Dad danced when he mowed. No, he didn’t foxtrot or cha-cha, or waltz. Rather, his body fell insensibly into a rhythm that, in its deft agility, its expressive rhetoric of physical movement, went beyond utilitarian movement to achieve a kind of embodied harmony. He danced.
Our suburban backyard was large enough to serve as the default football and baseball field for the gaggle of young boys in our neighborhood. In mowing it, Dad, a systems analyst by trade, plotted it into squares, working from the outside in. It was at the right angles that the dance appeared. First, there was the downward push on the mower handle with the left hand to raise the front wheels; then the swoop of the hand under and to the right to turn the mower 90 degrees, accompanied by the swinging out of the right leg and a quick left foot, right foot two-step to reposition himself behind the mower. A seamless motion. As the square shrunk, this patterned movement repeated itself more and more frequently, taking on a balletic athleticism, an elegant power, a prowess informed by balance and grace. The systems analyst became Gene Kelly. Dad danced when he mowed.
He would have scoffed at the very notion. For Dad, mowing had all the charm of a junkyard dog. It was the bacillus lurking in the healthy constitution of suburban homeowning. It was something he owed to social expectation, a bit of surrendered autonomy. No choice, really. Dad came up the hard way, an immigrant kid who spoke only Italian when he entered first grade, a Great Depression kid whose breakfast often consisted of a piece of toast dipped in the yolk of an egg he shared with his father and two brothers, a skinny kid who muscled himself by becoming an acolyte of Charles Atlas. Having made it by scrappy self-reliance and hard work, he did not like the idea of having to do another’s bidding, even if, especially if, that other was the substantive insubstantiality of social convention. He had paid his dues. But, if you aspire to a suburban home, you must cut grass. It was a duty, nothing more, and a disagreeably hot and fatiguing one at that. He contemplated it much the way a coffee bean might contemplate the grinder. It was a penance with no redemption in sight save the cold beer he rewarded himself with when it was finally, thankfully done.
And yet, he danced when he mowed.
How is it that the body speaks in a language the mind cannot understand? Descartes disjoined the mind, soul stuff, from the material, body stuff. And because he was aware of himself thinking, felt himself cogitating, he famously declared, “Cogito, ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am.” I’d amend this to “I think, and also I am.” Watching my dad dance when he mowed, I think I saw Descartes’ “sum” without the “cogito.” We disparage mindless tasks, the unthinking routine, but I suspect those are precisely the times when the CEO located in the neocortex, that master deliberator and analyst, takes a break, heads out for a smoke or a Frappaccino. And when that happens, other, older, deeper areas of the brain kickstart, areas having to do with balance and coordination and fluidity of movement. At those times, the body is restored to itself, to its own intelligence, to a blood-deep rhythm not defined by clocks and keystrokes, quotas and quarterlies. To riff on Pascal, the body has reasons that reason knows not of.
Is anything more awkward than a task performed in full awareness of each and every step involved in its performance? Has painting by the numbers ever produced a work of art? Is it not the case that all truly great athletes ultimately, finally, rely on an athletic instinct so deeply imprinted it seems molecular?
I’d answer no, but I’m speculating, really. Shamefully unempirical of me, undoubtedly. But here’s what I do, empirically, know: my dad danced when he mowed.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Grandma Jay's Rolling Pin
When Grandma Jay made the long bus trip from Ohio to visit us in Wisconsin, she spent much of her time making ravioli, hundreds of ravioli that we put in the freezer out in the garage and broke out for special occasions. We were perhaps one of the few families in Wisconsin—maybe the entire United States—who ate ravioli on Christmas, Easter, and, though less often, on Thanksgiving. This, I now know, was a silent sacrifice on my mother’s part. She preferred the traditional meals, and much preferred making them than thawing and cooking ravioli. She felt it diminished her role as wife and mother. She was a woman of her generation. But, since for my dad, my brother, and me, ravioli was nothing short of a taser jolt to the brain’s reward pathway, she deferred to our less than traditional taste. She loved us.
I watched Grandma Jay make ravioli, standing on a step stool next to her, watching her crack eggs into a crater in the middle of a pile of flour, listening to her sing softly in Italian, admiring the way those practiced hands mixed everything together into a sticky blob placed on a floured cutting board the size of a small kitchen table. Those hands, the felt knowingness in them, the pinch or sprinkle of this, the handful of that, the mounding and kneading. No measuring cups, no measuring spoons. Just the hands. Then out came the rolling pin to flatten the dough, from which circles were cut with a sharp-edged metal cup, which were filled with a manicotti mixture whose composition she refused to reveal, which were, finally, sealed with the tines of a fork. A low-tech operation, to be sure, but the ravioli that emerged from it would have made the most hardened Calvinist smile.
But that rolling pin. When Grandma Jay boarded the bus in Cincinnati, she stowed her luggage but carried that rolling pin. It never left her hand. She held it vertically, one end on the seat, for the entire journey. That rolling pin. Made from a broom handle. Tempered with olive oil. Worn smooth at the ends from the friction of her hands. Progenitor of untold thousands of ravioli. That rolling pin. It was a magic wand she carried to us. That rolling pin. The deft rhetoric of its outward push and inward pull. The rhythm of it, the grace of it, in it. That rolling pin. It spoke the deep grammar of simplicity, skill, and love. That rolling pin. It never left her hand.
I watched Grandma Jay make ravioli, standing on a step stool next to her, watching her crack eggs into a crater in the middle of a pile of flour, listening to her sing softly in Italian, admiring the way those practiced hands mixed everything together into a sticky blob placed on a floured cutting board the size of a small kitchen table. Those hands, the felt knowingness in them, the pinch or sprinkle of this, the handful of that, the mounding and kneading. No measuring cups, no measuring spoons. Just the hands. Then out came the rolling pin to flatten the dough, from which circles were cut with a sharp-edged metal cup, which were filled with a manicotti mixture whose composition she refused to reveal, which were, finally, sealed with the tines of a fork. A low-tech operation, to be sure, but the ravioli that emerged from it would have made the most hardened Calvinist smile.
But that rolling pin. When Grandma Jay boarded the bus in Cincinnati, she stowed her luggage but carried that rolling pin. It never left her hand. She held it vertically, one end on the seat, for the entire journey. That rolling pin. Made from a broom handle. Tempered with olive oil. Worn smooth at the ends from the friction of her hands. Progenitor of untold thousands of ravioli. That rolling pin. It was a magic wand she carried to us. That rolling pin. The deft rhetoric of its outward push and inward pull. The rhythm of it, the grace of it, in it. That rolling pin. It spoke the deep grammar of simplicity, skill, and love. That rolling pin. It never left her hand.
Monday, July 5, 2010
The Metaphysics of Cutting Grass
Everything I know about cutting grass I learned from my father. He had three rules and one quasi-rule. The three rules undoubtedly reflected his occupation as a systems analyst. Rule 1: to maximize efficiency and, thus, save energy, plot the yard into squares and mow inward from the outer edge. Rule 2: to prevent the engine from overworking and, thus, save gas, always position the discharge chute away from the square. Rule 3: to extend the life of the mower and, thus, save money, always service the machine according to the manufacturer’s specifications. The quasi-rule, however, was prompted not by occupational mindset but, rather, to reward himself for performing the tiresome chore he found cutting grass to be: have a cold beer afterward. I follow these rules today, though I confess I do occasionally fail to observe the letter of the quasi-rule by having more than the one cold beer my father permitted himself. But far more seriously, perhaps, I violate its motivating spirit by not finding cutting grass a tiresome chore at all. In fact, I enjoy it. Despite pushing a rotary mower up, down, and across the sometimes hilly terrain of a double lot, I like cutting grass.
Actually, Dad was a hostage to his lawn. Weeds were a noxious assault on Dad’s sensibility, and he waged a grim campaign against them. A brown paper bag and pronged weeder were always on call should an offending dandelion dare raise its head amid his manicured turf. An aerator was annually rented and an edger procured—much more efficient than the hatchet with which he had previously edged by hand--and an assortment of turf builders, disease abolishers, and chickweed, spurge, ground ivy, deadnettle, and crab grass dispatchers were routinely purchased and applied. I have not inherited that passion for lawn maintenance nor felt compelled to mobilize and deploy an armory of lawn weaponry. I own no broadcast spreader; do not monitor soil chemistry, pH readings, soil compaction; do not dethatch, top dress, aerate, fertilize, or apply lawn activators; do not observe watering cycles (I don’t water); do not use herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides; hold no animosity toward crabgrass; and am indifferent to fusarium blight, rhizoctonia yellow patch, necrotic ring spot, and snow mold. I am, in fact, sympathetic to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “weed is a plant whose virtue has not yet been discovered.” It’s all about who does the defining, isn’t it? Dad, though, was unmoved by the contingency of definitions. I quoted Emerson once to Dad. I should have known better. Dad asked, “Was he a homeowner?” “Yes,” I replied. “Well,” Dad declared, “then, he wasn’t a very damn good one.” Case closed—QED, as they say.
Like many men of his generation, Dad was eager to show that he had “made it,” that he was firmly entrenched in the middle class. Thus our house on a suburban cul de sac, thus steak for dinner every Saturday night, thus the tail-finned 1959 Chevy Impala, and thus his passion to display a well-tended landscape for public viewing. Men of my generation tend to use means other than our lawns to announce our social identity. Still, grass must be cut, and while most regard it as they would a TV that only showed CSPAN, I like doing it.
Cutting grass is transformative. Having finished, one can see, immediately, that the lawn is manifestly different than it was, manifestly better, improved, prettier. Mowing is applied art; in doing it, one edits the lawn, grooming the ragged, shearing the shaggy, making the unruly ruly. I value this transformation because it stands in such stark contrast to what I do for a living. As a teacher who has instructed thousands of students, preparing them for the event horizon of the “real world” into which they finally disappear, I never really know, in an indisputably empirical way, if what I have imparted has made a dent, has had any consequence, has advanced their skill set, altered, if only a little, the cartography of their lives—in short, has made any difference. Perhaps I yearn too much to hear my echo in the world. Yes, occasionally, I do hear from a former student, several years out, that something I said or did has assumed some meaning in their lives. And certainly I understand that students are with me only for 50 minutes three times a week, or that the results of instruction oftentimes reveal their value only in the fullness of time. Still, I find it troubling when, over the course of a semester, I see no palpable impact; I begin to doubt myself, feel vaguely fraudulent. Thus the satisfaction I find in cutting grass: when I’ve finished, I can see, clearly see, a genuine accomplishment, a consequence of my contact, a change in the physical, “out there,” external reality wrought by my expended effort.
But I find there’s another reality involved in grass cutting, one aptly figured by grass itself. Grass does most of its growing invisibly, underground, the result of an intricate root system designed to retain water. For me, cutting grass involves a kind of invisible growth. Ironically, the very routine of grass cutting, its essential mindlessness, clears mental space to fill with intentional, task-unrelated thoughts. I call it “the mull.” I experience regrets; weigh alternatives and make choices; plan upcoming events; sing songs I find meaningful, which almost always means songs from the 1960s; make up poems or recite poems from memory; analyze books, movies, TV shows, and ads; wax nostalgic, sentimental, skeptical, or cynical about something or other, and then wonder why I feel that way; examine assumptions; ponder love, justice, free will, God, or the best recipe for pasta primavera; and wonder at string theory, quantum physics, and the passion of the Mel—Mel Gibson’s proclivity for behavioral meltdowns. It could be that “the mull” is a mind-body thing; after all, cutting grass is a walk. Kierkegaard claimed “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” Rousseau asserted that “my mind works only with my legs.” Thoreau called walking “a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us,” to reclaim the holy land of deliberation and imagination. Less romantically, Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, speculates that such a churn of cognitive activity has an evolutionary advantage as a “reminder mechanism”: in resisting the gravitational pull of one preoccupying task, individuals are more vigilant because, Klinger says, they keep their “larger agenda fresher in mind.”
But I find there’s another, less volitional, mental activity that occurs while cutting grass, one that seemingly lowers a hook to snag things lurking beneath the surface of consciousness. Experts would call it “the incubation effect.” Most would call it “zoning out.” I call it “the dream-drift.” The mind wanders. Stray images and unkempt thoughts slipstream in from some far away cognitive Pacific. It’s strange, uncanny, pleasant, and just a bit unnerving, a kind of letting go which, for me, takes the form of a surrender to a mental whateverism, a kind of watching, one step removed, the products of unwilled mental activity, products broken free of any establishing context. It’s a being willing, not a willing—a willingness to be open, not a willed effort to establish a goal against which to measure myself.
Once when mowing I had a sudden image of a first-grade classmate, Drucilla, someone I did not know especially well and had not thought of, ever, for over 55 years. For reasons I cannot explain, it was accompanied by sadness. Another time I was struck by a fully-formed interpretation of a movie my wife and I had watched two nights previously. It did not take shape; it came to me fully shaped. Yet another time I had an abrupt, powerfully moving image of my grandmother making ravioli, speaking in soft Italian, with 10 year-old me standing beside her on a step stool, watching her crack eggs into a crater centered in a pile of flour. Yet another time Frank Sinatra singing “Witchcraft” sprang to mind. I heard it; my body fell into the rhythm of it. Where does this all come from, and why? No doubt Freudians would rub their hands and say, “Boy, do we have some work to do.” Neuroscientists would likely offer explanations involving neuron-firing sequences and unperceived stimuli. All I know is that a gated mental enclave briefly opened for a showing, that something, some connection, was occurring among my brain’s 100 billion neurons, each, like grass, part of a dense root structure, each entangled with the tendrils of other neurons.
It spooks me that the syntax of our minds so complex, so capable of recursivity. It spooks me that the texture of our mental experience is so embodied, that our bodies and minds greet each other in mutual recognition and do not, as Descartes would have it, pass each other with an indifferent look. It didn’t spook Emerson, though; he knew that “under every deep, another deep opens.” All I know is that, sometimes, while cutting grass, what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens” happens. I am in time, on the beat. My “I” meets my “me.” We have a beer afterward. Maybe two.
Actually, Dad was a hostage to his lawn. Weeds were a noxious assault on Dad’s sensibility, and he waged a grim campaign against them. A brown paper bag and pronged weeder were always on call should an offending dandelion dare raise its head amid his manicured turf. An aerator was annually rented and an edger procured—much more efficient than the hatchet with which he had previously edged by hand--and an assortment of turf builders, disease abolishers, and chickweed, spurge, ground ivy, deadnettle, and crab grass dispatchers were routinely purchased and applied. I have not inherited that passion for lawn maintenance nor felt compelled to mobilize and deploy an armory of lawn weaponry. I own no broadcast spreader; do not monitor soil chemistry, pH readings, soil compaction; do not dethatch, top dress, aerate, fertilize, or apply lawn activators; do not observe watering cycles (I don’t water); do not use herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides; hold no animosity toward crabgrass; and am indifferent to fusarium blight, rhizoctonia yellow patch, necrotic ring spot, and snow mold. I am, in fact, sympathetic to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “weed is a plant whose virtue has not yet been discovered.” It’s all about who does the defining, isn’t it? Dad, though, was unmoved by the contingency of definitions. I quoted Emerson once to Dad. I should have known better. Dad asked, “Was he a homeowner?” “Yes,” I replied. “Well,” Dad declared, “then, he wasn’t a very damn good one.” Case closed—QED, as they say.
Like many men of his generation, Dad was eager to show that he had “made it,” that he was firmly entrenched in the middle class. Thus our house on a suburban cul de sac, thus steak for dinner every Saturday night, thus the tail-finned 1959 Chevy Impala, and thus his passion to display a well-tended landscape for public viewing. Men of my generation tend to use means other than our lawns to announce our social identity. Still, grass must be cut, and while most regard it as they would a TV that only showed CSPAN, I like doing it.
Cutting grass is transformative. Having finished, one can see, immediately, that the lawn is manifestly different than it was, manifestly better, improved, prettier. Mowing is applied art; in doing it, one edits the lawn, grooming the ragged, shearing the shaggy, making the unruly ruly. I value this transformation because it stands in such stark contrast to what I do for a living. As a teacher who has instructed thousands of students, preparing them for the event horizon of the “real world” into which they finally disappear, I never really know, in an indisputably empirical way, if what I have imparted has made a dent, has had any consequence, has advanced their skill set, altered, if only a little, the cartography of their lives—in short, has made any difference. Perhaps I yearn too much to hear my echo in the world. Yes, occasionally, I do hear from a former student, several years out, that something I said or did has assumed some meaning in their lives. And certainly I understand that students are with me only for 50 minutes three times a week, or that the results of instruction oftentimes reveal their value only in the fullness of time. Still, I find it troubling when, over the course of a semester, I see no palpable impact; I begin to doubt myself, feel vaguely fraudulent. Thus the satisfaction I find in cutting grass: when I’ve finished, I can see, clearly see, a genuine accomplishment, a consequence of my contact, a change in the physical, “out there,” external reality wrought by my expended effort.
But I find there’s another reality involved in grass cutting, one aptly figured by grass itself. Grass does most of its growing invisibly, underground, the result of an intricate root system designed to retain water. For me, cutting grass involves a kind of invisible growth. Ironically, the very routine of grass cutting, its essential mindlessness, clears mental space to fill with intentional, task-unrelated thoughts. I call it “the mull.” I experience regrets; weigh alternatives and make choices; plan upcoming events; sing songs I find meaningful, which almost always means songs from the 1960s; make up poems or recite poems from memory; analyze books, movies, TV shows, and ads; wax nostalgic, sentimental, skeptical, or cynical about something or other, and then wonder why I feel that way; examine assumptions; ponder love, justice, free will, God, or the best recipe for pasta primavera; and wonder at string theory, quantum physics, and the passion of the Mel—Mel Gibson’s proclivity for behavioral meltdowns. It could be that “the mull” is a mind-body thing; after all, cutting grass is a walk. Kierkegaard claimed “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” Rousseau asserted that “my mind works only with my legs.” Thoreau called walking “a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us,” to reclaim the holy land of deliberation and imagination. Less romantically, Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, speculates that such a churn of cognitive activity has an evolutionary advantage as a “reminder mechanism”: in resisting the gravitational pull of one preoccupying task, individuals are more vigilant because, Klinger says, they keep their “larger agenda fresher in mind.”
But I find there’s another, less volitional, mental activity that occurs while cutting grass, one that seemingly lowers a hook to snag things lurking beneath the surface of consciousness. Experts would call it “the incubation effect.” Most would call it “zoning out.” I call it “the dream-drift.” The mind wanders. Stray images and unkempt thoughts slipstream in from some far away cognitive Pacific. It’s strange, uncanny, pleasant, and just a bit unnerving, a kind of letting go which, for me, takes the form of a surrender to a mental whateverism, a kind of watching, one step removed, the products of unwilled mental activity, products broken free of any establishing context. It’s a being willing, not a willing—a willingness to be open, not a willed effort to establish a goal against which to measure myself.
Once when mowing I had a sudden image of a first-grade classmate, Drucilla, someone I did not know especially well and had not thought of, ever, for over 55 years. For reasons I cannot explain, it was accompanied by sadness. Another time I was struck by a fully-formed interpretation of a movie my wife and I had watched two nights previously. It did not take shape; it came to me fully shaped. Yet another time I had an abrupt, powerfully moving image of my grandmother making ravioli, speaking in soft Italian, with 10 year-old me standing beside her on a step stool, watching her crack eggs into a crater centered in a pile of flour. Yet another time Frank Sinatra singing “Witchcraft” sprang to mind. I heard it; my body fell into the rhythm of it. Where does this all come from, and why? No doubt Freudians would rub their hands and say, “Boy, do we have some work to do.” Neuroscientists would likely offer explanations involving neuron-firing sequences and unperceived stimuli. All I know is that a gated mental enclave briefly opened for a showing, that something, some connection, was occurring among my brain’s 100 billion neurons, each, like grass, part of a dense root structure, each entangled with the tendrils of other neurons.
It spooks me that the syntax of our minds so complex, so capable of recursivity. It spooks me that the texture of our mental experience is so embodied, that our bodies and minds greet each other in mutual recognition and do not, as Descartes would have it, pass each other with an indifferent look. It didn’t spook Emerson, though; he knew that “under every deep, another deep opens.” All I know is that, sometimes, while cutting grass, what Seamus Heaney calls “the music of what happens” happens. I am in time, on the beat. My “I” meets my “me.” We have a beer afterward. Maybe two.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
What Books Are For
I built the bookshelves upon which my books stand, soldierly, at attention, spine out, though in places they break ranks in a jumbled stack. In my twenties I used boards laid across cinder blocks for bookshelves, and idea I plagiarized from my best friend Jim, who seemed on constant hailing frequency to all things chic. But cinder blocks are, well, cinder blocks, about as aesthetically pleasing as the drone of a vuvuzela. So, I replaced them with red bricks, and later replaced them with a variety of designer bricks. At some point I decided to build my bookshelves. Perhaps I was haunted by Willy Loman’s contemptuous comment to his sons that a man who doesn’t know how to use tools isn’t a man. Or maybe I decided that my books deserved a better display than boards laid across bricks—that I should give back to them in physical energy what they had given me in mental energy. The line of books on woodworking, power tools, fasteners, and do-it-yourself home improvement projects mark the evolution of that decision.
And that’s what books are for. To sit on shelves where they chronicle the stages of our interests, curiosities, knowledge, tastes, and dreams. Which is to say, us.
On my shelves sit all seven of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia series, in order of publication, beginning with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle. I read them to my son and looking at them reminds me of my childrearing years. Standing alone on a bottom shelf is the missal I used in elementary school, the facing pages in Latin and English, to remind me of the Catholicism into which I was born and educated, and which I so fervently practiced until, for reasons I still cannot explain, I joined the ranks of the fallen away. I see my mother’s copy of Gone with the Wind, which reminds me of her and of the cruel Alzheimer’s Disease that took her from me before it took her from me.
I see almost book written by Stephen King, a better writer than many are willing to acknowledge. Surely his dismissive self-characterization as “the McDonald’s of writers” was a playful irony. My avidity for King used to be an embarrassment, considering that I teach English for a living and am therefore supposed to read only literary literature. But they remind me that I long ago forsook such pretention for books that propel me along with an interesting story and characters whom I care about. That’s why I also have most of John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and all of Sherman Alexie.
The queue of books by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau remind me of my college years in the 1960s. They prompted my shift from a business major, where my heart wasn’t, to English, where I found my heart. I recall that Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” struck me as the most radical piece of writing I had ever read, and it fostered my participation in an anti-war sit in where I was roughly handled by a policeman.
My bookshelves house a series of books on theology; philosophy; the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Billy Collins, and Kay Ryan; the complete plays of William Shakespeare and August Wilson; mass media, with recent additions of both Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky; evolution; neuroscience, all of Carl Sagan and Steven Pinker’s popularizations; even a sizable collection of that most self-absorbed without being self-examining type of writing: literary theory.
The books on my bookshelves bear witness that I have not been pushed and jostled out of my own life, that, to paraphrase Martin Buber, my “I” and my “me” can still hold a conversation.
That’s what books are for. They are to be put shelves where they can act, to use an inelegant phrase, as memory retention devices, where they recount our personal history’s embodiment, our felt experience. Where they can, finally, ineluctably, bring us back to ourselves.
And that’s what books are for. To sit on shelves where they chronicle the stages of our interests, curiosities, knowledge, tastes, and dreams. Which is to say, us.
On my shelves sit all seven of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia series, in order of publication, beginning with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle. I read them to my son and looking at them reminds me of my childrearing years. Standing alone on a bottom shelf is the missal I used in elementary school, the facing pages in Latin and English, to remind me of the Catholicism into which I was born and educated, and which I so fervently practiced until, for reasons I still cannot explain, I joined the ranks of the fallen away. I see my mother’s copy of Gone with the Wind, which reminds me of her and of the cruel Alzheimer’s Disease that took her from me before it took her from me.
I see almost book written by Stephen King, a better writer than many are willing to acknowledge. Surely his dismissive self-characterization as “the McDonald’s of writers” was a playful irony. My avidity for King used to be an embarrassment, considering that I teach English for a living and am therefore supposed to read only literary literature. But they remind me that I long ago forsook such pretention for books that propel me along with an interesting story and characters whom I care about. That’s why I also have most of John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and all of Sherman Alexie.
The queue of books by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau remind me of my college years in the 1960s. They prompted my shift from a business major, where my heart wasn’t, to English, where I found my heart. I recall that Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” struck me as the most radical piece of writing I had ever read, and it fostered my participation in an anti-war sit in where I was roughly handled by a policeman.
My bookshelves house a series of books on theology; philosophy; the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Billy Collins, and Kay Ryan; the complete plays of William Shakespeare and August Wilson; mass media, with recent additions of both Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky; evolution; neuroscience, all of Carl Sagan and Steven Pinker’s popularizations; even a sizable collection of that most self-absorbed without being self-examining type of writing: literary theory.
The books on my bookshelves bear witness that I have not been pushed and jostled out of my own life, that, to paraphrase Martin Buber, my “I” and my “me” can still hold a conversation.
That’s what books are for. They are to be put shelves where they can act, to use an inelegant phrase, as memory retention devices, where they recount our personal history’s embodiment, our felt experience. Where they can, finally, ineluctably, bring us back to ourselves.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Philosophy of Education in One Paragraph
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.
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.
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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