Wednesday 2/22 -- Special Speaker, Miriam Lerner

 

SPECIAL EVENT FOR WEDNESDAY 2/22 !!!  We will still be meeting at noon but instead of our usual reading and discussing of poems, we will have a special speaker, Miriam Lerner. I know her as one of the most awesome ASL poetry translators who can “work on the spot” hearing a poem for the first time, capture the feel of it and translate into ASL.   She no longer does translation work, but has accepted my invitation to come tell us about ASL Core.    http://aslcore.org/  (you’ll see from the site, this is a Deaf-centric project which honors and celebrates Deaf culture and ASL.)
  She now lives in Vermont but will be in town this week and has accepted my invitation to come.  This is all inspired by the library’s involvement with the Big Read of Deaf Republic. 

Miriam Lerner (L) and Yours Truly (R)

 

This is her description:

"As the world continues on its breakneck trajectory of technical innovation sometimes language lags behind in its ability to express these new discoveries and inventions! If a language and the people who use it have been deliberately tethered and ignored, how does the language "catch up" in a deliberate and responsible way? ASLcore is a translation project which attempts to create suggested, linguistically accurate American Sign Language lexicon in order for Deaf students to have commensurate access to academic content. 

Explanation about the inception of the project as well as examples from the site will be provided.” 

Miriam shared as well this site https://www.spreadthesign.com/en.us/search/

 which shows how different languages sign differently!take "being" :  in English: two hands parallel tracing top to bottom as if making a tree trunk.  In Russian: Hands start the same, then one taps 3 times into the other hand; Italian: cup the RH.  LH picks up energy from cupped RH, spreads 2 fingers then directs to chest, then out.  (always the back of hand showing!) 

Please keep  the poems sent out for 2/22 however, tabled for March 1.

As extra: she thought people might enjoy this piece exploring how to sign philosophy: (excerpts from "Signing Hegel" by Miriam Lerner)

How do you take an abstract concept with no image to hang your hat on and create a picture in the air, accompanied by linguistically appropriate facial expressions to accurately representing the idea ?  Iconicity is to signed languages what onomatopoeia is to spoken ones.  You have to see it in your mind first before you can paint this canvas, just like you’d have to hear a dog bark to howl a convincing, “woof!” 

Cogito, ergo sum.  I think, therefore I am. 

 I interpret this stuff.

 Therefore I have to think.  Harder than I want to, and possibly harder than I can. 

 

What is thinking ?  The sign THINK is both index fingers describing vertical circles at the side of the temples. But from what I’ve learned, this isn’t really what “thinking” is in Philosophy.  I tend to use the same sign for “reason” as “thinking,” “reason” being the ability to plan ,predict, consider, analyze, make informed decisions. There is a sign, REASON, but it’s a noun, produced by the dominant hand “R” making that same circular motion at the temple.  But that’s a “reason” for someTHING, not the verb “to reason”.  We interpreters are becoming infamous for nounifying verbs and verbifying nouns, and it’s a slippery slope to slide down, because it’s convenient and seems to work so why stop if it makes life easier?  And why does it work ? Because the students we interpret for are, for the most part, getting well-meaning but crappy sign models their whole lives because 95% of them come from hearing families where no one signs and they learn sign from – who ??? The well-meaning interpreters. Who reinvent ASL grammar and infamously nounify verbs and verbify nouns. But that’s another story. Just take it on faith, I don’t use “R” reason for “reasoning” or using the faculty of reason to understand something.

I think, therefore I am.  How to sign Descarte’s basic, yet foundational concept ?   ME CONSIDER (eyebrows knitted together in thought), MEAN( eyebrows raised in realization) ME HERE ( or, another choice, ME LIVE).  

It took me a long time to feel confident interpreting just this one idea.  And if I was to sign CONFIDENT in this context, the facial expression I would use would look sickly, weak, and unconvincing, thus inflecting the sign to mirror how out on a limb and completely tragic it is that I’m doing this to the poor deaf students. 

Sigh. 

And you think you’ve got problems. 

**

Signing "Allegory of the Cave" : you set up walking along and seeing a hole in the ground or the side of a mountain, and you walk in and descend into the dark, enigmatic depths, and discover the people all sitting in a row, chained and constrained so that their faces are forced to forever look forward at the cave wall. There is a fire behind them, and between the fire and the captives there is a pathway traveled by people and animals, which cast shadows on the wall which is the only reality the captives know.  That is their world.  Until one day, one of them escapes, finds her way to exit the cave, and after her eyes adjust to the glaring brightness, her senses are overcome by a new reality, THE reality, which she had never known before. She realizes her duty is to awaken her cohorts of deceived and deprived back in the cave and rushes back to do so.   But when she attempts to describe the real world, and to entice them to accompany her to the surface and start really experiencing all life has to offer, they are angry and obstinate in their insistence on utter loyalty to the shadows of their lives. 

The Philosopher’s heartache. 

I can sign that !

**How do I love thee, Jean-Paul Sartre ? Let me count the ways. Existentialism rocks for so many reasons, and not just because I personally grok the message. When a professor explains its underlying precepts of the liberation of choice, the freedom of self, the incredibly daunting yet  invigorating responsibility of self-directedness of our lives – all of that I can embody, and I have the privilege of experiencing the thrill of the hour of consciousness every time I interpret it. Even though it isn’t self-generated I get to make it look like it is, it’s like tripling your SW Airlines Rapid Rewards points! Vicariously experiencing someones else’s hour of consciousness compliments of interpreting a lecture about it is just as profound as having one myself, and it was good for me, too!  Someone just bought the next round!  I get the same joy out of signing explanations of the word “sublime” in aesthetics classes.  Mmmm, mmmm, mmmmm, to show the heart-stopping, jaw-dropping awe and wonder which the sublime evokes, the translation more on my face than on my hands as in my mind I picture the Grand Canyon, a gorgeous sunrise, the first time I saw my children’s faces… 

Oh, come with me, and together let us adore Jean-Paul.

“Existence precedes essence.”

 Fasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride…

First of all “existence.” Isn’t it more than just the sign LIVE?  That sign is a state of being, a verb, although it seems to nounify well and I can still respect myself in the morning if I use it for LIFE.  When we speak of “existence” isn’t that more than my very prosaic life, my everyday interactions, my conscious being, my sentient, corporeal presence on the planet?   Let’s just leave well enough alone and pretend that the sign LIVE will suffice for now, I might change my mind later, but I do think I have to sign BORN FINISH ( FINISH  indicating past tense, otherwise it is present tense BIRTH) to show how I got here in the first place. And then sign LIVE…..

Now on to other, bigger fish to fry.

Like “essence.”  Well, hell’s bells and little fishes,( my mother’s favorite curse.)  I think “essence” is that kernel inside, the thing that makes me who I am, if you distilled all my me-ness into a drop, that would be my attar, essence of Miriam, which, when put on a slide and viewed on 10x magnification would show how much I love movies, blue corn tortilla chips, dogs, my husband, my children, travel, the Beatles, Tom Petty, the color purple, and bras that fit right.  As well as my life force, my aura, the nightly somnambulant gallivanting across the universe in my dreams, my low thyroid condition, and my new and expensive but wonderful orthopedic inserts. Etc. Pretend that at this point in the lecture. 

everything in the room freezes in a game of “Swing the Statue” and I am the only one who can still move.  The professor is posed with arms outstretched, brow furrowed, mouth still configured in a sibilant “S” after asking, “And what is our essence ?”  Students are frozen in time, taking notes, checking Facebook on the laptops on which they are supposedly taking notes, the real-time Captionist’s fingers are poised over the keyboard, someone is picking their nose, someone is asleep, others are looking thoughtfully out into space. I see it all…and now with the luxury of a parallel universe, it is time to play. 

Thanks to the amazing properties of ASL, I can take any or all of my attributes, as well as my past, my present, the way I was raised, one from column A and two from Column B, put them into a container, and then smash/crush/condense them down even smaller than those coffee tables people use to make out of old VW Bugs. I can show my hands squeezing them until one drop falls into the my left hand, and my right hand can take a delicate sample with my middle finger ( the one used for ideas like TASTE, PREFER,FEEL,LIKE,HATE) and then put a little on my tongue. And then happily declare, MYSELF. 

In existentialism, I am here on earth, I am born, I live and exist, before I have my hour of consciousness and begin the steady march towards essence accrual.  My essence will formulate and shift as I undertake the perpetual process of renewal, of constant re-realization and re-commitment to creating my own path and meaning in life. And so, “essence” is what I discover and build as I willfully and consciously “become” myself.

So I sign, ME  BORN FINISH HERE ( signed large and encompassing much space, so that HERE means not just this geographical location, but here on earth), BEFORE ME BECOME MYSELF ( signed two hands signing the honorific ME or WHO-I-AM). BECOME BECOME BECOME CONTINUE

  I am born and live and am present on earth before engaging in the continuous process of becoming the person whom I ultimately will claim as myself.  Or something like that. 

 

Whew. I sometimes think it would be fun to show up to classes in an old 1980’s Jane Fonda workout leotard and leg warmers and after doing a few sentences of class yell out, “Feel the burn!”  Although these days all of the students on campus -and most of the professors too, come to think of it, are too young to get the joke. 

 

 

There are reasons for the lack of standardized signs describing such concepts as “existence,” “essence,” “nothingness,” “ knowledge” “consciousness,” not to mention “epistemology” “ontology”, etc etc. The state of education for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the US is far from standardized, varies from ASL being allowed and encouraged,  to artificial codes and sign systems incomprehensibly and sometimes arbitrarily being mandated in some school districts. The ages of diagnoses of a hearing difficulty vary from child to child, as does the family’s willingness to adapt and accept the fact that no matter what kind of technology you drill into their heads, (a la cochlear implants), or affix to the inside of their ears ( a la hearing aids and molds) their child will never be “hearing.” An inordinate amount of time is spent on teaching lipreading skills and pronunciation of spoken English.  So after a few years of being pulled out of classes for repetitive and often uncomfortable speech therapy a child might be able to say “ice cream” “hot dog” “baseball” and “airplane” but not talk about what other kids in class are talking about or what their folks discuss around the dinner table at night.  The deaf kids who make it into college generally aren’t learning Philosophy (although, to be fair, neither are the Hearing kids these days) – and where I work, at Rochester Institute of Technology – they are more likely to engage in expert discourse about covalent bonds or photo voltaic epitaxy than Mill’s Least Harm Principle. 

But are their unexamined lives still worth living? 

(SUPPOSE WANT MIND-ELEVATE, MUST ( open up chest like opening a coat), ANALYZE  while looking down and inside myself),  2 hands alternating FIND FIND FIND FIND (expression of excitement ).  SUPPOSE DON’T-CARE, JUST-GO-ALONG,  2 hand alternating ACCEPT ACCEPT ACCEPT ( expression of passive complacency)LIFE WORTHLESS.

 

Knowledge. The sign KNOW is, again, a verb.  You have to take that sign and then provide something to hold what you know, a repository for those factoids, names, numbers, information, pie crust recipes, whatever.  I can sign KNOW and then in front of my forehead GROUP. Then I can point to it, I can add to it, it can grow, it can shrink. I can examine it as if it is something separate from me. I can doubt it/not trust it when I discuss Skepticism. I can add to it by empirically experiencing something with my senses and through experimentation.  

 

You get the idea.  Make something into a picture if you can.  With Philosophy, it’s like interpreting non-imagist poetry, the kind that is all about playing with words for the sake of the words and no one seems to be concerned with a hard, clear, translatable image as Ginsberg purported. Interpreting is like playing Pictionary in the air using everything you’ve got, face, body, hands, and some good grounding in ASL grammatical features. It helps to have an idea of the language skills and background of the deaf person in front of you. Deaf parents, hearing parents ? Deaf siblings, hearing siblings ?  Did he go to a school for the deaf and ASL will probably make more sense than a more English rendition?  Did he go to a mainstream school with other hearing kids and perhaps have a more sophisticated curriculum but less exposure to a full language ? If I don’t know any of these answers, which way do I jump to make this stuff clear ? AND WHAT IF THERE ARE MORE THAN JUST ONE DEAF STUDENT WITH COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ANSWERS TO THE ABOVE QUESTIONS, EACH WITH HIS OR HER OWN KALEIDOSCOPIC PATTERN OF LINGISTIC DEAF “STUFF” FOR ME TO ATTEMPT TO MATCH ? 

I haven’t mentioned how much I love dry red wine, have I ?

 

Being. Nothingness. Totality. Time. History. Negative and Positive polarities. Solipsism.The Infinite. Eternity.  All of it simultaneously in a continual trajectory of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. 

 

TIME

 2 hands NOTHING, NOTHING ALL-AROUND

BEFORE 

FUTURE

NOW

APPEAR

DISAPPEAR

FOREVER (signed 4 times, once in each direction)

Left hand IDEA, spell T H E S I S  

Right hand IDEA OPPOSITE , spell A N T I T H E S I S

CLASH (into each other)

FIGHT (each other)

Then they calm down and, BLEND, CONSTRUCT, spell S Y N T H E S I S

NEW

Move SYNTHESIS to the left

BECOME  left hand NEW IDEA

Right hand IDEA OPPOSITE

Repeat the whole process…

 

Consciousness…… I’ve been avoiding this one, but it’s what we need to stop running from, else we will never examine it, have it examine itself, negate it to create its opposite with an UN, and then have it mingle and become part of others’….so Jung can suggest that it become collective.

Can’t escape the music, so here we go.

 

Descartes succeeding in persuading the church to get its meddling mitts out of science by separating “spirit” or “mind” and body.  So, abracadabra and hava cadaver, go forth and dissect, it’s all good.  When we become aware of ourselves as thinking entities ( back to cognito ergo sum, again), it is that process of self-talk, self referential awareness, the soundtrack with no mute button that just won’t stop and ruins any attempt at meditation I’ve attempted for the past umpteen years. Of course, that’s for hearing folks – do deaf people see signs in their heads as their internal running commentary ?  Some say yes. Others I’ve asked mention a parade of ideas, but with no exact language forming them. There is a sign, used for two concepts, TALK-TO-SELF  and ISOLATION – formed the same way, 2 hands I, fists facing in towards the body at chest level, the pinky fingers flush together tapping each other. Actually like saying “ I I I I I I I I I” and another  “ I I I I I I I I” talking to it.  Internal monologue, all alone. Hmmm…. 

 

Wiki says that consciousness is aware of things internal and external.  I sense that it means concerted “noticing”, that whatever sign I use will strongly rely upon my head moving side to side, with my eyes seriously scanning the environment.  If I don’t think too much about it ( Ha ha – I crack myself up), the first sign that comes to mind is 2 hands, B shape, palm orientation inward, fingertips touching both temples and then widening outward, the chambermaid entering and throwing open the French doors of my mind so I can admire the pedestrians on the Champs Elysees. I feel that I need to add that CONSIDER sign as well – that adds some machinery to the experience, it shows that my perceptions are causing what’s inside to constantly shift and percolate.  Oh, wow ! And then when it regards itself I can turn the hands in towards inward, the sign for looking inward or being SELF conscious. 

As for UN – it’s a bit easier.  If something is unconscious, the sign is usually formed as the sign KNOW tapping the back of the head instead of the front, we know it “back there” where it is not accessible to our conscious mind.  For emphasis, we can add OVERLOOK, a hand swiping downward in front of our expressionless faces, truly showing how clueless we are as to what the hell’s going on back there in the cranium. 

And “collective unconscious” ? 

 WORLD (make a sphere) PEOPLE THERE THERE THERE THERE ( point to different places on the globe) MIND TRANSMIT-TO-EACH-OTHER ( like ESP),  THINK BLEND WITH, BECOME HANDS CLASPING.

Of course, that would still need all kinds of fleshing out by the prof, what it means in terms of similar myths, symbols, the notion of archetypes. 

Not my problemmo. Yet. 

But this all begs the question – wouldn’t the notion of “consciousness” vary across philosophers ? Hardly any of this stuff is one size fits all.  If the prof doesn’t specify, my own ideas are, of necessity, going to dictate where I go with the translation.  In this form of communication, perhaps more than any other, the medium truly IS the message. You won’t get it without looking at me and getting a glimpse of my own heart, soul, and mind. You also might notice I forgot to tweeze my eyebrows lately, and that I have a habit of pushing my hair back behind my ears even though it’s cut short now and I don’t have to do it anymore. Visual clutter juxtaposed with the profound.  Olympian thoughts conveyed in sign language, ephemeral images give way to each other, dissolve and reconfigure into another idea, through me and off of my face and body, to mingle in the infinite void into which all previously spoken and signed communication disappears.

 

Hegel – contradiction/opposition integrated and united.  True infinity. And his symbol for “infinity” was not a figure 8, but a circle, for the end is the beginning is the beginning is the end. The old man in the last scene of “2001” looks up from his deathbed and points out the window to the starchild floating through the ether in his embryonic sac. 

Life in the fast lane, everything all the time.  I’ll drink to that.  

I have to get to class and attempt this seemingly impossible task, class after class, year after year. 

 Eternal Recurrance.

Because thus spake Zarathustra.