The Benefit Of Admitting You're Human

It’s that time of semester where I begin to feel beat down, and my writing reflects my apathy.  I start nit-picking syllabi and try to decide what I can afford to skip while still keeping a high grade.  But these blogs are psychologically heavier than a grade…these things are forever.  There are people who aren’t on the earth anymore, yet their blog is still available to the public.  It’s eerie, and perhaps my motivation is morbid, but I don’t want to be remembered as someone who skipped assignments just because I got a case of the ol’ ‘mehs’.  But that’s just my perspective. 

Speaking of perspective, Rees’s article from Just Six Numbers fits in appropriately in this week’s section.  The concept that Rees is trying to get across is a huge thing to conceptualize, which is why when this article aims to break the universe down numerically it has to start small…by breaking us down numerically.  The explanation of the amount of atoms in humans is an effective tool that operates in two ways:  It puts the rest of this article into context, and it immediately addresses the “why should we care” question from the tyrannical reader.  Numbers in any fashion turns me off, but Rees eased me into it in a way that made sense.  This is accommodation, but a very sly version of it.  All the numbers are still there as they would be in the original article, but it’s the examples that make sense of everything and put the information into context.

  

            Moving to Atkins… It’s difficult to read a series of texts and not hold each one to the standard of the text that preceded it.  But I’ll say it—Atkins doesn’t read as interestingly as Rees does.  Perhaps this opinion of mine was conjured within the first few lines of this article.  “Change takes a variety of forms.” (Atkins 12)  When an article opens up with elementary ‘duh’ statements, I’m turned off because I feel like I’m being talked down to.  I’m certainly beneath Atkins intellectually speaking, but I don’t think that this is an effective stance to convey through writing.  Going back to the theme of perspective, I had a hard time rising to the level of Atkins to really understand what he is talking about.  I think perspective largely relies on experience, and the closest we come to experience through text is by example.  Atkins gives quite a few examples, bouncing balls, melting ice, house of cards, etc.  But these examples are fixed and small, and don’t quite animate the depth of the content.  This article is not concerned with answering, “why should we care”, which makes it difficult to share perspective as a reader.  Aside from all that, I did like something in this article.  In tandem with my apathetic mood as of late, I found comfort in this quote: “We, however, can see that achieving being there should not be confused with choosing to go there.” (Atkins 14)  I know that this refers to ‘random’ chaotic energy, but it seems pretty applicable to life.  No need to go off on a tangent about where this applies, but it gives me hope about the moments where I look around and wonder, “how the hell did I get here?”

            Staying on topic is getting difficult these days… Haldane has a way of writing that I envy, a conversational tone akin to a grandfather passing on knowledge to their grandchild, and by the time the story is over I’ve forgotten that I was even reading at all.  Haldane is the master of examples that lend the reader perspective.  The entire article is wrought with details of creatures of all sizes, and with each example the purpose of the article becomes more and more clear.  This is exactly what I was looking for in Atkins article, an illustration that makes sense of the concept.  Haldane levels with the reader in the first paragraph, saying that he is looking at a zoology textbook in front of him and making humorous observations.  This makes Haldane a real person, instead of some scientific figure who knows more than the reader.  This rhetorical strategy of the author painting himself in a common light lends even more credibility to the perspective of this article.  As I write this and make these connections, I realize I opened this post with the same “humanizing” strategy.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who is losing steam at this point of the semester, and if my opener is relatable, then you’re more likely to read on.  But it wasn’t an intentional trap!  I just think writing is more enjoyable when the author doesn’t have to omit any underlying thoughts that ultimately contribute to the rhetorical situation of the writing. 

  

Unnatural Juice

Since I have been utterly immersed in rhetoric in Kate Ryan’s class, I’m going to leave Gross out of this post.  It’s an extremely useful article, as persuasion seems to make the world turn, but I wanted to focus my word count toward Mishra, Lakeoff, and Johnson.  As per my usual style, I will grab quotations from the readings and stretch them wildly until I’m nearly off topic. 

Mishra fascinated me the most.  I like to arrogantly assume I’ve pondered most ideas, but Mishra’s explanation of how images affect us blew my mind.  Because pictures have been around since my consciousness, I never considered the world before their existence.  “Pictures are not natural,”(145).  Starting with just this small statement, I started wondering what constitutes a picture.  My grandparents call the television a ‘picture box’, which is exactly what it is.  Computers must follow suit, as well as phones.  Then things get a little obscured, and I’m wondering if everything is a picture.  Briefly touching on rhetorical concepts of truth, I think back to Plato’s version of truth, which is basically that only the divine hold true knowledge and humans get a restrained perspective of truth through our five senses.  With this in mind, our eyes generate a picture that may or may not be the real thing, and therefore our very existence may be unnatural.  (there’s the stretch)

 

Mishra goes on to say that, “Biologically this is most odd since for millions of years animals had been able to respond only to present situations and the immediate future” (145).  I’m finding a paradox here, as I type into my picture box in the present that will be published for the public in the immediate future.  This is still incredibly unnatural, and maybe that’s why I approach these blogs with such anxiety…this feels wrong.  This post can only be part of the present for me and me alone, and then it becomes a picture for all of you who read this.  It’s a very strange time to be alive. 

But if this is a picture, and you read it and understand it, this derails one of Mishra’s claims, “The psychology of art tells us that there are artistic conventions that have to be learnt in order to understand pictures,” because pictures are “creations of time and culture.”(148) This is a fancy way of saying it’s all made up, but in order to play our game you have to learn our made up conventions.  I don’t know much about art or psychology, but I know that when the picture box shows a person telling a joke, I get it, and I laugh.  Perhaps my understanding of understanding is shallow and uncultured, but I don’t see the need to learn artistic conventions for the sake of interpretation.

The Thinking Chair, With Our Handy-Dandy Apple Juice

Moving right along to Lakeoff and Johnson, the concept of the apple juice seat was brilliant.  It has no meaning without context, “But the sentence makes perfect sense in the context which it was uttered…and even the next morning, when there was no apple-juice, it was still clear which seat was the apple-juice seat. (12) This means that the next morning, a mental image served as the justification for something that was present, but a part of the past.  How does this fit in with Mishra’s definition of image interpretation?  All that is required to understand the apple juice seat is presence during the conversation, and has nothing to do with artistic conventions.  The concept of what it means to understand probably deserves it’s own dissertation to answer some of my questions, as well as mental imagery, because it differs with each person.  Much like rhetoric, a concrete definition is impossible to reach when a concept revolves around interpretation.  Still, I’m happy to chill in my apple juice seat, watch moving pictures in a box, and recall mental images that possibly further my unnatural existence. 

                

The Stretch

Let’s all exaggerate for the sake of significance.  I do this pretty often in writing and daily life to enhance whatever I experience alone, mostly because I like a good story.  There are tons of things that seem significant to us that seem to lose significance when we try to communicate it, hence the excluding saying, “you had to be there, I guess.”  It sucks to have to say that, because you know you’ve lost your audience and you’ve just wasted your breath telling a shitty story about how you got pulled over by the sheriff.  Nobody cares!  But if you put the right spin on it, you can fool people into thinking that your story actually matters.

            “I got pulled over for the first time today, you remember your first time?  Damn, I was scared.  I just picked up a pound of sticky and I was high as giraffe nuts.  She didn’t even ask for my license! She said that I ran a stop sign, and I was all, ‘Ma’am, there was no stop sign.’  And she was all, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my mistake, have a nice day!’”

            “Oh no way! I remember my first time being pulled over…”

              It doesn’t matter that none of that happened.  The audience got the main point: I was pulled over.  The significance was successfully transferred as soon as I gave the audience a relatable point, a point that allows them to reflect on their own experiences.

As Fahnestock says, referring to science accommodators, “Their main purpose is to celebrate rather than validate.” (279) Many of us (everyone that will read this blog) are trained to seek out ethos and logos in every article we read.  We need validation, because we read such an insane amount of material that it becomes necessary to rank our information according to significance. 

            I like the idea of writing for the layman as “celebration” because it sets up a different rhetorical situation for approaching the page.  Let’s be thrilled about what we’re doing so that by the time it falls into the reader’s hands there is still some lingering sense of enthusiasm that can be transferred.  The exclusion of some key facts about a subject really won’t matter to most people as long as they are entertained.  I don’t necessarily condone the spread of borderline false information, but we live in the age of TL;DR, and it’s rough out there.  Perhaps I surround myself with the wrong types of people, but from what I observe people don’t think that anything is significant unless it directly affects them.  If self-interest is the maxim of our generation, then we have to roll with it whether we support it or not so that we can become significant as writers.  There is something to be said about integrity though, and many of us college folk do our best to keep the information intact.  Those people are doing God’s work.  For me, I keep the information intact for the grade.  But when I finally enter the world as a writer who is writing for a majority of people who read more of facebook than they do of factual documents, I’m going to stretch the truth as far as I can to convey significance.  It’s immoral, it’s spreading a pandemic of the uninformed, but dammit if it isn’t effective in getting a main point across. 

            In the interest of examples, as Fahnestock’s article had so many, here is a real life one that actually incorporates some scientific element.  This is a prime example of when we really DO need the information, and not the layman’s terms. 

            Brewing beer is a pretty exact science, and while I’m not a brewer myself, I know how delicate of a process it can be.  I picked up a bottle of “Beard Beer” by Rogue, assuming it was a novelty ‘special strength’ brew for the mountain man.  I’m a bearded fellow, and though it was worth a shot.  When I got home and read the label (after half the bottle was gone) I realized this beer was brewed from natural yeast—BEARD yeast.  All it said on the bottle was (word for word), “Don’t freak out, brewer’s have been using natural yeast for years.”  How am I supposed to not freak out after finding out I’ve been sucking on some dude’s beard?  Why would they be so vague with something so potentially gross?  I was compelled to do some research to figure out how this is even FDA approved.  Luckily I got an explanation that allowed me to finish the beer.  Apparently yeast is a fungus (whether it comes from fruit or a beard) and this specific yeast was a combination of yeast vapors that the master brewer’s beard absorbed and cultivated as a sort of fungal petri dish.  Maybe this doesn’t make it less gross, but it at least rules out the thought of plucking a few strays and boiling them in a cauldron to produce some sort of alcoholic alchemy.  Information here is key.  Without it, I wouldn’t have finished their product.

            Although we may not always be able to “rely on the audience to recognize the significance of information,” (279) there are times where displaying the facts ‘as is’ serves a greater purpose than stretching the truth.  When the information concerns anything that may affect human health (viruses etc.) or the way we live (climate change etc.), I’m an advocate of the facts.  But when it concerns information that ultimately doesn’t affect our way of being, celebrate it.  Decorate your story with celebratory anecdotes, and make it matter.  After all, we all just want to be read and talked about, right?