Listening to NPR on the drive home, they were doing a piece on Grand Theft Auto IV, the new installment of the controversial video game line. Whatever negative elements exist in the game (or in video games as a whole), one aspect of the game is its skewering of contemporary culture (even as it is itself seen as asocial evil, how postmodern.) Anyway, what struck me was the short sound byte they played from the video game itself, when the avatar gets into a car, the player can select a faux radio station, one of them being an NPR spoof. The background music was sort of an angelic choir and a sepia voiced announcer saying "Preaching to the choir...you're listening to NPL" or some such. But this idea of preaching to choir. As we live in a consumer society, we tend to seek out venues of entertainment and community that reinforce our values and preconceived notions. This is certainly true in my own life, although I tend to project that quality onto others. Another spoof television station in the video game is the Weasel News Channel, pandering to a conservative audience. One of the values I learned through some of those old literature classes was a kind of resolution, or at least potential resolution to this polarization, which is brought to the fore in times like presidential elections, when reds demonize the amoral blues and blues make fun of uneducated reds. Thankfully, the dialogue seems a little more intelligent in this election cycle, but not by that much. How do we avoid this polarization within ourselves? How do we acknowledge our need to expand, to see others' points of view without somehow losing track of our own. For myself, I am particularly sponge-like and tend to absorb whatever I am immersed in. This would seem to be a kind of immature approach to the world, in which we can only stand to be around likeminded people for fear of losing our values. This may have something to do with how I was raised (for this is the deepest education, it seems), but I also had a "formal education" in which a sort of rewiring took place. But, it seems, this rewiring has to be practiced continuously, or the old patterns will simply reemerge. This can be especially daunting in a city like LA, where there are all kinds of pocket communities with their own particular take. Sometimes I sneer at the complacency and what I take to be the false assuredness of all kinds of fundamentalists, be they conservative or liberal, but have I not myself succumbed to a kind of comfortable complacency? How do you fight that? How do you walk that middle road of openness. Encounter with text is certainly one way of this expansion. I was humbled to read a bit of the debate between Anglican Bishop Rowan Williams and novelist Philip Pullman, during which Williams had the following quote:
What you learn, I think, after absorbing a really serious piece of fiction, is not a message. Your world has expanded, your world has enlarged at the end of it, and the more a writer focuses on message, the less expansion there'll be. I think that's why sometimes the most successful, "Christian" fiction is written by people who are not trying hard to be Christian about it. A bit of a paradox, but I'm thinking of Flannery O'Connor, the American writer, my favorite example here. She's somebody who, quite deliberately, doesn't set out to make the points that you might expect her to be making, but wants to build a world in which certain things may become plausible, or tangible, palpable, but not to get a message across.
As an English teacher in the ninth and tenth grade, I am repeatedly trying to "teach texts," but I am so concerned with basic things like comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, structuring a basic essay, coaxing students to actually care about their grade and their future, that I tend to speed through class discussions, teasing out whatever the main message seems to be, in a fairly didactic way, not allowing the fiction to breathe. And I am left wondering, to what extent am I failing as a teacher of literature, and to what extent am I bound by circumstance? I am left thinking the fault is not the kids but myself. I haven't done a good enough job of challenging myself to live a mythologically inflected life. I've come down on one side of a spectrum and I filter the truth down to what lines up with what I already believe and I try to reproduce that in others. I'm on a search to educate myself on how to move toward a middle way, but here again I feel caught in a human bind. The choice of exposure to something, even something new, different, other, is ipso facto a choice to exclude billion other things. You see the problem we find ourselves in. Even a decision to be open is itself extremely limited. I suppose instead the question is how to cultivate an open heart and open mind. How to experience, or at least open ourselves up to, the daily resurrection?
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