On Composition & Parataxis, Quantum Physics, & Tragicomic Hope

In order to understand the world, we must learn to question it. We start with a superficial why, as in Mommy, why is the sky blue? Then as we grow into ethical consciousness, we ask a deeper why, as in Mommy, why does the sky have to be blue? which then leads to questions of how one might re-imagine the sky as a wholly different color. As teachers of composition, our job is to provide the resources and opportunities with which students can first ask the superficial, then the deeper whys about writing in a given genre, which will ultimately lead to the kinds of how questions that empower students to re-imagine and re-purpose writing to meet their individual needs. If we skip the deep why stage of questioning, we never get to the empowering how - only to an automated responsiveness enacting the established paradigm.

This re-imagining, re-purposing is at the center of Cornel West's prophetic Christianity. Contradictions are not glossed over but antagonized until a dialectical synthesis emerges: the empowering how. We do not arrive at such an empowerment through hypotaxis - the linear, vertical, deductive progression of inquiry and argument, which prefigures a conclusion, arrives there consequentially, skipping the deep why stage between theoria and praxis. We do not cherry-pick the Biblical verses that fit our prefigured ideology. Instead they emerge through a paratactic re-imagining, an associative re-purposing in which seemingly hidden strands reappear in the new light of a contemporary context colored by our active engagement with the text and the world.

Newtonian physics is only good for shorthand stereotypical observation, as are genres and modes. You can teach a child intro, thesis statement, body, conclusion - or that what goes up must come down, and that child might ask why, and you might say organization or gravity, and eventually (hopefully) that child might ask - regarding physics - if what goes up must always come down, and if you say yes you'll be lying, because some of what goes up never comes down, and there's a chance some of it is on the other side of the universe by the time you try to answer, unless you go about measuring it with your hypotactic instruments, bending it to your will. Then, under the force of your deduction, the behavioral potential of matter regresses to a logic any infant can understand and obey (e.g. 5-paragraph essays). Sometimes, that kind of explanation, understanding, instruction is all we feel we have time for.

But the truth is we can't afford not to see the world as it is on the quantum level, where the vaguest of gestures disrupts universes within universes - where genres are fluid concepts made all the more fluid or rigid with every word we use to de/refine them. And if we can get our students to question first on a superficial, then on a deeper level why something is, we might be able to get to the empowering how of writing in the world.

First we must understand the tragedy - the hypotactic, linear, vertical, consequential trajectory of a given situation. We must recognize its boundaries as such, but we must also understand these boundaries as conventional constructions - as made and capable of being un/remade. Here is where the force of parataxis, association, prophetic imagination - comedy - reconfigures logos into nomos, narrative, human triumph.

We must remind our students that they are the wrench that tightens the bolts or grinds the gears. The agents of stasis or change. Study the machine. Then maintain, re-purpose or break the sonofabitch.

Keith Douglas wrote, "To be sentimental or emotional now is dangerous to oneself and to others. To trust anyone or admit any hope of a better world is criminally foolish, as foolish as it is to stop working for it."