The Persistence of Visions (Reflections on Living from the Classroom and Elsewhere)
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'We must always follow somebody looking for truth, and we must always run away from anyone who finds it.'
Andre Gide
'It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This book is about promptings, questions, desires, and resolutions. It is about things that have happened while I was busy teaching, among other pursuits, but primarily while teaching. This book comes from paying attention, to what feels authentic and what feels like a distraction. It comes from living with an extremely low tolerance for being able to put aside spiritual and intellectual dissonance, while just getting on with things, although there have been many times when I wished that I could do just that. It comes from cycles of loneliness when it seemed I could not find a way to express to others the drive to understand what lay beneath the practical and below the technique of whatever we spend our time and energy doing in our everyday lives. My passion was for the more fundamental human reality that was essential to improve our understanding of why we do what we do, and that, once openly discussed, could go very far in clarifying what we are about in any life endeavor. Such considerations might either make improvements in the techniques used to solve problems attendant to our current pursuits much more straightforward, or, on the other hand, would cause us to radically reconsider whether our actions were worthy pursuits at all. Doubtless, such a description of loneliness in the search for more fundamental meaning will strike some as a common phase in individual development. Still, it seems important to me to report that I, as well, experienced these anxieties acutely, and they are an indispensable part of my journey.
For me, this search led to a career in teaching, after experimenting in several other careers. To the limits of my understanding it seemed that being about the work of teaching, all the while pursuing more soul-satisfying answers to the purpose of life and effort, would never leave me afterward in a spiritual funk thinking I had been wasting time, or not doing the best with the insights I had at any given juncture. Further, I now have a much broader conception of the qualities I found through teaching, and see these qualities expressed in many other professions, locations and modes besides those of the formal classroom. So I offer these reflections only by way of what I observed, as I followed a chosen path.
This book springs from those wonderful moments of transcendent synthesis, when my ruminations were validated among others who found such pivotal, shared questions to be an invitation to envision what they might wish to do with their lives, rather than as a fearful experience. I have often heard of formal education referred to as the artificial antecedent to 'real life,' or the 'real world.' I find the converse to have been true. Where else could one find the privileged dispensation to ask students of all ages and experiences just what they consider to be the meaning of life, of their lives? What constitutes a life well lived, and how does one apply oneself to answering that question and then allow oneself to be directed by those answers? What could be more important in the process of learning anything, or pursuing any occupation, than to face such questions directly? And yet fear is a common and understandable response because such questions beg us to examine the status quo, wondering with apprehension just what we are spending most of our mortality doing. Without the proper environment which foregrounds the hope that arises from envisioning what might be, rather than the loss of what is, and which conceives of a significant meaningful emergence resulting from this hard work, the serious consideration of meaningful living appears to risk a spiritual free-fall with nothing else to grab on to.
And finally, this book finds its voice in conversation, and the conversations I can most readily locate are from the classroom. If there are true insights into these crucial questions, they find themselves in the art of conversation most broadly conceived: conversation in the presence of others within a community of trust; conversations with the insights of authors, artists, philosophers of the physical and metaphysical, and acquaintances; and with these dialogues to draw upon, our conversations with ourselves and the sublime.
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About the Book
'Where there is no vision, the people perish ...' (Proverbs 29:18)
These words, written perhaps three thousand years ago, are more vibrantly important today than ever. We are certainly 'living in interesting times,' according to the ancient Chinese blessing. But it seems that every truly profound point in human evolution comes with many possible outcomes, and every great uncertainty can be perceived as a vista of opportunity, or a chasm of dread. And whether we are able to proceed into the next century excited by the invitation of opportunity, on the one hand, or paralyzed by fear on the other, makes all the difference. It makes all the difference in the quality of our individual lives, and in the communities and futures we create. This is indeed the best of all times to be alive, and the rising generations should see it as their birthright to not simply repair the insults of modern life, but to envision new and more brilliant dreams and to bring them into fruition. The key to this disposition to living, however, is that one cannot simply proclaim it. We don't have the luxury of insisting on a view of life that we don't actually feel to be true. And there are plenty of authoritative voices ready to insist that, at the end of the twentieth century we have matured from the humanist ideal of man being the measure of all things to, as writer and teacher Catherine Stimpson has put it, 'men are nothing but things to be measured.'
In order for us to live an intelligent and spiritual life, and reach an appreciation for the miracle of our existence and our ability, indeed our calling, to envision, we must first understand how we arrived at our present collision of powerful insights and fear of those insights. We have arrived at an historical juncture where envisioning must be embraced not by a few intellectual or spiritual leaders, but by the many. What are the essential qualities of envisioning? How can we, as communities and cultures, transcend the informational noise that keeps our attention focused on problems rather than possibilities? How can we best invite the rising generations into the creative act of remaking our world? How can we incorporate essential learning into new wisdom paths, without drowning in either academic or religious dogma? Is it possible that storytelling might be the most human of practices and a pathway for visions? These are the questions that inform the journey you are invited to take in The Persistence of Visions.
This book provides new lines of sight on the most important themes of late twentieth century culture and our possible futures. Educators, religious and political leaders, community and urban planners, and anyone who seriously reflects on society and meaning will want to consider these insights on the nature and power of envisioning.
The subject matter of this book spans many fields, and may appeal to readers approaching envisioning from disparate vantage points. This book takes up various lines of inquiry and their trajectories intersect with writings of other contemporary authors whose work might be familiar to readers. In order to alert readers to congruences, I shall mention several dominant themes and approaches in this book along with other writers whom I find compelling in these themes and whose work has informed my own.
1. Spirituality: I urge the essential nature of spiritual reality (as opposed to materialist 'flatland') in tones similar to Ken Wilber (The Marriage of Sense and Soul), and Thomas Moore (The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life), as well as the writings of Thich Nhat Hahn, Lex Hixson, Stephen Mitchell, and David Steindl-Rast.
2. Stories: I work from a presupposition that storytelling is one of the most powerful human experiences, and that the stories we create are the most significant determiners of meaning and satisfaction in life. Here, I am most impressed by Dan P. McAdams and his book The Stories We Live By: personal myths and the making of the self, as well as Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach: exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life.
3. Choosing Futures: By this I mean that we have the ability to reach beyond our circumstances and create futures consciously, according to our best insights, both intellectual and spiritual. Authors of importance to me here include Robert Bellah, et. al. (The Good Society), Winnifred Gallagher (The Power of Place), Francis Moore Lappe, and Ellen Ullman (Close to the Machine: technophilia and its discontents).
About the Author
Nelson R. Kellogg is currently an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, part of the California State University system. He has a Ph.D. in the history of science from Johns Hopkins University, but has taught broadly in humanities, mathematics and physics. In his present position he has had the opportunity to develop and teach many courses that have reflected personal areas of interest, including 'Space, Time, and Culture,' 'Machine as Metaphor,' 'Biography of a Community,' 'Anatomy of a Virtual Community,' 'Inventing the Protean Self,' 'Aspects of Envisioning,' and 'Utopias and Monocultures.'
Dr. Kellogg has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, and from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He also works as a consultant to educational and various other organizations.