What are we doing here? You don’t go to Mt Holyoke and I don’t teach here anymore. To make matters worse, most of you don’t even know who I am. And perhaps most vexing of all is the supposition that because I did teach (some of) you, and was present at your graduation in 1985 and indeed was your chosen Baccalaureate speaker, because of that, I should have something to say to you now. The odds are against it.
Do you remember what I said in my Baccalaureate? Well, I didn’t either until I tracked down a copy from the bowels of my computer archives. It’s a cute little speech, I think. It’s title:
“NEVER PAT A BURNING DOG AND OTHER LESSONS I HAVE LEARNED FROM MY STUDENTS: A BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS”
is an enigma. I have no idea what I’m referring to here.
So, back to 1985:
A few weeks ago, when my family and I were visiting my parents, I happened upon an autobiography that I had written when I was twelve, illustrated by my sister. One of its more moving passages recounts the ordeal and the glory of receiving some award or other at a school ceremony. Now, as a responsible academic, I of course feel compelled to quote briefly from the text: “With my heart thumping like a washing machine out of balance and my knees wobbling like jello, I walked up onto the stage. Me – an award? But I was just the pain who liked to tease Mrs. Holden (my math teacher) about her hair being the color of an eraser, who always struck out when we played softball, and who got mustard all over her history paper when she forgot to wrap up her sandwich before putting it in her bookbag. Me – an award? Somebody must have made a mistake. I am just a plain girl.
In some respects, at least, little has changed. Twenty years later, we find me in my office, opening my daily MHC mail, which collected for a year by one of my colleagues weighed in at 20.2 kilos, tossing things haphazardly into various bins. But there, amidst business as usual, was an invitation from you to speak here today. Me? The baccalaureate address? But I am just the pain who likes to tease students in her seminar about why they are chewing on their pens as we discuss Freud’s “Dora”, who stopped playing in the Faculty/Student soccer games after she scored a goal for the students, whose yellow mug has driven students to metaphysical distraction, and who seems ritually to spill coffee on their papers. There must be some mistake. I am just a plain woman. But there I stood in my office with tears in my eyes, thinking about how mistaken you were, how all the admiration, the pleasure taken, and even dare I say it, the love, goes the other way. I thought about those of you I know well, and those less well and those not at all, and I was overcome with the realization that we are all plain women, trying to get from one end of the day to the other, and the very fact that we succeed as well as we do is cause for celebration and that is how I see this day, for each one of you and for me and for all of us together.
We have asked, sometimes politely and sometimes stridently, that our past and present voices be heard: past, so that we can remember, and present, so that we can reach. I have watched you, in a classroom, in my office, at dinner, outside my window trying to fly a kite in a hopelessly gusty wind, on Skinner Green in an evening vigil, declare your commitment to the living, without deceit, and without fear, and without reservation. I have watched you struggling to make sense out of man’s inhumanity to man, and to woman, all the while insisting that, if we are not perfectible, we must still do better. I have watched you demand that others respect you, so that you can, indeed, trust yourselves. I have watched you come slowly to the realization that we are here, not only in virtue of our hard work, intelligence, creativity and spirit, but also because of a fortuitous good fortune that far too few of our sisters and brothers share. I have watched you come to see that we must never close our eyes to suffering and injustice, that our good fortune commands an obligation to share that bounty with those whose world is darker than our own. And I have watched you laugh, and sing, and dance, and embrace one another in true friendship, always mindful that, without these things, our personal and cultural quests cease to have meaning. But I have not been able, because you have not permitted it, to stand by and watch. My watching has not been dispassionate, nor disinterested, but has come alive by the force of your integrity, your sense of purpose, and of course your occasional need, or desire, for corroboration or for simple consolation, the sympathetic ear. You have made it easy for me to exercise what Iris Murdoch calls a “just and loving gaze” and hence finally to understand why the exercise of such a gaze is essential to my own integrity, and hence to my survival. I have learned more from you than you have learned from me, for I have learned from you that one ceases to teach precisely when one ceases to watch, and to listen.
What I urge today is that none of you forgets the lessons that you have taught me, that when you cross the stage later today, heart thumping like a washing machine out of balance, knees wobbling like jello, that you accept your diploma as a sign, not only of academic achievement, but as a measure of your contribution to an institution which, in spite of its human flaws and its lapses, nevertheless strives, because of women like you, to be a real community. If it has failed sometimes to seem that way to you, if you have sometimes felt alienated, angry, disgusted, it is because the world today is not hospitable to communities. We do not always know, as individuals, how to be members of a community. We stumble in the dark; our paths illuminated by what we have made our own from history, and from story. Thirteen years ago, Alice Walker, speaking to a class of women graduating from Sarah Lawrence College, said, “But please remember … that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.” Times have changed, as they are disposed to do, since Alice Walker delivered that address. You are confronted with choices, and hence with obstacles, that I did not have when I crossed my commencement stage. Remember always just how good you are, and how much better you can be. We do do what we can, and remarkably enough what we can do, right here on this earth, is marvelous, is worthy itself, with all deference to Plato, of mundane idealization. The earth, the world is yours. Take it and make it new.
End of 1985 Baccalaurate
It seems so odd to me now from my venerable perspective, that at the age of 34, anyone (including myself) should have thought that I had anything of substance to say to you beyond my ability to light the fire of philosophical curiosity in those of you who endured my introductory courses in which I forced you to consider Descartes’ claim that we cannot know whether or not we are dreaming now. Or in the handful of you who were brave or foolish enough to sit in a seminar on Narrative and Identity where, for some reason I now cannot fathom, I made you listen to the Police singing “I’ll be watching you”.
But wait a minute, now you are now 46. Surely you know more now than the 34 year old who spoke to you from her naïve heart and was constrained by her knowledge that her words would be heard not just by the students she was addressing but by those who would determine her own professional fate. You have lived years beyond her mere 34. Thinking back on that time with that odd admixture of memory and present experience that constitutes an individual’s consciousness, it takes me but a moment to reenter the space that we inhabited then.
Remember the patriarchy? Remember compulsory heterosexuality? Remember sisterhood is powerful? Remember the personal is political? Those ideas – very much in healthy circulation before the media succeeded in putting a stake through feminism’s heart – those ideas permeated the air that we all breathed on this campus. They constituted the horizon of our lives beyond it. Where did those ideas go? How did their fascination, their urgency dissipate when coupled with the exigencies of our/your unfolding lives and the perturbations of culture? Attachment parenting and multiculturalism. Monica Lewinsky and Baby M. Make up and menopause. Managed care and hooking up. Osama Bin Laden and Michelle Obama. Texting and Botox. Sex and the City and same sex marriage. Glass ceilings and Britney Spears. Big Love and Big Oil. What a great 25 years it has been.
Of course in addition to this assortment of cultural markers, the past 25 years has allowed to unfold for each of us (you) a distinctive life filled with challenges, accomplishments and disappointments (which are sometimes the very same thing). You have had loving relationships, hateful relationships. wonderful opportunities to do creative work and times when you were not sure that you could get up in the morning. You have experienced the joy of motherhood (sometimes with a pound cat or a Rhodesian Ridgeback) and have found it difficult to face its Darker Sides. You know what I mean. Living turns out to be, like, complicated.
Back to 1985
The person who addressed you in 1985 wanted you to live lives informed by a sense of impassioned commitment to yourselves as women believing as she did then that being a woman carries particular responsibilities. That person wanted you to take away from MHC what she herself did, only two years after you graduated, when she left for the Dark Side, first across the notch and then, even worse, across the river. I wanted you to carry with you the belief that consciousness is made, not given and that women’s consciousness, in all its messy diversity, must be allowed to flourish and (to borrow from William Carlos Williams) to penetrate into all the crevices of our world.
My intention now is to not so subtly shift the burden of speech from my shoulders (look, no shoulder pads) to yours. Somehow, you carried something important with you when you left MHC. You did take the world and make it new. Tell me, what did you take? And where is it now? You tell me so that I can not only remember but can reach.
Nice article. Love all you said