My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #2, July, 1996

DIXIELAND THOUGHT

Someday I'm going to have to retire, leaving the university that has been my home for nearly twenty years now. And when I do, what I'm going to miss, more than anything else, is the conversation. One thing about academics--their stock in trade is talking. They read a lot, they know a lot, and they think for a living. And they love to tell you all about it--they are born explainers of the complicated.

This is refreshing, because most of us live within an impoverished conversational landscape. Women talking with other women talk mostly about children, relationships, and what dorks men are. Men in conversation with other men, I am told, talk mostly about sports and cars and their jobs, and what dorks politicians are.

But at a university, your table at lunch might include an art professor, a priest, a historian, the theater lighting director, a librarian and a vice-president for something or other. You name a topic--they aren't going to agree on it; they all know different things about it. You mention Bosnia, and the feminist talks about rape as an instrument of suppression; the art professor speaks with immense sadness about the architectural treasures destroyed in the bombardment of Sarajevo; the historian tells you about the 700 years of conflict between the ethnic groups; the political scientist tells you how the politicians spent years reminding Serbs and Croats and Muslims how much they hated each other; the professor who spent a year in a cultural exchange program teaching in Yugoslavia tells you about what it was like to live amid the escalating tensions.

You know, a really good conversation works like Dixieland jazz. Someone states a theme, and all the different instruments take turns picking the theme up and playing around with it. No two statements of the theme are alike, because some of us are saxophones or tubas or flutes, and some of us are rhythm instruments. We all have our little set pieces, but we listen to each other, changing our performance to respond to how the other members of the group have played it. Like Dixieland, the performers are having even more fun than the audience. It's a wonderfully generative act, that makes us all articulate ideas we had no idea we thought; when a conversation is really rolling, it can be as satisfying, in its own way, as sex.

But if a large group conversation generates ideas, it doesn't do much to help you explore them. Conversation is, after all, a social act, with social agreements--like the rule that everybody gets a turn. Typically, it will float from idea to idea, each one briefly developed then dropped.

Someone who insists on working an idea through all its dimensions during a group conversation is a social boor. It's like the dixieland band got taken over by a tuba player who thinks this lovely piece of music is really a tuba concerto--other performers can supply the bass line, but he gets to carry the theme, do all the variations, and show off like crazy on the cadenzas. The music is now all about him rather than us.

So you come back after a really good group conversation filled with partially developed ideas. It just takes a different kind of conversation to explore those ideas, test them for truthfulness, examine their usefulness, place them in context with what we already know.

This kind of testing of ideas is not as common as you might think. When higher education is the ticket of admission to the middle class, you get an awful lot of students who treat education like chickenpox--you go where it is, you catch it, and, maybe, you're immune to it for the rest of your life. These are people who sit in the front row, write down everything the teacher says, and remember it just long enough to spew it back on an exam. But the genuinely educated people are the ones who listen to the words, and say: "Yes! Because, this, this, this, this and this." And they list the supporting evidence they found in their own knowledge and experience. Or they say "No! That's wrong! Because, this, this, this, this and this." Or better yet, they say, "That's interesting. I wonder if that has anything to do with this?" As they make connections in their mind between what they know already and what they learn, they make the knowledge different, and they make it profoundly their own.

This kind of thinking requires a different kind of conversation. Maybe with just one other person who also wants to explore that idea with you, someone who will challenge your ideas, and supply different perspectives and information (like my economist son who keeps dragging statistics and the real world in to spoil some of my loveliest ideas). Or maybe just a conversation with yourself.

And the best tool for a conversation with yourself is writing. When you put a thought down in print, it has the decency to stay put on the page and let you examine it at length. Does it make sense? Are the ideas in logical order? Does it square with your understanding and knowledge of the world? Is it a useful idea? Will it help you deal with your life and your problems?

Conversation is to writing as Dixieland is to a string quartet.

That is why I love having this column to write. Over the years I have toyed with a whole lot of ideas. I've had all these one and two paragraph ideas that I never really explored at any length. The column forces me to finish the thinking process that all those wonderful conversations started. And though I may sometimes sound very definite, not to say opinionated, my columns are still me in the middle of a process of exploration. When my readers write and argue with me, they force me either to do a better job of explaining my opinion, or they help me change it.

In theory, of course, there's no reason why I couldn't have been writing all along. But if there's nobody to read it, you don't bother. If there's no deadline to meet, it's just another one of those things you're going to get around to someday, like organizing the family photo album.

So I'm very grateful. To all those interesting people at my university, who provide the Dixieland. And to the London Mall [where this column originally appeared], for making me turn it into chamber music.

It's not somber, profound, Beethoven-type chamber music, to be sure. What I do is definitely wind ensemble--a little frothy, a bit frivolous, but still structured to be listened to from start to finish.

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