Literacy Narrative

Buddha-Jesus: a Literacy Narrative

(Cloud of Literacy Inspiration): My parents divorce, personal faith, illiteracy, my 5th grade teacher Mr. Cavallo, every relationship I’ve ever been in, Buddha, the museum of natural history in New York City, artwork by Dahli, Chuck Close, H.R Giger, Alfred Hitchcock, Ray Bradbury, Nirvana,The Beatles, My grandmother dying of Cancer, Edward Gorey, Wes Anderson, The Matrix, rain...

The essence of literacy is something that escapes our ability to define. However this essay is meant to accomplish a practical or useful reflection of personal growth through becoming literate. The textbook Writing About Writing cheats a little with its definition of literacy, “Experts who study literacy typically think about more than the ability to read and write. They refer broadly to fluency or expertise in communicating and interacting with other people in many different ways. Thus, it’s more accurate to speak about literacies when thinking about what it means to be a literate person.” (Writing About Writing 64). Instead of trying to actually define literacy it claims that any definition would be inaccurate and it is more beneficial to discuss examples of ‘literacies’ instead. I agree with the choice to cheat, there are a tremendous amount of literacies contained in our world due to--as Deborah Brandt would argue--an individual’s economic place (Brandt 70). The reasons we become ‘literate’ spawn out of a need to survive; to maintain homeostasis. Survival has moved passed the point where basic needs (food, water, living space) can be met entirely on one’s own. This is because we now live in society, and survival at this stage in human evolution is dependent on some form of literacy because we are forced to ‘communicate and interact with people’(WAW 64). “Literacy, like land, is a valued commodity in this economy, a key resource in gaining profit and edge”(Brandt 75). In Deborah Brandt’s view ‘profit’ and ‘edge’ are the rewards for being a literate person. This is true when we look at the world through a Marxist lens. Literacy becomes roped into the constant dialectic of class struggle that has defined humanity forever. There is little room to argue against this. The goal of this paper is to show an example of how literacy reaches farther than the economic base of a society will allow. This paper chooses to accept Marx’s claim, while at the same time arguing literacy to be a means of transcending our commodified truths about the world; to define literacy as a tool to leave behind the self that exists gridlocked in systems upon systems of words and power that rob the agency of the mind of its ability to think.

Our ability to think is prefaced on how we’ve been conditioned to think. Being literate exists as a tool to allow one to progress further into systems of thought or to rebel against systems of thought. Literacy exists on the precipice of falling into ideology and being able to see and define ideology. What I mean to illuminate here is that the same tool that allows for one’s ability to think critically is also the reason why thinking critically is not encouraged. What does it mean to think critically? Thinking critically is when we challenge an understanding we have in our minds (a truth) with another thought that conflicts with the initial thought. In this way, critical thought challenges something we have come to understand about the world from our literacy sponsors. Critical thought is not encouraged because “the powerful work so persistently to conscript and ration the powers of literacy”(Brandt 76). This makes sense when we consider literacy to be the method of getting ahead in this world. But what if we consider literacy outside of the realm of economic progression? What if we consider survival based on truth and meaning; what we need to believe in order to feel okay with existing as phenomenal bodies in a phenomenal world.

The event in my life that catalyzed my consideration into this question was my parent’s divorce. The fissure encouraged an awareness within me of the ideologies and or literacies I participate in. If we think of literacy in terms of ‘literacies’ we imply the possibility of  one literacy running counter to another; those in favor of a particular literacy and those against. I am using my parents as an example of the earliest time I can recall understanding this concept. What becomes clear to me while writing this paper is that nearly everything in this life can be argued to relate to literacy. I would like to emphasize that I believe every literate person at some point has a realization about the vast complexity of our world; complexity in the sense that things are not simply A or B. My parents divorce happens to be the event in my life that sparked this realization. The importance I place on the understandings of the world we formulate as children is perhaps best expressed by Milan Kundera:

“Indeed the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”(Kundera 139)

Perhaps the earliest literacies we become fluent in derive from questions we ask our parents.  What we know of the world, meaning the base we build our understanding and interpretation of phenomenal stimuli on, comes from our parents. This idea can be extended into adolescence and adulthood once our parents become overshadowed by greater systems of control. For example, school, government, religion, etc… . Our parents, as well as greater systems of control, also become overshadowed by things that for various reasons influence us more or make our lives meaningful in ways our parents do not. An aspect of being literate is allowing ourselves to be changed by an understanding of the world that runs counter to what we’ve already established as true.

How I relate my divided upbringing to the pursuit of literacy is by my method of thinking that formed around a conceptual fork in the road. Everything I thought became a debate inside myself; a war between true and false. I felt that picking one understanding over another meant favoring one parent over the other. It seemed so dire in some respects that my love for them could only exist if my understanding of the world lined up with one of theirs. This carried on until I became conscious enough of my stark black and white view of the world to realize how restrictive this kind of thinking is. Perhaps Camus’ writing can illuminate this idea:

“For by asserting that all is true we assert the truth of the contrary assertion and consequently the falsity of our own thesis (for the contrary assertion does not admit that it can be true). And if one says that all is false, that assertion is itself false. If we declare that solely the assertion opposed to ours is false or else that solely ours is not false, we are nevertheless forced to admit an infinite number of true or false judgements. For the one who expresses a true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true, and so on ad infinitum.” (Camus 16-17)

An example of how this split understanding in my brain came about is through the individual faith of my parents. After their divorce my mother found it important to uphold some kind of Catholic education in me, while my father became heavily steeped in Buddhism. There would be times that my mother would drive me to my father’s house house after I got out of CCD, and I would walk into him meditating on the floor of our tiny apartment. I came to realize the very stark difference of my parents’ morality and metaphysical interpretation of the world. In one universe I was bombarded by western ideology of sin and punishment and in the other I was swallowed by eastern ideology of the turnings of thought and the code of the samurai. I found myself to question what was being told in CCD because it ran counter to what I was getting told from my dad. The immediate sense of contradiction between these two spheres of life prompted me to become critical of both. My mind became lost in, as Camus describes, “This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling.”(Camus 17).

It is the mind that studies itself that transcends the Hegelian plight of existing as a social being. It is precisely our ability to figure our own thought that allows for the transcende of meaning from merely just surviving in a capitalist system.  It is impossible to study anything outside of ourselves if we are incapable of studying ourselves. Otherwise, we fall victim to the force of undertow that is the essence of ideology.

Naturally discussions of religion eventually end in a conversation of morals; what is important, what brings happiness, who decides anything for us? My father believed that the answer to these questions was found within (in accordance with Buddhism), while my mother constantly searched outside for answers (in accordance with Catholicism). Although initially confusing, what I eventually realized is that although the two faiths and the two parents contradict each other, they can exist as true in and of themselves. For if it is my desire for both of my parents to be true this is the only way in which that truth was possible. It is exactly this conflict that is the source of truth as well as in a more general sense a source of literacy and critical thought.

The world became much more complex once my relation to it became rendered by my own mind. I became opposed to vicariously living through the perceived reality of my parents. This was not an act of rebellion, it was more so an act of self actualization. I didn’t reject the truths of my parents, I just realized that truth is not so easily universal. The acknowledgement of this fact is more important and greater than the fact itself. I’m not trying to say that everyone and everything is right because we are able to see the logic behind it. Obviously there is right and wrong, but an aspect of being literate is the ability to consciously acknowledge individual truth and think critically as to its relation to yourself and others.

Truths we come to establish are true in ourselves. The next question that needs to be asked is, from whose truth are we comparing our truth? God’s truth, Buddha's truth, Mom or Dad’s truth, Marx’s truth, Brandt’s truth, Camus’ truth, Kundera’s truth, America’s truth… . Being literate is being able to see the truth of all things alongside the simultaneous untruth of all things. The recognition of all answers amongst no answers. Being literate is impossible without understanding our singular limited capacity for understanding; meaning is born from the whole. However, at the same time we all exist within ourselves. So therefore all truth and meaning comes from within. This inherent contradiction to any formulation of meaning is the central tenet of what I define as literacy.

Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays, translated by Justin O’brien, Vintage    

Books, 1991

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable lightness of Being, translated by Michael Henry Heim, Harper

& Row, 2004

Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Downs. Writing About Writing, third Edition, bedford/st.martin’s,

2017.