Writing Reality

A giant blooming buzzing confusion

Originally uploaded by deborah lattimore.

I ran across William James’s famous phrase “blooming buzzing confusion” in an article on Dewey’s conception of vocation. James used the phrase to describe what a baby perceives.

The phrase contains two interesting analogies. Confusion is both the blooming flower and the buzzing bee. Thus confusion sustains and perpetuates itself.

I am the author of my own endless confusion. I allow it to bloom and expand endlessly (maybe mutate is the right word) because I continuously add ideas to my ever-expanding body of knowledge about teaching, learning, universities and education. Like the bee, I am ever on the outlook for new food sources.

The trouble is I am too much like the bee. (Or, should I say the colony? A bee is after all one element of a rhisomatic entity (cf. Deleuze and Guattari)). I must be more mindful of my vegetable-self. My constant state of perpetual conceptual growth leads not only to confusion but unwieldy complexity. You might say that my head is in danger of exploding (but that would buy into the myth that the mind is a memory-bank with finite storage capability). I would prefer to think that I am in danger of becoming a giant vegetable, too heavy to harvest. Or better yet a giant West Coast old-growth tree inexorably intertwined and linked into the local ecosystem.

If confusion is analogous to life, does that mean that certainty is akin to death? A fragmenting and freezing certainty, perhaps? But I feel myself slipping back into that old dichotomy of atomism/objectivism vs. holism/constructivism. Where should one draw the boundary of relevance when trying to make sense of something? The bee and the flower are interesting in their own right and can each be reduced to their consitutant elements, but they are inextricably linked in a larger whole that cannot be reduced to the elements in isolation. (To push this weird analysis a little bit further, I might argue that one might describe them as the interface between two related subsystems within an ungraspable, unfathamable whole.)