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2002 December Page 11 River A leading scholar of 17th-century American Puritan literature, Jeff Hammond has increasingly turned his hand to writing autobiographical essays, one of which won the prestigious Pushcart prize. Several of his essays have been recently collected in Ohio States: A 20th Century Midwestern. Here he reflects on the relationship between engaging in traditional academic scholarship and what he calls "indulging the heart." A birdwatcher's proverb, sometimes attributed to Audubon, says, "When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird." The proverb, which has spread beyond birders, is often taken to mean that when your heart and mind conflict, follow your heart. Read this way, it's a muchneeded defense of intuition and direct experience in an era that often seems obsessed with cold rationality and secondhand knowledge. And yet, this opposition of book and bird is simplistic and perhaps even dangerous, because it reinforces a splitting of consciousness, of human identity, that goes back at least as far as Plato: head vs. heart, intellect vs. emotions, reason vs. feelings. C. P Snow once observed that this split . was producing two isolated cultures: scientists and humanists. Lately we've been hearing a lot about the left brain and the right brain, but however we label it, we internalize this dichotomy all the time, usually identifying with one side or the other but rarely both. "Oh, I'm just not creative at all." Or conversely: "I'm just no good with facts and figures." Like most clich s, the head-heart distinction has some validity. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. But when taken as a statement of how people actually and always are, it fosters a sadly limited--and limiting--view of ourselves and our potential. It might even be false in terms of how our minds really work. The bird and the book are both constructions of discourse: that is, our experience of them is inseparable from the mental and perceptual categories that allow us to experience them. And since these categories shape us as whole beings, heads and hearts, drawing a firm line between the two is impossible. Our reasoning is partly guided by our temperament and feelings, and our emotions are partly guided by how we think. Still, we often align ourselves into separate camps of like-minded souls in order to clarify who we are. We empiricists are here, so you artist-types stay over there--and vice versa. The problem arises with these overly rigid self-definitions. In an insecure world, it's easy to choose one camp and dig in. Although this Gazette rather than a chore: as a still-fledgling "writer," I have far more in common with my composition students than I did in the single-box days. Crossing the line has also made me less afraid. Younger readers will just have to trust me when I say that middle-aged professors know fear, personal and professional, as fully as anyone. Students are often afraid, too: that they won't fit in, that they'll say something stupid in class, that they won't do well. Sometimes their fear drives them to copy us oldsters and seek refuge in one box or the other. English majors everywhere have a tendency to divide into "creative" and "scholarly" camps, with much energy wasted in defense of one side or the other. Whenever students seek my wisdom (this seldom happens, but like all professors, I offer it anyway), I advise them to resist committing themselves prematurely to either box. I want them to know that they can have warm hearts and cool heads, that they don't have to choose one at the expense of the other. This age-old opposition of head and heart encompasses a lot more than English classes. It gets reinforced in all of us as we specialize in accordance with the traditional disciplines and their varied notions of professionalism. Although the depth and focus acquired through specialization are valuable, any good thing can be taken too far. But while higher education exacerbates the problem, it also offers the remedy. In fact, if we are at all interested in living as whole persons, we might be dwelling in the best of all possible worlds for breaking our self-dividing and self-reductive habits. What are the liberal arts, after all, if not an enticing spread of head-things and heart-things, a vast buffet where different dishes can be sampled and different parts of the self can be stimulated and nourished? What's more, one dish balances another. You want salty, bitter, sweet, sour? and Try (in any order, depending on your tastes) painting, economics, fiction, and biology. The liberal arts experience challenges us, faculty and students alike, not to stick with only one dish, or worse, to assume that our chosen dish contains the only nutrition around. Audubon saw the bird and wrote the book which, in turn, helps us see the bird. Aren't the bird and the book alternative embodiments of the shared, multifaceted, and even contradictory experience of being human? Don't they convey two sides of how whole persons feel and think? It's worth the effort to stay open to both and honor both. If we do, we might even discover that the bird and the book do not disagree. Deep down, maybe they never really could. Balancing Head and Heart in Academic Scholarship by Jeffrey Hammond, Professor of English In short, it takes genuine feeling to write meaningful scholarship, and it takes genuine intelligence to write a good poem. choice might seem comforting, choices made from fear are not usually helpful. Because literature is what I know best, I'll use it to illustrate what I'm trying to say. Students and teachers of literature have a long history of dividing ourselves into critics or writers, scholarly types or creative types. We rarely think that it's possible, or even desirable, to be both. This traditional animosity between the two camps constantly plays itself out in English departments everywhere. Romans and Carthaginians, cats and dogs, oil and water--these oppositions are nothing. Scholars and writers: now there's a split worth talking about. Although the English department at St. Mary's is better than most at negotiating this split, we have our moments of mutual incomprehension. But like English professors elsewhere, we might be reaching a point where the old animosities will dissolve under the sheer weight of evidence. For some time now, literary and cultural theorists have been telling us that discourse encompasses "objective" as well as "subjective" modes of experience. Despite the quasi-scientific assumptions of formalist critics and old-style historians, literature people are finally recognizing that even the most meticulous, rationalist scholarship has always contained a subjective and creative dimension. (Mathematicians and physicists, of course, have known this all along.) We're also learning that creative writing, if done well, has always demanded a cool head and a keen eye. In short, it takes genuine feeling to write meaningful scholarship, and it takes genuine intelligence to write a good poem. Writing, whether scholarly or creative, that stays firmly - and a little too safely within either the head box or the heart box is usually perfectly competent. But if it fails to engage (or at least flirt with) the other side of the line, it will probably be predictable and unsatisfying. It will also ring a bit less than true, because it will Photo by Andrea Hammer Jeffrey Hammond reflect and embody only half a person, either a headless heart or a heartless head. Whether the result is cheesy fiction or unimaginative scholarship, a Zen koan might address both: what is the sound of half a person speaking? If I'm sounding like the Ancient Mariner, collaring wedding guests to proclaim an eccentric truth, it's because I'm a fairly recent convert to the belief that we should keep our heads and our hearts equally engaged with the world. For nearly twenty years I worked as a scholar, a literary historian who tracked down sources and allusions that would help define the temporal and cultural contexts of texts. A dug-in resident of the head box, I assumed that indulging the heart would somehow ruin my head. Seven years ago, however, I took up creative writing (or as creative as I could manage) in an effort to stay sane while chairing our department. I was surprised at how liberating it felt to work outside my usual box. Equally surprising, given my professional convictions, was that my mind did not melt into goo as a result. Although this may in fact have happened and I just don't know it yet, I can at least confirm that crossing the line from head to heart has changed my teaching. My literature classes these days are informed by all sorts of "writerly" questions that I didn't think to ask before. My creative nonfiction workshops strive to engage cool heads in a sober (even rational) assessment of student essays, those products of the heart. And teaching composition has become a treat

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