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It is really hard for me to write this week. Not just because it is cold, or my battery is dying, or because I don’t want to. But because coming here, for the “last time” this semester (I say “last” because I may visit on my own before I leave) forces me to think about how this semester has gone so far. In a way, Rhoads Pond has really reflected the way this semester has gone for me. In the beginning of the year, everything was beautiful. The pond was green and lush, absolutely gorgeous with life. Now, it’s different.  Sandy had strewn the pre-existing shrubbery away, leaving a barren and brown landscape.  Geese still stay on the water, and the reflections on the ripples are still mystically magnificent, but the tones are duller, muted. That’s how I’ve been feeling as the semester draws to an end.

So I'm finally posting the poem we wrote collectively as a summation of Monday's exporations at Ashbridge Park. I attempted to scan in the poetic product of Monday's wandering, but due to both my inability to work technology and the failure of Canaday's scanners, I was unable to. I thought it would have been really cool, though, if we had all been able to see eachother's handwriting and marks upon the paper. I might still scan it in later and attach it as a comment to this post, but we'll see. For now, here it is:

Stagnant water breeds oily residue

Slowly moving water

a plastic bottle, caught by a branch in the stream

Washed up against a bush with berries like polished red glass

What would it take for that sound to stop?

New experiences and knowledge

History, biology, and poetry swirling together to create this knowledge

A knowledge we have always had-just perhaps forgot.

What fuels the remembering? The air of the trees, the seeds, the mud?

All I remember now in detail is that there were minnows in the water so the rocks looked lovely.

Water trickled, running like thoughts.

Man cuts, stabs at the drumb. The water rolls and heals.

As the sunshine melts the frost on the grass, I breathe.

I was listening to the most recent This American Life, which centered entirely around the theme of animal sacrifce, and I wanted to share one of the stories from the show because I feel like it directly relates to our dicussion of Coetzee/Costello's beliefs. The journalist, Camas Davis, periodically holds classes that teach people how to raise and butcher animals for food. These classes somehow, counteractively to popular perception, actually tend to prevent people from eating meat by introducing them to the complexities of home-butchering/the meat industry in general. II really loved the story, and thought alot of Davis's quote directly responded to Costello's desire to realize the consciousness of animals.  

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/480/animal-sacrifice?act=2

Hope you guys like it!

"We are wounded in all the right places" - from Wounded by 1 Giant Leap

On the blind field shuttle tour of Bryn Mawr Campus, Carmen showed us that being blind does not mean being impaired but possessing a different way to perceive the world.

I was first at the back of the line. I could feel (or I thought I felt) the girl behind me shaking as we walked in the woods. I could hear a big humming engine right beside me as we crossed the street. Any small vibrations turned into big swings in the back of the line, as I consistently stepped on and off the paved trial onto the grass during the “peaceful” later part of the shuttle. Though I didn’t open my eyes during the whole trip, I couldn’t keep myself from aimless waving one of my arm for branches or imaginary obstacles. My shoulder is now a bit sore from all the sketching and waving in the air.

On the way back, I was at the beginning of the line. Knowing the route I was going to walk on, I felt easier and paid more attention to the flickering of lights on my eyelids.  I even noticed that the paved trial on front of the English house was more “rough” than the paved trail parallel to senior row. However, it was still terrifying when I heard a car shooting through my front as Carmen called everyone to cross the street again.

Last year at this time, I was recording an album.  After we played the same song over, and over, and over, again my friend would say: “Ehhh, we just gotta let it gel.”  Sometimes I think school is sort of like recording that album.  We do the same thing over, and over, and over again and doesn’t always look good or sound good or feel good until after we let gel.  You have to take a break to figure out what still needs working on.  It was nice to have a break from reading, discussing, and sitting in chairs this week because it meant that there was time to let things gel.  I need more gelling time.  I suppose that this is what the future is for.  What started gelling for me this week was largely unrelated to what we were doing together.  At first, I felt a little guilty for not focusing on class.  I don’t anymore.  

My daughter-in-law, who is a psychiatry resident @ Penn (and a graduate both of Haverford and of The Story of Evolution/The Evolution of Stories), sent me this NYTimes opinionator piece on Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination. It put me in mind of some of our earlier conversations about language, and how we read it. Thought it might interest some of you, of the more poetic bent....

Well, here is my - perhaps subversive! - question - perhaps jumping the gun on our discussion tomorrow - prompted by the first two pages of the second half of the Coetzee book!! 

What is this class really about???

Is it about ecology?

Or is the real topic hiding right there in plain sight: is it really about how to be academic?

Excuse me if this is obvious! And excuse my punctuation! Dashes - and exclamation points - are probably not very academic!!!

What is the form? and what is the content?

What am I really asking?

(perhaps I alologize again: a bit punch drunk as the end of the semester approaches!)

When I was trying to come up with something to write on Tuesday night, I saw, in the corner of Ecological Imagining's homepage, the title of a new blog post that sounded interesting. It was about smoking and Bryn Mawr, which are things that I just read about in the book about Bryn Mawr, Offerings to Athena: 125 Years at Bryn Mawr. So, I was really excited to write about this, and I did. But when I went to comment on the post, I realized that it had been made on a different part of Serendip, for a class called "Walled Women." Serendip seems like a little corner of the Internet, just for me and Ecological Imaginings, but it isn't, and I wish I could meet and comment on the posts of all the lovely Mawrters who are also on Serendip. But, since that is unlikely, I will just post the link to the article I read and my response.

/exchange/smoking-bryn-mawr-colleges-campus-representing-power-student-participation-student-government-associ