my

My, my, my. One besotted week later I read Jim's "head's up" email about today's deadline. Thanks, man.

Alejandro inspired, or I should say re-inspired me. I often get depressed and wonder about the futility of any effort I often feel. I totally lost it one night recently when I attempted to explain what "Interdisciplinary Humanities" is to a diner waitress. She just kept giving me a look that said "Yeah, so what? How's that gonna pay your rent?" But when I read Alejandro about "the quest for beauty and making beauty at the heart of our curriculum," when I imagine little kids whispering " thank you, Jesus, for letting us come here," when I remember staring, rapt, for hours at a single painting in the Las Vegas Guggenheim, oblivious to the crowds around me and the blazing neon inferno just one wall away, I remember why it matters. We are not machines of production, computers to calculate and perform tests. We are human beings and art, beauty and communication is what makes it have any value. Pulling together with each other is impossible if we can't find beauty in our world and make it our own. Once we do that we want to share it, and writing can not only communicate beauty we've seen and felt, it creates more.

Hang on a second, I actually cried a little there.

In Susan Andrew's piece, I kept going back to the start of this course, thinking about inner speech and audience. It's because of the audience that we desire to make inner speech into voice. And an unheard voice is not much of a voice. Expecting our audience makes us want to polish and tune that voice to reach out and grab them, hold them, pull them towards our own experience. In my "Power and the Story" class with Dr Kareithi, we keep discussing and wrestling with the problem of what happens when one story drowns out another "stealing the voice" from someone else. The writers in CNIS are just that sort of voices, unheard and ignored. To get them into circulation is awesome.