Seeing the World as It Is; or, Becoming a Transparent Eyeball. (Beryl, #24)
The Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education Study & field notes blog
I kind of got my Master’s degree by accident. I had a small scholarship from my year of service in AmeriCorps, where I taught GED classes at a homeless shelter in San Francisco (also where I learned most of what I know about teaching). I liked living in San Francisco, so I looked up SFSU, and I liked writing, so I found this degree called Composition and thought that sounded alright so I applied and got in. Later I spent 9 years on the Ph.D. Here we are.
But before that, I had looked up Ophthamology. Because I am fascinated by eyeballs! The rods and cones; perceptions that flip upside down; the way color is made by light and also by your previous experience with blue skies. (I also love optometry, and the aesthetics of the machine that flips lenses to test your prescription, and the whole ritual of it: “better, or worse? better, or worse?”). I studied the muscles of the eye, staving off farsightedness for a decade using exercises done with a knot in a string, until succumbing to the miracle (and fashion) of glasses promptly at age 46, when all my older friends had told me the eyes do begin to wear out. They do.
It was amazing to see again! I was always moved by the glasses donation boxes put out by the Shriners. Imagine the transformation, if a correct prescription was somehow delivered to someone who had never seen how much they couldn’t see. Recently, I took this picture of my own eyeball, dilated and projected in the office of my excellent ophthalmologist, Dr. Rupa Wong.
My eyes are green-grey (have you ever noticed that that all eye colors are earth-colored?). In my left eye (the eye that is managed by the right hemisphere of the brain) I have a speck. A speck of what, you wonder? It’s like… a speck of pupil. I’m sure there’s a name for it but I think of it as a speck of pupil, and I like to imagine that it has been responsible for my astigmatism and also, that it can see.
Lying on the roof, in the back of the valley, at twilight, using my astigmatic left eyeball, I looked up into the light blue hemisphere of sunset sky and saw Venus — like a speck in the giant blue. I felt “glad to the brink of fear”, for I was seeing through the speck in my eye! It was as if I was inside the orb of the sky, looking down at myself, on the roof, in the valley, through Venus.
Strangely, I had a similar sensation a week ago, while floating in the water near Waikiki. Casting my peripheral vision, I had felt like I was bobbing gently in the watery eye socket of the Earth.
Is that weird? Good.
This phrase came to me: “The right eye of Earth is ocean, and the left eye of Earth is sky.” The ocean and sky are the wet squishy parts of the planet, which has a body, which IS a body. I experience this thought looking at the mountain ridge known as Sleeping Giant behind my house. The house which I have not left for months, contributing greatly to my consistency in what Native Hawaiians call kilo, which is to watch, to listen, to observe, to forecast.
It’s very, very hard for me to kilo. What I am observing is hard. In this work, this blog, and my reading, and in the sky. These thoughts are hard wrought.
You see, I am trying to think outside of the box. But as Bayo Akomolafe says in the deep and deeply moving essay “What Climate Collapse Asks of Us”:
“Thinking out of the box is exactly how the box thinks. We are the boxes we strive to out-think.”
Literary readers will recognize my earlier homage to Emerson’s great essay, Nature, and to what he called the Transparent Eyeball. It is an idea I share with students to help them interpret Nature Literature and the 19th century American philosophy of transcendentalism.
I become a transparent eyeball;
I am nothing;
I see all;
the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me;
I am part or parcel of God. — Emerson
I was reminded of this eyeball-feeling while reading the essay, “Multi-layered Selves: Colonialism, Decolonization, and Counter-Intuitive Learning Spaces”, by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, who quite awesomely describes, I think, this transparent-eyeball sensation as one of several layers of existence. (The fourth, specifically.)
This week I interviewed a faculty member for the Teaching Climate Change study, and she said that what she needed most, and what seemed to be most elusive to her, was Joy.
I think about what 2030 will look like, and what 2010 looked like, and I’m thinking, I’d take the climate of 2010 any day and that was already an adulterated climate. I am looking at the trees across the stream and I need to find ways to commune with the things that are still really quite beautiful and alive and thriving…I’m halfway into the second decade of doing this and what I need is help with the joy and the wonder and, like, what’s the world that we want to see? And how do I find a community of people who want to still feel inspired and alive?
As a researcher, I’ve been grappling with how to protect the anonymity of this interview subject, because she is a woman of color and because there are so few women of color doing the work that she’s doing in the discipline in which she’s doing it. Beryl (a pseudonym) and I talked about microagressions and how she wasn’t the first woman to share something with me about the challenges of teaching climate change in male-dominated academic departments. “I think you need to be a woman, and/or a woman of color to know that even if you are right, it’s not going to go anywhere if it’s against the power, the money, the special interest.”
Beryl also said that during the time after the murder of George Floyd this past summer, “We were able to see the different levels of safety and conversation that the Black families have, versus non-Black families. I have a different bar for what I think is information that one can absorb or needs to absorb purely in a safety and security kind of way and how to navigate the world it as it is. I have an unvarnished understanding of the world as it is. With, crucially, an emphasis on emotional resilience so you can handle it.”
I’m thinking about “how did we get here?” in Higher Education, in particular, and is there any way to not throw the baby out with the bathwater? The faculty members that I talk to are so truly amazing, and they have all different kinds of degrees that represent, for better or for worse, some pinnacle of this civilization, some know-how and know-do. Is there anything that we take with us when we leave the house that modernity built? Is there something here that we need?
But then again, Woody Harrelson just looked me right in the eye and said, in the Netflix film, Kiss the Ground, that the planet has just sixty harvests left.
Ahmed Afzal’s thoughts, in “Education in a Time of Collapse”, speak directly to the dire reality:
“Many of the fundamental assumptions about the world are quickly becoming obsolete. Consider, for example, that we can no longer assume that the earth will continue to have a stable and benign climate, or that the national and global economies will continue growing indefinititely, or that the land and oceans will continue to feed more and more people, or that technology will continue to improve in its ability to solve our problems without creating new ones or that human populations will continue rising along with everyone’s standard of living, or, indeed, that our basic needs will continue to be met without any disruptions.
When my colleague, Beryl, was just seven years old, she experienced an aha moment. She described it as:
“a strong sense of us all being suspended in space. We are suspended in space, the entirety of our home. It’s just, oh my god. It is a strong memory, definitely one that I think shaped and reinforced some understandings about the fragility of our planet, and also shaped my sense of urgency.”
She continued:
If we didn’t treat people and their lands as disposable, we wouldn’t be here. You can’t do what you’re doing unless you’re overconsuming and destroying biodiverse forests and polluting waters that you think that you have access to and by you I mean the global north. Which is just to say that you can’t have climate change without injustice.
She continued:
This is all inevitable. It is the denouement of all the things we’ve been doing for the past several centuries.
And…she continued:
We have to understand climate as the context in which that we are living, not an issue that we are tackling. If we understand it as the context, then everything nestles in a little more clearly. It’s not about more courses on climate, its about climate being in all courses, right? We’ve inverted our understanding of what the environment is and how we sit in it.
Bayo Akomolafe discusses at length the exploration of ontological framings of climate change by Campbell, McHugh, and Ennis who he says, “finally insist that the reason we cannot solve the problem of climate change is because climate change is not a problem. We cannot save the world from climate change because climate change is the world — incalculably more complex and more multidimensional than our organizations can frame or address.”
Akomolafe continues:
We struggle with it because of the dynamics of centralizing human permanence and survivability.
We struggle because of a modernity-reinforced ‘feeling’ of entitlement that the world ought to be stable, convenient, and user-friendly.
And, he continues (in such gorgeous prose) to say that:
“We are not the fulcrum upon which the universe is balanced… the coddling and pampering of a historical inflection in the natural rhythm of things must now give way to foreclosure.”
This giving-way is what Campbell, McHugh, and Ennis call Bleak Optimism, the understanding that ‘this civilization is already dead’. It is “Janus-faced; one side finally acknowledges the unbounded, unthinkable, incalculable nature of this new reality, the other side, a chance to experiment with organizational forms of justice, ethics, politics and reason that are without precedent. The bleak optimist realizes this and enacts the creative foreclosure, when in turn opens up the possibility of a complete justice.” (p. 15)
Thus, I humbly add this term to the emerging lexicon of the Post Doom University. (Along with Supertasks, Hyperobjects, Hermeneutics, and other treasures contributing to this inquiry).
How might we practice Bleak Optimism and would this help us to see the world as it really is?
Works Cited
Afzaal, A. (2020, September 3). “Education in a Time of Collapse” Resilience.org
Akomolafe, Bayo. “What Climate Collapse Asks of Us.” Bayo Akomalafe, 2020. https://bayoakomolafe.net
Campbell, Norah et al. “Climate Change is Not a Problem: Speculative Realism at the End of Organization.” Organization Studies, 40(5), 725–744. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618765553
de Oliveira Andreotti, Vanessa. (12 October, 2016). (Image.) “Multi-layered Selves: Colonialism, Decolonialization and Counter-intuitive Learning Spaces.” Artseverywhere.ca
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1836. Nature.
Kiss the Ground. Directed by Josh Tickell and Rebecca Tickell. Big Picture Ranch, 2020.
Stein, Sharon, et al. (Image, p.55) “Cartography 4: structural damage to the house modernity built.” in “Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures: Reflections on Our Learnings Thus Far.” Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education (NJCIE). 4(1) 43–65 2020. doi: 10.7577/njcie.3518
