Re: e-mail tutoring

[bobbie silk <bsilk@keller.clarke.edu>]

A warning to my wcenter friends--the message below is long and much more
personal than professional.  If you do not have the time to indulge me,
please delete it without reading it.  I understand.

Contrary to my intention, I've given myself more than the weekend to think
about inhabiting/being-inhabited-by language.  In the meantime, my
thoughts have been shaped and diverted by a number of things.  Not the
least among them was the following from a message by Frankie Condon--

"I just wonder what's so great (and what's at stake in claiming
that there is something great)  about there being 'no bodies. No
genders. Just minds.'  What's so wrong with my body (or
any of our bodies, for that matter) that there is
a (cyber)space place in the world which is better because
or our physical absence (or the absence of physical difference)??"

At the time I read Frankie's message, my thoughts had been traveling along
lines they had traveled before.  I was juggling theories in the
air--Foucault, Vygotsky, linguistic-determinism, Chomsky.  I wavered when
I read the words "world...better because of our physical absence."  The
theories hit the ground--plop, plop, plop--when I received a phone call
from my mother who told me that my aunt had died.  It occured to me then
that my Aunt Kathryn, crippled as a child by polio, might have enjoyed the
bodilessness of cyberspace. But Aunt Kathryn was who she was because of
and in spite of her body.

I don't remember now how old she was when the disease hit her.  But I
remember my father telling me that my grandfather, a coalminer in southern
Oklahoma, scraped together what money he could and took Kathryn by train
to Tulsa's Memorial Children's Hospital.  He promised the family he would
send for them, and he did eventually, but for that time Kathryn was the
center of the family's concern.

My first memories of Aunt Kathryn involve suitcases--big, hard,
rectangular suitcases with satin linings and brass clasps that made
wonderful springy, clacking sounds when she pushed the buttons that
released them.  Inside those suitcases, among her clothes, were treats for
us from Arizona where she worked in schools run by the Presbyterian
Missionary Board.

She never married, and often referred to herself as an "old maid"--with a
laugh that dared anyone to make anything of it.  The disease had affected
one leg and hip, causing her to walk with a profound limp and sharp swing
of the torso to one side.  Later I came to know Kathryn as a determined,
bossy, sometimes insensitive, and subtly vulnerable woman.  With resolute
courage, she faced a number of operations on her hip throughout her life.
But that constant reminder of the body also made her see the world largely
in terms of health and illness.  We used to joke about her Christmas
form-letters, filled with news of family mishaps and convalescences. And,
often to our chagrin, there would always be in her some sense of being the
center of the family's concern.

I wonder how she would have reacted to the "liberation" of cyberspace.  I
wonder if her practical determination--which gave her the strength to deal
with constant pain--would have allowed her to play in bodiless space.

In his book _A Path With a Heart_, Jack Kornfield writes of the fully
integrated life that "I learned that if I am to live a spiritual life, I
must be able to embody it in every action; in the way I stand and walk, in
the way I breathe, in the care with which I eat.  All my activities must
be included.  To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as
great a part of spiritual life as anything else. In beginning to reinhabit
my body, I discovered new areas of fear and pain that kept me away from my
true self, just as I had discovered new areas of fear and pain in opening
my mind and opening my heart."  Provocatively, Kornfield adds, "The way I
treat my body is not disconnected from the way I treat my family or the
commitment I have to peace on our earth."

Like balloons released into the sky, I am releasing these memories of
Kathryn into the world we've created--not so much with electricity and
wires--but with our words and our willingness to let the words be our eyes
and all our senses.  

  --Bobbie
    bsilk@keller.clarke.edu