On Selling Out

When I was a teenager, the worst sin anyone could commit was selling out. My friends and I were obsessed music fans, and everything we did revolved around music. At first, we had to love Metallica’s Black Album because it is objectively great. But as it started selling two … three … ten million copies, it became clear to me and my music-loving-yet-tragically-snobby friends that Metallica had departed from their bread and butter—underground thrash metal—and made a commercial record. They no longer spoke for us. They had sold out, having given up their principles to cash in.

Now that I’ve become a professional myself, I can see how unfair I was being. The American Dream itself is trade off: we work our fingers to the bone for financial prosperity. Compared to when I was young, artists seek sponsorship much more in today’s music industry. In his article, "Is it even still possible to sell out?", Chris Richards, culture editor for the Washington Post, observes, “Drake has made it his job to sell more Drake—through rapping, through singing, through Nike, through Sprite” (Richards 1). What Richards is pointing out is that doing business these days means an all-out embrace of capitalism. As many have pointed out, selling out may not even be possible anymore because music has become just as commercial as Coca-Cola, and musicians have become brand executives.

While Richards’ point elucidates the complexity of my own argument, he can’t be right that there is no longer a line to cross. However, selling out shouldn’t retain the stigma that it did when I was thirteen either. Although it becomes a real problem when we break the bonds of trust with those who rely on us, selling out can be fine under circumstances where we balance personal gain with compassion for others.

I am a teacher, and teachers may seem like the last holdouts when it comes to selling out. However, take a look around when a tenure track position opens up: teachers scratch and claw our way into those interviews, as competitive as if we were actors desperate for that life-changing role. What this means is that if sponsors could gain anything from teachers, they would exploit them. And from what I have seen, many teachers would be happy to shift their priorities to make a little extra money. After all, the average teacher’s salary is barely above the poverty line. To gain perspective on what selling out would look like for a teacher, let’s take a look at what teachers value, and maybe we can discover where to draw the line between integrity and selling out.

Instead of money, the currency in academia is originality. Now, I don’t mean that this is how teachers get paid. I mean that teachers value knowledge, and because we generate knowledge by building on each others’ ideas, we must give credit to those we engage in written conversation. In other words, if we use another author’s ideas in our writing, we cite them (in correct MLA format, of course).

Most books published by academics imagine such a narrow audience that they only expect to sell a few hundred copies, mostly to university library collections. However, there are a few academic authors whose names alone ensure that anything they write will be a national bestseller, and teachers malign these authors--probably out of envy, and there is good reason for hating them. Basically, the talent of these pop-authors lies not in original ideas but informing a wide audience about typically tedious subjects—like commas—ideas originally written by other people. Are these pop authors sellouts? In Dan Charnas’ book on the history of the hip-hop industry, he contrasts artists who remain mindful of their values with artists who sell out. Academics and pop authors mirror the “tension between the polar impulses of rap and Black America as a whole—upscale versus downscale, aspirational versus proletarian, commercial versus street, profit versus principle” (Charnas 61). By pointing out the contrast in values of musicians, Charnas reveals to us another problem with selling out: it divides us. Pop authors are just better than academics at making knowledge sound good, but the trade off is simplifying ideas not your own. 

I am tempted at the thought of becoming a best-selling author. Even though it would take a lot for me to give up teaching, it would be a dream come true to make my living as an author.  But being a popularizer of other people’s ideas would test my ethical principles as a teacher. At first, it sounds like a straight sellout, and I wouldn’t do it. But already I have some ideas for this kind of book: maybe I would write a book about commas, and call it Comma Sutra, and make it appeal to people who never can tell what position a comma should be in. If a publisher like Norton called and offered me an advance of cash to write Comma Sutra, I have to admit that I would be thrilled.

The problem is, my book on commas wouldn’t be an original work. I would just be popularizing what others have spent their careers working on. Then I come in with a silly sex pun and am suddenly exploiting their work to make money. Is it selling out? Probably. Would I do it? Probably.

Short of theft, where would I draw the line on selling out? If I stole the idea for Comma Sutra from someone else and published it, that would be more than a breach of trust. It would be a violation of copyright law, and I could get sued. It’s plagiarism, passing off someone else’s work as my own. Is popularizing different from plagiarism? Almost certainly, but the legality of it isn’t the problem. It’s the principle, which brings me back to being a teacher.

As a teacher, I value learning. If I stay in the classroom and continue to teach the best I know how, my work is the benefit of others. In contrast, if I publish my stupid comma book, my work is the benefit of me. While it’s possible that some might learn something about commas from the book, I don’t think it will change anyone’s life. I’ve seen what my work in the classroom can do.

One of the true dangers of selling out in this way is how we patronize smart people. As one of the most talented musicians in hip-hop, Lil Wayne could write his own check. But he went too far with the album he released exclusively through Tidal, requiring his fans to sign up for a music platform he was invested in to hear his latest music. Effectively, “you tell smart listeners—a constituency of highly informed skeptics—not to care” (Richards 3). Wayne worked hard to gain his listeners, but Chris Richards points out his shift in priorities, from making great music to making business deals that don’t reward the listeners that respect him. Rather, Wayne and his business partners are the ones who benefit. To return the argument to my own career, it would be as though I had not only written a bad book, but then I required all my students to buy it for class. It’s a slimy move, and one that shows my complete lack of respect for them.

I can take a lesson from Metallica here. When they took a chance on appealing to a wider audience, they made one of the best rock albums in history. So if I take a book deal, I owe it to my students to write a better book.

The One Eye Love

Storytelling is important to me. It’s where I find meaning in the world, sharing stories with friends and getting to know strangers by their incantations. Within stories, I may escape my Self and experience life in someone else’s skin, as though I had crawled beneath it and looked out from behind their eyes.

The more important I find it, the more I question it. Why must experience be inextricably bound with eyesight? Poets tritely invoke the metaphor that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Despite our poorly evolved eyes, we humans invest a great deal of our being in our ability to see, even though many of us don’t have perfect vision. In fact, I wear corrective lenses as I write this to you. Images provoke, excite, anger, arouse, and delight us just as fast as new images appear.

Consider then, the blind. Do they not have a portal to experiencing the world as we do, a sense of looking out and our reciprocal sense of look back in, as the metaphor indicates?

Recently I lost sight in one eye. I was terrified, trying to come to terms with the sudden deprivation of my most cherished sense, thinking it was forever. I tried to take comfort in the blind storytellers who made their mark by substituting a profound, inner vision for their lack of physical sight. James Joyce struggled for many years with severe discomfort and vision-loss in one eye. John Milton went blind as he advanced in age and had to recite Paradise Lost to his daughter from the dark depths of his mind instead of writing it. Homer, though legendary, was supposedly blind. As a Cyclops, I was in good company. In fact, Odin, a chief god in the Norse tradition, sacrificed an eye for a tiny sip from a well that imparted knowledge. Odin wasn’t greedy; he only tasted a few drops of Mimir’s well in order to gain a little wisdom about the knowledge he was accruing from his exploration of the world. He bought that bit of wisdom with his eye. He bought it so he would understand the importance of knowledge, the power of recognizing his own ignorance and continuing to seek truth.

Yet, I did not want this deformity. That would be insane. No one would ask to lose their sight in order to find a more substantial, inner vision, would they? Milton tried to justify it, after he had gone blind. As a human being he had a need to apply meaning to his experience, and I love that about him. He was storytelling. From his point of view, God had chosen him to “see” a light divine and illuminate for his captives the state of being, to justify the ways of God to man. Even though he certainly failed, we lovers of literature benefit from his over-reaching goal. What a failure! I would fail a million times to come close to the genius of Paradise Lost, but I wouldn't ask to be blind.

Let me explain. I somehow scratched the cornea of my left eye, rendering me unable to see and in such severe pain that I repeatedly wept for relief, pain I wouldn't wish on my enemies. I went to the ER in tragic condition, and as I sat in triage, still unaware of the cause of my pain and blindness, fear took me and made me understand that I was about to find out whether I would be blind forever or just in temporarily excruciating pain. I cried. Not just once, but several times during my examination, I cried. Because of the pain, because of the possibility of blindness, because I felt completely vulnerable before a healthy young doctor, I cried.

Here is where it gets weird. I have a tattoo of Odin that has been left unfinished for over two years. A few weeks ago, I made an appointment with an artist to have it finished. The flat, unfinished Odin on my arm had been left too long, staring out with his one eye, looking weak, powerless to affect his world. The day after making the appointment, I lost my eyesight. This image that I had fixed on my skin as a significant story of sacrifice and pain in the pursuit of knowledge now mocked me in an all-too literal way.

Okay, Odin. You win. Again. My eyesight has been restored, and I know it’s time for me to suspend the physical scarring I have enjoyed for the past year and resume the search. Sure, I have scars that tell stories, and I will tell you where I got them. But in order to tell you something meaningful, it is my duty to seek truth and wisdom in my world. That is storytelling. That is love. So let me tell you what I see … 

The Dreary of Relativity

The streetlamps marked even spaces like Doric columns that I could nod my head to, and their light rolled over us like amber waves followed by a trough of shadow before the next glowing cone pushed toward us. Seams in the highway pulsed through our seats in a rhythmic reminder that we were in contact with the road. It was a Sunday night, and my dad was driving us home.

We were on the highway crossing town from the west side to the east. Glowing on the dashboard, the digits of the clock challenged me to predict the precise time we would pull into home, a game I found easy to cheat because as soon as the clock reached the time I had chosen, I would reason like a diviner that since we had exited the highway, the final stage of the journey had been reached, and I could therefore be called correct. I can imagine, recall that route in my head, not as a map but as a corridor of actual space in my city from starting point to home point. A matter of space, and the time it took to traverse it.

My dad looked down at me and flashed dark and light in the rhythmic shadows. He asked me about school, and I most likely described something I took for granted but that he had never learned, something wretched like geometry. Out of his league but unwilling to concede, my dad uttered his usual excuse for not being skilled in the basics of grade school math and without letting another streetlight go by extolled the wonders of physics, a subject he had actually paid attention to. I had heard this before, and I loved it. One of the few things about school I ever heard him talk about was the experiments that he had conducted in his high school physics lab: the motion of waves through water; the production of magnetism from electricity and vice versa; the chemical reaction of alkaline metals in water. In the dark world of a child’s mind, I was speeding through the night, catching glimpses of brilliance that would take me years to realize.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time in isolation thinking about the world, face in a book. My friends didn’t care about the mountains of the Moon nor find it funny that Long John Silver was the quartermaster under Captain Flint—his parrot. Together, we played a lot of football and discovered music and girls. But I didn’t get a sense of family from them; I didn’t feel related. Among my family, I was also pretty weird. My sister was much cooler than I and used to beat me up a lot. I countered by scotchtaping Satanic signs on the door of her bedroom. For some reason she found that disturbing. My mother had to put up with us on her own, and she struggled to feed us, let alone encourage my precocious curiosities. It wasn’t a warm, big-family upbringing, and I didn’t have a strong sense of what relatives were. I felt separate: an absolute.

As I explored the cosmos more and more, I couldn’t see myself in it. The questions of where I came from and where I belonged became troubling and disorienting, even as I learned more and more. I enjoyed learning for its own sake, but it seldom led to anything I could call meaningful. It was that beautiful moment of innocence, that existence when you’re sure of being at the center of the universe and the top of the food chain, just before the anger and the angst descend into the adrenal glands and go marching through the veins. I was to focus henceforth on the questions, not the answers.

As certain as he was about the electromagnetic field, my dad struggled deeply with one idea in particular—Einstein’s Special Relativity. On the amber-lit highway driving home, I knew it only as Relativity, and my dad turned to me and asked why the light beaming from the headlamps wouldn’t add the speed of the car to its velocity, as a stone thrown from our car window would, or a baseball thrown at my head at 90mph would smack my skull at 60mph if I was running away from it at 30mph. Relativity is an odd beast, and it’s founded on the fact that light travels at a constant speed, 186,000 miles per second whether you are moving or not.

And now that rapt young boy will turn to his dimly lit father as a grown man and shed some light on Relativity: no matter how hard you try to chase after a light beam, it still retreats from you at the speed of light.

Einstein tried to imagine riding on a beam of light. If you could ride the lightning and you held a mirror up to your face, would you see your image? Yes, because light always appears to travel away from the observer at the same speed. You would still see your face in the mirror. If I was going nearly 186,000 miles per second with a lightning bolt between my legs, and I switched on a flashlight, would its light be traveling twice the speed of light? No, because as your speed increases, your time slows down to keep the speed of light constant. Why does time slow down? Going from one place to another involves the distance and the time it takes to cross that distance. Einstein showed us that space and time are relatives. Increase movement, time slows. Decrease movement, time races. There is no absolute place and no absolute time.

Dear reader, you are on the side of the road on a Sunday night, waiting for my dad’s car to pass by carrying me in the passenger seat and my sister in the backseat. When the car passes you, my dad will turn on the dome light which is equidistant between me and my sister, and you need to tell me who the light from the dome light reaches first: me in the front, or my sister in back. From inside the car, my dad will try for the same observation. Click! the light goes on and my dad sees the light reach my sister and I simultaneously. All is well then. But wait, what’s that you say? You didn’t see it the same way? As we passed you in the car and switched on the dome light, you would observe the light coming on, but since my sister is traveling toward the light source, the beam of light has a shorter distance to cover to reach her. And in contrast, since I in the front seat am moving away from the light source, the beam of light has a longer distance to travel to reach me. What you saw was my sister light up first and me slightly after.  So whose observation is correct? My dad’s, who saw the light reach us at the same instant? Or you, dear reader, who stood beside the road and as we passed saw the light reach my sister first and me after?

The cosmos contains no shortage of truths. It contains multitudes. It is literally true that both observers are correct; for those riding in the car, time ticks slower than for you on the side of the road, allowing for discrepancies observed in space and time. Don’t believe it? GPS accounts for these discrepancies of Relativity to triangulate your position from satellite. GPS uses Relativity! If it didn’t correct for time passing slower in orbit, the satellites would drift out of position 98,000 feet per day!

Reality maintains its frustrating quality of uncertainty not because it has no meaning. But because it contains a multiplicity of meanings that complicate and contradict. I am all of the brothers Karamazov; I am both innocent and guilty. And I have found, dad, relativity in one another.

As I predicted. The dashboard digital reads  :   and we are nowhere near home. Long ago we emerged from the dark, confusing night, and I am still trying to catch that beam of light.