The Self-Examined Life

Jade S. and Queenie – you’ve won our Watcard gift certificates this week!  Drop by in September to pick them up.  🙂

This is most likely the last of our guest blogs from SJU faculty – but don’t worry.  We have a couple more blogs and a couple more Watcard gift cards to distribute!  This week’s post derives from Professor John Greenwood.  Professor Greenwood teaches many of the Human Sciences classes offered at St. Jeromes.  In the fall we offer one Human Science 101 class specifically for SJU students as a transition course.  We look at The Glass Castle this week from a Human Science perspective.  The aim of the Human Sciences is to deepen one’s understanding of and sensibility to the complexities and richness of the expressions of human living. To this end the Human Sciences incorporates the views from a variety of different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, such as literature, philosophy, history, theology, sociology, psychology, and political science. (http://sju.ca/programs-courses/undergraduate-programs/human-sciences).  Here is Professor Greenwood,

‘The Glass Castle’ in Jeannette Walls’ darkly naïve memoir doesn’t exist.  It’s the glass house that her eccentric father wants to build for his family in the desert.  But it exists in her experience as the power of the estranged imagination to transform the direst hardship into ‘adventure’.  For the father she tries very hard to believe in – despite his drunkenness and irresponsibility – is very much the directive power of her memoir and her life.  Hers is a life lived, she says in mentioning her Dad’s fascination with chaos theory, on ‘the boundary between turbulence and order.’  Ultimately, hers is a story about the transformative power of the imagination.  Or rather, the way our imagined life is an inseparable part of our actual experience: for each of us, what could be true is part of what is true.

The courage of the memoir is in its willingness to face up to the hard realities it recounts, namely a life of transience and poverty, of white trash growing up in the Appalachian coal country of West Virginia, among many other places.  It avoids the consolation of rational explanation or easy cynicism.  This direct response to experience is suggested by the relentless march of simple sentences:  ‘I was on fire.  It’s my earliest memory…. Dad came home in the middle of the night…. We were always doing the skedaddle…. I loved the desert…. Dad was a dramatic storyteller…. I never believed in Santa Claus…. We kids each slept in a big cardboard box…. I loved to go to the dump. We looked for treasures…. I tried to never complain.’  Like all memoirs, this one converts the raw material of life into story.  Unlike many conventional memoirs, it is very reticent about judging significance or drawing conclusions.  Its strange beauty is always beyond the outrage engendered by the circumstances.

The book’s autobiographical frame is important to us.  In the experience of our lives, and the story we tell concerning it, we live in the mystery between what we want to happen and what does happen.  Such answers as may occur to us about the meaning of events strike us as tentative, unclear.  We search for significance while suspending judgement.  With my Human Sciences background, I try to find answers to the issues raised in a text by referring back to that text.  Just as I try to find tentative and consistent answers to questions about the purpose of my life by referring back to my account of that life, and the questions I ask about it.

Could it be that what we account for as disorder is not really disorder at all?  Could it be that what we account for as meaninglessness is full of meaning?  That our failing to grasp the meaning in hardship does not mean that it is mere suffering and waste?  We live in the mystery between the question and the answer.  ‘Sometimes people get the lives they want,’ says the author as university student to her professor at Barnard College.  ‘If every action in the universe that we thought of as random actually conformed to a rational pattern,’ says the author’s Dad, ‘that implies the existence of a divine creator.’  He is impressed by the work at Los Alamos of physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum, who found that, in the transition between order and turbulence, ‘turbulence was not in fact random.’  There appears to be a pristine moral order at work in our world and in our life – that is, an order about the way things are that coheres with the way they ‘ought’ to be – despite our merely fleeting ability to glimpse what that order is.

Jeannette’s parents, her Dad a drunken dreamer, her Mom a sometime artist and self-proclaimed ‘excitement addict,’ are part of the ‘natural order’ of her world.  In her imagination, that order has a longing for beauty and a life of the spirit despite – or because of – a profound absence and emptiness.  The ‘Joshua tree’ that the family encounters in the Mojave Desert outside San Francisco is emblematic of this ironic flourishing amidst distress.  It is a tree, the author remarks, that is ‘beaten down by the whipping wind.’  It grows ‘in the direction that the wind pushes it.’  It is in a ‘permanent state of windblownness.’ Yet the author’s Mom thinks that it is ‘one of the most beautiful trees she has ever seen.’  Like that strange tree, her Mom ‘thrived in the desert.’  ‘She knew how to get by on next to nothing…. She was able to find water when no one else could, and she knew how little of it you really needed.’

I think the appeal of the author’s story of survival of the spirit, despite her raw and unforgiving experience, suits the darkness that currently inhabits the state of our collective psyche.  The world of our experience, abetted by our imagination, is an anxious one.  It is replete with word of disaster and distress, arriving almost instantaneously, and at any moment, from all quarters.  In response comes the rush of fervent, unconsidered opinion and ornate, politicized explanations that attempt to cover over our shock and grief with elaborate rationalizations.  If our response remains empathetic, it can only be personal – and uncomprehending.  What a challenge it is to find beauty and intention in apparent tragedy and disaster!

The author says this about her Dad: ‘But despite all the hell-raising and destruction and chaos he had created in our lives, I could not imagine what my life would be like – what the world would be like – without him in it.  As awful as he could be, I always knew he loved me in a way no one else ever had.’  Instead of the cheap plastic toys that other kids got for Christmas, her Dad gave her and her siblings the stars.  ‘He gave me Venus,’ she says.  Her Chistmases would be permanently distinguished from those of other kids.  ‘Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,’ Dad said, ‘you’ll still have your stars.’

Modern ‘chaos theory’ is really about the discovery of order – that there lies at work in what appears to us to be random or patternless phenomena a ‘deep structure’ or elegant and intentional design.  It suggests a directedness or purpose at work in our circumstances that lies beyond the bounds of our will – but not beyond the bounds of our attentive imagination.

The core idea is Socrates’ ‘self-examined life’ – we discover our predispositions in the questions we ask about ourselves.  Very honest, very personal.  Like the book.  A lot of what we have yet to find out about ourselves lies buried in our autobiography (and the way we tell it!).

—-University can be all about finding yourself.  Examining the unexamined life.  Okay all, the discussion this week and the winning entry will receive a Watcard gift card (randomly drawn), is lite and fun.  If you were to write your own autobiography, what would the title be?  Mine might be, “Are we there yet?”  🙂 .  Feel free to explain – or not.

Next week – p. 242-276