Description
 | (The Green Box), September 1934 Duchamp |
I have a friend, teacher, engaged in a project where her class is interviewing elderly people, both family and those they are meeting in an elder care setting and talking about their oral history, about their memories of key historical events and times. About their memories of not so key times too. About their memories of ideas students have prepare to explore. Questions they want answered from those who "lived the times." Witnesses to history. I've seen fantastic work on the holocaust in this same vein. When history breathes before us and shares these kinds of truth, we understand our roles in seeking justice and equity. We "know" things. It is a powerful teaching tool. I'm also seeing at my husband's District teachers working on projects that seek to archive oral histories so that it can represent something being investigated by the group 9different studies). The "perceptions" of the individuals of past times are usually inaccessible to the students....so this is a beautiful project, recording, and also creating "artifact" boxes as well. These are fascinating as they are like memory triggers or pieces that speak to a whole context, to something acquired through this process, shared understandings old to young, past to present into future. Her children ask about WW2, about Presidents but they also ask things like....information on childhood illness and they hear about children lost in times before medicines and care that we currently have.In another project like this I observed among many several years ago students at the highest point in San Diego interviewed tribal family members, elders, about "snow." So simple telling so much about climate changes in their 80 year time spans. And they follow threads they develop.
Oral history of course has many forms as students in her project re-interview as they gain understandings of the person. I would say generalizing they get more sophisticated about how to ask. Or how to listen. By recording the process they are afforded a distance to reprocess with different sets of lenses.
It is always fascinating to me when someone cares enough to share with you and engage you in meaningful conversation, allowing you insight into their life. Their perspectives. And in a way I realize as I write this engages us in working with students on this as a process in learning.
I would like to know more.
I am concurrently trying to build a project where a school collects recipes and the family traditions around this recipe, memories, called The Community Recipe Box. Building it on-line takes initial effort...but it is good work to do.The food as caring in the lives of the family. What does this food mean to you?I always ask, what food is your food? What comforts you?
As we share this we share about our lives. I suggested a look with students at this text to her because as we talked one issue her students do see along with this history in elders concerns about aging and people suffering dementia and Alzheimer's.
Somehow I was attracted to this book as it sat in a bookstore a number of years ago. 1995.
The Memory Box (Paperback)
by Mary Bahr (Author), David Cunningham (Illustrator)
In a very brief explanation a child is dealing with a grandparent declining with Alzheimer's. Together they are working on a "memory box" suggested because the ailing grandparent is sharply aware that their memory is soon going to be lost and thinking of preserving pieces as representation of important memories needed for the child. And in doing this "together" they are transferring the wealth of a life to the young person. In the story they are thinking people.... aware of the power of this process of acknowledging the truth of the disease and "containing it." Alzheimer's is going to steal away a defining human characteristic-your memory. And that is taken from everyone in the group of family and friends. A terrible sadness.
It is a process making this "memory box," responding to "help" in this nightmare. Hitting really a whole family that seems so important to me as a teacher, to find a way to help ease the time of accepting what is going on. Something in the concept or "idea" of this book can be adapted in teaching in so many ways. Often things spin out of our control in life and we are left only able to control how we respond. And this is a book about that.
Perhaps what you are really doing is teaching a "way." It suggests to me the value of embedding in this creative process, to give a human being and their family insights together about who they are and who they have been, a framework for understanding self and others.
I wish i had done this with my grandmother because though she told me so much it was hard for me to hold onto the pieces. Artifacts would have helped me. Drawing it would have helped me, journaling it, recording it would have helped me.
And it suggests a process to heal and/or at least deal with this loss of memory, the stolen mind that is Alzheimer's true tragic devastating feature.
I know. I have lived it..with my grand mom. To lose the mind, to lose the memory is beyond horrifying, it is a robbery of being. And for me this small book is about honoring and witnessing this. A way of responding to the suffering involved.
And we really do need to see suffering and respond.
I would also recommend this book...
The Hundred Penny Box (Picture Puffin Books) (Paperback)
by Sharon Bell Mathis (Author), Leo Dillon (Illustrator), Diane Dillon (Illustrator)
perhaps just as strongly, among my very favorites as a penny spurs the memories of each year it was collected, one of my favorite oral history suggesting books. And then for another kind of look at "box" this children's book has enormous oral history potentials as well....
Henry's Freedom Box (Hardcover)by Ellen Levine (Author), Kadir Nelson (Illustrator)
Today I have two kinds of connections to this "memory box" text. An artistic response, (teacher one) and personal one...oh that might be three.
Texts, good ones, " suggest" things to teachers, often that is how I bridge to class activities (what do they "do") and projects for children.
The Memory Box book resonates as my grandmother died in my care of Alzheimer's when I was in college. It was as if at a time in your life you are ready to expand, to find your dreams and horizons . Instead I had to take on this ...I can't exactly find a way to be articulate. It was very hopeless so I stayed as much as possible in the moment. It was downhill and it was destructive in many ways but I found if i stayed present, if I valued our time, if I looked for now, it worked.
Which maybe is why I am going back into classes.To gain more ways to speak my meanings. For now I am looking for some structures to talk to experiences and to see in different ways.
One connection for me here in my world now is the fact I teach children in poverty. I am the FRONTLINE. Many/most of my students are 1st generation immigrants, trying to learn a "new world" and I see them dealing with growing up in a hurry. I see them as thrust into things and knowledges of the "real world" what I would call the "hidden curriculum of world" .....these are very powerful kinds of experience. I'm called 'Sheltered Immersion' and you have no idea how the teachers in this designation should work to be a sheltering place. Often feeling a match on a frozen night.
It isn't a "protection" really at all for all that is going on. It is raw poverty. It is often brutal. It is often beyond me why the world walks by it. I see these things everyday. Many who often "judge them wanting in poverty " might well be on their knees with a trade in places. And through this I have learned that what we say and do, how we treat others, how we invest our days with meaning, how our compassion and eucation functions really is tested in the moment. I am "this", I am the "now."
Learned in part through those years i took care of in fumbling frailty(mine) my grandmom.
It is actually all about who we are with "now" and what we are called to do today...it is not even about how we fixate on our needs or our wishes, or our plans of our actions or manipulate events towards our desires..... as often behavioristic kinds of mechanisms propel us to "behave." (Not to discount that which means so much to so many in productive behavioral changes.) but in teaching.... For my work in teaching, as I have stated in writing before, if I have set the curriculum as demanded now in my world to what they call same page, paced, pre-determined.... this process precludes the ability to be in the here and now fully developing meaning, seeing opportunities to design learning, (and I value many perspectives around the skills needed for this and understand the work you must bring to that moment) I know what this now-ness means for my work. It is essential.
I had to experience each moment with my grandmother anew. No long term here, no tomorrow, no sense of forward to this it was backwards from there.This relates for me to oral interviewing because i think the skills sets seem to require the ability to hear the speaker and work together for shared understanding in the now.
My grandmum was losing capacities, I had to be relevant in the now without expectations.
Had to carry cheer and warmth into our days. I LEARNED the genius of the Merlin construct of aging backward, (the mentor to Author.) And see this as a relevant idea for a teacher to consider. No piece of writing could better define my relationship to that time my life than reading Arthur (and I read Steinbeck for that.) it wasn't fairy tale escape, I honestly saw myself dealing each day with her diminishing mind.
Needing her wisdom, she was a helpless child.
I was called upon TO REINVENT HER within myself. Full of all the mistakes of that rather disconcerting process, but just the same becoming maybe a bit of the best of her...becoming a person..... as she became a kid again-infantile, as a month old person. And that process taught me a lot and does relate to this children's book. And a box to hold our memories. It would include finding her in me. Me as that box.
Being human, how we are responding in a life context?
I think in a way these days with grandma were teaching me about not only the medical care world and its fantastic billion miles high fallacies and shortcoming, it revealed the gaping holes in the outreaching net of our the community and how alone we really were with this responsibility...it was opening my eyes to the value of this in what would be my life choices. I would hope now I have acted this. Hope I have taken seriously that which was about valuing human connection, capacities, efforts. I would hope I could center on another. Fully.
I would hope that I took time to develop understandings of other's perspectives.
From this stance I went into teaching. It does matter to me to work with students looking very hard at "what they make, say, do.".What I did was care for someone without negating this as having a lot to say to me about the brain, how minds/emotions work, how we are almost an animal self and how memory functions in this. How it is where we carry life force....it was a very revealing personal time of life. We could not hire anyone. I had to work, I never had a moment off. I learned about this too.
And I value it without resenting it. She was important to me. Her life force mattered to me. She came to this world worked as a nurse, served the poor, survived and raised a family. She exists to me in me. I am a way she is still here. I'm here because of her. And all I can do is work forward. As a memory box.
What was the hardest in many respects was nothing felt safe then, not well handled, no info to understand, read on Alzheimer's ...such poor access to resources which is why the net and this extension of mind is different a time really. This children's book to me was wonderful in that respect alone. It gave me an insight. As did ironically a very fine woman,
Rosalynn Carter. For a very good book on elder/parent care I recommend you read her.
But as I watched Grandmom's memory go I saw her grapple with the fears of this, with her unbelievable effort to tell her history, to remain her person. I saw her withdraw into the confusion and then be isolated within the last stages. Isolation is this disease. And from 18 or so into my early 20's it was devastating to watch in many ways because it was so powerfully destructive to someone in our family, who was loved, independent, someone that had great personal integrity. Hurt all around. And a fear by all to say this. So in many ways the early stages were ones of a kind of effort made by my grandmom to do what is suggested in the Memory Box book-reach out and pass along pieces of memory, to the young-me. Anecdotal records of "what was."
This aided me in gathering my sense of self.
I would connect this then also as another connection to work I did in art school at that time...where in a way what I studied in art, English(poetry/literature), talked to my life at home. I saw, knew and studied several artists over time engaged in making "art"ifact boxes. I recall a college sculpture project to create "fetish" boxes. Speaking to the box construct quite without conscious recognition...I knew he had a kink bent, but this was also a feature of those times too. I would say we have buried much of the open dialog to these primal forces within us now. With a daughter in college I think i prefer she not encounter this.
In my fetish box, which was no box, (though I placed it in a tiny silk suitcase.... )I made a kitten from a ball of fluff from a bush in my yard. It was contained within a form made from honeysuckle vines twisted into cat. Took me about ten minutes. Looking back I realize what it said to the audience. Lawson kept it. But to me my real cat Bootsie, who was dear to me and was the model, was the real subject of a kind of fetish. I explained nothing. I've learned over the years at least in visual arts and poetry and much of the rest of the time that explaining self is a waste of time. Anyway, it was read quite another way. It was, I guess, suggestive.
I learned a lot about what people bring to art, writing, to works made. And that was valuable. I would suggest something similar often happens in designing teaching, and that we can work towards recognizing this. We hold many wrong headed or missed perceptions. In my case sited , who cares. But it was embarrassing. Rather blind of me I suppose.
Creating boxes arose in art, in artists who decided art was a process of designation(dada), selection.....of the role of artist in collecting and presenting and naming this as the meaning. This is nothing to go through lightly. For as we bring to something our "intellect" looking, our choices, our naming and our attention so this in ever widening circles of influence we are in created frames which are shared as experience/understanding of our times...one would need to understand how this functions for me, as a meme process? I think so. This art then a cycle of meaning. I select this, contain it, it is then interpreted, remade, re-seen...it becomes a working understanding, expanding, influencing others, giving way to sharing it as shared value. Artist role as "seer". They do as Duchamp said, look at seeing. How we see. Judith Greene talked to me last night of reflexive practice. Absolutely.
Duchamp's The Green Box holds all his assimilated written thinking about the idea of what I see as a very important process in his art making, in thinking about the "art". Related here as I think of creating memory boxes to hold meanings representing a person/life. All their "time" in a set of artifacts chosen as sign posts.
In many art situations in the 20th century both for the evocative nature of the artifact and for the suggestion of its "story" related to a human or "individual collection" or selection of items and relation between them-you find meanings....trails....pieces of puzzles. A poetic connection.
Poetry.
We've seen boxes, pieces, created after major shocking disasters as ways individuals talked to the lost of someone/the horror of the experience/a kind of active stance really or the telling of their trauma. In fact one might argue the AIDs quilt as a flat 2D type of "box" to hold the essence of the lost one to the disease that should not be.In it's enormity we realize the scale of the lost but in a very personal way...and sense the impact of all of those that come together to make the memorial square. It is this above all that made me see how art could weave us together to "talk" to something like I experienced with my grandmother. We will all grow old and die and as i read from a friend it is a journey, yes, and often as horrible as the pangs of birth. And we carry it, not our mother.
As I saw when writing, story, oral history, artifact boxes, triggers for humans sharing and expressing care these are our OUR RESPONDING CHOICES. We can teach this. And we must/should teach this.
In this way this book holds connections to allow students, persons, to share out their own connection. It suggests.
In the disease of Alzheimer's one thing lost is communication, so in this box pieces that relate to significant memories are kept/communicated. They are held there as they slip through the fingers of mind. his you must understand is a very important thing the author was able to put together......it speaks to how the disease blows you to pieces. If I were to be creating a box or set of stories, or if I were making on-line presence or selecting to share with a person myself as a way of remaining....how might that "look." (Well I'm spending a good bit of energy doing this.) Why would anyone care?
Look at blogging, at work in the forms I see on-line, in art, in the lives of those I know.... you see a vast desire to preserve our story. Story projects, oral histories, the passing of this to the young frame so much of what compassionate communities do, facilitate. It is very healthy. It is a process of building frames and building if you will "boxes" to allow human codification of "what matters".
I just finished reading "I Am A Strange Loop" which I recommend.
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In it the author is talking about losing his wife suddenly to undetected brain cancer. He talks about "her" remaining within the memory of those around her. A kind of me in them. I would contend that the artifact creation of the kind suggested by this children's book with a "box" of things to trigger a story or memory, is in keeping with his writing on this person "living on." With the ability to link us still with someone who is dying, this was why I began to write. A kind of box, a symbol system to create a sharing of me. I was ill and wanted my children to know me in a different way. It assisted me in dealing with fears, finding personal voice, in feeling more able and more centered. Responding .
Today a student of mine was hit by a car, a horrible and devastating thing. He is six and ran apparently far away and in a dangerous way into cars. He will recover. He has bolted before. And he would not know how to be safe, he is impulsive. But said to me days end he was going to family he saw and bolted to a boy we thought his brother with babysitter, as he was dismissed. Of all the days in working where I create our shared story and records and hold pieces, know memories, this of course is just extremely awful. Just beyond me. Worst. Unthinkable.
I remained staying up tonight in worry about this.
One of my jobs will be to talk about this child. Help others..... another teacher calling late in evening about my student.... as upset, worried as I. We don't really now yet...I thought about a class creating a box for worries as I once had a worry box for my girls. Thought too about once my daughter made for me for mom's day a Mom's box that held things I might need...with a little paper heart inside and other visual representations of how a human copes. What can we do?
I was thinking of how we gift in this way really. Sending to another a book or a thing like music when we really might be sending just a bit in lieu of self, a representation of us, stand there with them....we are there with you. We think of you as a you...within our minds, hearts we stand with you. We do not run or hide. And as I stand in my role as teacher with students facing this accident with my kids....oh it will be a very difficult thing...sad... I was thinking that we might talk through making an artifact box for him. We might put things in it so that our student can heal, our kindness represented how? Things to represent our worry, our good thoughts, our sense of human acknowledging of his nightmare, his fear, his ordeal. On other levels certainly we know humans fear this "unknown" and the darkness. In my room I am going to place a box on his desk for us when we need to to contribute a written card, verse, toy, a piece of the day to take to my student. A box. Our heartsongs.
This expanded for me into ways to adapt it to other situations and needs. Which is the creative adaptive role of "teacher." So from box, to oral history, to art and making, naming we find ourselves striving to connect to community to find ways to respond to the tough days, to look at the moments as value. To make selections of our Pieces that speak to us of our core strands, to help the young to know life and to collect our wisdom as well into a box to contain our humanity.
And shed the tears we know and our laughter too.
This is why.
I would ask for your prayers and thoughts for my student. I would ask for your positive look at the moments is a gift to us to connect our lives. A box.
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