Open (Guide) - Class 11/29

Thank you (Tony) for all of the reading materials about processing election results. The aftermath of the election has continued to feel strange and disturbing. Of course on campus in the days following the election we have been organizing against sexual assault in the College of Environmental Design following the Chronicle story that broke news of the case in our department last weekend. Prof Nezar wrote a note to our class in which he said that he was the victim in this case:

I believe the campus’ current hyper climate has encouraged the filing of exaggerated complaints of which I am now a victim as time will ultimately tell. 

During the same week, my coop had our own regular election for house leadership positions and the election had some odd and upsetting parallels with the national election -- in terms of displays of sexism/misogyny in discussions by and on behalf of candidates. A woman at my coop, who is a PhD in the math department at Berkeley, put it all best in a long email on our house listserv (referencing our house level elections, not the national election results):

These are all situations we can deal with individually. Our mothers and aunts and grandmothers tell us how to get by: "you know you are better than responding to that," "brush it off," "work hard," or the worst, "you're a woman in STEM, you'll be fine!" Fine because of what? Because the broken affirmative action system is any compensation for years of social training to let men and other women shut us down and shut us down until we shut ourselves down too?

The past 3.5 years have been the beginning of my life as a full, self-supporting adult. As I have heard from all the ambitious young women I know, with the end of the meritocracy of the educational system has come an awakening to the slow, omnipresent, quiet and barely noticeable yet cumulatively debasing and disabling force of sexism in our society. I was always a feminist, but I did not know what that meant until quite recently.  

In short, there has been a lot to process at multiple levels. When it happens at home (both in our department, and in my home away from home in Berkeley), it becomes even more challenging.

The Guardian article that you shared with us that quotes the late Stanford philosopher Richard Rorty puts my fear about the national election results best: “Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.” Unfortunately contempt for women already exists, although sometimes in ways that are not immediately perceptible to those who do not directly experience it. It is disturbing that the sexism that we already experience could become even more explicit and commonplace. As the woman in my house wrote above (that I excerpted from her longer email), I too feel that as the years go by I understand more and more why it is so important to be a feminist. I also increasingly understand why it can be so challenging. 

I found a William Carlos Williams poem called "Trees" that I liked that I think relates to the issues that I discussed above and have included it below. The poem also relates to my drawing, which is of a manzanita forest in Green Valley, CA that I camped in this summer. I have also included the David Vogel poem below "This World Awakes to Silence." 

--
Trees

Crooked, black tree
on your little grey-black hillock,
ridiculously raised one step toward
the infinite summits of the night:
even you the few grey stars
draw upward into a vague melody
of harsh threads.

Bent as you are from straining
against the bitter horizontals of
a north wind,—there below you
how easily the long yellow notes
of poplars flow upward in a descending
scale, each note secure in its own
posture—singularly woven.

All voices are blent willingly
against the heaving contra-bass
of the dark but you alone
warp yourself passionately to one side
in your eagerness.

--
This World Awakes to Silence from the Hebrew

This world awakes to silence
under night's blanket.

From far away I return to myself,
In the dark I look deeply within:
like the night, I, too, am wide,
and like it flow slowly
to infinity.

The pure silence
that lies beneath all life
seeps into me.

I'll rest in this silence,
apart from the labor of my days,
and a blue child will sleep in me,
and a goat with a necklace of stars.

                                               David Vogel

(translated by Peter Everwine)