looking for the missing vernacular

[Skip Zilla]

I woke up this morning with "making things" (which led to "making sense" and "making lives") on my mind. Is it just me that wonders why fewer of us create the world actively which we inhabit, but instead comply with training to follow directions and expectations--passively and unpoetically and logistically--which command servitude of us that at bottom is our now accustomed view of how the world works? Even the sentences we speak like the things in our lives that as time passes go unnoticed and are used inattentively, are increasingly hand-me-downs already coined and supposedly beyond our ken to make our own. The original designs of our sentences which were born so abundantly when we were kids learning to speak reality from scratch we learned in time to stop allowing to emerge as we lessened our attentiveness and had enough "reality" already packed away in storage.

Combining with these morning wonderings was a leftover curiosity I've had about how humans have constructed their buildings of homes and public places and sea-going ships for millennia from the timber they cut from forests available to them. The technology of wood construction and the human civilizations it has sustained remind me that "manufacture" of the structures of ones' lives was the way minds and cultures were also made--for example, the Romans would have had no empire without instrumental wood constructions of all kinds from battle-winning siege machinery to inventions for the production of domestic goods.

Now a third thread began to weave through this cloth of amused thinking: the fact that we the people don't really know how to sustain our lives without all the experts working to profit from engineering a world in which we know and do less creatively on our own and can't prevent our collapse as civilized communities when we're cut off from our dependencies on their top-down schemes and on our own consumptive addictions. A whole socioeconomic and civilizing system is not there for us to lay for ourselves a foundation to commonly achieve the cultural dream of developing light-gaining meadows of community in which our better natures flower and seed a next generation of hope and fulfillment.

I found an interesting article at Wikipedia which feeds the fire of my thinking on these matters. It's titled vernacular architecture, and it's section on what "vernacular" means to the development of culture in a localized human/environmental ecology is closely allied to what else I've been thinking about this morning and to my sense that we need to find our own voices as "we the people" to reclaim our birthright to be truly ourselves.

(This was originally posted this morning at my (other) blog.)

[Skip Zilla]

Michael, I certainly didn't intend to convey that what I was thinking a few days ago was novel; your Montana Heritage Project realizes much of what I was imagining we consider doing to form educational ends with local means. We're experiencing painfully now what has been likely for years to be the result of our living lives which are consumptively materialistic and mistake an addictiveness to thirty-second bites of newness with the enjoyable excitements of engaging wholeheartedly and wholemindedly in the wonders at hand--especially the persons who may either enrich us with the heritage of the stories (muthos) of who we are and how we got here (literally "here" as where we're presently located), or dispel the scaled-eyed ignorance when heritages turns into incurious fundamentalisms of true believers who are prevented from seeing what is, in new ways with new lensing instruments in new explorations, enlighteningly compelling and disturbingly challenging at the same time. What I say about "vernacular education" sees ways of informing our lives as learners and doers (makers) with personal discoveries about realities at hand which haven't fully originated with any of us but have been conserved from the past for our benefit, and which open us to freshly reinterpreting what we think we know about ourselves and that localized world in which we live. Without the experiences of first-hand discoveries of the old or the new, which can (and do) incite our curiosities and imaginative ambitions and our want to communicate them among ourselves, our chances of living personally and mutually fulfilling lives are greatly diminished while our chances of being exploited in others more mean-spirited aims for us are increased. As we are about to enter a new year, I suggest we each and all take heed: be careful what far-away heaven you wish for (Dorothy), but hopeful for the one you have a hand in making yourself with those close to you.

[Ellen Pham]

I still think there may be more value in documenting the way Grandma Mable makes blueberry pie than in discussing a Wallace Stevens poem

Oh Michael, what a refreshing point of view! Sometimes I just long for some concrete, useful information, and for that to be valued as highly as the more purely "intellectual" thoughts and pursuits. I think we need that to center our personality, our values, and even our moral compass as human beings. So much of what we do is so far removed from real, grounded life. Whether you like her or not, Susan Kovalic spent quite a bit of energy emphasizing that children should learn about what surrounds them... for example, instead of learning about elephants and polar bears, early elementary grades should be studying (deeply) ants and squirrels or whatever wildlife and ecosystem they find themselves in- learning must be grounded somewhere, somehow, in a touchable, concrete reality.

[Ellen Pham]

Hi Skip- I just had a discussion on EFL that centered on the ways some basic facts about women's lives are discounted and ignored, and we are expected to hide these parts of ourselves and our daily lives away somewhere, out of sight, but what is interesting to me in THIS testosterone story is that it doesn't so much focus on agression and sexual drive, but on the way the hormone affects other aspects of our personality, and what seems to even be our soul. So I don't want to scare people away from giving it a listen, there is no lecture (at all) to it, just a very interesting experience one man had when he had to live without the chemical for 4 months. For example, at the end of the segment he talks about how everything he saw was beautiful, equally beautiful, to everything else- but I don't want to give too much away : ).

[Michael Umphrey]

Some years ago I had similar thoughts, focused on the difference between commercial cultures and folk cultures. That led to about $8.5 million in grants to support what we called "Heritage Education"--linking kids to family and community and place that still survived, and in some places thrived, under a rather astonishing onslaught of stories, images, and music created by commercial systems that have increasingly abandoned any concern for what's good.

I still think there may be more value in documenting the way Grandma Mable makes blueberry pie than in discussing a Wallace Stevens poem, but to see why requires about three paradigm shifts away from the mainstream in education, which makes talking about it in schools almost a form of derangement.

Still, it's a sublime way to live and work.

[Skip Zilla]

Ian, there is something deeply at the heart of education which is a matter of putting things into your own words or those of the group which shares in what you learn and do with what's real for you. Maybe there should be a new meme for educators to catch and spread: vernacular education. It would be an education with strong links to a cultural locality in which the real difference you make to a common good is in terms you speak for yourself and understand in their direct applicability and more immediate benefit to others you know and love.

[Skip Zilla]

Great new thread you've added to this awareness of connections, Ellen. You're reminded me of all the various vernaculars and cult(ure)s of (subordinated) women everywhere around the world and in nearly all civilizations historically--Eastern and Southern as well as Western and Northern. Domestication and subordination--male slaves, women, and children--and politically subdominant peoples, "conquered" or supplaced in one way or another--all with a languages of realities which are their own. The questions of invasion and migration and meeting, often with strong undertones of sexual unions, whether forced or agreeable across political/cultural boundaries. But the biochemistry of testosterone has been and continues to be at play behind our backs in the human doings which shape our personal and collective lives, especially in matters of subordination and servitude. Thanks, Ellen, for providing another theme to a symphony playing which we most often can't or will not hear.

[Ellen Pham]

What a good invitation, Skip... this is what I was thinking about last night, before I got sleepy by the fire. I was trying to relate an excerpt from a This American Life show about testosterone to the discussion. This is an interview with a man who, for medical reasons, went without testosterone for 4 months. He talks about how this affected him, especially spiritually. Maybe we could fit this in as architecture of our bodies, and what we are in some ways slaves to?

[Ian Carmichael]

Heady stuff in this globalised world; what can we contribute to the search for our vernacular? (I am thinking educationally - there is a great push for standards, replication, 'one size fits all' administration. As the 'local' slaves what of our own voice can we bring to bear? The vernacular has often been seen as subversive, a threat to empire, and language wars have been waged in every nation - Scots and Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Saxon, native American languages, etc. And, of course vernacular is threatening, for usually the empire doesn't understand it, and can only permit or deny it. It would rarely attempt to learn it.
And so it could go - what is the vernacular for our crops? I have a friend compiling a huge database of food plants - able to restore local plants to their proper place in the local food structure, properly placing our food sources in their context of biodiversity.
And to return to Skip's beginning - what is the vernacular for our architecture? Tasmania has some mighty, wonderful barns, built for the harsh European winters that never came. Some wonderful Georgian buildings with unshaded windows, set to swelter in the hot summers that did come.

[Skip Zilla]

Ellen, it occurs to me that needn't stay on the sidelines with the wealth of life experience and learning you have. I'm feeling a little outclassed by two brilliantly insightful and beneficent minds--one contributing, the other lurking!

[Skip Zilla]

Thanks so much, Laura, for adding an intriguing semantic twist that enhances an even better understanding the connections I'm making among historical, linguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, political, and even geographical threads of a human story that is as old as the oldest civilizations--even millenia earlier than the Roman--and as new as globalized challenges we face today in transforming dysfunctional societies into a vibrant diversity of localities which speak their vernaculars but share in a common political ethos of making peace and prosperity. I'm always amazed when highly intelligent folks insist that the world is newer than it's ever been--that history has few lessons that we need heed-- when what I hear is largely a "vernacular" (metaphorically speaking) we've developed in our post-modern times, which takes its place among a succession of others that have spoken a universal language which is unmistakably and naturally human. The continuity is compelling real, and we ignore at our peril what we might learn from it to do to carry ourselves forward together as a species.