The Way Beyond

Kenneth Burke’s “theory of comedy” is really more a theory of education and human relations than an analysis of a literary genre. According to the lessons of Burkean comedy, we should not take our troubles too seriously. Rather, we should use them as a means of self-improvement. Do not grieve your mistakes or discouragements, but cherish them for the way they enable possibilities of insight.

I take pleasure in the notions of mistakenness and trouble, when these aspects of human behavior prompt such eloquence as they did when Kenneth Burke wrote his great treatise on comedy, Attitudes Toward History. On page 41 of that miraculously human book, Burke writes, in ways that still make me shiver:

The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.

Burke was talking there about the “poetic categories”—comedy, tragedy, satire, and the like—explaining how their resources, their methods, their potentialities offered strategic ways of understanding human motivation. Comedy in Burke always led to humility, the discounting of one’s grandeur. Comedy “keeps us in trim” by knocking us down a peg. Whereas in tragedy we get all elevated—”man in the cosmos” shaking his fists at the gods—comedy pulls things down to a human scale, portraying a mistaken, misdirected “man in society”—a comedy of errors, where the hero forever must find correction and chastening by the “truth” and all its complicated circumstances and largeness of perspective, ungraspable in this human realm, but best and most accurately approached with a compassionate smile.

Comedy teaches, first and foremost, the “discount”—stepping back from the intensity of an experience, a conclusion, an endpoint and realizing that maybe our calculations are not quite hermetically sound. Comedy warns us that our plans are like wishes made on the Monkey’s Paw. Or that our calculations are more like those of Dr. Octopus (Spider-Man II) than Einstein. We certainly have miscalculated. Comedy admonishes us not to abandon the project but rather to adjust our attitude. We must slog ahead through the muck of “man in society” but let us do it with the proper humility. Rather than deny the errors in some attempt to bolster our case, we should embrace those errors, own them, be thankful for them. Let us value error as the reading specialists do in a “miscue analysis”: Errors are our friends, for in seeing just where we go wrong, we have the hope of a greater precision the next time. As Burke puts it in his novel, “you should have lived twice, and smiled the second time. . . .” If there must be tragedy, error, and trouble, the trick is to not let it stop there–but to take the edge off (through the “discount”) and come back at it again, a second time, with a smile and a lesson learned (not in that order).

So the comic frame helps us redeem our troubles—even those that are not directly the result of our own mistakes. We take our lumps from others—and like Rocky getting pummeled by Apollo Creed, the comic frame says “ain’t so bad!” We learn to value our struggles in life as opportunities for growth. Burke presents the “comic frame” as a “method of study (man as eternal journeyman)”—one that leaves us with a “better personal possession” than mere wealth or material possessions. The comic frame opens us to the possibilities of education. Burke writes:

The comic frame, in making a man the student of himself, makes it possible for him to “transcend” occasions when he has been tricked or cheated, since he can readily put such discouragements in his “assets” column, under the head of “experience.” Thus we “win” by subtly changing the rules of the game—and by a mere trick of bookkeeping, like the accountants for big utility corporations, we make “assets” out of “liabilities.” (171)

Treating our liabilities as assets—that’s the type of “transcendence” that led to this blog entry. For I was thinking of all this lately, as I was involved in a troublesome “liability”—some committee work with a colleague that had gone bad, and left me with a conflict. There were disagreements, principled stands taken, and much anguish over the possibility of error and offense. After it was all over (at least most of it for me, personally), I found myself writing to an administrator who was deeply embroiled in the matter from another angle:

Will this thing end, and end well? When I think of all the work you are involved in [. . .,] I think we’ve got to move beyond these little blips, which often become great chasms. . . . But I do feel the best way beyond is directly through. God gives us both canyons and mules. The rim view is nice, but a little too unreal. The mule trip across–that’s process! Anyway, anyway. . . .

Thence came the transcendence! Ironically, I was talking of mules and process and plodding through the thicket as a way of getting “beyond.” In essence, I was arguing for anti-transcendence, when, in a moment of poetic inspiration, I was able to “rise above” the whole matter and write a poem. Transcendence in the service of anti-transcendence: Methinks I would have my cake and eat it too. . . . But that’s what poetry and comedy do: they let us inhabit our contradictions, and wherever there be liabilities, we’ll take those too, for they are part of us too, and add to our measure.

This poem is the result of my committee work, of my scholarship in Burke’s theory of comedy, of my need to make peace, of my weekly work with my pre-service teachers, who had me reading about the use of poetry writing in getting students to tap into their experience, of my colleagues who keep me sane, of my love of paradox, of the play of language, with the word “blip” leading to “chasm” leading to “canyon,” of my need to transcend with my clodhopper boots trudging on in the morass of things. . . . We must try to get our house in order down here; we must get the human scale of things tweaked just so, for just above this microcosm of detail and setback and tiny elegance is that macrocosm that we sometimes catch a glimpse of—that true “beyond” where God in his awesome ways is quietly, eternally trying to chasten and overcome us with glimpses of just what can be.


The Way Beyond
     by Angelo Bonadonna
     March 1, 2005

God gives us both canyons and mules.
The view from the rim–that’s beautiful
but that’s hubris, too
too beautiful
too transcendent
too detached
Is that the other side?
So close, so bridged by a mere glance?

God gives us both canyons and mules.
That’s me down there
the mule with its 40 acres
too
to there
through there

God gives us our place,
and our way out of it, too.
Though the forest be lost for the trees
the trees are all we have
so mark them well

And with bark and leaves
and sweat and toil
and this smelly mule
we may reach the rim
and bridge all with a glance,
collapse all in silent awe.

NCA Presentation on Kenneth Burke’s Late Essays





Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke


To
Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke

by Angelo Bonadonna,
Saint Xavier University

(Delivered at the National
Communication Association Convention, Chicago, Illinois, November 12, 2004)

Nearly thirty years ago,
in the summer of 1975, Burke confided to Cowley,

The thing is, Malcolm, since Libbie cleared out, I have quit putting
out my books.  For two reasons:  the second is that she helped
so much by having been a secretary;  the first is that she helped so
much by my being so crazy about her, I was driven to prove, prove, prove,
only roundabout to the shitten world, because so directly every day and
night to her I was appealing.  (6/9/75)

In this praise of Libbie
as Muse and secretary, we see Burke’s typical "both-and" dialectic: 
the consummation of Idea and Matter, or Purpose and Agency, or action and
motion, transcendence and immanence, Libbie as Soul-mate, Libbie as Body-mate. 
The decline and death of Libbie roughly coincide with the publication of Burke’s
last book, Language as Symbolic Action, so one is tempted to take Burke’s
elegant praise as an accurate statement of his publishing motives.
[1]

The trouble is Burke did
continue to publish, and rather voluminously, (however volume-lessly, in terms
of a single book).  In all, Burke wrote reviews, essays, poems, postscripts,
replies, and countless letters;  he dabbled in music composition, delivered
talks, granted interviews–in a word, he verbalized–and with the kind of
scope and energy typical of any other period in his life.

How might we best characterize
this last and very productive stage of Burke’s verbalizing?  Limiting
the task, as I intend, to just one segment of Burke’s public writings, the
forty-plus critical essays of the post-Libbie, post-LSA era, will probably
ease the difficulty but slightly.  Regardless of how one chooses to discuss
or narrow him, Burke defies convenient pigeonholing, and this elusiveness
of his has gone far towards enhancing his celebrity status among postmodern
critics.  On the other hand, Burke himself never tired of pointing out
that the language using animal is a classifying animal, so it seems
only natural for us to come to terms–to find the right name for this Last
Phase of Burke’s career.

The earlier periods of his
life are more or less loosely defined by decade:  the teens present Burke
the Flaubert, the literary aesthete in New York City; the twenties gave us
the literary critic, music reviewer, short story writer and novelist; the
thirties added a literary theorist beneath the critic, and threw in a post-depression,
quasi-socialist social theorist;  the forties give rise to a language
philosopher;  the fifties a rhetorician;  the sixties a logologer.

Such a list, while it suggests
the scope of Burke’s speculations and their development from literature through
human relations to language theory, presents a rather hollow version of Burke.
It leaves us with mere titles, which, as Burke himself might remind us, are
always inadequate when left to stand in their naked, oversimplified generality. 
Our search here must not merely be for a name for the period, but for
a suitable strategy for appreciating the full complexity of all that
is subsumed in that name.  Burke said language not only enables
but requires us to approach situations strategically.  So as I
re-read the essays of this period, I kept a running tab of possible strategies
by which to encompass this most discursive of situations.  What I wish
to share with you today is a log of those strategies in a presentation that
is perhaps more pastiche than panorama, but one that is nonetheless offered
as a heuristic for investigating just what to do with these provocative and
varied pieces of Burke.

First, I thought I might
take the lead of other Burkean commentators and identify the distinctive nature
of the late essays.  James Chesebro, for instance, identifies 1968 as
the year that Burke finally gave up his "comedic posture" and got
into the serious business of ontological inquiry (141).  Cary Nelson,
on the other hand, uses Burke’s late work as the basis for formulating his
deconstructionist counter-Burke to the humanist Burke of earlier criticism.

Or in a more humanistic
vein, I could turn to Bill Rueckert who identifies "the Burke who took
to the road in the late sixties and has stayed on the road ever since, lecturing,
talking, reading, thinking on his feet–the critic at large in the most literal
and Emersonian sense of this phrase, which is:  the thinker let loose
in our midst" ("Rereading" 254).  On the road with Kenneth
Burke–some very inviting possibilities there–a strategy, might I punningly
suggest, destined to discover just what was driving Burke those many days
and words.

Moving along, Strategy 2: 
Treat the final essays as Burke’s attempt to finalize his system.  On
July 19, 1972, Burke wrote to Cowley  "Give me but two more years,
and I’ll prove my point"–though I should point out, as Burke does, that
he was drunk when he wrote that.

Strategy 3:  List and
characterize Burke’s co-hagglers of the period, from Wellek, Jameson, and
Howell to Vitanza, Lentricchia, Booth, and McKeon, and everyone in between.

Strategy 4:  Compare
the situatedness of these essay with the situatedness of the earlier works. 
What would Burke the dialectician have been against if he didn’t have technology–the
perfect scapegoat, since it is so perfectly the caricature, as he says, of
human rationality?

Strategy 5:  Account
for the temporal progression among the essays or a sub-group within the essays,
like, for instance, the Helhaven satires.

Strategy 6:  Organize
by genre.

Strategy 7:  Construct
a concordance of the major recurrent themes, which are as follows:  analogical
extension;  catharsis and transcendence;  ecology;  the victimization
of nature;  or, the infanticidal motive of "Ever Onward" ("Creativity"
74);  or "technologism," the belief that the solution to the
problems of technology is more technology ("Communication" 148); 
or, "hypertechnologism";  or, "technological psychosis"; 
or, the irrationality of the excess of rationality;  or, the "pandemoniac
multiplicity" of technology ("Towards Looking Back" 189); 
dramatism as ontology/logology as epistemology;  the trinitarian addition
of consummation to Burke’s earlier theories of expression and communication; 
entelechy;  archetype;  consummation as "a kind of creative
yielding to potentialities which are seen by the given seer to be implicit
in the given set of terms" ("Poetics" 403);  the autosuggestiveness
of creativity ("Creativity" 77);  the compulsiveness of creativity; 
the rounding out of a material operation by a corresponding act of symbolism
("Doing and Saying");  substitution and duplication; 
symbolic duplication as cathartic release or entelechial compulsion ("(Psychological)
Fable");  the attitude of apprehensiveness;  psychic immobilization
("Eye-Poem");  transcendence.

Strategy: 8  How about
cataloguing new moments in Burke lore, as for instance those rare glimpses
of Burke responding to much more recent cultural and scenic phenomena than
those commented on in his more established works?  A favorite of mine
is his appreciative but cautionary response to J. Hillis Miller in particular
and postmodern criticism in general.  After discussing Miller’s analysis
of Hopkins, Burke writes, "This brings out the whole issue in which a
lot of my colleagues are now interested–that of the marvels of verbal structure. 
But I have to push back now;  they’ve brought that out too much. 
People have accused me of just reducing things to words;  the whole system
is absolutely the opposite of that.  That is, I make a fundamental distinction"
("On Literary Form" 85)–and on he goes into his action/motion dualism. 
Most certainly, Burke does not reduce things to just words.  His environmentalism–or
anyone’s for that matter–is only logical if we grant that there is indeed
something outside the text.

Certainly the most songful
of strategies would be to cull aphorisms from the readings.  Burke credited
Libbie as the inventor of the Flowerish, and when she passed, so too did the
art form for Burke.  But, glancing through the readings, one can readily
spot traces of the erstwhile flourish.  For example:  "no construction
without destruction" ("Communication" 137);  "the
driver drives the car, but the traffic drives the driver" ("Why
Satire 311);  "Organisms live by killing ("Communication"
136);  "We are happiest when we can plunge on and on" ("Towards
Helhaven 19);  "Spontaneously, what men hope for is more"
("Why Satire" 320);  "Congregation by segregation"
("Rhetorical Situation" 268);  "Life is a Pilgrimage. 
Life is a first draft, with constant revisions that are themselves first drafts. 
. . .   Life is a series of prerequisite courses, in which we are
all drop-outs" ("Rhetoric" 33);  .­.­. [I]n a
cult of tragedy, one is asking for it" ("Dancing" 27); 
"Language is one vast menagerie of implications" ("Theology"
153);  Logology’s wan analogue of hope is "the futuristically slanted
and methodological engrossment in the tracking down of implications, which
may amount to translating the grand oracular utterance, "Know thyself"
into "Spy on thyself" ("Variations" 165);  and finally,
my favorite:  "Though language does talk a lot, the very essence
of its genius is in its nature as abbreviation" ("(Nonsymbolic)
Motion" 823).

A few strategies are implied
in my title, "To Logology and Back."  For instance, we might
ask just where is Burke going in his development of logology?  Accordingly,
I could clarify "logology," or words about words, by listing several
of its key components, many of which are "borrowed back" from theology. 
From St. Thomas we get the principle of individuation, which for Burke is
the body; from God we get godterms;  from the Scholastics we get the
slogan, "Crede ut intellegas":  Believe that you may
understand;  from St. Paul we get the principle that faith comes from
hearing–i.e., from doctrine;  from the Trinity we get the formal pattern
of naming. "Logology is vigilant with admonitions" ("Variations"
171). all of which circulate about its central question, "What is it
to be the typically symbol-using animal?" ("Variations" 169).

By my title I would also
suggest, though very indirectly, the possibility that Burke’s development
of logology is merely one of his last and most thorough defenses against his
lifelong fear of death.  In the interview by Harry Chapin in the early
seventies Burke mentions his profound fear of death (much stronger when he
was younger than at that time when he was in his mid-seventies).  In
his essay "The Party Line" he announces an addendum to his "Definition
of Man," "acquiring foreknowledge of death" (65).  But
it was a letter to Cowley, not the essays or the Chapin film, that first gave
me this notion of logology as a psychic cure for the fear of death. 

From early on Cowley and
Burke defined how each one’s project was motivated.  On November 26,
1974, Burke distinguishes his project from Cowley’s thus:  "Basically,
I think it would all berl [sic, of course] down to a distinction between
what you mean by ‘literary situation’ as background, and what I would sloganize
as ‘logological’ context of our poetizings."  While Cowley undertook
the portraiture of a particular generation, Burke would but dabble with the
particular–a dazzling few pages, for instance, on the formal qualities of
the ghost’s entrance in Hamlet–as a way to get to general formal principles. 
Cowley’s work would be needed for an informed view of, say, Ernest Hemingway
or William Faulkner, but Burke’s is required for a fuller understanding of
any symbolic action, from the most mindless yeasaying a demagogue to
the full reflexive action of a Shakespearean drama.

Burke would often sloganize
his project as "Literature in particular, language in general,"
but–especially in the later years–the proportion shifts decidedly to language
in general.  "Language in general," or the "‘logological’
context of our poetizings"–what are these but the deathless realm of
timeless logic, knowledge, and principles?  To the extent that Burke
has formulated a "logology," an epistemology, a "science,"
or philosophy rather of the general functions of language that apply to any
particular idiom, has he not indeed transcended death?  Burke’s imperviousness
to critical fads is a sign of partial success on this score.  Is the
study of logology,motivated by an attempt to rise above the deathy realm of
particulars into a veritable eternity of logical order?  Can Burke’s
ascent to logology be Burke’s way to heaven, without the baggage of religion?

Getting back to my title,
what about the "and back" part of it? By this I want to suggest
the age-old critical question of whether Burke develops at all in his adoption
of different terminologies or whether he is engaged in writing the same book
over and over again.

Many of my strategies come
to a head in Burke’s statement:  "No one could go on making his
words mean the same, even if he expended his best efforts to make them stay
put" ("Theology" 185).  Does one detect, lurking in this
statement, a nostalgic desire to keep meaning settled once and for all? 
Perhaps, but it is instructive to juxtapose another provocative comment in
which he defines the "minimum condition" for symbolic action as
"the inability of words to ‘stay put,’ as when even a proper name like
‘Caesar,’ referring to one particular person in history, gives birth to
such words as ‘Kaiser’ and ‘Czar’" ("(Nonsymbolic) Motion"
813).

This matter of "staying
put" addresses a host of issues, foremost among them being the question
of whether Burke is a system-builder, and whether or not he viewed the eternal
flux of language as a benefit or liability.  The ambiguities of Burke’s
attitude are most suggestively intermingled in his "Theory of Terminology,"
an essay which outlines five categories of meaning, Burke’s famous five dogs. 
The dogs cover the important Burkean principles of verbal entelechy, tautological
cycles of terms, the synecdochic, Freudian, metaphoric, and musical qualities
of words–in a word all types of verbal transformations that will infuse a
term with new, opposite, and apposite meanings.  At first, Burke’s attitude
toward the sophistic realities of language seem quite clear:

I should feel uneasy if I had to keep these various kinds of terministic
cycles trimly related to one another, so that I might make a composite photograph
of the lot.  Rather, I would turn that whole subject around, and call
attention to the fact that much of the freedom in man’s capacity for symbolic
action resides precisely in the range of improvising here open to him, collectively
shared by all the members of his tribe.  (90)

But then to illustrate this freedom, Burke offers
a curious figure:

A
cycle of terms is like a cluster of stars.  The sky, as viewed from any
one of such positions, will show a corresponding difference in the distribution
of the other positions, though they all ultimately form but one single set
of interrelationships.  And it is in this way that a man defies total
prediction until he is finished.  Indeed, prediction is in effect the
application to living man of parameters derived from the realm of death; 
that is, the possibilities of the future reduced to terms derived from the
past.  (90)

Typically here, Burke confounds his fluidities with
some fixities, his freedoms with some parameters, his positionality with an
Ultimate Position, a single, all-encompassing set of interrelationships. 

Aswirl in strategies, I
began to feel the onset of the old logologer’s ailment, counter-gridlock,
just as I was to begin wrapping up.  As matters stand, the only way to
conclude a paper like this is with yet another question, or, taking another
route, with a simplifying anecdote to answer all questions.  Burke supplies
an irresistible anecdote in his "Creativity" essay.  He writes: 

I
have asked students to write me three pieces, one praising something, one
inveighing against something, and one lamenting.  The students were to
choose whatever subjects they preferred, for each such exercise.  One
student, choosing but one subject, praised, inveighed, and lamented within
the range of that one theme alone.  .­.­.  [W]hat of that
student who subjected the same topic to three totally different attitudes?
(78).

So, Burke gives me a concluding
anecdote that ends in a question.  But:  Did not that student pay
Burke the most reverent homage imaginable by enacting the very attitude towards
language implicit in and unifying, though discursively, all of Burke’s writings? 
Has not the mischievous student of a more mischievous teacher come to see,
if only inchoately, that language requires such liquidity if one would strive
for "maximum consciousness" (ATH 171)?  Is not such
a student on his way to seeing, as Burke clearly did, that language is forever
doubling reality, forever entitling it;  forever changing, forever remaining
just as it is, forever defining, forever substituting its definitions? 
And finally, is not the good student learning that if language it has the
power to transport us into the "heaven" of the subtlest theology,
and uplift us with the pious and beautiful songs of thanksgiving that theology
inspires, it also has equal power to transcend downwards, as it gives "rise"
to pollution, bombs, and demagoguery?

Might I then conclude, tentatively, or with some measure
of intelligent inconclusiveness as homage to Burke’s attitude, that the same
liquidity Burke asks for in our attitudes toward life characterize our attitude
towards Burke himself?  Burke now is finished.  His works just are,
and, as he might say, if all his words were obliterated tomorrow, they will
go on forever having been uttered.  They have formed a completed total
set of relationships, like the stars in the universe.  Even if we could
encompass the totality rather than take partial perspectives on it, the fact
remains that for us, still in time, his meanings will not stay put. 
That’s the only fitting last word on Burke–a roundabout invitation to more
words.


Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth.  Attitudes Toward History.  Berkeley:
U of California P, 1984.

—.  "Communication and the Human Condition."  Communication 
1  (1974):  135-52.

—.  "On ‘Creativity’–A Partial Retraction." 
Introspection:  The Artist Looks at Himself.  Ed.  Donald
E. Hayden.  U of Tulsa Monography Series 12, 1971.

—.  "Doing and Saying:  Thoughts on Myth, Cult, and
Archetypes."  Salmagundi  7  (1971):  100-19.

—.  Dramatism and Development.  Worcester, Mass.: 
Clark UP, 1972.

—.  "An Eye-Poem for the Ear (with Prose Introduction, Glosses,
and After-Words)."  Directions in Literary Criticism
Ed. Stanley Weintraub and Phillip Young.  University Park:  Pennsylvania
State UP, 1973:  228-51.

—.  Language as Symbolic Action:  Essays on Life, Literature,
and Method
.  Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.

—.  "On Literary Form."  The New Criticism and
After
.  Ed. Thomas Daniel Young.  Charlottesville:  UP
of Virginia, 1976:  80-90.

—.  "(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action." 
Critical Inquiry  4  (1978):  809-38.

—.  "The Party Line."  Quarterly Journal of
Speech
  62  (1976):  62-68.

—.  "Poetics and Communication."  Contemporary
Philosophical Thought
.  Vol. 3:  Perspectives in Education,
Religion, and the Arts
.  Ed. Howard Evans Kiefer and Milton Karl
Munitz.  Albany:  State U of New York P, 1970:  401-18.

—.  "In Response to Booth:  Dancing with Tears in My
Eyes."  Critical Inquiry  1  (1974):  32-31.

—.  "Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy."  Rhetoric,
Philosophy and Literature:  An Exploration
.  Ed. Don M. Burks. 
West Lafayette:  Purdue UP, 1978:  15-33.

—.  "A (Psychological) Fable, with a (Logological) Moral." 
American Imago  35  (1978):  203-7.

—.  "The Rhetorical Situation."  Communication
Ethical and Moral Issues
.  Ed. Lee Thayer.  New York: 
Gordon and Breach Science, 1973:  263-75.

—.  "Theology and Logology."  Kenyon Review,
n.s., (1979):  151-85.

—.  "A Theory of Terminology."  Interpretation: 
The Poetry of Meaning
.  Ed. Stanley Romain Hopper and David L. Miller. 
New York:  Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967:  83-102.

—.  "Towards Helhaven:  Three Stages of a Vision." 
Sewanee Review  79  (1971):  11-25.

—.  "Towards Looking Back."  Journal of General
Education
  28  (1976):  167-89.

—.  "Variation on ‘Providence.’"  Notre Dame
English Journal
  13  (1981):  155-83.

—.  "Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One." 
Michigan Quarterly Review  13  (1974):  307-37.

Chesebro, James W.  "Epistemology and Ontology as Dialectical
Modes in the Writings of Kenneth Burke."  Landmark Essays on
Kenneth Burke
.  Ed. Barry Brummett.  Davis, CA:  Hermagoras
P, 1993.

Jay, Paul, ed.  The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke
and Malcolm Cowley
, 1915-1981.  New York:  Viking, 1988.

Nelson, Cary.  "Writing as the Accomplice of Language." 
Simons and Melia 156-173.

Rueckert, William H.  "Rereading Kenneth Burke." 
Simons and Melia 239-261.

Simons, Herbert W., and Trevor Melia, eds.  The Legacy of Kenneth
Burke
.  Madison:  U of Wisconsin P, 1989.



[1]        
Dramatism and Development,
published in 1972, is more a pamphlet or a pair of essays (two Clark University
lectures), than a book by the standard of Burke’s other books.


Prayerful Diversity



Untitled Document

I’ve been asking my students to write papers on the subject of diversity, and
I have been getting some good results. For instance, one student, Janet, who
is a teacher of writing at a community college conducted
some interviews of her students
and shared the stories of their diverse
backgrounds. The success of the new so-called "program project" was
obvious, for Janet said she never learned so much in a school assignment.
What was this assignment, though, but a simple self-assigned project (on Janet’s part) to
ask students questions
rather than "teach" them something?
I know I wouldn’t have thought of it, so score one for me on diversity–letting the student
find her topic–and score a big one for Janet, in letting her students speak and capturing their stories for others. Other
students also explored the topic of diversity, as they wrote more or less standard
research papers on the topic.

Anyway, despite the success, I’m wondering lately if the new English Education
"Program Projects" assignment is itself diverse enough. Just how diversely
should we be thinking of "diversity"?

What leads me to this reflection is my recent reading of Mentoring for
Mission
by Caroline J. Simon et al. I’m reading this book in connection
with my involvement in the University’s mentoring program this year. In a
section entitled, "How Does Your Garden Grow," Simon et al. write,
"In striving to think in a fully Christian way about
mentoring, it is helpful to call on two theologically informed organic metaphors,
one from the Apostle Paul and one from St. Theresa of Lisieux…. Paul tells
us in Romans that ‘as in one body we have many members, and not all members
have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body’ (Rom. 12:4-5)."

Paul urges acceptance and appreciation of one’s unique abilities and
limitations in regards to serving the larger whole. There’s an implicit lesson
of resignation here. How does a lesson like this, and the one that follows from
St. Theresa fit with a professional, secular, sociological perspective on diversity?

I saw that all the flowers [God] has created are lovely.
The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little
violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. I realized that if
every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness and
there would be no wild flowers to make the meadows gay.

It is the same in the world of souls–which is the
garden of Jesus. He has created the great saints who are like the lilies and
the roses, but He has also created much lesser saints and they must be content
to be the daisies or the violets which rejoice His eyes whenever He glances
down. Perfection consists in doing His will, in being that which He wants
us to be. (qtd. in Simon, 24).

It may just be me, but I see the secular/professional and Christian views of
"diversity" pointing in somewhat different directions. In the secular/professional
view, I think there’s an implicit command to "overlook" or not "weigh"
diversity once it’s understood–our diversities enrich our understanding
of one another, but the larger goal seems kinda to move beyond the ways we are
different, in order to find out how everyone is EQUALLY great, despite
differences–through differences, beyond differences…. The Christian
view, on the other hand seems openly accepting of the principle of hierarchy;
some will be "greater" than others, but all are beautiful and useful
and needed. Perfection lies in acceptance of the “reality” of us, and in a commitment to discovering how that reality might best serve God’s will.

And then, aside from the principles of hierarchy and duty, I wonder how comfortable my
students would feel in including theology-tinged notions of diversity in and
around the professional, academic conceptions of the topic? What is the role
of religious notions of diversity in a professional, academic milieu? Much to
ponder here.


Rhetoric of the Situation



Untitled Document

Internet Humor

Death of a Senator:

A powerful senator dies after a prolonged illness. His
soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance.

"Welcome to Heaven," says St. Peter. "Before
you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around
these parts, you see, so we’re not sure what to do with you."

"No problem,
just let me in," says the guy.

"Well, I’d like to but I have orders
from higher up. What we’ll do is have you spend one day in Hell and one in Heaven.
Then you can choose where to spend eternity."

"Really, I’ve made up my mind. I want to be in
Heaven," says the senator.

"I’m sorry but we have our rules." And with that, St. Peter escorts him to the elevator
and he goes down, down, down to Hell. The doors open and he finds himself in
the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a club and standing in
front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him.
Everyone is very happy and in evening attire. They run to greet him, hug him,
and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense
of the people. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and
caviar.

Also present is the Devil, who really is a very friendly
guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good
time that before he realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a big
hug and waves while the elevator rises.

The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on
Heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him. "Now it’s time to visit Heaven." So
twenty-four hours pass with the head of state joining a group of contented souls moving
from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and,
before he realizes it, the twenty-four hours have gone by and St. Peter returns."Well
then, you’ve spent a day in Hell and another in Heaven. Now choose your eternity."

He reflects for a minute; then the senator answers,
"Well, I would never have said it. I mean Heaven has been delightful, but
I think I would be better off in Hell."

So St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes
down, down, down to Hell. Now the doors of the elevator open and he is in the
middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends,
dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags. The Devil
comes over to him and lays his arm on his neck. "I don’t understand,"
stammers the senator. "Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course
and club and we ate lobster and caviar and danced and had a great time. Now
all there is, is a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable.

The Devil looks at him, smiles and says, "Yesterday
we were campaigning…Today you voted for us!"


I’m Talkin’ Baseball . . .

Week after week this summer, I searched. Where were they hiding them? Those St. Louis Cardinals–where were the smoke and mirrors they used to win game after game? Then the playoffs started, and for two series, I searched on…. And still I couldn’t find them. Even now, I can’t find them. But no matter, for wherever they are, the Cardinals now know, as I always did, smoke and mirrors just don’t work in the playoffs.