Anti-Education

"All kinds of utilitarian considerations will be brought forth to advance the cause of technology. Some of the mandarin intellectuals themselves may unwittingly slide into forsaking spiritually meaningful learning for the more certain rewards of specialization and routine research."

--Fritz Ringer.

Spiritually meaningful?!

And:

"Culture and knowledge had been uncoupled from values and ethics and subordinated to "material gain under a crudely understood earthly happiness"."

Now, this "uncoupling," which is surely related to the emphasis on science and the liberal view of the individual, doesn't just come about innocently, does it?

In economics: 

"That it [economic orthodoxy] afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."

--Keynes.

And what of your own experiences? You see the pressure on younger faculty building every day, the performance sheets, the constant evaluation and self-monitoring (a technique by which power is exercised); how the administration is hell-bent on creating a two-tiered "track" system that would consign the workers/teachers to a life of constant stress while at the same time creating a lot of anxiety for those who have to publish to avoid the "lower" track. Institutional divide and rule.

This constant need to tick boxes, to show people with money, other (bigger) administrators, that everyone is busy, doing something. Productivity is up, numbers are up. Couch everything in the language of the salesman and the job is already half done. Entertain the customers/students. They see through the whole shambolic farce that it is anyway. no, that's not right: they don't know any better. They think that that's the way it is and the way it's always been.  

But the real horror of the system lies elsewhere. At other universities and in the schools themselves, students are being ground down and fleeced all in the hope that they might-somehow-be able to make a living once they come out the other end. And the faculty at these universities, not those who are simply mercenaries, are being converted into factory workers. 

Of course, you will be told: why complain when people in the "real world" have it far worse? This, too, is a way of exercising control.

Today you received an e-mail about some project/conference/scam in Berlin: 

Present your research project, business plan, entrepreneurial or social initiative that is relevant to the world of today-in 3 minutes! 

When I think of all that is wrong in the false world of academia in the land of the pure..well, that one line encapsulates a significant part of it.

Everyone must get on the circuit, circulate, add to the "production" of knowledge, be "visible," present yourself, your "ideas," hop on and off the conference bandwagon. To just sit down and watch the world go by with a Jacob's Club (Orange) and a book; to want to do that, to have the resources and guile to be able to avoid being noticed, being spoken of, spoken to...is simply not permissible. Stand up and be counted! Fight the good fight against barbarism, illiteracy, the unenlightened, etc., etc.

Oh, the hilarity and naivete of it all; it makes me howl with laughter and bend over double in joy to witness the seriousness with which these fools take themselves.

~ 

Was stunned by Gilead. Hard to know what to say about it. Maybe some other time. 

After the heat of the day, the cool evening air and the crystalline clouds. Something had ended in your starred heart. We live without knowing.

These last moments rich in their suggestiveness. The older you become the more time is rolled into a single moment. Memories of previous summers suffuse this instant; your hands are loose and open...

What is there to hold on to?

There is deep silence. An unseen dog barks some streets down and then stops for no reason. A child laughs somewhere. Then from up in the hills you hear a train on the tracks. And then, as the breeze picks up and the leaves rustle, you hear the gentle tingling of wind chimes, a signal of presence. But all these sounds are heard individually and they form no " picture", only a pure succession of isolated notes. They are the faint and ghostly reminders of the life not lived. Nothing on earth remains or will ever remain but these cycles of appearance and disappearance- and yet we still dream of gold.

A drain pipe is illuminated by the last flaring of the sun. The light forms a solid horizontal bar of gold above the stone and the shadows. But before long it too is absorbed in the great samsara.

In my coat pocket I carry my ticket with the printed details of my departure. The stars have never looked so beautiful, the rose never so ephemeral. Everything comes into the summer light in time, for a time. Khayyam saw it, this brief, flashing world: drink, and drink well!

Wonder Years

There are many hours in a single day, taking the same shape over the years, slightly distorted, out of place with time. There are different kinds. The wide door leads into the days of our lives.

The hours are sometimes arranged in rows; sometimes not.

'The light in each room of the house is different
But the light of the whole house
Hangs suspended in eternal afternoon.'
---K. Irby.