Tuesday, July 13, 2010

More Draft Video Commentary


Continued from previous...
Still, in the way that video-conferencing beats a 12-hour plane trip, I figure giving people the opportunity to watch the movie is better than nothing.
3:15-10:14
I tell a long story centering on my time at Maclean’s during the Montreal Massacre
To my co-editor and me this is the most powerful story I tell in all the nine hours of footage. In seven minutes it encapsulates everything I am working against in terms of the accepted ideas and mores of our culture. I was going to use it as the very first scene but realized I needed something more hopeful and positive to begin. Still, it is the first main chunk of real matter: that encapsulation and me telling some of my story to get at truth grounds the whole film thematically and stylistically. From the expectation that I go to university to be “successful” to the heartlessness of ego-driven work environments and resulting adult ennui to “harmless” sexual advances in the workplace to idiotic either-or debates designed to entrench the status quo (e.g. the “debate” about whether Marc Lepine was a madman vs. men committing violence against women is socially sanctioned, as if both aren’t substantially true and there isn’t more to say).
University/Academia: I say: “I had no idea why I was there,” i.e. at university. I graduated in 1983 and couldn’t wait to get out. I didn’t have many words for my revulsion, just a marked lack of connection with the work I was expected to do and distaste for the machinations of the Philosophy Department where my then-boyfriend was a favored Ph. D. candidate much envied by his peers. I had the naïve idea that people in philosophy should have learned to be nice to each other!
Almost 30 years later I am in a similar situation. This time I am enrolled in university to get a credential so that I can continue to teach at the college level, rather than to please my parents and follow my socio-economic tribe. I am vastly more distressed by my current experience because I am now 48 years old, a woman of experience, consciousness, depth, and intelligence—a teaching award-winner even—and what is meaningful to me is dismissed by simple virtue of the parameters of the institution. A grown-up has almost no agency in the Education faculty, yet we think we are educating children to function in an extremely complex world. I wonder if the philosophers are being nice to each other yet.
Recently in a class I took for my M.Ed. the professor sent out a questionnaire. One of the lines was: “Education is…” We were meant to fill in the blank. I wrote “Education is: fucked. I do understand how history has shaped it and how much education has given to the world. But earthly events are moving at an exponential pace and educational institutions are locked in the past. Where we are today in terms of the urgency of our very survival is not reflected in what I see happening in any education system. I find this extremely frustrating.”
She indicated that she was rather shocked by my answer. I’m not completely sure why. But I find it interesting that a very liberal and open-minded professor was surprised by this answer. What is obvious to me seems hidden from most. Can I really be the only one saying this stuff? I am in the classes I’ve been in, but watch Sir Ken Robinson saying it more charmingly and knightedly on TED.com in 2006 and 2010. (An examination of why Ken is a knight and I am someone the U of L Faculty of Education presumably can’t wait to get rid of could be an interesting tangent. Is it Britain? Is it Lethbridge? Maybe Ken enjoyed writing scholarly articles before he became a speaker on the Chardonnay circuit whereas I can’t think of a better way to waste my time, energy, and skills.)
I realize I may seem to be on a bit of a digression here but it relates, on an essential level, to my work in the Human Body Project and the exact textual artifact we are discussing, my film. I may also not be practicing what I preach as an award-winning teacher, i.e. tailor your discussion to your audience, the audience in this case perhaps not amenable to my dissing of their chosen profession. (Reminder: I do not have tenure. I do not even have a job.) So I will emphasize that, for me, personally, the M.Ed. program has done one thing: I have reached a point where I feel completely strong and validated in my own process and choices, which, without a lot of inauthentic contortions, do not fit into the way academia is run. Those processes and choices are very much in evidence in this film. They are powerful, necessary, educational, and original. They are also inherently, and in the case of this digression, explicitly, critical of academia.
There is a fairly dramatic tension between my work then and my two intended audiences. One audience is the people of the world who are open to exploring how to move things forward, which very certainly includes our students. One is academia. Isn’t it sad that that Venn diagram has almost no intersection? God help them, where does that leave our students?
This isn’t just some melodramatic question; this is crucial. “What is curriculum theory?” asks eminent theorist William Pinar. This film is in that no-man’s-land: it is that “complicated conversation with oneself (as a ‘private’ intellectual), an ongoing project of self-understanding in which one becomes mobilized for engaged pedagogical action—as a private-and-public intellectual—with others in the social reconstruction of the public sphere “ (Pinar, 2004, p. 37). Pinar adds: “Curriculum theory asks you as a prospective or practicing teacher, to consider your position as engaged with yourself and your students and colleagues in the construction of a public sphere, a public sphere not yet born, a future that cannot be discerned in, or even thought from, the present” (Pinar, 2004, 37-38). I would suggest that the teaching, curricular, and research methods of the Human Body Project “cannot be discerned from the present” of institutional realities.
For me, my hidden work gets me a teaching award. My explicit work can literally only be held on the fringes (I talk a bit about this later in the film) with me fighting tooth and nail to keep it in the dialogue of the academy. It is impossible for me to write and talk about the Human Body Project and this film without “going there,” i.e. to those places where it rubs up against orthodoxies. This piece of footage under discussion is critical of institutional culture and the above is a deeper explanation (there you go, folks!) of how that relates to my experience.
Maclean’s/Ethics/Litigation/Being Liked: This kind of work is ethically challenging. I’m not making a piece of fiction. I’m talking about my own experiences and opinions; these are my stories (or, when they tell them, Megan’s or the audience members’). It’s possible I may hurt the feelings or pride of university professors in what I’ve written above. It’s possible that I may hurt the feelings or pride of people, some of whom I once worked with and am on friendly terms with, who work or worked at Maclean’s. I have come to realize that I can’t predict when, how, or whom I’m going to offend; there is pretty much a guarantee that offense will be taken, though. I’ll talk about that first.
Contrary to appearances, I’m a person who actually does not enjoy confrontation or conflict. I am very much someone who would like to be liked. I am thin-skinned and utterly pervious to criticism. Needless to say, it sucks to be as determined as I am on a course that, while I do also have supporters, guarantees criticism, misunderstanding, conflict, ostracism, judgment, weird sexual attention, dismissing, rejection (all of which are on the go), and, quite possibly, aggression or even violence (so far, so good, but I’m still a relative nobody). I can get very lost in anxieties about these consequences.
Guess what? I made an intention to allow myself to be vulnerable and it can’t be compartmentalized. It isn’t just part of my project, it is part of my life. I can choose when I write or show up naked but I can’t and won’t choose to go back on this path. Every day my conviction that this work is necessary grows stronger both because of what I see in the world and because of the growth that takes place in myself. I feel strong.
This piece of footage really brought out some of my fears of rejection and creating conflict. I was in Toronto recently re-editing and trying to lobby to get the film picked up by the Toronto International Film Festival (jury is still out) and was watching the film again with my co-producer who mused that the editor, who is still alive but difficult to find so I will not give away his name—if you want to know, you’re going to have to dig deeper than Google—might have reason to sue me.
But everything I say in the film is true. He was an introvert. He was, in my opinion, as I say, a damaged guy. He did drunkenly grab me from behind at a Christmas party in a way that can only be interpreted as old boss guy (younger than me now!) makes entitled advances on cute young hireling. (If you think this sort of thing doesn’t go on anymore, read “Drinking With Men Who Are Not Russell Smith,” by Stacey Fowles, June 28, 2010, on The Walrus blog, about gross male behavior in Canada’s publishing industry.)
I should add that he sent out a webmail memo the following week apologizing for his behavior at the party (no specifics mentioned, no apology directed to me personally), which he said was caused by mixing alcohol and prescription drugs. My young colleagues and I enjoyed great ironic amusement from this less than adequate admission. (Irony for me then was the great leveler. I now find irony less than adequate and really fucking irritating actually; hence the seriousness and conflict-prone nature of my current assignment.)
It all happened more than 20 years ago and could he possibly care and would he even ever find out? Hard to say. It did send me on a major freak-out spiral, though. I realized in a deeper way that huge conflict of interest I have doing this work. On the one hand, I want the work to get out. On the other, the more it’s out there the more I could be a target. What a vulnerable feeling and I’m only just beginning. As I said, I’m strong and determined to do it anyway but it makes me have some empathy for George Bush.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Draft Commentary On My Video Documentary


This is the beginning of a draft for some commentary about my film, Tasha Diamant’s Human Body Project. The film is 53 minutes long so at this rate I have a long way to go.
0:00-0:57 Opening scene in which I walk across stage naked, get my husband to hug me, and wish the audience peace
I chose this as the opening scene to start the film with love and peace. The hug between my husband and me is very sincere and gives me, anyway, a visceral feeling of the love and trust that is between us in that moment. This seemed, to me, to be the best possible evocation of the feeling I am hoping to promote in the world.
I then turn to the audience from this place of love to wish them peace. The clip continues for a while as I walk around the room looking at people while silently wishing them peace with my hands in prayer position. I continued with this part of the clip because I am hoping the film audience also takes in this wish for peace.
The day this clip was shot, my second Tasha Diamant’s Human Body Project show, was the most uncomfortable and difficult show for me at the Edmonton fringe. The audience was very quiet and stony-faced. Two women complained about the nudity in a way that made me feel defensive (one shows up later in the film). Both Megan, my co-presenter, and I felt that the feeling in the room was hostile. We also learned later that the Edmonton Sun reviewer was there. He’s in the back with dark hair and glasses. He gave the show 2 1/2 stars complaining that it was political and that he wished we’d put our clothes back on. My loyal cousin in Edmonton was outraged, but I actually thought it was a fair review for a Sun paper.
At the time of this clip under discussion, it was near the end of the show and I felt a strong need to at least try to connect with this audience in a peaceful way. I don’t as a matter of course always wish my audiences peace in this manner but it felt very necessary in that moment.
So it was really interesting for me to watch the video footage of that show months later and see that the people in that audience did often smile at us, many did often look engaged, and, contrary to what both Megan and I remember, they did clap for us at the end. It was a good reminder of the inaccuracy and inadequacy of perception. I think some people at that show were confused and irritated by their confusion but I also think there was more goodwill there than Megan and I were able to take in.
Unless video audiences read this commentary, they won’t know the background of that clip that day, but I think it adds another important layer of introduction to the video: the idea of overlapping realities—individual internal and external realities; and the realities of each person separately and together.
0:57-1:33 “Being naked is easier than being open-hearted… Another thing though that I’ve realized is that it is easier to be open-hearted when I’m naked.” That should sum it up!
But, still, I lengthened this scene, against my co-editor’s will, after making the first version. I added the statement about how I’d been doing “this” for four years and the part where I say I’m very uncomfortable.
Several people who had given me feedback about the first version said they would like to see more explanation, like why I’m doing it or how it came about that I’m standing there naked. I actually agree with Muniré (my co-editor and co-producer) that the video is enough explanation; as the video unfolds people have a discovery experience and there is plenty of explanation. The whole film is explanation! I find it interesting that even after watching the whole video many people still need an explanation. Like Megan has said to me, you can explain and explain but that doesn’t mean people will understand. This film seems like a perfect document to illustrate the difficulty of talking across paradigms (Clandinin & Connelly).
I also find it odd that people often don’t seem to get that my discomfort is part of the point. I am sure that for many people there is an assumption that I must be an exhibitionist. There is such a visceral response to nudity and vulnerability and crossing over the line from personal to public. Some people can’t get past their initial discomfort and discomfited squirminess and/or maybe they think there needs to be a linear explanation for everything. It is my distinct impression that the response spectrum from rejection to low-key that I have received from the Education faculty, none of whom have been to a Human Body Project event and most of whom have not seen the film, has at least some relation to these types of reactions.
1:33-3:15 Megan and I enter, introduce ourselves, Megan eventually says: “This is totally weird, hey?”
This footage is from the very first show in Edmonton. Megan joined me spontaneously at my third annual Human Body Project event in Lethbridge in 2008 (she talks about that later). But neither of us had ever done a fringe show and we hardly knew each other. We were very nervous and uncomfortable. I wanted to show that palpable discomfort early in the film to allow the film audience to have that experience up front just as the real audiences do. As Megan says, it is “totally weird” to be in a room with two naked women who are showing up authentically. Later on in the film I talk about how there are no social norms for such a situation.
In our culture it is more socially normal to be in a room with naked women who want to grind their crotch on yours—if you are a man (as a rule) and if you pay them money. At the very least, in our culture, naked women should suggest titillation. We, even beautiful, nubile Megan, are decidedly not titillating. How, then, does an audience deal with the non-titillating presence of these naked women? One of the delights of the film as it progresses is that many members of the fringe audience were very much up to the task.
This is the first time that Megan speaks and moves on camera. She is 25 years younger than me. I am old enough to be her mother and I felt and feel strong maternal feelings for her. We are now friends but on the day of this clip we had probably spoken with each other for a grand total of 15 minutes plus a few emails. After joining me in 2008 Megan kept in touch sporadically and indicated that she’d like to join me in Edmonton for three of the six shows. Her suggestion to join me felt right to me and that’s how I made the decision to include her. I also feel like her presence in the film adds something important and special—her youthful energy and easy openheartedness, for instance.
I find it painful on my friend Megan’s behalf that almost every person who saw the first version of the film complained about Megan as show-offy and over the top. One of them wondered why they all found her somewhat irritating and I said: “Because you’re all old fogies!” (Every one of my friends who I showed it to is over 40.) I have warned Megan to be on guard for this if the film ever becomes something. We will both be projected upon left and right but she, as a young and beautiful woman, may well bear the brunt.
Eve Ensler, on TED.com, talks about the missing “girl” in the world. She is talking about the suppression and oppression and repression of feminine energy and emotionalism (and more). We have lived for millennia in this kind of world and it is shattering us all on every level (I talk later in the film about the overbalance to masculine energy). To me, Megan perfectly embodies Ensler’s idea of “the girl”—beautiful, emotional, shining, joyful, honest, flowing—and threatening! When you have lived in a culture that has squashed “the girl” in you, seeing that kind of freedom and openness is bound to bring up all sorts of defences.
Interestingly, the fringe audiences responded to Megan with what I perceived as great empathy and love. It could be the audience but I also think there is no replacement for the actual experience. A real, live, vulnerable person can and does evoke deeper emotion. While I made the film to share the Human Body Project experience and to help the project grow and to spread the message of peace through vulnerability, I’m not sure it can substitute for the lived experience of sharing that vulnerable situation. We are just too inured to seeing and separating ourselves from people on screen.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Connected to the Earth

From a conversation today.

Tasha: "I want to be an aborigine before the white people came. They were totally connected to the earth."
H: "How do we get back to that?"
Tasha: "I believe we have to change evolutionarily. Our brains have to evolve like now."

Only visceral experiences will provide that. Literature is a good start but literature is comfort-in-your-own-home material. That's why I'm impatient with academia. The understanding of urgency is just not there. If more people get connected-to-the-earth-brain maybe we'll figure it out.

Index Card

One side:
wish Unity + Integration
lie Adulthood... Culture... What isn't?
dream classic shit dream, even in mouth
truth I forget
wish Joy + Community
lie I have deep respect for men.
dream darkness, stairways, lost
truth Peace is possible (not without discomfort, though)
blessing May I be guided and supported.
blessing May all children be safe and loved.

Other side:
drawing of Tasha as an aborigine before the white people came (giving whoever the finger)
What the fuck?
Okay, here's a real question... Universities used to be the place where paradigms shifted, now they're the upholders of the status quo: who cares?

Saturday, July 3, 2010

U of T (In Which I Complain to a Professor About the M Ed Program)

Hi Professor X

I honestly can't tell if there is something here that will be offensive to you. Please take what I am writing in the spirit of honesty and doing my best to make it about me and my work. My intention is to create understanding. I have no quarrel with you but I do with the program, as you know. I am trying below to communicate my difficulty with fulfilling the requirements and my confusion over how to work that out even with you, an understanding and caring teacher...

I was thinking about your suggestion to consider doing 100 hours of work in order to fulfill the requirements of a course.

I am not being glib or purposefully obnoxious by contending that if this is the criteria, here at the University of Tasha, I have many PhDs by now.

The University of Tasha, solely populated by one idiot savant, has been a very very busy place lately. Full of idiocy and, if not knowingness, then at least a lot of awareness of idiocy. Here at the U of T, I am always busy and aware if not always able to act on my awarenesses in any "successful" way--success in terms of personal and societal and academic criteria hardly ever being achieved! Fail me now!

But your lonely researcher has been toiling: sincerely, effortfully, and with purpose.

Right now I am typing on a keyboard while barely being able to stay attached to the earth my body is so rapidly vibrating. Some of that is about taking the Human Body Project on the road in a few weeks, but there is more to it; I am always working at being myself in what the majority of my perceptions tell me is a hostile world. Twelve years ago (in a longer timeline of not-so-good vibrations) I felt like this and was diagnosed with sub-clinical depression (?) and prescribed drugs. With my many U of T PhDs I am now able to stay in this vibratory place drug-free. I do believe that one day it will even be enjoyable (it isn't yet; it's exhausting).

This is my work: I feel deeply, I stay in the shit, it takes me places. I could write about it and I could art about it and sometimes I do. I could also attach it to the work of other people and say they have influenced me but that is mostly not true at least not in the limited academic sense of doing that. I have said from the beginning of grad school that the biggest influences that happened for me were: illness, Kripalu Center's yogic teachings, and becoming a mother. These three educational contexts shifted me into a new paradigm forming me as a human being working toward wholeness. I am, of course, moved and interested by the work of many other writers, artists, and teachers but I am able to find and process that on my own when I want or need to.

Here at the University of Tasha, most meaningfully and importantly, I learn and research emotionally and in my body. This research experiment basically consists of one theory: how I feel is how I feel and is meaningful and is connected to a bigger picture and influences the bigger picture in a way that leads to greater human understanding.

Here's what drives me crazy:
-I'm good at this
-I hold an incredible amount of wisdom and knowledge about how the dots of our world connect
-I've created a completely original project, the Human Body Project, to share and grow my own and humanity's wisdom with no institutional support that puts my whole self on the line, not to mention my finances and, in some way, my family life.
-Also I know why I'm doing the Human Body Project and, while I actually could write essay after essay about what it connects to in education, in academia, in art, in non-violent protest, in activism, in feminism, in cultural criticism, in documentary filmmaking, in theatre, in ethical grey areas, in life writing, in curriculum, in health and wellness, in evolutionary biology, etc., I don't value that process as meaningful for my own education or use of time and energy. The project speaks more strongly for itself and is enough in itself. The fetish in academia for being more meta-critic than creator is not useful for me. My idiot savant skill is meta-criticism. I don't need more.
-I spend and have spent hours and hours and hours (decades) feeling and processing deeply
-I, Tasha Diamant, a wise and 48-year-old adult person, am not only satisfied with this process in the sense of I understand it to be the most educational way of being for me, it is also very valuable and very educational for others (supported by data, as they say)

But, unbelievably, in my education that I am paying for in time, energy, and money, it appears to not be enough to satisfy Master's of Education criteria.

In my M Ed I have been asked to be honest and when I have been let's say that my perception is that I have not been supported.

I get that you are trying to forge some kind of mutually satisfying agreement with me and I feel very appreciative of that even if I sound like I'm not.

It's just that what I need to do is feel feel feel and vibrate vibrate vibrate! That is the most educative process for me right now and I'm okay that I am the one deciding that. I don't want to have to explain and justify. The process is exhausting enough.

I mentioned before that I feel like I am continually straddling two paradigms and that it can be unbearable. We live a compartmentalized, fragmented, unnatural, masculine-energy reality and I am connected to the muchness of all. Most people, of course, are vaguely okay while being vaguely miserable with the first reality. And there are some people who are able to navigate or negotiate holding both--I see you and Y and Z as people who seem to be able to do this and I admire you all for it. And then there is me who struggles struggles struggles. I am only barely able to do both, e.g. in my "real" life I barely manage a household and kids in suburbanality-land.

Here's a far-out, unsubstantiated-by-clinical-studies belief I hold: I am one of the people who is moving us into that connected to the muchness of all paradigm. I believe that some of us are doing that work for others. I believe that my illnesses and intense feelings are like a filter for those who don't feel. When I started to understand that I was in a deep healing and learning process that goes beyond my own self I was finally granted a layer of sanity and non-desperation that did not exist in my previous life. I still struggle struggle struggle with insanity and desperation but there is a strong and determined part of me that knows that I am moving myself and the world forward (I do at least have the "data" for this contention from people who have experienced Human Body Project).

My point is: If hard work and hours and results are the criteria I should be good to go. And if they're not, does it not seem reasonable that some explaining and justification to me, rather than from me, are in order? Ha ha. In other words, I believe there is no way to reconcile what is best for me with the parameters of the institution.

I know we talked about some options for me to write about and right now I'm drawing a blank.

Thank you for your kindness and consideration and understanding, Tasha.