Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander
Figure 32: ImgArcade aids with the Weaving Metaphor
In the traditions of fellow Indigenous scholars, I try in each of my works to incorporate story, as in the end the memes of my ancestors would have been transmitted in just such a way to young people sitting in a circle as an elder shared tales of life and history, of things learned and things yet to be experienced. It is my nature to engage this way, to offer tales from experience. I want to leave you, then, not with a list of things to think about next, but with a story.
A dear friend of mine once wanted to teach me how to weave a Cherokee basket, a task I have in years since done with my own students as a way of illustrating this very meme stance toward learning and exchanging information. When one learns to weave Cherokee baskets, the goal is not just to share the practices and the art, or to keep the cultural practices alive, but also to celebrate the way that the person learned and the soothing ease with which the task can be accomplished.
I learned in a unique way. I am not a weaver, by any means. I am a crafter, I have a bit of a hand for arts, but I’d never woven before. As a lifelong gamer I have nimble hands, and I’m also quite skilled at following directions and watching for subtle little nuances in movement and style. Sometimes, though, I forget the obvious need for innovation that I mentioned as key for memetic thought. Sometimes I fall into being a human copy machine.
As I watched the elder weave his basket, hands darting to and fro, sharing directions and memories of his first time weaving, he noticed that I was three steps in and stuck, holding a coil of river cane that kept uncoiling as I made my first major crossover to bind it. So he stopped. And he watched. I was doing what he’d said to do. He said it again. I tried again. Nothing. Again. Again nothing. Then he turned to face me, and I could hear my first grade teacher reprimanding me for erasing the board as I wrote, then apologizing because she realized I was left handed and couldn’t help that my hand trailed over my writing, that I would have to learn to not let my hand touch the slate if I ever wanted to write that way. I was looping the cane in the wrong direction, because I was working with my left hand as the elder would his right, reversing the motions. When I realized I should view him as a mirror, the step clicked, I caught up, and I crafted my first basket.
When I teach people to weave, I ask if there are lefties in the room. If there aren’t, I simply tell them to mirror every move they see me make, as I’m a little bit backward sometimes. They often tell me, to a person, that they “cannot” weave and this will be “a disaster.” I tell them that weaving a basket, or editing a photo so that it has a funny saying on it, or emailing someone a link to an obscure 80s pop singer might not seem like it’s the same heavy lifting that writing a ten page research paper is. That paper might seem like something that they cannot do, a disaster waiting to happen. I tell them that the important part is remembering that they can observe and think through a set of actions then apply those actions and end up surprised with the results.
I remind them that we all start from knowing so very little, but as we live and watch and grow we learn to do things we never thought possible, to pilot cars and to throw orange leather balls through seemingly tiny hoops. We learn to use computers and to give over large portions of our lives to Facebook. I tell them about my little left-handed snafu again, and I tell them how I felt I’d never weave a basket. Then I tell them to stop and look in their hands, and twenty surprised faces see that they have the start of a tiny Cherokee basket in their hands simply because they trusted me and they trusted themselves, and when they saw the pattern, they followed the pattern. They didn’t all weave the exact same way, but the pattern gave them enough that they had a successful woven thing.
They actually learned from someone teaching them in reverse to complete a complex crafting task. I tell them that writing is no different, that HTML code is no different. Once the task appears not as one monolithic monster but as a series of replicable steps, no task is too daunting to take on. No one makes a basket. People weave. No one writes a book. People write sections and paragraphs and chapters. Little replicable steps. We meme and meme through our tasks, one tiny victory at a time.
I hope that I open their minds.
At the very least I know I exercise their meme machines.