Flipping It

I left a video message on Skype the other day. I was trying to Skype my husband, who was away on business, but he didn’t answer, and Skype very kindly asked if I wanted to leave a video message.

Sure enough, when I clicked on it, a window popped up, and suddenly I was face to face with myself, my webcam tracking my every movement. I clicked Record and did it in one take.

When I clicked Stop, however, Skype gave me the option to send the video, re-record, or cancel. That’s when it got interesting. At that moment, Skype flipped the image of my video so that now instead of looking at a mirror image – which Skype provides when you see yourself on the webcam – I was now seeing the properly “flipped” image of myself that everyone else sees. This image was familiar in the way images of myself in photographs are familiar, but also strange and unsettling because I’m not used to seeing that person. I can honestly say I don’t know her well.

This got me thinking about an evening a week or so ago when I went to an open mic. Lately I’ve been working up new arrangements of my original music and playing them out at open mics. I am a classically trained cellist, but I only picked up the guitar a few years ago, so playing guitar while I sing, especially when I’m nervous, is still a challenge. Long story short, I did not play as well as I had hoped that particular night and was pretty upset about it.

But the truth is, my playing that evening was probably fine. I am not the next American Idol (though someone once paid me a confusing compliment that if American Idol had been on 20 years earlier I’d have been a shoo-in), but I didn’t stink up the joint either. I was actually “very good,” as another performer accurately noted, but that evening, this was not enough for me. I was in full-on piss-all-over-myself mode, furious at my lack of professionalism, steel nerves, and general perfection. I even went so far as to inform my steering wheel on the way home that I was tired of SUCKING.

But the truth is, I didn’t suck.

Which brings me to my point. The view from here – inside my head, heart and body looking out – is very different from the one perceiving me as everyone but me perceives me. I literally can’t see myself directly in the same way others see me directly.

Think about that for a second: we all go through our entire lives never having physically seen our own faces without some form of mediation like a mirror or a photographic device. Isn’t that enough to convince a person that perhaps our own judgments of ourselves from within are … well … limited at best?

Hang onto that thought for a moment, then consider my judging myself by my mirror image. This person who shows up in the mirror every day – and on Skype only during the recording process – is a stranger to everyone but me. I am the only one who sees her regularly, yet she is often the one on whom I base my judgments about myself, my worth, my abilities, and my talents, not to mention my looks.

As I considered these things, I realized how truly logically perverse it is to judge myself only from either the limited vantage point I have from inside my head, or from my mirror image. No one else sees or knows those two points of view, because they don’t correspond to anyone’s direct perception of me. The view from inside my head may be direct and real for me, but it’s limited. My mirror image, on the other hand, is neither direct nor real for anyone, because it’s not how I directly perceive myself, nor how anyone else directly perceives me.

Now I am not necessarily suggesting that others can see me better than I can see myself, but I’m willing more and more to entertain the thought. At minimum, I have grown more and more suspicious of my judgments about myself, particularly the harsh ones, as they come from a very limited perspective – the inside of my head, or from the indirect, inverted image I see in the mirror.

So it is with my music. I record my practice sessions regularly, and even though I shudder every time I set up the microphone, I am constantly stunned by how NOT CRAPPY I sound on playback. Again, I’m no American Idol, but I’m also never as horrendous as I perceive my talents to be at the moment I exercise them.

And so it is with life. I’m never as bad as I think I am. I don’t see me like everyone else sees me, because it is literally physically impossible to see myself as directly as they do.

This of course raises the deeper question of why I bother with any of this – why the obsession with judging myself? I think it’s natural to want to know how I’m doing, but on what criteria do I accept these judgments? Looking only to myself is suspect. Looking to others is also suspect, as their perspective on me is colored by their own wishes, desires, and suspicions.

I know the answer: I need to seek my value in the eyes of my higher power, but I still don’t know how to do that. Or rather, I still have not weaned myself from reliance on the opinions of mortals. It’s not that those opinions aren’t valuable; sometimes they are. It’s that they don’t satisfy, because no matter how sincerely anyone tells me they like my music, for example, I don’t really believe them, because I wonder if they're just trying to be nice.

Perhaps it is the discouraging words I have received from others that cause words of encouragement to bounce off. But that also suggests that I really should be relying on something else – or someone else, like a higher power – for a true understanding of my self worth rather than deferring to these nasty remnants of opinion that have taken up residence in my heart.

“So what is YOUR course going to be about?”

“So what is YOUR course going to be about?” she asked, the edges of her voice tinged with the manic, insecure enthusiasm I remembered among my fellow hyperactive humanities students in graduate school.

I blinked, not because I did not understand, but because I understood the question as well as the expected response, and I wished not to participate. Instead, I feigned ignorance.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, my course is going to be about race, class, and gender. What is your theme going to be?”

We were discussing our prospective syllabi for an introductory university-level writing class at a community college where 80% of the incoming freshmen test into the developmental level in writing – in other words, they lack the writing skills even to place into the intro level class we both were about to teach.

I blinked again.

“Um. My course is going to be about writing,” I said, with a little jiggle of my head and a goofy smile as if to say, “isn’t that nutty?”

I jiggled my head to blunt the point I was making. Now, two years later, I probably wouldn’t bother.

I am not a decades-long veteran of college teaching, so I probably have no right to speak on this subject. I’m also not a scholar of writing pedagogy, and I haven’t read a book about it for at least 20 years. I’ve stumbled across things about writing pedagogy over the two years since I’ve been back in a college classroom after a 15-year hiatus from teaching, and I read them with some interest, but I don’t spend my time reading about teaching writing.

When I decided to return to teaching, I did spend several days in the stacks of bookstores at the many universities and colleges near me, just to see what was out there in the way of writing textbooks. My summary of the 15 years I was away: not much has changed, except the textbooks have gotten a hell of a lot more expensive.

I am puzzled and impatient with the way college writing courses are taught by many instructors. These instructors load up their courses with “themes” that in themselves are admirable, and certainly important, but do not serve the needs of their students. Students of writing need to study writing: to focus their attention on the craft, techniques, and strategies for framing a written argument. Overlaying a theme on a developmental or introductory writing course is like insisting that students sew a wedding gown when they have never cut out a pattern or operated a sewing machine. Handling complicated and multi-faceted concepts like racism, for example, is difficult if not impossible when students have never been invited nor trained into the pleasures of deeper, analytical writing, and even less so when they are still struggling to slow down their thinking enough to write a complete sentence, thereby to frame a complete thought.

One of my former students once said that my courses should be called “The Philosophy of Writing,” and I took that as a compliment. I believe writing – the craft, art, technique, and purpose of writing – should be the focus of writing courses. Readings should either be about writing itself, or used as examples of writing techniques. In the latter case, the class discussion should focus on the content only to the degree that it informs the study of how the writer has put the argument together.

Please understand I am not talking about literature courses, or what most of us think about when we think of “English class.” Reading fiction or non-fiction and then writing about its contents is certainly the business of literature classes, but should not, in my opinion, be the business of writing classes.

The drive for a “theme” for a writing course implies that writing itself is somehow not sufficient as a subject of study. I’m guessing some instructors would argue that reading about writing or reading to discern the rhetorical strategy of the writer would not engage students enough. This is not my experience. On the contrary, I find that students respond not only enthusiastically, but also with palpable relief when they are finally given the chance to focus on the craft of writing. They know that being able to write well, with clarity and confidence, will carry them through not just their college studies, but also their lives.

Achieving this level of writing proficiency is often derailed by the need among students, many of whom may not yet have sufficient writing experience, to feign proficiency in discussing the complex themes imposed on their introductory writing courses by their instructors. Forcing students to wrestle with these complex themes before they have the writing tools that will enable them to think them through is not only counterproductive, but also, I would argue, lazy on the part of instructors, and possibly even discriminatory.

In any case, themed college writing courses don’t serve the task to which I believe we are called as writing instructors: convincing students who believe they can't write – because they lack the technical skills and knowledge, and/or because they believe they have nothing of value to say – that they can learn to write well … and that they should, because if *they* don't learn to articulate themselves, someone else will do it for them, and will probably get it wrong.

Ik wil trouwen

On a somewhat chilly and typically damp day in Brussels, Belgium fifteen or so years ago, I struggled to push my toddler son’s stroller over the large cobblestones near the Grande Place, just as I was struggling to figure out how to occupy him for the hour or so until my husband would join us. As I rounded a corner near our hotel, I noticed what looked like a parade forming up the street near the top of a small hill and thought, what good fortune! Nothing like a parade to entertain a toddler!

The sidewalk was mercifully smooth on the uphill slope. As I found a perfect spot on a corner, I noticed that there were strangely few people there to watch the parade. Counting myself lucky, I positioned my son for maximum visibility, then crouched down beside him to share my excitement at what we were about to share together.

What appeared shortly thereafter was not what I expected. Men in very little clothing and enormous, vibrant feathers strutted down the street, accompanied by men and a few women clad in black leather and a lot of hardware. They were having a perfectly fabulous time, and seemed delighted that my son and I were there to watch. I realized quickly what I had stumbled into, and while I confess that I was little relieved that my son was too young to ask any questions later, I was pleased to experience something far more topical than some random, centuries-old parade near a European town square.

After all, just a few short years earlier, I had penned and saw published a letter to the editor of the International Herald Tribune that argued cogently and passionately for the right of gay couples to adopt children. My letter was a response to an opinion piece I had seen a few weeks earlier arguing against it, and I carefully and succinctly took that opinion piece apart, point by point. Apparently the editors found my argument convincing since they printed it. I was very proud.

Yet even as I stood in my progressive self-satisfaction on a street corner that chilly day in Brussels, I saw a sign among the revelers that carried a message I had never before considered: Ik wil trouwen.

I don’t know why, but it had never occurred to me that gay people would want to marry.

I was startled. Stunned, even.

I still don’t know why I was so surprised, especially for a woman who was perfectly ready to argue for gay rights in areas that others thought should belong only to mixed gender couples. It probably had something to do with my religious upbringing, even though at that point I was not a practicing Christian.

Now I am a Christian, and I have been following what has been taking place on this question in the United Methodist Church. I have read my cousin Kevin Higgs’ book Hospitality to Strangers: Theology and Homosexuality. I’ve read what Bishop Melvin Talbert has to say on the subject. I realize that my denomination – Presbyterian Church USA – also fails to acknowledge gay marriage. I confess that I straddled this issue in my head for years since that day in Brussels: on one side, my gay friends and their unions that are no better or worse, and certainly no less sacred than my own, and on the other the supposedly Biblical teachings of my religion on the subject.

I read the Bible cover to cover when I gave my life to Christ as an adult to make sure I knew what I was getting into. I've read the parts about women, slavery, and homosexuality that I don't understand, and that don't seem to gel with who Christ is. So I kept straddling. I was probably worried about not being a good Christian, even as I spoke words of encouragement to my gay friends.

But over time my ambivalence has drained away. Maybe it was watching most of my college students look at those who do not embrace gay marriage as if they had just crawled out from under a rock. Perhaps it was seeing a fairly famous and talented friend perform career suicide by leaving her stance concerning gay marriage ambiguous at best, and by tangling it all up with Christianity.

In any case, I am straddling no longer. I don’t know or care anymore if it’s Biblical. I am simply a loving person who wants folks to be able to love those they love fully in the presence of God. I don’t think Christ would stand with those who hate. It’s just not in His nature.

On that damp corner in Brussels, with my toddler son staring in fascination, I had never considered gay marriage, and was certainly not ready to embrace it. Now I embrace it fully.