Re: Lovers and Fools and Seething Brains

[csjhs@eiu.edu (Jeanne H. Simpson)]

If I am the speaker in a session and someone gets up and leaves while I
speak, I may or may not perceive that exit as a statement about me.  Once,
I would have thought--oh, that person doesn't like my paper and therefore
doesn't like me and I'm a failure.    But acknowledging that I do not know
what the person's reasons are (and also acknowledging that the person is
very likely someone I do not know) can keep me from getting  distracted by
this issue and lets me keep my mind on the matter at hand, which is to
satisfy the people who stay.  

If I am a member of the audience and other people leave during a
presentation (not betweeen papers), and it bothers me, I have to ask
myself, why?  not why do they leave, though I might indeed decide to
speculate about that.  But why does it bother me?  Perhaps because I am
building a mental scenario about what all these actions mean and making
judgements about them, though in fact I have such a paucity of evidence
that, as an academic, ordinarily I would never draw any such conclusions. 

It seems to me that we need to be aware of how easily we are drawn into
these inner scenarios, how seductive they are, and how they subvert our
academic training which calls for suspended judgements and accumulated
evidence and tested assumptions. And they happen, ironically, right in the
midst of demonstrations of that academic training.  The dysjunction
between what we say we do and what we actually do is something we might
want to attend to.

I smile as I write these words, remembering a time two years ago when we
had this discussion about 4C's on the list and I griped about "boring" and
tedious sessions and got flamed for it and went off in a sulk.  It was a
good lesson for me.

Jeanne Simpson
csjhs@eiu.edu