For the past 25 years, I have professed English at a small, liberal arts university in Iowa. Like most such post-secondary institutions, it has sought ways to chamfer the sharp edge of the recent economic scimitar. My institution has, I think, taken an approach both prudent and wise. The prudent part: it has expanded its online and on-campus vocationally-oriented degree programs. The wise part: it has reaffirmed its commitment to the liberal arts. Compressed in the original definition of “liberal arts” is the idea that a course of study can be freeing (Latin: liber, free), empowering students to successfully transition from parochial and limiting perspectives to the sensitivities and flexibilities demanded by the world’s widening zone of complexity, a world at once increasingly diverse and increasingly interrelated. I believe the liberal arts can prepare students for all careers; indeed, even in those careers commonly construed as vocational, such as business and medicine, liberal arts coursework is being integrated into business and medical school curricula. As part of my institution’s reaffirmation of a liberal arts education, it has tasked a group of faculty with creating the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS). A key question facing CLAS (or any college, school, or program for that matter) is how it can enhance student learning. What follows is my contribution to that discussion—an educational philosophy in one paragraph.
I assume certain fundamental skills underlie all learning, no matter the discipline. I also assume all learning is a matter of training, which is the only way of getting better at something. Now, assuming my assuming isn’t some slippery seed stubbornly impervious to the grasp of reality, I see a way to both make our CLAS distinctive and enhance student learning. If learning, real, genuine, take-it-with-you-into-the-“real world” learning, results from training, what should we be training students in? Intellectual depth. And how do we train students in intellectual depth? Through organizing our courses around teaching styles, assignments, and classroom activities that encourage reflection, research, reasoning, analysis, interpretation, and critique; that foster formulating questions, identifying assumptions, discerning implications/conclusions, and adopting multiple perspectives; that promote application (that is, can students do something on their own, as a result of our instruction, in novel circumstances) and self-evaluation (which, of course, students will need to be taught to do); and that emphasize writing, which ligatures thought and adorns it, making it doubly compelling. This kind of training is the biggest issue facing liberal arts and sciences (its reason for being, actually), and its source of academic excellence. One other thing: we should never, not once, even for a moment, forget that students have lives that far exceed our particular interests and that the shape and making of those lives have had, have, and will have far more impact on the men and women they are and will become than we will. The challenge to us all is captured in Prospero’s question to Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “What see’st thou else.” We cannot transform students, not in the strict sense of the meaning of “transform,” but we can help them see the “else,” and in that small way (which is really a big way) maybe show them that instead of being swept along by events they have the means to wield the broom.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Poetry Rules
I like reading poetry, though I realize that such an activity, and my liking of it, places me in a group of people who could be listed on a Post-It note, with room left for The Aeneid. Perhaps that is because, as Adrian Mitchell says, “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” I do not like reading all poetry, however; I only like poetry that follows two rules, both of which insure that poetry does not ignore me.
Rule 1: A poem must be comprehensible on its first reading.
Making meaning of the poem will come later, interpretation being a second order process, but first I must understand the poem as it is on the page, what it expresses, its saying. After all, unless one lights votive candles and burns incense to the art-god Poetry, why compose a poem that stiffarms a reader? Why the deliberative murk, the churn of obscure allusion, the black hole verse that compacts clarity of expression into an unintelligible pinpoint? Why write a poem that pistol-whips its reader? No, a poem’s lucidity must be robust, efflorescent. A poem must be as clear and inviting as summer water. It must solicit me, not bypass me in service to some mediating theory or other. It must not depend for its intelligibility on something independent of my immediate experience of it. A poem must like me for me to like it. A poem should seduce me.
Here are the first few lines a poem that does not like me, that has the seduction of a soggy saltine:
Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%.
The remainder of the poem, called “Fact,” goes on like this for a full page. It is a listing of the ingredients of which paper is composed. It is cold and cerebral, a poem smitten with itself as an instrument of theory, in thrall to postmodernism, and intent, as near as I can tell, on disenchanting the act of writing, and reading, poetry. “Fact” in fact subjects the reader to the poem’s animating theory and, thus, practices a kind of coercion, a politics of control.
“Fact” is an example of conceptual poetry, the philosophy which, according to Kenneth Goldsmith, one of its foremost practitioners, intentionally employs
uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; . . . and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language . . . as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, . . . illegibility, unreadability.
Such poetry is wantonly arrogant; it willfully disdains its reader. It provides no perch upon which understanding can land. It stages a fixed cage match between the reader and the poem in which the reader, finally, inevitably, suffers a smackdown. It is poetic Calvinism, spurred to a self-flagellating purity of purpose from the conviction that language, like all things human, is irredeemably fallen. It glamorizes negativity. It disorients and ruptures without the prospect of a payoff—poetry as a perpetual gesture of skepticism.
Here’s another small sample, a stanza from Charles Wright’s “Tattoos”:
Liplap of Zuan’s canal, blear/ Footfalls of Tintoretto; the rest/ Is brilliance: Turner at 3 a.m.; moth lamps/ Along the casements. O blue/ Feathers, this clear cathedral . . .
Why the arcane allusiveness? Why am I banished from the act of reading and sent off to discover that Zuan’s canal is in Venice, where Wright was stationed while in the army; that Tintoretto is a Venetian painter; that Turner refers to Joseph Mallord William Turner, a British painter whose Venetian watercolors make striking use of light and color? Why should the footnotes to the stanza take up more space than the stanza? This stanza positions me as a dunce, more Homer Simpson than Homo Sapiens. It isn’t an insult to my intelligence; it’s a felonious assault.
In contrast, here’s a poem that likes me, Billy Collins’ aptly titled “Introduction to Poetry.” It contrasts his and his students’ attitude toward reading poetry. I side with Billy.
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterskiacross the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
A good poem invites us in. It welcomes us, allows us to examine, listen, explore. It respects us enough to value our meaning making. And it initiates this process by being penetrable, straightforward, uncluttered—by summoning us “to waterski across the surface.” To riff on Robert Frost, like ice on a stove, we ride on the poem’s melting. We do not need to pummel it into submission. It will unfold to us, but first we must be granted entrance.
Rule 2: A poem must provide what T. S. Eliot called a “shudder;” that is, it must provoke a visceral response.
Somehow, in whole or in part, a poem must embody itself in me, must stimulate shock or surprise, must conjure a sense of dread or reverence, must enchant me with its charm, must leverage a mood, must engage me in the density of a half-glimpsed perception. It must provide a form of feeling, heightened, boldfaced; a texture of experience to attend to, to regard, to make me examine my first-person connection to human being. Emily Dickenson declared that “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” An overstatement, no doubt, but a poem must contain within it that which is volatile. For the moment of reading, and often for inarticulate reasons, the poem must elicit my subjective response, must provoke or evoke or invoke, must trigger an irruptive physical reaction that lets me take the measure of my subjectivity and that leads me, finally, to think about that reaction.
Here is a small inventory from American poetry of such moments, with brief explanations for their transfixing power. What I cannot explain, however, and what remains for my further exploration, is precisely why I find them powerful.
· The crushing sense of contingency and mutability contained in the concluding stanza of Frost’s “The Hill Wife,” a lonely farmer’s wife who one day slips into the woods never to return. Her husband discovers that “Sudden and swift and light as that/ The ties gave,/ And he learned of finalities/ Besides the grave.”
· More Frost: The stark loneliness in “Desert Places” of a twilit field filling with snow described as “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express.” Or the tragic vulnerability at the end of “Reluctance:” “Ah, when to the heart of man/ Was it ever less than a treason/ To go with the drift of things/ To yield with a grace to reason,/ To bow and accept the end/ Of a love or a season”
· The unnerving “somewhat” in Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” responding to an English teacher’s assignment by arguing for the mutual entailment of black and white Americans: “As I learn from you,/ I guess you learn from me--/ although you’re older—and white--/ and somewhat more free.”
· The exuberant humanism of Whitman claiming “The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer” and how “The narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.”
· The stunning heresy prompted by the indifferent violence of nature in Emily Dickenson’s figuring of an autumn frost as a “blonde Assassin” that “beheads” a “happy Flower,” while “The Sun proceeds unmoved/ To measure off another Day/ For an Approving God.”
· In Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “The Lake,” an ecology of nature and human nature glimpsed in the closely observed intricate beauty of a sunfish she has caught:
I knew the place it came from
was deeper than I could ever see or dive to
that beauty could come up from a dark and cold place
and mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn.
· The frightening ease with which violence and maternal love can intersect and, more horrifying yet, the self-revelation in her daughter’s knowing look that Sharon Olds describes in “The Clasp.” Grasping her four-year-old daughter’s wrist as she is about to turn her sleeping one-year-old brother face down, Olds says
I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,. . .
she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeplyopen eyes took me in, she knew me,
in the shock of the moment
she learned me.
· The artlessness, sweet and deep, of Li-Young Lee’s reaction in “The Gift” to the gentleness with which his father removed a splinter, a gentleness the poet carried into his adult life: “I did what a child does/ when he’s given something to keep./ I kissed my father.” And while of the subject of fathers and sons, the felt need of a father for his father in Simon Ortiz’s opening lines of “My Father’s Song:” “Wanting to say things,/ I miss my father tonight.”
Each of these poems is a small world built of language, its plainspoken explicitness as well as its gestures, suggestions, and insinuations. Each lets us be, in event of its reading, a citizen of elsewhere, no passport required, no bureaucratic snarl at the border crossing. Each beckons us to enter and experience ourselves. It lets us make it our own, lets us, finally, be its subject.
Rule 1: A poem must be comprehensible on its first reading.
Making meaning of the poem will come later, interpretation being a second order process, but first I must understand the poem as it is on the page, what it expresses, its saying. After all, unless one lights votive candles and burns incense to the art-god Poetry, why compose a poem that stiffarms a reader? Why the deliberative murk, the churn of obscure allusion, the black hole verse that compacts clarity of expression into an unintelligible pinpoint? Why write a poem that pistol-whips its reader? No, a poem’s lucidity must be robust, efflorescent. A poem must be as clear and inviting as summer water. It must solicit me, not bypass me in service to some mediating theory or other. It must not depend for its intelligibility on something independent of my immediate experience of it. A poem must like me for me to like it. A poem should seduce me.
Here are the first few lines a poem that does not like me, that has the seduction of a soggy saltine:
Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57H98O6], used as a plasticizer: 52%. Phenolic modified rosin resin [Tall oil rosin: 66.2%. Nonylphenol [C15H24O]: 16.6%. Formaldehyde [CH2O]: 4.8%. Maleic anhydride [C4H2O3]: 2.6%. Glycerol [C3H8O3]: 9.6%. Traces of alkali catalyst: .2%]: 47%): 53.7%. 100S Type Alkyd used as a binder (Reaction product of linseed oil: 50.7%. Isophthalic acid [C8H6O4]: 9.5%. Trimethylolpropane [CH3CH2C(CH2OH)3]: 4.7%.
The remainder of the poem, called “Fact,” goes on like this for a full page. It is a listing of the ingredients of which paper is composed. It is cold and cerebral, a poem smitten with itself as an instrument of theory, in thrall to postmodernism, and intent, as near as I can tell, on disenchanting the act of writing, and reading, poetry. “Fact” in fact subjects the reader to the poem’s animating theory and, thus, practices a kind of coercion, a politics of control.
“Fact” is an example of conceptual poetry, the philosophy which, according to Kenneth Goldsmith, one of its foremost practitioners, intentionally employs
uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; . . . and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language . . . as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, . . . illegibility, unreadability.
Such poetry is wantonly arrogant; it willfully disdains its reader. It provides no perch upon which understanding can land. It stages a fixed cage match between the reader and the poem in which the reader, finally, inevitably, suffers a smackdown. It is poetic Calvinism, spurred to a self-flagellating purity of purpose from the conviction that language, like all things human, is irredeemably fallen. It glamorizes negativity. It disorients and ruptures without the prospect of a payoff—poetry as a perpetual gesture of skepticism.
Here’s another small sample, a stanza from Charles Wright’s “Tattoos”:
Liplap of Zuan’s canal, blear/ Footfalls of Tintoretto; the rest/ Is brilliance: Turner at 3 a.m.; moth lamps/ Along the casements. O blue/ Feathers, this clear cathedral . . .
Why the arcane allusiveness? Why am I banished from the act of reading and sent off to discover that Zuan’s canal is in Venice, where Wright was stationed while in the army; that Tintoretto is a Venetian painter; that Turner refers to Joseph Mallord William Turner, a British painter whose Venetian watercolors make striking use of light and color? Why should the footnotes to the stanza take up more space than the stanza? This stanza positions me as a dunce, more Homer Simpson than Homo Sapiens. It isn’t an insult to my intelligence; it’s a felonious assault.
In contrast, here’s a poem that likes me, Billy Collins’ aptly titled “Introduction to Poetry.” It contrasts his and his students’ attitude toward reading poetry. I side with Billy.
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterskiacross the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
A good poem invites us in. It welcomes us, allows us to examine, listen, explore. It respects us enough to value our meaning making. And it initiates this process by being penetrable, straightforward, uncluttered—by summoning us “to waterski across the surface.” To riff on Robert Frost, like ice on a stove, we ride on the poem’s melting. We do not need to pummel it into submission. It will unfold to us, but first we must be granted entrance.
Rule 2: A poem must provide what T. S. Eliot called a “shudder;” that is, it must provoke a visceral response.
Somehow, in whole or in part, a poem must embody itself in me, must stimulate shock or surprise, must conjure a sense of dread or reverence, must enchant me with its charm, must leverage a mood, must engage me in the density of a half-glimpsed perception. It must provide a form of feeling, heightened, boldfaced; a texture of experience to attend to, to regard, to make me examine my first-person connection to human being. Emily Dickenson declared that “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” An overstatement, no doubt, but a poem must contain within it that which is volatile. For the moment of reading, and often for inarticulate reasons, the poem must elicit my subjective response, must provoke or evoke or invoke, must trigger an irruptive physical reaction that lets me take the measure of my subjectivity and that leads me, finally, to think about that reaction.
Here is a small inventory from American poetry of such moments, with brief explanations for their transfixing power. What I cannot explain, however, and what remains for my further exploration, is precisely why I find them powerful.
· The crushing sense of contingency and mutability contained in the concluding stanza of Frost’s “The Hill Wife,” a lonely farmer’s wife who one day slips into the woods never to return. Her husband discovers that “Sudden and swift and light as that/ The ties gave,/ And he learned of finalities/ Besides the grave.”
· More Frost: The stark loneliness in “Desert Places” of a twilit field filling with snow described as “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express.” Or the tragic vulnerability at the end of “Reluctance:” “Ah, when to the heart of man/ Was it ever less than a treason/ To go with the drift of things/ To yield with a grace to reason,/ To bow and accept the end/ Of a love or a season”
· The unnerving “somewhat” in Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” responding to an English teacher’s assignment by arguing for the mutual entailment of black and white Americans: “As I learn from you,/ I guess you learn from me--/ although you’re older—and white--/ and somewhat more free.”
· The exuberant humanism of Whitman claiming “The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer” and how “The narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.”
· The stunning heresy prompted by the indifferent violence of nature in Emily Dickenson’s figuring of an autumn frost as a “blonde Assassin” that “beheads” a “happy Flower,” while “The Sun proceeds unmoved/ To measure off another Day/ For an Approving God.”
· In Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “The Lake,” an ecology of nature and human nature glimpsed in the closely observed intricate beauty of a sunfish she has caught:
I knew the place it came from
was deeper than I could ever see or dive to
that beauty could come up from a dark and cold place
and mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn.
· The frightening ease with which violence and maternal love can intersect and, more horrifying yet, the self-revelation in her daughter’s knowing look that Sharon Olds describes in “The Clasp.” Grasping her four-year-old daughter’s wrist as she is about to turn her sleeping one-year-old brother face down, Olds says
I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,. . .
she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me-yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeplyopen eyes took me in, she knew me,
in the shock of the moment
she learned me.
· The artlessness, sweet and deep, of Li-Young Lee’s reaction in “The Gift” to the gentleness with which his father removed a splinter, a gentleness the poet carried into his adult life: “I did what a child does/ when he’s given something to keep./ I kissed my father.” And while of the subject of fathers and sons, the felt need of a father for his father in Simon Ortiz’s opening lines of “My Father’s Song:” “Wanting to say things,/ I miss my father tonight.”
Each of these poems is a small world built of language, its plainspoken explicitness as well as its gestures, suggestions, and insinuations. Each lets us be, in event of its reading, a citizen of elsewhere, no passport required, no bureaucratic snarl at the border crossing. Each beckons us to enter and experience ourselves. It lets us make it our own, lets us, finally, be its subject.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
The Sisters of St. Antoninus
I was born, raised, and educated in the bosom of the Catholic Church, which, of course, makes me wonder, not without a twinge of guilt, why I used the word “bosom.” My Catholic education began at St. Antoninus Elementary School. Antoninus was a Dominican who in the 15th century served as the bishop of Florence. “Antoninus” means “little Antony,” likely an affectionate reference to his making himself small through inordinate humility. The Dominican sisters who taught at St. Antoninus were, to those of us in their charge, anything but small. They were wholly other figures, talismanic and imposing, their power welded to the authority of the Church and consecrated by the gold wedding band emblemizing their marriage to Jesus, possessing, so we thought, a bionic capacity for inducing in us the humility characteristic of the school’s namesake.
We were certain the sisters conspired nightly in their convent to devise the means necessary to liberate our natural inclinations to reduce all things to the small, tight circle of our prepubescent egos. The evidence of a conspiracy was irrefutable.
· Every sister carried a ruler, at all times and in all places, for the sole purpose of bestowing quick, hard raps on hands that misheld a pencil, on heads that peered out the window instead of at a sheet of long-division problems, on rear ends that moved too fast or too slow in the myriad lines that formed our mode of travel to lunch, or the playground, or Mass, or the gymnasium for polio shots. The ruler measured our misbehaviors which, like the devil it was meant to expel, were legion.
· Every sister utilized the “claw,” a technique whereby, after a stealth approach from behind while we were daydreaming or conversing with a neighbor, she would bury her fingers, up to the first knuckle it seemed, in our shoulder’s trapezius muscle. I made the mistake of describing this technique, and its effectiveness, to my mother, who promptly adopted it. Thank goodness I kept silent about the ruler.
· Every sister sent miscreants to an indeterminate sentence of kneeling on the hard linoleum, back to the class, in a corner at the front of the room, an unrivalled method of penitence, symbolically mimicking the postural humility of Mass but without the comfort of the padded kneelers. Many years later, reading Agamemnon, I understood completely Aeschylus’s comment about “the pain of pain remembered.”
· Every sister warned us about Elvis and the blasphemous hips that threatened the legacy of natural moral law stretching back to St. Thomas Aquinas. I discounted this warning, however; my mother was an Elvis fan and bought all his records. I simply could not see my mother as a barbarian at the gate of Church teaching. Besides, my father preferred the sister-approved Perry Como and Bing Crosby, and to my mind that defused whatever anti-foundational potential my mother’s affection for Elvis harbored.
And every sister told us a version of the following story: “Boys and girls, one Sunday morning two boys decided to ship Mass and go fishing. Well, while standing to pull in a fish, their rowboat flipped over. Both boys drowned and went to Hell for all eternity because they committed a mortal sin. Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls? Well, imagine that the Earth is a steel ball and every ten thousand years a bird flies by and brushes the ball with its wing. When that ball is worn down to the size of a BB, that’s only the beginning of eternity.” At first, aghast and dumfounded, we were silent; then, as the sheer enormity of what the sister had told us began to slip-stream into our imaginations, we cried. We wailed with a ballistic ferocity that undoubtedly rivaled that of the Enfield, Connecticut, congregants who listened with mounting horror to Jonathan Edwards’ description of sinners in the hands of an angry God being dangled over the gaping mouth of hell. The sister’s story was a subtle as molten lava, but it achieved its purpose. In an economy of saving souls, a glimpse of sin’s dark energy often pays the bills.
It occurs to me now that perhaps that glimpse was underpriced. To say the sisters were flinty disciplinarians compliments both flint and discipline. We did not fear them necessarily nor consider them inhumane; after all, they were married to Jesus, who, to our minds, would not countenance gratuitous cruelty in his spouses. No, grievances did not fester. Discontent did not simmer. Rather, we considered them obstacles, stalwart in their effort to bring order to the architecture of our id-addled prepubescent beings. They issued a summons to a beyondness, to a beckoning world that did not take our impatient desire for instant gratification as its measure, that did not operate on the principle that each of our impulses should be nanoseconds from satisfaction. We were children, not yet ready to put away childish ways. We did not understand, had no context for understanding, that they hurled themselves against the rock-hard obduracy of kid nature. Living healthily on a steady diet of frappes and kettle corn would have carried a higher probability of success. Only later, as adults, seeing other adults who had not put away childish ways, did the necessity of their Thermopylaen labor become apparent. Only later did I see that the management of desire they attempted to foster through stricture gave us an immanent apprehension of ethics, the principles of deportment, self-command, and a realization of consequences, by which social relations are regulated. Only later, when I was ready for it, was the sisters’ lesson learned.
One winter day, like Shakespeare’s schoolboy with my “satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail” from the bus drop off to school, I noticed a “snow sister” in the yard in front of the sisters’ convent. It was a bust, actually, and everything about it was exquisitely sharp and detailed—every fold in the hood and scapula, every bead in the rosary hung from the neck, the crucifix in place directly over the heart—everything except the face. It was a nonface, really, a vague gesture toward a face, a non-individuated abstraction meant only to embody the garments that signified the sisters’s consecration to what they took to be who they were and what they did. Even I, for whom the Hardy Boys books constituted the height of aesthetic achievement, recognized the loving application of artistic skill the bust exhibited. Only years later, however, living in a culture of undiluted self-absorption, did I tag it with meaning. It was a self unselfed to assume the larger self of sisterhood, or, perhaps better, a self reselfed as icon but not symbol, for that bust did not represent something else, it was the something else, the totalizing experience of being a Dominican sister, the continual reverence and humility that emblemizes their mindfulness of their lives’ moral context, of their living before the face of God. In his book Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber describes such a context as “something before which surrender and devotion and submission and gratitude are the only appropriate responses.” All Dominican religious have the initials O.P. after their name, an abbreviation for Order of Preachers. “What see’st thou else,” Prospero asks Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The “else” I now see is that the snow bust the sisters of St. Antoninus sculpted preached. I’ve grown up, put away childish ways, fallen away from the Catholic Church. Still, though, the sisters of St. Antoninus are imposing, large in having made themselves small.
Times change. Religious callings have diminished. The Dominican sisters no longer teach at St. Antoninus, replaced by lay teachers. Many of the sisters no longer wear habits. They live in apartments rather than convents. But last winter, after a snowfall, I suddenly wondered if a group of sisters somewhere made a snow sister. And, if they did, did it have a face a habit? Did it have a face?
We were certain the sisters conspired nightly in their convent to devise the means necessary to liberate our natural inclinations to reduce all things to the small, tight circle of our prepubescent egos. The evidence of a conspiracy was irrefutable.
· Every sister carried a ruler, at all times and in all places, for the sole purpose of bestowing quick, hard raps on hands that misheld a pencil, on heads that peered out the window instead of at a sheet of long-division problems, on rear ends that moved too fast or too slow in the myriad lines that formed our mode of travel to lunch, or the playground, or Mass, or the gymnasium for polio shots. The ruler measured our misbehaviors which, like the devil it was meant to expel, were legion.
· Every sister utilized the “claw,” a technique whereby, after a stealth approach from behind while we were daydreaming or conversing with a neighbor, she would bury her fingers, up to the first knuckle it seemed, in our shoulder’s trapezius muscle. I made the mistake of describing this technique, and its effectiveness, to my mother, who promptly adopted it. Thank goodness I kept silent about the ruler.
· Every sister sent miscreants to an indeterminate sentence of kneeling on the hard linoleum, back to the class, in a corner at the front of the room, an unrivalled method of penitence, symbolically mimicking the postural humility of Mass but without the comfort of the padded kneelers. Many years later, reading Agamemnon, I understood completely Aeschylus’s comment about “the pain of pain remembered.”
· Every sister warned us about Elvis and the blasphemous hips that threatened the legacy of natural moral law stretching back to St. Thomas Aquinas. I discounted this warning, however; my mother was an Elvis fan and bought all his records. I simply could not see my mother as a barbarian at the gate of Church teaching. Besides, my father preferred the sister-approved Perry Como and Bing Crosby, and to my mind that defused whatever anti-foundational potential my mother’s affection for Elvis harbored.
And every sister told us a version of the following story: “Boys and girls, one Sunday morning two boys decided to ship Mass and go fishing. Well, while standing to pull in a fish, their rowboat flipped over. Both boys drowned and went to Hell for all eternity because they committed a mortal sin. Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls? Well, imagine that the Earth is a steel ball and every ten thousand years a bird flies by and brushes the ball with its wing. When that ball is worn down to the size of a BB, that’s only the beginning of eternity.” At first, aghast and dumfounded, we were silent; then, as the sheer enormity of what the sister had told us began to slip-stream into our imaginations, we cried. We wailed with a ballistic ferocity that undoubtedly rivaled that of the Enfield, Connecticut, congregants who listened with mounting horror to Jonathan Edwards’ description of sinners in the hands of an angry God being dangled over the gaping mouth of hell. The sister’s story was a subtle as molten lava, but it achieved its purpose. In an economy of saving souls, a glimpse of sin’s dark energy often pays the bills.
It occurs to me now that perhaps that glimpse was underpriced. To say the sisters were flinty disciplinarians compliments both flint and discipline. We did not fear them necessarily nor consider them inhumane; after all, they were married to Jesus, who, to our minds, would not countenance gratuitous cruelty in his spouses. No, grievances did not fester. Discontent did not simmer. Rather, we considered them obstacles, stalwart in their effort to bring order to the architecture of our id-addled prepubescent beings. They issued a summons to a beyondness, to a beckoning world that did not take our impatient desire for instant gratification as its measure, that did not operate on the principle that each of our impulses should be nanoseconds from satisfaction. We were children, not yet ready to put away childish ways. We did not understand, had no context for understanding, that they hurled themselves against the rock-hard obduracy of kid nature. Living healthily on a steady diet of frappes and kettle corn would have carried a higher probability of success. Only later, as adults, seeing other adults who had not put away childish ways, did the necessity of their Thermopylaen labor become apparent. Only later did I see that the management of desire they attempted to foster through stricture gave us an immanent apprehension of ethics, the principles of deportment, self-command, and a realization of consequences, by which social relations are regulated. Only later, when I was ready for it, was the sisters’ lesson learned.
One winter day, like Shakespeare’s schoolboy with my “satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail” from the bus drop off to school, I noticed a “snow sister” in the yard in front of the sisters’ convent. It was a bust, actually, and everything about it was exquisitely sharp and detailed—every fold in the hood and scapula, every bead in the rosary hung from the neck, the crucifix in place directly over the heart—everything except the face. It was a nonface, really, a vague gesture toward a face, a non-individuated abstraction meant only to embody the garments that signified the sisters’s consecration to what they took to be who they were and what they did. Even I, for whom the Hardy Boys books constituted the height of aesthetic achievement, recognized the loving application of artistic skill the bust exhibited. Only years later, however, living in a culture of undiluted self-absorption, did I tag it with meaning. It was a self unselfed to assume the larger self of sisterhood, or, perhaps better, a self reselfed as icon but not symbol, for that bust did not represent something else, it was the something else, the totalizing experience of being a Dominican sister, the continual reverence and humility that emblemizes their mindfulness of their lives’ moral context, of their living before the face of God. In his book Integral Spirituality, Ken Wilber describes such a context as “something before which surrender and devotion and submission and gratitude are the only appropriate responses.” All Dominican religious have the initials O.P. after their name, an abbreviation for Order of Preachers. “What see’st thou else,” Prospero asks Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The “else” I now see is that the snow bust the sisters of St. Antoninus sculpted preached. I’ve grown up, put away childish ways, fallen away from the Catholic Church. Still, though, the sisters of St. Antoninus are imposing, large in having made themselves small.
Times change. Religious callings have diminished. The Dominican sisters no longer teach at St. Antoninus, replaced by lay teachers. Many of the sisters no longer wear habits. They live in apartments rather than convents. But last winter, after a snowfall, I suddenly wondered if a group of sisters somewhere made a snow sister. And, if they did, did it have a face a habit? Did it have a face?
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