Another walk to campus. Another day walking around in Simonides’ head.
Every summer I forget again that, come fall, on football weekends our neighborhood once again becomes a mausoleum: Cars roll slowly down the hill, drivers and passengers looking the other way, toward the Paterno house. The cars then turn around at Sunset Park, or at the end of our street, or in our driveway, and plod at funereal pace back up the hill toward campus. Looking the other way.
The late architect who lived across the street from us renovated the house his wife grew up in. The house now faces not directly across the street toward our house but rather away at an angle, toward the arboretum just east of us. The architect told me that he reoriented his house to look away from ours for a specific reason. "Your house is so ugly," he said, "that I couldn't bear the thought of looking at it all the time." I had to admit that I saw his point; the house we live in is indeed homely. Still, perhaps the architect shouldn't have gone there. And perhaps I, likening this neighborhood with its absent persons, famous and not, to a mausoleum, with cars "looking the other way" . . . perhaps I shouldn't have gone there either.
"Don't go there" -- a phrase ascendant in the 1990s and then shortened and intensified in the aughts to “don’t even” -- performs the meaning of rhetorical topoi. In the context of "don't go there," the unexplained "there" is a subject -- a topos -- not to be uttered. The admonition is against not merely saying but going: against traveling to a place. Rhetoric's first canon, its most important body of knowledge, is invention, the process of finding or composing thoughts or words or sounds or images. Therefore, practicing rhetoric necessarily involves thinking of some things that might be better left unshared. Central to Aristotle's second definition of rhetoric -- "seeing in any given case all the available means of persuasion" (1355b) -- is the acknowledgment that not all we "see," not all that we invent, should be communicated.
Topos is a concept central to rhetoric because humans are located in places for limited durations of time. A topos is a literal or figurative place for invention to begin and begin again, to invent and reinvent. Just as where a person literally is strongly affects what ze senses and what ze thinks ze knows, where a person figuratively is -- what zer beliefs, values, and attitudes are -- strongly affects how ze reasons, what ze might consider, and what ze might conclude.
Rhetoric scholar Michael C. Leff called topoi "atomic units of discourse" (27). Topoi can also be understood as bioregions of discourse: one literal or figurative place may generate and sustain some kinds of ideas and not others, while another location would more likely generate other regional specialties. Topoi are central to the study and practice of rhetoric in this project, which tacks back and forth in time between two places, Texas and Pennsylvania, over fifty years, to fathom the ratios between.
Guided by Voices: Invention and Memory in Time
In the eight years I lived in Austin, Texas, I drove back and forth to Pennsylvania at least two dozen times. My parents were elderly. I chose to drive rather than to take airplanes to see them for at least two reasons: First, flying with pets was rarer in the 1990s; pet flight was then quite risky because most animals had to travel in baggage, a violently loud space imperfectly pressurized and prone to extreme cold and heat -- a thought that bothers me deeply even now as I recall and write it. We flew with our dogs only once, when we had to rush home after my father, Austin, passed away. I hate to imagine what Sidney and Spenser Schnauzer might have endured down in baggage on flights from Austin, Texas, to Atlanta and from Atlanta to BWI. And back.
Second, I did all that driving because I wanted a car when I got to Pennsylvania. After my dad died, the dogs and I stayed during our visits with my mom in The Victorian Villa, her "personal care home”; it was good to be able to get out of there once or twice a day. Plus, not having been allowed a driver's license until I was nearly twenty years old -- dad ran a volunteer ambulance service in the community and had seen too closely the consequences of auto accidents -- made me crave my autonomy.
One time on the way back to Austin, Texas, from visiting Austin and Hope, I left Pennsylvania later in the day than I'd planned. That meant not getting all the way to Memphis the first night, which meant not getting all the way back to Austin, Texas, the second. I ended up shaky and exhausted somewhere near Plano, Texas, after midnight, having to stop and find a room where Sidney and Spenser and I could sleep for a few hours. Needing to be back on campus the next afternoon, the pups and I left Plano just before four in the morning, soon taking that cosmic left turn from I-30 near Dallas toward I-35E and south to Austin. Texas.
Involuntarily I turned on the radio. In the previous few years, partly because of my work on public memories of the University of Texas Tower shootings, I'd gotten to know Austin talk radio host Chuck Meyer. Chuck had made a few cassette mix tapes for my road trips to Pennsylvania and back, but I'd listened to them all at least three times already on the trip. So more than two hours north of Austin on I-35, I turned the radio dial to 590 KLBJ-AM, though I knew there was no way I could hear Chuck's voice until 5 a.m., when his morning drive-time shift began. Heck, there was no way I could hear KLBJ at all over terrestrial radio from that distance at that time of the morning. Still, my radio habit, a lack of sleep, and the feeling of being stretched between two places -- arcs and sparks -- compelled me to listen to static as Sidney, Spenser, and I together rode the concrete ululations of I-35 South.
Somewhere south of Hillsboro, I thought I heard a snatch of KLBJ-AM's jingle. Through the static, memory convinced me I could hear snippets of Chuck Meyer's voice. Somewhere past the Hill-McLennan county line, I was sure I heard Chuck's caramel-nicotine morning greeting between the hisses of interference. Then the road rose to an exit marked "Meyers Lane," and emerging from the inevitable bridge underpass I was certain I heard Chuck's voice saying things I knew he'd be saying because of what time it was. The voice of a friend, and the sudden surge of burnt orange sunrise across the sky, carried me all the way down I-35. I felt guided home by voices, Meyer at Meyers, Austin to Austin -- homed by radio, radioed home.
Yet perhaps I shouldn't have gone there. Guided home by voices? Perhaps the idea of riding the soundfumes of Chuck Meyer's voice all the way home to that other Austin is too much to expect you to accept. Too much rhetoric. Strains credulity. Makes you wonder about the teller of the tale. Still, I need to see if you can, if you will, follow -- at least for a while.
I mentioned invention above, and claimed it as rhetoric's most important canon or body of knowledge. Equally important, though, is the rhetorical canon of memory, because if you don't remember something, you can't use it in future thoughts and statements -- in future inventions.
Both invention and memory are intimately connected to topoi. British historian Frances Yates opened her definitive study of Western arts of memory from antiquity through the scientific revolution by recounting a story from Cicero about an ancient poet named Simonides of Ceos. After Simonides delivered his poem at a banquet, he was beckoned outside. While he was outside, the banquet hall roof collapsed, crushing the assembled. In order to identify the bodies, Simonides recounted from memory the place -- in Greek the topos, in Latin the locus -- at the table where each guest had been sitting. Hence, argues Yates, following Cicero, this story offers evidence of how the ancient Greek art of memory was understood and functioned: topoi were at its core. Yet human memory is neither complete nor perfect: each time we remember something, the memory changes as it is inflected through where and who we may be when we remember.
In addition to invention and memory, rhetoric's other canons are arrangement, style, and delivery. These bodies of knowledge were inchoate in Aristotle's Rhetoric, mentioned and discussed but not systematized. A few hundred years after Aristotle, rhetoric handbooks fully delineated what became the five rhetorical canons -- invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery -- central to the teaching and practice of rhetoric, off and on, up to the present. Though different rhetorical canons were emphasized and subordinated at different times in rhetoric's history, memory and invention together -- memory and reinvention -- are what contain the capacity for changing selves and societies. In her book Rhetoric Reclaimed, Janet Atwill described this as rhetoric's capacity for invention and intervention.
Reminders of three more Greek words before we travel together further: khronos, kairos, and parakairos. The ancient Greeks had two senses of time. There was chronological time -- how we generally think of time in the West: beginning, middle, end; the number line. The other sense of time was not the number line but a point on that line: kairos, the correct or opportune moment. Whereas chronological time was more or less a given, kairic time was a matter of judgment: opinions differ as to the correct time for a particular word or action. Finally, the opposite of kairos was parakairos, untimely or inopportune. The virtue of seeing or knowing the right thing to say can be wasted if one delivers it at the wrong moment.
Just as individual memory is vital for personal and, when shared, interpersonal invention, public memory is central to a society's capacity for change. Public memory reveals what a public chooses to value by how it is remembered -- or not remembered -- publicly. Anniversaries and other commemorations combine khronos with kairos, taking the exigent "now" of kairos to give presence to incidents chronologically distant in time and experience. Anniversaries are themselves towers of memory -- at least for those who know and remember.
It was public memories of August 1, 1966, recounted on local talk radio in Austin, Texas, on the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Tower shootings, that gave me the idea -- invention -- to offer a course on the UT Tower shootings and public memory, a course that became more generally about the UT Tower and public memory so that students could choose if they wanted to write about issues other than gun violence. Many students wrote papers about public memory in their cities and towns, or of departed ancestors whose memory they were concerned might be lost. Hearing other voices -- on radio, via podcasts, or in conversation -- gives me ideas. I think best in -- as Hannah Arendt described it -- the presence of others. Truth is that my brain appears to have been too heavily composted; almost anything will grow there, at least ephemerally. Besotted with words and often astounded by what can be invented in words -- for better or worse -- this professor of rhetoric sometimes finds herself bewildered among khronos, kairos, and parakairos.
Why am I talking about myself again? Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer observed, soon after the 1967 march on the Pentagon, in The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History,
If you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can do the job -- it is the tower which takes months to build.... Of course the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences -- history so much as physics -- are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes ... has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower.
Photo: arleksey / Shutterstock
Character: Periodic Tables
In ninth-grade physical science class we were studying the periodic table. Our teacher, Mr. Filizzi, told me one morning through his Enrico Fermi moustache that I was “a free radical” -- one of those elements on the periodic table that has an incomplete outer electron shell and is therefore, physically speaking, unstable. Mr. Filizzi's observation is among the most meaningful things anyone has ever said to me. A decade later Mr. Filizzi's observation made it into my self-description: "I'm a free radical; I'll combine ephemerally with almost anything." Five years after that, Mr. Filizzi's observation became one way I explained my marriage: "On the periodic table of human personality, I'm a free radical: I'll combine ephemerally with almost anything. Keith's an inert gas."
Though the metaphor of the periodic table worked well for a while, it harbored unintended consequences: free radicals cause metastases -- the uncontrollable division of cells leading to tropics of cancer. Remembering my agricultural roots, I revised my metaphorical self-description to one that had no negative cellular consequences: I became a free-range rhetorician, an organic discourse-farmer.
That I could claim to be guided home by Chuck Meyer's voice emerging through radio static suggests my free-radical self: my missing electrons left spaces to be filled willy-nilly. And that I would compare -- what is a metaphor but a comparison intensified? -- my marriage to a chemical bond, or its lack, should suggest something about my rhetorical character, the "self" I am constructing to tell this tale.
I am willing to imagine almost anything. But there are a few places I am not willing to go. The limits of my imagination are constituted by acts of violence and cruelty: after more than two decades studying gun violence, I can no longer tolerate watching violent films. And I can no longer tolerate images of animals and other creatures being harmed, tortured, or killed. This is neither virtuous or unusual: I state it to articulate the few off-limit areas of my imagination, of what I am -- of what my character is -- unwilling to invent or witness. These limits I cannot, however, call judgment; they are neither reasoned nor reasonable: they are reflexive, involuntary, like the kick that follows a knock to the patella.
What, then, is judgment?
Here is a recent example of something I'd call judgment:
Yesterday was the second day I met my students in Communication Arts and Sciences 478, a course about contemporary US political rhetoric, specifically focusing on discourses about school shootings and other public violence. Between the first and second meetings of the class -- I wonder if you recollect this incident -- a Virginia man shot to death a television reporter and her cameraman while they were on air. The murderer videotaped the shootings and uploaded the video to Facebook and Twitter before he completed the story more conventionally: suicide.
I chose not to watch that video. My newsroom ethos of detachment has long ago faded. So I didn't watch -- though I still feel that I should, given what I study -- and I told students that afternoon that I didn't watch and why. That is individual judgment.
However, rhetoric is even more centrally about collaborative, or collective, or public judgment -- what the ancient Greeks called krisis, from where we get our English word criticism. Rhetoric provides a common language that allows people to deliberate and make judgments, however ephemerally. "Invention is the art of discovering new arguments and uncovering new things by argument, while judgment is the art of testing arguments, proving conclusions, and verifying statements" (59), wrote Richard McKeon, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who was hip to the power of rhetoric for building systems of thought, disciplines, ideas, arts, and methods. McKeon's work helps me expand my understanding of the power of topoi -- of literal and figurative places -- for building and rebuilding systems of knowledge and understanding through individual and collective judgments. Finally, my sense of judgment follows philosopher Hannah Arendt's admonition that invention -- in this case, thought -- needs to be tempered by judgment about practices: "the point is to think what we are doing." There is wisdom and there is practical wisdom, phronesis. Judgment is knowing what to do.
All of this is to say that I am sometimes too enthralled by the power of words and what they can invent -- “Worlds! out of nothing!” -- and sometimes, thus enthralled, I do not take enough care with what I say, when, and to whom. My inventions sometimes threaten to eclipse my judgment.
The Wetmore Cox Division of Rhetoric
One day at a faculty meeting at The University of Texas at Austin, our director suggested, wryly as I recall, that we might need to find some sort of private funds to sustain the operating budget of our small and quite-new unit. Strange coincidence, I thought: I had just a few weeks earlier been considering raising the possibility with my colleagues of a potential conversation with the owners of the city's newspaper -- growing media company Cox, Inc. The Tower course I was teaching and several of our other courses helped us identify ourselves as centrally concerned with teaching students to generate public-minded rhetoric, writing that helped various publics deliberate and come to judgment about important common topics.
Even stranger: Just that weekend a friend from college had visited. When we went to Kerbey Lane Cafe for breakfast, she sat down and spread her fingers wide. More than one big diamond was on each hand. We had worked at the Daily Collegian together as undergraduates at Penn State. Her last name was Wetmore, and she said, "I'm sitting on a big pile of money!" She said she was about to retire and was looking to get involved with philanthropy and corporate boards.
That day at the faculty meeting, prompted by our director's question, the two opportunities -- the newspaper and my friend -- collided in my brain. I can't remember whether I said it out loud or whether it merely danced around in my too-delighted brain, to be relished to this day. In any case, it occurred to me that, if my colleagues wanted to combine corporate with private money, we might become the Wetmore Cox Division of Rhetoric.
I often say I am all invention and no judgment. But perhaps I had the judgment that day not to say "Wetmore Cox" out loud. In any case, over the years between there and here I have been telling this story of the power of the words juxtaposed, a way to suggest my contempt for the obscenity of a culture that refuses to see that by devaluing public education -- and denying access to public higher education for all -- it is destroying its capacity for collaborative self-governance.
