Unpacking silence: An informal exercise

April 13, 2008

Unpacking silence: An exercise for an online course, "The Uses of Silence,"

taught by Maggie Ross for the Church Divinity School of the Pacific's CALL program.

By Allan Roy Andrews

Without a doubt, some ancient Greek philosopher first framed the question, but I learned it from reading Heidegger; it goes something like this: “Why is there something, rather than nothing?”

To add to my bewilderment, today my son and I read on a car waiting at a traffic light in front of us this bumper sticker: “The best of things is not a thing.”

And many of us have been moved by the Vietnam era anthem made popular by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel—“The Sounds of Silence.” (Do I hear paradoxical intention in these words?)

I am objecting to the phrase that describes our course, “The Uses of Silence.” Silence is not an object.

My sense is that “use” is part of our commercial, materialistic, attainment society. To make myself more clear, you are going to have to indulge a bit of my professional rantings. Back in the 1990s, one of the slogans of the newspaper industry—as well as of the TV and radio business mavens—urged editors and reporters to give readers or listeners (called consumers in this mentality) “news they could use.” This became of course a slogan aimed at increasing revenue and marketing the daily news much as if it were a consumable commodity.

A little more than a decade ago I wrote a column criticizing the “news you can use” mentality. Let me offer a précis of my argument:

“Of what use to readers is news that enemy combatants are mercilessly killing each other? Of what use is it that a man with a gun in Utah went on a rampage and killed three people? Of what use to readers is the news that a father and son perished in an airplane crash in Wyoming last week?

“What these stories do is challenge our comfort zones and remind us of the frailty of human existence. Such stories should arouse compassion and move us to acts of charity and correction. We report the horrors of war in a faint hope that future wars can be averted.”

My complaint went on to defend the freedom of the press and to castigate the business school mentality that sees the sale of the news as the bottom line of journalism.

I hear echoes of that mentality in the phrase the “use of silence.” It’s as if this course is not going to have any value to those enrolled in it unless they can somehow devise a way to “use” silence in developing some programmatic spirituality.

Whatever silence is, it is not a marketable commodity; it is not something we can dress up with colors and images, not something we can package, sweeten and sell; it is not something we can promote or seek to turn into a profitable object; it is not another form of indulgences. In a word, it is not something we use!

I respond appreciatively to those who describe silence as a phenomenon in unity with language; the negative spaces of the painter; the spaces between the notes of the composer; the time of absorption at the close of a homily.

I prefer to think of silence as a revelation, or better perhaps, as a revealer. It is not something we discover or grow into or develop with varieties of practices. It is more of a gift; a gift we perhaps need to learn to accept or to open without cost or benefit.

The verse in the psalms that we all know usually translated: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 KJV), is better translated as “Desist, and know I am God” or “Be at leisure, and know I am God.”

To me the psalmist appears to be implying that silence (or leisure) can reveal something to us.

As I told Maggie, I’m still unpacking this for myself. I have to stop here. This is thinking by writing--perfect fodder for a blogger.

Taking an online course: "The Uses of Silence"

March 30, 2008

Uses of Silence

I enrolled in an online continuing education course called "The Uses of Silence" taught by Maggie Ross (aka Martha Reeves)for the Center for Anglican Living and Learning at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

I've taken several courses through CDSP, most of them in the Anglican Studies category. I latched on to this program many years ago when I signed up to read Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk.

For the most part, my classes have been stimulating and rewarding. The idea of going through six weeks of study with people whose faces I never see is a bit disconcerting, but it has advantages, too. No one gets bogged down in fashion, as it were, and most people have to think before they communicate (mostly by Blackboard messages and e-mails). At any rate, I'm using the course as an excuse to write something for this blog.

I've always been convinced that most of us--especially those who spend their lives in the media--are challenged by silence; in fact, many are frightened and made anxious by it.

Certainly, Maggie Ross is not one of those. She recently placed "Silence" in the Museum of Curiosity, a clever, comical, and conspiratorial BBC radio program. I say it's conspiratorial because under its guise of comedy and light-hearted banter, it weighs heavy in its considerations. Of course it is restricted by the superficiality it presses into 30 or so minutes.

Speaking as Martha Reeves on the March 26 program, Ross raised some interesting ideas and challenges--not only regarding silence but also regarding her own theological stance on things such as the definition of God and whether or not she believes that Jesus was the "Son of God."

Stop back here for further reflections.

Browsing and reading in the age of the Hyperlink

March 27, 2008

Reading and the Internet:

BROWSING AND READING IN THE AGE OF THE HYPERLINK
By Allan Roy Andrews

---

This column was originally posted on January 2, 2005, as part of a collection of columns.

ANNAPOLIS, MD -- (January, 2005) —

Remember the time you turned to the dictionary to look up a word and got sidetracked by another word or words along the way, eventually closing the book before finding the word you sought in the first place?

There's a subtle pattern in this activity that's important to understanding the modern mind of adolescence, and especially the mind of the adolescent reader.

That you are reading this column indicates, I suspect, that you are one of those persons who picks up a newspaper or goes online for leisure, sits, and relaxes by scanning some generally innocuous words. O.K., so you're doing so now with a computer, but, admit it, you still like to read the newspaper.

Modern adolescents are far less likely to engage in such activity.
A study of young readers and where they get their news—a study now almost a decade old— indicates that young adult readers claim to read the newspaper about three times a week, and that's the high reader group.

You've heard it from many quarters, no doubt, especially from educators, that today's teens simply do not read. It's wrong to call them illiterate, but they may be a-literate; that is, they know how to read but prefer not to.

That assertion, however, needs careful elaboration. High school students do not read the things they are assigned to read by teachers.

They are indifferent—notoriously indifferent—to reading anything that they are assigned to read or ordered to read by others.

They choose to go against most things intellectual that have an adult flavor, and that includes the adult habit of keeping up on the news through newspapers. Most teenagers, faced with the prospect of a fresh newspaper newly delivered and still encased in its plastic wrap, will pull out the comic section or the sports section--just as most adults did when they were learning to read the newspaper.
Nevertheless, the assertion that teenagers do not read is blatantly untrue!

Their reading, however, is more often than not in a form that many adults are only beginning to experience and understand. (As you are because you've come to this Web site to read what is basically an opinion column similar to many in the daily newspaper. To grasp what I'm arguing here, consider how you arrived at this Web site!)

When I say teenagers are reading in a different manner, I speak of a reading that depends heavily on hyperlinks, and hyperlinks are the basic stepping stones of reading on the Internet

Reading on the Internet is, I think, much like getting caught up in the exploration of words while looking up a specific word in the dictionary. One just never knows where the trail is leading, and while one has some control over which hyperlinks to follow, there is a path that becomes almost irretrievable once the first two or three links are opened.
In the old days of newspapering, the rigid principal of the inverted pyramid guided journalists, and while that principal is still at work in many news stories, its rigidity has been greatly relaxed. According to the inverted pyramid model, the most important elements of a story must appear in the first few paragraphs; in fact, the opening paragraph is to contain most of what is determined to be "new." Second and third paragraphs become supporting or buttressing paragraphs of what was introduced in the lead. For many people confronting the daily newspaper, reading beyond the first few paragraphs is unnecessary.

By virtue of its physical presentation to readers, the Internet also demands a "lead" and supporting information below. Many of the popular search engines charge a premium for the upper echelons of their listings; thus, one sees "sponsored results" topping off many search listings. These essentially are nothing more than paid-for leads.

Similarly, most news sites on the World Wide Web provide simply a lead to the story, often with a headline that is a hyperlink. One reads the lead and clicks the hyperlink to get to the story in its fullness.
The point of the matter is this: What we have known as "browsing" a newspaper (or even the library shelves, for that matter) has been revolutionized by the Internet and the Web. Browsing is no longer a leisurely scan or a chance glance; instead, it has become a kind of electronic hopscotch, a multiple checker game jump on an unlimited board with no squares.

The reading skills of a newspaper reader and an Internet reader are essentially identical, but the dynamics are miles—and generations—apart.

Hyperlinks, virtually unknown two decades ago, have become commonplace, not only in advertising and popular literature such as magazines, but in scholarly research. Look at a bibliography on a scholarly paper that's been written in the past five years. There's a good chance it has more hyperlinks than references to books.
Teenagers haven't stopped reading; they've simply stopped reading the way most adults were taught to read. Once we grasp this, we may recognize that the hyperlink is as revolutionary as the double helix.

The other side—perhaps the frightening side—of this sort of reading, of course, is that it tends to randomness and disorganization; some might even say to chaos.

Nevertheless, there are those who argue that genuine learning emerges more from chaos than from organization! But that's another avenue to explore, and I haven't reached that hyperlink just yet.

So, you wanna be a writer!

March 4, 2007

(Editor’s Note: This article is adapted slightly from a column written in 2000 and published by "The American Reporter," an online daily newspaper and reprinted in Connections, a publication of the Annapolis Area Christian School [Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2003]. It was written before the writer began teaching at Annapolis Area Christian High School, and is a response to the authentic e-mail that begins the piece.)

So, you're a writer wannabe!

BY ALLAN ROY ANDREWS

Dear Editor: 

I’m almost 14 and want to start a serious writing career. Can you please help me decide the best courses to take in High School to help me get a head start on my career? I would really appreciate it alot.
Thanks, 555.

Dear 555:

You ask a difficult question because “courses” are tough to choose to plan a specific career. Sometimes a course that seems least likely to help you turns out to be the best course for what you need or want. Even math courses can help a writer!

My advice has three steps (perhaps four):

Step 1: Read everything you can get hold of or are assigned in school.
Step 2: Read some more.
Step 3: Read even more. Don’t eliminate any area.

Read in science, literature, religion, computers, sports, geography, poetry (especially poetry), business, economics, political science, world history, journalism, romance (go easy on that one), science fiction, psychology, medicine. Read style books and grammar books (and don’t use words such as “alot”). Make the dictionary the most important book you own, after The Holy Bible, and learn how to truly read both books.

Read lots of magazines. Learn your way around your school library, the public library, and any college libraries close to where you live. Learn your way around the libraries with sites on the World Wide Web. Browse in every library. Read the magazines in the library. Become a friend of librarians; they may be the most valuable teachers you’ll have at school.

Read when you’re in the doctor’s office; read in the dentist’s or orthodontist’s office; read when you’re waiting to have your hair cut. Read in the bathroom. Occasionally, you can skip the shower and take a bath, just be sure to read when you’re in the bathtub.

Learn a foreign language (several, if you can), and read about the countries where that language is spoken. Don’t let anyone tell you there is such a thing as a “dead” language. Books keep languages such as Latin, New Testament Greek, Ancient Hebrew and Ugaritic alive. Learn other “languages” such as Morse code and American Sign Language. Study Native American languages, lots of them are hidden in the names and places you may travel to in the United States. Learn the languages of computers and especially the language of statistics.

You get the picture. Oh, yes, look at lots of pictures in books and magazines, too. Read books about photojournalism. Read books of cartoons, especially older ones. Don’t let “Calvin and Hobbes” or “Garfield” keep you from Thomas Nast or James Thurber. Did you know there is a Web site that gives access to every cartoon ever published in the New Yorker magazine, one of the most literary magazines ever published? [http://www.cartoonbank.com]

At those tough times when you’ve got “nothin’ to do,” and you’re tempted to drop into a soft couch and watch TV -- don’t! Read instead. Make it a habit to read before watching television. Read cereal boxes; read junk mail; read billboards; read road signs; read CD and DVD cases; read movie credits. Reread books you read in grade school. If you have younger brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces or neighbors, read to them or read with them.

Read maps. Oh! Please read maps, and don’t just read them when you have to find directions to get somewhere. Study them, memorize them, and keep them close to other things you are reading so you can understand expressions such as “the road to Mandalay,” and “the snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “a shooting in Sarajevo.” You never know where maps may lead you.

Set aside a regular time to write. Keep a journal. Write for yourself not for anyone else (unless it’s an assignment). Share your writing with an older person you trust: a teacher, a parent, an older brother or sister, even a pastor or priest or another thinker or writer you may know. Ask them not only to read your stuff, but also to edit it. Learn to trust good critics and not rely on people you know simply to say, “This is good,” or “I like it.”

Send your poems, short stories, essays, plays or news and feature articles to contests (you can find them listed in magazines such as Writer’s Digest, The Writer, or Poets & Writers) or to magazines that might publish them. Write for your school paper. Write for your school yearbook. Write for your school literary magazine. Write for your church or club or team.

Never, never pay to have someone read your writing or to publish your writing. Publications are supposed to pay you for your writing, even if they pay only in copies of what you write. At your stage, don’t write with an eye on getting paid. An old adage applies to writing careers: Do what you love to do, the money will come later.

Don’t worry about special courses. Concentrate on the courses you’re required to take and read everything you’re assigned. Write personal reactions in your journal to what you read. Go back over your reactions every so often and write later reactions to how you reacted the first time you wrote about a particular topic in your journal. Write poems and short stories based on your journal reactions. Take your journal everywhere you go and write in it about everything that happens to you or that you observe.

Make every conversation a kind of interview. Try to learn as much as you can about the people you meet. Make notes on what you see and hear and understand about them.

If you can afford it, take a summer writing workshop--one sponsored at a local college is best, I think--but don’t spend a lot of money on this and don’t worry if it’s filled with old people. You can interview them and write about them. Two books that were written as a result of chance conversations are Schindler's List and The Life of Pi, last year's winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize.

When it’s time for you to go to college, don’t look only at writing programs. Get a good general liberal arts education in a subject field you love, and if you still want to be a writer, think about getting a master’s degree in writing.

Remember that a writer emerges from a group of people who write much more frequently than from a group of people who only study writing. Even if you don’t wind up becoming a professional writer, you’ll be better at what you do because you write carefully and well.

Pray! Not that you’ll become a writer, but that you’ll grow in wisdom and grace as you grow in years. Try writing prayers. Read others’ prayers.

Show this email to a teacher or some other mentor that you trust and find out if they agree with what I’m telling you. This is what I would do if I were about to turn 14 and wanted to become a writer.

Don’t stop thinking. Don’t stop writing. Most of all, don’t stop reading.

My best wishes to you and your future.

Peace.

Teaching poetry as an outlaw and heretic

February 02, 2008

The powerful place of poetry in education and life

BY ALLAN ROY ANDREWS

[This is an updated and slightly revised version of a column posted in May, 2003]

ANNAPOLIS, MD -- Were I permitted to do so, I would teach my high school students nothing but poetry, not only during the month of April (national poetry month) but throughout the academic year.

I wrote this reflection in the wake of National Poetry Month in the United States in May 2003, and I still recognize that teaching nothing but poetry sounds a bit heretical, even to the literati among my colleagues at the private Christian school in which I teach.

In 2003, high school English and Journalism, along with “Creative Writing,” were my assignments as defined by the curriculum for 9th- through 12th-graders, and, frankly, there is much poetry that can be taught under the rubrics to which I’d been assigned. My English-teaching colleagues and I make forays into the worlds of British, American and international poetry. For these poetic opportunities I’m thankful.

But it isn’t enough.

We live in an era that masks and hides its poetry; in a time that disdains its poets; in a culture that dispatches poetry to the margins of consciousness generally classified as “nice” but not truly relevant. Poetry, while seemingly tolerated and accepted as a tradition worth visiting, appears to our culture as hopelessly irrelevant. To be sure, there is a subculture of poetry, mostly associated with a tiny portion of the academic world, where poetry slams and literary readings abound, but these fit better into entertainment calendars rather than into mind-shaping cultural movements and events.

In our world, finances, wars and personal relationships come and go with meteoric speed. The slowness that poetry demands often is perceived as ill-fitted to a modern mind. Poetry’s structured meanings often are seen as needlessly convoluted. For many, poetry--like its literary cousin, theology--has nothing to say to a post-modern world. Unfortunately, while many thinking Christians would balk at saying theology is irrelevant, they join the cultural mentality that relegates poetry to a category akin to dodos or unicorns.

Many educators, even those who love and teach literature, would begin to see problems with my suggestion that modern secondary instruction focus only on poetry. College preparatory curricula demand disciplined lessons in critical prose analysis, fact-finding, vocabulary and grammar as well as in a variety of writing styles and genres of literature. Our curricula are driven by an academic competition that cannot permit students to slow down, pause or take time for reflection in the midst of their studies.

This is where my notion of teaching only poetry becomes a bit radical. I endorse the words of contemporary Hispanic poet and teacher Alberto Rios, who in an interview called poetry an “outlaw” and noted that the art of poetry is “almost heresy.” His words are best quoted:

“And that’s in some sense what makes poetry exciting. It’s outlaw-like. It’s almost heresy. It’s saying, ‘Don’t go forward. Stop for a moment and understand where you’re standing. Just understand this moment.’ ”

Poetry makes us stop. Its brevity and its artistic presentation are to be savored and not raced past. Almost every teacher and textbook of poetry that I know suggests that poems must be read at least three times. I’d say at least five times, but that’s not the point. Good poetry should be read unceasingly, a suggestion akin to the Apostle Paul’s admonishment concerning prayer.

In the driving, hectic, achievement-obsessed world in which I live and work, brevity is known prominently in ads and sound bites. Savoring the lines of a good poem simply does not fit easily into a world occupied with Instant Messenger, video games, calculators, cell phones, reality TV, put-down comedy, lacrosse Moms and competitive athletic scholarships. There is no contemporary equivalent of Bart Simpson quoting poetry; there is no Bill Gates of iambic pentameter.

The poet and critic Robert Bly once curtly concluded that Americans haven’t grown up and are still singing nursery rhymes. Newspapers long ago gave up publishing poetry with any regularity, generally suggesting it lacks news value (Contrarily, The New York Times in 2003 began running poetry in its Sunday magazine once more, and if one currently searches The Times carefully, one can find news about poetry, but not a great deal of poetry itself). Aptly, poetry is an outlaw; it has become a form of heresy among the techno-economic worldviews that motivate much of modern culture.

Even in the evangelical Christian world in which I have worked, poetry largely is disdained unless it runs toward greeting card verse with some sort of evangelistic witness to a sinful world or chronicles the sinner-ego emphasis of a contemporary praise chorus. Check the popular literature of contemporary evangelical Christianity. I can’t recall the last time Christianity Today published a contemporary poem (in any of its stable of publications) or that World magazine interviewed a working poet. This seems a rather disjointed phenomenon, given that The Bible, the book on which evangelicalism asserts its rootedness, contains vast sections of poetry in its Old Testament. And some of Christianity’s most theologically rich poetic words crop out of the New Testament.

To be sure, there are Christian poets at work; however, their forum of expression lies in obscure little magazines. There are not many homes with copies of Image or Christianity and Literature on the reading stand. There are not many graduates of Christian schools looking for creative writing scholarships. Even in the wake of the so-called evangelical publishing boom of recent years, poetry gets little attention. The commercial success of pretribulation apocalyptic literature has not translated into more widespread exposure for poetry. Christian educators, I fear, have mishandled badly the importance of poetry in our lives.

Don’t read me wrongly; I’m not trying to be a Luddite calling for a return to pre-technological education (or to pretribulation education, for that matter). The famous poet W. H. Auden once made that mistake when he claimed the camera and the internal combustion engine had become the bane of modern life. What would he have thought of plasma TV and NASCAR? Nor am I on some pop-cultural crusade to have our culture recognize and appreciate the poetic voices hidden in rock music and rap (instructive though this might prove). This path, I think, may represent the poetic immaturity that Bly has identified with Americans.

Rather, I’m calling for recognition of poetry’s power to shape the mind and spirit. Therein lies the “outlaw” nature of poetry that Rios perceives. Poetry, I’m arguing, may be our culture’s neglected path to knowledge and wisdom. Poetry is the arena of philosophers and world-shakers, not the stuff to be banished to the “Kids Korner” like some ersatz Sunday School materials.

When I began teaching in a public institution many years ago, a colleague who taught philosophy insisted that his students read regularly from an anthology of poetry. The instructor had no interest in rhyme, meter or any of the traditional elements associated with poetry; he wanted students to grapple with ideas, and he found the most accessible grappling was with those who wrestle with words--the poets.

A journalist colleague of mine once told me that as a youth he read everything he could find written by Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and e. e. cummings. Their poetry had a tremendous influence on his life, he said, especially during that critical search for identity that marks the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Unfortunately, he confessed to not having read poetry in several years.

This exposes a problem in our teaching of poetry. We treat it as a canon of wisdom that all must be exposed to in youth, but we neglect its power to challenge and shape our current thinking and opinions. The conventional wisdom seems to suggest we outgrow our need for poetry once we’ve moved beyond nursery rhymes and the so-called schoolboy poets, or once we’ve been force-fed Britain’s bards and poet laureates.

Or perhaps we fear poetry’s power.

When a group of poets scheduled to read at the White House early in 2003 were dis-invited because they suggested they might read words of protest to policies of war, we may have witnessed an unwitting nod to the power of creative poetry. Can poetry actually influence political and moral decision-making?

You bet your sweet sonnet it can! (And, by the way, the nation’s press that so diligently reported the dis-inviting of the poets made no effort to uncover what the poets planned to say. Their poetry couldn’t possibly have news value, the editors must have decided.)

In 2002, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Ruth Walker made a gentle plea for a “marketplace for poetry.” She said, “ . . . I somehow want to connect Shelley's reference to poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ with Jefferson's preference for newspapers without government over government without newspapers. Would we be more wisely governed if we had more poetry in our daily papers?”

Walker points to a power in poetry beyond art.

In Rios’ words, poetry can force us to stop and understand where we are standing. Furthermore, we can learn from analyses such as that of former White House press secretary and PBS documentary journalist Bill Moyers, who in his book The Language of Life called poetry “the most honest language I hear today.

“Poetry is news,” Moyers asserted, “news of the mind, news of the heart.” So powerful is it, Moyers said, echoing Walker’s conviction, that “democracy needs her poets.”

My conviction holds that poetry is a way of knowing, an epistemology, for those with a philosophical bent. Poetry probes the mind and the heart in ways that science, technology and economics cannot.

In 2003, Margo Jefferson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said under the headline “News from poetry”:

“As for the question of poetry's role in the public realm, why does the United States seem to be the only country in which artists still argue about whether politics can coexist with aesthetic complexity? It can. And poetry can be the only sure conduit to emotional truths that politics has done its best to shut down.”

One could easily substitute education or religion where Jefferson wrote politics. (One could easily substitute economics or journalism or science or social science, as well.)

Just to set the classroom record straight: Is there a better way to learn vocabulary than to be exposed to great poetry? I think not. The syntax and punctuation of poetry demand an understanding of the structure of English sentences. One can learn an immense amount of grammar from studying poetry--and lots of other stuff taught in textbooks, too.
___________________

Allan Roy Andrews taught journalism in the high school at Annapolis Area Christian School in Maryland when he posted this essay. He can be contacted at aroyandrews@gmail.comReferences:

a) McInnis, Susan. ‘Interview with Alberto Rios,’ Glimmer Train. 26: Spring 1998. 105-121. Accessible at http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/interviews/page6.html

b) Walker, Ruth. ‘The marketplace for poetry,’ Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 2002. Accessible at http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-84026550.html

c) Moyers, Bill. The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. New York: Doubleday, 1995.

d) Jefferson, Margo. ‘On Writers and Writing: The News from Poetry,’ New York Times, May 11, 2003. Accessible at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFD61F3DF932A25756C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=