Disrobing

In the first place, I feel fully dressed in my T-shirt and boxers. My boxers are very definitely old-person undergarments; they're loose, they come down to my mid-thigh, and the fly has a button. I've answered the door in them, gone out to get the mail or to get something from my car, and felt completely covered.

In the second place, Oregon has wonderful evening breezes. I walk home from work, and the first thing I want to do when I get in the door is open the windows and the sliding glass door and let in some cool air. But I also want to shed my belt, and usually my pants as well. And here's where it gets slightly irrational. I always wait until my pants are off before I open the window.

And the reason I do doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I feel fully clothed in my boxers, but I feel very odd taking off my pants in front of an open window. I can't pin down how it's any different from taking off my coat, which I'd feel perfectly normal doing in front of an open window. Before, I'm fully clothed; after, I'm fully clothed. During, I'm fully clothed. So what's weird about it?

It seems to me that it's an example of some of the fuzzy-logic, very pragmatic cultural knowledge that most people soak up without thinking about it, but that a few people have a hard time handling. Clothing norms, in general, are more complicated than many of us realize, which is the chief reason young children don't grasp them too thoroughly. To a toddler, it's difficult to understand why it's okay to take off your hat in public, but not okay to take off your underwear. Both are discrete articles of clothing that cover specific body parts.

Even worse, the norms aren't universal; they're subject to extreme cultural variability. I've read about aboriginal cultures in which complete nudity is customary in just about all situations, but they'd find it deeply humiliating if anyone watched them eat. They build very solid shelters in which everyone can eat all alone, out of sight of everyone else. I can't imagine what they'd make of our restaurants. Probably the same thing we make of pictures of nekkid folks in National Geographic: we just roll our eyes and wonder at what weirdos they are.

Most folks walking around have some sense of what semantic meaning is, and all but a few recognize syntactic meaning with just a brief explanation and a couple of simple examples. But I think we way downplay the difficulties that crop up with the third dimension of meaning: pragmatics. I know that most folks understand what dyslexia is, and that more and more folks have a grasp on other learning disabilities, such as auditory processing, dysgraphia, etc., but surprisingly few have any idea about nonverbal learning disorders. We're beginning to recognize the problem in kids: they aren't sure when it's okay to enter a conversation, or how to use eye contact when interacting with others, or how much personal space others expect. Similarly, they may not understand what clothes to wear, or possibly how to wear them, which is an even more complex subject.

And I suppose I also think that we underestimate the degree to which the affective, pragmatic, nonverbal stream of information is becoming more complex all the time. We all take it as obvious that there are more things to know, that we swim in a sea of information, that advances in communication technology produce more and more data that everyone is expected to absorb and process, but I wonder if we recognize that the world is also a more complicated place in ways that aren't reducible to data? What with increasing immigration, the erosion of ethnocentrism, and in general growing understanding that difference is less a threat than a resource, there are more pragmatic modes, more ways of behaving, more fuzzy, complex formulas for complying with others' expectations than in the past.

I suspect we don't recognize it. I think we're still stuck on trying to persuade the recalcitrant that those who are different aren't necessarily wrong or bad, so we haven't made more than inching progress in the next step, which involves sizing up just how much we have to learn, and how we're going to do it. And when we do, and when we realize that these aren't things that fit neatly into formulas, textbooks or training sessions, I think we're probably in for a brand new type of information sickness, something like the overload people feel after the first few days in a new job or a new school, but far more intense. And along the way, I suspect we'll see symptoms that resemble those of data-driven information sickness, including memory lapses and other burps and slips in rational thinking.

Like odd depantsing rituals.

Discipline

Over the past forty-eight hours, I fought my battle with coffee. It was over a lot sooner than I expected. All the same, I doubt I'll touch the stuff before August.

Coffee is addictive. And I don't mean that in any cute sense of the word: I mean that it creates physical dependency, and if a dependent person cuts down on coffee intake, there are withdrawal symptoms. That's simply a fact. A scary fact.

When I was in graduate school, about a decade ago, I went hog-wild on coffee. There was a very nice locally-owned coffee shop just about a block from my workspace, so I frequented it. This should give you an idea of just how frequent my frequenting was: they had, as many college-town businesses do, a punch card setup. Ten punches got you a free beverage. They weren't very smart about it, as they gave a punch for everything, even a small house blend, and the freebie was good for anything on the menu, no matter how expensive. But their foolish generosity was my boon, and I traded in a whole lot of punch cards. To be precise, it was not at all unusual for me to start a day with a brand new punch card, and, by the end of the day, fill it and claim the freebie. That was a lot of coffee. It gradually dawned on me that it was an unhealthy amount.

What saved me, I think, is that I hadn't been a coffee drinker before that. I started drinking coffee at that phase of my education, because my doctoral adviser was a hard man to pin down, but could often be enticed into stepping out for a cup of joe. At first, I had to have a mocha with a lot of whipped cream. Then I managed to choke down flavored coffee with lots of cream and sugar. The next step was unflavored coffee with cream and sugar, then just sugar, and now I drink it black. As a matter of fact, I like cafe Americanos, nothing added except, occasionally, an extra shot. The point of that little beverage history is that I worked my way up to my ridiculous overconsumption of caffeine pretty darned quickly, inside of a year or two. And I gather, from purely anecdotal evidence collected from friends and family, that what causes the addiction is heavy consumption of coffee over a long period of time. I wasn't able to put the serious hurt on myself in just two years, praise God; it takes year after year after year of steady coffee consumption.

So, earlier this week, I finally asked myself why I was still brewing up coffee every morning. It's summer. I have no need to get out of bed until I feel like it. I have no particular need to be alert. Once I realized there was no positive reason for me to go straight from my warm bed to a warm cup of coffee, I decided this would be a good week to see if addiction had set in.

Oh boy.

Tuesday was the day. I didn't suffer any symptoms until about two or three in the afternoon, but then it hit: the caffeine deprivation headache. Boom. Boom boom boom boom boom, like a jackhammer. And the pain pulsed with my heartbeat, which meant when it came time for me to take my regular half-hour walk home, I felt the headache at quadruple intensity every time I climbed a hill. By the time I got home, I was so wrung out from pain that all I wanted to do was go straight to bed. I slept fourteen hours: 6 PM to 8 AM.

And then I felt fine.

Yesterday, I had a little ghost headache in the afternoon that didn't amount to anything. Today, we'll see, but I don't expect anything fierce. I think my body shook it off in one day. And I think it did so because of a choice I made about twelve years ago.

Around the time that my excess consumption of coffee started scaring me, I made a firm resolution and cut back to one very strong cup, very early in the morning. Except in special circumstances, such as when I have to stay awake to drive, I never drink coffee more than about an hour after I wake up, and I never have a second cup. On more than a few occasions, my colleagues have requested, or even demanded, an explanation for this. I tell them that I have quite enough trouble falling asleep at night without making matters worse with too much caffeine, and this is true. But it's not the chief reason. The idea of being deep into caffeine dependency, with no way out except through a lot of pain, is one I find quite unsettling. And even though I drink coffee just about every day, it seems as though limiting myself to one early cup makes for a shallow dependency that's easily dismissed. Every few years I go off coffee for a while, and the effects are mercifully brief, so I'm not inclined to mess with what works. Yes, this being the Pacific Northwest, I keep passing places where I can smell it, and oh, does it ever smell enticing. But some sacrifices are worth it.

Something like the above reasoning explains the majority of odd choices that I make: choices about food, about sleep, about spending money, about making friends, about driving a car, about how I teach my classes, and the list could go on. Much of what I do doesn't make sense to other people, but I'm not inclined to mess with what works.

Doom

For the most part, I love being a teacher, and I can't imagine doing anything else for a living. There's just one part of the job that I don't like.

It's very easy to get the wrong impression, and to think that just because students apparently are paying attention, giving good feedback, saying positive things about the class, that somehow I'm setting their feet on the right path and steering them away from mistakes. I thought that for the first few years I taught. Then, I had to learn the hard way: I never, never, never steer them away from a mistake. Never have, never will, can't. They steer themselves away, when they do. And they don't very often.

I am not saying my students are stupid. The run of them make better decisions than I did at their age. But what I learned the very hard, and painful, way, is that I cannot stop a student from making a mistake. They have to make their own mistakes. I can't protect them, I can't shield them, I can't get through to them. They do what they do because they decide it's what needs doing.

And really, that's the way it should be. I made a choice to teach college, and it has a lot of benefits. I don't talk to parents, ever. I deal with people who are young, energetic, creative, and fun, but still have at least a sketchy foundation of adult behaviors, so I don't get worn out and wrung out by excess childishness. I've had friends who taught younger students, and while they reap enormous rewards themselves, they also suffer from a particular kind of burnout that I think would claim me pretty quickly. College is the right age group for me to teach.

But the thing about college students is, it's a mistake to protect them. By this point, the time for protection has passed. Since this is their first stage of being out from under adult command, it's actually very important that they make and implement their own decisions, even if those decisions are disastrous. I can put it this way: it's more important for them to do an idiotic thing that they decided to do than it is for them to do a wise thing at someone else's insistence.

But it's more than a mistake to protect them: it's just plain impossible. I have, over the years, watched students of mine, students that I cared a lot about, destroy themselves. I've seen them spiral down into drug use. Some aren't alive anymore. At least one is in prison, and won't be out anytime soon. And I remember everything I said and did, chiefly because I go over and over it; and I remember moments when I thought I'd made a difference, only to find out later that I hadn't. No one ever actually teaches a college student; instead, college students take advantage of the resources around them, including but not limited to what their professors have to say, to teach themselves. And it simply doesn't matter how right I am, or how vividly I remember making the exact same mistake in my young adult years: if a student is hell-bent on doing the dumbest thing imaginable, then I am powerless.

And every once in a while I feel like Jeremiah. I explain to students that what they intend to do is a bad idea, even though I know full well that my words are bouncing off. What motivates me to do it anyway is a pretty dreary purpose: I don't want them to be able to claim that no one warned them. When a moment of accountability arrives, when a consequence comes thudding down, I don't want them to be able to lay the charge at my feet that I never cautioned them. I want to be innocent of their blood. What I want is really much more: I do want to reach them, to persuade them, to lead them away from danger, but I know better by now than to think that can happen. College students change their behavior for one reason, and one reason only: because they've decided it's the wise course of action. And while that's inescapable, it does also result in a lot of agonizing moments for their teachers, friends, and loved ones: moments of absolute paralysis and impotence.

The thing about it is, people do not learn what they are not yet ready to learn. People learn when they're ready, when they reach the proper spot in their developmental track, and not before. And there is zero, and I mean zero, and let me emphasize zero, way to speed up that process. It happens at its own pace. When a toddler is terrified of monsters under the bed, an older person may chuckle, may remember a similar fear at a similar age, but the older person cannot transfuse the knowledge that there are no monsters under the bed into the toddler's mind. To the toddler, they're there, waiting. And it's one of the toughest things for the older person to have empathy for the toddler, to experience what it's like for an irrational threat to be absolutely real in the mind.

Just one sore spot I'll get specific about, and then I'll put this behind me: moving, transferring, etc. to be closer to friends and family. I had an advisee do it, and I have a Sunday School student who's about to do it. It's their choice, and it's not my place to tell them it's not a good one. But it isn't. Life moves on. Surrendering to homesickness is not a move toward growth, but toward immaturity and stagnation. It's wonderful to be close to one's family members, but not wonderful to be stuck on the end of an umbilical cord. And being needy and dependent on one's high school friends to me seems uncomfortably similar to peaking in high school. Yes, those years are enormously influential, and most folks acquire wonderful friends and wonderful memories then. But it comes time to move on. There are hordes of people in the world ready to be wonderful friends. If an old friend shows up in the same neighborhood, or the same line of work, then that's great. But holding back and limiting one's options in order to stay close to high school friends really strikes me as tragic.

Despite all of the above, despite the frustration of being powerless, I still love being a teacher. It's actually somehow comforting to know that the students I teach are in control of what happens to them. Certainly limits my ability to screw things up.

Dodging

I dodge cyclists. I do this by walking on the extreme edge of the sidewalk. Cyclists have this thing about blazing straight up the middle. I've trained myself to stay way over to the side, to avoid collisions. So far, I've been lucky; no collisions yet.

I dodge goose poop. There are lots and lots of Canada geese here, and their poop is at least as large as that of a mid-sized dog.

I dodge bootlicking. Most of my students seem to have a fair helping of integrity, but there are always a few who think the way to get what they want is to be excessively ingratiating. They don't appreciate how much that gives me the creeps. So, they'll try to find out my viewpoints on various issues, especially political ones, so they can parrot them back to me. I therefore try to be pretty hard to pin down.

I dodge socializing. Both at work and at church I have wonderful friends who frequently invite me to their homes, or to come out and meet them for dinner and fun. But one thing that hasn't changed, and probably won't, is that I'm much more happy in a room by myself with a good book than I am in crowd. Work involves being around people, and so does church, and as long as those are inescapable, I'd just as soon they be nice, interesting, fun people, but I still don't seek out people when I want to enjoy myself; I seek where they aren't.

I dodge stodginess. I don't do what I'm supposed to, what would make sense to other people. I'm an academic, which makes it okay to be eccentric, and I take full advantage of the privilege.

I dodge pain. I make light of too many things. I laugh at what really ought to be addressed. But I'm far from alone. I think it's a culture-wide sickness.

I dodge God. Fortunately, He's quicker.

I dodge androgenic alopecia. I use a Gillette Mach 3.

I dodge popular culture: no TV, few movies. With a breathtaking economy of movement, I simultaneously dodge dementia.

I dodge spiders. Once in a while, one of them catches up to me. He usually doesn't live too much longer.

I dodge easy categorization. When people find out I'm from Texas, they can't believe it. When people find out I'm a Southern Baptist, they can't believe it. And the list goes on.

I dodge raindrops. I find it does little good, but I love a challenge. I even find futility kind of charming.

I dodge sniper fire. I must be good at it, since they haven't hit me yet.

And even if everyone around me converts to Islam, I will not. I will stubbornly dodge the Hajj.

Destinations

For this one, I need help, in the form of comments, from my fellow Oregonians.

I'm not taking a big out-of-town trip this summer. For one thing, I don't have the money. For another, I don't have time, as I have this steady dribble of little responsibilities and duties and chores that will keep me tethered to home.

This is not a bad thing, really. I've grown into a homebody in my middle age. What I've decided to do, though, is make a lot of little one-day excursions. And in Oregon, there are a lot of those available.

What's below is a draft list of places I plan to visit. If you spot good choices that I'm overlooking, do please put up a comment and add to them.

The criteria are pretty simple: it needs to be easy to get to. That means either it needs to be a two-hour drive or less from Eugene, or it needs to be accessible by Amtrak. (I love Amtrak!) And it needs to be worth the visit. And it can cost something, but it shouldn't be opulent. I can spend one night, or possibly two, but single day trips are what I'm really after.

Here's what I have so far:

• Portland/Seattle. I'm going there at the end of June. The Indigo Girls are playing in Eugene, Portland and Seattle on consecutive days, so I'm following them up the coast on Amtrak, then coming back home and getting back to work.
  
• Along the way, I do plan to swing out and see Multnomah Falls.
  
• And I may take in the Japanese Garden again; I saw it in December, but I'm told it's spectacular in the summer.
  
• And I've been commanded to go to OMSI.
  
• Coos Bay/Bandon. A couple of folks in my Sunday School class are Coos Bay natives, and they tell me there are all kinds of coolness to be found in these two towns, some of it little-known.
  
• And although I took one excursion to the coast last fall, and checked out both Florence and Newport, I by no means exhausted everything there was to see. I skipped Heceta Head, and rolled through a lot of towns like Yachats.
  
• The South Sister/Mount Pisgah. I haven't been much of a backpacker thus far, but I'm very okay with extremely long walks, even strenuous ones, and I'm told either or both of these treks would include some mind-slamming views. I'm also told I need to check out Sahalie Falls while I'm out that way.
  
• The church has an excursion to Triangle Lake in mid-July, so I'll get a good look at that.
  
• Speaking of the church, the college fellowship folks are talking about a road trip to Ashland for the Shakespeare festival. I'm quite intrigued by that.
  
• And closer to home, places I can reach on foot, include Spencer's Butte and Gillespie Butte.
  

That's the beginning of the list. Help me make it longer, eh? Thanks.

Detritus

Fun is not the point. Fun is a by-product.

There's a difference between instrumental goals and terminal goals. I don't arrive at work on time because arriving at work on time will make the clouds part and the angels sing and my life suddenly feel complete and fulfilling. I arrive at work on time because it helps me to be a more effective educator: I can get my morning scut-work done before class, I can start class on time, and so forth. Many things in my life are subordinate to the goal of being a good educator of students.

But even that's not the terminal goal. The terminal goal is glorifying God. Whenever I do a good job of keeping that in mind, it settles a lot of unsettled things in my life.

But back to fun, I run into this problem all the time. I have too many students, and even the occasional colleague, who put fun too close to the core of their value array. And that's asking for trouble. I cannot think of a single endeavor about which I can say "I am doing this solely for the purpose of having fun," that won't wind up disappointing me. Many things that need doing can be fun along the way, but there's always a more substantive objective. I usually have fun when I teach, have fun when I work with my colleagues, have fun when I write test questions (it's so easy to write a good, rigorous test question that just happens to have a bit of a joke in one of the wrong answers), have fun when I do almost anything. But anytime I'm tempted to think, "I don't want to do this for the sole reason that it isn't fun," I'm straying from sound decision-making into frivolity.

It occurs to me that this has something in common with the kind of conceptual inflation, the kind of bubble, that surrounds efforts to raise people's self-esteem. That, I am convinced, is one of the most benign-sounding terrible ideas of all. If someone has a fever, it's a mistake to treat just the fever except in circumstances when the fever itself has become life-threatening. Those circumstances are pretty rare. Similarly, it is a mistake to treat low self-esteem except in that limited set of circumstances when cratered self-esteem is making suicide look like a good idea. Yes, in situations like that, I can see it. But the overwhelming majority of the time, it seems to me that addressing self-esteem without addressing the inputs that caused it to sag is cutting a corner, taking a shortcut, taking the easy way out, running away from confronting core issues. If you've got such a huge, festering boil in you that it's raising your body temperature a degree or two, then you accomplish nothing by popping an ice-pack on top of it to cool it off. Instead, it needs to be opened up and drained. And where people have complex, layered, multivariate distortions in their perceptions, their relationships, their expectations, their self-talk habits, etc. that are dragging their self-esteem down, then it's the inputs that have to be treated, not the symptom.

That was a bit of a digression, but it's an opinion I've arrived at after a bunch of years navigating the Communication Studies field and seeing what kinds of atrocious thinking we sometimes get up to. And my feelings about fun are closely related.

When you cut the corner and just try to raise someone's self-esteem, the outcome is bound to be inauthentic. If people compliment me just because they think I'm having a down day, then sooner or later I'm going to figure out that the compliments were just a product of sympathy, not an expression of genuine admiration. The whole "everyone gets a trophy, everyone gets to be valedictorian" perspective on self-esteem produces only phoniness. It doesn't produce enduring confidence that has a hard center and resists setbacks; it produces a fake, frothy ersatz self-esteem that can't stand up to an imagined cross look from a friend.

And I get the same dissatisfaction whenever I put my own enjoyment at the center of an activity and measure it by how successfully it entertains me. Things that are worth doing have a purpose, have a product, and are satisfying to complete because I know they needed doing. I get up and go to work every day knowing that I make a difference, that I help old children become young adults, that I encourage and nurture and cultivate and train and strengthen. It's all exhausting work, but at the end of it, I feel a very sturdy sense of joy at what I've racked up. And, along the way, there are endless opportunities to have fun.

That fun needs to be kept to the edges, at the periphery, so it doesn't dilute the actual serious work, but just flavors it and makes it a bit more palatable. Fun can be energizing, and the energy can flow back into the effort. But fun for the sake of fun just doesn't compute. It just reminds me too much of empty calories. Good, nutritious food can be prepared in appealing ways, but when we pull out all the stops to just slap together chemicals that have a pleasing flavor, the outcome is an abomination. Or at least that's how it strikes me.

Departure

A comely looking bunch.



Bye, folks.

Difficulty

I wouldn't want to be the person assigned to pick thank-you gifts for academics. That seems to me like a bug of a job.

From time to time, I get asked to show up at this or that function and help out. Just about every time I've done so, I've had a good time. And people around here are awfully good about writing thank-you notes for that kind of thing. But a half-dozen or so times this year, they've gone a step further and given me a Starbucks gift card, so I've been steadily accumulating a stake in Starbucks' inventory.

Problem is, I can't stand Starbucks.

Now, don't think I don't appreciate their effort. Their motive is entirely generous, and I do feel a momentary flash of pleasure when I see evidence of such consideration. But only momentary. A moment later, I think "What am I going to do with this? I haven't even tapped into the first five they gave me." And I think it points up the problem with trying to deal with a group as iconoclastic as academics tend to be.

So, yesterday I managed to put a tiny dent in my accumulated wealth by using a walk to Starbucks and a free beverage as an excuse to have a needed conversation with a very good student. I even left it unclear whether the student needed to give me the gift card back. But back it came, so this morning I went and stocked up on the one Starbucks item I actually do enjoy:

I couldn't really tell you why I like Starbucks mints so much. And it has to be the peppermint ones; the others just aren't the same. But, well, there it is. I could probably attribute it to the same kink in my taste that has me going back and back to Pizza Research Institute in hopes that they've whipped up my favorite soup.

On my walk back, I had all five tins stuffed in my pocket, so every step I took with that foot made this wonderful crunching sound. A lady I encountered apparently noticed it, because she looked down at my leg, and then made eye contact, with a tiny knit to her brow. "Old war wound," I said. God knows what she thought.

In this kind of thing, I'm far from alone. If you talk to a dozen academics, you'll soon uncover a dozen zillion quirks. And yet, from time to time, the poor staff folks have to try to select a treat, answer a question, project an opinion, from the perspective of a generic faculty member. That's like trying to find one drop of water that's representative of the ocean.

My hat's off to them. Certainly not a job I would want.

Doyle

I've never liked my name.

And I do mean never. I distinctly remember disliking it when I was in Kindergarten, and announcing to my mother from time to time that I had changed my name. I don't remember any of the names I came up with, but they were all radically different.

It's a nickname magnet, for one thing. "Doily." Yes, yes, I get it; a little lace thing associated with old ladies, and it's my name with a little flourish on the end. How droll. Speaking of "Droll," that's what one upperclassman decided to nickname me during my freshman year in college. Funny once; not all that funny nine months later. Then there was "Bananas," which was a reference to the Dole fruit company, "Doyle in boiling oil," which has a slightly more sinister cast in the post-Guantanamo world, and my personal favorite, "Doyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyle," intoned like the twang of a plucked spring. That last one is the only one that, looking back, I think was actually reasonably cute. But when I was eleven years old and it was still fresh, I hated it.

That, I think, is just one sign of how wound up I was as a child. I was a bad-tempered little kid. I have another memory from one of the first days in second grade: a friend of mine, with the unfortunate name of Christy Slaughter, whom I'd loved to play with during Kindergarten and first grade, told me one day, "You're a lot meaner than you used to be." And I remember thinking that, as startling as it was to hear it, she wasn't wrong. I had a big vocabulary and fast reflexes, and I didn't like myself very much, so I put into play the strategy of making the best defense out of a good offense, and I hurt a whole lot of people's feelings over the years.

Debate pulled that tendency in two different directions. In one sense, it made it worse, since debaters tend to have a taste for an artful cheap shot, and I certainly didn't need any encouragement to be more creative with my cruelty. But for several years, that's exactly what I got. The pull in the other direction was, for want of a better phrase, combat fatigue. Eventually I just got fed up with all the nastiness, and jaded and cynical about the scrappiness that most debaters have. It's much easier, in the wake of that, to turn loose of aggravation and walk away from arguments.

Not that I've banished that flaw. No, no, not by any stretch. That side of me still comes out from time to time, especially when students probe a little too hard for loopholes, or when someone I care about is falling short of what they're capable of. But I like to think I grew into someone who was pretty adept at letting unimportant things roll off, and saving my fire for the fights that needed to happen.

This started out being about my name, didn't it? It wandered away. I know that in the Bible, often people's names were changed when they reached turning points in what God had planned for them. What I can say here is that although I've never exactly fallen in love with my name, I'm at least at peace with it now. I don't hate it, although I certainly would never pass it on to any hypothetical kids. So maybe in a sense I did experience a name change to go with my mellowing.

One or two people who read this may burst out laughing and say to themselves, "If this is mellow Doyle, I would hate to have met angry Doyle." All I can say to that is, yes, you would. And there's a longer story that goes with that, but it'll have to wait for another day when I don't have unfinished grading still tugging at my sleeve. It would make a great country song -- maybe I'll slide it to Brad -- because the best title for it would be, "God spoke to me at the Wal-Mart."

Duality

So, every now and then I get to daydreaming about synaesthesia. There's a kink in my brain wiring that may qualify as an example, but I've never been sure. I am blessed to have a natural ability to spot spelling and grammar mistakes effortlessly. A few years back, it struck me that what actually happens is that a sentence will taste wrong; I actually feel an unpleasant sensation that closely parallels the jolt of an unexpected flavor. I'm not just talking about food that's burnt, or badly made, but also food in odd combinations that just don't seem right. Years and years ago, when I was ten, I actually spotted, plunked down money for, and chewed, (brace yourself) chocolate bubble gum. It was just as awful as it sounds. I had to spit it out after a few seconds.

At any rate, I get a similar bump when someone sneaks a comma splice, or a misspelled word, or a misuse of punctuation, into their writing. It certainly streamlines the process of grading written work, although not enough to raise it above the level of sheer drudgery. But this morning, it got me to thinking about one of my favorite subjects, which I've already treated in an earlier post here: deliberative versus associative thinking.

Spoken language is arbitrary and conventionalized. Objects and concepts are attached to particular words for the sole reason that we've decided they are, and because we are confident that others will recognize those words when we use them. Written language is mostly functional, but at the margins it's governed by aesthetics and heritage: we spell the way we do and arrange sentences the way we do to maximize understanding and minimize error, to please ourselves with prettiness, and because others have done it a certain way and we follow their pattern. (Pattern. Here comes the associative part.)

Grammar is, mostly, rule-governed. But, as I've described above, I usually attack it with no conscious attention to the rules. I go at my grammar-policing in an almost entirely associative mindset: does this sentence taste right? And that's a typical and predictable behavior, as most people make most decisions through both a deliberative and an associative process, deriving confidence in the result from the degree of overlap between the output of the two processes.

The thing is, I've noticed more and more that I do the same thing for arguments, for reasoning. On more occasions than I can count, I've heard someone stake out and defend a position, and I've thought "That's a really bad argument." Back in the day, it used to be the case that I would have in mind what, exactly, the problem was with the argument: the flaw, the answer I would use to refute it if the need arose. Now, more and more, I just get the same unpleasant jolt that I get with bad writing. Somehow, bad reasoning has some unfinished abrasion to it that knocks up against my critical faculties and makes me gag on it.

I was thinking about this as I walked to work this morning, and I thought "This is all getting to be a little too yin-yang, a little too much in line of tired variations on dialectical tension." But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it wasn't. From my vantage, it seems as though the two modes of reasoning operate independently of one another, although they're brought to bear on the same questions. But what they don't do is, they don't necessarily, or even very often, move to opposing poles and generate tension. Very often my gut and my brain tell me exactly the same thing. When my gut tells me a sentence isn't properly constructed, often my understanding of grammar rules is just one step behind, ready to label the mistake and explain to a student what it would take to salvage the idea.

It also got me to thinking about salvation, about being justified through Christ's death on the cross, being sanctified by the work of the Spirit, and daily putting to death the Old Man of the flesh. On the one hand, through the law I learned what sin was, and through the Bible I learned how, of my own free will and without fear, to conduct my life in a way that it is an offering of love and gratitude to the God who forgave my sins. On the other hand, God judges the contents of my heart to the exclusion of the nuts and bolts of my deeds. I can do what's good and right with a loving heart, or I can do it without sincerity; I can fall down and make a terrible mess of things even as I try my best to seek God's face and follow in obedience, or I can make the same terrible mess as a result of my selfishness. The choices I make and the deeds I enact are concrete, perceptible, sequential, deliberative; the condition of my heart is associative and impressionistic. They're both part of the equation, sometimes allied, sometimes opposed, sometimes in some odd configuration that I can't quite pin down.

And the last thing I chewed on this morning was, which one is prior to the other? When we're newborns, we have sensations and notice repetitive patterns before we ever have the concepts or language to categorize them, but it's also the case that our experience is fundamentally incomplete until we interpret it. From the study of emotion in my field, we know that the set of physical sensations associated with any particular feeling can be assigned any one of a dozen or more labels, which is why self-talk makes such a difference. What one person finds exciting, another may find terrifying, even if their measurable physical outputs are identical. So, I'm not sure it's possible to assign one priority over the other.

Anyway.