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Metaphor

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Gazing into the Abyss – a Deux

The title of this  posting is my latest attempt at using a double entendre (a word or phrase with  two meanings). It is also an attempt to get back to my former self. As I  conceived the idea for this posting, I was well aware of the concept of a word with two meanings. I used to have a reputation as a great punster. A punster likes to play with words, and is usually considered a master of the double entendre. However, this past week I had to Google “word with two meanings” to find the phrase “double entendre.” That particular phrase was not coming to me his week.

Due to my battle with aphasia, I lost some of my ease with words. Many times when I am searching for a word, I feel like I am in a cold, dank and dark coal mine, bent over on my hands and knees crawling into the small crevices of my mind. When I get to the back of a crevice, I have to painstakingly claw through the mother lode of words that I find with a small pick and shovel for words to express my ideas. Although the images of what I want to say are very clear in my minds, the words I need to use to express those ideas are compressed into the hardened walls of my mind.

At other times,almost the opposite occurs. I find words or ideas jumping into my mind like Asian carp jumping out of a stream into boats when the stream is disturbed However, just like the Asian carp, once the words or ideas are in my mind, Idon’t know what to do with them. That’s why I carry a small notebook with me at all times, so I can write down these words and ideas, so that I can return to them when I am in a better position to do something with them.

The double entendre that I was trying to use in this posting is the phrase a deux. The first meaning of a deux comes from a French idiom for the phrase pas a deux, which means a dance for two. I believe the relationship between a patient and caregiver very closely resembles a dance for two. I will follow-up on this idea in another  posting.

The second meaning of a deux comes from the cinematic scene. Ever since the movies “Hot Shots” and “Hot Shots—Part Deux” became box office hits, Deux has come to be associated with the idea of a sequel. Thus, at this level, I mean for this posting and any other follow-ups to be sequels to my earlier posting “Gazing into the Abyss.”

In movie parlance, the word sequel can itself be a double entendre. A sequel can be a continuation of the first movie, picking up the story where the first move left it, or it can be an amplification of the first story. I intend my sequels to be an amplification of the original posting. Oops, I let the cat out of the bag–there will be more than one sequel.

As a result of the posting Gazing into the Abyss, several individuals have commented that I led them to the brink of personal abysses and left them looking into the black hole of themselves. That is definitely not what I intended. What I was trying to say in the last paragraph of the posting, was that one of the most important things I can do is stand on the edge of the abyss waving a yellow caution flag and yell: “Stop gazing into that abyss, or else it might start gazing back into you and begin to draw you into it.”

I am not alone in this task. Fortunately, through the close-knit communities of patients with aphasia and epilepsy and their caregivers, I have encountered a number of other individuals or groups that are working diligently to wave yellow flags and warn others. In several follow-up postings I will highlight two such individuals, with  blogs “Bendedspoon” and “Findingstrengthtostandagain.”

I will also do follow-up postings about two organizational or group blogs or websites. In case you can’t wait to get a head start on these last two categories, they are Aphasia Corner at <www.aphasiacorner.com> and the Epilepsy Foundation of America at <www.epilepsyfoundation.org.> (If you check out aphasicorner.com I invite you to read my essay that is featured in the lower right hand corner of the front page of one their issues and also available at <http://aphasiacorner.com/blog/living-with-aphasia-2/aphasia-friendly-words-are-more-like-cats-than-dogs-274>)

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Is There Room in the Academy for a Realist?

         In a recent posting on this blog, entitled “Teamwork is Critical, Learning with and from Others”, I wrote about the dichotomy known as yin and yang. In ancient Chinese philosophy, these terms represent opposite but complementary items which form a complete whole. One way to over simplify this concept is to suggest that the same situation is viewed by some people as a problem and by others as an opportunity. A modern western idiom attempting to express this is the question, “Do you see the glass as half-full, or half-empty?” As I admitted in the afore-mentioned posting, as I have inventoried and catalogued my collection of files and books, I have experienced both feelings. At times I am elated at the long hidden jewels of ideas and thoughts that I am finding in my files and books. As I consider these ideas I am easily distracted and start trying to track down more about the given topic. I find myself creating more files to add to my already abundant collection. When I try to return to where I was when I was distracted, I can’t find my place or I can’t get back into the flow of things. I am pleased that I have been reintroduced to many great ideas that I had somehow abandoned. However, I am frustrated that I can’t excavate around these ideas more fully. I am almost convinced that a life-time of thinking will take a second lifetime to explicate it.

Speaking of yin and yang, this week I also discovered a quote that was attributed to Winston Churchill. Reportedly, he said, “A pessimist is someone who sees problems in every opportunity, and an optimist is someone who sees opportunities in every problem.” The question I would ask is, whether, in the academy, you must be either a pessimist or an optimist. Is there room in the academy for a realist?  I would define a realist as someone who meets all of the following conditions:

  1. On a bright sunny day with not a cloud overhead, the realist enjoys the beautiful weather.
  2. However, on that bright sunny day, if there are gathering storm clouds far off in the distance, possibly not even within visible sight, the realist prepares for the coming storm, while continuing to enjoy the current beautiful weather.
  3. In the midst of a severe storm, the realist takes all reasonable precautions for personal and property safety.
  4. After the storm is past, the realist immediately gets to the task of remembering and honoring any individuals who might have been lost in the storm.
  5. After the storm is past, the realist will also immediately begin the job of clearing the debris from the storm and the restoration and rebuilding of new and better physical objects.

Instead of being the doom-saying, stuck in the mud pessimist, or the blue-sky always looking through rose colored glasses Pollyanna optimist, how much better off would the academy be, if more of us were realists?

 

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Living in a metaphoric world and trying to communicate with the academy

I found two articles published this past July very significant and helpful. The first was an article in the Epilepsy Advocate magazine about Chris M., a minister and author, who found he was thinking and writing differently after the onset of epilepsy. The article may be found at http://www.epilepsyadvocate.com/default.aspx. The second article was a Chronicle of Higher Education review by Carlin Romano  entitled “What’s a Metaphor For?” which can be found at http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-a-Metaphor-For-/128079/

Why were these two articles significant for me?  After two traumatic brain incidents (TBIs )left me essentially able to think only metaphorically and unable to think analytically, sequentially or deductively, I have found it extremely difficult to communicate with the academy. This has been very difficult for me because the academy was my life for 40 years.

In March 2009, I had  brain surgery to remove a benign tumor which was discovered when I had a stroke-like event (first TBI). When I regained consciousness in the hospital after the surgery, I immediately realized something was different. I couldn’t find the right words to complete thoughts. I knew what I was trying to say but the best word to express my thoughts would not come to my mind.  I also had trouble following what other people were saying or writing. My speech therapist called the condition aphasia (loss of words). After 9 months of intensive therapy, I got to the point where usually I was the only person who realized that I was having trouble with words.

In December 2009, I had four conic-tonic seizures within a 30 minute time span (second TBI), which my neurologists blamed either on the stroke-like event or the scar tissue left from the removal of the benign tumor. When I regained consciousness in the hospital three days after the seizures, I immediately knew something else was very different.

I knew my ability to think analytically, sequentially or deductively had been severely compromised. Prior to the first TBI, I would try to think everything through analytically. After the seizures, my first reaction to any situation, problem or question was to draw a mental picture, i.e., devise a metaphor. What’s the difference? The battle between thinking analytically and metaphorically is like living in two different worlds or looking down two very different sides of the same mountain.  For 40 years, I lived in an analytic world. However, now I was living in a metaphoric world. In such a world I found that I could not rigorously define metaphor. The best I could do was to describe it using more metaphors. Notice in my account above, to describe what was going on in my mind, I had to use a metaphor. Another discovery is that even the best metaphor may not completely satisfy the need for the rigor of those living in the analytic world.

Having lived in both worlds, I found it easier to understand someone living in the metaphoric world when I was in the analytic world, than vice versa. This insight reminded me of the episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation, entitled “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” In this episode the Enterprise Crew was working on trying to understand messages from the alien world of the Tamarians. The Star Trek universal translators could translate the words but the words make no sense to the Star Trek crew. Finally Dathon, the leader of the Tamarians, kidnaps Picard and strands the two of them on the planet El-Adrel together with a common foe. When Dathon tosses Picard a dagger, several of the Star Trek crew members suggest that this is a hostile act. It is not until later when Picard and Dathon are attacked by a third hostile alien that Picard understands that the dagger was an invitation to cooperate and jointly fight this new enemy. Although Dathon is killed in the fight, the humans and the Tamarians see that they can cooperate. It is only when the Tamarians start referring to this event as Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel, does the Star Trek crew understand that the other phrases the Tamarians were using were actually  metaphors that referred to important events in their history. Thus, even though the Tamarians never could understand the straight-forward explanations the humans offered for events,  the two groups were able to communicate and understand each other through metaphors, because the Star Trek crew started using metaphors.

As I contemplate a limited future within the academy, the two articles mentioned above have given me some new hope that I can find a few good friends who will be willing to work with me so we can translate each other’s language so that both groups will be enriched.

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General Education and Turf Wars

The National Endowment for the Humanities begin their booklet “50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students” with a quote by Mark Van Doren from Liberal Education: “The one intolerable thing in education is the absence of ntellectual design.” I find this ironic in that the curriculum outlined in the booklet and the process used by most institutions to arrive at their general education is a process of turf wars. I find almost nothing intellectual in turf wars. In turf wars, the largest, most powerful departments will win almost every time.

I remember the process of redesigning the general education at one institution. At this institution the general education was listed as 48 hours. As we surveyed the faculty, it was their over-whelming conclusion that 48 hours was too large. Why? Because this didn’t give students enough room to complete a degree in many disciplines within the normal four-year path to a degree of 120 hours. How is this possible? Many majors specified courses in other disciplines as requirements within their discipline. When you counted these courses and the required prerequisites for these courses, the total number of required hours for the average major was well over 90 hours. For example, the psychology major required a course in statistics. But the mathematics department required a course in Fundamentals of Mathematics as a prerequisite for statistics which was different from the general education course that was entitled Quantitative Reasoning. Thus the typical psychology major had to take 9 hours of courses from the mathematics department. In another area, the psychology major required a two semester sequence in anatomy and physiology (8 hours since these were lab courses), but the biology department required a 4-hour prerequisite to these courses that was entitled Introduction to Human Science that was different from the 4-hour lab science general education requirement entitled Introduction to Life Science. Thus, a psychology major would graduate with 16 hours of biology courses. How could the mathematics and biology departments have this much effect on psychology requirements? Because the courses in question were in their turf and they were the best judges of what was needed.

You should have heard the cries of distress and the weeping and wailing when I strongly suggested that we cut back the average number of required hours by 20 hours. I was decimating majors. Graduates would never get into graduate schools. So where did the faculty find hours to cut? They agreed to limit the number of hours required for a major to 78 unless there was an outside accrediting agency requiring more. Although, in the first survey of the faculty they said that students needed more foreign languages, then they cut out entirely the general education 9 hour requirement in a foreign language, but added a new 3-hour course in cross-cultural communications. They cut the 12-hour requirement of sequences in both United States and World Civilization and added a new 4-hour required course in Western Civilization. How could the faculty make these changes? The Foreign Language Department and the History Departments were not members of large enough voting blocs to get the votes they needed to stay in as part of the general education.

These days were out and out turf wars. Intellect and intelligence were not very visible anywhere. It was a matter of who had the votes or what treaties you could make to get the votes. Who said there is no politics in education?

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Relief Through Reading – Part II

For my first excursion after many years into what I thought would be recreational reading, I chose a book I saw on the New York Times Best Sellers List that sounded interesting. It was a novel by Emma Donoghue, entitled “Room.”

If recreational reading is reading for fun and enjoyment, it is hard for me to call “Room” recreational reading. However, I have to label it recreational reading in my taxonomy, because it definitely isn’t informational or work-related, at least at first glance. I will explain this a little later in this posting.

After getting started on the book, I found myself having a hard time putting it down. I found myself mimicking my wife, reading for hour after hour, trying to either get through the book or at least to a good stopping point. When I finished the book, I returned the favor to my wife by telling her, “You’ve really got to read this book. It will disturb you, but you will like it.”

Since we had gotten the book from our local library and there was a long list of people who had reserved it. My wife picked it up immediately and finished it before we had to return the book to the library. My wife admitted that it did disturb her, but that she liked it so much she recommended the book to her book club as a future choice for a book of the month.

The story line of the book revolves around a five-year-old boy named Jack who has lived his entire life in an 11×11 room with his mother. They are captives of a deranged individual who abducted Jack’s mother when she was a teenager and imprisoned her in this specially constructed room that had one door and only one window, a skylight. For more than eight years ‘Ol Nick’ would come in the room at least once a week to bring food and molest the frightened young woman who had no way of escape. Because of these sexual advances, two babies are born in the room. Only Jack survives and we pick up the story when he is five-years old with all the normal curiosity of a young boy, but no knowledge of the “outside world” other than what he can see through a skylight, a black and white TV with limited reception, and a few National Geographic books. ‘Ol Nick’ knows of his existence but Jack’s Ma shields Jack from ‘Ol Nick’ by making Jack hide in a wardrobe every time ‘Old Nick’ comes into the room. When Jack starts asking Ma about the outside world, Ma begins concocting a plan of escape.

As I continued to reflect on the book and its story, I began to discover applications of the story to higher education and to my life. I kept finding rooms that had been constructed to imprison people and keep them from fully developing and enjoying the outside world. Most of those rooms were not physical rooms, but they were prisons all the same. In the posting by Finding Strength to Stand Again, entitled, “Hitting my head on Glass Ceilings” : http://findingstrengthtostandagain.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/hitting-my-head-on-glass-ceilings/,

we see rooms that have been constructed to keep those people with challenges “where they belong.”  In her Glass Ceilings posting, the author talks about how she has been shut out of employment because she is different. She has a disability.

These rooms are difficult to see, hence the name “Glass Ceilings” They are metaphysical rooms, but they are just as real as the room ‘Ol Nick’ used to imprison Jack and his Ma. I know because I have experienced several of these rooms recently. The law says people who are aged challenged and physically challenged are members of protected classes in terms of employment. However, if I were to submit my resume for a job opening that I was perfectly qualified to fill five years ago, I wouldn’t even get an interview today. I know because three years ago I was looking for a new job as a chief academic officer at a college or university. Even though I had an outstanding resume from my 40 years of work in higher education, and was well-known in the Christian college and higher education assessment circles. I had a difficult time convincing some institutions to even give me an interview. I know that my age was a problem. When I finally did get two interviews, one of the first questions that I was asked at both institutions was, “How long are you planning to work?” I told people who I could not promise anything, but that I planned to work for another seven to ten years. At that time, I felt that was quite doable. I felt good and I had maintained a rigorous physical exercise routine for more than 50 years. One of the great advantages of working in higher education is the availability of a gym. Until my knees finally gave out and I couldn’t find a surgeon who would operate on them for a fourth time, I played an hour of competitive basketball five days each week. In life after basketball, to keep up my workouts, I switched to a recumbent stationary bike. In my first year on the bike at age 62, I racked up more than 10,000 miles pedaling more than 30 miles per day.

Paraphrasing the 1970’s hit of the Five Man Electric Band, “Rooms, rooms. Everywhere rooms; keeping me in my place; playing with my mind,” I can hear a new acquaintance that I have come into contact with through the web, say right now, “Be careful. You’re heading into dangerous territory. You are trying to stretch an analogy or metaphor too far.” ‘Ol Nick’ was imprisoning Ma for his own evil intents. People in higher education are not imprisoning people for evil intents. I concur with that. However, to the victims, the results are similar.

I believe that by playing off the metaphor of “room as a prison,” I am using what we know from learning theory. People learn more when faced with a compelling problem and can connect the new problem to something with which they are already familiar. I understand the concept of a room. The compelling problem is looking for a means of escape. It makes sense to me.

In Part III of Reading for Relief, I will explore the ideas of rooms and means of escape in relationship to higher education.

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Relief Through Reading Part I

I am sorry, Readers, but I am going to subject you to a long, round about introduction to a posting about reading. It was inspired by two recent posts by bloggers that I have come to appreciated immensely. I can’t recommend their blogs highly enough. They are great people who have great stories to tell and tell them wonderfully.  The postings that inspired this long post are  Finding Strength to Stand Again  http://findingstrengthtostandagain.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/hitting-my-head-on-glass-ceilings/

and Bended Spoon

http://bendedspoon.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/we-think-too-small-like-the-frog-at-the-bottom-of-the-well-he-thinks-the-sky-is-only-as-big-as-the-top-of-the-well-if-he-surfaced-he-would-have-an-entirely-different-view/

How many of you remember the old tv commercial that ran regularly during  major league baseball games? There would be a scene of a famous relief pitcher warming up, supposedly getting ready to go into the game. An off-screen announcer would say, “How do you spell Relief?” The camera would close in on the pitcher and he would say, “I spell it “R O L A I D S!”

How do you spell Relief? My wife spells it R E A D I N G !

I have been a voracious reader since I was a young kid. I recognize that there are ar least three types of reading. They are recreational, informational and work related reading. Recreational reading Is the act of reading to relax or escape. Informational reading is the act of reading to gain information or knowledge about a topic of interest not directly related to your work. Work related reading is the act of reading of material directly related to your work.

My wife and I are both aged-challenged. (We’re both eligible for Medicare this year. Please don’t tell her, I’ve told you how old she is.) We’ve been married for over 40 years and have known each other for almost 60 years. For all of those years, we’ve been readers, Although I must admit our reading habits are very different. My wife has always been a recreational and informational reader. She has always had two or three books in which she deeply engaged. Much of her recreational reading has included authors like Janette Oke, Terri Blackstock, Ted Dekker, or Frank Peretti. She also enjoys biographies and autobiographies. Her tastes in informational reading have centered on inspiration books like “Fear Not Tomorrow, God is Already There” by Ruth Graham or “Purpose Drive Life” by Rick Warren.

I have always been a voracious reader, but generally, “it had to have a purpose.” Since I have been in higher education all of my adult life, I have always owned a large collection of books. While I was in high school, my parents bought me the entire set of “Great Books of the Western World.” I set still have those classics, along with all the required readings from my college literature courses. I never sold a college text book or required reading after a course was over.  Most of my other books are work related. Although I have some informational books that you would find in the “How –to” or Religious sections of Barnes and Noble. The How to Books were bought to help me with my latest DIY project. The religious books were to help me with a theme for the latest adult Sunday School lesson or a sermon that I was preparing. To borrow a phrase from Rick Warren and use it out of his context, my reading has almost always been  “purpose driven.”

For years, my wife would chide me with the comment, “Why don’t you read something for fun?” I would reply, “I don’t have time for that.” Her response was “Try it, you may find that you like it.” My response back to her was, “The time that I want to dedicate to fun is better spent antiquing, exercising or doing DIY projects  like remodeling rooms, insulating and putting vinyl siding on our old house, adding a deck, or enclosing our back porch.

Occasionally, I would watch sporting events like basketball, baseball or automotive races on television. My wife and I also both like to watch new segments of “This Old House” or “Antiques Road Show.” We would take this last passion one step further by trying to find unexplored antique shops and digging through them for undiscovered treasures. Those things were fun. Fortunately for me, my wife also suffered from the DIY and antiquing viruses. We spent many weekends together trying to satisfy the cravings that those bugs would cause. If we were not at home working on the latest DIY project, we would be on a road trip to find one more of those unexplored antique shops.

On a Saturday when we didn’t have a pressing DIY project hanging over our heads we would get up early, and tell our college-age daughters that we were going for a ride. The girls would glance at each other, and one would say, “We’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.” Many times they were right. After finding an unexplored antique shop and digging through it until closing time, we would find a nice restaurant and a cute inn or motel and spend the night.

On each of these trips, I did most of the driving and my wife would pass the time in the car reading one more fascinating chapter of her latest engrossing novel or biography. Every once in awhile she would stop reading and say to me, “You really should read this book, you would really enjoy it.” I would pause for a moment then in all seriousness say, “I can’t right now, I’m driving.” My wife would sigh and say, ”I didn’t mean right at this moment. What about this coming week?” I would respond by saying “I have some work that must get done this coming week and all my reading will have to center on that job.”  She would sign again and go back to her reading. I guess she almost figured out that I was a lost cause, until she came up with a brilliant idea. She went to the local library and checked out some audio books, so on our next road trip, we both listened to someone read those books  to us. Using this technique, we read Mitch Album’s “Tuesdays with Morrie” and several John Gresham novels, including “The Client” and “The Rain Maker” plus a number of cat mysteries. I must admit the audio books did help to make the miles go more smoothly. Although I can’t remember the titles or the authors, other than Album and Gresham, I do remember most of the story-lines and I will also admit that this was a fun way to read.

All of this changed for us on March 16, 2009. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my story check back to some of my early postings. On that date I had what appeared to be a stroke. However, it wasn’t a stroke, a blood vessel in a benign tumor attached to my brain exploded (surgeon’s word) and the tumor imploded (again surgeon’s word)  creating all the symptoms of a stroke. After the removal of  the remains of a dead tumor, I have battled balance issues, fatique, aphasia, epilepsy and most recently Parkinson’s disease. I took a medically induced break from my life as an academic administrator, first on disability and now officially on retirement. Supposedly that should give me more time to read. I will tell that part of the story in Relief Through Reading, Parts II through V. In these posts, I will also share how Finding Strength and Bended Spoons have inspired me to expand my reading list somewhat, read  more and write about it.

As indicated above on March 16, 2009, I was introduced to a new phase in my life that supoosedly  should give me more time for reading, but I must admit that old habits die hard. It has taken me two years to get to the point where I can pick me a book and almost read it just for fun. However, instead of throwing open my reading list to many more recreational reading books, I have taken up more informational  reading. I have dropped the DIY readings and picked up readings about neurological dysfunctions, such as “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks and ‘ My Stroke of Insight” by Jill Taylor, and higher education like Charles Murrays’ “Real Education” or Mike Rose’s “Lives on the Boundary.”.  The neuologiacl books are helping me understand what I am going through and what I can expect ahead of me. The higher education books are keeping me in touch with the academy. The next three books on my reading list are “Awakenings” by Sacks, “Always Looking Up” by Michael J. Fox, and “Reading in the Brain” by Stanislas Dehaene.