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COLUMBIA FORUM
The Center, the Pith, the Core
When Professor of Philosophy Emeritus Richard
Kuhns received the eighth annual award for Distinguished
Service to the Core Curriculum (with Professor of Russian Emeritus
Robert Belknap) on November 14, 2000, it capped a 50-year
relationship with the core. Kuhns, who won the Mark Van Doren
Teaching Award in 1992, began teaching Literature Humanities in
1950, and has taught Contemporary Civilization and chaired the
Literature Humanities program as well. He used his acceptance
speech to meditate what we mean when we use the word
"core."
The
word "core" invokes a variety of thoughts and
associations:
According to one derivation, core derives from Latin
cor, meaning heart; hence core is the heart of the fruit,
the central structure of an argument, the armature of a sculptural
work of art. Core may also derive from French corps meaning
body, the central living presence. It may also come from cor
meaning horn, and in that aspect of its derivation it assumes some
connotations that are especially relevant to our students, for they
feel at times "cored" (as if gored by the horn of their books) and
further that the core is a strangulation in the throat, something
you cannot swallow. or wished you had not been assigned.
Core
has an earlier Old English form in colk, which can mean hollow or
empty. Indeed, where no book has been, we are hollow and empty, and
when the book has become part of us, we are plentiful in the
core.
Since I subscribe to conflict theory, I declare core to assert
the heart and at the same time the heartless, or full and empty.
And its bi-valence - its being at once full of meaning and
destitute of meaning - must enclose both the center and pith, and
that which you cannot spit out, something you can't get over, which
is certainly our endless involvement with the core. It arouses then
deep passion, and that, too, is embedded in the word: I quote a
preacher who said, "We are all choked with the core of carnal
concupiscence." Obviously core is one of those terms and concepts
that have a moral and spiritual meaning, a philosophical
implication as well as a down to earth bodily connotation, somewhat
like the Greek term katharsis.
So,
when we say "core" or "core curriculum," we are implying a
metaphorical transfer from core's more aggressive and hard-boiled
senses, choosing to emphasize its benign, digestible (no sticking
in the throat, no embracing carnal concupiscence). Perhaps we
intend a true cornucopia.
Lifelong involvement with the pith of it all makes us ever more
sensitive to two inseparable forces that are themes in any human
life: metamorphosis and immortality. In the words of Henry James:
"Art prolongs, it preserves, it consecrates, it raises from the
dead." And also by [Luigi] Pirandello: "If you are lucky enough to
be born as a character, you have nothing to fear from death. You
don't die."
Such
thoughts are part of almost every book we read as we dash through
our syllabuses, and they play off against each other in the books
that are in my core, and within that core, the pivot on which the
whole order turns is to be found as far as I'm concerned in
Apuleius' Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, and
Boccaccio's Decameron. They are clear about the claims
Pirandello and James made.
In
The Golden Ass, the character Lucius, having undergone a
metamorphosed state as an ass, gains immortality through the Priest
of Isis and the goddess Isis who allow him to resume his human
shape. If the hero had simply remained an ass and his adventures
continued, salvation would be achieved only if the tales unwound
endlessly, but they cannot since we don't, and therefore salvation
comes through a power higher than that of the
storyteller.
Endlessness was, however, nearly realized in the Thousand
Nights and One Night, and you will remember that Scheherzade
escaped death by expanding her storytelling powers and her sexual
attractiveness to overwhelm the Sultan. Eternal life is implied by
the survival of and overcoming of the Sultan's barbaric anti-woman
obsession: she overwhelmed his death urges, gave him three
children, and to us who read, the belief in storytelling's immortal
powers.
In
the Decameron, to leave plague-ridden Florence for 10 days
of storytelling certainly bestows long life on the brigata -
the band of young women and men - who thereby escaped the Black
Death, and who furnish us with the means to alleviate our own
anxieties against not only disease and death, but also the dangers
of taking ourselves and our beliefs with too great
seriousness.
In
my fantasies, Lucius and Boccaccio and Scheherzade must be
entertaining one another in a great variety of ways with a great
variety of stories this very instant. Well, perhaps that sort of
conversation and storytelling represents the center, the pith, the
core.
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