UR Images: An Idiot’s Guide to Humanities

PSS opens its doors Monday after taking the Governor’s suggestion for the delay of school opening under advisement, to which an Executive Committee from Capital Hill was immediately convened and dispatched to check on the readiness of the school plants and equipment, but saner minds decided to weather the power on-nages (that’s the opposite of “outages,” Joseph). The BoE depended on teachers’ creativity and the students’ imagination to begin forming the communities of learning in each of the schools before the Aggreko promise may cast another layer of helplessness and despair in the communal morale.

Logistics notwithstanding, the issue is what guides teachers when they teach the learners. To be sure, one has to focus on reading and writing, listening and speaking, and we know that listening is the big hole on that quadrant, locally and nationally. My class begins the day with 15 minutes of silence, if only so that the students can hear themselves think. Mathematics, the patterns and ratios of parts and whole, along with science and its inquisitive experiential methods, provides the language and the method for understanding quantifiable data. The social face of that database is the domain of social studies, dealing with time (history), space (geography), social roles (civics and government), sustenance structures (economics), and communal significance (culture). Common standards and benchmarks accompany this core curriculum from K to 12. Teachers then add their individual uniqueness and creativity into the academic stew.

I add magic to mine. Following Jung’s archetypes, we conjure up images of beginnings, or Ur images, following Jung’s contention that each of us carry these images as they are transmitted by our culture(s) even without being self-conscious about it. Ur images are far below the verbal levels of thought for they are the intuitive ways a culture approaches life.

Since preteens in 6th grade (11-13 yrs. old) finally begin to create images of themselves as individuals and the world we live in, from its ancient beginnings to its current struggles, (at this grade, Social Studies is thematically on Ancient Civilizations), this is as good a time to confront them with pictures of the heritage of our global humanity.

The Fiddler on the Roof has a raucous song called “Tradition.” This sense of remembering what had gone before strongly emanates from the desert. No tracks and pathways remain long on sand dunes. It is therefore imperative to remember the details of a previous journey. The stars become practical because of their seemingly predictable positions once pegged within a cycle but they remain transcendent reality. The ruah (the desert fierce wind) takes on character at once mysterious and awesome, an immanent presence to be feared and revered.

This Ur is up against the desert, preoccupied with history, and its inner conflict is between fate and freedom. Its quest is to know the right tradition (memory), its key is social style and its communal form is the covenant of the brotherhood. The people of the book, from the Vedas to the Koran, are examples of this Ur I color-code Tan.

Standing in the middle of the Deccan Plateau, one’s imagination is bounded by the high and cold Himalayas up north, the humid Indus Valley and the Ganges River, the dry eastern and western Ghats and the turbulent monsoon that annually sweeps in from the Bay of Bengal. At a Mumbai bazaar any given day, it is not unusual to step on decomposing goat dung while being affronted by the flowery scent of myriad of essences. This Ur simultaneously inhales and exhales, emitting a deep sound “Ohm” that comes from the deep bowels of one’s being. It is the profound symbol of acceptance that takes in, affirms and celebrates the One in the Many and the Many in the One. I take the cultures of the South Asian subcontinent and color code this Ur Brown. It is confronted by the mountains and is preoccupied with consciousness, its quest is for unity at all cost, with methods as key. The caste system exemplified this attempt at unity of and in diversity.

The flood plains confront this Ur, its river’s yellow silt, the Loess, devastates crops and livestock but also leaves fertility and regenerates growth. It is preoccupied with community among competing forces, recognizes the paradox of complementary opposites, the yin and the yang, and quests for form that would honor and bowed to, not deny or banish, the opposite other. Strategy is key to moderation and harmony, e.g., keeping spicy hot sweet and sour at bay in cuisine, and filial piety and the preeminence of the family is its social structure. I color code this Ur Yellow and the ancient ways of the Zhung Guo, the Hangkok and the Nippon drank deeply in this well. So do a fifth of the population in our Commonwealth.

From Mt. Elbros, the highest point of the Caucasus range, one overlooks the Black and the Caspian Seas. Its northern slope residents confronted the North Sea while their southern cousins headed for the Aegean. The inhospitable Baltic-North Sea created the defensive structure of the dikes and dams, the protective moat around the castle, and the confinement the heat in the chambers on those long winter nights—the domestication of the dreadful natural order. The clear but deep waters down the fjords created this Ur, confronted by the Sea, preoccupied with rationality to shed light to the dialectic of order and chaos, being and non-being. Its quest is for meaning, rationality of the spoken and written word its key, and its social form the intentional community, the State. I color-code this Ur White. The political tradition from the Code of Hammurabi to the US Immigration Law of 2008 derive from the ways and understandings of this Ur.

The heartbeat of the tropical rainforest in West Africa was once described with terms as “black” and “dark” when these were more descriptive rather than pejorative. The predictability of the flooding Nile, and the drumbeat of the savannah, the sound of the stomping elephants and slithering hissing sound of the snake, all too familiar to jazz aficionados, is a tradition that was confronted by the jungle, and preoccupied with the beat. Were John of Patmos writing from this vein, he would have said: “In the beginning was the beat, and the beat was with God, and the beat was God.” Its quest is for balance between the aggressiveness of natural powers with the assertiveness of the human brawn. The key is to keep with natures’ rhythms and the social group is the tribe.

In Lagos, I once asked my Nigerian friend while we were riding a bus why, given the new wealth of the country, didn’t people use deodorant. He looked at me patronizingly and firmly declared: “If you cannot distinguish people’s smell, how will you know which tribe you belong to, and which one is your friend or foe?” Raw passion and vitality is the preoccupation of this Ur and I color-code it with the politically incorrect Black.

Red hot lava flows from volcanoes after a violent eruption and the cultures by the Ring of Fire, particularly in the cordilleras of Norte and Sud America, evolved a preoccupation with temporality, the dichotomy between day-by-day successiveness interrupted by the wild eternality of the discontinuous.

When I listened to a radio in Lima, Peru, one would hear a recorded message on time, every minute on the minute. This consciousness of time gave us the practice of siesta and the fireworks of fiesta. It reveals a discipline to endure continuity and the willingness to feast on the discontinuous. In short, surprise is built-in to the schedule. This is the TGIF Ur. The up-against-ness is the volcano and programming the eruption even when one knows it can come anytime is its response. Living on the edge fuels motivity; metropolitan Mexico City with almost 20 million people sits on a former lake that is the tip of an extant volcano.

I color-code this the Red Ur. The quest is participation, and democracy is becoming to be the defining character of the Americas and its indigenous cultures. The Allyu (check this out, Joseph), the extended family, is its social form and the creation of designs is its method.

The description above is science to the degree that Loren Eisely and Buckminster Fuller would be dubbed as scientists. I prefer to call it myth-making in its cultural anthropology sense, which is spinning to provide a handle for understanding and illumination.

The new Earth clamors for a new mosaic, not a melting pot. At this stage, my image is of six strands wrapped separately inside a cable. I would color code this the Blue Ur, my image of the fragile planet. Its preoccupation would be a one-liner: All that has been, thanks! All that will be, yes! Its mantra would be: all the earth belongs to all the people (economics); all the decisions of history belongs to all the people (politics); and all the gifts of humanness belongs to all the people (culture).

It is not a question of whether one agrees with this description of humanity. The question is what myth do you go by, and for teachers, what is the underlying Ur image(s) that inevitably color your teaching. Welcome to my global human.