On a recent morning, looking out a kitchen window, I saw a cardinal in my winter-ravaged garden. The sight instantly filled me with a vitality of feeling that suspended the moment of looking into a clock-frozen now, a pause poised over time. That red knot of energy, that rubied spot of gladness, that pulsing heart amid the purgatorial gloom, recalled for me the bloom and color that had been driven deep and dormant by the earth’s backward tilt, to await the summoning shout of spring. That cardinal was a rumor of redemption irrupting into the fallen present. It was the beauty of innuendo. It was a stop-and-pause-to-reflect thing, a thing given me from beyond me to see and enjoy, an evocative and immersive moment to linger in and experience wonder at.
That wonder made me feel gratitude, and that gratitude made me feel reverence. Not gratitude to something but about something; not an owing or indebtedness, not an imposed obligation, but a state of being, a style of feeling a moment’s wholeness, an urgent tug of attunement, a succouring inspiration, a quickening and a homage, an impulsive heart-leap of nowness and thisness, an attentiveness so intense it transports the seer inside the seen. And not a reverence that is religious in a doctrinal sense, not a matter of practice and ritual, not a worship exactly, but, rather, an attitude or stance, a recognition and receptivity, a willingness to be beckoned by the sacramental in the everyday, to lift our heavy eyelids and see the mystery and magic the world discloses to us continually, to experience respect, deference, veneration.
We need gratitude, I think. Our lives too often seem immutably mutable, constitutionally vulnerable and subject to immanent wounding, to weariness and fault, to vagrant hope, to encumbrance. We too often feel potshotted and potholed, too often metered by the poetics of adversity, too often unmustered and unsettled, too often marionettes to motions not our own, too often homeless in our consciousness of ourselves, spectral presences in our own lives. We too often pound the kick-drum of self-rebuke. Our per capita output of regret seems astonishingly high. Like bubbles, we are always balancing inner and outer pressures, seeking an equipoise to preserve a membranous self that often feels sketched in outline, partial, waiting to be filled. We fear we are subplots whose connection to the governing theme of a larger story is disturbingly unclear. We yearn to pronounce ourselves, sound ourselves out, write our narrative in bold block letters, and yet, too often, language fails us, the words point elsewhere or otherwise.
And yet, and yet. The world to some extent echoes our thinking about it. We need gratitude, not to deny the sad existential truths, not to turn a blind eye to the shearing hurts that beleaguer us, not to slough off the dark otherness of our lives with thoughtlessness or the anesthetizing bright-sided optimism of Irving Berlin’s “I’ve got the sun in the mornin’ and the moon at night.” No, we need gratitude to see fully, to cultivate mindful notice, to avoid what Aldous Huxley called our “almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” We need to ask ourselves the questions Mary Oliver poses in her poem “Gratitude”: “What did you notice?” “What did you hear?” “What did you admire?” “What astonished you?” “What do you want to see again?” “What was most tender?” “What was happening?” Answering those questions, Oliver says, will “shake us from our sleep.”
We can catch our breath, catch a moment, catch ourselves. I believe we can be wise. We can balance the ledger’s debits with credit entries. I found one several mornings ago. A cardinal, mid-winter, in my garden; a vermillion throb that, for as long as I bore witness to it, banished the drab and droop, the blasted and bedraggled, the parched and shriveled, the scurfs of snow and crust of frost. I regarded it, as the physicists say, as a fine-structure constant. Indeed, I’d like to think a strange and wondrous physics was at work that morning. A tensile force bound the particles of cardinal and me into a tight nucleus of sensibility. It was hardly a fearful symmetry. It seemed enough, sufficient. It was a souvenir against forgetting. And I did the only thing that seemed appropriate. I said, “Thank you.”
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
The Storm King and Don Quixote
During my junior year in high school I owned what would now be considered a vintage lighter, the kind that featured a striking wheel, a wick, and a wind hood and that required periodically soaking cotton packing with lighter fluid and replacing the flint. The name “Storm King” was etched on its brass casing. That lighter lit many a cigarette when I hung out with my best friends Jim and Mark at Barney’s DX station, back when cigarette smoking was still considered cool and the Surgeon General’s warning a mere surmise. It also illuminated late-night keyholes, discovered keys or coins dropped on darkened car floors, and fired up the charcoal at grill-outs. An all-purpose tool, indeed, and I seldom left home without it.
In my late adolescent desire to appear the embodiment of sophistication, I perfected a technique of snapping the Storm King open by squeezing it between my thumb and index and middle fingers. Despite diligent practice, however, I was unable to combine that dexterous move with hitting the striking wheel to cause an igniting spark—a feat that would no doubt have had the editors of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not hustling to my door. During the summer between my junior and senior years I somehow lost the Storm King and, strangely, through the time from then to now, have sometimes recalled it and wished I still possessed it. Undoubtedly, I could find a Storm King somewhere online. But I’ve never really looked. I wouldn’t buy it. I want the one I had back then.
* * *
In the winter of 1979, while visiting my folks over the Christmas holidays, I announced that, after eight years of small-town Wisconsin high-school teaching, I had resigned, effective at year’s end, to enter the Ph. D. program at the University of Minnesota. The graduate coursework I had done during the previous summers to move up and across the pay scale had awaked in me an eager desire to know more, to know better. I wanted to become a college professor. The University of Minnesota had not only accepted me, but also offered a teaching associate position.
Dad was pleased. He understood the urgent tug of aspiration and the seizing need for intellectual plenitude and self-betterment. His life embodied it. Mom, too, but she worried about my leaving a secure job in the present for an uncertain job in the future. It was not an idle worry. The graduate school application materials I had received included a cautionary statement describing the precarious market for tenure-line positions in higher education. I was effectually readying myself on a high board for a half gainer into the unpredictable. Still, like Dad, she supported my decision.
A week later I received a small package in the mail from Mom and Dad. It contained a small, hand-carved, wooden figurine of Don Quixote, mounted on Rocinante, shield in one hand, lance in the other. A note was included: “We know that for you, no dream is impossible—except for that one about playing middle linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.” Beneath my words, they had heard, as they always did, my own anxiety about the wisdom of my action.
That figurine occupied a prominent place on my bookshelf for many years until, somehow, amid the confusion of a move, it inexplicably disappeared. I have, ever since, mourned its loss.
* * *
A cigarette lighter; a figurine. Two small objects whose loss I lament. Elizabeth Bishop says in her poem “One Art,” that “so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” but I do not find the implied indifference to be the case Perhaps I am afflicted by a Freudian melancholy, induced by an attempt to reclaim the libidinal investment of a lost object. Could that be why the songs of that troubadour of nostalgia and loss, John Mellencamp, dominate my iPod’s playlist? “Hold on to sixteen as long as you can,” he sings in “Jack and Diane,” because “Change come around real soon/Make us women and men.” And yet, I do not believe that we lose sixteen in the process of becoming adults. We carry it with us, as we carry all pieces of ourselves, into the present, if not as parts of who we currently are, then as points from which the who we are evolved. We gestate long in the womb of experience. Amid the jostling push and pull of the events that mark our lives, we carry those pieces forward to retrieve and stabilize ourselves, to calm the often turbulent churn that threatens to rend our I’s from our Me’s. We poach in the preserve of memory and carry our trophies forward to selve ourselves, to stitch a coherent sense of who it is that we have become.
Some say the past is inaccessible, a country whose borders, once crossed, permit no reentry. I think the readmission policy is considerably less implacable. Perhaps Walt Whitman says it best: “It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not.” We enter the past often to repopulate and recontextualize ourselves. Indeed, I sometimes find the same memory requires several visits: they are too ponderous for just one, too rich in their thereness; too complex, too densely layered to be taken in whole at once; too value-tinseled to be cursorily released in deference to an impetuous present; too filled with micro-revelations and small but fully visceral epiphanies.
Nor is the past a silent country. It calls. It hails. It speaks, continually, sometimes with the buttery drawl of pride or the trilled dialect of joy, sometimes with the moonlight inflection of nostalgia, sometimes with the clipped accent of regret, sometimes with a blowtorching howl. Always it speaks, a persistent soundtrack, and always we hear it, even if we are not listening.
A cigarette lighter and a wooden figurine. Two artefacts, cupped in remembrance, unduplicatable, absent but ever-present, objects that mean, still, and whose value lies in that recession-proof market of people and places and events connected to them, and to me.
In my late adolescent desire to appear the embodiment of sophistication, I perfected a technique of snapping the Storm King open by squeezing it between my thumb and index and middle fingers. Despite diligent practice, however, I was unable to combine that dexterous move with hitting the striking wheel to cause an igniting spark—a feat that would no doubt have had the editors of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not hustling to my door. During the summer between my junior and senior years I somehow lost the Storm King and, strangely, through the time from then to now, have sometimes recalled it and wished I still possessed it. Undoubtedly, I could find a Storm King somewhere online. But I’ve never really looked. I wouldn’t buy it. I want the one I had back then.
* * *
In the winter of 1979, while visiting my folks over the Christmas holidays, I announced that, after eight years of small-town Wisconsin high-school teaching, I had resigned, effective at year’s end, to enter the Ph. D. program at the University of Minnesota. The graduate coursework I had done during the previous summers to move up and across the pay scale had awaked in me an eager desire to know more, to know better. I wanted to become a college professor. The University of Minnesota had not only accepted me, but also offered a teaching associate position.
Dad was pleased. He understood the urgent tug of aspiration and the seizing need for intellectual plenitude and self-betterment. His life embodied it. Mom, too, but she worried about my leaving a secure job in the present for an uncertain job in the future. It was not an idle worry. The graduate school application materials I had received included a cautionary statement describing the precarious market for tenure-line positions in higher education. I was effectually readying myself on a high board for a half gainer into the unpredictable. Still, like Dad, she supported my decision.
A week later I received a small package in the mail from Mom and Dad. It contained a small, hand-carved, wooden figurine of Don Quixote, mounted on Rocinante, shield in one hand, lance in the other. A note was included: “We know that for you, no dream is impossible—except for that one about playing middle linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.” Beneath my words, they had heard, as they always did, my own anxiety about the wisdom of my action.
That figurine occupied a prominent place on my bookshelf for many years until, somehow, amid the confusion of a move, it inexplicably disappeared. I have, ever since, mourned its loss.
* * *
A cigarette lighter; a figurine. Two small objects whose loss I lament. Elizabeth Bishop says in her poem “One Art,” that “so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” but I do not find the implied indifference to be the case Perhaps I am afflicted by a Freudian melancholy, induced by an attempt to reclaim the libidinal investment of a lost object. Could that be why the songs of that troubadour of nostalgia and loss, John Mellencamp, dominate my iPod’s playlist? “Hold on to sixteen as long as you can,” he sings in “Jack and Diane,” because “Change come around real soon/Make us women and men.” And yet, I do not believe that we lose sixteen in the process of becoming adults. We carry it with us, as we carry all pieces of ourselves, into the present, if not as parts of who we currently are, then as points from which the who we are evolved. We gestate long in the womb of experience. Amid the jostling push and pull of the events that mark our lives, we carry those pieces forward to retrieve and stabilize ourselves, to calm the often turbulent churn that threatens to rend our I’s from our Me’s. We poach in the preserve of memory and carry our trophies forward to selve ourselves, to stitch a coherent sense of who it is that we have become.
Some say the past is inaccessible, a country whose borders, once crossed, permit no reentry. I think the readmission policy is considerably less implacable. Perhaps Walt Whitman says it best: “It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not.” We enter the past often to repopulate and recontextualize ourselves. Indeed, I sometimes find the same memory requires several visits: they are too ponderous for just one, too rich in their thereness; too complex, too densely layered to be taken in whole at once; too value-tinseled to be cursorily released in deference to an impetuous present; too filled with micro-revelations and small but fully visceral epiphanies.
Nor is the past a silent country. It calls. It hails. It speaks, continually, sometimes with the buttery drawl of pride or the trilled dialect of joy, sometimes with the moonlight inflection of nostalgia, sometimes with the clipped accent of regret, sometimes with a blowtorching howl. Always it speaks, a persistent soundtrack, and always we hear it, even if we are not listening.
A cigarette lighter and a wooden figurine. Two artefacts, cupped in remembrance, unduplicatable, absent but ever-present, objects that mean, still, and whose value lies in that recession-proof market of people and places and events connected to them, and to me.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
The Optimist
Back in the day, I played a mean game of golf, good enough to win tournaments and club championships and attract local attention. I worked at it, spending countless hours on the practice range, often under the tutelage of the club’s professional. I even worked at the golf course, in the pro shop, and on the golf course, with the maintenance crew. To a large extent, being a proficient golfer comprised my identity, for others as well as for me.
While I was in graduate school, I did not have the time or opportunity to play. For six years I did not touch a golf club. When I was finally able to take up the game again, I found that I had lost it. Flaws had crept into my swing, and, despite incessant analysis, I was unable to recapture my former level of play. In a pattern that unspooled over many years, I’d think I’d discovered the problem, make the change, but found improvement elusive. I devoured books and magazines featuring golf instruction, took lessons, prowled golf websites to watch videos of professionals’ swings—all to no avail. I would have had better luck clicking my heels three times and wishing I were back in the Kansas of competent play.
The strange thing is that, despite my unsullied record of failure to diagnose and correct my swing, every time I stepped on to the first tee I felt I was on the cusp of rejuvenation. I’d think, “This is the day when it will all come together. Today, what was then will become what is now. This is the day my golf game will be reborn.” By the third hole, however, I had mentally checked out, consoling myself with the thought that at least I was getting some good exercise—or, in my more desperate moments, with the slogan I had once seen on the scorecard of a Baptist-owned course: “A closer walk with God,” although, in truth, it felt more like a loitering in Gethsemane. Actually, Mark Twain was more accurate: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Still, the next time I played, I stood on the first tee, fully Galahaded, fully expecting on this foray to find the miraculous grail of my glory days.
And strange to say, miracles, at least of the micro variety, do happen. Three springs ago, while on the practice range, I discovered the problem that had plagued and beleaguered me. What I had lost, I found. Instantaneously, I began striking the ball more solidly, dead solid perfect off the sweet spot, launching it straighter and farther and at a higher trajectory than I had in many years. And on that day, the day when my long-expected renaissance had finally arrived, I drove home, put my golf clubs in a basement corner, covered them with a small tarp, and quit playing.
* * *
I have aspirations for myself. I like the pragmatist notion that meaning is use, body and thought in action. I do not seek to be a bystander to my life, irrelevant to myself. I make plans for the future. They carpenter our lives into an ordered unfolding; they hold an arm outstretched, palm upward, to resist the havocking churn and plunge, the mad ricochet, of events. I expect skills once acquired, to stay acquired, over the course of time, at least until they decline, as they necessarily must, with age. Until then, I go on going on.
That day on the practice range, I reclaimed the ability I had lost. It was enough. And so, I left playing golf behind.
* * *
I am excited at the beginning of every semester. I am sure that the work I have done to prepare my classes has refined them to the point of can’t-fail success. Having read up on best practices and the latest pedagogical research into student learning; having created new in-class activities sequenced and scaffolded to impart the skills necessary for student success on papers and tests; feeling certain that this cohort of students will display curiosity, will write clearly and comprehensively in prose polished by editing and proofreading, will be willing to read not just with texts but against and beneath them, will gladly entertain ideas that broaden their horizons rather than genuflect before those that validate and reinforce their preconceptions, will be open to making canyon-wide intellectual leaps that even Evil Knievel would envy, I approach each new class with radiant expectation. “This is the semester it will all come together,” I think; “this is the semester when students will embrace intellectual culture and experience a renaissance of wonder.”
And three weeks in, that radiant expectation has not just been dimmed; it has been dealt an eyeball kick and forehead blow. 4-G attention spanned, smartphone-armed, discipled by the new dispensation testaments of Twitter and Facebook, students will not go gentle into the educational experience I have prepared for them. I realize that the majority of my students might touch an idea, but will not fondle it; that they are good at accessing and disseminating information, but cannot quite massage it into knowledge; that they will resist introspection and refrain from the difficult work of analyzing for assumptions, forecasting implications, and engaging in evaluating and synthesizing ideas. I realize that this semester, like past semesters, will be as frustrating as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.
I can feel myself hunkering and find my eyes scanning the surroundings for sandbags to pile up around me. Yet, I think, “OK, I’ll need to rework the architecture of the course once the semester ends.”
* * *
Perhaps I’m ensnared in a Nietzschean eternal recurrence: “the hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again,” he says, and evidently me with it. But I don’t think I love my fate that much, to the point of seeing all my planning haywired and hackysacked. Perhaps I need to renounce my affiliation with Emerson’s “party of hope.” Perhaps I suffer from optimism bias, projecting rosy faith into the future where it solidifies into expectation. Perhaps I pursue a fool’s folly, victimized by self-delusion, an apologist for an unrealistic thithered elsewhere. But whatever it is, it is necessary. Absolutely necessary.
I have aspirations for these young persons, aspirations that may involve me, certainly my children and grandchildren. I want them to know how to coax meaning from information. I want them to be minds in thrumming motion, celebrants of kinetic thought, acolytes of continual learning. I want them to realize that the world is not for loitering in but acting upon; that it is made, not given, and, thus, can be remade. And so, I remake my courses. I simply must believe, must expect, that this time, this time, it will indeed and in fact all come together.
And when it does, when it does, I will leave teaching behind.
While I was in graduate school, I did not have the time or opportunity to play. For six years I did not touch a golf club. When I was finally able to take up the game again, I found that I had lost it. Flaws had crept into my swing, and, despite incessant analysis, I was unable to recapture my former level of play. In a pattern that unspooled over many years, I’d think I’d discovered the problem, make the change, but found improvement elusive. I devoured books and magazines featuring golf instruction, took lessons, prowled golf websites to watch videos of professionals’ swings—all to no avail. I would have had better luck clicking my heels three times and wishing I were back in the Kansas of competent play.
The strange thing is that, despite my unsullied record of failure to diagnose and correct my swing, every time I stepped on to the first tee I felt I was on the cusp of rejuvenation. I’d think, “This is the day when it will all come together. Today, what was then will become what is now. This is the day my golf game will be reborn.” By the third hole, however, I had mentally checked out, consoling myself with the thought that at least I was getting some good exercise—or, in my more desperate moments, with the slogan I had once seen on the scorecard of a Baptist-owned course: “A closer walk with God,” although, in truth, it felt more like a loitering in Gethsemane. Actually, Mark Twain was more accurate: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Still, the next time I played, I stood on the first tee, fully Galahaded, fully expecting on this foray to find the miraculous grail of my glory days.
And strange to say, miracles, at least of the micro variety, do happen. Three springs ago, while on the practice range, I discovered the problem that had plagued and beleaguered me. What I had lost, I found. Instantaneously, I began striking the ball more solidly, dead solid perfect off the sweet spot, launching it straighter and farther and at a higher trajectory than I had in many years. And on that day, the day when my long-expected renaissance had finally arrived, I drove home, put my golf clubs in a basement corner, covered them with a small tarp, and quit playing.
* * *
I have aspirations for myself. I like the pragmatist notion that meaning is use, body and thought in action. I do not seek to be a bystander to my life, irrelevant to myself. I make plans for the future. They carpenter our lives into an ordered unfolding; they hold an arm outstretched, palm upward, to resist the havocking churn and plunge, the mad ricochet, of events. I expect skills once acquired, to stay acquired, over the course of time, at least until they decline, as they necessarily must, with age. Until then, I go on going on.
That day on the practice range, I reclaimed the ability I had lost. It was enough. And so, I left playing golf behind.
* * *
I am excited at the beginning of every semester. I am sure that the work I have done to prepare my classes has refined them to the point of can’t-fail success. Having read up on best practices and the latest pedagogical research into student learning; having created new in-class activities sequenced and scaffolded to impart the skills necessary for student success on papers and tests; feeling certain that this cohort of students will display curiosity, will write clearly and comprehensively in prose polished by editing and proofreading, will be willing to read not just with texts but against and beneath them, will gladly entertain ideas that broaden their horizons rather than genuflect before those that validate and reinforce their preconceptions, will be open to making canyon-wide intellectual leaps that even Evil Knievel would envy, I approach each new class with radiant expectation. “This is the semester it will all come together,” I think; “this is the semester when students will embrace intellectual culture and experience a renaissance of wonder.”
And three weeks in, that radiant expectation has not just been dimmed; it has been dealt an eyeball kick and forehead blow. 4-G attention spanned, smartphone-armed, discipled by the new dispensation testaments of Twitter and Facebook, students will not go gentle into the educational experience I have prepared for them. I realize that the majority of my students might touch an idea, but will not fondle it; that they are good at accessing and disseminating information, but cannot quite massage it into knowledge; that they will resist introspection and refrain from the difficult work of analyzing for assumptions, forecasting implications, and engaging in evaluating and synthesizing ideas. I realize that this semester, like past semesters, will be as frustrating as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.
I can feel myself hunkering and find my eyes scanning the surroundings for sandbags to pile up around me. Yet, I think, “OK, I’ll need to rework the architecture of the course once the semester ends.”
* * *
Perhaps I’m ensnared in a Nietzschean eternal recurrence: “the hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again,” he says, and evidently me with it. But I don’t think I love my fate that much, to the point of seeing all my planning haywired and hackysacked. Perhaps I need to renounce my affiliation with Emerson’s “party of hope.” Perhaps I suffer from optimism bias, projecting rosy faith into the future where it solidifies into expectation. Perhaps I pursue a fool’s folly, victimized by self-delusion, an apologist for an unrealistic thithered elsewhere. But whatever it is, it is necessary. Absolutely necessary.
I have aspirations for these young persons, aspirations that may involve me, certainly my children and grandchildren. I want them to know how to coax meaning from information. I want them to be minds in thrumming motion, celebrants of kinetic thought, acolytes of continual learning. I want them to realize that the world is not for loitering in but acting upon; that it is made, not given, and, thus, can be remade. And so, I remake my courses. I simply must believe, must expect, that this time, this time, it will indeed and in fact all come together.
And when it does, when it does, I will leave teaching behind.
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