Gravitas

I got some questions today that I thought would go a little way toward this small project of composing a history of Gravitas. I thought the answers to these questions would be interesting to a few.

How did Gravitas start?

The chronology of this is a little difficult to understand. The earliest thing I remember is being at Jill’s house having a meal on a Sunday afternoon and suggesting it would be great to have a midnight pizza bash and talk about something worthwhile. But before this, in the summer, we had had something similar at Bauder’s house where we got together to talk about Epistemology with a few people. This was a result of Ryan Martin’s suggestion one day that the thing we needed to do was to hammer out our epistemology. It is the single most important idea he ever put in my head. These things were a proto-Gravitas.

So in the fall we scheduled a midnight pizza bash and many of the young and none with small children came. I remember that first time we kicked it off by playing some music and I asked stupid questions about it. Then we got to the main part. We read Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn because it seemed agreeable to all. What I slyly neglected to mention was that I had a book by Cleanth Brooks called The Well Wrought Urn with a whole chapter on the poem which I consulted beforehand. So we arrived and began to discuss and we had a Christian School literature teacher to take exception to my notions. The conversation went around and I was patient enough to elicit a fuller explanation of the opposition and then pulled out my borrowed arguments. It came off very successfully. We all talked about the poem, and sunk ourselves into it by thinking and debating back and forth, and my actually having something substantial borrowed from Brooks to put in there made the thing work pretty nicely. We were all satisfied when we disbanded.

So we tried it again at the same late hour with Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality which was way too long, Brooks or no Brooks (the book also had a chapter on this). First we talked a bit about music and I made some more fatuous remarks that I have since found were that pretender Wagner’s stupid notions about music (I was disabused by Barzun in his book) and I am afraid I made the weariness of everyone present all the more keen by so doing. Then I read all the poem and I’m afraid it was a bit histrionic and soon after that many decided it was time to go and I never got to put in the bits by Brooks. We did not talk long, except that Todd stayed and talked to me till three about something or other. That was the end of the midnight pizza bashes and there the whole thing languished till January.

In January Eric and I had a class with Bauder, at the end of which, we started talking about having a get-together. I called it a bash, and Bauder got a list of people we thought showed signs of having enjoyed the Teaching Methods all have heard of by now, and he invited all to his house for a bash. We talked about impressionism and then about Thomas Kinkade (disparagingly). What really helped us keep it from falling all apart was having Bauder along early on. We needed him to help us with keeping the discussion from deteriorating away. If somebody tried to shut it all down with heavy handed objections, he was there to rescue things. Gradually he lapsed but he only helped to spark the regular thing and to send it in a more-or-less good direction. We began to do the thing monthly, then we added a newsletter, then we got a name for a silly reason and there it is.

And it takes time and failure and trying again. You have to learn what to avoid, how to ask questions, how to prepare, what things will work, and so on. It is worth keeping after even if you have a dull bash or a bash where everybody is mad at everybody because in the long run, perseverance is what it takes.

Did you lay down any ground rules?

We never really laid any ground rules. At one point we decided to come up with a sketch of our beliefs and that brought on some welcome argument, standing up and shouting at each other, and such. Some don’t enjoy that as much as Ryan and I did.

Were you all quite aware that you were on the same page from the start?

I don’t think we were all on the same page or are yet—for example, the intrusion of small children. So we still have disagreements and it is very good to get a person disagreeing as part of it as long as they aren’t obnoxious and one isn’t either. Some came and wandered away, having decided other commitments were more important, that the conversation was not enough about architecture, or what have you.

Did you ever invite people who you weren’t of the same mind?

Anybody who wanted to come was welcome. We never invited anybody who might not be interested, but the criteria was not, at least in my mind, disagreement, but rather disinterest. There were disagreements (people questioning inerrancy or Weaver). What we did for years was just decide who wanted to do something the next month, one or two things: lead a discussion of a poem, help us understand a piece, talk about this author or a journal article, etc. The point was not to be an expert at the thing, but to cultivate our capacities by fumbling around talking about serious matters. And we would read books by experts to help us along. One time we had a philosophy teacher from the U of St. Thomas, once a local pastor tell us how they did their worship service, this, that and the other.

What other questions should we answer?