The University of MichiganNews Service412 MaynardAnn Arbor, MI 48109-1399
Robert Pinsk's Commencement Address
"Nobody remembers what the Commencement speaker says": that saying has become a commonplace.
And there is comfort in this for the speaker; if what I say is stupid or boring, so what?-- nobody will remember.
But what is it about these occasions that makes remembering and forgetting an issue?
Commencement exercises like these are perhaps the most elaborate civic rituals in our American culture. The funny hats and get-ups, capelike hoods with an arcane code of symbolic colors explained in the program, the procession, the mace-
By comparison, great civic occasions like the swearing-in of the President or becoming a US citizen are treated with not much more ceremony than getting a driver's license.
What does all of this ceremony and ritual mean? Why are the young graduates wearing garments that suggest some remote era or fictional planet, and yet at the same time emphasize how very young many of you are?
(The sneakers or rubber thongs peeking from under the gown, inflatable objects, Teddy bears or pineapples attached to the mortarboards.)
The very hats are like some surrealist representation of mystery: a flamboyant, stylized symbol of unfunctional symbolism itself.
If these ceremonies and these outfits were created by a theatrical designer, what would their meaning be?
There are two usual explanations for this unique intensity of ceremony: one is that the graduates have worked very hard at their education. Possibly so. Another is that the parents and families have made material sacrifices, sometimes mortgaging homes or taking second jobs, in order to pay for the education. There is something in that notion, too. But neither seems an adequate cause for elaborate ritual garb.
On a deeper level, what we observe today is the celebration of two great obligations or standards, the two great tests that apply to every culture on earth, the two values by which any social group must be judged.
These secular rituals and extraordinary gowns invoke those two monumental standards.
I mean the two great requirements of the human animal, without which human community is corrupt or useless: caring for the young ones, and honoring the wisdom of the old ones, including the ways and wisdoms of the dead.
I propose to you that one reason nobody remembers what the commencement speaker says is that commencement exercises celebrate a mystery, a mystery greater than any sentiments we can articulate. We intuitively choose to remember the civic ritual of that mystery, its vital form rather than its content. We forget what is said because it is never as important as what is symbolically done.
Our memories of what is said defer to our awe- and even dread. The tribe or community or nation that fails at either of those missions- honoring the Old Ones and teaching the young- brings woe and destruction on itself. That truth transcends the rather silly notion that this is an occasion for a few minutes of "advice."
Today, the graduates pass symbolically from being the objects of the first concern-young ones who have been nurtured-to bearing the responsibility of the second-those who will care for the young, and who will preserve and extend the wisdom of the dead.
Our colleges and universities are places where these fundamental activities of caring for the offspring and revering the ancestors predominate. Commencement exercises present a transition or meeting place between the two broad purposes of any people.
If we come upon a tribe that neglects its children or ignores its old ones, we know that some great woe is extinguishing that people's spirit. Our symbols today are a kind of secular prayer that our spirit be healthy, that we keep those two basic missions sacred.
Most mammals must care for their young, but in a great classical tag, the human animal is especially puny. Its claws are all but useless as weapons, as are its puny teeth. Its hide and patchy fur provide only flimsy protection. The pathetic creature cannot swim very well, nor fly at all. It cannot jump very high, its climbing is mediocre and even its most athletic specimens aren't very fast afoot compared to other beasts.
But the creature is clever and busily observant, and for survival it has developed means of communication not only with horizontally, with its peers, so that they can co-operate in securing food or shelter- but also vertically, with its predecessors and successors, so that the experience of past lifetimes can be applied.
Information about where the best food is at what time of year, about how to hunt or fish, about the best marriage customs or burial customs, about government, is shared across generations, handed down from the long dead to the yet-to-be-conceived.
For this purpose of memory and transmission, the animal has devised the binary code of the computer, and printed marks before that, and incised or written marks before that, and before those the creature made a technology of its own body, notably with a highly refined system of grunts, emitted through its feeding orifice. Like the griots in Alex Haley's Roots, who could call up across the centuries information about dynasties, family relations, property rights, the human animal through the amazing grunt-code of speech can retain subtle shades of information: which food is available at what time of year, what customs for mating or burial will best serve the community, information as precise or subtle as "bring me a pound of galvanized ten-penny nails" or "I love you but not that way."
For this reason, art--poetry and painting and music- are not ornaments at the fringes of human intelligence and accomplishment, but rather they are at the very core of our intelligence, at its origin. If we neglect them, or subordinate them, breaking a chain that goes back to the first primates to remember their ancestral wisdom with some combination of what we now divide into dance, song, poetry- if we are the generations that break that chain, then woe to us! We would bring a might curse on ourselves.
(Remember that, graduates, if you are ever on a school board or committee that must decide between buying, on the one hand, some hardware or software that will soon become obsolete or, on the other hand, something like a cello or a piano, which will never become obsolete.)
Mostly, we take this process for granted-but not always. When I was in grade school, they used to show us movies provided by industrial groups: The Story of Glassmaking or Meet Mr. Petroleum or The Amazing Truth About Paper, with informative graphic diagrams and vivid scenes showing complicated machinery pulping paper or making bottles or fiberglass curtains.
I remember shots of technicians in lab coats controlling the machinery or developing the processes, making notes on clipboards.
And I used to watch those machines and assembly lines, those elaborate diagrams of chemical processes, and I'd think to myself: "There is no way that we kids are going to learn to do this stuff." When the grown-ups who worked in those factories and laboratories died, I felt, the world would fall apart, there would be no more coke bottles or paper or whatever.
"I know these kids," I said to myself, "they can't learn this stuff: when it's our turn to manage all this stuff, they are not going to work those machines where the caps come down on the bottles ten times a second." I knew in my bones that maybe one or two kids out of three hundred had absorbed the diagrams, and none of us could work the machines.
But I was wrong. Amazingly, not only did the subsequent generations learn those intricate processes, we improved them and extended them and replaced them. The chain of transmission, unlikely as it seemed to me, however imperfectly, works.
Graduates, I submit to you that you are not the most important people to be considered today. Nor are the parents nor the teachers nor those of us on the platform. No one here invented country music or molecular biology or jurisprudence or business or poetry or the ideals of democracy --the people who receive honorary degrees today learned what we know from ones older than us, many of whom are now dead. And those dead ones in turn learned from ones who went before them.
Your teachers hope that in your turn you will transmit knowledge we got from the old ones to people now in their infancy or not yet alive.
It is that chain going further back than we can remember or see that we honor with our funny outfits. These ceremonies acknowledge our dependence on the chain of knowledge going back and forward. They acknowledge that the most important people on this occasion are the old ones and the ones who come after. If you win a Nobel Prize in science, if you build a great business and use its gains philanthropically, if you protect justice and equality on the Supreme Court or make works of art or works of scholarship, if you advance political liberty or love of art in your country or the world-your individual achievement will be less important than the keeping alive of art, democracy, knowledge, philanthropy, jurisprudence--all that we have inherited from generations of the dead: all that you are responsible for preserving and enhancing and passing on to those yet to come, those important ones.
Something like that is the inner meaning of these rituals and odd garments: an allegory of memory that reaches beyond and across lifetimes. With all that implicit emphasis on memory, no wonder our memory of the explicit absents itself.
To put it another way, anyone's life is brief; our arts are long.
I cannot close without reciting ten lines of verse on that theme:
The bird in cold and darkness buffeted in Briefly through the bright warm hall and out again.
All nations wither, Chief Seattle said, And yet they are not powerless, the dead.
The shifting hero wanders alien places, Through customs of cities and histories of races,
Their arts and evils, their goods, odd works and treasures. Provincial, cosmopolitan, the hero embroiders,
Recollects, travels and summons together all- All manners of the dead and living, in the great Hall.
Class of 2001, I hope that when you see caps and gowns you will sometimes at least vaguely remember your debt to the Old Ones and how it obliges you to honor them by caring for the young, in the process of eternity. Congratulations and good wishes to each of you.
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