24/7
24 Love Letters to Maxine Greene
(In no particular order)
Followed by 7 Questions
Dear Maxine,
I’m wandering along an open road tonight, wobbly and a bit unhinged, wondering where I’ll be by morning, writing you now under a sea of stars. You’re on my mind 24/7—I love you, you know—and here’s a simple sampling of letters from the day, one every hour, followed by a week’s worth of questions:
1) Your eyes, yes, why not? Laughing eyes, and worried too. Wonderful eyes, burning day and night, aware, alert eyes.
2) A sense rumbling beneath every conversation: you’re just waking up, at this very moment—this morning’s news! That cab-driver’s comment! The piece on the war in the New Yorker! Rachel Madow! The show at the Public! Bill T. Jones! Rashid Khalidi on Charlie Rose! Brecht!—and you’re breaking loose. You’re speaking to me (I know it’s a narcissistic illusion, but I allow myself, why not?) as if I’m just waking up too, and in our first waking moments I must pay urgent attention, gather whatever courage I can, and prepare to break loose as well.
3) You offer me a bowl of soup and a bed for the night—me, the natural narcissism again, why not?—but you offer a bite and a bed for the night to many others, including the homeless man on 5th Avenue one night in a snow storm (my hopeful invitation in perspective!) and his aggressive rejection: What do you want from me lady?
4) Your crazy question after that lecture: Was it OK? It was, yes, it was surely OK. It was only words after all—let’s not make more of it than it was—conceived and constructed and spoken by you for perhaps an hour, a bit more, in a crowded room, a stuffy place at the start. And yet people who heard you were gasping throughout, some weeping, some laughing and reaching out to touch another’s hand. The air sizzled and crackled, until, as you would have it, fresh and startling winds began to blow through the room. No one left quite the same, not even you. It was OK—why not?
5) Your one persistent rule, which is to reach, and your dazzling embodiment of the practice of it, the effort of it, trying again and again to speak beyond barriers and without bounds, to stretch, to reach.
6) Those exaggerations, those excesses—all the little efforts and grand gestures, and why not, designed to clear the air of hum-drum, ho-hum, and all the tedious repetition and buzz.
7) The admonition to create—right here and right now, in this community or in this school or on this corner—a place to do philosophy, and a bit of the possible world we might want to inhabit.
8) Your inner rhythm: Wake up! Be astonished! Act! Doubt! (REPEAT!)
9) Storming all those habitual barricades, the impositions and constraints, especially your own.
10) Reminding us again what it means to be alive and in dialogue with others, unfinished and situated, in-motion and struggling to expand the public square as a place of balance and decency, human dignity and possibility.
11) Your sense that we are all necessarily blind to our own blind spots, anesthetized, sleepy, and in need of occasional jolts and shocks into new awarenesses.
12) Your contradictions and conflicts, your reversals, dialectcs.
13) Another world—not necessarily a better world, possibly much worse, but another world nonetheless—is inevitable: Imagine a possible world you’d like to live in. Why not?
14) All the echoes: Arendt and Camus and DuBois, for example, Addams and King and Horton, Ginsberg, Shelly, Hughes and Brooks. Orwell. Morrison. Saramago. DeLillo. Woolf. That wild unruly company you keep.
15) Your invitations—to try once to construct a classroom on a base of fearless and relentless inquiry, for example, every established and received bit of wisdom, common sense, and dogma open for examination, interrogation, and rethinking.
16) Your impatience with gurus of every stripe, and with anyone who 24/7 | Bill Ayers:
(In no particular order)
Followed by 7 Questions
Dear Maxine,
I’m wandering along an open road tonight, wobbly and a bit unhinged, wondering where I’ll be by morning, writing you now under a sea of stars. You’re on my mind 24/7—I love you, you know—and here’s a simple sampling of letters from the day, one every hour, followed by a week’s worth of questions:
1) Your eyes, yes, why not? Laughing eyes, and worried too. Wonderful eyes, burning day and night, aware, alert eyes.
2) A sense rumbling beneath every conversation: you’re just waking up, at this very moment—this morning’s news! That cab-driver’s comment! The piece on the war in the New Yorker! Rachel Madow! The show at the Public! Bill T. Jones! Rashid Khalidi on Charlie Rose! Brecht!—and you’re breaking loose. You’re speaking to me (I know it’s a narcissistic illusion, but I allow myself, why not?) as if I’m just waking up too, and in our first waking moments I must pay urgent attention, gather whatever courage I can, and prepare to break loose as well.
3) You offer me a bowl of soup and a bed for the night—me, the natural narcissism again, why not?—but you offer a bite and a bed for the night to many others, including the homeless man on 5th Avenue one night in a snow storm (my hopeful invitation in perspective!) and his aggressive rejection: What do you want from me lady?
4) Your crazy question after that lecture: Was it OK? It was, yes, it was surely OK. It was only words after all—let’s not make more of it than it was—conceived and constructed and spoken by you for perhaps an hour, a bit more, in a crowded room, a stuffy place at the start. And yet people who heard you were gasping throughout, some weeping, some laughing and reaching out to touch another’s hand. The air sizzled and crackled, until, as you would have it, fresh and startling winds began to blow through the room. No one left quite the same, not even you. It was OK—why not?
5) Your one persistent rule, which is to reach, and your dazzling embodiment of the practice of it, the effort of it, trying again and again to speak beyond barriers and without bounds, to stretch, to reach.
6) Those exaggerations, those excesses—all the little efforts and grand gestures, and why not, designed to clear the air of hum-drum, ho-hum, and all the tedious repetition and buzz.
7) The admonition to create—right here and right now, in this community or in this school or on this corner—a place to do philosophy, and a bit of the possible world we might want to inhabit.
8) Your inner rhythm: Wake up! Be astonished! Act! Doubt! (REPEAT!)
9) Storming all those habitual barricades, the impositions and constraints, especially your own.
10) Reminding us again what it means to be alive and in dialogue with others, unfinished and situated, in-motion and struggling to expand the public square as a place of balance and decency, human dignity and possibility.
11) Your sense that we are all necessarily blind to our own blind spots, anesthetized, sleepy, and in need of occasional jolts and shocks into new awarenesses.
12) Your contradictions and conflicts, your reversals, dialectcs.
13) Another world—not necessarily a better world, possibly much worse, but another world nonetheless—is inevitable: Imagine a possible world you’d like to live in. Why not?
14) All the echoes: Arendt and Camus and DuBois, for example, Addams and King and Horton, Ginsberg, Shelly, Hughes and Brooks. Orwell. Morrison. Saramago. DeLillo. Woolf. That wild unruly company you keep.
15) Your invitations—to try once to construct a classroom on a base of fearless and relentless inquiry, for example, every established and received bit of wisdom, common sense, and dogma open for examination, interrogation, and rethinking.
16) Your impatience with gurus of every stripe, and with anyone who 24/7 | Bill Ayers: