Advanced Rhetoric — ENC 4377, Fall 2020

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Course final epistolary reflection:

The first piece we highlighted for this course was Donna Haraway’s Cat’s Cradle. It took me three hours to read. I got through about a page of the piece and then I had to call my friend Sarah, my personal resident Smart Friend. Over the next hour or so, Sarah and I sent each other text message voice memos talking through the text as we processed. “This is what I think this means,” or, “I don’t understand this, but this other part makes that part a few parts ago make more sense,” were some of the versions of things we sent back and forth. 

I think we had three different reading assignments that week. I didn’t manage the third one, in part because time-management continues to be a cognitive mental struggle for me, but mostly because I’ve become acquainted with the way reading fails to be the docile acknowledgement it used to be, back when reading remained personal victory laps around the words that no longer required effort to sound out. Tragically, I have to understand each word, what each word paired with each different word means, and what every single sentence intends to say as it keeps piling and piling atop of new sentences. Within the close friends in which I’m most comfortable, I’m known to interrupt others mid-sentence to ask for definitions, explanations, and clarifications on terms and phrases I don’t know, or even just don’t know fully, searching words on my phone’s dictionary app as I try to appear still engaged. 

The short of what this does is stretch out a lot of minutes into larger clumps of time. The long of what this does is something I’ve come to learn within this course. 

I’ve found, frustratingly within the day-to-day, that this attachment to full understanding permeates my life outside of reading and coursework. I have a hard time submitting to any resolve if I don’t have an at least comfortable familiarity with its individual parts. By reading my writing with others in class, focusing on different sentences or phrases that contradict, I’ve been able to familiarize myself with the way I process not just course material, but myself. I desperately want to understand—everything—yet I feel a sort of immediate and perpetual tragic imposition by my understanding of the incapacity to understand everything, because being able to understand everything--to know everything, to have it all figured out or even to have a shred of confirmation for what the world is or how it works—is not only unrealistic, but its logic is conflicting. What I’ve been able to learn in this course, really what I’ve realized in its last week, is that I’ve remained within the conflict. Which, normally, is good. That’s where growth often happens, when we uproot comfort and step outside of complacency. But I’ve sort of forged my own complacency by submitting to conflict as a state, as a residence of unknowing that’s charged only with frustration in not being able to know, and then being unable to know how to get out of it.

But that’s a lot of what many of the other writers we read in this course talk about. They take something unknowable, and they talk about the ways they’ve chosen to decide what they know about it. Really, they shout opinions, or in many cases in texts we’ve read in this course, they artistically articulate why the opinions of others are wrong from their own individual mountaintops of scholarship. I disliked what Gorgias had to say the most, but I deeply enjoyed reading his work and work we read about him. I admire the fervency, the almost disregard for any contrast posited beforehand or that might be opportune afterwards. I liked Nietzsche the most and reading the small amount of work by him felt invigorating, but I almost detest his writing because of my ability not to understand it, but to agree. I know that’s a rabbit hole I’m always going to have to be wary of travelling down, that I am a very vulnerable candidate for nihilism. 

Many of these writer’s decisions, the ways they chose their language to explore the thoughts they already intended to do so or the ideas they at least intended to question, are opinions, yes, but more than anything I’ve noticed that they’re opinions about what they don’t want the world to be. Harraway doesn’t want the world to be a string of separate islands that grow depleted when untraversed. Gorgias may just not have wanted the world to be a place without any ground for him, or ground high enough for others to see that he did have a place to stand on. And Nietzsche I will eternally be trying to quite figure out, but so far I think he just didn’t want the world to keep pretending that it was this place that had it all figured out or that what it did think it had figured out wasn’t most likely wrong, or at least not indisputably correct. 

I don’t yet know exactly what I don’t want the world to be. I think I’m still caught up in the confidence that’s needed to be acquainted enough with it in the first place to be able to talk about it in any way outside of my own experience. But I think that in this course I have found that I’m pretty concerned with the world at least being a place that we can all fit within it, and really fit, in ways that allow each of us to stretch out and try to understand what that feels like for us, what feeling feels like at all. 

But that is the temperament I’ve unknowingly carried out throughout this course—stretching, asking myself questions, even asking a string of questions and interlocking them until I realize or until someone else points out that some of those questions are things I can’t know because no one can know them. But we’re trying to, and that’s what all of these different texts are. They’re people who think they know, or who are telling others about what they don’t know, and they’re feeding into this greater link-pile for all of the rest of us to sift through while we try to figure it out, if we want. 

Without knowing, that’s what ended up happening with my first essay project that turned into a semester-long enterprise. I thought I knew what I wanted to talk about because of what I initially wanted to interject what I didn’t want the world to be—this place a person could never resolve to stay in without a prescribed resolution. But even that was really about a friend, not every would-be friend within it. But the more I read, the even more that I looked up definitions and phrases and references, the more everything became a question. The questions didn’t necessarily change exactly what I thought I wanted to talk about, but the focus changed onto the need I felt for us to consider how big these questions were. Not to know them, but to know that we couldn’t know them. I found a sort of peace within that, at least within my essay, by sort of letting go of the greater structure in order to spend more time within the interval, within the sound before it knew how it became one and before it eventually dissipated. It was something I didn’t know that I was teaching myself, or rather being taught—by my books, definitions, and the self that stretched into my writing to offer some comfort to the rest of her that always feels stuck underneath all of the conflict.

As the semester aged, I learned to get through giant critical theory or historical philosophy pieces at least a little bit faster. Many of them aren’t intended to be understood at the onset, because the writer is cats-cradling their own pool of information in order to finally present its reader with the string. Freeingly, I’ve learned that it’s normal to think with an uninterrupted “what?” until at least the second half of a piece, and that soon I’ll arrive at the “oh, this is why they said this,” or “this is what this is for.” I’m able to apply that to situations outside of theory, making my own decision to consider that things aren’t assigned to determined meaning or use, that information poses various questions that challenge numerous resolves as applied. I guess that’s how it gets a little bit easier, when I’m able to breathe through beginnings until understanding seems within sight, carrying my question-mindedness into malleable thesis’ as I encounter them, asking my friends to help me understand or to grow an understanding with me, and using information, experience, and slivers of understanding as I collect them to thread into the smaller arch within me, the a-little-bit-bigger arch I’m exposed to, and to wait until someone else figures out the big one, at least long enough until I know I don’t need it as much as it feels like I do. I’m already beginning to let go, to know more.