Centipedal

My eyes feel like centipedes. So overworked by staring at screens are my eyes, by reading print-outs, reading books, reading the letters that pop up one by one as I type, and watching them reorganize when I edit, that they feel as though they have sprouted a hundred legs each, each leg now attached to some object, now detached and waving weakly in the air.Or maybe it’s my brain.

I find Collins’s weblog essay fascinating on the level of content and form, even if it has contributed to the centipede effect. On the one hand, it’s so much easier to both loosely hold the whole idea and still be aware of how the strands shoot out and loop back, connect and criss-cross, than when reading a fixed, linear printed text, easier to “know” swiftly and intuitively, very different from the methodical hunt and pick I normally do when I read theory, copying out notes by hand, thereby automatically privileging and imprinting some points and not others.

Will anything stick, though? Only time will tell. Actually, and speaking of time that’s not quite true: those elements that ring an old bell will, I reckon, such as the questions of now and time and moments. I learned from Anne Carson that ancient Greek actually had a tense–perhaps it was called deictic or epideictic, I don’t remember–to describe the precise moment when the sun was directly overhead, noon exactly, when shape and the shadow were fleetingly united. I have used this shallow knowledge in the past to discuss the short-short as a form in fiction. Of course, there is no such tense in English. When I brought this up with respect to Derrida in a class, I was reminded that he would say ’tis impossible, the signifier and the signified, shadow and thing, can never occupy the same space. What the old Greek tense, and this essay seems to say, however, that the fleetingness, the temporality can be built in, referred to, approximated if not represented. So is deictic temporal as well as spacial?

This has interesting possibilities for my periodic work on literary impressionism in Deborah Eisenberg.I love the idea that with all these discussion of the modern we are always returning to the ancient, and from MacLuhan via Heston, from technology to the body…

These are just silly many-legged notes and here are some more:

1. Class blogs as centripetal vs. centrifugal. Which is the case with these blogs, the ones for Pedagogy? They are centrifugal, or mine has been at least, in so far as they spin off texts and discussions that are other parts of the class, and we use them to connect to other aspects of experience and learning. They are centripetal to the degree that we use them to pull out points from the authoritative texts, stick close to the centre, and to the degree that there is an RSS feed directly to an instructor who can respond negatively or positively within moments. Centripetal to the degree that I feel as though I am not following the instructions on the syllabus whenever I am most engaged with writing and the blog.

2. My own Comp course and teaching style are deeply centripetal. I started them off in small groups discussing clips from This is England, but they were so quiet, so low-energy today, that when I asked them if they would be more comfortable in a big group discussion that they all shouted yes, so I reorganized them again around my authoritative identity, and let them just make comments to me, get my response, answer my questions. What a cop-out. But cannot even the most apparently centripetal student experience be centrifugal in the long run, insofar as it is networked to the rest of their lives and learning, as Collins says our own teaching experience is? And here if I knew more about physics or had more confidence I could talk about the universe’s expansion, and questions of time and speed. Perhaps Collins himself says this; to know I’d have to click back and click around. That’s a challenge, too, trying to write and read on the same small physical screen. Trying to slip out from under the sun, or is it the shadow, long enough to speak.

3. I think I might try a course blog next semester. Just see if it makes things a little easier, gives them some space of their own, one that isn’t a windowless cinderbock cell overpopulated by me.

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