Matters of Scale
Dot Dot Dot ... 14
If you’re on a phone, you’re seeing Splinter #2 at its actual size, or close. This is important.
Never did I imagine or intend for Dot Dot Dot … to bring politics into the mix. I was aiming for a kind of intimacy that would encourage readers to connect the small things — like how things ran at the family dinner table, if there was one — to the larger picture of their lives, meaning their day-to-day feelings and behaviors and their patterns over time.
I’ve written before that I remember JFK’s assassination and Nixon’s resignation. And that’s pretty much all I remember until Nixon’s resignation, George W.’s failures, and Obama’s rise. That’s a years-long gap in which I was fundamentally politically illiterate. And I was kind of proud of that.
This fall, I began my communication classes with this quote from Martha Gellhorn:
My students are mostly average, connected by their interest in the fashion business. More than 90% are female, by sex or identity. Students are Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and international. It is a broad audience in some ways, narrow in others. Many display the ignorance and nonchalance about politics that I did at their age. I tell them that, and I share my regret, and I work to help them engage by using US politics as a context for exploring intercultural communications and then linking to personal identity. To scale the global to the community to the individual.
While most are receptive, and most voted, I’ll still get slammed in my course evals for being “too political.” I tell them that too, and that that is a shrug about our shared reality that will affect their futures far more than mine. I do all this in as non-partisan a way as I can, letting facts lead the way to emotion and, possibly, action.
I haven’t been on campus since Election Day. I just couldn’t. I held Wednesday’s communications class virtually. My Thursday class — A History of the Selfie — is virtual anyway. Tomorrow I have to go in.
My students like to be read to, and I like reading to them. Tomorrow it will be today’s issue of Letters from an American (Heather Cox Richardson) and some of Today’s Edition: The Grassroots Resistance, 2.0 (Robert B Hubbell). There are so many excellent writers and thinkers here on Substack; I’m grateful.
I spent most of my last 24 hours figuring out how all this connects to Splinter #2 and my intentions here, which have not changed. I hope I can express it.
Last Thursday I shared my plan to help heal the sickness in our country by gardening with the South Midwood Pollinators (This Is Us). I felt a little exposed later, waiting for some big guy to make fun of me. Wait a minute. “Big guy”? My spontaneous word choice exposed me further: as preparing to be demeaned, by a guy, for a gesture too small to matter. An expectation of dismissal. And the last few days have proved, again, that ours is a culture of dismissal, a culture that belittles women and girls because we are women and girls.
Patriarchal culture divides, just as other differences divide. But differences aren’t the problem; they are just definitions. The problem of toxic divisiveness, to my mind, is rooted in the emotional, rooted in personal history.
My introduction to patriarchal culture started at the dinner table. Dad, the original guy, was clearly in charge. He was smart, witty, handsome, charismatic, a great storyteller. It was easy to be attracted to him. He was also human, and a man, and a man of his time (born 1928). I don’t know enough about his growing-up, but what I do know points to an aggressively undermining family dynamic. He was highly critical of my brothers and me. Maybe it was inevitable that I linked his criticisms to my girlness and his guyness, and grew the expectation of dismissal that is still reflexive today, despite my shadow career as several very good therapists’ client.
The dots connecting my plan to garden (as a solution for toxic divisiveness) to my fear of being laughed at are more clear now.
And Splinter #2? The same: too small, too slight, to matter. So much of my artwork has prompted this question: “Can you make that bigger? I’d love to see that bigger.” As if it were a sketch or model for something yet to be made that is big and important. “Sure,” has become my stock response, “but then it wouldn’t be my work.” In other words, fuck off.
When my work does get physically big, it’s usually by obsessively making the same small thing or gesture a few hundred or thousand times. The labor and accumulation are the point, and the physical presence is just the evidence that I was there, insistent.
Gardening is right just like Splinter #2 and Splinter #11 are right: a small gesture by a small person in a personal language. A riff on Cousin Itt, if you will. To self-dismiss either action is to obey in advance, just as the fascists hope.
I love that you are putting these things into words - good concise words. Wishing you the best for tomorrow’s class. May they (the students) be receptive.