Welcome! This initial post is to introduce myself and to give some background on what I intend with this blog, henceforth known as TKM Connect.
My name is Tom Kaplan-Maxfield (TKM to my students); I’ve been an author (see books on my website, tkaplanmaxfield.com), professor of English (at Tufts University and Boston College) and building contractor (KM Contracting) for the past thirty years or so. I’m starting this site now in June 2020—during the year of plague, in the fourth year of Trump’s presidency, pervaded with police brutality, George Floyd as the latest victim of the police, of capitalist brutality, the general collapse of the old world order, environmental calamities now unleashed—because it’s time and because to remain silent really is a crime like a knee on the neck, which does not allow the body politic to breathe, preventing life-giving oxygen to the system.
Even as I teach and write books and so have those public platforms for speaking and contributing, it seems that this time of crisis has put a point on what I have come to see as the purpose of my generation with reference to the next. That is, it’s clear the world is in profound transformation, all the present systems collapsing or undergoing alteration to the extent that we must acknowledge a new world being born out of the ashes of the old.
It’s in this spirit that I write out of the notion that, having by now backed into becoming an elder, I might offer one more voice of experience and perspective, one more node in the network of life. I often tell my students that though I’m not any smarter than they, what I do have that they don’t is greater perspective—the gift that is bestowed on those of us by virtue of our enduring for decades—and in the process coming to reflect upon life. It becomes clear after a time that life experiences and behaviors move in patterns, and that we can eventually begin to recognize these patterns. One becomes, so to speak, an initiate into life. So that right there—such perspective—is what I want to offer in this blog, first to anyone younger and then expanding outward to fellow travelers.
For the defining image of our time is, of course, connectedness. We see its images everywhere in life, in paradoxical ways: on the one hand all those things that connect us—the internet, the plague, globalization, and on the other those that split us: surveillance, income disparity, and all the isms that are signs of separation—racism, sexism, nationalism. This is the underlying and driving principle of TKM Connect: to talk about the ways we might be better connected and how to bear those divisions without their killing us, not to mention other animals and plants.
A little more background before I begin: I’ve taught a course on Love at Boston College for the past twenty-five years, and if you’d like to pursue more directly what that course is all about, see the link here on this blog for A Little Course in Love. There’s so much sentimental and confused information about love out there these days that some clarity seems to be in order.
I’ve also taught a course on Love and Indoctrination guided by the notion that love, as the principle of connectedness (my own definition derived from various readings), is the cure for indoctrinated thinking and systems. We see this today everywhere, from Trump the great divider to his fans split off from their own best interests, shooting themselves as it were in the foot; to capitalism with its emphasis on competition as opposed to cooperation. The great lie of capitalism is the supposed fact that humans are essentially competitive creatures. We’ve all so ingested this notion that spending time alone in quarantine during the virus has turned into a competition to see how we can out-compete ourselves or one another in proving that mere isolation actually shows us as thriving. Be our better selves! becomes the watchword of the day.
While I do believe capitalism as a way of thinking is destroying the planet and us, I admit I am a capitalist; I’m not standing outside the system and critiquing it from some external or superior position. Quite the contrary; I—as I imagine you are too—am suffering its depredations. I’m not sure if the system is inherently flawed or evil, but I don’t know of any examples of it where it does not eventually lead to a constant speeding up, a delusion that resources are infinite, and a casual cruelty visited upon future generations, given that in essence it’s a system always projected into the future and never focused on the moment in front of us.
Love, insofar as it’s been the main concern of my life whether via teaching, writing, or building, will therefore remain front and center in everything I have to talk about. I’ll refer to the writers and thinkers below to help flesh out various ideas about love and other matters. But beware: this is not the soft, vulnerable love of all-too-many voices out there (which take at best half the measure of love), but instead a more complete limning of the various aspects of Love as we actually experience them.
I envision this blog’s point of departure as formed by the community of students both current and former with whom I’ve interacted over the years, some of whom have become friends, I’m delighted to say. I receive a fair number of emails replete with excellent ideas, and I’m hoping by means of this blog to relay those ideas to you as participants, radiating them outward for everyone to contemplate—ideas being the common currency of humanity. In this way the thoughts you send to me whether via emails or by posting directly on this blog as comments will become the seed material of new ways of thinking and doing in the world. So please, write back! Let us all hear your thoughts on where we’ve come from and where we’re going—and how we’ll get there.
If you’d like to know where I’m coming from and why I think the way I do, here are sources of inspiration I’ve benefited from over the years—the tree upon which I grow as a small branch. That is, these are the human and not-so-human inspirations who make it possible for me to speak. In other words, to understand as fully as possible the ideas I’ll be articulating here, go read up on the following masters (in no particular order):
Henry David Thoreau
Lawrence Durrell
Henry Miller
Margaret Fuller
Thomas Mann
James Hillman
David Abram
David Haskell
Richard Powers
Ursula LeGuin
James Baldwin
Kurt Vonnegut
Mary Shelley
Mark Twain
Edward Abbey
All the various Gods and Goddesses of Love as well as Pan and Hephaestus
What I read online for thoughtful analysis and insight:
Counterpunch.org
Consortiumnews.com
Truthout.org
Truthdig.com
TheIntercept.com
Peakprosperity.com
Orion magazine
Dark Mountain
Jacobin Magazine (jacobinmag.com)
Individual reporters and writers:
Chris Hedges
Caitlin Johnstone
Noam Chomsky
Glenn Greenwald
Jeffrey St. Clair