Quilt by former slave Harriet Powers
Every month or so, it seems, an article in a major publication announces the death of the humanities. Last week I had a chance to talk about one such report while teaching a Lucille Clifton poem.
The New York Times article I quoted reports a precipitous decline in the number of literature and philosophy majors at elite universities. It seems that many of the best students are currently being drawn to STEM disciplines. Some of this undoubtedly has a pragmatic explanation: majoring in engineering, math or the sciences is more likely to lead to immediate employment in tough economic times. However, a Harvard English professor also states that much of the most exciting research at the moment is housed in the sciences. According to Louis Menard,
In the scholarly world, cognitive sciences has everybody’s ear right now, and everybody is thinking about how to relate to it. How many people do you know who’ve read a book by an English professor in the past year? But everybody’s reading science books.
It sounds a little like the 1950s and 1960s when Sputnik was all the rage and literary studies felt that they had to mimic the sciences–which is to say, undertake cold formalist analysis–to be taken seriously. Poems were stripped of author, reader, and context and studied as specimens. That was one reason I didn’t major in English in college. (I majored in history and shifted to English in graduate school.)
In her poem “quilting,” Clifton sets up a contrast between the warm arts, which she associates with a nurturing mother-daughter relationship, and the cold sciences:
quilting
somewhere in the unknown world
a yellow eyed woman
sits with her daughter
quilting.
some other where
alchemists memble over pots.
their chemistry stirs
into science, their science
freezes into stone.
in the unknown world
the woman
threading together her need
and her needle
nods toward the smiling girl
remember
this will keep us warm
how does this poem end?
do the daughters’ daughters quilt?
do the alchemists practice their tables?
do the worlds continue spinning
away from each other forever?
In my Intro to Lit class, my women biology majors had some legitimate complaints about Clifton’s caricature of science as a cold, analytical, and exclusively male domain. That being acknowledged, however, we also agreed that much of the current avoidance of the humanities may be driven by suspicion of the arts. Alchemy, or its contemporary equivalent, seems more likely than quilting to pay off massive student loans.
In the end, we saw the poem as an argument for a liberal arts education. We want these two worlds spinning towards, not away, from each other. Even alchemists, after all, will be warmed by a good quilt.
