Imagining A to Z: T is For Talking When You've Nothing to Say

T is for Talking When You've Nothing to Say

Talking About Malcolm X, II (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

John Cage  (1967) wrote:

                                                                           

                                                                              For something                         to

be             a                 masterpiece                    you             have             to             have    enough time       to     talk            when    you     have          nothing      to       say.

Talking About Malcolm X, I (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

I think about Cage's words as I think about the two men who are featured in these images. Both men were kind enough to allow me to photograph them while they talked. Originally from Brooklyn both were at that time living in Florida. They each lived in Crown Heights, but neither knew the other while there.  They met each morning at the ocean to talk, often about politics and the old neighborhood. One of those mornings I photographed them while they talked. On that day the topic was Malcolm X, Barack Obama, and how America might come to better understand itself by studying both men.  At the time Obama had not yet secured the Democratic nomination for president.  

Cage is right. Sometimes you just need enough time to talk, to see what surfaces, to come to say what you did not know you could produce. There are all kinds of ways to talk, yes?

Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.

Imagining A to Z: H is for Hack the Music

H is for Hack the Music

To hack is to cut away; to clear.

Sometimes clearing away in order to experience what has been in front of you or alongside you, but nonetheless remained hidden, requires a bit of hacking. A bit of clearing. Oddly, clearing can also be achieved by being in a place that is full. It is inside a fullness that clarity is achieved.

There is a story Jonah Lehrer tells in Imagine about David Byrne and it reminded me of John Cage's understanding about traffic, music, and silence and how being full can lead to insight, inspiration.  I think it has something to do with triggering the right hemisphere.  Anyway, here's Lehrer writing about David Byrne:

While Byrne celebrates the pleasures of biking—“ The wind in your face, the exercise, the relaxation”— he bikes mostly for another reason: it lets him listen to the city. He describes cycling as a form of urban eavesdropping, a way to overhear the hum of the streets. “When you’re stuck in a car, it’s like you’re in a bubble,” Byrne says. “You can’t hear anything that’s happening outside. But when you’re on a bike, you can tap into the atmosphere. You can feel people doing their thing. It’s a kind of connection.” When I met Byrne outside his office loft in SoHo, on a cobblestone street filled with fancy clothing boutiques, he was carrying a muffin and a helmet; his shock of white hair was perfectly vertical. He led me inside, up three flights of stairs, and down a grim, industrial hallway. (The building used to be a sweatshop.) It was a warm day, and the windows of his studio were wide open— the sound of the street seeped in. “I like it a little noisy,” Byrne says. “It reminds me where I am.”

from David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries.

In this interview with John Cage, he helps us to uncover the relationship between traffic and silence.

John Cage. Écoute film from doralance on Vimeo.

Lehrer, Jonah (2012-03-19). Imagine: How Creativity Works (Kindle Locations 2431-2434). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.

Remove the Records and Someone Will Learn to Sing

Trio (Central Park, 2010)

"A lady            from Texas               said:            I live in Texas            .

                                    We have no music    in Texas.              The reason they've no

music in Texas                                               is because            they have recordings

in Texas.                        Remove the records from Texas

                                    and someone               will learn to sing

                                    Everybody                        has a song

                                    which is                               no                                song at all  :

                                    it is a process             of singing                                     ,

                         and when you sing                            ,

                                    you are                                 where you are                               .

                                                                       

                                                                  John Cage

                                                            from  Silence, "Lecture on Nothing," p. 126.

Listening For Silenced Voices

During the opening weeks of the semester I met with Kathy, a single mother, who had recently started college after securing her G.E.D.  She told me, “I want to make something outta my life. Something for me and my kid.”  After class and over coffee Kathy told me that she had read her first book during the previous semester.  She told me this slowly, hesitantly as if she might be revealing too much, too quickly and I think perhaps she was.  She dropped her voice and said,  “It was a young adult book, but I really liked it. It was the first book I could read.”

She continued explaining that she “got mostly A’s” on her papers the previous semester in Developmental Writing I.  She also said that her teacher rarely commented about her writing.  That was when she asked me if I would read the same essays as she was considering then for her portfolio. I said yes and she then confided in a lower voice that she didn’t believe the grades her work received were warranted.

“I think she just gave me the grades because she liked me.”

I read and reread the essays Kathy gave me. The texts were brief, averaging slightly longer than a paragraph of two to three sentences.  They were rather lifeless texts, insomuch as the spirit that Kathy showed during our conversations outside of class was difficult for me to discern within the texts. As she had indicated to me, the compositions were each topped with a red A and the sparse cryptic markings of correction, such as c/s and awk.  The one essay that stood out had no teacher remarks or a grade.  It was the one essay that Kathy would later tell me she did not hand in.  In this essay she wrote about being a single mother receiving welfare, a topic she knew first-hand.  It was her most sustained effort of seven sentences and the one she kept silent.  In sharing this writing with me, I thought of her courage to tell her heart especially after she explained that she didn’t hand the essay in “cause it didn’t belong at school.”

Years later, I still wonder what belongs at school. Whose stories matter? It was 1994 when I wrote that opening to a ten-chapter inquiry about women and courage.  I was beginning course work toward a doctorate and teaching at a community college in NJ. I didn't know then that Kathy's understanding of what belonged and did not belong at school would be so prophetic. I would learn though that Kathy was right: Matters of the heart have no place in a standards-based world.

I've been thinking about the terrible constraint the Common Core Standards impose on learners.  I've read through the document a few times and I can't find the section that acknowledges that matters of the heart are central to learning.  Instead I find statements situated as writing objectives that say sixth graders need to "demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of three pages in a single sitting." Why three pages? Why in a single sitting? Is this behavior anticipated in preparation for the computer testing that is being developed for sixth graders by groups like PARCC?

Bass (Central Park, 2010)

Lost in all the racing about is what makes for great learning: caring relationships, courage, perseverance, diversity, autonomy, and love. As these cannot easily be tested we no longer find them in what is privileged curriculum via national standards. The more we privilege standards and measurements that narrowly test those standards, the more I think John Cage was right.  He was wise to discern the difference between a recording and music.  Instead of the real deal, the people in Texas have only the fake.  And I think that what is true about the relationship between records and music is also true between standards and learning.

The Common Core Standards wall out important learning by narrowly attending to lists of ten and by paying xenophobic attention to mostly "foundational" texts.  Additionally, now that national tests are being made based on these extremely narrow standards, the most students can hope for are records, not music.

It makes me wonder: if we were to remove the standards, might students not learn to learn?