On Place

My friend Nick talks like Jack Kerouac writes – in a racing thought stream, punctuated with occasional emphasis on a word you wouldn’t expect to carry any weight. Once, Nick took me to Small’s, a Greenwich Village jazz club, where a sepia Duke Ellington photograph stared me down from the wall behind the bassist and the only sounds I heard were the trio’s syncopated notes and the “mmhmms” from the jazz-educated audience. Hours later, when we arose from the cavernous place, back onto the misty loud city streets, Nick told me that here, on this glittering concrete bridge to the vast metropolis, he is home. It was the shortest string of words I heard him say.

Home is a concept I’ve pondered extensively and one that has followed me through my college days, my master’s degree, and straight into my first year of law school, when Fr. Kalscheur, while teaching us diversity jurisdiction in Civil Procedure, asked me where my domicile is. For most of the eighty-two people in the room, this was an easy question, but I was speechless. Where do you belong when you have no place to which you return?

Like Nick’s, my home is more free-form. Having spent my childhood navigating a smattering of rural, suburban, urban, and foreign communities as my professor-parents moved us between campuses, I have been rooted in a world of knowledge but never in a place. In college, I studied abroad four times and developed a fascination with the role of neighborhoods and cities. Afterwards, I studied urban planning until I realized I wanted to take the intellectual inquiry that grounded me and apply it to one piece of the place puzzle, so I began a master’s program in sociology and education. The first book I read was Place Matters. I was home.

While studying part-time, I worked with veterans who were beginning programs at Columbia. Our life experiences were worlds apart, but we connected through a shared sense of displacement. Working with them, I wondered about people whose lives are substantially more complex than mine, like those suffering from homelessness, growing up in foster care, divided between homes during custody wars or because of incarcerated parents, or who are illegal immigrants or part of witness protection programs. To where do they return in the eyes of the law?

In my education, my job, and my own life, place and my “domicile” have mattered in access to resources, quality of life, and who I become as a human being.

Worth a Read

Postcards from America: The New York Times asks four writers to report on their local economies. I was particularly struck by the Iowa story, which, after seeing Food, Inc. recently, really resonated with me.

The Marvelous Chaos of Applying Methodologies to Daily Life

Professor Harrington sits on the table, eying the 14 of us encircling him. He uses his hands to steady his aging frame on the table's edge, turns slowly towards me, and quietly asks, "What's happening here?" Taken off-guard by the non-rhetorical nature of such an obvious query, I quickly respond, "we're students sitting in a room, about to learn." He grins and asks, "is that what's happening, or what you think is happening?"

And so begins my dizzy spiral into the world of ethnographic methods. The prefix title of this class, the part before the colon (often described as "the category of interest"), seemed meaningless when the class appeared on a list of requirement-fulfilling courses. "Methods of Inquiry." It sounded like it would offer an overview of a particular research method and provide an opportunity to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and premeditated choices of the research I've been reading in other courses.

As I've now learned, one of the core features of ethnography and participant observation is triangulation, the merging of multiple methods of gathering data and the cross-checking of this data through these multiple sources. To get triangulation, we ask three questions: What do people say is going on here? What should be going on here? (Or, perhaps, what do people say should be going on here?) And finally, what's actually going on here?

The funny thing about answering these three questions on the same topic is that the answers are rarely synonymous, despite the fact that we arrange our lives on the presumption that they very often are. It's both disorienting and liberating to know that what's supposed to be going on is very rarely what's actually going on, and often not even what the participants say is going on. Does this mean that we are constantly deceiving ourselves? Are we resistant to seeing the real occurrences of our daily operations, our societies, or our behaviors? Which of the sources or answers holds the greatest truth: our reality, our perception of it, or our expectations (essentially our understanding of the order of our activities and our world)? Finally, how do we ever really assess what's actually going on here, when that assessment is almost always human-determined, and every one of us brings a lens that forms a unique perception of the situation?

I couldn't help but write down Professor Harrington's comments on the first day of class regarding the absence of truth in science. He said, so matter-of-factly, as if it were the simplest comment worth saying, that scientific inquiry is about building connections between truths. Not discovering the ultimate truth, not uncovering anything at all, but building--taking two things that already exist and developing a model for understanding their relationship. Ethnography, of course, is exactly that.

In learning about ethnographic methods I am also learning how covertly I've been trained to think as a sociologist. When told to "do research" my mind immediately runs toward random samples of large populations, surveys, statistics, and ways that we can quantify our questions despite their focus on abstractions like "race" and "learning." In this course, we're learning how to sit down and talk with people, to build a big picture from a very small one instead of the other way around. Our ethnographic methods rely on spending lots and lots of time in the community or institution that we're studying, with the aim of answering the three questions above through direct observation and participation. At a very basic level, this makes sense--what better source of information than the participants and the settings themselves? Go straight to the source, take good notes, and build yourself a model of that tiny universe to help you understand some things there and even beyond.

This alternate role of participant-observer has, in my own life, presented an entirely different vantage point from which to consider all the relationships and scenarios I encounter. Out I go each day, examining and hypothesizing, asking questions of all the things I have historically taken for granted. Why do drivers stop at a red light? Is it because it's the law, because they don't want to hit a pedestrian, or because they don't want to be hit by cross-traffic? Why do children who fight in the classroom play together on the playground? Why do small, mixed-income immigrant communities flourish in pockets in this city where neighborhoods are so stiffly defined by socioeconomic status? Am I suddenly asking these questions because of the exciting prospect of field research, that golden gem of ethnography, which would require me to get out there and experience the scenarios behind these questions? Or, am I now realizing that every procedure, every situation that's part of our daily operations, has a story behind it and a logic that may not be what it seems? It's all chaotic and wonderful, wondering and questioning and theorizing about the best way to get to the bottom of this and that. I'm on my way to the train, a ho-dum process I engage in twice daily, and oh, I spy a curious scene!, off the brain wonders to consider triangulation.

Taking Harrington's advice and looking at scenarios through all the theories I've learned, I now want, or perhaps even need, to ponder, "what's happening here?" Playing detective like a five-year-old, I am rediscovering the beauty of the hidden methods and patterns of our crazy, unconsciously orderly lives, and it's marvelous.

Framework for Summer

My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality;
This printed and bound book...but the printer and the printing-office boy?
The marriage estate and settlement...but the body and mind of the bridegroom? also those of the bride?
The panorama of the sea...but the sea itself?
The well-taken photographs...but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?
The fleet of ships of the line and all the modern improvements...but the craft and pluck of the admiral?
The dishes and fare and furniture...but the host and hostess, and the look out of their eyes?
The sky up there...yet here or next door or across the way?
The saints and sages in history...but you yourself?
Sermons and creeds and theology...but the human brain,
and what is called reason, and what is called love,
and what is called life?

-Walt Whitman

Remembering John Updike

Requiem

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— JOHN UPDIKE

Published January 28, 2009 in the New York Times

Remembering Structure in Progress

I’m so happy to have come across this recent article by David Brooks. In October, I wrote a piece for Oberlin.edu on the value of an Oberlin education. I wrote about how Oberlin equips its students to be fearless thinkers, to be innovative, to affirm that there is endless knowledge to gain. In this ode to Oberlin, I neglected to explore context, and to question whether Oberlin prepares its students to be all of these things while navigating the institutional frameworks that define our society.

I’ve talked a lot already about what it means for a school to prepare its students for the real world. This point comes close to home for me because I’ve never felt fully equipped to work within the institutions that shape the structure of my life. Whether this is a fault of the educational institutions I attended or my own is not really relevant—what does matter is, did Oberlin do the best that it could to build my awareness of institutional persistence? Did it appropriately prioritize individualized agendas and critical, innovative thinking against the way our world actually, mechanically, works?

When I started at Teachers College, I had a general sense of the kinds of things I would learn and the arguments I could expect to hear in the classroom. What I didn’t expect was to encounter readings by Tyack and others that remind us of the immense challenges of educational reform based on the permanence of our institutions. As recent college graduates with fire in our eyes and passion in our hearts, former teachers empowered by too many years of lacking power in their schools, and mid-career changers seeking a new spark, we are buzzing with thoughts we think have never been uttered before. We are scathingly, unforgivingly critical of the very system that brought us to where we are, picking apart the details of a school day, the educational units that define and bind a degree, the notion that children sit in a room together to learn. Yet as one apt writer once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Institutional theorists, those brave, seemingly negative souls, strive to bring us back to the base, to remind us that the system just doesn’t change as much as we think it will. Radicalism may be what it takes to see the change we need, but the change we need might not come from a total restructuring of the institution of education itself.

David Brooks’ words offer an important reminder. “In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us.” He continues:

“As we go through life, we travel through institutions—first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft. Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do…New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve.”

At the end of his article, Brooks calls for renewed faith in these institutions. In a way, he’s telling us not to bite the hand that feeds us. These institutions are here to stay—just as a writer derives her argument from engaging in another’s and a teacher structures her lessons around the core curriculum that has shaped millions of students before hers, we live in our world through constant engagement with the past and the present and the future via these institutional mechanisms that contain our interactions. Our institutions don’t ask us for complete conformity; they ask us to acknowledge the progress of our ancestors and to pass on a usable framework to those that follow us. In doing so, they allow us to continue forward, learning ever onward, finding comfort and strength in consistency and in our ability to critically, thoughtfully, and wisely understand where we stand against where we have been and where we could be.

Back on 120th St, Dreaming of 120th St

For years we have paced this block on our way somewhere. To home, to work, to school, downtown, uptown, cross-town, even beyond the rivers that bind this island. It has held us when we have been marching toward a class we hope we won’t fail, a performance we hope we’ll nail, an encounter we’ll never forget. It has been our gateway.

I am here now, almost everyday, for different reasons. This street is no longer my gateway to somewhere else but my destination. I arrive here on 120th Street to learn, to argue, to develop, when from this same street I used to launch, bold and fearful, to learn everywhere but on this very street.

We’ve all departed somehow. To Chicago, to Alfred, to Poughkeepsie and back, to Washington Heights, we’ve found new launching pads and new places from which to depart. These new places are too new to define us. They seem temporary, ephemeral, like places we are visiting or lands we will conquer and then abandon. How long did it take for 120th Street to own us, and for us to own it? When did it become our starting point, the place at which we end and then begin again each day?

One intersection divides this 120th Street we used to know from the 120th Street that serves me now. On Amsterdam, turning left coming up from 119th Street has become my normal routine, though I constantly find myself glancing at what lies to the right, just making sure that it’s still there. Normally when people move they literally move, they relocate themselves and return just to visit. How often does someone’s former habitat become redefined for them? How common is it to learn to re-navigate a neighborhood because it serves a different purpose for you now?

New York, no matter how big it seems sometimes, is full of these reinventions. In such tiny city blocks we live every part of our lives here, and in doing so we categorize these little radii in order to organize our behaviors. This is where I work, this is where my daughter goes to school, this is where my doctor is, this is where I get my hair cut—we compartmentalize small spans of blocks, associating corner markets and flower stands and Indian restaurants with the places where we are going nearby. But when something changes, say your doctor moves to the same block as your daughter’s school, or your best friend changes jobs and now works in the building next to your favorite bagel shop, we re-invent, we re-categorize. We accommodate one more in this tiny radius of city blocks.

The problem with this recategorization, though, is that we lose things sometimes. I want 120th Street to always be the block I walked down to pick up lunch from the Apple Tree on one of our spring-cleaning Sundays. I want it to always be the street where I watched Cordelia, 6 years old with fire and glee in her eyes, jumping over the glittering sidewalk proclaiming that she saw the stars in the city ground. I don’t want these things to change, yet the more I re-invent this place the more these new moments seem to take their place.

I remember once hearing that the more things change the more they stay the same. I hope for me, for here, for this street, that is the case. I want it to always be simultaneously everything to me—the place where I first lived in New York City, the place where I learned how to reform education in America, the place where I left and the place where I will always, in my heart, begin.

---------------------------------

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page…

-“Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion

You Never Seem to Recognize My Face

preoccupation (n.): The state of being preoccupied; absorption of the attention or intellect.

preoccupy (v.):
1. To absorb or engross to the exclusion of other things.
2. To occupy beforehand or before others.

Many words have multiple definitions, but preoccupation and its root, preoccupy, have been on my mind for a while now. If a thought or a subject has completely preoccupied you, has consumed you completely, are you occupying that thought pattern before anyone else? Have you claimed that preoccupation as your own? Does it belong to you? Or, is it just the opposite? Does preoccupation own you by preventing you from owning whatever the preoccupation is?

Usually, the verb "preoccupy" is modified by the preposition "by." In effect, this means that whatever follows the "by" is what's doing the action of "preoccupying." The actual subject of the sentence then becomes that which is being preoccupied rather than the preoccupying agent.

When I am preoccupied by something, I feel helpless, unwillingly transformed from the agent to the recipient of some other action. I know I don't want to think about this thought or subject anymore but, try as I might, I cannot get myself to think about anything else. Preoccupying me wholly, it takes over my sensibility and, like an unavoidable demon, forces my attention on something undeserving.

"She was preoccupied."

Maybe what all of us are looking for is the less common form. "She preoccupied him." "The fate of the world preoccupied them." Maybe this switch of the agency is all that we need to feel meaningful rather than powerless: to occupy beforehand or before others, rather than to be occupied at the exclusion of all other things.

Verde Que Te Quiero Verde

As a student of psychology, I learned that the human brain needs categorization for comprehension. As an example, children formulate a definition of a "tree" based on the elm tree outside of their Massachusetts school or the palm trees lining the Los Angeles boulevard near home. Then, when an unfamiliar tree comes into the picture, it is at first foreign, undefinable, until that category of "tree" is expanded to include this new meaning and all the features that accompany it.

It turns out that we rely on this categorization mechanism to process nearly all the information that we encounter. Faces, places, names and objects all filter through a complex series of categorical worlds until suddenly (hopefully) a match can be made. Recognition follows shortly after.

Paradoxically, what enables us to pick up where we left off day after day also binds us to a strangely limiting need to process events and features based on what we have experienced and seen before. For relationships, this means an inevitable and awkward consideration of who we are currently dealing with in relation to those we have dealt with before, in other situations, in other moments, in seemingly disconnected scenarios. The result is a perpetual string of relational ties that enables us to make some sense of a situation that would otherwise be intangible, incomprehensible, and wonderfully, beautifully new. Why do we fight against this relational activity that our brains immediately plunge into? Why do we desire original experiences yet immediately rationalize them through comparison to anything that shares a feature or two with what we have, momentarily, found exhilaratingly fresh?

The Truth Is...

I'm not really a redhead. I spent the first 6 years of my life proclaiming to anyone who would listen that "I have auburn hair," and it's the truth. The tragedy of being auburn-headed is that one is neither a redhead nor a brunette. Culturally, those of us straddling the median must pick one side or the other: will we go through life claiming high levels of pheomelanin and all the expectations that accompany this, or will we join the boring brown sidelines where those with less exciting pigmentation must find other conversation topics? Obviously, I've opted for the former and spend my days impersonating some meant-to-be real redhead whose life I am most surely co-opting.

July 4, 2008

"Here's where I am, here's where I stand," tearing down the walls of apartment 2G in 90 Morningside Drive, pushing papers into heavy cardboard boxes, as we say goodbye with sweeping brooms and ladders to reach the cabinets we haven't touched since day one. It feels like we have been moving always--13 years of trips to storage and spring cleaning initiatives blend together now. We have lived here the longest, we keep saying, both as an excuse and as a coping mechanism.

How do we reflect? When do we look back to C.'s 1st grade "presidents" birthday party and M.'s senior prom? When do we honor these hallowed hallways?

We can see where we are now. C. is a young woman--she eats at school now and doesn't count her handwashes. Mom is tired but still exuding creative energy. Dad is the same as always but more worried. I am too practical, less passionate, disoriented.

For years we have defined ourselves as a family that lives in New York. Do we define ourselves as a diaspora now? Dispersed for economic and educational reasons? In Chicago, Dad inhabits a world of academia that many see only in movies. In Alfred, Mom will re-learn (or discover for the first time?) rural life and a real opportunity for leadership. Back in New York, remaining in New York, C. and I will navigate the remains of our youth. Like ghosts, we will traverse the streets of Morningside Heights pursing new, revised dreams. We will cross independently at crosswalks that used to require a held hand; we will make decisions that used to be made for us; we will open doors we could not have yet imagined.

Yet some doors, like that of 2G in 90 Morningside Drive and like 5J in 400 W. 119th Street before, will close to us, vaulting previous phases of our lives so that they are accessible only in the memories that visit us when certain smells or notes or conversations invite them. Now remembering seven odd years earlier than this moment, writing a poem that begins: "there comes a time when memories are all we've got. A shoebox of photos, an attic of pasts, decorating the modern memorabilia." We are so vulnerable to our memories--this has never occurred to me before. Nostalgia is the most powerful feeling that has no immediate rooting in the present moment. It is the past intruding on where we have arrived--it is a reminder that we may or may not need.

How long have we used this apartment, this home, as our base? From here we learned New York. Speeding down Broadway on the 1 train, we learned the restaurants of the Upper West Side, the Stardust Diner, the need to avoid Times Square, Younghee in Tribeca, Canal Street, the World Trade Center. Privately, we made our own discoveries, building secret New Yorks that no one else will share. We found patterns that suited us, routes we found preferable, places that meant comfort and safety and hope. We began to define ourselves through these individualized ties, these constructed days and weeks that we could allude to across the dinner table but never fully recount.

When did our relationship with this city change? Was it when M. left for college? When D. left for Israel? When the plan became to leave this city, to go our separate ways? Or was it only when we packed the last straws, the wrapping paper boxes, the Ganeshas over the doors?