The Inanity of Humanity

(or, President’s Day Laborers)

Today A and I are both day laborers – we have done all the dishes, loaded up the wash, scrubbed the bathroom, cleared the living room of furniture, and now I sit trapped in the kitchen while she mops the living room floor. And it is not yet 1 pm. I am not sure why I would write a blog post about this – it is after all quite boring – but then again, this is life and these are the things we must do some times. I find myself tempted to search for some great meaning, some moral to draw from our morning of productivity, but most likely it’s just what we did this particular Monday. And there are many, many such writings out there in the blogosphere, or at least I imagine so. Nobody said musing on everyday life was particularly interesting.

We went up to the Crest last night and saw the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man,” a movie which could be read as questioning the human urge to moralize about everything. I don’t think I will ruin the ending for anyone if I say that there is no ending. It is a movie about a man whose life goes wrong in so many ways, and though the last few scenes offer a glimpse of the clouds clearing and life improving again, there is also, well, a tornado on the horizon. Nothing is particularly resolved, and there is no lesson to be learned. We still don’t know whether God exists, and if so, why he would make things the way they are. We don’t know whether our actions are right or wrong, nor whether we will be rewarded or punished accordingly. Presumably, though, we go on living.

With that in mind, perhaps I should help A finish the cleaning rather than type all day long.

A poem seems appropriate – one of A’s old favorites, and now mine too:

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

-John Berryman

disciplinarity; or, what I learned from the Poli Sci department

Whoa. So that happened.

I’m giving a paper at the ACLA in April – on a panel with my dear undergrad professor! – on the topic of human rights and artistic representation. I’m a part of a human rights grad student colloquium at UW, and as the only member from the humanities, I often feel an untoward amount of pressure to defend the likes of things such as the importance of discourse, the meanings of language, etc, ad nauseum. Mostly, it’s fun. But last night – last night! – I presented my paper for practice. The group was sympathetic, supportive; they understand what I’m talking about as much as I understand their arbitrations of international law and policy, but we do fine.

There was one Poli Sci professor there. He waited till everyone had said her piece, and then opened the tirade – the dressing down – the umbrage that you never really expect is coming your way.

I won’t bore you with details, but 3 things came out of this for me:

1. I can actually hold my own. No: more than that: I got upset. Reader, for all of my wafflings about the political import of academia and my seeming inability to ever commit to anything (I like to call it a poststructuralist malaise), I suddenly realized that I do have something at stake in this conversation. I felt this amazing surge of energy and desire to be able to explain that words do mean something – nay, words actually make something - and the ability to represent/ be represented is, actually, just as keenly important as “actual” human rights.

2. I can raise ire.

3. The disciplines talk really, really differently. We hold profoundly different things important. We think we know what each other are talking about, but we don’t. When we come to an impasse, we tend to dismiss the other as stupidly concerned with the wrong thing.

So after the presentation R and I went and drank Mexican beers and I talked myself into a real flurry, convincing myself again and again why it is as important to discuss the discursive practices of human rights as “actual” human rights. Today the point seems bigger. What happened, at that table? What happens when English and Political Science sit down together? What is lost when we’re so narrowly in our own little worlds – or, alternatively, what stands to be lost by listening to outside voices?