. O'Donohue writes,

Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated...Goethe says that once the commitment is made, destiny conspires with us to support and realize it...A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.

The last line stays with me. Lingers. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect. 


II.

I have been waiting.
Even when I did not think that could be true, I have been waiting.

Waiting to hear the sound of Rob's footsteps as he climbed the flight of stairs from the garage like he did for 14 years.
Waiting for someone to explain how my husband could die so quickly, so young.
Waiting for breath to return that isn't tinged with pain.
Waiting for time to rewrite itself.
Waiting for God to come down from heaven and apologize.
Waiting for solace to rename this grief.
Waiting for my heart to restart.
Waiting, like those women who lean their elbows on windowsills and dream of other places, other times.


III.

Edward Said told us that we are often well past beginning when we are able to name it as so. I closed my dissertation with that observation. How could I know that I would embody it so fully 20 years later?

I am well past the beginning.





*"A good beginning is half the work.” 

Beginnings: Doorways We Walk Through (#SOL15, Day 28)

House by the Tracks (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

I.

Edward Said wrote that “a beginning is accepted as a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship is over” (1975, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p.76). Being beyond a moment often helps us to reframe it.

Tonight, I am wondering about the partial beginnings I have known.

In writing about the partially unknown beginning, Said explains “that we make and accept it at the same time that we realize that we are ‘wrong’” ( p. 78).  In reading Said's words, I think about the messiness of school.  We have accepted schools as they have been made.  Fictions and realities are co-constructed on a page, as well as in a classroom--in the school house. These fictions, these realities serve us little.

There are new doorways, we need to walk through if we can find the courage to do so. 

II.

In the current push for the Common Core State Standards and “tougher” normed assessments that dedicate weeks out of the school year for preparation and testing the folly of our ways is more and more obvious. Our need for certainty obscures that learning has always been a human enterprise, temporally located, fictitious and real.  

Yes, fictitious and real. 

Schooling though is not the same as learning. It never has been--even when we needed it to be so. The schools we have known--the ones we have made are ending. And tonight I know that another generation will not sit tight for the dusting off of something old, something too blue, something they no longer need. The signs are everywhere. 

Identity is composed in the joining of fictions and realities—be it on paper or in the lived-curriculum of a classroom.  Said explains that this composition holds constant “so long as we have language to help us and hinder us in finding it, and so long as language provides us with a word whose meaning must be made certain if it is not to be wholly obscure” (p.78). The meaning of school can no longer be made certain. 

What gets made in its stead, interests me, even though I know what we make can't help but be wrong.

Thinking About Rhizomes, Beginnings and Endings

The Middle of Something (M.A. Reilly, October 2012)

I.

I made the image above early in the morning--the same morning I was thinking about rhizomes.



II.

It's early morning also when I come in from making images and notice a tweet Gloria Jacobs sent last night--well at least last night via my time zone.

Two things catch my attention: 

• this idea of coming into the middle and
• the rather provocative use of the term, curation. 

I am wondering about the way we situate ourselves and how that placement establishes beginnings and ends. I also wonder about the practice of curation.  Curation suggests the preservation/restoration of some type of artifact by act and location. Whether we are speaking of museum curation, digital curation, sheer curation, healing--something is preserved and perhaps restored.  

III.

Curation is the juxtaposition of things; a hybrid that rises out of things placed alongside things. Gloria has me stretching this definition to now include people alongside people. 

Curation is an act of bring another into an ongoing conversation--into a specified context.


IV.

Later in the morning I read this by Bruno Latour (2009) and again am thinking about rhizomes and Gloria's tweet:

Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled" (p. 44).

It is the idea of action as a node and how it is a "conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies" that halts me, even as other ideas swirl around me.  


V.

I am standing in a stream, becoming aware of my position as the coldness of the water swirls around my ankles and calves even as I know that such awareness is fiction.


VI.

Are we not always in the middle? Is that not what makes death so pronounced and beginnings of life so contested? Do we mark beginnings and endings when we (re)frame action, separating a contextualized frame from the stream?  I wonder about this in light of teaching and learning and wonder how differently we might name these acts if we de-emphasized beginnings and endings, and focused more keenly on the middle of things.

VII.


Edward Said (1975) wrote that “a beginning is accepted as a beginning after we are long past beginning and after our apprenticeship is over” (p.76). Said explains “that we make and accept it [such beginnings] at the same time that we realize that we are ‘wrong’” ( p. 78).

Work Cited:
Latour, Bruno (2007-09-06). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) (p. 44). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Said, Edward. (1975). Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press.