"And we all shine on . . ."

A lot has happened since I last wrote, and I have a list of posts (on dissertating, on NEMLA) that I plan on submitting to the blog very soon.

For now, however, I want to talk about something else. Two years ago today, my beloved father-in-law passed away. This anniversary is hitting me particularly hard, so I don't honestly have all that much that I can say right now -- words aren't coming that easily, and there are so many stories that I could tell.  Too many for a single post though, and they deserve more justice than I can give to them right now.

What I do want to announce, however, is that my incredible mother-in-law has written a beautiful book about Mark, and it's going to be released tomorrow. It's called The Humanity of Medicine: A Journey from Boyhood to Manhood, and you can find it here. 

 For those of you who don't know, Mark survived what should have been terminal cancer as teenager, and went on to have a miraculously long and rich life. He was diagnosed again with malignant melanoma in October 2009, and while the months (and especially the weeks leading up to his passing) were among the most brutal our family has ever experienced, I will never forget what he told us when we saw him shortly after the diagnosis.  He reminded us, in his gentle way, of all the cards stacked against him throughout his life. He was told he wouldn't survive cancer as an eighteen-year-old, and yet he did. He was then told that he wouldn't have children because of the chemo, but he went on to marry the love of his life and they have not one, but three amazing kids. He was told he wouldn't live long, but he lived cancer-free for about thirty years. He reminded us of all of these things, and he told us that he was going to fight hard to beat the cancer again, just as he did before; but if it turned out that this was his time, he told us that in his mind he felt he'd already lived a truly blessed and rich life.  Here he was, facing down his own fears and confronting them with grace, but also finding a way to lead his family through the storm; truth be told, he never stopped being a healer, not even on his death bed . . . one of his last lucid conversations involved him asking his doctor (who had known him a long time) how she was holding up.  He somehow found it within himself to be strong in the face of immeasurable sorrow and fear -- and not even just then, in 2009, but throughout his entire life. He chose to live his life by looking forward rather than over his shoulder, and that was, in no small part, what he sought to give and instill in all of us in the last months that we were able to spend with him.  

I can't express how glad I am that this book is going being released tomorrow. I just made the discovery a few moments ago, and it struck an immediate chord.  Loudly and clearly, it reminded me to spend tomorrow/today trying not just to remember and grieve for the amazing person I was so blessed to know, but to live by his example, to try -- as best I can -- to "take a sad song and make it better" (Mark's motto). Because truthfully, we control precious little in this life. The only thing we seem to have any control over is the way in which we digest and respond to our circumstances.  True joy lies within those choices -- even in the face of sorrow and loss. This was a truth that Mark knew deeply and well, and I hope that I can do him proud by striving to live in that awareness. 

Making Our Way in the World: Musings on Medieval and Modern Maps and GPS

As my dissertation deals in many ways with medieval travel and medieval maps, I've been thinking a lot about my own travels and use of maps. Perhaps some of these musings will make their way into the introduction of my dissertation eventually. For now, I will begin to sketch out some of my thoughts here. Please let me know what you think.

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I've been on two different road trips across the United States. The first was when I moved from California to Rochester, and my old roommates travelled with me across the middle and north of the country. The second was when my mother moved to Rochester, and she and I drove her car down the west coast, across the south, and up the east coast. Both trips were beautiful and serious and silly, just as road trips should be. The topography and company was obviously different, but our mode of navigating was also quite different. My first trip was before I owned a GPS, and we made our way with an atlas, various state and regional maps, and (when Internet access allowed) google maps to help us out. My second trip was with a GPS in tow. We had a US atlas for good measure, but our days were spent following the green line across the screen of the GPS as we followed the highways through the windshield. Each trip was successful, both in the quality of the experience and in the fact that we arrived at our destination, but I can't help but think of the ways in which having a GPS on that second trip changed our relationship to the land around us. I have always felt that driving to a new home helps to make the move, and the distance, real. When my family moved from Alaska to California in my seventh year, we drove our truck from campground to campground, through the Yukon and down the 101. I had flown back and forth many times before that, but that drive lent a gravity to the move that those flights never did. But on that trip Mom and I let my father deal with navigation. He attempted to interest me in his various, haphazardly folded maps, but I was more interested in what was outside the windows than what was on those complicated pages. On my later grown-up trips, I had a more direct relationship with the planning and the map-looking. And thus I noticed the ways in which locating our own position in the country was different due to the different navigational methods.

Psalter World Map, c. 1260

With a map, one has a sense of the larger landscape. Even when a map contains a large dot and a "you are here," there's a greater framework for the individual location. That dot is in terms of the big picture. Context may vary according to the map in question, but context is nonetheless abundant. The surrounding area is available, as is an image of how different areas and landscapes and paths connect with each other. When I teach about medieval maps, I talk about how world maps relate to worldview. Maps depict the world metaphorically as much as literally, and medieval cartographers were no less making an accurate worldview as modern ones. In medieval maps, the worldview being so carefully depicted was different from ours, and the aims of the maps are therefore different, but the fact that they give a sense of worldview is the same. If anything, medieval maps are more clear about that fact than modern ones, with the modern notion of depicting the world as it "really is." What medieval world maps can teach us is how constructed maps really are, how much they can tell us not just about how to get from one place to another but also about the cultural mindsets that went into their creation. When my friends and I planned that first cross-country trip with maps and atlases, we gained some of that sense, whether consciously or not. We noticed the shapes of the states and therefore were confronted with the historical and geographical features that forged those boundaries between the individual puzzle pieces that make up this country. We saw how sometimes lakes or mountains manage to cross those borders as well as create them. We became aware of the things that are included in these maps, and the the things that aren't. At any given point in the trip, we could envision our relation to the rest of the trip as well as to all of the areas of the country outside of our path.

When I went on my second cross-country trip, we got some of this as well. I did examine an atlas from time to time, but for fun instead of for practical reasons, since we allowed the GPS to guide us completely. My father having recently passed away, and my mother's move occasioned in response to his death, the trip was cathartic for us. Since my dad loved maps so much, having some along felt right. But, without Dad in the car, the GPS navigated for us. It was a leisurely trip, and we made lots of stops to visit relatives and see sites of historical and/or geographical interest. And our GPS guided us faithfully every step of the way. I love that GPS, and it has never failed me. Mom and I even joked that it saved our good relationship, since getting lost can wreak havoc on family members in the close quarters of a compact vehicle. Yet I began to realize, as we followed its rather insistent directions without question, that watching the GPS screen was giving me a completely different view of the country than looking at a map would have done. A GPS only shows the direct area around the vehicle, and with only the most basic place names and other such features. A large enough river or lake might merit a blotch of blue on the screen, but most topographical features are excluded totally. The most notable feature of the GPS is the green line to indicate that you're going in the right direction (or the dreaded red line to warn you that you're going in the wrong one). In some ways, a map like this might make clear how far from the actual landscape maps actually are, its stylized representation of the country bearing so little resemblance to the view outside the car windows. But there's something else that distinguishes a GPS from other varieties of maps. A GPS gives a teleological view of geography. It's purpose is not to represent the country or region or state or town or neighborhood with any kind of totality but instead to get the driver from point A to point B. Larger context is shed and only the details that serve the purpose of the final destination are included. Anyone who has used a GPS has become painfully aware of this fact when attempting to make an unexpected detour. Dare to stop for a bathroom break or for lunch or to make a spontaneous visit to a roadside attraction, and the harsh tones of a phrase like "Turn back where possible" will repeat insistently until the passengers are forced to turn the sound off until back on the original path. As useful as the device is, it really is about the destination rather than the journey. The people of the Middle Ages had something for this purpose as well: the itinerary. Meant for pilgrims who needed to know how to get to a specific destination, itineraries were long, unfolding maps depicting the road and roadside details needed to find one's way from one place to another.

Sections from an Itinerary to the Holy Land by Mathiew Paris, 13th century

The aesthetic differences between the mappa mundi, or world map, and the itinerarium peregrinorum, or pilgrim's itinerary, are immediately apparent, as are the differences of purpose. While mappae mundi are aesthetic creations and visual encyclopedias that tell the viewer about his/her location in terms of a larger historical and spiritual narrative, itineraries give the traveler a means by which he/she can accomplish a journey. The former is of little practical use when trying to find one's way, though it may in fact have given people a sense of finding their way in a more cultural and spiritual sense. The second may give some practical guidance to the traveller (though, looking at itineraries, I am dubious of even how much they would have helped a medieval traveller). Finding one's way and locating one's self in the world are the province of each, but in a different way. Perhaps they give a different sense of narrative as well as geography. The way in which biblical and classical and contemporary history overlap on the world maps tells us something about the view of history such maps relate. They're densely textual, but the each piece of text only has meaning in terms of its spacial relationship to other bits of text or features of the map. The visual and the textual are inextricably bound. Itineraries are often colorful and beautiful, but they still give a sense of narrative as linear. They move the viewer from a beginning point at the bottom, before which there is nothing, to an endpoint at the top, after which there is nothing. A GPS is different, of course, in that the destination can be changed on a whim, and that the traveller can enter a new destination for each portion of the journey, but it still privileges destination. The device will do nothing until a destination is entered, and it only functions for any length of time when the car is on and it can be plugged in (helpfully reminding the user not to drive and work it at the same time). It is, in that way, for no other purpose than getting from place to place. Its ever changing screen allows for no contemplative functions, and that's OK. It serves its purpose well. Yet comparing different kinds of maps and navigational tools reminds me of the different ways in which we relate to our geographies, our histories, our lives. As I play with my apps from National Geographic World Atlas and Google Earth and watch as the screen zooms in from globe to individual location, I wonder about the multiplicity of ways in which we can view the world around us.

Reducing the Medieval (with an anecdote about dissertating!)

Waimea 

Apologies for the hiatus, folks. I am in the last two weeks of dissertation editing before I file (o.O).  I feel, at the moment, much as I felt when I (stupidly) decided to swim at Waimea Bay a week before surf season started despite the black flagged beach and the warnings of a dangerous shore break (n.b. DO NOT EVER DO THIS). Despite these warnings, swimming at this beach seemed like a great life decision, and so I did.  My solution to dealing with the large waves crashing ominously close to shore was to time my entry in between the dangerous waves, swim out a nice distance, and tread water far enough away from shore so that the waves wouldn’t toss me around and damage my person.  I did this for as long as I could until I began to get tired and pruny – about an hour or so.   My hope is that my exit from the dissertation editing will leave me with at least a shred more dignity than what remained after I tried to exit the ocean on this particular day.  To say that I “exited,” in fact, assumes far more dignity than what I actually maintained.  “Projectile vomited by Mother Nature” is probably a more accurate description.  It certainly comes closer to capturing what I looked like as I emerged, like a geriatric Swamp Thing, from the chop.

So, here’s hoping I look a lot better on the 13^th of March than I did at Waimea a few Novembers ago! I would post comparative pictures, but a) there were, quite mercifully, no photographs taken on that fateful day at Waimea and b) there WILL be no cameras anywhere near me on the 13^th of March.

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In the meantime, I wanted to share a few thoughts that came to me as I commented on student questions a couple weeks ago in my medieval literature course.  My students are fantastic, by the way, and have managed to make the past few weeks a truly innervating teaching and learning experience – even though we are only three in number!  One of my students brought up Eve in a recent comment, referring to her as many tend to do — as arguably the most negative exemplar for women in medieval iconography, the binary opposite of the Virgin Mary.  In truth, however, Eve’s treatment in medieval literature, as John Flood has recently observed, is far more nuanced and – in several cases – more deeply sympathetic than we’d necessarily assume.  My student was hardly at fault for not realizing this, since the negative portrayal of Eve in the Middle Ages tends to take the foreground more often than not.

The process of clarifying my student’s understanding of Eve’s representation in medieval literature, however, got me thinking about reduction and its imbricated relationship with proximity.  It is so much easier to strip away nuance —from a person, a religion, a culture, etc. — when the object in question is distanced from the viewer.  I’d even go so far as to say that the farther away you get from an object, the easier this process becomes.  Many pre-postcolonial theorists who examine medieval literature have noted as much about the treatment of cultural others in medieval European literature (the work of Sylvia Tomasch comes immediately to mind), and my dissertation argues, in part, that the stark binaries that appear in so many Middle English crusades romances are maintained specifically because of this relationship between proximity and reduction.

The conversation with my student, however, reminded me that this ability to be reductive by way of distance can also apply to 21^st century perceptions of the Middle Ages. As John Ganim has observed, the Middle Ages as a time period is both consistently and conspicuously Othered, and scholars who invest themselves in the study of it will always be at odds with the reductive approaches that have been endorsed and perpetuated for centuries.  Because of this treatment, however, studying the Middle Ages can allow students to become more aware of how we are conditioned— and how we condition ourselves — to consider and quantify “things in the past.”  Perhaps one of our broader purposes of teaching these dusty tomes, then, is to invite students to challenge their own tendencies to strip nuance away simply because the object in question is – and always will be – profoundly alien.

"Do you feel different than you did yesterday?": Identity and Growing up

This past week I've turned 30, and I've been thinking a lot about age. In my culture, I've reached a new landmark. I'm now in a different category. Perhaps I'm even an adult (though it's hard to be sure). Yet I remember clearly being a child, being a teenager, turning 18 and 21. Those selves were different, and yet they were also me. I am different, and yet I am still them as well. When I look at the images of me in my prom pictures, first drivers license, or kindergarten school photo I know what thoughts lie behind the eyes of the girl in those pictures because I was the one thinking them. Since I teach and write so much about identity, I think it's perhaps useful to think a bit about how age and identity interact in ways similar to and different from other identity categories.

Aging is inevitable; as long as we're alive we continue to age. (Whether we mature or not is another story . . .) And yet I find it important to remember earlier ages, to remember what it was like to be in different positions because of age. Children are disenfranchised and vulnerable, at the mercy of those to whom fate has delivered them. I was lucky enough to have wonderful parents to care for me, but not all children are fortunate in this way. And being a child is scary even in the best of circumstances. Everything is new, and children have little power over their lives, little understanding of the world around them, and little ability to communicate their ideas.

I remember learning to write my name with my grandma. I must have been about three. I felt terribly unjust providing the "i" with dots and leaving the other letters dotless, so I took a bold and unprecedented step and dotted every letter. My grandmother, a wonderful teacher and very patient person, erased the extra dots and explained to me once again how to spell my name. I tried to explain to her that I did understand how to write my name, that I hadn't made a mistake but instead had made a difficult choice in the name of justice. As you might imagine, I simply didn't have the words. Though this is a silly example, I still understand that struggle to express my opinions and beliefs to others. In fact, much of grad school has been about learning to put into words those things that I've always cared about. Dissertation-writing is so painful at times because it's an attempt to think things that haven't yet been expressed and find a way to express them.

I also remember my first day of pre-school. I was thrilled to be entering a world of learning, but I was also painfully timid. I sat at playtime doing nothing. I wanted to go across the room and get the play-doh, but I wasn't sure whether or not I was allowed to play with the play-doh. That distance between my chair and the toy cabinet was too perilous to cross, so I sat alone while other children laughed and played. Yet that day I came home and announced to my parents that I would be a teacher one day. In the safety of my own bedroom, I grew bold in my newly attained school-wisdom. I lined up my dolls and stuffed animals and taught them everything I'd learned. Over the years, I have worked hard to bring out the assertive teacher-self in me. Most of the time, I have succeeded, but sometimes the scared little child in the big and frightening classroom of the world returns without warning. Not only do I remember what it's like to be her, but sometimes I am her again.

I could write endless examples of such moments in my life, both meaningful and mundane. I could write about the sense of desperate grief and dismay and terror when my friend was stolen from her bedroom at night when I was 11 while her mother slept down the hall. I could talk less seriously, and explain my feelings of righteous validation when it was discovered that my first car was stolen (and totaled) by a bunch of 30-somethings rather than by "stupid teenagers," as all the adults had assumed. I could talk about my first breakup or about my cross-country move or the moment I discovered that my father had died. All of these represent different moments of my life. I can neither fully exist in those moments again nor be fully detached from how I felt in them. They work together to make up me.

Time is funny that way. Age is funny that way. We all move inexorably from childhood to adulthood, whatever those terms mean. In fact, age might be the only way in which everyone, without fail, drastically changes identity categories. All one must do is stay alive. At different ages, we exist differently in the world, and the world treats us differently based on how long we've been in it. Of course there are countless factors making up our identity position at any one moment. Our race, class, sex, religion, etc. all impact identity position, as does individual personality. And different times and places define ages differently, as they do these other factors. But age is unique in that any given age is fleeting. We all move from one age to the next and can make the choice of how to treat those people younger than we (or, for that matter, older than we). Perhaps if we can consider how it felt to be in a different identity position because of age we can go a step further and think about how it might feel to be in a different position for other reasons. Perhaps if we learn some compassion for our younger selves, we can extend that to compassion for other people as well. Perhaps it's clear that, while I've grown more cynical with each year, I'm also still the same idealist who wanted to give every letter a dot.

Is there a teacher in this class?

Yesterday I had an unusual first day of the semester. I have never felt so prepared, never so calm, about a new class. I've had the syllabus printed and collated for a couple of weeks, the library workshops booked, the books in the bookstore, the e-reserves online and the films ready for streaming. For the first time, I had really thought of everything. I didn't have a single teaching anxiety dream. The morning of my first class I pondered whether this lack of anxiety was a bad sign or whether it simply meant that I had finally figured things out. I hoped it was the latter. I arrived in class a few minutes early, but not so early as to make the students nervous, and I made comfortable first-day chatter as I handed out my carefully-planned syllabus. As I looked up, I noticed that every single student in the room was giving me a strange look. One brave student finally raised his hand and asked what class I was teaching. When I answered Freshmen Writing, all of the students raised their hands and informed me that they were here for German class. If I had been in a good humor, I might have gotten out my copy of Beowulf and joked that Old English was close enough to German. Instead, I quickly and quietly gathered up my things and moved into the hallway. What I discovered after a few phone calls is that there had been a miscommunication about the class time. I had been told one time and my students had been told another. Further, my students had been told an earlier time -- I had missed my first class altogether.

Even at the time, I knew that this would shortly become a funny anecdote. I wrote my students an email explaining what had happened, and I was aware that it would be OK. Yet what I can take from it is that no amount of planning can account for everything. Part of being a good teacher, I think, is the flexibility to adjust to the situation rather than trying in vain to make the situation fit to a preconceived notion of how things should go. Not that good planning is a bad thing, but that in teaching, as in life, we simply cannot control all of the variables. And that's OK. This will probably be a much more memorable first day than any I've had thus far. If I spin it well, it might even provide us with a shared joke that could speed up our rapport as a group. My class theme this semester is dreams in literature and film, so maybe the feeling of displacement we all experienced will put us in the right frame of mind (I know my pneumonia-fueled fever last semester helped me identify with some of the crazy texts I was teaching). If nothing else, I can feel connected to the dream theme in that showing up to the wrong class on the first day is a classic teaching nightmare . . . Happy beginning of the semester, all!

Celebrating Joan of Arc's 600th Birthday (whether she was born on that day or not)

Happy 600th Birthday, Joan of Arc! Although it's a bit too convenient that the Saint happened to be born on the Epiphany, and it is more likely that her birth date is simply unknown, I still like the idea of celebrating Joan's birth. Her death date is, of course, quite certain (30 May 1431), but she was many things before she was burned at the stake. She was a pious girl, an outspoken woman, a battle leader, a key participant in a king's coronation. She was a woman who refused to wear a dress, and a peasant who refused to be silenced when she had something to say. She demanded that the people around her listen, and, quite surprisingly, they did. She wouldn't have been tried and executed in such a public manner if she hadn't made a lot of people very nervous. She was barely more than a child, and she would probably have lived a quiet life completely outside of the historical record if she hadn't stood up and made people take notice of her. She insisted on entering and changing the course of history.

So often we define Joan by her death, and it is true that her death was so spectacular that we could hardly forget it. Not only was Joan the only person in history to be both convicted of heresy and canonized by the Catholic Church, but her manner of execution was horrific even by the standards of her time (perhaps even more so by the standards of her time). Her body was burned twice and her ashes were thrown in the river -- not a sight that people could forget. Representations of the saint in film often focus almost exclusively on her trial and moment of death, and movie posters show larger images of Joan engulfed in flames. To the left, Ingrid Bergman screams in pain amid technicolor flames with the caption, "Greatest of all spectacles!" Her death holds a morbid fascination; it is the culminating point of her story. Yet she would have been neither executed nor canonized if she hadn't led an extraordinary, though extraordinarily brief, life. And, as I've written before, her story has continued beyond as well. Her story has been appropriated by every possible political and religious and ideological agenda, and it is hard to extract her from the complex web of retellings and associations. But the very fact that her story has taken on such a life of its own indicates that many found her life, as well as her death, both fascinating and inspirational.

The Twelve Days of Dissertation Chapter Editing . . .

Given that we're right in the middle of the twelve days of Christmas, we decided that a special present was in order for all of our lovely readers. Kate has been toiling away on her Arthur and the Crusades Chapter, and submitted it to her advisor before the holidays. While lamenting to Kristi over its decrepit state, the two of them began discussing the ups and downs of the writing process, and the fruits of that conversation can be found (in story-book form) below. It is, in part, an homage to one of our all-time favorite blogs, Hyperbole and a Half, but also the best way we knew how to cope with and describe the highs and wretched, wretched lows of the dissertation process.

And so, here is your Christmas story.

Wasshail!
-- Kate and Kristi



Day 1: MOTIVATED!!! (i.e.WRITE ALL OF THE CHAPTER!!!!)

Day 2: Photocopy the mother******* articles like an adult! (censored for the children).

Day 3: Sharpening Pencils (I mean business!)

Day 4: Despair, Part 1 (What does my introduction even MEAN?!)

Day 5: Stalling (Icecream and Netflix!!)

Day 6: RALLYING!

       








Day 7: Cut and Paste?!

Day 8: Senseless Destruction or Sensible Destruction?

Day 9: Despair, Phase 2 (Control, Alt, Delete?)

Day 10: Purchase oddly appropriate t-shirt that mocks your crushing sense of inadequacy. 

Day 11: After copious revisions (and assurances from your fire extinguisher-wielding partner in ice-cream misdemeanors), send to advisor. 

Day 12: Holiday party -- advisor says he's received chapter and your knee-jerk response is "I'm sorry . . ."