And Context – Little Boxes All the Same
Dr. David Suzuki, a Canadian scientist and environmental activist, explains in his film Suzuki Speaks what, in context here, serves as an objective for this unit:
Throughout human history our songs, our prayers, our rituals celebrated the fact that we are deeply embedded in the natural world and dependent on it. We constantly reaffirmed that we had a responsibility to act the right way in order to keep nature as generous and abundant as it had always been. That was the human understanding. Because in nature everything is interconnected, anything you do has consequences, and therefore we have responsibilities. But today we live in a world in which that sense has been shattered. 3
Dr. Suzuki speaks to more than just our interconnectedness within nature, he addresses the need for us as beings to realize our interconnectedness with one another. If we fail to realize it, the results, as they already have been, will be catastrophic, even more than they have been in the past. We must embrace all of nature, all animals and places and peoples that inhabit the land and sea. We cannot afford to continue living as though apart from one another, failing to understanding that our differences, as well as our sameness, are what allow for interconnectedness in the first place. The way to accomplish this, I believe, is through a true interaction with our own and each other's Imaginations. William Blake's teachings evoke the power of imagination and suggest that renewal is possible, if not inevitable:
The Nature of Visionary Fancy or Imagination, is very little known, & the Eternal nature & permanence of its ever Existent Images is considered as less permanent than the things of Vegetative and Generative Nature; yet the Oak dies as well as the Lettuce, but its Eternal Image & Individuality never dies but returns by its seed; just so the Imaginative Image returns by the seed of Contemplative Thought. 4
For survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the man-made disaster from the failed levees, and for our student survivors of personal tragedies, Imagination is the vital force that allows them to re-imagine their selves, their homes and their City, and to become, once again, interconnected to all life in the bayou, and surrounding sea and land, and in their interior landscapes. Blake's statement also speaks to every individual who seeks to grow through "Contemplative Thought" regardless whether or not they have been directly affected by a disaster.
Although people throughout America were affected by Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill, few of my students, if any, were directly, but they likely will experience, first or second-hand, some other disaster during their life. Certainly, being in California, my students will experience an earthquake but, worse, we adversely affect our environments by allowing toxins and poisons into them. That is why it is imperative that to have any real, meaningful education we are to begin in the home or home community, seeking solutions to the problems that exist there. So, here, I shift focus to a very specific place with iconic structures that, according to the popular song "Little Boxes," suggest conformity and therefore limited life and connection to it, and furthermore a full lack of interconnectedness with the greater world and the Earth. It also implies the very same of the actual people who inhabit those houses. In the words of Joseph Roach, leader of the Seminar, The Big Easy, and author of Cities of the Dead, "The heart of the matter [is] in those little boxes, which seem to deny "culture," but which in fact are an emphatic performance of it." 5 I intend to teach my students that beyond the "emphatic performance" of the structures, the more important heart of the matter is within them, the very people living in those little boxes. The boxes, or rather houses, along with the fog that is endemic to the region, seem to hide the varied peoples and cultures within. And though it is evident that Malvina Reynolds, who wrote and performed 'Little Boxes,' was inspired by specific homes, it is understood that she was not being literal or exclusive in her message deriding suburban conformity. Still, her message touches upon a legitimate concern. The song itself resonates with me, its lilting melody and salient notes get me to singing along: "And the children go to school… And then to the university, where they are put in boxes and they come out all the same." 6
I am in the choir, so to sing, when it comes to speaking out against institutions that, intentionally or not, effect conformities and confine life. Yet, ironically, though I sing in accord with Reynolds, I do so with the slightest trepidation since, as a teacher, I am most often in my classroom at Westmoor High School that is in the neighborhood of Westlake, the very neighborhood known to have been the inspiration for Malvina Reynolds' song. Still, I see, in varying degrees, the very children of the very parents of the very "boxes made of ticky-tacky," knowing that they are not the same and not "the same," except in the universal sense that they are children who do go to school.
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