From Word To Word

There is a little place down the street from us, a cafe and a pizza shop in one, nothing very fancy or very remarkable, except that it is independently owned and operated by a woman who used to live next door to us.  We only go into the shop occasionally, but the owner always welcomes us warmly, and she often gives my kids a couple of timbits or day old doughnuts for free, just because we are her neighbours and because my kids can be very cute when they know that free pastries are on the line.  She did this again yesterday when I bought a coffee while we waited for the toy store to open, and I began reflecting on how often this sort of thing happens in my neighbourhood.  Our housemate works at the little grocery store near our house, and we know several of the other staff by name, and they greet us, not as customers, but as neighbours.  My kids play with the kids of the woman who often waits my table at a local pub.  The people who run my independent video store know me well enough to alert me when new titles come in that I might like.  The guy who teaches my kids music is also the organist at our church.  The staff at the used bookstore stop to talk with me when I see them on the street.  The guy who runs the clay store, which my kids love, also plays on my basketball team.  I have known many of the vendors at the market for something like twenty years, well enough that some of them sent cards when my father-in-law passed away a few years ago.

As I was reflecting on these things, it occurred to me that this kind of community is entirely natural to my kids, however uncommon it might be in most places.  My kids expect that our family will know the people who run our shops and join our activities, that they will live next door or down the street, that they might come to our place or we might go to theirs, that we will exchange greetings when we pass them on the street, that we will stop to talk with them when we meet them at the library or the park.  They believe that this is how the world is, because they have never experienced the world in any other way, and this is both a wonderful and a terrifying thing to me: wonderful, because this is exactly the experience of neighbourhood and community that I value so much and spend so much of my time and energy fostering; terrifying, because I know, as my kids do not, that most of the world is not like this, that they will one day, sooner or later, be confronted by a world that is in many ways the very opposite of this conviviality.  There is no good solution to this tension, I know, but I hope, at the very least, at least in some ways, that my children can grow up experiencing the world, not as it is, but as it should be, and that they will be inspired to build this world themselves as they grow into their own families and their own communities.

As some of you will know already, this year I am planning to plant a garden to supply vegetables for the Agape Drop-in, and I am hereby officially extending an invitation to anyone who would like to assist.

Since this is the first year, we will be planting only root vegetables that we can grow with minimal maintenance and that the drop-in can store with minimal effort, potatoes and carrots mostly. The garden will be located on a little property that we have been calling The Foundry, which can be accessed by a little laneway off of Division Street near Woolwich (I will post a flag), and we will be meeting this coming long weekend to break ground and begin planting.  Anyone and everyone is welcome to join us on Saturday the 21st and Monday the 23rd from 1:00 to 4:00.  We would love to see you there, even if you can stay just long enough to see the place.

If you would like to support the project but are not able to help with the actual gardening, we are still looking for a few things, and we would really appreciate it if you could supply some of them: a second rain barrel, a second wheel barrow, a couple of garden rakes, and some garden hoses that are in decent shape.  Also, if someone has a pick-up truck that we could borrow on the Saturday to take a load of garbage to the dump, that would be very helpful as well.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like any further information.

I have been thinking about ideas of relation and connection for several years now.  I mentioned them together first back in May of 2008 in a post called “An Addendum of Sorts” and then again in a post called “Social Holocaust?“, and these ideas have been percolating in my mind ever since, so much so that I thought I would take some time to look at what the words have meant in our language historically as a way to start making sense of what they could mean for us today.

The word ‘connect’ in the sense of ‘joining together’ has been in use in the English language since the middle of the 15th century, and it has been employed in the sense of ‘establishing a relationship” since at least 1881.  With the introduction of telephone connections, it has also been used since 1926 in the sense of “getting in touch”, and this sense has grown to include ‘awakening emotions’ or ‘establishing a rapport’ since the early 1940’s.  In contemporary usage, it has become used increasingly in both technical and interpersonal ways.  In a technical sense it is now used to describe virtually every contact between electronic devices, so that we now routinely speak of internet connections and cell phone connections and wireless connections and network connections.   In an interpersonal sense, we also now refer to our relationships increasingly in terms of connection and connectivity, especially as our electronic connections begin to dominate our interpersonal interactions, so that we now keep connected to our friends through our various devices and applications and speak of these relationships in terms of connections also.

The word ‘relate’, by comparison, comes into English usage a little later, sometime around 1530, and it is first used in the sense of ‘recounting’ or ‘telling’.   It does not come to mean ‘establishing a relationship’ until 1771, and it is only around 1950 that it comes to mean ‘feeling sympathy or connection’.  Whereas the word ‘connect’ originates in the act of joining together, especially in a technical sense, the word ‘relate’ originates in the act of telling.  It comes to describe interpersonal relationships, not in terms of mere contact, but in terms of telling and recounting stories to one another.  We relate our stories, and we thereby come into relation.

Considering the differences in connotations between these two words, I think that our culture’s increasing preference for the word ‘connection’ over the word ‘relation’ is perhaps symptomatic of how our devices and applications are coming to mediate our relationships.  Because these technologies have changed how we interact, we have taken on new ways of speaking about our interactions.  It no longer makes as much sense to speak of having a relationship with someone, because the nature of our interaction is no longer that of relation, no longer that of sharing our stories with one another.  Instead, it makes more sense to speak of our interpersonal interactions with the same terminology that we use to speak of the technology that now enables and produces these interactions, to speak of connectivity rather than relation, to speak in terms of being put in contact or being joined together.

As I was thinking about the implications of this cultural and linguistic shift, it occurred to me that I might also make a similar etymological study of another word that has been significant to me with respect to how we are relate ethically to one another, the word ‘encounter’.  It appears in the English language much earlier than either ‘relate’ or ‘connect’, being used as early as the late 13th century.  Its initial meaning was ‘the meeting of adversaries,’ but by the 16th century it had already weakened to mean ‘a casual or chance meeting’.  This is one of those instances, I think, where the ancient sense of the term bears a much profounder meaning than the contemporary one, an instance where the continuing resonance of the ancient sense is what makes the word so powerful even in its contemporary usage, especially when it is used in an ethical sense.

It is after all a pair of enemies who encounter one another in the quintessential story of ethical relation, The Good Samaritan.  The Samaritans and the Jews were cultural and religious enemies, refusing either to socialize or to worship together, and this enmity is the element of the story that makes the Samaritan’s actions so remarkable.  In a standard interpretation of the story, the Samaritan rather than the Priest or the Levite is the one who acts as a neighbour, is the one who acts ethically, because he shows compassion to the man who had been robbed even though he was a cultural and religious enemy of his people.  I have myself characterized this moment as the moment of ethical encounter in much these same terms, but I wonder, considering the ancient meaning of the word ‘encounter’, whether this is a moment of ethical encounter needs to be understood a little differently.

Perhaps it is only because the one I encounter on the road is other to me, because this one is not of my faith or my race or my gender or my politics or my social status or my pay grade or my whatever, perhaps it is only because this one on the road is other to me, not just different from me but other from me in a way that is a threat and a concern to what I am, perhaps it is only because of this otherness, this enmity, that I can truly encounter the other at all.  Perhaps it is not an ethical encounter even though the one on the road is the other.  Perhaps it is an ethical encounter precisely because the one on the road is the other, must always be the other, no matter how much he or she may appear to be like me.

This otherness, this enmity, this hostility, may in fact be what is essential to ethical relation, may in fact constitute ethical encounter as such.  I am reminded here of Derrida’s idea of hostipality, in which hostility and hospitality are both necessarily present in the gesture of the host, and it seems to me that the ethical encounter functions in much the same way.  It is the decision to treat the other as myself, precisely because the other is not myself.  It is the decision to love the other, precisely because this other is what I do not love.  It is the decision to befriend the other, precisely because the other is my enemy.  It is the moment comprised, necessarily, of both enmity and amity.  The moral of the story is not that everyone is my neighbour and so I must be a neighbour to them.  The moral is that no one is my neighbour, that everyone is my other, that everyone is my enemy, and that I must be a neighbour to them anyway, because there is no other way to be a neighbour.

All this has brought me a fair distance from where I began, but not without value, at least for me, because if it is true that in our culture we now speak more of connection than of relation, and if we have always spoken more of connection and relation than of encounter, the origins of these words should warn us that perhaps our language is betraying a shift away from relationships based on the sharing of our stories toward connections based on little more than mere contact, and that even this shift does not account for a deeper and more worrying refusal to understand how we relate ethically to each other, how the other always encounters us an enemy, how this otherness may even be a precondition for us to act ethically in the world.

Some people from my neighbourhood have launched a community worshop, something that I have long thought would make a good addition to our community. They have called the initiative Diyode, and its mission is to: “Build a space for makers, artists, and crafters to access tools that they would not normally have access to. Make it kid-friendly, with activities to spark interest in electronics, machine building and practical problem solving. Give people of any age the tools, the confidence, the advice, and the excitement to build and invent things themselves. Create a wonderland of possibilities and a community to match, then set it free and see what it produces.”

This kind of initiative encourages people to learn and create and work collaboratively and openly, and it is precisely what our communities in general and our children in particular need in order to live differently in a culture that knows only how to buy rather than to make and explore and experiment. I am very excited that this idea has become a reality at last, and though I am not sure whether my kids are quite old enough to make good use of it yet, I am going to check things out and see where we might get involved. I will also be encouraging our local homeschoolers to see if they can form a partnership of some kind with the workshop.

Diyode holds a weekly meeting on Monday nights at 9pm at 71 Wyndham St. South, Unit B, Guelph.  Those who are interested in knowing more can visit Diyode at www.diyode.com or email them at info@diyode.com.

The 2010 edition of the Guelph Festival of Moving Media opens today and runs through the weekend.  It is my favourite local festival because it focuses mainly on documentary film, so it always has something that appeals to me.  This year I will to try to see Neil Diamond’s Reel Injun on Friday night, Kevin McMahon’s Waterlife on Saturday afternoon, Michael Madson’s Into Eternity on Saturday night, and Jacob Andrén and Helena Nygren’s I Bought a Rainforest on Sunday afternoon.  I will not likely make all four shows, not considering everything else that needs to get done this weekend, but I will see as many of them as I can, and I would encourage you to do the same.  You will not have many other chances to see screenings of these films, and many of them are well worth seeing.  So check out the festival’s full schedule, find something that piques your interest, and join us for some worthwhile screen time this weekend.

After Halloween last year, I wrote about my frustration with the commercialization of the holiday and my intention to make our celebrations a little more community friendly this year.

In the event, I discovered that making caramel in large quantities can be a touchy business, either staying too thin and sliding of the apples or becoming too thick and clumping everywhere, which meant that they were certainly not the prettiest caramel apples, even if they tasted quite good, a fact that I tested more than once. The apple cider was also not quite up to standard, since I was unable to find the time to get some apricot brandy from the liquor store.

Even so, things went very well. We gave away by far the better part of sixty apples and a similar number of apple ciders, and many people, especially the parents, seemed genuinely delighted. I had to encourage several of the adults to leave the apples for the children and to content themselves with cider, and the oldest among them sometimes became quite nostalgic.

It was a real pleasure for me, despite the cold, to sit on the porch and see the excitement of the children and the surprise of the adults, to have people stay long enough to drink a cup of cider rather than just take a few candies and leave, to have the holiday be something more, even if only a little more, than a commercial candy exchange.

Now I just have to perfect the art of making caramel before Halloween comes around again.

We have been cutting and drying herbs at our place (oregano, lemon balm, tarragon), and though this is a time consuming undertaking, it is one of those mundane tasks that leave plenty of time for thinking and conversation, and I quite enjoy the labour of it, particularly when friends drop by, not quite unexpectedly, as Don Moore and his family did the other day.  While the kids played in the back yard, Don began helping me prepare the herbs for hanging, and we talked, about the book that he is writing on post-9/11 film, about City of God, and about other things. These moments, when others are able to join the rhythm of the home, both practically and intellectually, gratify me very much.  They affirm in practical ways the truths I hold most closely.

There is neighbourhood group centred around one of the parks near our house.  It is not one of the city’s official neighbourhood groups, because there are too many limitations on these organizations.  It is simply a group of neighbours who gather to make an icerink or have a community BBQ or run free soccer for kids, and it is by far the most active and functional neighbourhood group in the city.

My wife was talking to a member of this group at the park the other day, and he suggested that the neighbourhood around this park was so strong partially because its school is still exclusively a walking school, so that most of the parents in the area see each other twice a day, five days a week.  He was explaining that this sense of community is what makes the school’s PTA so strong, but I think that it also goes a long way toward explaining why the city’s most active and most independent neighbourhood group is centred around the closest park.  There are only two walking schools left in the city, both of them less than ten minutes walk from my front door, and I do not think it is any coincidence that both of them are also within easy walking distance of a strong and effective neighbourhood group.

It is not that there is anything especially magical about walking schools.  They are merely what forces people in our area to walk through their neighbourhood, passing each other’s houses, meeting each other in the street, talking with each other on the school’s front lawn.  This function could be performed by many things, by a church or a community centre or an employer, but it is a function that is no longer performed by anything in many of our communities.  The walking schools bring otherwise isolated people into the street, makes it possible for them to encounter one another.

Even though my children do not attend the school, many students and parents pass by my house every day, where I am usually sitting on my front porch with a coffee, and I have come to know many of them over the last few years, some of them so well that they will beg a cup of coffee from me if they have not had the time to make their own.  My children know them too, shouting and playing and arranging times to meet in the park.  Once my eldest even put up a stand to give the kids free lemonade on their way home from school.

When people interact in this way, not occasionally, but continually, as a part of the way they live, the natural outcome is that a sense of community will develop.  It will be impossible to avoid this development.  It will lead us on the way community, however much we try to avoid it.

People always want to begin with writing, but good writing is an ending before it is a beginning, a culmination before it is an inauguration.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, good writing is preceded by slow and careful reading, by thoughtful and patient reflection, and by learned and leisurely conversation.  Writing that does not proceed from these things is deficient.

Slow and Careful Reading – It is better to read one book very well than to read many poorly.  Being well-read should never be confused with being much-read.  Many people read much without ever reading at all.  There are fewer people who truly read well.  Though they may perhaps read less, they are the readers who gain from their practice.

Good reading approaches the text slowly, attentively, with an openness to what might be thought through it, with an openness to being interrupted by reflection and by conversation.  There is no substitute for this time and for this attention.  It permits what is not us, what is other than us, to approach us through the text.  The text is not itself of the greatest importance.  It is the site through which we are encountered by what is of the greatest importance, and its value is in how well it provokes us to be so encountered.

Good reading leaves its mark on the text.  It writes in the margins, and it turns the corners of pages, and it notes its favourite passages with bookmarks, even if it does these things only figuratively.  A book that is well read is stained with fingerprints and coffee stains, even if only in metaphor.  It is well used.  It is a tool that has become worn to fit the mind that is reading it.

Thoughtful and Patient Reflection – It is necessary to reflect on reading whenever something calls through the text, whenever the text provokes, but also regularly, as a discipline.  To reflect is to engage in the exercise of thinking as if it were a religious act, as if it was the rule of a monastic order, in order that it might sometimes become a spiritual act, beyond the rule of any order.  It is to order one’s mind so that it might be prepared more fully for what will come to disorder it entirely.

Reflection is always accompanied by a writing that is not a writing, a secret and secretive writing, notes and jottings, incoherences and incomprehensibles, a writing that will never appear as a writing to be read, a writing that remains hidden and unread.  It is a writing that is also a rereading,  a returning to the places in the text that need mastication, rumination, regurgitation.  This writing chews the text like a cow chews its cud, again and again.  It digests the text, gains sustenance from the text, takes the text into itself, makes the text a part of itself.

Reflection is a wondering and a wandering.  It follows the text to other texts and returns them to where they began. It takes its time as it wanders.  It does not run or even walk.  It strolls.  It ambles.  It perambulates.  It wallows in its journey through the text, follows it wherever it leads.  It is not concerned with a destination, at least not now, not yet.  It leaves destinations to the future and reserves for the present a certain forgetfulness of what the future might demand.   Its purpose is to see what might be encountered now on its path through the text, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, not to create a coherent text of its own.

This activity, this reflection, this meditation, is essential.   It must not be hurried.  It is not brainstorming or some other such technique.  It is an openness to the text, a willingness to give the text time and space, a discipline of doing the text justice.

Learned and Leisurely Conversation – Conversation is not mere group discussion.  It is not mere argument.  It is not mere chatter.  It is a coming together through the text, where the text becomes a site where we catch sight of one another.  There are always too few of these opportunities to converse, always.  They must be treasured when they arise, guarded jealously, so that they are not overwhelmed by the many things that are less important but more pressing.

Conversation involves a careful listening of one another.  It considers what the other has to say.  It considers what it will reply before it replies.  It takes its time, so it is not afraid to pause.  It is willing to say less and have it be meaningful than to say much and to have it be mere chatter. It knows that it is better to give things their proper time.

Conversation is being on the way together, is helping one another along the way.  It turns us in the same direction, puts us shoulder to shoulder.  Though we may turn our eyes to one another, our feet are always on the path together, following the same path together, so that we might draw nearer to what it is we are seeking.  Whatever disagreements we may have between us, conversation always agrees, before all else, to walk the path together.

Conversation is also sitting at the table together, breaking bread together, recognizing what is other to us through the breaking of bread.  It is the invitation to the table and the acceptance of the table.  It is sitting face to face.  It is having more between us than words.  It is also having between us a giving, and a hospitality, and an invitation, and an acceptance.  It allows us to digest each other’s words like bread and wine, to make each other’s words a part of us.

Conversation never ends.  It is always being suspended for a time, but it is never ended, except by death.

Writing -  Only in the context of these disciplines of reading and reflection and conversation, only in the context of these practices, that writing can begin.  Indeed, these disciplines will produce writing, inevitably.  Though this writing may take many forms, it will become a necessity in the one who reads and reflects and converses.  It will become, not a task to be undertaken, not an ideal to be fulfilled, but a hunger to be satisfied, a thirst to be quenched, a lust to be satiated.

This is what there is to be learned.  This is the learning that teaching must let be.  This is the learning that teaching must let be learned.

Most people no longer converse.  At least, they no longer converse well.

They chat well, certainly, about the weather, about their favourite sports teams, about the newest entertainment news, about anything that will not reveal or involve them personally.  Otherwise, they say very little, and when circumstances require them to go further than mere chatter, require them to say something meaningful about what they think, feel, and believe, they lack the practice, the experience, the tools, to say anything very coherent. Even those few who are willing to go beyond their chatter often fall short of real conversation as well, falling into mere argumentation, into alternating monologue, into self-absorbed verbiage.

Conversation, however, true conversation, is much more than mere chatter or argument.  It is an exchange of words that is like an exchange of gifts.  Those who converse approach each other ready to give and receive words as tokens of themselves, as tokens of their love for one another.  They approach and receive each other as an act of hospitality, as an act of friendship, and their words are the gestures, the icons, the sacraments of this exchange.  They give and receive themselves through their words, though this giving and receiving is nothing that they can determine or guarantee.

Conversation is never satisfied with idle chatter, even if it permits this kind of talk to take place and to perform its function.  It does not do away with chatter, but neither is it satisfied with it, because conversation always desires something more, always desires to know the other more deeply in hospitality, in friendship, in love.

Neither is conversation ever satisfied with argument, even if this argument takes up questions of the profoundest significance, because conversation desires that words be exchanged like gifts, not that assent be compelled by force.  Though conversation is open to disagreement, open to difference in thought and feeling and belief, it exchanges even this difference, especially this difference, within its economy of giving and hospitality and friendship.  Difference, through the exchange of conversation, is made to strengthen rather than weaken the relation that is formed through the exchange of words.

Conversation is only satisfied, then, with words that give ourselves and receive others, with words that perform a continual hospitality, with words that are nothing except as they come to form a relation between us.

This is why a conversation does not end when a particular subject becomes exhausted, because the subject is secondary to the relation in any case.  The conversation extends beyond any subject, beyond any occasion, even if the subject and the occasion inform it profoundly.  The conversation  extends also beyond any greeting and farewell, waiting always to be continued, extending itself across whole lives, passing from generation to generation.

This kind of conversation does not come without labour, however.  Like anything worth doing, it must be cultivated.  We must seek it out wherever it might be, give ourselves over to it when it is found, guard it against thoose things that would threaten it, because it is perhaps our  profoundest human treasure.