Love and Longing

Special thanks to Avital Ronell, Shirley Steinberg, Karen Lombardi, Raymond Barfield, Petra Munro Hendry, Molly Quinn, Toby Daspit, John A. Weaver, Daniel Chapman, William F. Pinar, Delese Wear, Mary Aswell Doll, Deborah P. Britzman, William Eaton, Kathleen Hayes and Jack Simmons.

The Mississippi River coils around the edges of New Orleans. They call her the Crescent City. She is beautiful: this city, this river. She is monstrous: this river, this city. The Vieux Carré. Sorrowful. Post-Katrina. New Orleans has had its share of tragedies. Hurricanes intensify. The river rises; the city sinks. O! Sorrowful city. At dusk. What happens to the Great Blue Heron during hurricanes? The Roseate Spoonbill? The Snowy Egret? Do the birds fly away? I worry about the birds.

Falling in love with a city is an odd thing. But it happens. It happened to me. The Vieux Carré is peculiar. They say once you live there, you cannot leave. And if you leave, you will come back. The French Quarter; the Crescent City. Frozen in time. The eighteenth century. It cannot be the selfsame as it was. Can it? It is and it isn’t. Out of time, in time. Is it possible to step out of time? Yes and no.

Go to New Orleans. There you shall be educated. I became a philosopher in the Vieux Carré, even before I became a philosopher. Mon amour: philosophie. It was November. Black leatherbound notebook in hand. And a pen. Chicory coffee. Periwinkle blue box: Gauloises cigarettes. I decided to hit the streets at dusk. She is seductive, this city. Especially at dusk. A writer’s city, a philosopher’s city. She is seductive and indifferent, the Vieux Carré. She is not always kind; she is devastatingly beautiful. A city of love and despair.

Philosopher of the city: Roseate Spoonbill. Skyward. In descent. Unsettling. It was November. I came home. Leatherbound notebook in hand. I returned. To her. But for a few days. I left her. Once again: unsettled. O! Vieux Carré: Mon amour.

Chicory coffee. Roseate Spoonbill. The gray pelican. I will go home. To stay. One day. Again. To that blue shotgun house on Governor Nicholls. One day, I will go down to the river: the Mighty Mississippi. To sit. To think. To write. Mon amour: Vieux Carré.

The chapters in this book turn on love and despair, longing and the ineffable, education and the distracted, friendship and betrayal. Generally speaking, this book is about love and education. Let us think about love. Some might ask: Why bother? Don’t we already know what love is? And that is precisely where the problems begin. Let us think about education. Some might ask: Why bother? Don’t we already know what education is? I don’t think so.

The problems begin with language. Social science has killed the language of education. Social science limits the kinds of questions we can ask. In order to ask questions anew we need a new language. For education. Can education bear the language of love? Of philosophy? Of poetry? Of literature? There have been many books written about philosophy, poetry and literature in the context of education. But this book takes another look. From a different angle. I ask different questions. I move the conversation elsewhere.

Academic discourse limits the kinds of questions we can ask. I suggest that we challenge the very form of academic discourse in order to ask different kinds of questions. The problem begins with language. To change the language of education, we need to change the way we think. Different forms of thought require different forms of writing. Consider taking indirect routes. Socrates tells us to take the long way round. Take side roads. Back roads. Avoid the interstate. Put up different signage. Think backward. Get unnerved.

For the most part, philosophers think that love—as a concept—is stupid. Well, in some ways they are right. If love is a Hallmark card, then it is stupid. An idea is stupid if you make it stupid. Avital Ronell (2002) remarks: “Stupidity, the indelible tag of modernity, is our symptom. Marking an original humiliation of the subject, stupidity resolves into the low-energy, everyday life trauma with which we live. It throws us” (p. 11). We are living in the time of stupid. If we think stupidly, we live stupidly. Otherwise than Stupid requires thought. Different forms. Forming thoughts differently. Thoughtful thought.

I argue that the concept of love is not stupid. In fact, it is the weightiest of subjects. Love is right in front of us, but it eludes our grasp. It resists conceptualization because it is non-conceptual. Love is sensual. The sensual is difficult to put into language because it has no language. Even still, poets write in the language of love. This kind of language differs from the language of logic. Because love is not logical.