being wrong about love

What does it mean to say someone is wrong about their experience of love? We often make these judgments when we've fallen in love with someone new: "I never knew what love was before!" Of course, we'll make the same judgment the next time. And so forth. We're adorable, ain't we?

Among the many themes in Gabriel Marcel's Metaphysical Journal, he discusses feeling, experience, and the difference between them and thinking.

I am unable to say to a friend, “What you experience for that person is not, as you imagine, respectful friendship or disinterested curiosity; it is love,” unless there is a certain universal idea of love. (307)

Marcel goes on to say that the difference is “disinterestedness.” The paradox is that a feeling (friendship, love) is precisely not disinterested, and the objectivity and detachment of the disinterested perspective will always seem out of place. In fact, even one’s own reflective thought, in distancing itself from and objectifying a feeling, transposes feelings into ideas.

Love, as a feeling (like any feeling), is not itself “transmittable,” that is, not translatable into symbols to be exchanged or mediated. That quality is what gives feelings their being (we can’t say ipseity, because that too transposes them into ideas).

The judgment of another’s feeling, and even the judgment of our own feelings, is guilty of paralogism. This paralogism occurs whenever being and thing are conflated, or thou and him/her, or feeling and idea. Marcel’s position makes it seem that whenever we judge or reflect on our own unreflected experience, we create paradox.

When I experience love, when I fall in love ("it will be in springtime..."), the feeling is unimpeachable, and more to the point, incorrigible. I live in that feeling, and its reality surrounds and fills every moment and space. When someone comes by and says, "well, you know, you did say this just last month, about that other person...," I immediately dismiss it, not because I judge this judgment to be incorrect (which it might be), but because the judgment itself is out of bounds.

Yet, we know, that is, we think in the cool light of the early morning of reason (when it's had a good strong cuppa and is ready to face the day), that indeed we can be wrong about the experience of love. In fact, thinking about it, we can come up with several ludicrous examples to make the point, leading us to exclaim, "oh, man! What was I thinking?!" when, of course, we precisely weren't thinking.

Marcel, to his great credit I think, does not resolve this paradox. He uses it to explore the gap between thought and faith (and the translation I have steadfastly uses thinking, not reason, which is interesting). He also seemed to take clairvoyance completely seriously.

text of a speech I didn't give at the CFA Assembly

The 72nd CFA Assembly was held in Los Angeles this weekend, so yes, it was our second trip down to LA in 9 days. We just drove back up through Kern County dust and windstorms (which badly scratched the passenger side door of Eddie Jetta by nearly impaling us with a tumbleweed), and hard rain through Madera, Merced, and Stanislaus counties. It was harrowing, and now I've got to try to calm myself, and get some work done for my long class day tomorrow.

Luckily, last night I hardly slept. I was up half the night thinking about what a hellish academic year this has been for us and for our families and students. In particular it's been hell on lecturers.

I spoke last night to a lecturer activist whose campus is contemplating cutting 80% of the remaining lecturers for next academic year. It brought back so much of the strife we've dealt with at Santa Claus the last couple years, and my own personal worries about the end of my job here, and of the end of my academic career - a real possibility still, but more remote for me.

It got me thinking about the relative risks, rewards, and stress levels of faculty activists who are on the tenure track versus those of us on the tenuous track. This isn't to say the tenure-line faculty have been anything less than superb in their support -- for the most part. But they haven't so immediately faced loss of employment, loss of their colleagues, and the guilt and unfair blame we feel.

At the Assembly we discussed the CSU Chancellor's latest scheme to invent a problem and impose a draconian solution that helps to blame faculty - this "deliverology" nonsense they've bought from Michael Barber. CFA brought in a Barber critic named John Seddon to speak about how deliverology has worked in the UK (a key example: their public health service is now much worse and the cost management controls imposed by deliverology have resulted in increased costs).

So, there lie in bed, thinking that after all we've done to try to help preserve as many jobs of our fellow lecturers as we can, along comes a new plan that will necessarily result (is planned to result) in even greater loss of faculty work. And I got up and wrote a few words to say at the Assembly. I wouldn't have read it, but I would have used it to speak from - so I'd be more loose and spontaneous, which I like. Anyway, since I didn't say it, here's the text I wrote:

Good morning fellow faculty activists. I wanted to say something this morning about what has been, for me at least, the elephant in the room this whole weekend. Could I have all the lecturer activists please stand for a moment?

[Presumably, they'd stand. They're about 33% of the Assembly.]

I've spoken to many of my fellow lecturer activists at the Assembly this weekend, and not a single one expressed any confidence at all of returning to work, and to our struggle, next academic year. This is important to me because all of the troubles and stress we've dealt with has been compounded for lecturers who know their jobs are even more precarious now than a year ago, despite our fighting back. I hope to see all of you next fall. Thanks, you can sit down again now if you like.

We know why our situation is as precarious as ever next year: deliverology. I don't know about anyone else here, but I think the original version of this story by Franz Kafka is much better written. It also has a happier ending.

Because all of us are exhausted, and all of us can't afford to stop fighting, and all of us are facing the potential futility of our fight, I wanted, finally, to offer something I've been telling myself all year, for what it's worth. No matter the outcome for ourselves and for our colleagues, we haven't failed. We haven't failed ourselves, we haven't failed our colleagues or students, and we haven't failed our universities. And no matter the outcome, we should have hope. I don't have hope because I think the outcome will be good - I don't, in fact. I have hope because we're here now, and because we have fought, in solidarity and in love, and no matter what happens, we still won that solidarity and that love.

my loveliest's birthday

This is for my love. This is the fifth of her birthdays we've spent together. It may not be high art, but it's meant.


impossible to contemplate
a thousand days without you
a century ago
the million hours
passed in the dark
uncountable dark

when I say you are a miracle
I mean you are the sun,
I mean you are
impossible to contemplate,
I mean you are the sun

impossible to contemplate
the dawn without you
or centuries, or hours
or anything,
even the dark

when I say you are the sun
I mean you are a miracle,
the centuries, the hours,
the miracle of light,
impossible to contemplate

fifth of July

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of Lauren and I cohabiting. We celebrate three anniversaries, in fact, but to me, the fifth of July is most important.

July 5, 2004 wasn't the best day of our lives together. I had spent the previous week moving my effects out of a household that had been broken for longer than I care to think about, and myself out of a relationship that had been broken at least as long. Lauren arrived late that afternoon with a carload of her stuff, moving out of another unhappy relationship. We were both terribly excited, which masked some of the overwhelming stress and uncertainty. It was a tough way to start a life together, but we made it, and created a beautiful, delighting life.

In retrospect, that says a lot about how we love one another and why suddenly it's been four years together. We've had a tremendously happy time together, most of the time. But also a lot of terrible times, a lot of sad and distressful times. This isn't earth-shattering. Everybody goes through difficulty. The beauty and delight abide, always.

What keeps coming to mind for me lately is that no matter how stressed, paranoid, upset, angry, confused, or certain of doom I have been, of all the people in the world, Lauren always gives me hope and joy. The hope and joy she gives make it possible for life to be open, free, meaningful, and make it possible for me to fight the good fights I have to, and to smile. That hope and joy, and grasping hold of that hope and joy, of the possibility for happiness, is what the fifth of July represents to me.