Conclusion
I don’t feel like reviewing prominent themes or promising future work, so I will look backward and forward in a different way. I will tell you a story. This story is about the literary and legal theorist Stanley Fish, the history of Western thought, my mom, John Dewey, my dad, Mikhail Bakhtin, a Catholic priest, sex, and me. It is a fun story. Much more fun than Fish’s (1995) story about Western thought across the ages, but that’s where I start.
The Fish story is that Western thought has been one long quarrel between two kinds of man. The one man is homo seriosus, SERIOUS MAN, who thinks that he has grabbed hold of the real world (as it really, really is) with his power of reason. (If you can remember as far back as chapter 2, then we could also call this one MONOLOGIC MAN, which sounds more like the superhero SERIOUS MAN usually imagines himself to be.) The other man is homo rhetoricus, RHETORICAL MAN, who pretty much thinks that the best we can do is talk the world over and make it up, as best we can, as we go along. If you paid attention at all as you read my book (or even just as you read this conclusion so far), then you know that, when push comes to shove, I stand with RHETORICAL MAN. So did Mikhail Bakhtin and John Dewey.
My feminist, pro-feminist, and psychoanalytically inclined readers will not be surprised to learn that it was actually a WOMAN–MY MOTHER–who introduced me to this quarrel and started me on the path to rhetoric. Actually, my mom and the Catholic Church.
Whatever else my grade school education at St. Mary School did, it confronted me directly, explicitly, early on, with basic existential questions: What is life? How should we live it? What does it mean? Even as I have fallen away from the church, I have not fallen away from the idea that I have to take these questions seriously, and that my life will be a more or less worthy answer to these questions.
Of course, St. Mary School provided me with the right answers to these questions.
My mom, Lynn Lensmire, was and is a sincere Catholic. She also was the catcher for her neighborhood baseball team (the rest were boys) when she was growing up. She also was and is the daughter of the late machinist and vocal defender of labor, Walter Manicke, and the daughter of Gladys Manicke, who has given years of service to the Salvation Army and one Christmas told me about childhood summers she spent with her father (my great-grandfather) in the woods as he tended his still. Her job was to watch for planes flying overhead that might carry federal agents bent on stopping the illegal production of alcohol and looking for smoke.
My mom wasn’t from “The Hill” in Wausau, Wisconsin–a sign, then (maybe even now), of wealth and status. But she excelled at Wausau High School in English and mathematics and science. And in debate (my mom still likes to argue).
When I was in grade school, Mom told me that I had to take the questions put to me in religion class very seriously, and that I had to listen carefully to the answers provided. But she also said that, in the end, I would have to come up with my own answers, even if that meant disagreeing with the Catholic Church. I knew that my mom disagreed and argued with the local priest, Father Geissler, about birth control and how to educate young people. (Father Geissler scared me silly when I was little, so I am making him into the bad guy of my story.) When my mom absolved me from absolute obedience to the serious answers of the Catholic Church, she set me up to question the answers of other authorities I would encounter as I grew up. She also set me up to question my own answers, the answers I gave to and for myself.
This freedom and responsibility often felt terrifying–this was serious. And of course there were plenty of other serious people who, unlike my mom, were intent on making sure that I knew and embodied not my own answers, but the right answers. The biggest one when I was a little boy was Father Geissler. He was a tall, loud, shouting man with an angry mouth and a severe crew cut. He wore a black cassock. In God’s army, Father Geissler was a Marine.
When I was in sixth grade, all the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade boys had to go to a special evening meeting at school with our fathers. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Father Geissler was going to talk at us–and talk at us about SEX.
Or should I say SIN. I sat next to my dad in a steel folding chair in the cafeteria. Father Geissler was standing in front, by a chalkboard. He was especially loud and angry (apparently some of the older boys–who? where?–were crossing gender lines, and he didn’t like it). At one point, Father Geissler said that if we ever got an ERECTION, that was a SIN. To help out those of us who might learn better when the shouting is supplemented by other modes of communication, he drew a picture on the chalkboard. (I confess that I was a late bloomer and that all of this–despite the priest’s powerful pedagogy–was just a bit theoretical, a bit beyond me, at the time. I was slow to grasp the topic at hand.)
Father Geissler finally finished. As my father and I walked out into the freezing Wisconsin night, he told me that I should take what Father Geissler said with a grain of salt. And as we shivered in the car on the way home, he started laughing, and told me about a time he went swimming with his friends in the Eau Pleine River. Lots of people were there, and Dad and his friends were hollering and wrestling in the water.
His friends decided it was time to go, and ran out onto the beach and started drying off. When they saw that Dad hadn’t joined them (he stayed, crouching, in the water), they started yelling and waving to him to hurry up, it was time to go. It seemed like all the people on the beach were looking at him, waiting for him to get out of the water. But he couldn’t, because of a fairly obvious SIN in his swim trunks.[1]
My dad was laughing and I was laughing. For a moment, I didn’t have to worry so much about controlling my body and keeping it pure. And the sometimes lonely prospect of growing up and having to answer all those existentialist questions about life and its meaning and how to live－that didn’t seem so lonely if I could go swimming with my friends and talk to people like my dad.
From Lynn Lensmire and John Dewey and many others, I have learned that there are important questions to be answered through our lives, that we need to listen carefully to the answers provided by diverse others, and that we are responsible for putting forward our own answers, which will in tum, hopefully, be listened to, affirmed, questioned, rejected, revised.
From John Lensmire and Mikhail Bakhtin and many others, I have learned that to sustain life, we need to laugh and be with and enjoy each other. We need to tell stories and have our stories answered by other stories and questions, need to rehearse different ways of being and acting in the world, in a rich celebration and deliberation of what is and what could be.
The End.
- A 2024 footnote, because there are at least two additional funny things here. After this book was first published in 2000, my parents decided to buy a copy of it as a gift for the teachers at St. Mary’s, the elementary school I had attended as a child. My parents had hoped the book might be helpful to teachers as they tried to teach writing. So, the first funny thing is to think of this book, with its stories of a yelling priest and erections, sitting on a shelf in the school where these stories happened. I had wondered, at the time, if my parents had read the book all the way through to the end before they presented it to the teachers. The second funny thing is that, a year or so later, I was talking with my dad and somehow we got onto the topic of this book—and he told me that I had told his story wrong in my conclusion. That it wasn’t him stuck in the Eau Pleine River, unable to walk out onto the beach, but one of his friends. He told me this with a serious look on his face, as if he was angry about and embarrassed by my mistake. But I could tell that he thought it was pretty funny, so I laughed and then he laughed, too. ↵
