Talk to Wilkins' Candidates April 1993
Gerald L. Smith
I am delighted to be asked, or allowed, to speak to the Wilkins Candidates again. After last year when I let the cat out of the bag as it were by taking as my theme the nature of play in the course of which I disclosed that the VC plays with trains, I wasn't sure that I would be invited back. Then there was the year I interpreted Sewanee as a Seussian System noting its perennial nature as a place, like all Seussian places, where things never quite work right. And another year, I really thought I had blown it. I was supposed to be right here and do this lecture--and I forgot--mainly because I was home putting up my flyrod and cleaning trout since I had spent all of Sunday afternoon on the river. I might have forgotten, but Al Newell didn't forget--Al Newell is like my grandmother's god: HE never forgets--not names, not hometowns, not gpa's, not SAT's, not even your flight numbers. Al found me. Fortunately, I had written my speech.
Well, I am delighted to be here, as I am delighted to be at Sewanee. When I was your age and on my Wilkins-equivalent weekend at UVA, I could never have imagined that I would be here nor the winding road that got me here. It was a road that took me through chemical engineering and mathematics--and a 100% full pay scholarship at UVA--to English and Religion at the University of Richmond and no scholarship and a mountain of student loans I had to pay back. It was a road that led me in and out of five schools and six degree programs until I finally came to rest on the doorstep of Sewanee at the still tender age of 26 with a brand new Ph.D. in religion from Duke. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. Where else could I have ever found a place that would let me teach religion, take biology and computer science courses, go flyfishing with my students, play with firetrucks, shoot with the police, fly with the science profs doing aerial photos, live in a world of books and maps, and get to dress up in funny gowns and lead academic processions--or hijack the Good Morning America bus? Nowhere but Sewanee. It's a blast.
It is a blast--and it is also the best liberal arts college in America. [And they don't pay me to say that.] The claim may seem excessive, but I don't know of another place like this: I don't know of a place that for so small a program has turned out the number of eventual Ph.D.'s as our Chemistry department, that consistently gets more than 90% of its pre-meds into medical school--including now six religion majors; I could go on with this sort of thing, but it would not be the truth--not because all the things I could say wouldn't be true, but because it wouldn't be the right truth. What makes Sewanee the kind of place it is is not what our graduates do, it is who they are. Sewanee is not about careers and jobs--important as we all know these to be. Sewanee is about life and vision, about knowledge and action, about sense and meaning. It is about who you are and where you stand and what you are going to do. Sewanee doesn't train you for anything, doesn't prepare you for anything, makes no guarantees or promises. It will give you only this: a place and a chance. A place to be and find yourself and know who you are and what has made you, and a chance, based upon the most critical process of inquiry and informed learning, to make a difference in changing this world for goodness and truth and justice.
If you come here, you will find that much of what we do is concerned with the nature and interpretation of texts--of all kinds of texts: classical texts, medieval texts, novels, poems, operas, paintings; and other kinds of texts--statistical patterns in voter behavior, historical sequence and causality, those marvelous mathematical texts called fractals, along with forest succession patterns, and sedimentation of streams and meander patterns of rivers. The whole idea of what a 'text' is is currently much up in the air in academia along with the whole question of which texts are appropriate for study, whether the canon of texts for liberal education is closed, along with the often bitter question of the correct way of interpreting or understanding texts. There is a fancy word for the interpretation of texts: it is called hermeneutics--the theory of interpretation. For a few minutes tonight, I would like us to engage in a kind of after dinner hermeneutic exercise: the interpretation of a text. This is to whet your appetite for the kind of thing we do at Sewanee--but let me warn you, not all your professors here will use the same kind of texts I use--and they certainly won't tell you not to take notes but to bring coloring books to class. [That only happens in the Religion department.]
My title for this evening's talk is: "Camo [camoflage], Waldo, and the Law of the Excluded Middle: The metaphysics of identity and conformity." Or, How to be Outstanding without Standing Out on the Wilkins Weekend.
My Text: The Collected Works [Gesammeltewerke, for you German buffs] of Martin Handford, better known to your little brothers and sisters and cousins as Where's Waldo, The Great Waldo Search, and Find Waldo Now. Since their publication beginning in 1987, these books have quickly won a large [and lucrative] place on the bookseller's shelves--but more importantly a place in the imagination of children [and would-be children--including certain college professors who shall remain if not nameless at least decorous when discussing such matters!] everywhere.
Now you may be thinking, "Here I am on the most important interview weekend of my academic career, I am at one of the best liberal arts schools in the country, and the lecture is about a children's comic book...what's going on here?" Well you might ask. In justification of my selection of text, I would only submit that probably few books you read here--or at any university you attend--will captivate your minds as much as the books of your childhood. Children's books [and their TV adaptations] are among the most important vectors--avenues--of values instruction you are exposed to. What child or adult child for that matter can be immune to the lesson of The Lorax in Seuss's book? You probably have learned more good ecology from Seuss and bad ecology from Bambi and Walt Disney than from any sources you will study the rest of your life. And who could not be mellowed by Pooh? What child reading Pooh is not beguiled by Pooh's characteristic genial survivorship in a world fraught with all manner of happenstances? Who has not learned lessons of loyalty from Charlotte's Web? Emotional bonds as deep as any ever uttered in grasping a Velveteen Rabbit? [Once here, in a very serious fire where some students were dangerously trapped in the upper floor of a burning cabin and feared for their lives, one of them afterwards stood sobbing in the yard, holding her stuffed bunny and choked out, "I want my Daddy." Bunnies and Teddies are very serious business.] What child among us has not had A Nighmare in My Closet? Who has not journeyed at least in that most wonderful of childhood vehicles, imagination, to Where the Sidewalk Ends or longed to go Where the Wild Things Are? And who has not learned just a little non-violence from Ferdinand? And there are probably one or two among you who are thinking, if you could just say it out loud, of The Little Train That Could.
Children's books are our first instruction in who's who and what's what in the world--providing a familiar inventory of the world. The better ones always tell us who we are, where we stand, and what we have to do in life--thus supplying the essential function of religion in every society: to help people sort out how they fit into the cosmic scheme of things. Often, as adults, we carry with us a sense of world order imaged to us in the stories told us as children, a sense of order deeper than our ability to name it but as secure in our adulthood as was our innocence in childhood. The stories of these books go with us even when we think we have forgotten them, but sometimes with students and adults who have either forgotten too much or learned too much, we have to re-educate them. People sometimes think that I, perhaps because of my gray hair, keep children's books in my office for those times when my old students drop by with their children. Not at all--they are there for the likes of some of you who need a bit of a refresher course in innocence and wonder and free thinking once in a while. Some days before going to class, just to get in the right mind set, I read Where the Wild Things Are or Harold and the Purple Crayon, and I am ready to teach.
So, "Where's Waldo?" Perhaps the question should be--for those of you--all you faculty and staff, and for many of you candidates out there who were already just a little too old when these books appeared--"Who is Waldo?" A quick summary of Waldo then: Waldo is the delightful creation of a young English cartoonist, Martin Handford, who frankly admits to daydreaming a lot in school. Waldo is a young man with hiking stick, backpack, and armload of books who sets out to lose or almost lose himself in the world. He travels from place to place--you can't quite tell whether he is on vacation, fleeing for his life, or just merely lost--always smiling. Along the way, he goes from town to town, to the beach and the mountains, to track meets and museums. He goes to the zoo, the mall, and the theme park. In Volume Two his liberal education begins as he travels in time and place with an armload of books, visiting the world of cavemen and Egyptians, pagan Rome and the Vikings, goes on a Crusade and to a Medieval Town, finally visiting the world of the Aztecs and Medieval Japan. His education is both historical and practical, interdisciplinary and multicultural--and not a bad curriculum for any school.
In Volume Three he eventually hooks up with the Wizard Whitebeard. Then his adventures really begin. This is like graduate school--the curriculum is not so much fun. In fact, it begins to be a bit scary. He encounters, in order, the Gobblin Gluttons, Battling Monks, Carpet Flyers, Great Ball-Game Players, Ferocious Red Dwarves, Nasty Nasties, Fighting Foresters, Deep-Sea Divers, Knights of the Magic Flag, Unfriendly Giants, the Underground Hunters, only to end up in the most terrifying land of all--the Land of Waldos where everyone looks exactly alike--except for Waldo himself who has lost one shoe. My favorite in this volume is the land of the Fighting Foresters--green-haired women who live in trees and fight off the evil technological black knights aided by the trees and animals of the forest and a wonderful weapon called "The Living Mud." All in all a place not unlike Sewanee.
Oh, yes. There is something else about Waldo: he wears blue jeans, hiking shoes, and a red-and-white striped shirt and what Handford calls a "bobble" hat. If you have seen one of the books you understand why it is necessary for him to wear the red-and-white shirt, his most "outstanding" feature. In the blizzard of artistic detail--and zany situations--on each page of the Waldo books, there is so much color, confusion, line, and curve, and other red-and-white garments, that even with his red-and-white shirt, the task--which is the whole point of the books and the fun of children--is to find Waldo! Waldo has, much like college students, a wonderful way of losing his possessions and books, so the books end with homework--to go back through the pictures and find the things Waldo has lost. You can spend hours with Waldo.
The Waldo books present us with a kind of hermeneutic problem, a problem of interpretation. While the prose text is simple, the meaning of the imagery and the encryption of motif in a screen of distracting activity make the books hard to sort out. But that is what we are about in the liberal arts: not just the translation or reading of texts, but the decipherment of sense so that we can say what the book is about, so that we can understand it. The interpretation of childrens' books is made all the more difficult because of the absence of a plausible literary critical apparatus and, more importantly, the absence of formal categories for the structural analysis of symbolic motifs. Recent discussions and controversies about the nature of texts, however, has at least broadened the range of critical interpretation and supplied many new techniques of textual interpretation.
Now how do we assess Waldo--that is, is there a model, an ideal, a type, by which we can measure him? For instance is he the Kierkegaardian "knight of faith" sustained by an existential leap of faith into the unknown trusting that his act of commitment will be honored by the justice of god in a redemptive universe? Or is Waldo a kind of Everyman in red and white stripes? Or a messianic redeemer? Or the mindless vagrant--like college students on spring break? Or is he an innocent perpetually abroad? Is he the Ugly American? Or naive American? Or is he an Hemingwayesque existentialist hero--a sort of Nick Adams of the Playground on quest for authentic selfhood amidst the banality of endless confusing detail? I won't answer this yet.
Let me suggest that what we have in Handford's books is the perennial philosophical/metaphysical problem of identity and difference: when is something what it is A=A [identity] or not A#X [difference]? In social theory we call this the problem of individualization vs. socialization. How to belong and fit in yet be yourself and know your own mind. This is the problem of teenage girls in the mall: how to get seen [and try out new outfits, lipstick, and ear piercing] while retaining your dignity as a person [and avoiding your mom]. Boys, of course, don't have this problem at the mall--that's because they're still at the stage of drooling on the video games in the arcade. At Sewanee, we have a much more acute version of the Waldo scene: its called Homecoming. Talk about a conflict of individuation vs. socialization! How to be prettier than your mom without making her mad or looking truly bizarre. Homecoming makes me think there should really be a gender opposite of Waldo--Waldette, Waldine, perhaps?
We might describe this problem as the "Waldo syndrome": How to fit in and stand out at the same time: This is the schizophrenia of the interview process [and of liberal education for that matter]: how to be outstanding without standing out--basically in this Wilkins weekend we ask you to do something that in other circumstances would get you committed: we ask you to perform a simple act of insanity: to be and not be two different things at the same time. Is it too much to suggest that ever since you left home to come up here you have felt--quite literally in your gut--the awful contradiction of being and non-being, like you were being torn in half, part of you wanting to run away as fast as you can and the other, like Billy Idol's demented southern belle, screaming "More, More, More"?
We might also describe the Waldo Syndrome as the problem of camoflage vs. anonymity. Inner vs. outer, the Quest for self vs. the Problem of Society. At Sewanee you will be asked to [and pressured to] do a lot of fitting in--especially about clothes: blazers and kakhis; smiles, straight teeth, neat hair and perfume; creativity in a paper vs what everybody says the prof wants. You will also have the problem of finding anonymity=total camoflage, when you need it: how to get away, find private, quiet space for yourself on a campus where there are no secrets: Sewanee meets the classic definition of a small town: the kind of place where people who know you know each other. Where can you hide? nowhere! But does it matter? No. We are very tolerant here.
I would remind you of this--whether we are speaking here of the adventures of Waldo or the trip that is Sewanee--these issues may appear only psychological or social, but their root reaches all the way into our sleep at night: we are not talking about--this liberal education is not about--perfume and clothes and conformity: it is about the most fundamental issues of meaning in your life, about the most fundamental issues of meaning of life on a planet quickly being destroyed by the Evil Knights and Unfriendly Giants, and Underground Hunters, Nastie Nasties, and Gobbling Gobblins; it is about whether life itself makes sense or not and on what terms there might ever be--in your heart and in the way we live together--an end to that awful war within us between being and non-being.
The Waldo Syndrome may take many different forms. For some it may be the tension between your home/roots and the college and the world beyond: you sense but cannot say it yet, but most of you will never go home again. You will have good and happy lives, but unless you know who you are, you will carry within you that perpetual, sad shadow of longing and passing. For others of you, the Waldo Syndrome will be the tension of the insidiously subtle pull between college/peer values and your values, between your prof's ideas and your ideas. For a few, the Syndrome will manifest itself about the time you choose majors: do I really want to be a doctor or do I want to write poetry? For others it will be the sound of the fabric slowly tearing between your grandmother's world and her god and your brave new world and its god. As your education progresses, you may think you have to choose, but I argue here and now that if you do, if you choose, you will lose.
The choice is not either-or; it is how to do both--and it is doing both that requires a new context--a new metaphysic--for our thinking. So often education, and society gives us these matters as binary choices and we always end up settling for half truths--what the poet Elizabeth Sewell describes as the "curse that splits us into prose or verse." The alternative must be found in a new understanding of community--of the society of being in the world in which self and other are mutually grounded in what the chemist Polanyi called a "fiduciary commitment"--a framework of sustained, lived, belief and value as the basis of community. It is the community of the liberal arts college that today is the best model of this way of being in the world--and the best context for resolving the Waldo Syndrome.
You see, Waldo is in a double bind: if Waldo "fits in"= meshes totally into his background, he disappears; if, on the other hand, he is wholly different, he also disappears [though in a different way: he becomes so different he doesn't belong, doesn't fit in]. The middle ground of being-yourself-and-belonging requires a different worldview, a different metaphysic: a metaphysic of community which rejects the always false choice of self OR society. Sewanee is the kind of place where you have to confront the issue but you don't have to make the choice. That is why we call it liberal education--because it frees us from false choices.
Finally,
Remember the Instructions in The Great Waldo Search: "Wherever Waldo goes, he must find the single scroll. So where's the scroll?" the book asks. If you know the book, you will know that the scroll looks exactly like a diploma. Four years from now when you see me again for the last time officially and as Marshal I check your name in your final collegiate roll call, you will know where the scroll is: it will be in the hand of this man [point to VC] who will be waiting for you in the center of the chapel. Along the way, like Waldo, you may visit many exotic times and places; you will find the Wizard Whitebeard, and if, in good cheer, you persevere in you journey, in your pilgrimage, for Waldo is the eternal pilgrim, you will find the scroll. Good luck and Godspeed.
Oh, one more thing: next year's lecture will be entitled: "A Deconstructive Analysis of Little Rabbit Foo Foo: Gender, Weapons, and Easter Symbolism."