By's Musings

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Reading through the Week–Part I: Introduction

In the January 2012 issue of Christianity Today Alan Jacobs, Professor of English at Wheaton College and author of the recently released Oxford University Press book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, is interviewed by John Wilson, the Books and Culture editor for CT. The title of the interview “Don’t Worry, Read Happy” is a light hearted attempt to encourage CT readers to expand their horizons for reading beyond work related assignments and to read for enjoyment. The subtitle of the interview, “Stop Fretting Over What You Need to Know, and Enjoy Those Books that Bring Delight,” is a quote from Jacobs that interviewer Wilson culled from the interview.

As I read the interview, I was reminded of two of my previous blog postings that I entitled, “Relief through Reading.” I went back to look at them. I was extremely surprised that it has been almost a year since I published those posts. As far as my reading for the past year, it has definitely been up and down. I have been able to read a few books for what one could the sheer enjoyment of it. However, most of my reading has been focused on my writing projects.

The title of one book, The Curious Incident of the Upside Down Dog, might suggest light reading. It was anything but light reading. It was a bio-novel, written from the perspective of a young adolescent boy suffering with Asperger Syndrome who discovers his neighbor’s pet dog killed in her backyard. Since the neighbor finds him with the dog and “she considers him strange,” she accuses him of killing her pet. Since the boy loved the dog and wanted to prove his innocence and find the real culprit, he begins an involved search for the real perpetrator. As the boy delves deeper and deeper into this mystery, we are drawn into the mind of an autistic youth, the inner workings of two dysfunctional families, the awful truths from which both parents and neighbors tried to insulate this innocent autistic boy, and the boy’s herculean efforts to find that truth, no matter what it meant for him and his family.

I selected this book because I knew from the advertisements it dealt with Asperger Syndrome supposedly written from the inside. Since much of my writing has attempted to write about difficulties from the inside of those difficulties, the first reason I selected this book was to get another example of how this type of writing might be done, definitely not reading for the pleasure of entertainment.

The second reason for selecting this book was because of an essay that I wrote more than two years ago, but have not yet published. In that essay, I suggest the behavior of many college and university faculty members was consistent with the behavior of autistic adults. I was hoping I could glean some guidance from this book on how to write about abnormal behaviors without criticizing those individuals for behaviors that were beyond their control.

I must admit that I didn’t get everything that I wanted from the book. It was a polemic about how adults treated this boy. The best message that I could take away from the book was that college administrators have a great responsibility to monitor, hold themselves and faculty members accountable for their behavior, and assist faculty members when they seem to be straying from acceptable behavioral norms.

I started this posting with the idea of writing another light encouragement to read. However I started to approach this in a manner that went against the advice of Professor Jacobs. My first idea was to suggest a reading plan that hit each day of the week. I was working on this idea even before I saw the Jacobs interview in CT.

In “Reading Through the Week, Part II, I will outline the reading plan that I developed for me. It is a plan that includes 7 books that contain the names of the days of the week. This book list is not for everyone. It was a plan and a book list to which I was attracted. I learned something from each of the books. I found some of the books to be a challenging read. Each of the books brought me enjoyment at some point during the reading. I found this exercise has helped me to return to an activity that I enjoyed during my childhood, reading for reading’s sake and not just to complete an assignment.

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Life Verse

Psalm 147:10 (NIV) “His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of the warrior;”

 

It’s been 50 years since I have seriously considered the concept of a life verse. As a teenager growing up in what many would have called a fundamentalist church, we regularly heard in our Sunday school classes, youth group programs and from the pulpit, the importance of having a life verse. Two events within the past month brought this concept to the front of my mind. The first was seeing an advertisement for “The One Year Life Verse Devotional” by Jay K. Payleitner. The front cover of the book claims it contains 365 stories of remarkable people and the Scripture that changed their lives. In Payleitner’s Introduction, he defines a life verse as “a piece of scripture that God used to inspire, challenge or rescue you at a turning point in your life.” My concern as a teenager with picking out a life verse was that I knew there were would be many challenges and questions in front of me. However, I had no idea what they might be. How could I be sure that one verse would answer all my questions?  In high school, I was fairly confident that God was calling me to teach mathematics in a college setting. I couldn’t find any verse that specifically talked about teaching mathematics at the college level. So I never sat down and picked a life verse.

The second event of the past month that brought me face to face with the concept of a life verse was my reading of the verse Psalm 147:10.  I know I had seen it many times before. However, this time it hit me between the eyes. I read it and I said, “That’s me. That’s my life verse.”

What in the world am I talking about? How would the fact that God did not find pleasure in the strength of a horse nor delight in the legs of a warrior have anything to do with me? Why this verse struck me at this time has to deal with two items. The first is my given name Bayard. I will admit that “Bayard” is not the most common given name. I was aware of a few other individuals with the given name Bayard. Growing up in Delaware, I was also aware of a much larger number of people with the family name of Bayard.

As I researched the name Bayard, I found that there were 3 places where the name arose. The first was Danish mythology. Bayard was the name of a horse with magical powers. The second was from old English and French contractions of “bay of the yard” or roan colored farm horse. The third was from a gallant French knight who was named Sir Bayard, because of his bravery and his chestnut colored hair.

So here in one verse, the Psalmist speaks of strong horses and brave warriors. He is using my name.

But it goes even deeper. For 50 years I ran. I wasn’t running from God, but I was trying to outrun age. I played an hour of basketball each day for at least five days every week. I strengthened my legs. On my 50th birthday, I played in a Gus Macher 3-on-3 basketball tournament. My team made it to the semi-finals. Even at age 60, for pick-up games, I was the first one on the court and the last one to leave. I had the nick name of “Old Iron Legs.” But that was soon going to change. Due to all the pounding on the hard wood, my knees finally gave out and I couldn’t find a surgeon who would fix them. I had to switch to a stationary recumbent bike to get my exercise. In 2008, I pedaled at least 30 miles a day, at least 200 miles each week, and more than 10,000 miles for the year without moving an inch. My knees might have been shot, but my legs were strong. They looked like the legs of a young athlete, with huge, solid thighs and hard, firm well-defined calves.

Then in March 2009, all that changed. I had a blood vessel in a brain tumor burst. It technically wasn’t a stroke since no blood was cut off to the brain proper, but I had all the after effects of a stroke. It was several months of therapy before I could walk a hundred feet without wobbling. Since that event, I have had two other events that showed me that my legs were not my strength. In December 2009, I had 4 tonic-clonic seizures that left me unconscious in a hospital for 3 days. I was now battling epilepsy. In December 2010, I was diagnosed with the early stages of Parkinson’s. It was back to therapy. In March 2011, I had a pacemaker implanted to try to help control an atrial-fibrillation condition that was starting to get out of control.

Four times in my lifetime, doctors have said that they have no medical or scientific reason that they can give me as to why I am still alive. They said my physical conditioning was a big help, but it couldn’t explain everything. Several of the doctors went so far as to say, I was a walking miracle. All I could say to that was: “Amen, I know it.”

My cardiologist has given me permission to get back on the bike as long as I monitor my heart while exercising. I am only doing six or seven miles a day on the bike, but now I know for sure that my strength comes from the Lord and not from my legs. It is not our bravery or the strength in our legs that pleases God. Psalm 147:11 tells us that:”the LORD delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love. .” (NIV) Our bravery and our legs will fail us, but God’s love will not.

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Happy New Year!

The Year 2011 is over, and Year 2012 has begun.

         If you have read any of my previous postings, THANK YOU. I really do appreciate the time and effort you have spared from all the important things that you could be doing to read about the things that are dear and close to me. I pray that you will find a nugget now and then that you can use that in some small way will repay you for your time and effort.

If you are new to my posts, please allow me three paragraphs to let you know what you will find in my posts. The three things that I hold closest to my heart are my belief in God, my wife and family, and the enterprise of education. Since a traumatic brain incident (TBI) in March 2009 and several follow-up events, I have found myself facing a taxing mental battle, in addition to living daily with aphasia, epilepsy and Parkinson’s. After spending my entire adult life training, thinking and writing in an analytic, sequential and deductive world, I found that I was now exiled to the land of metaphors.

Living and thinking in terms of metaphors was a shock to someone who was brought up in and agreed with the teachings of John Locke when he said, “Metaphors are the worst abuse of language ever invented and need to be annihilated and expunged from our usage.”  As I have now studied metaphors, I have come to a very different conclusion than Locke. Learning theorists and brain scientists have found that we learn something new by tying it to something we already know, something that is already in our heads. This is precisely what a metaphor is. Thus metaphors were a way of thinking long before they were a way with words. Therefore I, the new feeble Don Quixote, am riding off on a pathetic horse on a new quest to restore metaphors to the high esteem with which Aristotle viewed them, when he said that the proper use of metaphors was the highest form of genius.

Returning to my New Year’s Greeting, as I wrote “the year 2011 is over and 2012 has begun”, I was reminded (metaphor attack) of two similar statements. The first is from Jean Valjean’s soliloquy in “Les Miserable,” when he steals the bishop’s silver and decides to skip out on his parole. He throws up his hands and says: “No more is Jean Valjean! Another story must begin! I must escape my life of sin.” I find it ironic that he is planning this escape financed by stolen silver. From scriptures, we know that the only way to escape a life of sin is through Christ. Paul wrote in II Corinthians 5:17 (KJV) “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold all things are become new.”

         Welcome to my world. The title “By’s Musings” comes from my Nick Name “By.”  Although my first name is spelled “Bayard,” it is pronounced “By’-ard.” Please call me “By.” All my friends do. Settle yourself down in your favorite easy chair, have a hot cup of real coffee (I wish I could, but the closest thing to real coffee that I am currently permitted to drink is decaf) and let’s talk, friend-to-friend.

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Evolution of Normal

The 12/01/11 posting on FindingStrengthtoStandAgain’s Blog, “The Day the Wind Caught Fire” <http://findingstrengthtostandagain.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/the-day-the-wind-caught-fire/#comments> is a must read for all individuals who have suffered a traumatic brain incident. The caregivers of these individuals should also read this inspiring posting.

I must admit my initial reaction to the title was that the posting was going to be about the Santa Ana winds and fires that are devastating parts of California currently. When I opened the post and saw the first picture, I was convinced that the posting was going in the direction of talking about wildfires. As I read the posting, I discovered that it was indeed about wildfires, but not the physical wildfires that scar our earth. It was about the internal wildfires which strokes or other traumatic brain incidents (TBIs) precipitate.

Those of us who have had a TBI and our caregivers know all too well about those wildfires. Tara is the epitome of a great teacher. She has had the courage to share her wildfires with us, so that we can learn from them. In this posting, she shares two lessons with us.

The first lesson relates to educating everyone about the after effects of a TBI. She correctly states each individual is different. She encourages everyone to work to see that the handbooks and guides given out to predict a TBI survivor’s outcome should not be one size fits all. We need to set our sights above those predictions, and remember everyone will progress differently. Each TBI affects a different area of the brain in different ways.

The second lesson struck home with me. Individual TBI survivors and their caregivers must have patience and take time to understand how the survivor’s “definition of normal will evolve.” I am still struggling to learn its implications in my life.

After spending 40 years in the academy immersed in analytical thinking, it was very difficult to wake up in the hospital after the removal of my brain tumor and find that I was now living in a metaphoric world. After all, metaphors were just the word pictures which you added to the end of your reports to help the uninitiated understand what you were trying to say. They were the icing that you put on the top of the cake that you baked in your analytical, sequential, deductive oven.

I have tried very hard to return to the analytic world and at times I find myself visiting it. I have not yet been able to make the warp jump into a more permanent return to the only world that I knew for 50 years. However, as I explore my new metaphoric world, I have found some very interesting things.

In James Geary’s book I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphors and How It Shapes the Way We See the World,” I discovered that “metaphors were a way of thought, long before they were a way with words.” From my study of learning theory, I should have known this. We learn by tying new and unknown things to old and known things. Metaphors are a comparison of something unknown with something we already knew. Understanding this, life in a metaphoric world became more tolerable. My normal evolved. I haven’t stopped striving to regain pieces of the analytic world I left behind, but I can now live peacefully in my new world and honor it.

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Skeletons in the Closet–The Academy as a Metaphor

I began this series of postings with the intent of following the historical development of liberal education and colleges. The first posting focused on the ancient Greeks and a difference of understanding among some of the leading ancient Greek philosophers as to what constituted liberal education and for whom it was designed.

         In that first posting I indicated that I would continue the series by looking at the development of liberal arts through the early Roman civilization, the medieval times and the European Renaissance. However, I have found that I must take several small detours.

There are several reasons I have decided on these detours. The first reason is that as I have become more accustomed to my metaphoric world I have discovered how deeply our language is built on metaphors. In my exploration of metaphors, I came across a real eye opener of an information source in James Geary’s book, “I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World.” Geary is a journalist and also New York Times Bestselling author of “The World in a Phrase.”

In preparation for his books, Geary did extensive study of language and the way we use it. As a result of that study, he concludes that metaphors are as old as language itself. As I have studied learning theory, I believe we must conclude that we learn by comparing and linking the unknown and new with the known and old. Therefore, metaphor was a way of thought long before it was a way with words.

As one of his major sources of information and examples in “I is an Other,” Geary relied on the archaeologist and expert on ancient languages, A. H. Sayce. Sayce estimated that three-fourths of our language consists of metaphors; some of which are active, while many are worn-out or whose origins are buried. The worn out metaphors could also be labeled as dormant. I was very skeptical of Sayce’s estimate of the extent of metaphors until I looked at the examples Sayce and Geary presented. I began to see how almost everything I said was based on a metaphor, long before I took up residence in a metaphoric world.

         I should not have been surprised that three-quarters of our words have a metaphor somewhere in their history. Learning theory tells us that we learn by tying something new and unknown to something old and known. A metaphor attempts to help us understand one thing or concept by comparing it to something we already know. Thus we build new concepts and words via a metaphoric process.

         If three-quarters of our words are based on metaphors, what are the implications for our understanding of liberal arts colleges? Thus, my first detour will be to investigate the metaphors upon which liberal arts education is built. In my investigation, I found that all of the followings words are built on metaphors: liberal, arts, sciences, literal, truth, academic, scholastic, education, knowledge, idea, conceives, and college. In my next posting, I will look at the metaphoric foundations of these terms.

As I previously indicated, I thought following the development of liberal arts and liberal arts colleges through history would be a straight path. However, as I looked at the history of liberal arts throughout history, I found it more resembled a cow path meandering through a pasture, among Western and non-Western civilizations. Living next to farms for many years, the only two times I ever saw a cow walk in a straight line were: 1) when it was feeding time and new food had just been dumped into the feed trough; and 2) when cows were entering the barn at milking time and they headed straight for their assigned milking stations.

If the history of liberal arts does not flow in a straight line, to more fully understand liberal arts and liberal arts colleges and follow their development, I have decided that I needed to meander through history and non-Western civilizations with them. Some of my upcoming postings will feature those meanderings. As with most detours, I believe that we will eventually end up at the desired location.

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Gabby Gifford TV Special

I am sorry that I missed the Gabby Gifford special. Is it saved and posted somewhere? Like many others, my own battle with aphasia started with a traumatic brain incident. I had a blood vessel burst inside a benign brain tumor. My doctors believe the tumor had been growing, undetected in my head for more than 30 years. The surgeon who removed the tumor said that the blood vessel “exploded” and the tumor “imploded.” My head filled will blood. Since blood wasn’t cut off to the brain proper, it technically wasn’t a stroke. However, I was left with all the symptoms and after effects of a stroke. I was in speech, physical and occupation therapy for many months. As an administrative officer at an academic institution, words were a very important part of my work. From the first the time I woke up in the hospital after the surgery I knew there was something wrong. I knew what I wanted to say, I just couldn’t find the right word. Oral communications were more difficult for me than written communications, so I started writing essays to describe my difficulties. Several months into my speech therapy, I watched a TV special on Bob Woodruff, the imbedded TV reporter wounded in IRAQ by an IUD. At one point in the show, he used the word aphasia to describe the difficulty he had in preparing his news reports. I told my wife, my caregiver, “That’s what I have.” When I asked my speech therapist at our next session, she started apologizing profusely and said that she thought that she had used the word aphasia to describe my condition. She said that taught her a lesson that she will never forget. She vowed that in her therapy sessions from then on, she would be very careful to let her patients and their caretakers know the names of their conditions. From the beginning of human history, humans have found that they must name something to have control of it. As soon as I found the word aphasia, I discovered “Aphasia Corner” and the “Aphasia Corner Blog” (URL < http://aphasiacorner.com/blog >). Knowing about aphasia has been a big help in the past 2 years of my recovery. In one essay, I described my battle with aphasia by saying that words were behaving more like cats than dogs. Dogs come to you when you call them; cats come to you when they want to come. This essay was featured at one point on the blog “Aphasia Corner”, along with a beautiful translation by Audrey Holland into an article that is “aphasia friendly.”< http://aphasiacorner.com/blog/living-with-aphasia-2/aphasia-friendly-words-are-more-like-cats-than-dogs-274>. The shortcut to my essay on my blog is< http://wp.me/p10snX-x > Other analogies, which I have used to describe the difficulty of communicating for someone with aphasia, are trying to put jigsaw puzzles together with pieces missing, or digging coal out of the dark, damp crevices of a mine on your hands and knees. As was noted for many of us, aphasia is not our only difficulty. Nine months after the brain tumor was removed, I had four tonic-clonic seizures within a 30 minute time frame, which left me unconscious in the hospital for three days. So now I was also dealing with epilepsy. For nearly one year I had no more major seizures, just many minor annoyances, such as sensory migraines or auras. Two days shy of the anniversary of the seizures I was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease. Three months later, I had to have a pace maker implant to help control a long-term A-Fib condition. I have had no major seizures since those first ones. However, as noted I have had numerous minor auras or absences. My neurologist keeps a very close watch on my seizure medication, and asks me to keep a log of my episodes. Coordinating my seizure medications and my heart medications has been a constant challenge. My battle with aphasia has had its ups and downs. For 40 years, I lived in the analytic world of academia. Immediately after the seizures, I found myself in a metaphoric world. Analytic, sequential and deductive thinking have been a real challenge. At times the metaphoric world completely overpowers the analytic world. At other times, I catch glimpses of the analytic world in which I formerly lived. From the Epilepsy Foundation and their magazine I found that I am not alone in this transformation. Although my aphasia is classified as mild, I find it interesting and sometimes discouraging to see that there is a great deal of work searching for treatments and cures of Parkinson’s, some work on Epilepsy, but very little on Aphasia. We need to spread the word about aphasia. I would not want to put undue pressure on Gabby Gifford or Bob Woodruff. However, because of their celebrity status, the American public is more likely to listen to them at the beginning of a campaign to combat aphasia. We need to begin the campaign by using the word aphasia. We don’t need to be afraid of the word. Remember the first step to controlling something is to name it. There is nothing to be ashamed of to say I have Parkinson’s. Why should there a stigma hanging over our heads, if we say, “I have aphasia;” or “I have epilepsy.” There! I’ve said it! “I have aphasia.” I am fortunate and I thank God that my aphasia is mild. Others that I know are not as fortunate. We must do all we can to help them.