Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository
and right-facing pairs, it symbolized, among other things, day and night, life and death, masculinity and femininity, the four seasons, the four winds, the four elements, and the four phases of Ursa Major. Within all of these unions, one of the “contraries” begets and is begotten by the next as the swastika, that prehistoric sun wheel, turns and turns, without end. Each of the “contraries” rises and falls to its very fullest. Again, there is no “middling.” There is no “sort of.” There is only change, deep and fierce. And the yin and yang and the swastika are both depictions of this change – the ebb and flow of a dynamic universe. For me, it is with utmost curiosity that I think of our prehistoric ancestry, observing winter turn into spring, observing life beginning and life ending, observing the moon travel across the night’s sky, and engraving these symbols, into bone and rock and metal, whose meaning, whose significance, would be professed through the observation of the atomic fabric of reality. And, again, there is no “balance” to be found there, at least not as we commonly know it. If not “balance,” then what? What other way is there to work within – to feed off and to flourish within – that tension that rises out of the struggle between Certainty and Uncertainty, in a way that we neither reproduce a limited and limiting dualistic perspective of knowledge, reality, and “Truth,” or a “middling,” “sort of” posture that is nothing but 140
a compromise and a retreat, yet another willful manipulation of the natural way of the world and our existence upon it? Again, what else is there? What I have been exploring throughout these last few pages has hinted at it. The answer is vibration. The answer is the ebb and the flow. In his 2009 article for College Composition and Communication, Mao, in advocating what he calls “yin-yang dynamics” as a way to join Chinese and Western rhetorics and the contrary practices therein, explains that to do so and, thus, to open their eyes to a “balance and becoming [that] are always in a flux” (W53), would allow writers and teachers of writing to “use these terms of opposites without buying into the hierarchical and oppositional paradigm, but with an understanding of how difference or opposition can be recast and reimagined on a discursive continuum and through the acts of interconnectivity.” Although we use different terms, Mao’s perspective and my own are not strangers. For me, I have come to see, through my reading and my writing and my teaching, that the intercourse between Certainty and Uncertainty – the contrariety, the conflict, the communion – must be dynamic. Again, it must vibrate. It must ebb and flow. As Mao had declared, it must be “always in a flux.” Anything else is stasis and stasis is a sort of death. Death without new life. For that space between Certainty and Uncertainty to be void of such vitality, to lack 141
- Page 97 and 98: Uncertainty and the prolonging of U
- Page 99 and 100: falling away to such a “shift”
- Page 101 and 102: Rhetoric. She would root that “sh
- Page 103 and 104: For my real purpose here then, it i
- Page 105 and 106: Although Hairston is writing about
- Page 107 and 108: of them, I was enlightened. I was p
- Page 109 and 110: All experiences, even the scientifi
- Page 111 and 112: the tendency of that reality to mak
- Page 113 and 114: asking the same question: What had
- Page 115 and 116: and “truth” simply ends where i
- Page 117 and 118: silence we have so often deplored [
- Page 119 and 120: attempting to make room for the exc
- Page 121 and 122: said, I would pose another question
- Page 123 and 124: From [a theoretical] point of view,
- Page 125 and 126: It was this “technical rhetoric
- Page 127 and 128: synonym for doing or making as in
- Page 129 and 130: former I will not really pay much a
- Page 131 and 132: avoid Certainty put forward as Unce
- Page 133 and 134: Derrida’s purpose for “deconstr
- Page 135 and 136: “subversion” and there is no
- Page 137 and 138: IV. As a teacher, how do you not be
- Page 139 and 140: urge to “write with Uncertainty,
- Page 141 and 142: his book Embracing Contraries, he e
- Page 143 and 144: iochemical workings of the human bo
- Page 145 and 146: with the densest, most unyielding o
- Page 147: are, as LuMing Mao explains in his
- Page 151 and 152: more fully human is curtailed. Eros
- Page 153 and 154: “cooking”: “Between People,
- Page 155 and 156: palpable. To teachers of writing st
- Page 157 and 158: een greatly influenced by this conc
- Page 159 and 160: attribute that movement, that progr
- Page 161 and 162: But this is a somewhat vague answer
- Page 163 and 164: where students perceive “all know
- Page 165 and 166: with a graduation from college or u
- Page 167 and 168: call for thinking. In essence, it i
- Page 169 and 170: Difficulty or obstruction in the wa
- Page 171 and 172: education, but it ends with his con
- Page 173 and 174: is also the rise of the other. But,
- Page 175 and 176: processes? “Morals”? Deliberate
- Page 177 and 178: exactly is that teacher to evoke fo
- Page 179 and 180: The more remote supplies the stimul
- Page 181 and 182: would say a few things about my ped
- Page 183 and 184: to coin wholly new and different mo
- Page 185 and 186: “middling” and Knoblauch’s ow
- Page 187 and 188: question of how their educational e
- Page 189 and 190: of the readings and, quoting the as
- Page 191 and 192: genetics and chemistry? Or is the i
- Page 193 and 194: ibliography, and a final report, wh
- Page 195 and 196: turned outward, towards society and
- Page 197 and 198: as a whole. These essays attempted
and right-facing pairs, it symbolized, among other things, day<br />
and night, life and death, masculinity and femininity, the four<br />
seasons, the four winds, the four elements, and the four phases<br />
of Ursa Major. Within all of these unions, one of the<br />
“contraries” begets and is begotten by the next as the swastika,<br />
that prehistoric sun wheel, turns and turns, without end. Each<br />
of the “contraries” rises and falls to its very fullest. Again,<br />
there is no “middling.” There is no “sort of.” There is only<br />
change, deep and fierce. And the yin and yang and the swastika<br />
are both depictions of this change – the ebb and flow of a<br />
dynamic universe. For me, it is with utmost curiosity that I<br />
think of our prehistoric ancestry, observing winter turn into<br />
spring, observing life beginning and life ending, observing the<br />
moon travel across the night’s sky, and engraving these symbols,<br />
into bone and rock and metal, whose meaning, whose significance,<br />
would be professed through the observation of the atomic fabric<br />
of reality. And, again, there is no “balance” to be found<br />
there, at least not as we commonly know it.<br />
If not “balance,” then what? What other way is there to<br />
work within – to feed off and to flourish within – that tension<br />
that rises out of the struggle between Certainty and<br />
Uncertainty, in a way that we neither reproduce a limited and<br />
limiting dualistic perspective of knowledge, reality, and<br />
“Truth,” or a “middling,” “sort of” posture that is nothing but<br />
140
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