Teacher/Student

"I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.... My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.... and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken." (Audre Lorde)

I've never been a natural at social outings...

One of the more unexpected parts of adulthood for me has been the experience of suddenly losing old patterns of behavior-- things, like social anxiety, that always felt permanently embedded in my personality. Somehow, just like snakeskin, the human body knows when to get rid of obsolete psychological functions. They can and often do simply slip out of use when the time comes for them to go.

The funny thing is, it's often our inability to believe something has changed that makes an old pattern end up overstaying its welcome.

Finding your voice means you are then called to use it. Part of the act of finding it, too, means you've been refining its usage, whether you're aware of the fact or not. When we are called upon to speak, we are quite capable of doing it.

I remember the tremendous feeling of power I found in the words of Audre Lorde, when she wrote (in the context of fighting breast cancer) that our silence does nothing to protect us. She was really pointing out that there is nothing for people to gain by drowning out what they know. The truth can not be hidden forever. It floats upward like oil in water. This is not always apparent, since prevailing forces spend much time making sure that critical voices are quieted, whatever it takes. Many countercultural voices of great value have been explicitly given the choice between speaking their truth and having their lives taken or the quality of their lives reduced through violence or threats of violence. Lorde argued that this is a false choice: the underlying truth is we have more to fear from negating our voice, and that whenever we respond to fear with silence, we have handed over the very source of what makes our lives livable to an ill culture.

That's an idea to keep firmly in mind.

My struggle with this now is subtle. It lies in not totally believing my voice works, in being thrust into positions where I am speaking but am not used to having my words publicly received.

Part of speaking in public and of being received is that Americans are not very used to participatory discussion. We tend to place performer/audience or teacher/student roles upon anyone presenting information. We want to know who's in charge, who is supposed to speak, who is supposed to be listened to, and who we shouldn't bother paying attention to. Imagine walking into a room for a lecture: many people would get automatically anxious, maybe even leave, if it appeared that the room was set up for small-group discussion rather than for a traditional presentation from a podium (something that doesn't demand more from us than our apparent attention...)

This is hierarchy. It is hard to challenge. I have found myself unsure of how to respond to feedback on my work lately, because I keep assuming I am being responded to as something of an authority figure. I know I am not an authority on anything but the glimpses of life I have lived through, and that teacher/student roles are very fluid things. The tricky part is bringing this view to the surface in conversation, asking questions about content and ideas and having discussion allow everyone involved to contribute.

Not much by way of solutions here, just thinking...

The Interview Game

This is something I've loved to play with people for a few years now. Simple as hell, but a good way to equalize conversation and to learn a lot about someone in a short amount of time. There are only three rules:

- You take turns asking questions.
- Answers must be 100% honest.
- You may not ask the same question back.

I learned through playing this game frequently that I like EVERYTHING about interviews! Making up questions, hearing answers, finding out what others want to hear about...

Which brings me to how happy I am to have had a couple opportunities in the past few weeks to go on radio shows and talk about ideas that excite me. The next one of these is this upcoming Tuesday night (February 12), from 9:00-10:00 PM on Cleveland's WRUW, 91.1 FM. This is Voices and Choices, a great radio show that's been laying out the facts about threats to and organizing around reproductive rights for years.

Neat! I wish more people got to have intense conversations over the airwaves. I would listen with great interest...

Dense.

This past week, Language Foundry writers Joseph Makkos, Carmen Tracy and me, and tech crew Jose Luna took a trip to New York City under a bad moon. We were heading out to read as part of a Small Press reading done monthly at Greenwich Village's Think Coffee (thinkcoffeenyc.com/cup-and-pen). The reading was sweet, though we rolled in 20 minutes late after a series of unfortunate events-- the kind that come with such severity, whimsy and synchronicity, it's hard not to read some sort of meta-narrative into them. Like, are we supposed to skip this trip entirely, now that the 60 mile-per-hour winds are blowing, and the electricity's gone, and all the male intuition around us has its red alert blaring?

But we made it, and the reading was great. If you're from New York, check out Think Coffee. I was really impressed with the list of upcoming events I happened to see advertised there. Friday night, there was a panel on alternative energy, including staff from Just Food (a great NYC organization that sets up CSA's and urban gardens: www.justfood.org).

I ended up stranded in the city for two extra days after buses into Cleveland were cancelled due to weather. I walked around a lot, saw many different sections of the city... New York's tough. I think I tend to assume that when you have such a density of people, you'll see a lot of interesting social interaction going on: the magic of chance meetings. Instead, I got the feeling that the density has really made people put up invisible auras around themselves to ward off possible conversation or contact. You can be standing a half-inch away from someone on the subway and never make any indication they exist. In fact, that's par for the course, the accepted way of doing things.

I was lucky to get to talk with several people I love who now live in New York-- Angela, Megan and Manuel. All of them had things to say about the social isolation of the city, most interestingly, that they felt cut off as artists and activists from other artists and activists, which is pretty crazy, given how I'd always thought both were alive and very well in New York.

Which they are, just not on the surface. What's on the surface is money, not people. People are everywhere, but getting to see their faces is so very difficult-- so much social expectation to navigate, so much fashion sense to cut through, so many rules about where you can sit and how much it will cost you.

It was good for me to see this particular dynamic, as depressing as it was. I've written about how suburban culture pushes people away from each other, and how I believe urban life in certain forms can combat that, just by people being in proximity to each other. But New York really underlined to me how in the end, proximity can help people get in each others' space, but it doesn't mean people will choose to relate with one another. Relationship really is about making a choice, and we seem to be excelling in America lately at coming up with mores that distract people from doing that.