On Learning Sign Language

Every semester at COM (the college where I teach), we can take one free class as part of our benefits package. This semester, I signed up for a six-week course in American Sign Language, and the experience has been quite interesting. I have bad hearing, so I was partly motivated to take the course by a vague notion that it might be good to begin learning sign language now. I've also always been fascinated by Deaf culture in America (the growth of which can at least partly be attributed to earlier educational efforts to quash sign language in America, an effort that included tying the hands of students so that they would learn to speak and write English instead of signing).

ASL is not structurally related to English in terms of syntax or morphology, although it's probably an exaggeration to say it's "completely unrelated" to English, as some claim. Much of the vocabulary has connections to the English word-equivalents. The sign for "french fries," for instance, is made using the sign for the letter "F", and there are many similar signs ("boy" uses the sign for B, and so on). The ASL alphabet (which is not the foundation of the language, but more like a supplement) also corresponds to the English alphabet, and is used for things like spelling names and movie titles. ASL uses a system of understood signs (many of them like picture words), mime, and facial expressions, along with some aspects influenced by American English.

Our instructor (an older woman originally from Thailand, I believe) was terrific, encouraging and supportive, and she worked in a lot of interesting stories about how the signs evolved or what visual pictures originally inspired the signs. The sign for "Spain," for instance, seems to have come from the movements of a bullfighter. ASL is a very original and beautiful language in its own right.

Alas, I don't think I took to learning ASL very well. My instructor did praise my ability to use facial expressions, a skill I must have honed through teaching. On the other hand (no pun intended), I seemed to struggle with remembering the shape of hand required and, whether the palm is supposed to be down or up with a given sign. I also disliked working in pairs, which is something she, quite logically, asked us to do quite often.

On the last day of class, I started to reflect about social anxiety and how that might hamper one's ability to learn language, which is essentially a social activity, after all. The sign-language instructor even mentioned that we were doing better than her other classes, because we weren't as shy. I may have learned to fake not being shy, but I think it still interfered with my ability to really take to sign language (that and a kind of self-consciousness about the body, which also hurt my efforts to learn karate). I'm just guessing here, but I imagine polyglots (those with an ability to learn many languages) would tend to have highly evolved social skills and be able to adapt to new situations easily. I'm afraid I don't fit that bill very well.

Or maybe I just didn't practice enough. There's no substitute for dedicated practice and a serious motivation to learn something. My motivation at this point was simply to be exposed to the language and to get a solid foundation, and I think I accomplished that.

Graduation

I just got the official word today that I have finished my MFA degree with the University of Texas at El Paso. It has been at interesting process, and as with any worthy educational endeavor, it has changed my perspective as well as expanding my knowledge and skills. In many ways, it was similar to my experience in the MA program, in that the quality of the faculty far exceeded the reputation of the program (which ought to say something about the competitive nature of academic jobs in the humanities). Going through the process of writing my thesis, in particular, raised many questions about the effect of the "program" mentality on writing in general and why exactly writers feel the need to be validated in terms of educational credentials as well as publication. (Once you're writing a thesis, it feels too late to really ask such questions seriously; it seems just as easy to finish the degree.) But I am setting aside those questions for now and trying to enjoy the sense of accomplishment in finishing this degree, which is in one sense a "second master's" but in another sense an entirely different kind of degree -- a terminal degree that is perhaps supposed to signify that I am a much better writer than I am. But all writers -- or at least all writers of any worth -- are writers in progress, writers who are constantly working at their art and improving in complex ways. We have often seen the problems faced by famous writers once they accept their greatness; perhaps it is far better, artistically, to accept that one is always learning and striving toward greatness with the acute awareness of the elusiveness of this goal.

Peter Pan and his American cousin, Huck Finn

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Peter and Wendy, the novel by J.M. Barrie based on his earlier stage play (which was not put into text form until after the novel) and the basis of numerous versions of the Peter Pan story to follow. (An annotated version of the novel has been released to mark this anniversary.)

Peter Pan remains the ultimate Victorian-Edwardian fictional tribute to childhood, a story about a boy who won’t grow up and a story that reflects and comments on the very clear demarcation between the innocence and endless optimism of childhood and the serious and rigidly structured state of adulthood. Peter Pan, the mischievous and rebellious boy forever on the cusp of adolescence, embodies the adventurous and imaginative spirit of boyhood.

Yet, in the stage play and musical, the character of Peter Pan is usually played by a girl or woman, and the character of the father and Captain Hook are played by the same actor. Similarly, the Lost Boys and Wendy’s brothers are often played by girls. These kinds of choices, along with the fact that the girl protagonist, Wendy, plays a mother figure, give the story all kinds of strange Freudian undercurrents and a general sense of gender confusion. In the original play and novel (not the Disney film), Wendy and her brothers pay a sad price for the act of putting off childhood. Aside from the idealistic yearnings for a childhood that lasts forever, the story in many ways comments on the special confusion of adolescence and the way in which we grow into our sexual identities.

A few years earlier, in the 1880s, Mark Twain released another book about a boyhood hero, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Unlike Peter, Huck Finn is distinctly male, an adolescent, tough boy hardened by living with an alcoholic father and having to survive on his own. He smokes a pipe and fishes with a bamboo fishing pole on the banks of the Mississippi River. Gender confusion does not figure into this realistically rendered story, although there is a humorous scene in which Huck dresses like a girl. Huck and Peter Pan also share a love of adventure and a fondness for the wilderness. But while Peter has difficult relationships with Wendy and women in general, Huck generally feels a fondness toward women and a shy kind of desire to please them.

A more important difference exists between the English Victorian creation of Peter Pan and the very American boy hero of Huckleberry Finn. While Peter Pan refuses to grow up, and while the story in general hangs on to sentimental notions about childhood, Huckleberry Finn sees himself put in a situation where he has to grow up. He has to learn to consider what is valuable to him and to question the mores of the corrupt society around him. He has to learn to accept the consequences of his actions and to do the right thing to help a friend, even if that means he is doing the wrong thing according to the rest of society. Huck Finn must learn that sometimes being an adult isn’t easy and can be pretty confusing, almost as confusing as being an adolescent.

Of course, in spite of Victorian sentiments to the contrary, we know that childhood is not always an easy time and comes with its own confusing moments. Most Victorians also knew this, and indeed they lived in a society in which child labor and poverty had become side effects of the industrial age. Perhaps Victorians sentimentalized childhood as a way of protecting children in a symbolic sense, to reassure themselves that things were not as bad as they appeared.

Mark Twain also sentimentalized childhood to a point, especially in his first boyhood classic, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But in Huck Finn, Twain became more honest in his assessment of childhood and considered the special pain of adolescence as a time when one wrestles not just with gender identity but with a whole host of other issues central to one’s moral and intellectual identity. With Huck, Twain created the American counterpart to the English romantic heroes beloved by Tom Sawyer. Huck is adventurous, yes, but his adventures are full of real danger and serious consequences, not the stuff of pixie dust and daydreams.

Open Minds Quarterly

I have just had an essay published in the Summer 2011 issue of this journal, which focuses on stories and poems involving the survival of mental illness. Although the essay cannot be read online, I wanted to give the journal and its fine sponsoring organization a plug, anyway.

9/11 Poetry

Recently I was asked to participate in a commemorative ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I began researching poems in hopes of finding something that we could include in the event. While I did not manage to find an appropriate poem, it was interesting reading through a lot of the poems inspired by that day.

Many of the 9/11-inspired poems, especially the most well-known and well regarded poems like "Photograph from September 11 by Wislawa Szymborska, focus on the memory of bodies falling from the sky, those visual images of men and women in business attire jumping from the burning buildings, in a sense "choosing" certain death over the hell of destruction (although it's a mistake to think of it as a choice at all).

I wrote a short story that also touches on these particular images, so I understand why they're compelling and why they linger in the mind. In a very real way, creative writing, and especially poetry, says what we cannot otherwise say. To paraphrase one expert on the subject, poems exist to explain themselves.

These 9/11 poems meditate on the haunting images of falling bodies, because what else besides poetry can really do these memories justice, even if poetry itself remains inadequate? Only poetry can explain the unexplainable, something so grief-inducing and moving as the sight of those people leaping into oblivion. We can never get used to the images of those falling bodies, so all we can really do is write poems that try to capture that bottomless feeling of seeing these people, the sickening grief and boundless compassion that we felt as we saw the images and realized what we were seeing. We would have done anything, but we can do nothing, and so we turn to art and poetry.

Foreign Films

I just finished watching a beautifully eerie Russian movie called The Return, and it got me thinking about why I love foreign movies so much. I generally watch these movies by myself, since most people, even if they like the occasional foreign movie, tend to get a little bit restless at the thought of sitting through some unknown film that involves the tedious task of reading subtitles. Of course, one of the reasons I like foreign movies is because I find the subtitles themselves appealing; I have substandard hearing and have a particularly difficult time with voices. Foreign movies are a very practical alternative for someone with my level of hearing loss.

Yet that remains only a small, superficial aspect of my taste for foreign films. I enjoy the practicality of subtitles, but I also enjoy taking in the subtitles as bits of written language. In that sense, foreign films become mixed-media art forms, combining the visual and auditory images with the printed word as it appears on the screen. To love foreign films, you must also love reading and language; reading the closed captions of an English-language film can involve some of this pleasure, but foreign films transcend the clarity of that experience.

Foreign films take film to a different poetic level, in which the viewer (unless he or she is fluent in the language) hears the words only as pure sound, even while he or she also absorbs the visual, active imagery of the film and the separate level of poetry as represented by the subtitles on the screen. Viewing a foreign film becomes a multifaceted, complex experience, akin to hearing a poem read for the first time, and then reading it again and again for meaning. With a foreign film, however, this experience is compressed, so that we heard sound and see image even as more literal meanings unfold in front of us. Film in any language can approximate this experience, but I believe in foreign film it can be seen in its purest sense.

Of course, I also like foreign films for the more commonly expressed reason that foreign films do not shy away from complex and ambiguous endings in the way that American films do, and for the fact that so many foreign film cultures seem more amenable to meandering plots and poetic expressions of human conflict. I like foreign films because they are different, after all; by exploring and probing difference, we can discover those truths that lie beneath all human experience.

GFW (Gym-Floss-Writing)

I am embarrassed to admit it, but the SO and I recently watched an unhealthy number of episodes of the "reality" show "Jersey Shore" (insert usual excuses for watching reality TV here -- I enjoy laughing at these horrible people, etc.).

Say what you want to about the Jersey Shore crew, but I would like to suggest that the boys' regimen of "GTL" (Gym-Tan-Laundry) borders on genius. Yes, it's simplistic and superficial, and it serves as a testament to the fact that these guys only care about how they look and how much they score. Yet there is something elegant in its simplicity, something Zen-like in its approach to life.
"Gym-Tan-Laundry." That's it. That may not be your formula for a happy life, but it is the formula that works for Pauly D, the Sitch, and that other guy. It is said that Buddhist monks always make their beds, while the rest of us dismiss this practice as a waste of time, since we're "just going to sleep in it again anyway." Yet monks understand that routine serves as a kind of meditation, and living a well-ordered life helps us to keep our thoughts organized and our brains on the right track. I think the Sitch and Pauly D. (let's face it, that other guy doesn't count) understand the beauty of such simplicity.

I have adopted my own regimen of simplicity, which includes "Gym" but otherwise focuses on some other values more in keeping with my own life-stage and priorities. We all need to go to the gym, even if we may not work the Abs in the same way that the Situation does. But tanning is not something I'm interested in, and I am blessed to have laundry mostly taken care of. My other priorities, then, are "flossing" and "writing." Every day that I go to the gym, floss, and write, I feel better about myself and my life. As Susan Sontag said (and I'm paraphrasing), writing is the only thing I do where I don't feel like I'm wasting my time, and the same could be said of the gym. Keeping healthy keeps you going. It's never something you should "have to" make time for. As for flossing -- well, I've resisted it for a long time, but I must say, you get to liking it when you do it, and it was nice to be complimented by the hygienist for the first time in my life. You only get issued one set of adult teeth, so it's best to do what you can to preserve them.

GFW, baby.