Merry Christmas! Here's My Much-Requested Saag Paneer Recipe as a Gift

I've been asked for the saag paneer recipe I use to keep the husband in my wicked thrall. There are many different recipes out there. This is just accidentally the one I tried first and Brian liked it so well, I've hardly tried another.

Some ingredients* will require a little trip to an Indian store. There are two good ones I've used in Tulsa: New India Bazaar and Laxmi Spices of India.

This recipe serves six hungry people easily. Serve it over rice.
For those who eat "non-veg," this is a good side dish to a meat dish. For vegetarians, I'd recommend serving this with a dahl or other legume dish.

Ingredients:
- one 16-ounce bag of frozen spinach
- about one cup cubed paneer* (Indian cheese) (extra-firm tofu can be used instead of paneer)
- 2 cups unsweetened yogurt (go for the full-fat version)
- 1/2 cup warm water
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Spices & Seasonings:
- 2 tablespoons fenugreek leaves*
- 1 teaspoon ground tumeric
- 1/2 teaspoon black cumin seeds*
- 2 teaspoons ground coriander
- chili powder (a milder version = 1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon;   hotter version = 1 - 1 1/2 teaspoons)
- piece of fresh ginger
- 1 large clove garlic
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 - 2 teaspoons salt (to taste)

Utensils:
- one small frying pan
- one medium-size pan/pot
- metal spatula
- large spoon
- sharp knife
- food processor or chopper (or use a shredder for the ginger & garlic, and omit step 8 below)

1. Steaming Spinach & Fenugreek Leaves
Put the Frozen spinach in the medium-size on medium heat, put the fenugreek leaves on top, and cover. This will be defrosting and steaming while you prepare the spices.

 2. Grinding Ginger & Garlic

Just as you would peel the paper-like skin off the garlic clove, you need to remove the skin from the piece of ginger. Just peel it like a little potato, then drop it in your food processor or chopper with the garlic. Grind it up as finely as you can. Set next to the stove.

3. Measuring Spices

Measure out the spices in a cup or bowl. Set next to the stove.

4. Frying Spices

In the small frying pan, heat the oil on a medium-high setting. Drop in the spices and ginger & garlic you've set aside. There should be a gentle sizzling and bubbling. It will start to smell amazing.

This frying of spices is one of the first steps in many, many Indian recipes. I found it a little daunting at first, so I'm including a video here to show what it looks like when it's being done right. It's an active frying for a couple of minutes on medium-high heat, so keep it moving to prevent the spices from sticking to the bottom and burning.

[video will be posted here when Blogger cooperates]

5. Adding the Rest of the Ingredients

After the spices have fried for a couple of minutes, add the warm water and stir. When the water starts to boil, add the sugar and salt. Stir until all are combined.

6. Combining Spice Mixture and Spinach

Add the contents of the spices and water pan to the spinach and fenugreek that has been heating in the medium-size pan.

7. Adding Yogurt 

Pour the yogurt into the other ingredients and stir well. At this point, the cooking is done really. It can sit warming on a stove or in an oven for hours and only needs stirring now and then.

 8. Final Grinding

If you have a decent food processor, the crowning step is grinding this mixture until the texture is smooth. (However, unless Sharukh Kahn is coming to dinner or something, it will taste the same if you omit this step.) 

9. Paneer

Cut the paneer into cubes and drop it into the spinach mixture. Paneer doesn't melt, so feel free to keep this warming on the stove / in the oven / on a hot-plate for as long as you want. It keeps in the refrigerate for days and can be frozen if you wish.

Serve this with a big bowl of rice. Everyone just scoops some rice, then tops it with the saag paneer.

The Problem of Beauty-- 1. Why Is This Thing Beautiful?

I've had some interesting feedback. Nothing makes it clearer what you need to say than the honest responses of readers. Blogging is great for digging at truth. Surely, even Socrates would approve of it! (Now, there's a really good article that needs to be written!) The vital issue I haven't touched yet is the problem of beauty. I've asserted that Americans look sloppy and our clothing is often ugly. Here are the refutations I'm hearing:

- It's just your opinion that Americans look sloppy.
- Caring about aesthetics isn't important to people who are independent thinkers.
- Ugly clothes aren't new--c.f. the leisure suit.

To an extent, I grant all of these are true. Therefore, let me take a different tack in explaining my larger point. Here's the question now: How do we define what is beautiful and what is ugly? Perhaps this is the angle I should have begun with all along. Let's examine it.

I could come at this from two different directions: what makes something beautiful, or what makes something ugly. My husband advises it would be easiest to start at beauty, and so I shall. Let me go directly to the beauty that is attracting me these days: India's traditional aesthetic. Since I'm wildly smitten with their textiles, I'll begin there. But I'll begin there after I've established some important points.

First, let me establish that my reader and I agree that the word beautiful means something more than "I, personally, perhaps even idiosyncratically, like it." Everyone has specific taste, I'm not denying that, but there are qualities and principles that render some things beautiful. Even if you wouldn't wear it or display it, we are faced with things in the world that we must concede are beautiful. If I'm Rousseau or Emerson, I call to my reader's mind a sunset. Anyone want to argue that a colorful sunset is not beautiful? Didn't think so. Wait, hold on--there's always a guy in the back who wants to make an argument that his cousin has a retinal disorder that makes colorful sunsets agonizing to look at. Fine. It's possible to find a sunset painful--but that is not an argument against the beauty of sunsets; it's just a believe-it-or-not fact about that guy's cousin. In the end, no one is going to take a serious stand against the statement, "Sunsets are beautiful."

I had to bring up Rousseau and Emerson because the Romantics rear their carefully tousled heads when beauty is the topic. Romanticism unnerves me because it is relativistic and elitist, a great intellectual trap. It is no mistake that it arises with capitalism-they need each other. This will be the subject of other posts, I'm sure. Let me just make the note here announcing that I want to consider beauty without the sticky residue of Romanticism and it may not be possible to do so. I'm hoping I need only make use of their beauty-in-nature argument to put to rest the notion that beauty is too subjective to ever be discussed outside of simple statements of personal preference.

So then, is it possible to extend this assertion that beautiful things exist to the realm of material culture? Can we discuss the beauty of man-made objects? Surely we can all agree that this is beautiful:

That's a page from the Book of Hours. Anyone want to throw down that this is not beautiful? I'm not asking if it is your favorite image in the world. I'm not asking if you would hang it on a wall in your home. It may not be your taste exactly--but it is beautiful. (In choosing such an artifact, rather than a painting by Davinci or a sculpture by Michelangelo, I'm disclosing my alliance with the Arts and Crafts movement. I'm going to be employing their arguments, so c.f. William Morris on all that follows.) So, what makes it beautiful? Let me hazard an answer--and I'm interested in any other answers I'm missing, so let me know. The two most obvious reasons it strikes us as beautiful are the graceful lines and harmonious colors. I'd also say that it has a unique quality that renders it beautiful in the way a painting or sculpture is not: it is a text that has meaning in addition to its lovely images. It is an intensely human thing--a beautifully human thing--to create text and render it aesthetically pleasing. It's not the floral images that are the beautiful part. It is all beautiful. The print is no less pleasing than the leaves and flowers. So, why is the script also beautiful? It's not meticulously perfect. A computer could generate a more flawless text. Interestingly, I hear my students' voices in my head now. My generation might have asserted that this beautiful thing could be improved upon with some digital retouching. However, I think young people today would generally argue against that. There is a new appreciation for the telltale signs of a human hand at work. This gives me hope. Can I get a general agreement that this page from the Book of Hours is beautiful because of its hand-made quality? Would anyone want to go on record as the person who does not find the hand-crafted quality of this appealing? Anyone?

Identity Epiphanies in Rome

I have been away from this blog too long.

I was in Rome for a week last month. It was a pilgrimage for my mother and there is actually much to say about it as such. However, since I am using this blog to bat around material related to my book project, I'll confine myself to the experiments in the truth of material culture that this short visit occasioned.

On the Sunday evening I was there, I had the privilege of meeting Peter Gonsalves, the author of Clothing for Liberation which I reviewed for the Southwest Journal of Cultures. (SIDE NOTE TO GRAD STUDENTS OF RHETORIC and/or COMMUNICATION: This book is a great model for your own writing. Consider it a lesson in how to turn a history or pop culture interest into an object of serious scholarly analysis.) As seemed to be the case with almost everything on the Rome trip, my meeting with Peter was the result of a series of happy accidents so well timed that anyone would be tempted to call them fated. In researching for my own writing last spring, I came across Peter's book literally days after its US publication date. That made it not only a book I needed to read, but one I wanted to review for the Journal. I read the author's bio note and realized that he lived in Rome. I had just booked my mother's trip to Rome at that time and gleefully seized an opportunity to combine the pilgrimage for my mother with research for my book.

Finding the email address for a scholar in Rome is not easy. I did a number of online searches and found nothing. I tried calling his publisher who gave me a generic email address that no one ever answered. I tried contacting his religious order (turns out, Peter Gonsalves is a Catholic priest in addition to being a scholar). But even the contacts I could reach with his order were unable to get me connected with the man himself. And so, I resorted to Facebook, and that finally worked. (Lesson learned: email really is dead. Social media are what's happening now.) From reading his book, it was clear to me that Peter was a serious Gandhian. He never says he considers himself a follower of Gandhi's principles in the book, but his reverential tone and lack of cynicism were tip offs. The fact that he was educated in my discipline, Gandhi's principles, and Catholicism made him someone with whom I very much wanted to exchange ideas. Peter responded to my post on the Facebook page for his book and we emailed a couple of times. I felt foolish outlining my project to him--I was only just beginning to pull the concept of the book together--but I so very much wanted to toss my idea in front of someone in my own field who was of a like mind. I originally approached him by saying that I was reviewing his book and wanted to video a short interview with him to post on the Journal. He cordially agreed to meet me when I was in Rome.

Between the time I exchanged emails with Peter and the time of my visit to Rome, I found myself ethically obliged to quit my job because of several incidents of corruption, hypocrisy, and abuse from above. I spent a month reordering my entire life and it was by turns exciting and terrifying. The terror came as I contemplated relative poverty. Even when I could believe my husband's reassurances that we would be fine financially, I was haunted by a frightening sense of not knowing myself anymore. I was suddenly no longer a professor. I had a greater love and commitment to my book project, but I wasn't sure who I was writing as. This identity crisis was intensified when I contemplated my meeting with Peter Gonsalves.

One of my greatest weaknesses is that I have a poor sense of how I come across to others. (Shall I blame the dyslexia? Mild autism?) So, of course, I fumbled in my first contact with Peter. I was so eager to convince him to take me seriously that I put my professional credentials up front immediately: "I'm a Rhetorician." "I'm writing a book." "I have a journal." Peter later told me he felt anxiety about meeting me because he imagined that a rhetorician was going to put a camera on him and shoot "a lot of hard questions" at him. So, ironically, I arrived in Rome as anxious about who the hell this poor man was meeting as the poor man himself. Fresh from the shock of my sudden change of lifestyle, I was too shaken to focus clearly. We arranged to meet Sunday night. He would meet me at my hotel and we would go find a cafe in which to talk. I had no idea how I would present myself.

Peter & I Sunday evening

Peter Gonsalves generously spoke with me for hours. I found myself telling him about my harrowing experiences at work and my resignation. He said all the things I needed to hear. He offered excellent advice, both professionally and spiritually. Most importantly, he was a mirror for me to see my new self for the first time. Perhaps I will find a way to write about the whole experience of revisioning myself. For now, I'll just say that during the conversation, I told him that I wanted to pull together the time and courage to walk through some typical Italian clothing stores and look in the labels to see if "made in Italy" was as extinct as "made in the USA." I suspected it was not. Peter said he assumed the place for clothing shopping was certainly the via dei Condotti. I dared to contradict him. Condotti is the designer clothing street at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Only the very rich would shop there. I told him I was interested in what the average Italian bought. As he walked me back to my hotel, Peter suggested that he would be happy to lend me his excellent Italian to ask some of the groups of college-age women walking past where they bought their clothes. He warned me that they would say via dei Condotti. I thought not. It was absolutely certain that the people passing us did not shop on that street; they were perfectly middle class. I can't speak Italian but I can understand it a little, so, when Peter asked the first group of women, I needed no translation for the simple response they gave. The first thing every one of them said was the via dei Condotti. I had to ask Peter to follow up with the question, "Where did you buy the coat you're wearing now?" They looked sheepish at this and demurred to say. Peter explained that I was a foreign visitor researching Italian clothing choices. This made the gals chatty. Those who would confess, said they had bought much of what they were wearing on that very street. So, I was right in assuming that my hotel's neighborhood shops carried what most of the Italians were really wearing. But Peter was right in predicting that via dei Condotti would be every Italian's answer to my question.

Spot the tourists on the via dei Condotti!

And so, this brings me back to pondering identity. If I asked Americans where they shopped for clothes, they wouldn't be shy to admit they buy their clothes at a local shop rather than a designer showroom. What is this Italian reluctance to admit that price is an issue in selecting clothes? Did they assume the question was what fashions do you prefer, not what do you actually wear? It is certainly obvious that the average Italian dresses much better than the average American. Their clothing is stylish, tailored, and in excellent condition. Ours is usually not. And, sure enough, when I visited the clothing stores on that middle-class street (and it seems every other store is a clothing store in Italy), more than half the labels read "Made in Italy." And so, now this brings me back around to the subject matter of my book. It is often observed that Americans dress sloppily. The assumption is always that this is the result of some cultural / aesthetic / moral failing on our part. But isn't it possible that we dress badly because of what we are offered in our stores? I think so. And isn't it therefore possible that what we have lost is more than manufacturing jobs since our country gave up clothing manufacture?  When we leave our clothing production to the lowest bidder, are we are losing an aspect of our identity? Have we lost--or, rather, had taken from us--an identification with the aesthetics of our clothes? I'm thinking that Americans toss on an over-sized T-shirt, baggy jeans with frayed hems dragging the ground, and dirty athletic shoes because they don't have any identity when it comes to clothing. It is something to cover their nakedness, nothing more. The only great valor is in finding serviceable garments at a cheap price.

Now, before everyone says it, let me: not all Americans have given up on personal appearance. There is still a percentage of us who are exceptions to the rule. But look around at our fellow Americans and tell me there isn't a rule. As a rule, we look dumpy. And I want to insist that this isn't our own fault. This has been foisted on us by an industry that wants to sell us volume instead of quality. We gain closets stuffed with cheap double-knit junk but at the price of our sense of who we are.

Please Give Me Your Opinion

I've been deriding the American accumulation of stuff and am having interesting discussions on Facebook about the posts. There's a sense that our economy just works like this and we have to go along with it because no individual can change things. Well, here's my theory on that: 


The evils of the global economy are driven by manufacturing in poor nations (without developing the local economy, mind you) and selling the products back to us. The garment industry has been a central concern of mine. The US and Japan are the main consumers of apparel in the world. So, if our consumption habits changed, we ourselves could be a force for change in the world. The sweatshops in Asia and Central America are set up to chase our dollars. If we become aware of what our participation in this system is actually doing, we will surely want to create change. I'm thinking that if I want to write a persuasive text, I should address the cost to us of allowing the US apparel industry to continue with its outsourcing practices. I list below the various points I am hitting as I write my manuscript. I'd like everyone's feedback on which of these is most compelling. And, by all means, please tell we which combinations of these you would find most interesting as a reader:


1. Our clothing is now cheap in both senses of the word. We Americans look like neglected children. This was not the case in the past and it is not the case in countries where garments are made in legitimate local businesses. We have lost a sense of personal dignity in our appearance and seem to only be clothing our nakedness, not engaging in the pleasures of self adornment. The loss of these pleasures diminishes our lives. For more about how the art and variety has been lost in the current global economy, see Teri Agains' The End of Fashion. She has some inconsistencies in her cause and effect but her information on how the business has morphed recently is fascinating.


2. US jobs lost.


3. We have a moral responsibility to know how the things we buy were produced. If we refuse to care, we are as bad as the worst sweatshop owner. Turning a blind eye makes us global bad guys. This has a very predictable disadvantage: our country is hated in many of the poorest parts of the world (and many of the not-so-poor parts too.) This is the best fuel for terrorism. 


4. Ours is a very religious nation. Though that can make for some nutty behaviors, most people in the US are sincere in their faith. We are a compassionate people who are prone to great optimism about the future. A specifically Christian  argument against participating in over-consumption might be listened to.


5. Over-consumption leads to depression. It's an unlikely argument, I know, but divesting our sense of pleasure from the accumulation of stuff is a solution to many of our domestic worries. We are a nation mired in personal debt. That debt comes from buying what we actually cannot afford. Without a change in attitude toward consumption we will also be depressed if we cannot buy things we want. This is the theme I began the blog with and it did get people talking. I think there's a lurking desire among us to have such a change in attitude recommended. (And it's my theory that this is why the Hoarder TV shows have taken off in popularity.) At the heart of this is what we do in stores. We have a way of thinking and behaving in stores that serves the interests of corporations, not ourselves. I would like to walk through that self-talk and examine its self-defeating nature.

The Problem of Privilege

And now to address the aspect of my reader's challenge that deals with race and class. Here's the well-articulated challenge to my position that we Americans are caught in a rhetoric that disorders our perception of possessions:


"I still agree with you that there is a national trend towards stuff that’s problematic, and that we are all to varying degrees complicit in a troubled system, but at the same time, to have a house full of extraneous stuff is a problem of privilege, one that many less-well-off people in America would be happy to have. I guess I’m wondering how it might feel to be poor, for instance, and then encounter rhetoric encouraging the viewpoint that having too much stuff is part of disordered thinking. Or how it might feel to be African American, with a family history of being legally forbidden from owning property, and then encounter rhetoric saying that our stuff “owns” us (such a loaded term in that scenario). And I'm wondering to what degree it is important to acknowledge and respect these differences, and to what degree it just keeps us isolated from each other. I recognize that, as a white, middle-class, educated woman myself, trying to put myself in the shoes of a lower-class or African American person runs the risk of sounding paternalistic and patronizing, but I am really struggling to think through how we can discover Truths that helpfully apply to all the world while still acknowledging the individuation that informs our respective circumstances."


Several decades of academic positioning according to race, gender, and class has prepared us to hold these distinctions between people in an artificial reverence. I think the root of our perverse attachment to houses full of useless objects is capitalism's rhetoric shaping our perceptions. And I would like to argue that it does the same thing to all classes and ethnicities. While I understand the reader's point that owning too much is certainly not a problem for the desperately poor, I don't have any qualms about asserting that consumption for the sake of it is wrong. Just as I know there are people without enough to eat, and yet that will not prevent me from counting my calories if I start putting on weight. It is, in a sense, a problem of privilege but that makes it no less of a problem. 


More importantly, however, I want to be clear that I'm not trying to do some Romantic grand gesture. I'm concerned about sustainability and our roles as American consumers in problems of global poverty. We have stores overloaded with cheap things that are neither useful nor beautiful and consequently we have homes that are overrun with the same. My argument that this is wrong is based on the actual economic circumstances under which these things clutter out lives. The manufacture is done in third world countries by the most disadvantaged of those people: women and children. The only reason people work in sweatshop conditions is because we Americans turn a blind eye to what it is we are actually buying and instead focus on the artificial pleasure of plenty. But it isn't plenty of good things--it's plenty of low-quality junk we value only because we have consumer mentalities. That consumer mentality isn't natural to us but resisting it takes a great deal of effort. Our accumulation of stuff is making the poor poorer. That's the real issue.


No doubt subsections of the US population have group-specific attitudes toward material objects. That's an interesting area of study for sociologists, I'm sure. However, the material reality of what is in our stores is the same for all of us. Every sweatshop item we buy advances human misery. That is the truth of our stores. I'd like to reason out a way to live authentically under these new economic conditions. Perhaps I would reason differently if I were black, hispanic, gay--I don't know. But the option to walk away from considering how to live under these conditions is not optional. I will either participate in a cruel system or I will have to figure out a way to resist that system.

What a Rhetorician Means by "Truth"

An interesting challenge from a reader who self-identified as feeling defensive when reading my urgings to liberate ourselves from stuff:


"...This, for me, raises the question of universality. I am very curious about how you think your theory of stuff might change when viewed in terms of race/class/gender/ethnicity/ability etc. The "bling" phenomenon in urban African-American culture, for example, strikes me as conspicuous consumerism, consciously performed by a historically underprivileged and disenfranchised group, as a means of asserting status (which is both a power-getting strategy and a survival strategy). Bling is definitely stuff, but would you assess that particular "stuff" in the same way you'd assess your own stuff?"


Ah, universality. As a rhetorician, I cannot embrace universality, essentialism, etc. However, I have dared to invoke Socrates, Christ, and Gandhi as my examples of a proper relationship to the material world and these men are usually associated with one or another sort of universality. Let me do the truly Socratic thing and go back to a working definition for my term. As the quote above indicates, the reader means to distinguish between "universal" as the opposite of "individual" or "cultural." You can see the whole message here. When she wrote of her own defensiveness, she was distinguishing between the universal and the individual; wondering if my broad statements about our disordered relationship to material objects really applied to herself. When the reader wrote the specific lines above, she is questioning whether my broad "universal" assertions are culture-specific. 


Before giving my complete answer which involves further definition of the term, I'd like to take each of these possible challenges to my theory of stuff (oh dear, that's a turn of phrase that may stick) in turn. This is an important question because if my experiments with the truth of clothing, food, and clutter are valid, then I can't simply be asserting that they are true for me. I am clearly saying "we" and "us" in my postings, so I better back that up. So, as for the distinction between the universality of my statements on this score: yes, I'm doing universality. I do not believe we are drastically different from each other in the way our current cultural understanding conceives of individuality. I believe that we are all motivated by our common need for love. I don't believe this is untrue for any person ever. We want love and community with other people and our consumer culture perverts that in ways that are not good for us--any of us. 


Now, having dispensed with the more general question, I'll turn my attention to the specific examples of individual exceptions to my broad, universalist rule. The reader brought up the possibility that people with specific neurological or cognitive issues could be exceptions to my assertion that memories and things have no deep connection. In doing this she taps her own authority as a person who suffers from such a problem and I know this moment well as a teacher: this is the point at which students come up with special circumstances that would surely confound a general principle. It's a necessary stage in testing the veracity of a concept. Allow me to respond to this challenge by making the same rhetorical move as the reader who posed the question. I, myself, have such a condition. As an adult, I have discovered my many seemingly inexplicable failures in school as a child are attributable to dyslexia. One of the quirky ways in which it manifests in me is an inability to remember faces. I don't mean a vague difficulty in pinning a name to a face. Everyone experiences that. I can't recognize a student currently enrolled in one of my classes if I see her outside the classroom--even at the end of the semester. I confuse people I know with similar hair color or body shape, even if I know one of them fairly well. Only people I see literally every day are immediately recognizable to me. So, I really do understand the need for visual memory cues. I recently got into the time-consuming but worth-while habit of requiring my students to send me a photo of themselves and attaching it to that student's contact info in my gmail account. That has helped me pin names to faces but nothing helps when what seems to me like a complete stranger says hello in the grocery store. There is only so much you can fight this kind of disability before it becomes your whole identity. There are more important things about me than my dyslexia. I accept the limitations and awkward social situations dyslexia has given me because I know it has also given me some advantages. I have to solve problems creatively to work around what seem to be memory problems but are actually perception problems. This has made me a very efficient student and an insightful rhetorician. It's a fair trade. 


And this is the point in a classroom where someone suggests I've gone off the original topic when, in fact, I'm just arriving at the heart of the issue. I believe that one of the great advantages dyslexia has confired on me is the ability to step outside of a line of thinking and re-imagine it another way. This is essentially what rhetoricians do. So, let me step outside my explanation of how I see dyslexia as a fair trade. The original question was posed as one of "disability." Disability is not a thing in itself. It is a rhetorical construction. I'm not saying it isn't real. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. I'm just saying that "disabilty" is attached to a discourse in our culture that establishes, among many other things, that individuals with a disability need to self-identify to the non-disabled of the world. This discourse also establishes that the non-disabled are unable to understand the life experience of the disabled. And so, this is my problem with responding directly to my reader's concern about whether the principles I'm outlining apply to her: she has isolated herself with a rhetorical construction and I don't want her to position herself that way. I countered the discourse conventions of "disability" by mirroring her rhetorical move, asserting that I, too, have a cognitive disability. I chose to do this because it is the only way I can position my reader as I want, as someone who is not different from me. And I didn't make that rhetorical move just to persuade that reader. I also made that move so I could explain what I promised at the start of this post: "my complete answer which involves further definition of the term."


And so, I would like to argue that the position I am taking in my "theory of stuff" is not one of universality, but one of rhetorical construction. I do not believe that individuals differ in their relationship to material objects and that can be labeled universalist. However, I will argue that my reasoning behind this statement is not universalist because I am not basing the statement on enlightenment-era assumptions about a mechanically ordered universe. Rather, I am arguing against such a scientistic view of the world as a well-ordered machine in which individual differences between people can be studied, measured, and explained. I am arguing that the world is made up of rhetorical constructions. We name our experiences. We have to do this to make sense of the world and to communicate with each other. However, rhetoric is powerful stuff. It is not the pliable tool we sometimes mistake it for. The very words that we use to communicate with others are the same vehicles we use to make our experiences intelligible to ourselves and those words come with baggage attached. We have to sift through the baggage and figure out how the words we use actually control our thinking. For example, I say that I am dyslexic because my culture has this term and it is useful in explaining how I am different. But the day I believe that term is what I am, I'm in trouble. On that day, I have to turn to a medical definition of myself and I have handed over my identity to medical discourse. And I would do that if it seemed medical discourse had a handle on my identity but they don't. Try to find a clear definition of dyslexia--and it's one of the easy cognitive disorders to diagnose. Yet it's a constellation of possible symptoms that don't ever seem to manifest the same way in any two people. I can't hand my identity over to a discourse that imprecise. I will, however, use the word when I need to reference the limited things it denotes in my case: my weird glitches of visual memory that routinely provide me with social embarrassment as an adult and that made school a hell as a child. But I don't want to hand my identity over to a medical definition of disability when this thing that gets called dyslexia is also useful to me. 


I believe we construct understandings of our stuff that placate our anxieties about the world. However, these rhetorical constructions tie us to political and economic realities that are soul-killing. If we resist this truth in the name of personal identity, we justify our self-soothing by reductionism.


I realize that I have dealt with only the last of the reader's big-four of human difference: race/class/gender/ethnicity/ability. But my answer is the same for all of these. 

Why Dr. Cowlishaw Wears a Sari

Now, I am well aware that walking around Tahlequah, Oklahoma in a sari makes me look like I might be insane. I won't argue my sanity. Instead, I would like to sing the praises of this amazing garment and offer the Gandhian reason I wear it. So, here's the weird image:

Now go take a look at the label inside any item of clothing you own. Seriously, go look. Swivel around what you have on right now and look at the label. Come on, do it--this will all make better sense if you look at your own clothes first because, if you don't, you can assume I'm a crack-pot crank. And, again, I won't argue my sanity but I want you to understand that what I'm telling you is the truth. Almost no clothing is made in the USA anymore. There's an obvious reason to dislike that: no jobs for US workers. And the US garment industry used to employ a lot of people. I grew up with these ads on the TV:



Yep, "Our wage is going to feed the kids and run the house...." But not anymore. Now the people who make the clothes for sale in American stores are third-world people who are poor. But, you may be thinking, these poor people now have jobs. That's good. Well, it would be good if those poor workers were making a living wage like the Americans in this ad were. And they work in conditions that are more like prisons than factories. Don't take my word for it--I'm a leftist and therefore not to trusted--maybe you could take Business Week's word for it--or the students of MIT. Want to see a video that explains it? Take a look:



Want to see a video that shows an actual sweatshop and the "workers" there? This should disturb you:



These deal with Bangladesh and India, but the situation is the same--or worse--in the country printed inside your clothings' label. As the gentleman in the first video said, these workers are powerless but we Americans can do something about this.


As I said in a previous post, I love beautiful clothes. But clothes that pass through the hands of desperately poor, maltreated women and children cannot be beautiful. What is for sale as clothing in our stores is an assault on human dignity. Our dollars for these items are participation in our own demise. It does not have to be this way. Here's an articulate explanation that I've altered slightly:


"It is my claim that as soon as we have completed the boycott of foreign cloth we shall have evolved so far that we shall necessarily give up the present absurdities and remodel national life in keeping with the ideal of simplicity and domesticity implanted in the bosom of the masses. We will not then be dragged into an imperialism which is built upon exploitation of the weaker races of the earth, and the acceptance of a giddy materialistic civilization protected by naval and air forces that have made peaceful living almost impossible....[The USA] can become fit for delivering such a message, when she has become proof against temptation and therefore attacks from outside, by becoming self-contained regarding two of her chief needs-food and clothing."


It reflects our situation right now in the USA but it was written in 1921 by M.K. Gandhi in reference to India. I think Gandhi's insights into India are exactly what America needs to hear right now. That's the subject of my book. (Gandhian insight into the USA's food system will be the next book.) And so, I am only buying clothing I do know for sure was not made in a sweatshop. In doing so, I am giving my business to the craftspeople of India. I buy only handloomed saris. These lengths of cloth have been made by craftspeople who pass this skill down through their families. I know my saris are not made in sweatshops. And the added pleasure of giving my money to these legitimate artisans allows me to atone for having given money to the people who enslave their countrymen in sweatshops. 


The fact that I look really out of place here in my sari is useful to me. I have a message I'm writing and it enhances my ethos as the writer to do this daring thing. It doesn't matter to me if people think I'm brave or crazy. I just want to make people think about their clothing and their values. As a professor, I was never afraid to make a fool of myself in order to teach a lesson. Making a fool of one's self is often a really excellent way to get students to pay attention. I hope it will work for me as a writer too.

The Power of Clothing

This attempt to simplify my life is taking on a life of its own already. Issues are coming to me and obliging me to think thorough them. My previous post considering religious objects and their relative value would have never occurred to me as something to work through but when a reader brings it up, it should be addressed. And comments about that post (on my Facebook wall) led me to think even further into the issue.

Now, I have had to work through my own personal relationship to the clothes I own. You'd think I'd have approached this first since the book I'm writing deals with the contemporary American clothing dilemma. And I had--in the abstract. First, let me say (if you don't know me well enough to know this already): I love beautiful clothes. I love coordinating an outfit. I derive much pleasure from clothes. I had decided years ago that I'd rather have a small, quality wardrobe than a mass of cheap things. And so, until this past weekend, I owned five good dresses, three good suits, three good skirts, and a handful of sweaters and blouses. When I say "good," I mean they were primarily from Banana Republic and Anne Taylor. I had two good purses and a half dozen good shoes--by which I mean I could wear them with the suits. I had made one serious decision about these items over the course of the last year: these "American" garments, produced in countries where labor is cheap, are products of a garment industry that creates poverty in the world.

After reading Gandhi's autobiography, in which he examines so meticulously the economic, social, and moral decisions of what to wear, I felt called to do the same. The details are the subject of my book, but the decision I made for the summer was to wear only handloomed saris from India. In this way, I could still revel in beautiful garments but without the cognitive dissonance of wearing sweatshop products. I'll have to post on all the reasons I embraced the sari soon. For now, I want to examine my relationship to those "American" garments that hung in my closet all summer unworn. In fact, the dresses, suits, etc. remained unworn into the fall semester as I began the semester wearing only saris to teach in. And, in the future, I'll have to write about the reactions I encountered doing that. But, this weekend, I was forced to consider what to do with my "American" wardrobe.

In the course of Facebook discussion about the inevitable garage sale to come, a former student sent me a private message asking if this garage sale would include any of my professional wardrobe. The answer to that would have just been "no." But her message also include an explanation of her situation. She was in sudden need of professional interview clothes and, at the same time, in sudden difficulty financially. I'm ashamed to say that my first reaction was to hang on to the clothes. But once I started thinking it through, I had to acknowledge that this was a test of my authenticity. I needed to let the clothes go, not just generally, but very specifically to this young woman. If I hadn't been confronted with a person who really needed the clothes, I would not have wanted to let go of them yet. I put so much energy into collecting those items. I loved the way I looked in them. They made me feel like the professor.

Parting with the clothes could have been wrenching. I could have justified putting them in a garage sale because they might fetch some now much-needed money. But most of those clothes are a size 4. The shoes are size 6 1/2. There aren't a lot of women in Cherokee County who could wear them. Even if they sold, they'd probably be carted off by the buyer to a resale shop where it would be a race between the few women who came in and could fit into them and the moths. I'd bet on the moths in that siutation. When I saw how well the clothes fit this young woman, it was a joyful experience giving them to her. These clothes solved a real problem for her. I got to witness her relief and it was genuinely priceless.

This clothing give-away experience has been a good lesson for me as I write about the difficulty of what to wear in America. Clothing only has any monetary value if it serves a rhetorical purpose. In this country, we are awash in cheap clothes. They are cheap in price but also cheaply made. No clothing for sale at the Walmart, K-Mart, Target, etc. is going to make the young people who shop there look ready for a serious job interview--not in the world of the middle class. All of that clothing is disposable--and a huge amount of it does, in fact, end up being disposed of without anyone having ever bought and worn it. But clothing that performs a rhetorical function retains a value. It is tragic that such clothing must be tied to the misery of what is politely called "developing nations," which is just a euphemism for the poor.

As the young woman in question obliged me to justify my not taking any money for the items, I found myself explaining the fresh realization that I really don't need them anymore. I quit my job as a professor to become a writer. Since my writing is on the subject of clothing's power, it made good sense for me to take a radical step toward sartorial authenticity. Wearing those "American" clothes would actually undermine my message. And, should I ever find myself in need of interview clothes myself, I have retained one suit. If I am able to write and sell the books I want to write, I will dispose of the remaining one. But, I can't help but think that any interview I have any time soon will be far less about my clothes than it would be for a young person just starting out. I have a Ph.D. and 19 years of college teaching experience. It's just not going to matter as much whether I'm dressed "professionally" or not. Showing up in a sari can enhance the quirky professor image that no one really holds against an established academic. I've got my middle-class respectability accounted for now. But since the clothes still have the power to speak of middle-lass respectability, it would have been irresponsible of me to throw them away. It would have been futile to sell them. Only giving them to someone who needs them right now, because she is trying to get herself established in the world, feels right. I am grateful to this young woman for giving me new insights into my project that I could have gotten in no better way.

Are Religious Objects Mere Stuff?

An interesting question from a reader:
"What about religious artifacts, relics, and icons? I am not sure precisely what religion you'd identify with, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how this all pertains to, say, a few crosses you have in your house, or some menorahs in the attic. Do we make different stuff-rules for objects from religious value-systems?"


I would be interested to know if there are people with a unique attachment to religious objects. As a practicing Catholic, I've always had such items: crucifix, medals, rosary, etc. For me, these are the same as every other object in my life. I was never taught to treat them as anything other than tools. Most of the ones I own are mementos of people. For example, I have a crucifix on the wall by my bed that used to hang over my grandmother's bed. As a child, I fell asleep looking at it many happy nights. It's a cheap plastic thing I would never buy, but I will always sleep near it. I allow myself this because I think of it as a tool I use every day. I won't get rid of it for the same reason I won't get rid of my food-processor: using it makes it easier for me to practice a healthy lifestyle. That crucifix is something I use. If it were in the attic, it would be stuff.


I do, however, hang on to two rosaries. One is a pretty one I bought because it was beautiful and I wanted to be able to appreciate its beauty when I pray. The other is almost always just sitting in my jewelry box. That one is do treat as a special thing--though still a tool. It is attached, of course, to a story about a loved one who is gone. My uncle was a Jesuit priest who died unexpectedly on a trip that was originally supposed to be a trip to visit me and Brian. Perhaps because I was such an inconsolable wreck at his funeral, I was given his rosary. I have a tendency now to think of it as a special, powerful tool. My whole family and I are natives of New Orleans and so, on the night Hurricane Katrina was bearing down, I prayed for the city using my uncle's rosary. My own rosary is in my purse. I would not carry around my uncle's rosary like that. It could get lost or broken. In that sense, this rosary is connected to fear, what I have said in previous posts I want to free myself from. 


I know perfectly well that my uncle's rosary is just another set of beads. I don't really believe it has any power. But I like to treat it as though it does. And I can only really get away with treating a rosary like this. Because it is a tool for prayer, it is actually useful in connecting with my uncle as he exists now. To explain that, I'll need to explain how Catholics are taught to think about the dead. Our tradition holds that God's people are stretched out across space and time but are always in unbroken connection with each other. This is a reason we sometimes pray to saints--not to worship them, but to ask them to pray for us in the same way I might ask my next-door neighbor to pray for me. Those who are fully in God's presence will have a clarity of mind to pray the proper prayer for me that we on earth may not. So, my faith gives me the opportunity to understand myself to be praying with my uncle when I say the rosary. Using his rosary emphasizes the communal aspect of prayer for me.


Of course, it wouldn't be helpful to me to have a drawer full of rosaries so I can feel myself praying in community with every person I ever lose. It's special for me to have this particular rosary because I believe I have a continuing relationship with my uncle. He lived with a vow of poverty and I am just beginning to understand the wisdom in that. And, at the risk of sounding crazy, I must say I have had my uncle's help in my grieving for the loss of him. He has visited me in dreams that have been sources of enormous comfort and enlightenment. There's another traditional Catholic idea (though a Hindu friend of mine recently expressed a similar belief): visits with the dead in dreams. Certainly, it is entirely reasonable to understand these dreams as simply the workings of my own mind--the stuff and clutter of imagination. But when I treat these dreams as special, I feel peace and love, not fear and anxiety. That is my evidence that this understanding of these dreams is true. On the other hand, when I treat objects as special, I engage with fear. If I grow spiritually, I will eventually want to let go of my uncle's rosary, no doubt. In my examination of it here, I have had to concede that I treat it as special and that connects me to a fear of losing or breaking it. I need to ask myself honestly if knowing it is in my jewelry box brings more peace than fear. I'm not sure it does. Perhaps I'm waiting for the dream in which my uncle shows me how to let go of it in the same way he showed me how to let go of him.

I love, therefore I own stuff

Here's a response from a reader of my first post on this blog. The context is her suggestion that there must be different levels of value to personal possessions. I'm delighted that she argues not for objects with monetary value, but sentimental value as the most worthy of holding on to:


"Yes, it's still an object, but the emotion that makes it valuable to you is not the sort of thing you can mass-produce. It's unique to you and your mind, and every time the object facilitates the release of memories and feelings, it ceases to be yet another disposable object and instead becomes a relic, a holy vessel of ancestry. No, it's not your grandmother herself, but neither is it wrong or disordered to want to hang onto things that facilitate such deep, personal significance."


What strikes me so much here is the love the writer has. I don't know what objects or loved-ones she's thinking of when she writes this, but each object about which she feels this strongly is tied to a person who she has loved very much. It's been said that the origination of all emotion is love. Even hatred is the human response to rejection, and rejection hurts so much precisely because we want to love and be loved. The writer of the quoted lines above is longing to extend and receive love to people who are no longer near her. What she wrote captures my own feelings as I go about wrestling with things that own me.


But I have to argue with the part of me that identifies with these sentiments. In a way, this is the very heart of what I'm blogging about. And before I examine what I assume Socrates, or Gandhi, or Christ would say to this impulse I share with everyone else, I want to be clear that I'm not saying it's "wrong" to hold on to objects. However, I think I will say that it is "disordered." And my reason for saying so is because the deep valuing of the object is getting in the way of the love of the person. The person who wrote the lines, "every time the object facilitates the release of memories and feelings, it ceases to be yet another disposable object and instead becomes a relic, a holy vessel of ancestry." wants to connect with the person she loved and lost. But notice that the beloved person isn't even the reason she wants to have the object. Her reason for holding on to the object is to "facilitate the release of memories and feelings." The object is providing her with an experience she feels she needs to have. She wants to have the memories and feelings, and she assumes that the object preserves those memories and feelings as if it has the power to generate those memories and feelings. But it doesn't, does it? Would she forget her grandmother if she did not have the object that once belonged to that grandmother? I can't imagine her memories disappearing when she still feels so passionately about that person. Certainly she would never forget her grandmother--but she fears that she will.


What I think is really going on in our minds when we presume that objects have the power of memory is related to a sort of post traumatic stress disorder. Someone we love is gone and it was a great loss over which we had no control. It was a shock, even if we knew it was going to happen well in advance. Every morning for weeks, months, we wake up and feel the shock freshly as if getting the news for the first time. We cannot fight it, we cannot flee it. Settling into a life in which that person is no longer an element is yet another reality over which we have no control. We fear a future without that person. We fear losing our memories of the person.


These fears aren't "wrong." But the fear of loss doesn't get better by having objects. in fact, I would argue, it sets us up for the very thing we fear the most. When we attach the significance of a holy relic to an object, we become responsible for treating the object with proper reverence. Wouldn't the time and effort of doing that be better spent interacting with someone we love now? And wouldn't caring for someone else be a better way of honoring those we've lost? Because, after all, we didn't love the one we lost because of this object. We loved that person because of the interactions we had with him/her. Meaningful interaction with other people is what we want. We want love, not things. Caring for things is misdirected love. Holding on to things is a concession to fear. Isn't love supposed to cast out fear?

Things Stored in Mom's Basement

Inspired by Mary Ellen, Casey, and Patrick, I shot a video (that I can't get Blogspot to upload) in my mother's basement--a space in which  I'm trying to make room for all my worldly possessions. I will either get that video uploaded by tomorrow or I'll simply post a narration of what it contains with still photos. It is one amazing experience to sort through items from your childhood and even your grandparents' lives while asking yourself if these things are needed.

 So the problem of possessions is needing to be explored. The question is what does one hold on to and what should be let go? I agree with Mary Ellen's position that all objects are not equal. There are two kinds of value we're discussing: monetary and sentimental. In the end, however, my thesis is that this only amounts to different reasons for divesting one's self of the things--not a differentiation in how to treat the objects. 

I brought up the question of hoarders and how they seem to suffer from a malady that we all have to some extent. It is a sickness that our economic system forces on us. The problem with our stuff is that it owns us. That is the truth. The things themselves are meaningless. That is also true, I very firmly believe.  And by allowing meaningless things to own us we are slaves to falsehood. That is a fairly romantic flourish, I admit: "slave to falsehood." This is what my husband has called "getting all Mother Theresa." I apologise for the poetics. But I sincerely mean what I'm saying and I truly believe this is a matter of deep morality. 

I have said that our culture's attachment to objects is a sickness and immoral. I had better clarify my purpose in saying that. I am not suggesting that we people who suffer from this are, ourselves, immoral. In our minds, these objects are attached to our most profound humanity: our love for others. This instinct is good and beautiful. I am not advocating a Buddist detachment from the world. In fact, I'm advocating a complete and thorough connection to the world -- or, more specifically, the people who occupy it. And the great irony I would like to examine is the way our attachment to things prevents us from being able to  do that very thing we all desire most: connecting with others, experiencing love.

The Delusion of Stuff

I am enormously grateful to everyone leaving comments on this blog. You have no idea how much you are helping me. And while the congratulations on being "brave" are appreciated, it's the comments that resist my central thesis that are most helpful.

I have put a good deal of thought into the problem of stuff. I think I need to call it that: the problem of stuff. Stuff is a great word. It diminishes the value of what it denotes. I like that. That helps my purpose here. Two issues have been raised: stuff as bulwark against loneliness and the possibility that all stuff is not equally valueless. But I would argue that they are, in the end, the same problem. Casey agrees with Mary Ellen who wants me to find the line between useless stuff and that which she describes as "unique to you and your mind, and every time the object facilitates the release of memories and feelings, it ceases to be yet another disposable object and instead becomes a relic, a holy vessel." I completely understand this sentiment and I know that it comes from love. However, I do not believe this is true. And, again, I thank Mary Ellen, Casey, and Patrick for helping me be true to my blog's purpose: experiments in truth. I am now off to my mother's basement where I will make a little video illustrating my perspective on memories, feelings, and stuff. 


[An aside to my concerned students: At this moment, I feel I am putting in the best day's work I have ever done. Forgive me for leaving you but I think I am where I am supposed to be right now. I love you.]