Religion Writer

The study of religion is bound in the often uncomfortable tension between opposing positions and forces.  It seems we would need to know what religion is in order to study religions, yet how do we know what religion is without encountering religions.  How do we state what we know about religion without predisposing these definitional and categorical statements toward specific “prototypical” religions?  Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the current study of religion is based heavily on Christianity being the prototype, yet tacitly so.  Religion, in perhaps the most common sense experience, is loaded with non-language experiential bodily phenomena, yet the study of religion seems tightly bound, almost exclusively so, to language phenomena (scripture, philosophy, doctrine, description, history, and other academic studies).  Academic methods, including academic writing conventions, demand objectivity and scorn subjectivity and feeling and emotion.  Academic methods are restricted to the mind and ignore and discount the body.  Yet, extensive research during the last half century has increasingly supported the position that conceptual and propositional thought, even reason itself, is based in subconscious sensorimotor patterns, schema, and meanings. Continue reading

A Horse is an Automobile without Wheels

September 8, 2012

In memory of Kenneth Morrison

Thirty years ago I published a book titled Beyond “the Primitive:” the Religions of Nonliterate Peoples (1982) that was intended to establish some less biased position or stance from which to appreciate and understand folks living in small-scale cultures, tribal or, what was for some time called “traditional,” peoples.  While studying at the University of Chicago, I found that much of the heritage of the academic study of religion was established in the study of what was called “primitive” people and in those days there was only a nascent awareness of the inappropriateness of this term.  It was the primitives that told us how religions got started in the process of human cultural development and the issue was variously framed in evolutionist terms (in which case magic preceded the rise of religion) or essentialist terms (in which religion, being essentially inseparable from divine creation, existed in the earliest of times found in “primitive” cultures evidenced by the presence of a “high god”).  In a fascinatingly illogical position contemporary people who live in small cultures were considered to represent these ancient people, the people “of the beginning.”  My teacher, Mircea Eliade, perhaps the most influential religion scholar of the twentieth century, was a major proponent of this approach, constructing his influential understanding of religion, one still present in popular understandings, by exemplary studies of “primitive people,” especially the aboriginal people of Australia.  Decades later my book Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia (1998) attempted to place this approach in a constructive and comprehensible context (or history) if a critical one as well. Continue reading

Origins and Evolution: Writing in the Long View

Origins is not something that I have ever found engaging.  In the formation of the academic study of religion (a good place to learn more details is Walter Capps’s 2000 book Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline), the question of origins was a constituting issue.  The concern has a late nineteenth century flavor because this is when the evidence supporting biological evolution began to establish Darwin’s audacity despite the Christian biblical attribution of origination to god.  The matter has yet to be settled and continues to create in public society something resembling schizophrenia, especially for those who are Christian and also accept biological evolution.  How could it not?

Continue reading

Christmas Conspiracy

It was about 12:30 p.m. when I started up Flagstaff Mountain Trail, perhaps my favorite close-in hike, just to the west of Boulder.  I’d eaten a quick lunch of leftovers from yesterday’s family celebration of Christmas because I wanted to get on the trail early, knowing that, this time of the year, the sun dips so far to the south and west by even midafternoon to shade parts of the trail.  It is a gorgeous warm day, but shade can still be chilling.

Hiking midday I thought that I’d likely have the trail to myself, reasoning that most would still be in the midst of their Christmas feast to be hiking.  Perhaps later, bundled up, some groups and couples would be ready for this mildly strenuous hike to work off the lethargy of tryptophanic turkey and a few calories.  Even as I had parked my car this idea was altered as a woman, I’m guessing in her late 30s or so (though I’m terrible at recognizing age), parked her SUV behind my car and hoped out to head up the trail a few yards ahead of me.  The trail was actually more populated than usual, yet, with mostly single and mostly male hikers.  I did encounter several couples that I’d guess were either empty nesters or childless couples.

My attention was rather strongly focused on “the vitality factor” or “the vitality life” and all the things I could write about this topic, yet, I began to realize that while all the hikers made the usual courteous greeting to fellow hiker when paths cross, not a single one of us acknowledged the day, by saying “merry Christmas,” “happy holidays,” or “feliz navidad.”   We constituted a silent conspiracy to avoid the obvious, that we were all spending Christmas alone.

Sam Gill

December 25, 2010

That Little Thing

Completing my undergraduate major requirements in mathematics before I was a senior, I had grown impatient with mathematics largely because it seemed to me at the time so isolating from people.  I was utterly naïve of course and had become a math major simply because my mom told me to do so believing, why I have no idea, that with a degree in mathematics I’d surely get a good (meaning well-paying) job.  I took a course in business administration from Professor Larry Jones.  He was a tall clean-cut pipe-smoking intellectual-looking man.  On one assignment I was asked to indicate what I would do in a particular business situation and the situation was extensively described.  I wrote my paper on the many reasons I was sure that I would never have gotten myself into that situation in the first place and would thus not have to deal with the thorny problems clearly present in the situation.  He gave me a “D.”  I was not, however, discouraged because I caught a glimpse of a sea change that was at that moment taking place—this was the mid-‘60s—a shift from a behaviorist perspective to methods of quantitative analysis supported by the introduction of computers into the business environment.  I realized that with my background in mathematics I was rather well placed to put this to use in the business environment.

Entering a graduate degree program in business I found myself positioned with the right stuff at the right time.  Professor Jones had landed a senior administrative position for the Coleman Company—he would later become president of the company (and would later run for governor of the state)—and he was not so put off by my performance as to recognize that I might have something to offer even if I could be counted on to argue with premises.  I was hired in a research position at the Coleman Company, I somehow landed a position teaching a class in the Business School at Wichita State University on quantitative methods, and I was a full time graduate student.  I enjoyed many privileges and opportunities in these interrelated capacities, even though I was a bit busy.  Financial and business success seemed completely assured.  All was smooth sailing I felt and I totally loved everything I was doing.

We never know what comes next in life, what little thing might happen on any day that will alter the course of our lives, or so it would seem anyway.  As I had been impressed by Professor Larry Jones and did all I could to learn and be inspired by him, I admired even more Professor Harry Corbin.  He had been a young president of Wichita University, a municipally based school when I entered in 1960, and in the early ‘60s he ushered through the Kansas State Legislature the necessary measures to have the university accepted into the state system of higher education under the new name of Wichita State University.  As an undergraduate student leader in numerous capacities I had had many opportunities to observe President Corbin in action.  He too was a tall handsome reserved quietly powerful clearly brilliant man.  He seemed to me the very epitome of an academic.  Once the school had been accepted into the state system, Corbin gave up his presidency and returned to his research and teaching.  He had studied political science at the University of Chicago and was deeply interested in religion.

During my graduate studies in business, I learned that Professor Corbin was teaching a course on world religions.  I knew it was likely similar to history and I was concerned about that since the only “C” grade I had ever gotten was in a world history course.  Still, I truly wanted the experience of being in a class taught by Professor Corbin.  My business advisor allowed me to take the course, most likely because Corbin was so respected that it would be unacceptable to suggest that his course would not contribute to any student’s work.

So there it was.  That little thing.  A course that didn’t fit my program, taken for personal reasons.  Once the course started, it didn’t take long.  I have often described the experience I had in that course as like discovering a door theretofore unknown to me that when opened revealed the enormity of a world I didn’t even know existed.  Small town Kansas education is not all that worldly, for sure, nor are studies in mathematics and business even in a state university.  But here it was … an enormous rich complex confounding luscious world of peoples in era after era and culture upon culture.  That little thing had suddenly turned into one of almost unfathomable dimension.

Though my work and study and teaching were all exciting, the success I experienced in all of them was perhaps the greatest wedge to the need for change.  In the research capacity I enjoyed at Coleman I was centrally involved in replacing groups of working people with computer applications.  I saw upper level executives forced into early retirement because they couldn’t adjust to the tsunami of computer technology.  My satisfaction with a job well done, with my role in facilitating the march of technology, was tempered by my experience of the human costs I observed on people being displaced and outmoded.  As my power and accomplishments grew, so did my doubts and concerns.

Somehow I got the idea that I would benefit from a brief sabbatical from business to reflect and regroup.  I sensed that the timing was crucial, because I could feel that I was quickly approaching a point of no return.  My superiors at the Coleman Company were sympathetic to the idea, so I set about considering what I might do for a while to beneficially fill a leave of absence.  This took me to Professor Harry Corbin.  And this is actually the part of the story I want most to tell.

I met him in the office he had occupied as university president, retained I’m sure as a way of honoring his considerable contributions.  It was handsome and elegant and simply made one feel important to be in.  I explained my situation to him and asked his suggestions.  Corbin said, “Well, I’ve studied off and on for decades at the University of Chicago.  Might you consider that?”  I very clearly remember asking, “Oh, do they have a university in Chicago?”  He assured me that they did and that it might be worthy of my consideration.  Since I had studied world religions with him, I thought that might be fun to continue those studies and asked if that would be possible there.  He indicated it was and referred me to the Divinity School.  The story gets better, or perhaps worse.

Knowing not a thing about it, I contacted the Divinity School and asked for an application for admission.  I received it and filled it out and sent it back.  I was informed that I’d need to take an entrance exam and that they had their own exam which would be sent to Wichita State where it would be administered to me.  I remember taking the exam, but absolutely nothing about it.  This whole thing was premised on my firm belief that I’d be there just a few months.  I was then notified that I had been accepted to the Divinity School and was asked what field I wished to study.  I wrote back to ask them what fields I might choose among.  They sent me a list and I really didn’t recognize much of anything on the list so I selected “Christian Theology.”  They wrote back indicating that that field had filled, but might I be interested in a field called the “History of Religions?”  Even with my concerns about studying history, I knew it really didn’t matter, short termer as I was planning to be, so I responded, “sure.”  And that is how I entered the University of Chicago and a profession that is still unfolding over more than forty years.

My Great Awakening

for Alex Perry

I’d been sitting across the desk from him for what seemed an eternity.  He was hunched over my paper commenting on every one of the dozens of red notations he had written there.  We were still on the first page.  Jonathan Smith, “You describe Dwight L. Moody as ‘infamous’.  Do you have any idea what that word means (not waiting for me to answer)?  You should never every use that word to describe such a figure as Moody.”  Why didn’t I just get up and leave?  I had slid down in my seat to the point I was about to fall onto the floor … well this was perhaps more the description of my self-esteem than my physical body.

It had all started just a little over a week before.  I’d conferred with another professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago where I was a new student.  How I got there is another story, but needless to say, with an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a graduate degree in business administration and only one religion course on my transcript, this was not a place where I felt at home.  I was a floundering homeless academic living under an overpass, a high speed highway travelled by my classmates who all had graduate degrees in religion or history or language.  This professor had asked me if I’d yet worked with Professor Smith.  Learning that I had not he directed me, seemed a command actually, to contact Professor Smith to arrange to work with him.

Dutiful and responsible if nothing else in this graduate program, I mustered my courage and made an appointment to meet with him.  When I walked into his office he seemed barely to notice me, but eventually asked my business.  I told him that I had been referred to him by another professor and I was there because of that.  “Hmmm,” he said looking at me quizzically, “so why would you be the sort of person I’d want to work with?”  Oh wooo!   I had no answer whatsoever for that question.  I can’t even remember what I did, but it surely was little more than to stand there with a dumb look on my face.  Finally, he said, “Well okay then.  Write me a paper and leave it next week.”  I muttered some sort of agreement and left.

I don’t know why I chose to write on Dwight L. Moody and late nineteenth early twentieth century revivalism, but that’s what I choose.  I’m guessing the paper was 12 to 15 pages long.  I dropped it off the next week and made an appointment to meet with Smith in a couple days to get his response.

That response was, as I have described, nothing short of a bludgeoning.  I felt humiliated and stupid and grilled and belittled and hammered and embarrassed … just to begin the list of my feelings.  However, I sat there and listened and took notes and tried to keep from crying.  Certainly in this fog of emotions I was experiencing there were some thoughts of what I might do with my life given this state of failure.  Yet, then a voice, Smith’s voice, that now seemed so very faint and far away somehow penetrated my awareness.  As he stood up extending me the paper he said, “Not a bad paper really.  Revise it and have it back here next week.”

As I found my way outside of his office I experienced the strangest sequence of changes and awakenings.  Did he just say, “Not a bad paper?”  Did he just ask me to revise it and get it back to him?  Surely this means that he hasn’t sent me away for good, drummed me out.  He wants a revision!  Oh my god, it wasn’t that bad!  As I walked along it suddenly dawned on me that I had just had my first real learning experience.  This man thought enough of my work to take it deadly serious down to my every choice of words.  It mattered to him what I wrote and mattered in the greatest detail.

It was a moment of awakening and transformation.  To have someone take my work seriously enough to give it the full measure of criticism in service to my learning, my education, was something I’d never experienced before in this way.  It was my first true learning experience and I knew that from that day forward I would take myself as seriously as had Smith.  He had somehow seen something in me I hadn’t seen in myself and that isn’t the way it should be.  Not only did this experience set the course of my education, it set the course of my career as an educator.

Cowrys on an African Bracelet

for Krista Keil

The surf was pounding.  It was difficult to make out the details of the lava rock formations ahead because of the wind-swirled sea spray.  Fishy wetness filled our nostrils and our lungs.  A beach near Busua, deserted now that Jenny and I had passed a group of squishy fat ruddy Australian miners with their gorgeous sexy Ghanaian mistresses.  Last night in Cape Coast we met a boy of perhaps 12 who told us of his busy day at school and his favorite American action and adventure movies, his favorite actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and his interest in computers.  Busua was but 20 miles or so to the west and yet only the skinny wood poles lined the rutted road the wires carrying the world had not yet installed.  We were assisted in finding a place to stay by a 12-year old boy, dressed in a University of Colorado T-shirt, who sweetly asked us if small small boys like him got to drive cars in America.  He was endlessly fascinated to learn about telephones and computers and cars and anything American.  Only twenty miles, yet decades of distance.

Walking the beach I picked up a cowry shell.  I remember walking the shell-littered beach at Mission Beach Australia.  Emily and I spent many hours walking the beach.  At dusk the fruit bats flowed forth like a black river across the golden sky.  On that beach I took up, without resolution, the strange issue of what compels us to actually bend down and pick up a shell; one particular shell among thousands.  Finders keepers.  And then weeks later when we get home we have this little baggy filled with sticky sandy shells wondering what we are to do with them.  I’m not so sure I thought about that on the Busua beach, but I did think about the significance of the cowry shell.  Of course the cowry is available for free, for the taking, on the beaches of many tropical countries.  Yet, cowry shells have for millennia been used as money.  Something that in itself is free, worthless really, being used to represent wealth.  Guess we do the same thing with paper money.  It is, in itself, worthless or nearly so, yet we allow it to represent our wealth.  In God we trust.

Given the sameness, I think I prefer the cowry.  At least it is beautiful either on its own or as a decoration on an African bracelet.  It shines and it comes in different colors.  It was once the home of a creature.  On one side it appears as an eye looking at us, checking us out I suppose.  The other side is a dreamscape of imagery from teeth to vaginas to vagina dentate … now there’s a story for you.  The cowry: a thing of mystery, of creativity, of desire, of fear; … beach trash;  …  wealth.

12/12/2010

Writing is Gesture: Leroi-Gourhan

In his fascinating Gesture and Speech (1964, 1993) André Leroi-Gourhan traces the development of alphabetic writing considering it a distant consequence of the upright posture that allowed the hand to be free to draw the focus of communication from the face to the techniques of the hand.  The face and graphics are more strongly associated with mythology while the eventual development of alphabetic characters arranged in a linear stream precipitated the emergence of rational thought and philosophy.

There is much of interest in this way of understanding writing and its emergence because it centers the importance of alphabetic writing in the body, particularly the hand, and it identifies alphabetic writing as gesture or technique.  My reading of Leroi-Gourhan indicates something like a simultaneous development of writing gesture and the privilege of reason and thus philosophy suggesting, importantly, that body, that technique, that gesture, is linked at least as much with agency as with expression.  In the long history of human development we think as (not just what) we write and vice versa.  While I think Leroi-Gourhan understands that alphabetic writing and reasoned thought co-developed, my reading of him suggests that he understands writing in more of a utilitarian fashion, as a tool of memory, rather than as a tool of creative and explorative thought.  Clearly the evidence of what the earliest writing was about supports this understanding.  However, this leaves untold the story of when and how writing came to be a creative active powerful heuristic imaginative process, surpassing and complementing the functional characteristics of recording and documenting.

As I am in the process of critiquing academic writing conventions, these observations of Leroi-Gourhan are important.  It is clearly notable that a culture’s or community’s techniques of writing correlate with the way that community or culture thinks and engages the world.  Writing conventions that prohibit first person pronoun, that proceed along a reasoned and factually supported argument from thesis to conclusion, inculcate and reflect a reasoned and linear and factual mind and a world that is similarly ordered and related to.  These conventions correspond with a world that is orderly, firmly based on fact, and that can be understood and fully comprehended by the proper use of reason and objective observation and description.  These conventions correspond with a world where reason reigns and emotion, intuition, experience, subjectivity are excluded as distracting.  Yet, Leroi-Gourhan shows that alphabetic writing is inseparable from the bodily posture of walking upright, inseparable from the hand gaining some role in communication otherwise centered in the face.   Writing is, as Leroi-Gourhan shows us, gesture, a technique of culture and history.  The conventions of specific forms of writing amount to unconsciously used gestures that instill value without ever articulating the value.  The agency of the conventions is in the repetitious unquestioned practices of the body, the hand stringing alphabetic symbols across a blank page under specified constraints.

Leroi-Gourhan, writing in the 1960s discussed the impact of audiovisual innovations as suggesting a shift in gestural practices that he believed might well spell the end of writing.  He explicitly discussed film and audio recordings.  He focused largely on mechanical production and reproduction with hints of electronic media.  Little could he have imagined the developments that have occurred in the last half century.  What might Leroi-Gourhan have thought of the uncontrollable expansion of the Internet, the availability of 6 million songs on iTunes along with 10,000 music videos, 20,000 audio books, 65,000 podcasts, and 500 movies.  What would he have made of YouTube with its 120 million videos (up from only 6 million 3 years ago, only I say!), or Facebook with 500 million active members?  These too are founded in gestures that demand greater analysis than we have yet given them as techniques of culture, especially the bodily implications of these media forms.  Surely, these new media mark ever more strongly than did Leroi-Gourhan the end of writing or at least the necessity of its radical shift.  The interactive and relational character of the Internet engages gestures that defy the values insinuated by academic writing conventions that have changed little in a couple thousand years.  And the extensive research that convincingly grounds mind, value, and meaning in gesture, body, sensorimotor patterns, and bodily movement offer equally powerful challenges to these same conventions.

The future of writing surely lies in that aspect of writing that is a technique of creativity and imagination and exploration.  Until now we have relegated this technique to the sideline where we place art and entertainment; the challenge is how to embrace this technique while retaining some semblance of what we understand as academic.

Sam Gill – August 26, 2010

Education is Not Information

The future of education must carefully and critically question the current broadly held understanding that education is information.  Late in the twentieth century research began to demonstrate conclusively that meaning and value are based in and founded on bodily experience.  The western Cartesian perspective separates mind and body (and experience, subjectivity, and emotion).  In many ways information is disembodying and body-denying.  Even though we may know lots of facts and bits about something, this information does not a rich experience make.  Information is information about and about signals object and distance.  Even while advertisers and information providers identify very closely our personal individual information interests (most usually without our even knowing it is being done)—suggesting a subjective and experiential development—the information still stands apart from experience, from body.

This trajectory towards education as information  marks, in my view, the greatest threat to education and thus to human value and the quality of human life.  The difficulty in an electronic information age is how to link learning with experience, particularly bodily experience.  While there are endless possibilities, a couple are worth a mention.  The colony model suggested by Thomas Frey puts students, faculty, and professionals together as workers, developers, producers, investigators, creators, contributing to society as they experience learning while actively pursuing practical goals:  a film, a product, a service, new knowledge.  Another possibility is the by-product of the scale of efficiency of e-learning.  If most of the traditional time in classrooms and on campuses were spent e-learning, the time needed to learning would potentially be less than that required for the more traditional learning methods.  Time would be saved since the learning would be individually paced; once a student has learned a bit of knowledge she may move on.  Time would be saved in the efficiency of having the active learning tools available to students at any time and place, rather than being restrained to scheduled classrooms and class times.  Thus, with less hours spent learning the same materials, with facilities freed from the exclusive inefficient use of classes, this time and these spaces could be devoted to a wide range of bodily-based activities:  intramural sports, yoga, dancing, fitness, and so forth.  I’ll need to write before long on the types of brain/body activities that create the greatest potential for brain/body acuity.  These need to be present in any learning environment.

A further option would be a transformation in the practice of writing.  Currently university writing practices are consistent with the out-dated objectivist linear understanding of learning.  Current university writing conventions generally abhor any significant presence of the author, of subjectivity, of experience, of emotion.  Given that it has become well established that experience, emotion, movement, sensorimotor patterning, gesture, etc are fundamental to all meaning, future university writing conventions need to change.  The challenge will be to create conventions and expectations in which academics—faculty and students—are writing the body, writing the moving body, writing experience, etc while continuing to be academic in the sense of creating and establishing generally applicable knowledge, principles, ideas, concepts, etc rather than simply personal trivia or even art.  To rise to this challenge is an exciting prospect.

Sam Gill, August 26, 2010

Future of University – Writing Conventions

The Future of the University:  Writing Conventions                                          August 24, 2010

It is somewhat confounding to me that while one of the most important images and charges of the university is that it represents the freedom to experiment and think, privileged and enabled by a separation from society, it appears in some respects to be among the most conservative and protective of societal institutions.  Much of the scientific research has already given over to being contracted by business and government.  The humanities however seem to be in a plodding phase where research is conducted on models established decades, if not centuries, ago.  And teaching methods have changed little.

As Marshall McLuhan and others have shown, there is a strong interplay between medium and message.  As futurists and educators evaluate the powerful shift toward electronic media, there is an accompanying discussion of the future of education.  My readings of this discussion indicate that when electronic media are considered, everything in education turns to information.  The assumption is that what e-media deliver is information.  I suppose this is conditioned by the Google and Wikipedia and Facebook mentality that allows us to find out something about most anything we run across.  I totally love this aspect of the Information Age.  However, having information does not an education make.  The university, in my experience, has over the last twenty years steadily drifted towards the understanding that education is information processing.  This is not a healthy direction for it supplants an information portal for a school.  Back to that in a later writing.

At the moment I want to think about the standard writing conventions that are expected in most universities.  While I think there is a shift to simply using writing to “report” on information gathered, there remains that standard linear narrative: thesis, argument, conclusion.  The disembodied posture (enough said) places this narrative as some object in the world that can and should stand alone.  This academic writing convention is, in some sense, the hallmark of the university as it has been for a very long time.  The accompanying qualities of these writing conventions—disinterested, disembodied, objective, unemotional—have far-reaching implications for us.  While the university seems uninterested in even budging on its writing conventions, its own research findings have proven the error of the human qualities so strongly engrained in the university’s most cherished  gesture, its writing convention.

From my perspective the reluctance to experiment with, reinvent, play with, try out alternative writing conventions is, along with the limitations of the furniture and architecture, the most oppressive and limiting features in the contemporary university humanities programs.  Thomas
Frey introduced an interesting situation that I’d like to extend beyond his use as an analogy for how our writing conventions limit our research and world.  He noted that the ancient Romans were highly limited by their number system—Roman Numerals.  While this system works satisfactorily for tracking some things—I suppose keeping track of years is the main example, since we actually continue to do so—it clearly doesn’t work well for keeping one’s bank statement or for the calculations necessary for rocket science.  While the Romans understood their number system as wholly adequate, they had no idea of the limitation this system imposed on their world.  It is rather, as Frey suggests, like asking a fish to understand the limitations of the water in which they swim.  I think also here of that fascinating book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott , in which we, by analogy understand the possible limitations of a three dimensional world.

The analogy I’d make is that our current writing conventions, especially when their limitations and determinations are not even acknowledged, function similar to the way the Roman numeral number system did for the Romans; it limited their universe and experience in ways they couldn’t even detect.  Academic writing conventions simply limit the world we are able to see and experience and investigate and they do so in ways that we cannot even see or know.  It follows then that what we need is a revolution in academic writing conventions.  In the midst of this far-reaching electronic media revolution, this effort may well be the only way that university humanities programs will survive, that the idea that education is anything more than information processing may survive, that the very idea of the liberal arts educated human being is important might survive.

How can this revolution in writing conventions be achieved?  How can a fish even “know” about “air” much less appreciate its importance (the parallel to evolutionary history might well be of interest here)?  I suppose there are a number of strategies (and I’ll want to write more before long on creativity, play, hypothetic inference) but there are a couple obvious directions.  First, we might simply ignore the conventions while continuing to write and see what emerges.  Second, we might take a Janus perspective and look back that we might see forward.  Here, we’d need to ask what is writing.  Why do we write?  What does it matter whether we write or not?  When did we start writing?  How does writing relate to identity? To agency?  Third, we may already have some hints, indeed some very strong indicators, about who we are as human beings and what actually matters to us:  passions, feelings, emotions, movement.  We may already understand that these qualities and values function even hidden behind the standard academic writing conventions.  We may recognize that these qualities are inseparable from being embodied human beings and that being bodied is an essential aspect of our identity and agency.

“New writing,” if writing at all, must be shaped by who we understand ourselves to be as human beings, as academic beings, as valued human beings and also by who we want to become, by how we want to impact the world in which we live, by how we want the world in which we live to look.  “New writing” must be seen as agency and action as creation as personal as powerful, not simply as some passive mechanism by which to connect information sources with information demands.

“New writing” is not, in the rapidly emerging e-world, some nice little experiment in cleverness initiated by idle academics bored being removed from the real productive world.  “New writing” is, as I see it, an essential task to save the humanity in a world that is hell bent on transforming everything into information and every being into an information processor.  Not only do we lose something important of our humanity in this process (like our humanity), we also truncate our human potential.  We even lose the point of information: Why information?  Through “new writing” we may realize ourselves; we may recreate ourselves to be powerful and creative in the new world that is arising around us.

As a teacher of writing I am at the point of admitting that I am a fish in water, but that, through analogy and imagination, I have begun to imagine that the water in which I swim may be depriving me of a type of oxygen, a vitality, whereas I thought it was the source of life.  I can imagine breaking through surfaces and finding new, now unimagined, vitality and richness, yet, I am confined in some ways (how can I even know?) by the gestures and postures that comprise me.  While I’ll do my best to realize “new writing” as fully as I can, I think of my students more as the tadpoles with legs who are about to rise to the surface and walk out on new lands into new atmospheres.  My students are the ones that have the greater potential to explore and create new heretofore unimagined worlds through their creation of new writing systems.  I’ll nip their heels to force them forward.