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Words from the Head of School

Frames

 
Dear Brandeis community,
 
Last week I received an unexpected package. Not one of the hordes of Amazon boxes that seem to stack up on our doorstep like emails in an inbox—though this was from Amazon. It was different by virtue of being a surprise, not generated by my shopping cart, or Kate’s, not tied to an upcoming birthday or holiday that might engender gifts. I didn’t realize this until I opened the box, of course—I’m so habituated to online shopping that my first assumption was that I had simply bought something and not remembered it, while absentmindedly fidgeting with my phone in line at some physical store. But, no: I opened the box to find Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new book, Autumn, and a machine-printed note informing me that this was a gift from my dear friend Jesse. The unexpectedness of it shifted my sense of the day—looking anew at that moment of unboxing, more mindful of my own assumptions.
 
Knausgaard is known for the five-book series My Struggle, which I’ve not yet read but Jesse has, and loved them. Autumn is a smaller book, and a beautiful one physically, soft to the touch and saturated inside and out with beautiful paintings. It felt perfect to bring along to Sukkot in Yosemite, to move from my typical reading on an iPad screen to reading an actual book, which I like to do when we’re camping. So, I did, and a cold gave me enough time in bed to read the whole book while there. It consists of a series of short vignettes about material objects, punctuated by letters to Knausgaard’s then-unborn daughter, his fourth child. Many of them are exquisite. Here is a part of the piece “Frames”:
 
The physical frame, usually of wood, is made to measure by a frame maker or produced in a frame factory. But frame and framework are also used figuratively, to denote that which limits something, such as the time and money spent on a construction project. We speak of time frames and financial frameworks, or religious rites, which take place within the confines of a ritual frame. In other words, the frame limits a phenomenon, sharply demarcates an inside and an outside, and by isolating it, the phenomenon also becomes clearly defined, that is it becomes something in itself. It gains an identity.
 
The motion of this passage, from the very simple to the quite profound, is typical of the book, which uses quotidian objects in the world of Knausgaard and his family as ways of grounding this series of meditations on life and the world around us.
 
Framing, in particular, felt resonant in the space of the Yosemite Valley, surely one of the most powerful frames the slow motion of glaciers and tectonic plates has produced in our world. The word of the weekend was awe—we were awe-struck, it was awesome, almost in its etymological sense of fear and dread, in the shadow of such sheer granite cliffs. Waking in the cabins at Half Dome Village (RIP Curry Village), we would step outside and crane our necks back as far as they would go to see the top of Glacier Point, rock and mountain seemingly the whole sky. It is hard not to be reminded of scale, in such a place, as Cam Yuen-Shore put it—the scale of an individual life against the pace of geological time, or just the size of our bodies below those mountains. Our community framed the weekend—three hundred or so of us scattered across that sparkling, hazy valley—gathering and dispersing in various formations of grade, geography, or interest.
 
Our weekend ended in a ritual frame, standing in a circle with arms around shoulders with other Brandeis friends and families, singing the Havdalah prayers as the deep dark of the Yosemite night sky burst to life with stars beyond stars beyond stars. We held up our fingernails to candlelight, appreciating the gift of light and of life, how strange it is to be anything at all. Havdalah means separation, or division—a way of clearly defining the ending of Shabbat and the beginning of the week, so that each becomes fully itself. Shavua tov, we sang—a good week, a week of peace, may gladness reign and joy increase. Despite the hardness of our world, and the sometimes painfully small scale of our lives, I felt lucky in that moment to be reminded of the importance of these ritual frames, their power and their purpose. Peace and joy.  
 
Driving down, thick now with a head cold, I found myself wishing that this would be a week without tragedy, without calamity—a week of peace. Such was not to be the case, as Monday many of us woke to the sharp smell of wood smoke, to ash raining on our cars, to friends and loved ones and beloved camps in danger, and in some cases gone. Sitting sick at home I looked anew at the frame of this house—its doorways, its floorboards—imagining them incinerated, up in smoke. Over dinner we talked about what we would grab, given mere minutes to pack. Our hearts ached for the lost memories, as I thought about what Isaac Jacobs-Gomes described on the Yudcast last week as “episodic memory”—the memories embedded in place—and the lost ritual spaces. Yesterday we gathered as a team to plan how we at Brandeis can help—you’ll be hearing from us about that soon—and also to talk about how we can set an example for our students, our community, our colleagues, and ourselves. We talked about the power of simply being present to the “small moments, many times” as Tania Lowenthal shared, which make up parenting, working, living, and which at times get lost in the larger framings of our lives.
 
Wishing you all weekends full of peace, my friends.
 
Warmly,
 
Dan
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