A further installment of "Read a Memo": Chancellor Katehi's UC-Davis memos

The header to this blog reads Thoughts on book publishing, editing, contemporary poetry, dementia, and teaching by the editor of Tinfish Press. It's time to add one more to these someone high-flown categories listing the obsessions of Tinfish's editor. The new category, which has been touched on more than once before on these virtual pages, is that of "administrative memos." As far as I can tell, the most widely read of my posts was one I wrote in October 2009 in response to a memo from the President of UH, M.R.C. Greenwood, who lamented the UH faculty's refusal to sign a contract that would have cut salaries with no promise of pay-back. What struck me most strongly about that memo was the president's use of pronouns. Where naively faculty think of the "we" of the university as its students and faculty, President Greenwood used "we" to denote the administration: "The university is disappointed in the UHPA vote to reject our contract offer." UHPA is the faculty union, and the vote (hence) was that of the faculty. That sentence let us know that "we" were no longer the university, but that--like children--we had disappointed the parental "we" of the university's administration.

This past week has seen "Occupy" demonstrations across the country. After one at Berkeley resulted in a confrontation between police, students, and two prominent poets, including Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass, the latter a former US poet laureate, students at UC-Davis demonstrated. A flurry of protests must needs garner a raft of memos, these from Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. Once again, the content of the "we" is at issue.

The first memo, dated 11/18/2011, is written to ask students to take down their tents by 3 p.m., a request that comes only after several paragraphs of administrative prose, asserting at once a desire to support free speech, and the need to shut it down. As later discussions of what would happen that day at Davis revolve around questions of responsibility, I will quote the paragraph in which the Chancellor invokes that word:

However, we also have a responsibility to our entire campus community, including the parents who have entrusted their students to us, to ensure that all can live, learn and work in a safe, secure environment without disruption. We take this responsibility seriously. We are accountable for what occurs on our campus. Campus policies generously support free speech, but do include limited time, place and manner regulations to protect health, safety and the ability of students, staff, and faculty to accomplish the University mission. If an unfortunate incident occurs as a result of violations of these limited regulations, we are all responsible.

I'm not sure who the "we" is here, although I gather it must be an administrative--rather than (or as!) a royal--we. The responsibility is that of guardians of the children of parents who send those kids to UC-Davis, and it's a responsibility that includes the oft-bruited "health" and "safety" rationales used by many of the nation's mayors in recent weeks. Hence, "we are accountable for what occurs on our campus," sounds at first blush like a claim by administration to bear this tough, adult, weight. But the last sentence blurs the "we" into another realm, that of the students: "If an unfortunate incident occurs as a result of violations of these limited regulations, we are all responsible." The "we" has grown to include the student body here. We administrators are responsible for your health and safety until such time as you are not healthy or safe, when it's also your responsibility . . . Rather than take down their tents and patiently await what the Chancellor referred to as, "continued productive and peaceful discourse moving forward," the students held their ground. Many of them locked arms and sat on the sidewalk, while others encircled the area.

What happened next is all over youtube, facebook, and other media, namely the actions of one aptly-named Lt. John Pike, who sprayed seated students with pepper spray as if they were roses infested by bugs, or maybe just bugs. The outcry was immediate, and so was the administrative response. Another memo emerged, also dated 11/18. In it the Chancellor wrote much the same thing she'd written in the first memo. The prose was as if stirred in a large pot, with notions of "health" and "safety" and responsibility to parents circulating with only slightly more agitation than in the first memo of the day. But this prose does not serve as advance warning, which includes a notion of administrative responsibility; rather, it serves the purpose of removing responsibility from the equation, at least from Admin's point of view. Hence, the re-word "responsibility" comes to be replaced by the re-word, "regret," as in: "We deeply regret that many of the protesters today chose not to work with our campus staff and police to remove the encampment as requested. We are even more saddened by the events that subsequently transpired to facilitate their removal." In this sentence, "we" are back among the administration, but this "we" is not responsible, but somehow sad that their responsibility came to naught. If regret replaces responsibility for the administrators, then responsibility must be given over to "the protesters," many of whom--she writes--are not from UC-Davis at all, but from the "outside."

The ethical continental divide comes in the sentence after the one about "protesters" who "chose"--active ones!--in the next sentence: "We are even more saddened by the events that subsequently transpire to facilitate their removal." It was not Lt. Pike who removed them, in large part by spraying chemicals in their faces and then having them forcibly taken away, it was "the events that transpired." These events transpired not to remove them, but to "facilitate their removal."

Student response to these memos and the actions ordained, excused, and then displaced by them, was brilliant. Students surrounded the building the Chancellor was meeting in. When she finally emerged from the building, she was obliged to walk several blocks to her car in the dark, surrounded by students seated (as their pepper-sprayed colleagues had been) on the ground. No one made a sound. This use of silence was beautiful, and also politically effective. Silence carried a weight that was spiritual (both for the chancellor forced to examine herself on that walk, and for the students who were as-if--or who were--meditating together). Silence was the fullest of possible reponses. See video of her walk here.

The OED tells me that "responsibility" means:

1. Capability of fulfilling an obligation or duty; the quality of being reliable or trustworthy.

But it's more than that; the word "responsibility" includes within it the word "response." Responses are of many kinds, but responsible responses are, if we follow Steel's argument (after the parable of the Samaritan), neighborly. Suffice it to say that the police response to students at UC-Davis, was not neighborly, even if it was a response. Yesterday, I wrote about Leonard Schwartz's discussion of "little anger" and "big anger" in his new poems and in conversation. I'd like to transpose the "big anger" that shows itself not as anger but as something else (whether it's carnival or silence) into Steel's reading of neighborliness, while acknowledging that neither Brecht nor Schwartz are Christian, nor Steel necessarily angry. But if our (and I use "our" advisedly) anger is to be creative rather than corrosive, we need to transmute it into something like neighborliness. Let that be a responsibility between peers, not between parents, their proxies in university administration, and the rest of us children. Those kids last night were not much seen or heard, but their message was eloquently delivered.

Prepositions [sic] about rage: Leonard Schwartz, Makana, and the Angry Iraq War Vet

"What am I to this table?" For me, the difficulties of learning another language were embedded in the problem of prepositions. Where I was in relation to a table, or a verb (do I give "to" or "of," or do I offer "up" or "at"?), or a lover, became near metaphysical problems, even if the answers were most easily accessible from rote memory. Whether this relation was static or moving, kind or hostile, was also in question. "He threw the ball at the batter" alters the sense of "he pitched to the batter," by a great deal, even if the ball travels in the same direction. The first statement suggests anger, the second a rule-bound exchange. The first threatens to begin a brawl that is not part of the game itself; the second is necessary to the game's plot.

Leonard Schwartz thinks much contemporary poetry is too direct in its expressions of anger. He argues for poetry that internalizes politics, feeling. Like Makana, who recently sang to APEC officials of his rage in a tone that had little to do with anger (Makana's tone was sweet), he wants to create the possibility for new thoughts and feelings without demanding them. So, the central trope of Schwartz's new book, At Element, is not awakening, but sleep. He doesn't work over his ideas; he sleeps on them. The mixed state of his sleeping--one of forgetting and meditation, inertia and act--allows him access to openness: "Thus all the writing I have done before this was preparatory to this new openness, to this fundamental address. I am at the beginning, finally" ("The Sleep Talkers," 74).

But back to anger. Anger is what holds us most firmly to ourselves. When I am angry I do not let the subject of my anger go, but I also do not let myself go (unless, of course, I "lose it," which is another matter). I am most myself when I am angry, or that's a statement I could argue my way through (as if statements were tunnels full of vines and waterfalls and I had to "make" my way through them toward the light at the end of my assertion). Schwartz writes: "In order to achieve this [a different way of being] I will need to liberate myself not from sleep but from a repetitive resentment that binds me to self-identity, and thus, to paranoia" (97). Elsewhere, he remarks on poets' tendency toward such repetitions, resentments. But that has to do with reputation, with making one's mark, and he's after something more central here, something closer to the actual bone. Let me quote a full paragraph:

In Polish there is a word, Zbnigew, that means "a man who has overcome his own anger." (Imagine the wisdom of a language that has a special word for a man who has overcome his own anger, and that people give to their children as a name.) In German it was Nietzsche who wrote so influentially about the French word resentment. Anger, then, and resentment, and paranoia, and that special Polish way of outgrowing them, Zbnigew. Also the English word awning.

Giving a child a name that means "to overcome his own anger," offers him a gift of foreknowledge. The child will get angry, as all children do, but he will also be able to fall back on his name; the name is a hint, a goad, to his overcoming. He will grow into (another preposition) his overcoming. So far as I know, no one has named their child "Awning," word that appears mysteriously at the end of the paragraph. But that word means "shelter," and it sounds a note of "awe." It may not mean overcoming anger, but at least it's an incline the anger can run off of, like rain water.

Sleep exists between light and dark, life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, identity and its effusions (like Whitman's jags in eddies). Sleep is freedom: "we make ourselves absent even when physically present and there is no shame in this, it is a form of our freedom, and when we become present again, one can feel the impact. As universal as sun on the beach, as riding the waves, as being too old for this activity, or too young for that" (89). To assert universality is a difficult thing in contemporary poetry, as in life. But Schwartz wants to go there. If anger is what separates us, even if it seems to make us whole as long as it lasts, then calm, sleep, blurred boundaries are what invite a fluid statelessness in, around, above, below, us. If Buddhism were not already secular, I'd be tempted to call this secular Buddhism.

This state enables Schwartz to imagine reconciliation between objectivity and subjectivity, or to tap into a pre-fab phrase offered to him in a car by Rob Fitterman, namely "sobjectivity." He reports that he laughed when he heard the word, but not too many short paragraphs later he relates, "Because of sobjectivity I feel free to imagine the voice of a suitcase, of a sock, of a rotting log or a crack in the sidewalk" (101). It also permits us to feel for the object, to "sob" in relation to it. For what object does not carry within itself its own decomposition, its own developing sadness?

Schwartz's meditations are more complicated than these brief remarks allow; there is, for example, a great deal of violence in his world, including an odd man-against-duck scene later in the piece, as well as the contest for priority in father-son relations. But he knows, as a bipolar friend once put it to me, that "anger is not the solution; anger is the problem." When we were confronted by a mutual friend who was extremely angry, corrosively so, at the state of the world, Leonard quoted Bertolt Brecht, whose "idea is that little anger is what we know as anger, the anger that blows off some steam, but never really leads to change . . . whereas big anger doesn't even look like anger, intent as it is on its purpose, which would only be upset by revealing itself as anger. It's in Mother Courage" (I quote here from a personal email). To extrapolate, while little anger turns on its carrier, eating its host, big anger moves outward. Little anger objectifies the self, while big anger sobjectifies.

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Video (provenance forgotten): An African American Iraq war vet in camouflage jacket faces down New York City cops. He yells and yells at them. "Why are you hurting these people? Why are you hurting them? If you want to hurt people, go to Iraq and hurt people. These are Americans. Why are you hurting them." His audience is a group of cops standing in the street. They are remarkably passive. They are letting him shout himself out, but he refuses to, and keeps yelling at them. He is the aggressor, if only verbally, and they the impassive listeners. It looks wrong. (It is wrong, as it is but one camera angle on a day of protest and police brutality.) There is a moment at which his anger, his pleading, his repetitions, reveal his own hurt; it is past this point I cannot watch the video without hurting myself. He is asking them not to hurt him. He has been hurt, and he has hurt others. This is his confession, his plea, his expiation.

I found him; he's Marine Corps Sgt. Shamar Thomas. Here's the video.

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The media can attack the Occupy movement for its carnival. They're banging drums. In a circle, no less. They're dancing. They have a library. Oh my, they have iPads. Some of them are yuppies, others homeless people, so some of them are too clean and some of them are too dirty. They chant things. They yell in unison. How quaint. But, like Makana's performance at the APEC dinner, these are not moments of silliness; they are our sorrow songs. If the "master" could not hear the "slave's" lament because it was sung, then the media cannot seem to hear the occupier's anger because it comes cloaked in joyful noise. Listen. There's rage there, and it's catching.

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Leonard Schwartz's new book is At Element, from Talisman Books. You can order it here.
Our 2008 conversation about memory, with 2011 photo, can be found here.


The photo is of Leonard Schwartz (foreground) and Tom Devaney (background) at Kelly Writer's House, University of Pennsylvania, September 2011.