Category Archives: Education

We were not allowed to put our elbows on the table or burp or fart while at the table. Although the old man could fart anywhere he wanted it being his god given right to do so.  We were not either to sing, at table, or hum.  One brother, when early still in years, took to humming uncontrollably.  He did not hum a tune exactly but made a sound like the hum perhaps of an electric generator.  This sound didn’t require that he move his lips.  It just came out of his head sort of and sometimes when he was ordered to stop it, he said that he didn’t know he was doing it.  I believed him since I felt then as now that all us boys were a bit autistic due to sensory deprivation.

We also had to sit erect at a proper distance from the table with no slouching allowed.  We were not to reach either for anything but if something was out of our reach we were to say, Please (the name of whoever was nearest the wanted item) pass X.  When X had been passed you were to say Thank You, and the person who passed it was to say You Are Welcome.  Sometimes this was about all the conversation we had at the table.

Of course, we were to keep our mouths closed while chewing and we were not to speak or hum or sing when our mouths were full. Also we were to chew our food before swallowing.  For a brief period we were required to count our chews, ten being the minimum number necessary before swallowing since the old lady had been influenced at one time by the Great Masticator.  But this command was too difficult to police and was given up as impractical.

Why I was assigned the chore, I don’t know, but there being no girls in the family, I had to set the table.  This was an exacting task.  The knife had to be to the right of the plate, which was to be centered on its place mat, along with the spoon to the outside of the knife, and on the left side was the fork with a paper napkin folded neatly and placed under it.  This made no sense to me since we were all right handed, and placing the utensil we mostly used—i.e. the fork—on the left required making, as far as I was concerned, an unnecessary transfer of the fork from left to right.

Meanwhile the knife, once employed, was placed cattycorner on the edge of the plate with the handle end always to the right.  Moreover, if you had a piece of meat such as a pork chop, you were not to cut the meat all up at once into bite sized bits so as to facilitate the meat’s consumption.  No, you were only to cut off bits of bite sized meat as needed.

Nor were you to make noises with your food, such as gargling noises with your ice tea.

When consuming soup one was not to pick up the bowl and apply it directly to the lips, nor was one to make slurping noises from the spoon.  Further when one neared the end of the soup one was not to tilt the bowl towards one to gather the last remaining fluid.  No, one was to tilt the bowl—contrary to all common sense—away from one.  Additionally, one was not to draw the spoon directly up and to one’s mouth, but away and then up to one’s mouth.

If one ate in this fashion, one would be recognized as having good manners—the purpose of which as far as I was concerned was to make eating as difficult as possible and to increase the possibility of one being yelled at for screwing up one of the rules.  If one was lucky enough to make it through a meal without screwing up, one stood, pushed one’s chair under the table and asked if one might be excused. 

What I was being excused for or from I have no idea.  But I was happy to be excused nonetheless.

It might have been a couple years ago, and I hear a couple of students talking.  And one says you know some people believe the pyramids were built by aliens and that’s where human life comes from.  And the other guy says, sort of pedantic like, well, that’s one theory. And I go to myself, for god’s sake and Jesus H. fucking Christ who the hell are these people that I am supposed to be teaching.

I wanted to grab the pedantic sounding guy by the neck and say, the idea that aliens built the pyramids, aside from being a statement based on profound ignorance, is not a fucking theory, but goddamn untrammeled and uncontrolled speculation of the most rampant kind.  Not that I am opposed to speculation, mind you.  The power and importance of what some people call speculative philosophy, meaning mostly continental philosophy since Kant, is under-rated by the master knit-pickers of English analytic philosophy, who have added nothing to the philosophical tradition except picked nits.

But something I did get out of college—and it goes along with ambiguity tolerance—is the importance of the fact/value, belief/fact distinctions.  Now I know these distinctions, arising as they do from empiricism, instrumentalize reason and make anything like wisdom, as a combo pack of knowledge and value, in the practical world impossible.  But that said, it alarms me to feel that many of my students today don’t know or care about these distinctions.  Marx—he too, is just another theory, and so is Freud, or Darwin for that matter; and because they are, like the question of the aliens and the Egyptians, just another fucking theory, it is pretty easy just to blow them all off.

But the real problem as I see it isn’t so much that students blow off scientific theories as theories but they don’t use these theories to think about themselves or to look into their own interiors in different ways.  While I stupidly set “The Truth” as the goal of my studies, I came with time to see the “Truth” is NOT OUT THERE.  No, it’s in here; or rather the determination to seek the truth is in here.  My goal was to have the strength to acknowledge that truth, whatever the fuck it was. 

For example, looking inside myself I realized that homosexuality made me uncomfortable.  Well, why not, when I went away to college, I knew what homosexuality was but in a completely abstract way.  I hadn’t knowingly seen a gay person till I got to college, and there was this one guy who hung out with the girls and had no hair on his legs.  So I mentioned the hairless legs to some guy as a matter of speculative interest and he said the guy with the hairless legs was a faggot.  Oh! Like things started clicking into place.

But during my seven years in the hole, during which I much doubted my own masculinity, I decided to look at the truth and did what I do on such occasions.  Read all I could get my hands on that had been written by gay guys.  I read Gide first and then Genet, and I’ve got to say the guy had me in the palm of his hand when he started out Our Lady of the Flowers, I think it was, observing how people hated other people’s farts but loved their own.  Real prison literature, from a guy who had nothing better to do than lie in his bunk with his blanket over this head smelling his own farts!

I came out of a lecture in my sophomore year of college and said to my good buddy, poking my finger in the air, Ambiguity tolerance.  I have got to cultivate ambiguity tolerance.  We had on three days just sat through three lectures on the Russian Revolution.  And I had found them unsettling, even upsetting.  I felt a sense of frustration because all the lectures had been different.

They were of course all about something called the Russian Revolution but one was about serfs or something like that, and one was about the bread riots or marches, and another about the various parties and by the time it was all over you didn’t know when the Russian Revolution actually took place, when it started exactly or when it ended.  So how could you even call the Russian Revolution an event if you couldn’t figure out such simple things as when it started or when it ended.

Ambiguity was a big word for me in my literature study, along with paradox, because literature was taught where I was generally from the perspective of what was called way back then, “The New Criticism.”  The New Criticism is probably more responsible for the formation of things called English Departments than anything else because it stripped literature of its relation to history and to philosophy, and set it apart as something that might be studied apart.  One looked for the meaning of the art object just in itself and not relative to when or where or why it had been produced.  The overall goal of this study was to say what a book or poem meant.

But mostly one had great difficult saying what anything meant.  One guy said this and another guy said that and nobody could prove or disprove anybody else, so the result almost invariably was ambiguity and/or paradox.  So that’s how I felt after those three lectures on the Russian Revolution.  I came out feeling that it was all ambiguous.  But this was not some book being ambiguous, but something that had actually the fuck happened, the Russian Fucking Revolution.  So if I were not to be upset by the ambiguity, which I was, I had to learn to tolerate it.

That was a big moment in my education though I didn’t at the moment see all the ramifications or consequences of it.  I saw that there wasn’t One Truth, but many, or rather there were many theories and each generated facts that were asserted as important by the theory itself.  Or to put it another way, whatever anybody said about a book or an historical “event” was the result of their original assumptions, sometimes clearly understood, sometimes relatively buried. And if you could dig those out what anybody had to say about anything was relatively predictable.

So I did learn something in college.  Maybe the most important thing.  Middle class education was not about morality or religion or values (just like they said) it was about knowledge, about how you knew something or how you didn’t.  And that was important because many of the middle class professions were based on the claim to knowing something whether they really knew it or not.