Maxine's Voice and Unfinished Conversations… .

Maxine's voice—singular, unmistakable, extraordinary. Maxine spoke and wrote like no one else in the field of education and, for that distinctiveness, she garnered numerous accolades, as well as a huge, diverse, and devoted following. But early on in her career, Maxine's voice—that voice in all its multiple registers, both symbolic and literal—was resisted by more than a few, especially within her philosophy of education arena. Her voice was challenged as being too literary, too poetic, too filled with allusion, too existential phenomenological … too female, if you will.

But it's that very voice that immediately drew me to her when I read her work as a Masters student at the University of Rochester in the early 1970s. Maxine (1978) already was addressing what she called “predicaments” of women, and I wanted, needed, to know more of how she was perceiving the women's movement in the United States, how she was engaging as a woman philosopher with her work in sometimes less-than-welcoming contexts. I was most curious about how one might lean forward into the world as a constantly becoming feminist existential phenomenologist, a feminist academic.

I first heard Maxine speak about these issues and more at one of the very first US curriculum theorizing conferences that fueled the movement known as the Reconceptualization. I stood, crammed into a corner in the very back of the conference room, mesmerized by Maxine's voice. Dressed in her New York black, she leaned into the rhythm of her words as she read from her prepared remarks, periodically gazing at the ceiling as she spoke. Maxine was speaking and doing philosophy, urging us all to work tirelessly for betterment in the project she called education.

Maxine, too, recognized the incessant challenges involved in working toward that betterment. To gesture toward complexities involved in such, she leaned on Sartre's notion of freedom in relation to his version of a fundamental project, wherein individuals daily must make choices and in fact, are not able to avoid making choices. But choices only are free when individuals not only recognize that more than one possible action exists in any one moment and context, but also are able to enact options situated in contexts and conditions that support and enable them to choose.

Educators, Maxine argued through her whole life, are especially challenged to choose to engage in activities of meaning-making that might support informed choices, even as these activities may well also involve our constant posing and pondering of often unanswerable questions. And such question-posing engagements, as we know she so firmly believed, could be wrought most compellingly by imaginative encounters with the arts. But above all, within all of these choices and encounters and questions, Maxine took every occasion possible to remind us that our responsibility to others—and most especially to our students—also must entail the realization that justice is that toward which we must strive, without end. Maxine understood that social and political transformation is an incessant project, one that should not and cannot be relinquished, one that is coextensive with the always-in-the making, always becomings of life.

I first had the chance to speak individually with Maxine about such challenges in 1974 at a curriculum theory conference where we began our elongated conversations that lasted 40 plus years. Along with her interrogations into the “predicaments of women,” I immediately had been drawn to Maxine's passionate commitments to what she called “social imagination: the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficit society, on the streets where we live, in schools” (Greene, 1995, p. 5). Maxine's own clear capacity for such impelled us all to try to see more intensely, deeply, broadly—to enact phenomenologist Alfred Schutz's (1962) notion of wide-awakeness—which he defined as “a plane of consciousness of highest tension originating in an attitude of full attention to life and its requirements. … This attention is an active, not passive one” (p. 213). Maxine's very presence and her always-identifiable voice in fact radiated active, not passive attention.

Maxine's perspectives and insights and voicings thus permeated much of what I read and studied during the early and mid-1970s, and I literally felt propelled and inspired by her passionate articulations of her commitments. I thus wrote and defended a dissertation in 1977 that engaged with Maxine's scholarship in relation to curriculum studies and humanities education arenas, in particular. Encouraging and supportive of my research, Maxine invited me to her apartment so that we could talk together for an extended period of time; in her phone invitation to me, she said: “Bring your tape recorder. We don't want to miss a word.” And so I flew to New York City from my doctoral studies at The Ohio State University. I fidgeted with my list of interview questions in the lobby of 1080 Fifth Avenue, waiting to be announced and then buzzed up into her apartment. It was one thing to read and study all of Maxine's work published at that time, as well as many of her unpublished papers that she so generously had packaged up and sent to me, unsolicited. And it was one thing to speak with her at conferences and on the phone—but it was a whole new enterprise for me to be face-to-face with Maxine, to be invited to spend the whole day with her and to engage in extended conversation. I was petrified.

That day, sitting on her living room sofa, Maxine's warm welcome quickly erased my anxieties as we ranged across a dizzying array of topics that trailed through the early afternoon and into the evening. As my tape recorder ground to a halt, seemingly filled to its capacity with our stream-of-consciousness meanderings and connections, and as Maxine baked some spaghetti for Jack and me, and as we later watched the lights blink open through the Central Park trees outside her windows, my research interview with Maxine marked the beginning of conversations that have extended across decades. Lucky enough to have lived in the same city for years, I've subwayed, bused, and taxied my way over to the East side for our almost always weekly meetings that included fits of laughter, gobs of gossip, and Maxine's unfailingly incisive readings of world crises, the most recent New York City public school contentions, current art exhibits, movies, plays, and—oh yes—some of the latest reality TV shows.

So, that unsolicited hand-wrapped brown-paper package that arrived one morning years ago at my doctoral student apartment door in Columbus, Ohio—a package torn at the edges and along one side, with pages of some of Maxine's typewritten papers trailing from the openings, but still intact—is a treasured gift that I've kept over the years. I’m now able to add these papers—as well as many other papers, photographs, memorabilia that several of us helped her to cull from her apartment during recent years—into the official archives of Maxine's oeuvre, which I’m working to compile and catalog at Teachers College, at her request.

I thus hold dear not only the transcript of that initial tape-recording of our first elongated conversation, but also transcripts of several years’ worth of audio-recordings of Maxine's and my conversations. We framed these as our work together toward what Maxine had invited me to write and name as a “collaborative biography of Maxine Greene.” In our most recent engagements with those possibilities, Maxine and I had explored what we started to call our “convergences and divergences.” And in our most recent iterations of this particular collaborative biography project, we especially had taken up often contradictory and difficult challenges of becoming in light of shifting and now seemingly changing versions of academe into vessels of entrepreneurship, of disciplinary boundaries and some of their dissolutions, of nonessentialized conceptions of woman academic, of health and relationships, and of possible connections, disconnections, and reconfigurations that attend such fluctuations. My work to continue and to complete this particular project is guided, always, by her voice—most certainly as recorded on these audiotapes, but more pervasively through our years of never-ending conversations.

So now, in these still-painful moments of our collective and momentous loss—when I so long to hear Maxine's voice just one more time—I realize that I do hear Maxine's gravely Brooklyn intonations—always pushing, challenging, cajoling me—even as she was saying my name, grasping my hands as I bent down to look into her eyes as she leaned against her pillows in that Lenox Hill Hospital room. Even there, in her own way, Maxine was reminding me again that our world is one in which nothing stays the same, and where, by extension, we all are obliged every day to reinvent ourselves, and where we must “identify the gaps between what is and what is longed for, what… will some day come to be” (Greene, 1988, p. 129).

Undeniably, then, it is Maxine's voice, filled with urgings to embrace the daily work of beginning, yet again, to forge ways to come together to act on the possibility of repair, that I hear most strongly. That possibility was one that she, herself, so magnificently envisioned, embodied, and enacted, and that dares us all to continue to work toward that repair. How can we not? Because every day, Maxine herself mustered the courage to choose, even in her final days on this earth, to begin again and again, knowing there were no guarantees.

Indeed, Maxine's voice urges us, as educators, to “fight a plague, seek homes for the homeless, restructure inhumane schools” (Greene, 1995, p. 19). To honor Maxine and her commitments, we must continue to work to banish inequities, to act in the face of the unknown and unanswerable, to change deficiencies in the world, to challenge the uncaring, the fake, the disinterested, the cruel, to fight against the plagues of normative, as well as concrete, acts of violence.

Yes, there was still so much for Maxine to say, to write, to argue and push for, to defy. But it is, as Maxine constantly reminded us, our “incompleteness—the open question, perhaps—that summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action” (Greene, 1995, p. 74). In our own incompleteness, we honor too what cannot be totally possessed, what in Maxine's life indeed exceeds our grasp. Although we might, at every turn, try to give varying accounts of her life's “meanings,” I believe that we must address Maxine and her ineffable contributions as always becoming, thus keeping any final meaning of her name and her work as always open.

At the same time, what we might be able to do, even in the midst of Maxine's declared incompleteness, as well as of our own, is to remember and attempt to enact Maxine's commitments to constantly becoming. We can call attention, again and again, to her binding ties with multiple and differing others, to her grace amidst the unknowns of self and of life, to her desires to forge connections with people who indeed make fighting a plague, seeking homes for the homeless, restructuring inhumane schools their life-projects.

Maxine's is a voice that, indeed, never will be replicated. And all of our varied conversations with Maxine are, and never will be, completed. This is her legacy: unfinished conversations—with untold numbers of students, teachers, colleagues, friends, and family—as a form of daily questioning, choosing, becoming. But I believe that what we can say, without attempting to own or totally define Maxine, is that all of these aspects of her incompleteness at the same time constructed a voice—a life—that undoubtedly has made and will continue to make an astounding difference.