COASTLINE JOURNAL

I’ve been asked about deadlines for submissions. As this is a blogged journal, so to speak, there are no deadlines. Articles or essays are uploaded as they arrive, which means one person’s essay may occupy the top of the home page for a few days, or it may be shifted into second place by a new arrival. I don’t want to crowd anyone out of the home page and into the archives, so I’ll make sure the last half dozen essays are visible.

Style was another enquiry, and I made a few modifications on the Masthead page which I hope will clarify things. Basically, it has to be in an academically acceptable format, but as that encompasses a diverse range of styles, I’ll say that I prefer the Chicago/Turabian notes-bibliography style, but I’m cool with other styles. As long as it looks good, makes sense, gives credit where credit is due.

After my email blitz to the AGLSP member and associate member programs, I’ve received a couple of essays each from Fort Hays State University and the University of Pennsylvania, which suggests an active, and proactive, faculty who see the value in getting their student’s best work online.

Our first U.S. entry, from David C. Hilton of Fort Hays State University, speaks to the diversity of study and writing in these programs, with his essay The Impact of Aging Consumers on Business. David, 76, credits retirement with the impetus (and time) to pursue Liberal Studies.

The week following I received The Meaning of Knowledge from Fort Hays’ Amanda Nelson, and will soon publish a scientific essay by Arista Dechant, also of FH.

From Pennsylvania we present three writers: Susan Burt-Collins on citizenship in early America; Billy Thompson on seeing more than just the picture in film; and Kathryn Feldman on the famous racehorse Barbaro and the cult of celebrity illness.

All great reads–Fort Hays State University and the University of Pennsylvania are well represented! As is the university I attend, Simon Fraser, in Vancouver, where I am halfway through my MALS program.

SFU’s Sandra Lockwood presented her essay Speaking to the Dead: a Study of Yasunari Kawabata’s Short Story Jojoka, to the joint GLS student and alumni symposium in June, 2008. In it, Sandra brings both the scent of melancholy and spring to the journal. I couldn’t help adding the photo of cherry blossoms, as it has been a bleak, cold spring in Vancouver, and the few crocuses, snowdrops and daffodils that braved March are still the only indication that spring is here. Usually, by now, our streets are blossomed in pink and white, a lasting legacy and gift of our Japanese community.

Mountain View Cemetery

I live not far from Vancouver’s largest cemetery, Mountain View, and often see families honoring their departed with incense and food. A beautiful new columbarium, or resting place for cremated remains, has been built south of the new offices, with three fountains, stone benches, and tasteful memorial walls. We do not want to forget those who have left us behind, and Sandra’s essay speaks eloquently to the yearning we have to remember.

Without any intention, Coastline began with a focus on tragedy and death in the first essays, perhaps due to the fall 2008 course taught by Heribert Adam on Negotiating Compromises in Divided Societies.

Scott-Ryan Abt, also from my cohort at SFU, writes about the Allied bombing of Dresden and the terrible firestorms that ensued. Under the Rug of War examines our attitudes toward remembering or forgetting our crimes against humanity.

That immoral, illegal and downright murderous acts occur in wartime and are committed by the armies of all nations is not news. The fog of war has been used by all belligerent states and their militaries – which hold a monopoly on the truth during conflicts anyway – to further obfuscate, obscure and otherwise sweep under the rug, atrocities perpetrated against an enemy. It seems that no side in any armed struggle is immune from this. In the same way that one today must reexamine long held certainties about the moral righteousness of the wars of the last century, in coming years we will also need to look back at the conflicts currently underway with a more critical eye.

And Mike Donovan’s essay on the Spanish Civil War, On Wounds and Graves and Their Opening, engages the reader with its immediacy:

Traffic was lighter than normal, as most of the city’s builders were on strike. The car rumbled along the Paseo del Prado, site of the May Day parade a month earlier. On that day, the avenue had pulsated with the energy of thousands of socialists and communists. Mandolin musicians struck the notes of the Internationale, and a multitude of banners were unfurled: “Unite Proletarian Brothers!” “No Peasants Hungry!” “Long Live Socialism!”…

Peeking through closed shutters, the conservative rank was shocked and repulsed by the swagger of the poor, of the women, of the working class.

UPDATE: the essays by Scott Ryan-Abt and Mike Donovan were removed at the request of the authors as they will be included in a published anthology by Heribert Adam. M.Cox, May 15/09

I have to remind myself, from time to time, that life is not a rehearsal, that each day is a gift. That was my intent when I wrote, for the foundation courses in Reason and Passion, on finding something positive in tragedy.

Besides, what is this great and evil lust for life that drives us to be so greatly agitated amidst doubt and peril? There is an end fixed for the life of mortals, and death cannot be avoided, but die we must.   [Lucretius, de rerum natura, 3:1076-1080]

Carol Tulpar (SFU-MALS, 2004) sent in a poem and two essays:  The Empowering Journey , which reflects, in many ways, my own experience of post secondary education and the decision to apply to GLS later in life; Carol’s second essay is on rejoining our soul as the “third leg of the stool“, which has been unbalanced for three centuries since Descartes built it.

In early April I sent email invitations to most of the members and associate members of the AGLSP, in the hope they would pass it along to current students and alumni.  If you are a current Liberal Studies student or an alumnus, please consider sending us one of your essays!

Sandra Lockwood, Simon Fraser University

presented to the Joint Student and Alumni Symposium, Stanford University
June 27~29, 2008

download this essay: lockwood_kawabata

photo by Duran Cheung, courtesy beyondrobson.com

Speaking to the dead–what a sad human custom!

But sadder still, I can’t help thinking, is that men should have to project into a world beyond death, the images of their loved ones as they knew them in this life. [287]

So begins Kawabata’s Jojoka or Lyric Poem, the intimate address of a woman to a former lover upon hearing of his death. This short story has haunted me all my adult life. I take the occasion of this Graduate Liberal Studies Symposium to offer a personal essay on this work.

This story is about grief. It is about how we, the living, the surviving, maintain a relationship and a channel of communication with those loved ones we have lost. Jojoka is a young woman’s monologue, desperate to be a dialogue, in which she explores the complex emotions of grief. She loved a man. He betrayed her. She harbours deep, unresolved feelings that crave reconciliation. Jojoka is Kawabata’s personal examination of the fate of the soul, not just the human soul, but that of all living entities, plant and animal, from a sensual, poetic and decidedly unscientific perspective.

What if the essence of the soul is a like a smell, existing on the level of our most primal sense, conjuring forth and reconstituting memories? Perhaps, the soul “like a trail of incense, wafts from [the body] gradually and recomposes itself in the heavens after the pattern of the body it has left on earth [291].”

The narrator seeks solace through Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, Shinto animism, Western Spiritualism, and telepathic, premonitory episodes from her own childhood. She concludes that for her, she will choose to distill the remaining essence, the memory of her lover, into a sprig of plum in her tokonoma and address her words to the flowers.

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Michael Cox, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

download essay: Passionate Endings

Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave and I will wear him
In my heart’s core (Hamlet, 3.2.68)

Nothing is less in our power than the heart
which is more apt to command us than to obey (Heloise, 105)

Socrates claims happiness is found in the ascension from physical, intellectual and moral love to the pure love of truth and beauty, while our western view of happiness is materially based, that we can (and ought to) attain it, whenever we want. In his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau claims that happiness is out there, somewhere, but it is  “a lasting state which does not seem to be made for man in this world” (Rousseau: 137). Freud tosses a wet blanket over the concept of true and everlasting happiness which, he writes, is “at loggerheads with the world”, adding, sourly, “one feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’” (Freud: 25).

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