Just now, if I stand in the backyard garden at just the right place, I can see the rubied tulips at the foot of the rose-leafed dogwood surmounted by the lavendered explosion of the red bud in the smaller “nook” garden across the yard. Just to the left, the butterfly bush is undergoing its restoration and soon will be attracting those lepidopteran flutterers that carry summer on their wings. I feel like a stranger in this sightscape, the only thing in it in physical decline, the only thing with wintriness about it, the only thing deblossoming. And yet, standing here, rooted to the earth, I somehow feel at home, as if my being here, my witnessing this small-scale epiphany, is somehow right, necessary. An act of communion. I feel as Thoreau did when he stood immersed in one foot of a rainbow: liberated from the densities of matter and gravity, swimming like a porpoise in pure color; an experience removed from instrumentality; an experience unmolested by the necessity of representation; an experience of hint and intimation and innuendo, of pure value, of meaning as meaningfulness; of self, at least for that stilled moment, as a precondition for transcendence.
In that stilled moment, I think I know what “soul” means: our capacity to recognize and acknowledge those rarefied moments when things abracadabra to a different order, take on a luminescence, demand a sustained act of mindfulness; when the drone of the quotidian becomes music; when the block letters of the everyday become calligraphy; when the eye—and through the eye, the mind and heart—is struck and simply must gaze, steadfastly and unblinkingly; when we realize, as did William Carlos Williams with the red wheelbarrow, “so much depends/upon” what we are seeing. The soul is that glistening instant when body and mind, the material and spiritual, distracted from distraction, fuse and transition beyond almostness and in-partness into the uncloistered wholeness of a being being wholly in the world.
And in that stilled moment, I think I know what “Easter” means, that movable feast set some 1700 years ago on the first Sunday subsequent to the full moon subsequent to the vernal equinox, itself a fused moment, of winter and not-winter transitioning to spring; that Christian replacement for the pagan festival of Eostre, Germanic goddess of dawn, itself a fused moment of night and not-night transitioning to day; that capacious holiday, making celebrants of anyone, no matter their faith tradition, that day of basketed sweetnesses and the joyous laughter of children scurrying to discover hidden eggs, themselves emblematic of a fused moment between born and not-born transitioning into aliveness; that day of the hoped-for, the wished-upon, the expectation-imbued; that day of a risen Redeemer or simply the redemptive promise kindled by the rejuvenated earth, once more, once again, gloriously, thankfully, resurrecting itself from the cold-stoned obduracy of winter.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Gratitude
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.”
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.”
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.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
The Margin Man
Every day, in the privacy of my study, I do something that, should they see it, would cause some to round their eyes in horror, extend their index finger, and shout “sacrilege.” I write in books. Yes, I am a serial annotator, a compulsively prodigious practitioner of marginal commentary. Oh, I use and abuse my books, embrace and deface them. I imperially claim the marginal space as my sovereign territory and colonize it. I oppress it to impress in it traces of myself. I leave fingerprints, footprints, evidence of a mind wishing, as Edgar Allan Poe says, “to unburthen itself of a thought.”
Poe published his marginalia in a lengthy series of magazine articles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s marginalia fill five volumes. I have no such pretentions, but I do relish the idea that filling a book’s white space embeds me in the long history of the written word, and the large community of those who have commented on it. Many of the Christian codices, those precursor books of folded and bound parchment, featured spacious margins, inviting annotation the faithful. Toiling in their scriptoria, monks often left marginalia in the texts they were copying. The margins of the 1602 Bishop’s Bible, one of the source texts for the 1611 King James Version, teems with notes of translators and the scribes they employed. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Jane Austen, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, David Foster Wallace—all have been margin writers. And then there are readers like me, and the millions like me, past and present, truants from the notice of history but nonetheless present in it, who have penciled and penned our thoughts and reactions, busily engaged, as C. S. Lewis puts it, in “making something all the time,” responding, always responding, as best we can, to words that stab at our ears until we understand them. If, as Nabokov says, the “ideal reader is someone who reads with a dictionary and a pencil,” we book markers, every single one of us, are Platonized.
Those who write marginalia know that it is one thing to possess books, quite another to own them. We draw books close to ourselves, so close we enter them, pass through their avenues and boulevards, always attentive, always willing to be hailed, always willing to respond. We read to be taught, but, as Whitman says, the best teachers teach “straying.” We encounter another mind, another perspective, and become mutually entailed, though sometimes we spin in another direction. We talk with and talk back—the arc of our covenant with the writer. Writing marginalia is active reading, proof that “we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages,” as Billy Collins says in his poem “Marginalia.” It is curious reading, the book “chewed and digested,” in Francis Bacon’s words. It is diligent reading, attentive reading, reading that notices what it is noticing. Writing marginalia is deep-brain stimulation without the impertinence of electrodes. It is attunement and wandering from the tune, a willingness to shift its key. It is our echoing reply to a writer’s shout across the gulfs of time and space.
Reading the marginalia others have left in their wake can prove a revealing look under the psychological hood. Famous or not, their markings are pieces of themselves left for posterity, indices of their personalites that sometimes provide all the satisfaction of voyeurism without its stigma of creepiness, but more often than not simply display our common humanity. One scribal monk, attesting to his tiresome task, scribbled “Only three fingers are working now.” Another, beset no doubt by a rumbling stomach, inscribed “I can’t wait for dinner time.” John Adams showed a smart-alecky side when he summarily dismissed Condorcet’s history of the human mind, writing on page 53, “Thou art a quack, Condorcet.” But the rectitudinous Adams is plainly visible in his marginal comment on de Gebelin’s golden-age-intoxicated descriptions of the primitive world: “Phallus. I hesitate to write the word, but the meaning of it is so important in allancient religions that it cannot be omitted.” Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, we know the authors of the Federalist Papers essays, for he included their initials in his copy. And to show that a serious annotator responds in the spirit of the text being read, Jefferson, reading Plutarch’s Lives in Greek, inserted between the leaves his commentary on slips of paper in neatly-written Greek.
Some writers have used the margins to vent. Working his way through suffragette Sarah Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins, Mark Twain, whose books were not selling well at the time, stopped in a fit of pique to write “A cat can do better literature than this.” Poe, perhaps revealing the jealousy of many male writers at a time when female-authored novels ruled the best-seller lists, says of Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton, "A remarkable work, and one which I find much difficulty in admitting to be the composition of a woman." William Blake’s romanticism is in full view when he jots a two-line poem on the title page of the ultraconservative and classically trained portrait artist of the elite Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses, “Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade,/Here idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the letters L.M. to mark what he considered a “ludicrous metaphor,” and N. to indicate “nonsense”—a classier response, certainly, than my own B.S.
Often writers will mark books to reinforce a cherished belief, as in Jack Kerouac’s underlining and checkmarking of this passage from Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”: “The traveler must be born again on the road.” Some mark passages that explore themes of intense interest, as did Melville in those passages in Dante’s Divine Comedy dealing with original sin, free will, and necessity. Some writers’ marginalia expose anguished and aggrieved minds and hearts. Perhaps her troubled marriage prompted Sylvia Plath to set write at the end of Chapter 7 in The Great Gatsby, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan have come to an uncertain intimacy, and Gatsby stands alone in the moonlight gazing at their house: “knight waiting outside dragon goes to bed with princess.” David Foster Wallace marked this passage from Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, “Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around him” with the simple but telling notation “Amherst 80-85.” Wallace’s troubled relationship with his mother stands uncloaked when he writes beside another, heavily marked, passage, “Becoming what narcissistically-deprived Mom wants you to be—performer.” But minds and hearts are not always in conflict with themselves. There is the joyous, the rapturous, marginalia that Billy Collins describes finding in a library copy of Catcher in the Rye: “A few greasy looking smears/and next to them, written in soft pencil-/by a beautiful girl, I could tell,/whom I would never meet-/`Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.’"
My own annotations tend to aggregate around a central set of concerns. In fiction and poetry I typically mark passages that indicate how writers or their characters understand reality and express values, or what seem to be emerging thematic or stylistic patterns. In nonfiction, I note claims, arguments, reasons assumptions, and implications. Pretty standard stuff; not especially noteworthy notes. Of more interest to me, though, is the marginalia I have left in books read in both the far and near past. Such marginalia are an archeology of my intellectual interests at the time, the disclosing strata of what I understood, and what I failed to understand. In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, marginal references to “plausibility structures” and “moral foundations,” indicating my reading of sociologist Peter Berger and psychologist Jonathan Haidt. On the title page of Jacques Lacan’s vexing Ecrits I wrote “labyrinth of murk; tasted but couldn’t get it down—sorry Sir Francis.” My conceptually muddled experience with the text itself is apparent in the frequently littered interjection “huh?”—a seemingly reflexive response in most of my literary theory books, which led me, in one, to plaintively write, “Is there a `Literary Theory for Dummies’ book?” and in another “Where are Strunk and White when you need them?” In Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, I scribbled on an endleaf, “I am smitten;” in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, “miraculous;” in the second volume of Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, “a soul right side up.” And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, in an act of ego-addled boldness, I have suggested a revision. Next to e. e. cummings’ lines “kisses are a better fate than wisdom,” I wrote “kisses are the better fate of wisdom.” Virtue, after all, should have a reward other than itself!
And always, always, when passages take such emotional possession of me that they would defy even the exorcising efforts of Fathers Merrin and Karras combined, when they stride right up to the door of magic and kick it in, when they are so buccaneeringly gorgeous that they glut the eye, when they are carpentered to a perfectly fitted joint with the idea they express, I underscore them and write in the margin the only thing I can think to write: “WOW!!!,” always capitalized, always tailing three exclamation points—hardly a learned response, but one wholly in keeping with the full-nelsoned tensile force with which such language grasps me.
I can understand the accusatory book-marking-as-sacrilege coming from librarians concerned with their patrons’ reading experience, or from bibliophiles who see books as art objects having qualities that may equal or even surpass their content. The choice of paper and typeface, for instance, or the manner in which the books are bound, designed, inked, and illustrated can all make books aesthetic artifacts in and of themselves, as the pre-Gutenberg illuminated manuscripts amply demonstrate. Mostly, though, I see books as objects to be consumed; objects meant to provide an absorptive, immersive, and powerfully intellectual experience; objects not simply to be looked at and looked into, but to be used. And that means wielding pencil or pen to record our experience of them, our collaboration with them, and, thereby, ourselves in them.
Poe published his marginalia in a lengthy series of magazine articles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s marginalia fill five volumes. I have no such pretentions, but I do relish the idea that filling a book’s white space embeds me in the long history of the written word, and the large community of those who have commented on it. Many of the Christian codices, those precursor books of folded and bound parchment, featured spacious margins, inviting annotation the faithful. Toiling in their scriptoria, monks often left marginalia in the texts they were copying. The margins of the 1602 Bishop’s Bible, one of the source texts for the 1611 King James Version, teems with notes of translators and the scribes they employed. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Jane Austen, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, David Foster Wallace—all have been margin writers. And then there are readers like me, and the millions like me, past and present, truants from the notice of history but nonetheless present in it, who have penciled and penned our thoughts and reactions, busily engaged, as C. S. Lewis puts it, in “making something all the time,” responding, always responding, as best we can, to words that stab at our ears until we understand them. If, as Nabokov says, the “ideal reader is someone who reads with a dictionary and a pencil,” we book markers, every single one of us, are Platonized.
Those who write marginalia know that it is one thing to possess books, quite another to own them. We draw books close to ourselves, so close we enter them, pass through their avenues and boulevards, always attentive, always willing to be hailed, always willing to respond. We read to be taught, but, as Whitman says, the best teachers teach “straying.” We encounter another mind, another perspective, and become mutually entailed, though sometimes we spin in another direction. We talk with and talk back—the arc of our covenant with the writer. Writing marginalia is active reading, proof that “we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages,” as Billy Collins says in his poem “Marginalia.” It is curious reading, the book “chewed and digested,” in Francis Bacon’s words. It is diligent reading, attentive reading, reading that notices what it is noticing. Writing marginalia is deep-brain stimulation without the impertinence of electrodes. It is attunement and wandering from the tune, a willingness to shift its key. It is our echoing reply to a writer’s shout across the gulfs of time and space.
Reading the marginalia others have left in their wake can prove a revealing look under the psychological hood. Famous or not, their markings are pieces of themselves left for posterity, indices of their personalites that sometimes provide all the satisfaction of voyeurism without its stigma of creepiness, but more often than not simply display our common humanity. One scribal monk, attesting to his tiresome task, scribbled “Only three fingers are working now.” Another, beset no doubt by a rumbling stomach, inscribed “I can’t wait for dinner time.” John Adams showed a smart-alecky side when he summarily dismissed Condorcet’s history of the human mind, writing on page 53, “Thou art a quack, Condorcet.” But the rectitudinous Adams is plainly visible in his marginal comment on de Gebelin’s golden-age-intoxicated descriptions of the primitive world: “Phallus. I hesitate to write the word, but the meaning of it is so important in allancient religions that it cannot be omitted.” Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, we know the authors of the Federalist Papers essays, for he included their initials in his copy. And to show that a serious annotator responds in the spirit of the text being read, Jefferson, reading Plutarch’s Lives in Greek, inserted between the leaves his commentary on slips of paper in neatly-written Greek.
Some writers have used the margins to vent. Working his way through suffragette Sarah Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins, Mark Twain, whose books were not selling well at the time, stopped in a fit of pique to write “A cat can do better literature than this.” Poe, perhaps revealing the jealousy of many male writers at a time when female-authored novels ruled the best-seller lists, says of Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton, "A remarkable work, and one which I find much difficulty in admitting to be the composition of a woman." William Blake’s romanticism is in full view when he jots a two-line poem on the title page of the ultraconservative and classically trained portrait artist of the elite Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses, “Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade,/Here idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the letters L.M. to mark what he considered a “ludicrous metaphor,” and N. to indicate “nonsense”—a classier response, certainly, than my own B.S.
Often writers will mark books to reinforce a cherished belief, as in Jack Kerouac’s underlining and checkmarking of this passage from Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”: “The traveler must be born again on the road.” Some mark passages that explore themes of intense interest, as did Melville in those passages in Dante’s Divine Comedy dealing with original sin, free will, and necessity. Some writers’ marginalia expose anguished and aggrieved minds and hearts. Perhaps her troubled marriage prompted Sylvia Plath to set write at the end of Chapter 7 in The Great Gatsby, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan have come to an uncertain intimacy, and Gatsby stands alone in the moonlight gazing at their house: “knight waiting outside dragon goes to bed with princess.” David Foster Wallace marked this passage from Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, “Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around him” with the simple but telling notation “Amherst 80-85.” Wallace’s troubled relationship with his mother stands uncloaked when he writes beside another, heavily marked, passage, “Becoming what narcissistically-deprived Mom wants you to be—performer.” But minds and hearts are not always in conflict with themselves. There is the joyous, the rapturous, marginalia that Billy Collins describes finding in a library copy of Catcher in the Rye: “A few greasy looking smears/and next to them, written in soft pencil-/by a beautiful girl, I could tell,/whom I would never meet-/`Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.’"
My own annotations tend to aggregate around a central set of concerns. In fiction and poetry I typically mark passages that indicate how writers or their characters understand reality and express values, or what seem to be emerging thematic or stylistic patterns. In nonfiction, I note claims, arguments, reasons assumptions, and implications. Pretty standard stuff; not especially noteworthy notes. Of more interest to me, though, is the marginalia I have left in books read in both the far and near past. Such marginalia are an archeology of my intellectual interests at the time, the disclosing strata of what I understood, and what I failed to understand. In Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, marginal references to “plausibility structures” and “moral foundations,” indicating my reading of sociologist Peter Berger and psychologist Jonathan Haidt. On the title page of Jacques Lacan’s vexing Ecrits I wrote “labyrinth of murk; tasted but couldn’t get it down—sorry Sir Francis.” My conceptually muddled experience with the text itself is apparent in the frequently littered interjection “huh?”—a seemingly reflexive response in most of my literary theory books, which led me, in one, to plaintively write, “Is there a `Literary Theory for Dummies’ book?” and in another “Where are Strunk and White when you need them?” In Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, I scribbled on an endleaf, “I am smitten;” in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, “miraculous;” in the second volume of Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, “a soul right side up.” And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, in an act of ego-addled boldness, I have suggested a revision. Next to e. e. cummings’ lines “kisses are a better fate than wisdom,” I wrote “kisses are the better fate of wisdom.” Virtue, after all, should have a reward other than itself!
And always, always, when passages take such emotional possession of me that they would defy even the exorcising efforts of Fathers Merrin and Karras combined, when they stride right up to the door of magic and kick it in, when they are so buccaneeringly gorgeous that they glut the eye, when they are carpentered to a perfectly fitted joint with the idea they express, I underscore them and write in the margin the only thing I can think to write: “WOW!!!,” always capitalized, always tailing three exclamation points—hardly a learned response, but one wholly in keeping with the full-nelsoned tensile force with which such language grasps me.
I can understand the accusatory book-marking-as-sacrilege coming from librarians concerned with their patrons’ reading experience, or from bibliophiles who see books as art objects having qualities that may equal or even surpass their content. The choice of paper and typeface, for instance, or the manner in which the books are bound, designed, inked, and illustrated can all make books aesthetic artifacts in and of themselves, as the pre-Gutenberg illuminated manuscripts amply demonstrate. Mostly, though, I see books as objects to be consumed; objects meant to provide an absorptive, immersive, and powerfully intellectual experience; objects not simply to be looked at and looked into, but to be used. And that means wielding pencil or pen to record our experience of them, our collaboration with them, and, thereby, ourselves in them.
Friday, February 10, 2012
The Afterglow
Sharon dreams a lot, or, at least, remembers her dreams more than most. She wonders about her dreams. Worries, really, about what they might mean. I suggest Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams or Jung’s Man and His Symbols. She smiles and looks away. And then the smile fades. She’s afraid of what those books may say, she says, what they may reveal about her. She wants to figure them out for herself, she says, on her own terms—to take the full meaning neat, undiluted by psychological theory. So she writes about her dreams. She is writing her way to understanding them. I admire that.
Sharon is a nontraditional student. She had left college to marry and settle on a farm and raise a family near a small town in northwestern Missouri. She worked for over twenty-five years as a small-town bank teller. The bank folded—the bank bankrupted, she says—and she is back in college, training to be a high-school English teacher. We are discussing an idea for a draft of a writing assignment. It concerns a recent dream.
Sharon enters a second-floor bedroom in her house to find a door she has never before noticed . She opens it and finds what appears to be a long, narrow living room. The furniture and curtains suggest a 1950s décor. She realizes with a start that it is an exact replica, right down to the dollied chair and couch arm covers, of her grandmother’s living room—as if, Sharon says, it had been teleported and compressed to fit what she had thought was an attic space. And sitting in an armchair, in a housedress and Keds Red Ball Jet sneakers, smoking a Salem cigarette, is her grandmother, who had passed away nearly thirty years ago.
* * *
“Grandma?”
“Hi, kiddo.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve always been here.”
“But I’m in this room almost every day, and I’ve never seen this door.”
“Yes, you did. You just didn’t see it. I’ve always been here. Afterglow”
“Afterglow?”
“Afterglow. You remember when I took you to Pioneer Park and cooked you bacon and eggs on one of those outdoor grills? And I told you about the house up on the hill?”
“You said an Indian chief lived there. He was 300 years old and was watching over the park because it was land that used to belong to his tribe.”
“See? Afterglow. And do you remember when I bought you a cane pole and took you fishing and you caught a sunfish?”
“The fin cut my palm. I’ve never fished since. Never even eaten fish.”
“Afterglow. And do you remember when you saw that little bottle of Mogen David wine I had in the cupboard, that little 4 ounce bottle and you wanted to drink it because you thought that little bottle was so cute and you liked the blackberry color? And at first I said no, and you begged and pleaded, so I gave you a little bit in a shot glass?”
“And I had a headache the next day. You said I had a hangover and not to tell mom. It’d be our secret. I don’t think half a shot glass of wine can cause a hangover, though. But I felt like a grownup because I got to drink wine. You had a hard time saying no to me.”
“You were my daughter’s first-born, and I loved you beyond all reason, kiddo.”
“I know. I’m the same with my daughter’s first. I never told mom our secret. Did you?”
“No.” And then she smiles. It’s an eyes-twinkling sly smile. “Still haven’t.”
* * *
Sharon asks if it would be a good topic for her essay. I ask her what she thinks she can do with it.
“Well, the people in our lives, the ones we love, maybe even the ones we just know—they leave us something of themselves. An afterglow. And dreams; I don’t know, it’s kind of like you’re walking on a bridge with a glass bottom and if you look down you see the bridge goes over a reflecting pond.”
Her voice has inflected into a question. She is looking right at me. “Go write,” I say.
Sharon is a nontraditional student. She had left college to marry and settle on a farm and raise a family near a small town in northwestern Missouri. She worked for over twenty-five years as a small-town bank teller. The bank folded—the bank bankrupted, she says—and she is back in college, training to be a high-school English teacher. We are discussing an idea for a draft of a writing assignment. It concerns a recent dream.
Sharon enters a second-floor bedroom in her house to find a door she has never before noticed . She opens it and finds what appears to be a long, narrow living room. The furniture and curtains suggest a 1950s décor. She realizes with a start that it is an exact replica, right down to the dollied chair and couch arm covers, of her grandmother’s living room—as if, Sharon says, it had been teleported and compressed to fit what she had thought was an attic space. And sitting in an armchair, in a housedress and Keds Red Ball Jet sneakers, smoking a Salem cigarette, is her grandmother, who had passed away nearly thirty years ago.
* * *
“Grandma?”
“Hi, kiddo.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve always been here.”
“But I’m in this room almost every day, and I’ve never seen this door.”
“Yes, you did. You just didn’t see it. I’ve always been here. Afterglow”
“Afterglow?”
“Afterglow. You remember when I took you to Pioneer Park and cooked you bacon and eggs on one of those outdoor grills? And I told you about the house up on the hill?”
“You said an Indian chief lived there. He was 300 years old and was watching over the park because it was land that used to belong to his tribe.”
“See? Afterglow. And do you remember when I bought you a cane pole and took you fishing and you caught a sunfish?”
“The fin cut my palm. I’ve never fished since. Never even eaten fish.”
“Afterglow. And do you remember when you saw that little bottle of Mogen David wine I had in the cupboard, that little 4 ounce bottle and you wanted to drink it because you thought that little bottle was so cute and you liked the blackberry color? And at first I said no, and you begged and pleaded, so I gave you a little bit in a shot glass?”
“And I had a headache the next day. You said I had a hangover and not to tell mom. It’d be our secret. I don’t think half a shot glass of wine can cause a hangover, though. But I felt like a grownup because I got to drink wine. You had a hard time saying no to me.”
“You were my daughter’s first-born, and I loved you beyond all reason, kiddo.”
“I know. I’m the same with my daughter’s first. I never told mom our secret. Did you?”
“No.” And then she smiles. It’s an eyes-twinkling sly smile. “Still haven’t.”
* * *
Sharon asks if it would be a good topic for her essay. I ask her what she thinks she can do with it.
“Well, the people in our lives, the ones we love, maybe even the ones we just know—they leave us something of themselves. An afterglow. And dreams; I don’t know, it’s kind of like you’re walking on a bridge with a glass bottom and if you look down you see the bridge goes over a reflecting pond.”
Her voice has inflected into a question. She is looking right at me. “Go write,” I say.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Look Up
Andrea was a pleasant young woman, but guarded. She never spoke about herself. She was not self-disclosing. That’s why I was surprised when she told me the story of her brother’s accident.
We were discussing a possible paper on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s narrative technique in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Andrea was particularly interested in Stowe’s use of irony. There was nothing subtle about it, she said. It was designed to bypass the mind and deliver a taser charge straight to the heart. St. Clare’s death, for instance. On the very day he decided to free his slaves, the very day that would have sent Tom back to his cabin, back to his wife and children, his family made whole once again, St. Clare is killed in a street mugging, and Tom, Christ-like Tom, winds up marooned in the moral chaos of Simon Legree’s plantation where, sacrificing himself so that others may live, he is beaten and mortally wounded and lies dying just as the son of his original master arrives to purchase his freedom.
As we talked, Andrea’s mood changed. It darkened. I could see it. Her face tightened, rinsed itself of expression. Her eyes turned inward. She was replaying a memory. And perhaps because we have been discussing untimely tragedies, deaths undeserved and senseless, she uncurtained her past and told me about the freak accident that killed her older brother six years ago.
Her brother was downtown, walking past a storefront, when a block of stone fell from the masonry high above the store’s sign, struck him squarely on the top of his head, and killed him instantly. Someone suggested rainwater entering hairline cracks, over the years, creating pressure, fissuring the mortar. But that moment, just that moment, with her brother walking by below. No one could explain that. No one tried. Andrea paused for several moments, and then her eyes turned outward again, looked directly at me. She said, “I mean, your life has a momentum, and things are good, and then this, this thing happens, and it tilts it all out of whack.’
Teacher and student are words in reciprocal relation. They represent separate subject positions, hierarchical but mutually entailed. One requires the other to be meaningful. But it seemed to me that Andrea’s revelation, so atypical, so unexpected, deepened that arm’s length entailment into something else, took it to a place beyond social performance, beyond the quarantine of image and role, a place where another self emerges and asks to be recognized. In the space of her telling, Andrea’s world opened to me and intervened in mine. Another life, previously private, sealed, became palpable, shareable, wrote itself in mine, wrote its being sheared by the profound tragedy of the unaccountable, the incomprehensibly arbitrary. I responded in the only way I could think equal to Andrea’s vulnerability, her risk.
“How can you not be changed when such a thing happens,” I said.
“Yeah, I was; am” Andrea said.
“It shakes one’s faith. It’s like a test of faith,” I said.
“It is,” Andrea said. “And I failed. At least for a while. Still am failing, really. I was cynical and I didn’t like being. I’m back, though, going through the motions so maybe the feeling comes back. And when I walk, I look up.”
We were discussing a possible paper on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s narrative technique in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Andrea was particularly interested in Stowe’s use of irony. There was nothing subtle about it, she said. It was designed to bypass the mind and deliver a taser charge straight to the heart. St. Clare’s death, for instance. On the very day he decided to free his slaves, the very day that would have sent Tom back to his cabin, back to his wife and children, his family made whole once again, St. Clare is killed in a street mugging, and Tom, Christ-like Tom, winds up marooned in the moral chaos of Simon Legree’s plantation where, sacrificing himself so that others may live, he is beaten and mortally wounded and lies dying just as the son of his original master arrives to purchase his freedom.
As we talked, Andrea’s mood changed. It darkened. I could see it. Her face tightened, rinsed itself of expression. Her eyes turned inward. She was replaying a memory. And perhaps because we have been discussing untimely tragedies, deaths undeserved and senseless, she uncurtained her past and told me about the freak accident that killed her older brother six years ago.
Her brother was downtown, walking past a storefront, when a block of stone fell from the masonry high above the store’s sign, struck him squarely on the top of his head, and killed him instantly. Someone suggested rainwater entering hairline cracks, over the years, creating pressure, fissuring the mortar. But that moment, just that moment, with her brother walking by below. No one could explain that. No one tried. Andrea paused for several moments, and then her eyes turned outward again, looked directly at me. She said, “I mean, your life has a momentum, and things are good, and then this, this thing happens, and it tilts it all out of whack.’
Teacher and student are words in reciprocal relation. They represent separate subject positions, hierarchical but mutually entailed. One requires the other to be meaningful. But it seemed to me that Andrea’s revelation, so atypical, so unexpected, deepened that arm’s length entailment into something else, took it to a place beyond social performance, beyond the quarantine of image and role, a place where another self emerges and asks to be recognized. In the space of her telling, Andrea’s world opened to me and intervened in mine. Another life, previously private, sealed, became palpable, shareable, wrote itself in mine, wrote its being sheared by the profound tragedy of the unaccountable, the incomprehensibly arbitrary. I responded in the only way I could think equal to Andrea’s vulnerability, her risk.
“How can you not be changed when such a thing happens,” I said.
“Yeah, I was; am” Andrea said.
“It shakes one’s faith. It’s like a test of faith,” I said.
“It is,” Andrea said. “And I failed. At least for a while. Still am failing, really. I was cynical and I didn’t like being. I’m back, though, going through the motions so maybe the feeling comes back. And when I walk, I look up.”
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)