Back Story: The particulars — Jane is studying to become a librarian, all of it done through distance learning, library-speak. She comes to this with degrees in liberal arts and teaching, a children’s author as well as a former journalist. Having grown up in a Mormon family she is what is now known as a “Jack Mormon,” divesting herself of what was a deleterious conditioning by this cult founded by a charlatan from upstate New York. In my interactions with her now and then I see, detect and sense, the inhibitions and self-imposed restrictions which are the traces of her “religious” upbringing. A reader of Darwin and a reveler in evolutionary biology, our morning conversations are often intense as we explore each other’s ethnic and religious background. This blog is a reponse to this morning’s “chat.”
As conditioned as she is with my own brand of secular — atheistic –Judaism, for I am immersed In Jewish gravy, ethnicisms, enjoying the cultural values, lore and wit of the Jewish mind. I share with her that as a student teacher many decades ago a group of us visited an elementary class in a Catholic parochial school as well as a class in a Hebrew school. What stood out to me was that in the Catholic school students were in a receiving mode, well-mannered, taking in; in the Hebrew school, which a few of my college students found “disorderly” the children were raising their hands, making sounds as they struggled to get the teacher’sattention. Their eyes had betrayed them. I had experienced that same environment in Hebrew school — in short, I have no fear if I ask you a question, indeed, it is expected of me, although I could never bring it into awareness at the time, being shtooped with the latency period. The contrast to this one Catholic school was, to my mind now, the conformed acceptance of that which was conditioned and foretold, that to question was not as critical as to receive and take in.
Jane heard this and quoted a verse from John in which he says, to wit, go ahead and seek the truth and do not be afraid. What Jane liked about this was the air of freedom which said question — however, in her religious upbringing it was expected that you do not question. Imagine, Jane says, if Joseph Smith went to all the different religions and asked a pastor or priest if their religion is true — that the minister would shoot that down by saying, of course, it’s the truth; however, living with me, Jane went on to say that if she went to a rabbi and asked the same question about the validity and truth of Judaism, there would a variety of responses: 1) do you need an answer? 2) or, why are you asking? and the question itself would be accepted as appropriate as the rabbi might be vexed if an answer was given, for answers are doorstoppers of the mind.
Jane and I explored this further, my suggesting that it is highly unlikely if there have been many articles on librarianship that take on an analytical point of view. I suggested for her to take a mental ride with me: Imagine a documentary in which the camera establishes the opening shot of a library; that a close-up is made of the plaque that usually contains who the architect, construction company and citizens were that made it all happen for the communty. Finally the camera pans up to an inscription above the arched doorway. It reads: “Knowledge is death.”
I further queried Jane if that would keep people away; would some people feel annoyed by that? would librarians rush to get through the entrance or would some hold back? I suggested that we seek to become aware, but that most of us do not want that; we want to have our senses and pleasure principles sated — and why not? However, I imagined that upon entering this “strange” library, there were five books under glass, their pages opened to specific pages of note, and one had to pause here before going any further. I asked Jane what the five books might be: I offered a few titles — The Interpretation of Dreams, Origin of the Species, the Bible was definiely excluded — I might suggest the greatest play ever written — Oedipus Rex, and then I stopped. Jane was asked — you are asked — to supply the other two, the condition being that this work had to make you thoroughly aware, decondition your mind-set, shake you to your foundational roots. After this first challenge, I suggested to Jane that these brave new librarians might go ahead to one other glass case and here would rest the greatest of all works on awareness — I weakly suggested, The Flight of the Eagle,” Krishnamurti, but I was not sure. Only after this challenge is met would the librarian receive his degree.
Jane had opened our conversation with her observation that she noticed that people tend not to ask questions of the librarians as much but now went directly to the web for answers. She felt there was something similar to her own feelings as a child when she had the distinct feeling that to ask a question was to be shot down, or to vex the adult or annoy the authority figure at the time. Although she fully realizes that the librarian with the “answers” has no idea of what is being projected upon her or him, nevertheless, human beings live in, live out, in these projections. We are made up of projections — just try transference with your therapist. The point is that we place our hand above our eyes, for we dread the light more than we dread the dark, a good definition of humanity. I remember well as a kid walking into a movie theater on a very bright July day and having been blinded until my eyes adjusted to the interior darkness; I also recall the adverse effects of coming out of the darkness into the light of the summer day after the movie. I feel the dark into light is harsher. Perhaps the entrances to libraries should be enshrouded in black drapes and the inviting, more motherly, inscription might read: “Ignorance is bliss.”
Grossly speaking, generalizing, why does one become a librarian on more than superficial levels — job, salary, percs, order and regularity, constancy, job security? Is one participating in a greater good, that is, amassing knowledge, dispensing it, sharing insights, impacting on others — that is, is the librarian entering the occupation to condition or not to condition, to enslave with knowledge or to emancipate? For example, the library system that censors a book is revealing a reaction-formation, denying to others that which one finds of prurient interest. Recently, a library system in Virginia took The Diary of Ann Frank off the shelves because the newest and unexpurgated edition had Anne Frank speak of her vagina. Of course, the good libarians do not have this organ. And the old argument that they are protecting very young minds from “awareness” goes back to totems and taboos (See Freud).
The radical librarian does not salt and pepper his treasure trove. He neither conditions nor deconditions; this is not neutrality but the highest advocacy one can offer as a free human being. The radical librarian dwells in the soft light, fig-laden palm trees of the Question. Answers are anathema if doctrine and dogma, dicta. The free librarian is the caterer of a huge buffet. Isms are never served, religions kept off the tables. In that scary, sometimes shaky feeling we have when we enter, for rare moments our lives, the sacred arena of not knowing but willing to know, in Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country,” the librarian’s duty is just to simply pull the drapes aside.
Leave a Reply