E

I had it in mind to work from today's letter, E, by writing a poem. But then I thought, wait, you've already done that. Then I got thinking about other possible E words. I thought about "engagement" and "excellence" and, of course, "education." But that trio felt intimidatingly large individually, much less taken together. I don't want this 26-day challenge to turn into a marathon that leaves me wiped out at the end. I wanted something with three defining characteristics, first that it would be different from what I've already done, second that it might be thought-provoking with involving a lot of brainbending word work, and third that it would fit in with or reinforce both the abecedarian architecture of this series of posts and its educational focus.

So then I thought some more about the (capital) letter "E," and its particular architecture: a vertical line on the left, and three horizontal branches to the right. It looks a little like graphic organizer for an essay. Or a blog post.

I had already thought about simply presenting a poem, as opposed to writing one. At the end of yesterday's post I was speculating on the universal impulse for escape (a good "e" word), the desire to be somewhere else, and even as I was thinking about Derek Walcott's poem "Elsewhere" as a likely candidate.

So today I went over to my office and rifled through my files to find "Elsewhere." And as I was doing so I also ran across two other "E" poems. Throughout my teaching career I've generally made a practice of asking students to read poems in clusters, on the theory that the choices a writer makes in one poem often call attention other choices made in other poems being read together. And so then I figured, what the heck, why not just present these three poems as a group, with the poems individually being the branches, so to speak, and the post as a whole sharing an architecture with "E."

Then there was the question of sequence, what order to put them in, and worked that out. So here they are:

The Elusive Something

Was it in the smell of freshly baked bread
That came out to meet me in the street?
The face of a girl carrying a white dress
From the cleaners with her eyes half closed?

The sight of a building blackened by fire
Where once I went to look for work?
The toothless old man passing out leaflets
For a clothing store going out of business?

Or was it the woman pushing a baby carriage
About to turn the corner? I ran after,
As if the little one lying in it was known to me,
And found myself alone on a busy street

I didn't recognize, feeling like someone
Out for the first time after a long illness,
Who sees the world with his heart,
Then hurries home to forget how it felt.

Charles Simic, from Master of Disguises,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Simple enough, right? The speaker, out on the street, senses… something. But since he doesn't know what it is or where it's coming from, he can only interrogate it, which is why the poem begins with five questions. The act of asking the questions, trying to figure it out, leads him into unfamiliar territory. Pretty much the entire last stanza is an extended simile, which makes the attempt to describe how the speaker feels, "alone on a busy street I didn't recognize," by comparing himself to another entirely hypothetical someone who might be lost in a similar way, and whose response is to go back home and erase the whole experience from his mind.

Maybe not so simple after all? That's been my experience with reading Simic. His poems are often short narratives using ordinary language to tell about what seem to be ordinary occurrences, but upon examination they begin to open up in unexpected ways. Why does the guy in the example want to forget? Is it too hard, too painful, to see the world with your whole heart? Is that something to be cultivated? Or to be avoided at all costs. Given the presence of an "elusive something," how can we get at it? Do we really want to? Should we? Discuss.

It's hard for me not to read this poem as an oblique, or maybe not so oblique, commentary on being a writer in the first place. As Lia Purpura has it, "A word is a way to speak about something that really, in truth, no word can touch."

Elsewhere

(For Stephen Spender)

Somewhere a white horse gallops with its mane
plunging round a field whose sticks
are ringed with barbed wire, and men
break stones or bind straw into ricks.

Somewhere women tire of the shawled sea's
weeping, for the fishermen's dories
still go out. It is blue as peace.
Somewhere they're tired of torture stories.

That somewhere there was an arrest.
Somewhere there was a small harvest
of bodies in the truck. Soldiers rest
somewhere by a road, or smoke in a forest.

Somewhere there is the conference rage
at an outrage. Somewhere a page
is torn out, and somehow the foliage
no longer looks like leaves but camouflage.

Somewhere there is a comrade,
a writer lying with his eyes wide open
on mattress ticking, who will not read
this, or write. How to make a pen?

And here we are free for a while, but
elsewhere, in one-third, or one-seventh
of this planet, a summary rifle butt
breaks a skull into the idea of a heaven

where nothing is free, where blue air
is paper-frail, and whatever we write
will be stamped twice, a blue letter,
its throat slit by the paper knife of the state.

Through these black bars
hollowed faces stare. Fingers
grip the cross bars of these stanzas
and it is here, because somewhere else

their stares fog into oblivion
thinly, like the faceless numbers
that bewilder you in your telephone
diary. Like last year's massacres.

The world is blameless. The darker crime
is to make a career of conscience,
to feel through our own nerves the silent scream
of winter branches, wonders read as signs.


- Derek Walcott, from The Arkansas Testament, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)

This poem takes a broader view than Simic's. It's longer, more ambitious, and certainly more explicitly political than the Simic poem. It's similar in terms of its stanza form and the density of its imagery, although Walcott makes a point of rhyming. Initially. (The fact that the rhyme pattern breaks down as the poem goes on is anything but accidental.) There's an explicit attempt to contrast the "here where we are free for a while" (that one line an island of exceptionalism, and even that qualified by the rather chilling "for a while") with all of the other somewheres. What links this poem to the Dylan imagery I wrote about yesterday is the longing for freedom, the desire to be somewhere else, but here Dylan's solipsistic individual yearning is inverted and politicized: rather than wishing to be somewhere free, the speaker, who is in fact in a free place, temporary and vulnerable as it may be, is thinking of all of the other souls on this planet who could only wish to be as fortunate as he is now. The ethical question underlying the whole enterprise is what should be, what can be, an adequate response to the plight of those who are suffering while we are not. Even the act of writing itself is, comparatively, a luxury. Walcott evokes the comrade who cannot write, not having the means to make a pen; later he explicitly connects the lines of the poem to the bars of a prison: "Through these black bars hollowed faces stare." The last stanza inverts the whole question of blame and responsibility again: Walcott in writing this poem, and in inviting us into it, could be said to be "making a career of conscience," but in his own words, that is even a "darker crime" than absolving yourself of responsibility. True? False? Discuss.

E= MC2

Someday, perhaps, some alien eye or eyes,
Blood red in cold and polished horny lids,
Set in a chitinous face
Will sweep the arch of some dark, distant sky
And see a nova flare,
A flick of light, no more,
A pin-point on a photographic plate,
A footnote in an alien chart of stars
Forgotten soon on miles of dusty shelves
Where alien beetles feed.
A meal for worms,
Sole epitaph
To mark the curious end of restless man,
Who for a second of galactic time
Floated upon a speck of cosmic dust
Around a minor sun.

- Rosser Reeves

Since this is a post about the letter "E," I could not very well resist the temptation to include this poem, which supplies us with one of that letter's most influential and powerful (pun perhaps intended) definitions. I first was introduced to this poem forty years ago. At the time, I had not heard of Rosser Reeves and was unable, in the pre-internet era, to find out anything about him. I did not know until today, when I ran across this poem and decided to Google him, what an interesting life he had as an ad executive, nor that the character of Mad Men's Don Draper was apparently modeled at least in part on his life. (Although Don Draper, as far as I know, does not have a hidden life as a novelist and poet.)

In any case, this third poem in our little series takes the broadest view of all. If Simic is about the street, and Walcott is about the planet, Reeves is about, well, the universe. From the point of view of galactic space and time, nothing we do or don't do, in the short or the long term (relatively speaking), for better or for worse, makes a hell of a lot of difference. That seems to be the meta-message underlying all that we human beings have learned from our investigation of the world we've lived in these few thousand years. How does that make you feel? Liberated? Oppressed? Depressed? Discuss.

Dance. Dylan. Dionysus.*

Discussion:

One of the dangers of overexposure is that even what began as something startlingly original comes to be seen and felt as cultural cliché. Familiarity breeds contempt, which in turn breeds neglect, not to say amnesia. From the point of view of 1980, much less 2012, the very name of Bob Dylan elicits a thoroughly predictable range of stock responses, at least in those who remember him at all. (This is despite the fact that he is, amazingly, still writing and performing.) Songs that at one time were anthems are now thought of as being quaint, comic, even trite. It's hard even for diehard fans to listen to "Blowin' in the Wind" without a tinge of embarrassment, the internal equivalent of a patronizing smile. And perhaps that's well-deserved. Even Dylan at one point said he wished he had never written that song. "Mr. Tambourine Man" is a different case entirely. Yes, just the mention of the title conjures up visions of a longhaired guy on a barstool in a tie-dye shirt playing a guitar to an audience of stoners. But try wait. Before you blow him off, take another look the some of the words he actually wrote in that song:

…take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

If there is a more elegantly modulated and evocative sequence of sequence of words in popular music, I don't know what it would be. (Nominations, anyone?) There's a certain state of mind that each of us experiences—some more than others, perhaps, but nevertheless a universal longing—that responds to the gap between what our lives are at a given moment and what we might wish them to be.

Digression I: When I was growing up—this was in the early 50's—my mother was told, by her doctor no less, that she was working too hard. He suggested that she take a cigarette break several times a day. So she got in the habit of sitting down for a smoke. I can still remember that moment, when, heaving herself up from her chair, she would smile somewhat ruefully and, presumably quoting someone—although I haven't been able to find out who—say "Duty calls, and I must answer." I got the part about duty calling, even then. What used to give me, and I must admit, occasionally still does give me pause, is the "must" part. Must we in fact always answer?

The sixties are famous for being the time when the "must" was called into question. The paradigmatic example was the response to Lyndon Johnson and his call to duty in the Vietnam war, which was, for a significant and highly visible minority (who were later chastised by those who thought of themselves as "the silent majority") was "Hell, no, we won't go." Why not? Well, there were a lot of reasons, some political, some personal, some philosophical. But there was also this gut feeling, enhanced no doubt by the ready availability of psychotropic drugs, that there was a higher value than duty, a higher principle than the reality principle. Why be realistic when you can be ecstatic? Why go for delayed gratification when the only time you ever really get to experience is now? That's the layered sentiment that Dylan captures here, the mixture of elevated awareness and longing for escape, combined with the impulse "to dance beneath the diamond sky" forgetting about (the imperatives of) today until tomorrow.

Not that this impulse of is exactly new to human experience. The ancient Greeks embodied the opposing human tendencies in the two of the primary figures in the pantheon: Apollo, god of the sun (and therefore of reason and sober, mature judgment), and Dionysus, the god of wine and impulse and oblivion. The very word "ecstatic" is a Greek coinage: ek stasis means, quite literally, to leave your body (or place) behind, to "stand outside" yourself.

Digression II: in college there was a student in freshman year in college whose dorm room closet was filled with jumbo plastic garbage bags filled with various kinds of marijuana, some of which he sold, but a great deal of which he consumed himself. This student, whose real name I never learned, was seldom seen in class or doing anything that might have been called work. It's perhaps unsurprising that he did not return for his sophomore year in college. But, still he was a legend of sorts, and among many of his more duty-bound classmates a figure inspiring awe and a wistful kind of envy. He was known to all by his nickname: Dionysus.

As the Greeks knew all too well, there is something of the Apollonian and something of the Dionysian in all of us. We all like to think of ourselves as reasonable, responsible people. We all feel a sense of duty to something. Even Dylan himself, in a later song, said "You've gotta serve somebody." But is there any on of us who, as a student in school or an adult at a desk, has not at one time or another stared out the window wishing to be anywhere but where they are, doing something…. else? Something unbounded, something liberating and engrossing, something to take us out of body and place and time. Dylan's figure on the beach, dancing.


(Black and white drawing by Yours Truly, January of this year.)


* Supporting cast: Danger. Discrimination. Disarmament. Decriminalization. Death and his descendant consort Discontent.

The Seven C's

Since this, the third post in this series, was to be devoted to the letter "C," I found myself thinking about the various lists of 21st Century skills that I've run across in the last few years, ranging from the four C's to the five C's to NAIS President Pat Bassets five C's plus one to, inevitably, the seven C's and the irresistable nautical wordplay that goes with it. I've looked over many of those lists, borrowing from here and there, and compiled a list I can live with. Here they are, with some explanatory/exploratory comments.

Competency

I've got this one first because it's one that often is left out of lists like this. I will be the first to admit that an overt concern for narrowly defined basic skills seems me to be misguided. As I've said before, as an educator, a student, and a parent, I believe strongly in what B.F Skinner was getting at when he said "Education is what's left over after you've forgotten what you learned." But to say that basic skills are not the most important thing we need to focus on is not to say that they don't matter. Simple competency is empowering. Knowing how to perform basic operations in math is a gateway to being able to learn anything else in math. Knowing how syntax works is a gateway to being able to express yourself with clarity and precision and grace. So yeah, there's nuts and bolts stuff I want my kids to learn, and I'm going to try hard to teach it to them. But not at the expense of the more important stuff, like

Character

A former colleague once said to me, "The longer I teach, the more I realize that my ultimate goal is, and should be, to produce a certain kind of human being." I realize that the word "produce" here is problematical, but I take her point. What kids learn (and eventually remember, or forget, it doesn't much matter) is secondary to the whole complicated set of habits of mind and beliefs and inclinations that define their individual identities. Bluntly, I care less about what you know or don't know and more about who you are. So what are the character traits that define that "certain kind" of person? My preliminary list would include

• intellectual humility
• a capacity for enthusiasm
• a sense of care
• a sense of wonder
• a growth mindset

I'm not going to get into unpacking each of those terms; that would take weeks or months, and we'd be talking about a book and not a blog post. But the point is that a student who has these characteristics is going to be in very good shape whether or not he knows the chemistry of photosynthesis or how to solve a quadratic equation. A student like that can learn pretty much anything he wants to. Whereas a student who has learned any number of "basic skills" and procedures by rote is likely to be dead in the water when confronted with a new situation. Nineteenth and twentieth century schools have been very good at teaching students how to follow directions, and rewarding them for doing so. In the 21st century, in a world changing so fast that we cannot even predict what jobs will be available when the student emerges from school, that's not going to be good enough. None of this, of course, is new. Ken Robinson, among many others, has been hammering on this idea, with intelligence and humor, for years now. But everything in the standards-based movement, in combination with the high-stakes test movement, ignores character education entirely, and in fact militates against any kind of independence or originality of thought on the part of teachers or of students. It's implausible. It's tragic. It's unacceptable. But there it is.

Critical Thinking

This is a useful term, but dangerous, in that it means quite different things to people who use it, and they often assume that they're on the same page when in fact they’re not, or that they're not when in fact they are. I've spent a large part of my career working out what "critical thinking" really means. Surely it involves being a good and patient observer. It also involves being able to enumerate and distinguish between what you know, what you can infer, and what you have questions about. But beyond that I think it boils down to this: confronted with a new idea or a knotty problem or something that you just don't understand, what resources do you have in your mental tool box to be able to attack that problem? Another way of phrasing it might be, "What do you do when you don't know what to do?" Answering that question involves a certain degree of self-awareness (I understand that I'm stuck) combined with willingness to try something and see what happens, without worrying about whether it's the right thing or whether you might fail. An educator I met last year said "There's only two things that can happen when you try something new. The first is that you succeed. The second is that you learn something." I think that mindset is crucial to becoming a good critical thinker.

Creativity

Another slippery term. We all use it like we know what we're talking about. What is it really? Again, if I get myself going on this I'll be here forever. So here's an attempt at a short take: creativity involves setting up the conditions for things to happen that you do not expect to happen. That's what writers do. That's what artists do. Robert Frost famously said, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." So if it's true that we're trying to surprise ourselves, how do we do that? How do we learn that? How do we teach that? There are answers to those questions. As I've said before, I don't think creativity can be "taught." But I think we can create the conditions in our schools in which creative processes can be practiced or played around with, and in which creativity itself can be learned.

Collaboration

One of the most successful innovations in the business world in the last few decades has been the advent of cross-sectional teams. Edwards Deming, one of the leading voices of the quality management movement, articulated 14 key principles that have helped to re-shape corporate culture. Principle number nine stated "Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, in order to foresee problems of production and usage that may be encountered with the product or service." Cross-sectional and cross-discipline teams have become the norm in much of the business world, even as globalization has complicated the business environment by demanding communication and cooperation between people from different countries, different cultures, and even speaking different languages. One of the most important things students can and should learn in school is how to adapt their individual roles in any given situation to what the group needs as opposed to what they is used to doing or being. This kind of purposeful, strategic redefinition of oneself in the context of a group enterprise does not come naturally for students. It involves a kind of metacognitive awareness. The good news is that the need for that kind of awareness is not hard to communicate, and the awareness itself can be honed with practice.

Communication

The obvious point about communication is that it's simply necessary. It's a given. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone argue that their world or the world would be better off if we just communicated less well. The less obvious part about communication is that it's an essential part of any process of generative thinking or design thinking. Articulation is only the first step in the process, but it's an essential step. We need to attempt to communicate for the same reason that we sometimes need to write: words make thinking visible. Until you know what your first thoughts are, you can't really move on to second thoughts. "Iteration" in the design thinking process refers to producing a series of non-precious prototypes which allow a design to become progressively more sophisticated as each prototype is tested and feedback is gathered. But the word iteration has another, earlier, more primary meaning: to say again, to repeat. Saying it, saying it again, saying it out loud; each iteration reshapes the original idea and brings us closer to the core of what we really mean or are really trying to get at. Simply stated, communication is practice, and practice makes, well, you know.

Cosmopolitanism

This one, proposed by Pat Bassett, is perhaps pushing the C thing a few notches too far (especially when he defines it as "cross-cultural competency, which brings us up to nine or ten Cs, depending on how you feel about hyphens) but I agree that it is scarcely possible any longer to imagine a world in which our present students and future adults will NOT need to be able to interact with and pay attention to people from other backgrounds, other countries, other cultures. Global education is something that American schools have not typically emphasized or gone greatly out of their way to facilitate. One of the unfortunate spinoff effects of the notion of American exceptionalism, currently showing up again in our presidential campaign, is that if we believe ourselves to truly be better than everyone else, we have no real reason to want to listen to what anyone else might have to say to us. If you do that at the interpersonal level, you will acquire an earned reputation as an arrogant jerk. Why we believe it works differently at the international level is beyond me. It takes us back full circle to the notion of intellectual humility as a key element in character.

B

B

I.

B is for baby or bottle or bib.
For bull or for ball or for boat.
For bubble. For bible. For barrel.

For bake and for bread and for bagel.
For business. For ballast. Beatification.
For beast and balancing beauty.

For break and bash and blast
and bomb and blood. And
after the boom, for bust.

Bad words: Bitch. Bastard, Bullshit.
But also, if not for good, for better and best,
for boon and bounty and benefit.

II.

Winged insect. Spelling competition.
When they make quilts. A decent grade.
Alternative plan. Existential exhortation.

III.

Become. Beware. Bestow. Betoken.
Bewitch, bewilder, bemuse. Belittle.
Behalf. Beholden. Befuddled. Besmitten.

IV.

I wanted to talk about books. I was on my way to writing that when I started fooling around with B words, and that got pretty engrossing for a while and the whole sequencing thing and the whole rhythm thing took over and it was pretty fun for a while and then my brain began to buckle (once you start it's hard to stop) and I said, okay, enough of that.

I wanted to talk about books. Partly because they have been of central importance to me, to my upbringing, to the person I have become. I love to read. I have always felt more comfortable surrounded by books. Visit my home or my office and you're going to see a lot of packed bookshelves. I have trouble letting go of them. The books are in some sense the artifacts of my identity, the exterior representation of the ideas I carry around in my mind.

But I also wanted to talk about books because we've somehow arrived at a point when it is possible to conceive of a world in which books will be museum relics, objects from a period in history that it will be hard for people growing up in that new age to even imagine. Already I buy more of my "books" on the Kindle than I do in the bookstore. I walk around on the campus of my school and where I once saw students reading books everywhere, now when I see one it stops me dead in my tracks and I think, how endearing, how quaint. What I see instead is students with laptops and mobile phones and earbuds, plugged into the endless simultaneous overlapping data stream of words and sounds and visual images. I don't know what to make of that. It makes me wonder. Sometimes it makes me worry. It makes me wish for a return to the golden age. I tell myself, you're getting old.

I wanted to talk about books, about the feel of a book in your hands and the visual, tactile experience of falling through the words into a story, about the way you recall as you read an earlier passage that was somewhere up on the left hand side of the page, and how you can flip back to that page and check it out, holding your spot with your thumb. About how different that is from reading digitally. But I don't think there's much to say that hasn't been said better by bazillions of bloggers before me.

I wanted to talk about what is irreplaceable and inimitable about reading a book, and why even as I applaud and support the deployment of technology into the hands of our students and am fully convinced of the potential benefits it provides to them in the facilitation of learning and of personalized expression, I want to say, but don't forget books. It's not the same experience. It's not something you want to walk away from lightly. Hold a book in your hands. Flip through its pages. Sample a sentence here and a sentence there. Have a seat. Start to read. See what happens.

I wanted to talk about books. And I guess this is a start. But I feel like I've only made a dent, a scratch. A baby step. A beginning.

A is for Accomplishment

I'm going to borrow an idea from my current favorite blogger, the formidably talented Mary Ann Reilly here, which she borrowed from someplace else. The idea is to put together a series of posts each of which is tagged to a letter of the alphabet, starting with A and working from there. I may or may not be able to find the time to keep it up, but I'm going play with it and either just take longer than a month or perhaps just do the letters for the days I am able to write, starting with A on April 3. I'm going to impose an additional constraint on myself, which is to make most if not all of the posts related to teaching and learning.

Five years ago February I attended the NAIS conference in New York City. One of the sessions was a dual presentation featuring Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik. I went because I wanted to hear Gladwell, but walked away more impressed with Gopnik, who has since become one of my favorite writers. His work is featured regularly in The New Yorker.

In Gopnik's very personal and very impassioned talk, he talked about his daughter's experience in school and more generally about the meta-messages that schools send about what's important. (I'm going to have to paraphrase his argument here, and badly, at least compared to him. All of the illustrations I offer below are my own. But his basic point has stuck with me. (What Gladwell had to say that day, I can't recall.))

Gopnik drew a distinction between "achievement" and "accomplishment." The former, he argued, is what schools celebrate and what students are taught, overtly or covertly, to value. It is etymologically related to the word "chief," from the French a chief venir, to come to a head. It's about being on top, about winning, about public praise. School administrators often take public notice of the achievements of the senior class at graduation. An achievement is the sort of thing likely to be showcased in a resume. But achievement comes with a high price tag. It's often the result of competition. It's exclusive.

It's an achievement to win the state title in, say, basketball. But it's not generally understood to be an achievement to come in third. It's an achievement to be valedictorian, but there can be only one valedictorian. It's an achievement to score high on a test, but there is no inherent value in the test itself before or after it has been scored. In many ways the focus on achievement narrows our children's sense of what is important, overemphasizes competition, and leaves those who are not chosen for recognition with the sense that they have failed. What has, over the years, been the epithet of choice to express disdain? "Loser."

Accomplishment, on the other hand, is simply the visible manifestation of what you have been able to do. The word "accomplishment" is etymologically related to the word "complete." It's an accomplishment to learn a foreign language, to teach yourself to play the guitar, to draw a picture that satisfies you, perhaps, if you are a reluctant reader, to finish a book. It might even be an accomplishment to make it through the week without breaking down and weeping. Accomplishment is about setting your own goals and then going after them. It suggests that you have finished what you started. Its context is individual in pursuit of his/her own goals, not the individual in pursuit of public recognition.

One of the most influential voices in education today is that of Carol Dweck, who argues against what she calls a "fixed mindset" in favor of a "growth mindset." She cites studies that show that children who are praised for being smart wind up, when faced with new challenges, being risk-averse, preferring not to undertake tasks which might involve failure, because smart people aren't supposed to fail. Whereas children praised for their hard work, when faced with a challenge, roll up their sleeves and dig in, because "hard workers" know from experience that they persevere they'll be able to work their way through the challenge.

It seems to me that "achievement" is a fixed-mindset word. It suggests a goal arrived at, rather than worked for. "Accomplishment" feels more to me like a growth-mindset word. Gopnik suggests that our children, and our students, would be better off if we made it a point to talk with them about what they have accomplished rather than what they have achieved. Makes sense to me.

Arisen

Spent maybe six hours Friday, Saturday, and Sunday working on this. It's the fourth in a series of drawings, roughly seven and a half by ten inches, that are explorations of the the effects of strong blacks and strong whites. No shadows or cross-hatching. I usually draw directly on paper. I use a Canson Comic and Manga drawing pad; it's got a buttery-smooth surface that is easier on the pens that regular watercolor paper. It's also easy to erase, which came in handy this time, because for the first time I actually began by doing a pencil drawing first, at least of the baroque-looking octopus-like figure that starts in the middle right and flows out and down the left. I also decided for the first time to leave a large white panel in the middle instead of filling in every inch with line and color.

The pens in this case are various sizes of Pigma Microns (03, 05, and 08). The 03 gives a nice fine line, the 05 can get in the corners and small shapes, and the 08 is good for laying down a lot of ink at a time when you're filling in.

One thing I'll say about this kind of work: it's incredibly soothing. I put music on (in this case, a playlist of songs by Kate Rusby) and sit and draw and whistle and hum along while I work. (Here's a typically haunting and idiosyncratic version of an old standard, which I kept banging the replay button on while I was working on this.) There are a lot of things these days that I have trouble concentrating for more that a half hour or so, but I can draw for a couple of hours and not lose focus.

I never know when I start what it's going to wind up looking like or how the parts are going to fit together. I did the octopus (not what it's intended to be, but it's a shorthand way of describing the shape, which is the most complex I've attempted) first, then penciled in the straight lines forming the rectangular areas in the background, and then draw the outlines of the boxes so formed with ink. Then it was mostly a matter of deciding, one at a time, what was going to be in each box. It won't be obvious unless you look at it, but there's a logic to that: in the octopus the forms are black and the surrounding lines are white, but it most of the rest the forms are white and the surrounding areas are black.

One unifying stylistic feature of all the drawings I've been doing is the presence of the red seal in the lower right corner, which are the Chinese characters for my initials: RBS.

Thusly

Thusly

Suppose what of red. Border integration, but not anxious. Cascade.
Sometimes empty. Arisen. Thought cloud. Perhaps a circle, perhaps
a vessel, a constellation. Interference. Inevitable irregularities, but
still. Text and just almost. I'm asking you. A pool. A spool. Sub-
version. Mapping the alternatives. Arrest. Not prime. Isle of Man.
Spice. If ever, water, trip, collide, focus. Distillation thereof.
However. Please. Beneath the threshold. Unless. Immediately.
Gradual realizations. Breath. Sure, there's noise, water. Replete
for single. Master. Integumentary. Among of green stiff old.
That too. What's possible. What's right. Spiral? Always okay.

Process Reflection:

The image is one of a series I was working on recently combining watercolor, ink, and collage. I usually work with those separately, but here I was playing with the combinations. As you might guess from looking at the text fragment, it's small, about 3.5" x 5.5". Just playing with juxtapositions, what I could do inside of a rectangle. Several kinds of balancing acts going on simultaneously: colors, forms, shapes, objects (of which there are five configured in a rough circle). Collage is about putting found objects, or created objects, or both together, in order to see what happens. Some kind of energy, some kind of coherence. I've become interested in how one goes about "reading" a collage or other type of abstract art, which turns out to involve a willingness to simply be present to the experience, to accept the suchness and thusness of what is without trying to impose a logic upon it. The work of art is a field of energies defining their own little universe. Spending some time in that world is a kind of tourism. What is this all about? How is this one different from the last one? The next one? The one you live in now? The one you construct in your dreams (or your dreams construct in you)?

The poem, if that's what you'd call it, is an attempt to replicate or re-enact the same process using words instead of objects. The words and phrases are in some (intentional) sense random, and in some (intuitive) sense connected both to each other and to the image they are intended to mirror. Because they are words, we want them to add up to something beyond what they are, words. As they do. As they must. But not in the way they ordinarily do. The ordinary rules aren't in play. So the experience of reading is bent or altered as well. Taken together, they add up to... something. It's recognizable as a poem. It even includes a quote from a (just slightly less oblique) poem (by William Carlos Williams). But it's not going to speak except in its own voice.

Writing this way is harder than it might at first appear. But like all purposeful play, it has its satisfactions.




I

PBN. Quest. Fog. Movie.

This morning I was in a meeting at my school attended by some representatives from Daylight Design who are working with us to employ design thinking concepts within the framework of the school's master planning process. I've attended a number of design thinking workshops and comfortable with the concepts and language and processes associated with design thinking. But today Sven, the team leader for the group working with us, sketched out a diagram on the white board that I had not seen before and found interesting. This afternoon I took out my notebook and transferred the diagram as he had drawn in onto a Keynote slide. (Thanks for the suggestion, Tedd.) I'm going to try to walk my way back through it and explain it, both to clarify it in my own mind and in order to share it here. (I've actually flipped the diagram Sven drew both vertically and horizontally because it felt more intuitive to me this way.) The diagram looks like this:



The vertical axis represents the degree of clarity you have in any particular situation about your goals, your objectives, what you hope to accomplish when you're done. At the bottom of the line you basically unclear about what you want to get done, what the output will be. At the top of the line you're quite certain about outcomes.

The horizontal access represents the how, the degree of clarity you have about the processes you are going to use to arrive at your goal. On the far left, there's a lack of clarity or certainty about methods, on the far right, you know exactly what you intend to do.

The two lines create four quadrants. The upper right quadrant represents the state of mind in which you know exactly what you want to get done and exactly how you intend to do it. If you know you need to order office supplies and you know where you're going to order them and there's a process in place to do that, it's a done deal. It's a cinch. It's what Sven labeled as PBN, or paint by the numbers. Not much ambiguity there.

The upper left quadrant represents the state of mind in which you know exactly what you want but have no idea how to get there. You're going to have to search for a way to find it or make it happen. It's a quest.

In the lower left quadrant you don't know where you want to accomplish and you don't know how you're going to even get started. This is the foggy zone. You feel a need, but you can't articulate it. This is the zone of greatest ambiguity, but it is also the zone of greatest fluidity. All your options are still open. It's a good place for generative thinking and brainstorming.

In the lower right quadrant, you know what your process is but you don't know yet what the outcome will be. It's more of an exploration, like making a movie. You have a cast of characters and an evolving narrative and you create the story as you go along.

The point of the diagram, as I understood it, is that it's helpful to be clear about where you are at the start of a process, so that you can make informed decisions about how to proceed and focus your energies on what is most likely to be helpful in moving you forward.

Having gone this far, I decided to google the quadrant terms and came across another diagram covering the same turf in a slightly different way:

Hunger Games

So last night we went to see The Hunger Games, which I thought met or exceeded all reasonable expectations. I thought it was well-structured, well-acted, and very true to the feel of the book. It was also consistently interesting to watch, even though I, and presumably most of the people in the theatre, knew basically how it was going to play out. There are several built-in challenges to making a book as stylized and hard-edged and violent as this one into a movie. You can the tone wrong, especially when you have a book that walks such a narrow line between realism and satire, and between sentimentality and brutality. You can, in cutting out as much of the action and the interior motivations of the characters as you need to pare a book down to a movie, disrupt the flow of the narrative or put too much emphasis on one thing at the expense of another. And then there's the daunting question of how to create scenes which are adequate to the violence of the book without alienating or grossing out the millions of twelve-to-fourteen year-olds who constitute the core target audience. Not to mention getting their parents up in arms (so to speak) or getting an R rating from the MPAA. The Hunger Games succeeds in handling all of these challenges effectively and with assurance.

If there was a weak character in the movie, it would be Elizabeth Banks in the role of Effie Trinket, who has little to do other than to mince about in outrageous costumes making inane remarks. But that's basically what Effie did in the book as well. Everyone else was solid. I've read criticism of Woody Harrelson's performance, but was surprised to find him totally believable as Haymitch. Stanley Tucci takes a very minor role in the book and takes over the screen every moment he's on it. Jennifer Lawrence plays Katniss with a tightly controlled intensity that was pitch-perfect. It was one of the most satisfying movies I've seen in a very long time.

The one thing that bothered me after I had time to think about it a situation that occurs toward the end of the movie when two of the tributes who have been in the arena all the time, like Katniss, make reference to something which we as the audience know to have happened but which there is no plausible way they could have known about, unless they were watching the games on state TV instead of participating in them. But it's a logical flaw, and a minor one at that, and it does not to my mind reduce the dramatic effectiveness of the scene in question or the movie as a whole.

Then this morning I read David Denby's characteristically stodgy and humorless critique in the New Yorker in which, after bestowing such compliments as he could bring himself to make, he goes on an extended slash job in which he labels the movie "pretty much a disaster—disjointed, muffled, and even, at times, boring." He rips on the camerawork, waxes indignant about the incoherent action sequences, and complains that "the movie looks less like a fight to the death than like a scavenger hunt. Katniss is always finding something useful in a tree or lying on the ground." I wonder how many instances add up, in Denby's mind, to an "always." Denby ends his review with "The result is an evasive, baffling, unexciting production—anything but a classic."

I don't know what movie he was watching. Or why the New Yorker would choose the buttoned-up, pedantic Denby to review this particular movie, instead of co-reviewer Anthony Lane, who if he were of a mind to complain would at least do it with perceptiveness and humor.

Purpura

"A word is a way to speak about something that really, in truth, no word can touch."

- Lia Purpura

Maybe two months ago I was in Barnes and Noble looking for a particular book of essays which it turned out they did not have. But, as sometimes happens, right where the book I was looking for should have been, there was another book that looked like it might be interesting called Rough Likeness by Lia Purpura. I picked it off the shelf and started flipping through it, and was struck immediately by the freshness and freedom of the language and by the way her writing seemed to mirror the motion of her mind in thought. Too often essays, even (especially?) essays of the kind that appear in anthologies like Best American Essays, have a kind of earnestness about them that makes reading them feel like, well, eating your spinach because it's good for you. But these had a different feel to them. They looked like they might be fun to read. I tucked the book under my arm and made my way to the cash register. When I got home and started to read, all of my initial impressions were confirmed, and then some.

Purpura is an inventive, explorational writer. She is interested in the effects that can be created by the sequencing of words, and in the words themselves. Avoiding the formal, familiar, and therefore more predictable language of the academic essay, she writes in a way that seems to follow the immediate tendencies of her mind in action. She's a self-conscious writer in the best sense, in that she is fully aware even as she writes of the sometimes bewildering number of choices that are presented by each word she chooses. She's a writer of poetry as well, and the rhythms and sounds and imagery of poetry often characterize her prose. Her writing is carefully crafted, but comes across as natural, spontaneous speech. Here, for example, are the first few sentences of "The Lustres," the second essay in the book. (The title is from Emerson, who used the word to describe "the prickly bright sensations" which he said were one of his pleasures in reading.)

I am, I admit, daunted here. Set upon by impossibility, which is both my subject and predicament. My method, then will be the standard proceeding-in-the-face-of variety. I'll call some point beginning and begin. This state, right now, is coiled up like a fiddlehead fern, so bright-green, fresh, lemony, cochlear I cannot bring myself to pick/wash/steam it just yet. This moment, folded into itself, is resting so tenderly I find it hard to get going—in just the same way I cannot bring myself to make a fist with one hand while touching the yielding velvet of an earlobe with the other. Or to bite down hard on pearled barley on luminous beads of tapioca. (9)

The "moment" she is referring to is the moment of generation, the instant at which and in which the artist touches a brush to a blank canvas or the writer puts the first tentative words in the page. It's the moment of the first gesture, the first move, from which all othes must follow. She begins by considering how it feels to be beginning, and comes up a series of similes (the fern, the fist, the taste of tapioca) to convey the feeling of the moment. And it's characteristic of her that the last simile in the sequence comes in from what feels at first like deep left field. It surprises me. I'm sure it surprised her. It was not what she had in mind when she began, but in beginning, she found her way to it. Which is, of course, why we write. (Most students do not understand this, and are in fact convinced that the only reason to write is to prove to someone (usually a teacher) that you have something already in your head. I've made a career out of trying in my own limited way to get them to reconsider that core belief. But I've ranted about that before.)

Purpura is enamored of words, and supersensitive to their overtones and undertones, their denotations and connotations, the freight they carry with them. "Lustres" is in large part an essay written in appreciation of words, and there a number of specific words that in this essay ("Vienna, Japan. Sublime. Bower. Pigs.") she takes pains to unpack:

I learned the word bower for an intimacy I trace to a scene atop an enameled pillbox, given to me by Madame Lulu, visiting from South Africa. She ran an orphanage for Jewish refugees, and we knew the grown-up orphan who was my parents' friend, David. On the pillbox, in blue and white, a seated peasant girl and standing peasant boy inclined together in a tondo of love amid hills and a far-off, blurry castle. Their heads touched, their eyes met on the empty basket in her lap and the bouquet in his hand hung just a wisp, a breath of white away from it. Sometimes I'd take a break from the scene and flick the golden lisps of the clasps apart, open the box, and touch my tongue to the fine powder there left by Madame's pills—tiny saccharine tablets for her tea—then snap the box shut and ride the wisp all the way down to the girls lap, and fast up to the distant castle. (12)

In another essay, "Against Gunmetal," she ponders the use of that word as a familiar adjective for gray, as in "gunmetal sky." Her impulse is to reject it precisely because it is so familiar as to be shopworn:

I want such a sky to quiet me (not "strike me dumb"— that's a rod drawn up, enforcing awe, and one is "smote"). And I want, in that quiet, to search out my terms. And what I decide on, I want to be more than a firearm's alloy. Harder to come by. Chromatic. I want to turn to oyster and mouse, tidepool and tin, and then tank those and reconfigure if they grey they offer is not worthy, if associations gained are not surprising, of a distance previously unreachable, and intimately roomy. Freshening and new. (37)

Purpura is also a teacher (of college-level creative writing), and one passage in particular struck me as being particularly apt and true to my own experience of both writing and teaching:

Here, I walk into class thinking Really, I have nothing to say to these people, the proper study of writing is reading, is well-managed awe, desire to make a thing, stamina for finishing, adoration of language, and so on about reverie, solitude, etc. Here, sitting down I'm going over my secret: I don't want to be inspiring, I just want to write and they, too, should want that—let's all agree to go home and work hard. I walk in, I see people with books, stacks fo books I've asked them to read. Besides Woolf, there's James Agee (let's take that out class), who lived with the poorest of white sharecroppers of Alabama and whose force of nature, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was published in 1941, as he might add, Year of Our Lord, to dignify the event. (Event: I choose my word carefully, friends, for as Agee writes, 'this is a book only by necessity…' let's turn to page xi…) Now I'm cooking. I, in my flight suit (black sweater and jeans) look into the faces of my cadets. Everyone's eager. We walk to the runway. We find the ignition. (81)

Footnotes

Four quotes from reading I did today that might serve as footnotes to yesterday's post:

To be playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. Absence of dogmatism and prejudice, presence of intellectual curiosity and flexibility, are manifest in the free play of the mind upon a topic. To give the mind this free play is not to encourage toying with a subject, but is to be interested in the unfolding of the subject on its own account, apart from its subservience to a preconceived belief or habitual aim. Mental play is open-mindedness, faith in the power of thought to preserve its own integrity with out external sup ports and arbitrary restrictions. Hence free mental play involves seriousness, the earnest following of the development of subject-matter. It is incompatible with carelessness or flippancy, for it exacts accurate noting of every result reached in order that every conclusion may be put to further use. What is termed the interest in truth for its own sake is certainly a serious matter, yet this pure interest in truth coincides with love of the free play of thought.

- John Dewey via the indefatigable Wes Fryer

Writing in 1870, Walt Whitman said, “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without; for I see clearly that the combined foreign world could not beat her down. But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-overarching American Ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them.” And he said, “It is the fashion of dillettants [sic] and fops (perhaps I myself am not guiltless,) to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from. See that you do not fall into this error. America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brained nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers.”

It is true that the period after the Civil War was a low point in American political history. And it is true also that the country came through it all at last, fairly intact by the standards that apply in such cases. This is reassuring to consider, since we now live in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather. We have the passive pious, who feel they have proved their moral refinement in declaring the whole enterprise bankrupt, and we have the active pious, who agree with them, with the difference that they see some hope in a hastily arranged liquidation of cultural assets. It was Whitman’s faith that a great presiding spirit of Democracy would check, or correct for, the worst deficiencies of the civilization. It may indeed have been that ideal that kept us on course, or allowed us finally to find our way back to a better and healthier national life, then and in all the other periods in our history when our politics have seemed to be beyond redemption. Whitman says Democracy “is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.”

Whitman was a Quaker and he wrote as one: “I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion, / Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur; / (nor character nor life worthy the name without religion…).” This is from Leaves of Grass, and so is this: “All parts away for the progress of souls, / All religion, all solid things, arts, governments, all that was or is / apparent upon this globe or any globe, / falls into niches and corners / before the procession of souls along / the grand roads of the universe.” The vision of the soul, all souls, realizing itself in the course of transforming everything that has constrained it and them, finds expression in many writers of the period, prominent among them Emerson, Melville, and Dickinson, and in later writers such as William James and Wallace Stevens. For all of them creeds fall away and consciousness has the character of revelation. To identify sacred mystery with every individual experience, every life, giving the word its largest sense, is to arrive at democracy as an ideal, and to accept the difficult obligation to honor others and oneself with something approaching due reverence. It is a vision that is wholly religious though by no means sectarian, wholly realist in acknowledging the great truth of the centrality of human consciousness, wholly open in that it anticipates and welcomes the disruption of present values in the course of finding truer ones.

- Marilynne Robinson, from the preface to her new collection of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books

No Apologies?

In yesterday's post I wrote briefly about Stephen Greenblatt's Swerve and mentioned that it dealt in part with the role that (the rediscovery of a manuscript by) Lucretius had to play in the evolution of the modern world view, or at least that particular view modern world view referred to both by its adherents and its detractors as secular humanism. In his introduction, Greenblatt talks about his own personal first encounter with Lucretius, when, as a college student on a limited book budget, he pulled a copy of De Rerum Natura, marked down to ten cents, out of a used-book bin, more or less on a whim, and took it home to read. Somewhat to his own surprise, he found that the text was exercising an unexpected power over him, and that one of the sources of that power was that the text conveyed "an astonishingly convincing account of the way things actually are."

The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaselss process of creation and destruction. There is not escape from this process. When you look up at the night sky and, feeling unaccountably moved, marvel at the numberless stars, you are not seeing the handiwork of the gods or a crystalling sphere detach from our transient world. You are seeing the same material world of which you are a part and from whose elements you are made. All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and reproduce successfully endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited die off quickly. But nothing—from our own species to the planet on which we live to the sun that lights our days—lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.

In a universe so constituted, Lucretius argued, there is no reason to think that the earth or its inhabitants occupy a central place, no reason to set humans apart from all other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature, no escape from the constant making and unmaking and remaking of forms. On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing. What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world. (6)

Greenblatt marvels, as I do, "that these perceptions were fully articulated in a work written more than two thousand years ago. Later in the preface, he talks about the impact of the rediscovery of the work in the 1400's and its impact on Renaissance thought, in which "something… surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body."

The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in this world; to understand that humans are made of the same stuff as everything else and are part of the natural order; to conduct experiments without fearing that one is infringing on God's jealously guarded secrets; to question authorities and challenge received doctrines; to legitimate the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain; to imagine that there are other worlds beside the one that we inhabit; to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible—never easy, but possible—in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough. (10)

Perhaps it is less surprising that these realizations, once articulated, found their way into public discourse and began to re-shape the human experience, than that after so many centuries, many if not most of the firmly held if implausible beliefs that "the centuries," and perhaps more centrally the dogmas of various religious organizations, are still so firmly and self-righteously proclaimed in the face of all evidence to the contrary. The current state of political paralysis in this country owes a great deal to elected representatives who seem to be incapable of imagining that there might be any point of view worth considering other than their own.

In the New Yorker which arrived in the mail today (March 19 – lucky you live Hawaii), Louis Menand reviews and reflects upon Michael Kranish and Scott Helman's biography The Real Romney. In the middle of that article Menand writes:

Still, despite the multiple incongruencies surrounding his candidacy, Romney's campaign pitch will, in the end, almost certainly be the Republican pitch no matter who the nominee turns out to be. The pitch is that Obama and the democrats believe we've entered a "post-American" world, a world in which the United States is no longer the preeminent power on the planet but just one nation among many; and the Administration's policies are designed to manage this decline in our status, not reverse it. Democrats have abandoned "greatness" talk; Republicans want to bring it back. "I believe in American exceptionalism," as Romney says. This is the belief for which he offers "no apology."

There are a lot of notions out there today, being fiercely promulgated as truth by self-appointed know-it-alls, that might be less dangerous if there were room for at least some tiny quotient of apology in the equation: the notion that America is a special case and therefore should get to play by its own rules; the notion that by virtue of the country of our birth we are somehow more worthy or more virtuous or more deserving of the material and cultural benefits we have inherited; the notion that women should not have the choice to determine what happens inside their own bodies; the notion that those who see things differently than we do, or worship differently than we do, or have a different skin color than we do, or speak a different language than we do, or think differently than we do, are somehow morally and culturally inferior to us. These are the notions that, arising as they do from cast-iron, unapologetic certainty accompanied, in too many circumstances, by a willingness to go all the way to extermination to enforce, have caused untold misery and conflict throughout human history and into the present moment. If only in our current national and international political climate there were more reason to believe that the openminded and openhearted vision of Lucretius and his latter-day disciples might ultimately prevail.

Borrow My Book?

I'm reading Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, which is an erudite and surprisingly entertaining book about the origins of modernism. Greenblatt has a lot to say along the way about the history of books and the various means by which reading has been either encourages or discouraged by the prevailing technologies (not to mention political and religious forces) of particular eras.

One recurring narrative thread in the book features the efforts of one Italian layman, Poggio Bracciolini, who in 1417 was going from monastery to monastery seeking out rare or unusual books. He could never be sure of his reception, because, as Greenblatt points out:

Books were scarce and valuable. They conferred prestige on the monastery that possessed them, and the monks were not inclined to let them out of their sight, particularly if they had any prior experience with light-fingered Italian humanists. On occasion monasteries tried to secure their possession by freighting their precious manuscripts with curses.

Greenblatt then offers this example, which made me sit up and take notice for two reasons: first, because it's disconcerting specific and startlingly forceful curse, but second, because I actually remember having run across this text when I was in college, and in fact had in made into a bookplate that I glued into several of my more prized volumes:

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

So there. You want to borrow my book? Sure. Just read the terms of the contract and sign here...

Spoiler alert: Poggio does manage to liberate one manuscript, De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, and that manuscript winds up playing a key role in the development of modern consciousness.

O

O

Starting point. An opening.
What's missing: Absence. Zero.
Zilch. Naught. An empty space.
Sound of being taken off guard.
Coin, perhaps, or plate, or wheel.
Sun. Moon. Egg. Zygote. Maw.
Bucket as seen by a descending
drop. Target. Lens. Operator
Partner to x, and sometimes y.
Hug with kisses. Wedding ring.
Circularity. World without end.
Orbit. What the compass said.
Business end of a barrel.
Bullet hole. Alpha's omega.
Peephole. Stasis. Enso. Stain.
"Absolutely not" with N.
Odor with body, out with knock.
Face without eyes, the eye itself,
iris. Boundary. Clique. Nailhead.
Brain pan. Binary "Off." Omphalos.
In soccer: nil. In tennis: love.
Belated realization. Abject failure.
Beginning and end. What's left
When there's nothing to say.

Process Reflection: The idea for this came to me a while back when I was scrolling through my recent blog posts and saw the post I had done last July about the letter "E." Like that one, this is just a list poem, a right-brain exercise, inventorying associations I could make with that particular shape. The fun part in writing it was playing with the sequences of sounds, the singularities, the surprises. I started out just writing things as they came into my head but spent a lot of time rearranging them, substituting words ("maw" for "mouth," for example), trying to tighten up and cut back on stray syllables. I knew I needed an exit line and liked the little double entendre I came up with in the last line, but then had to go back and replace "nothing," in the third line with "naught," which I actually like better, now that it's there. I felt the same way in writing this that I often do when I'm working on an abstract drawing, which was focused down in a way that makes time sort of disappear.

That was yesterday. Today a motorcycle starting up next door woke me up at 4:30 a.m. and as I lay in the dark in other words and phrases began occurring to me, so I grabbed a pen and paper and lay in the half-darkness, scribbling them down as they came. That has always been an interesting time for me when I'm writing: in the space between waking and sleep the brain seems to work a little more fluidly, with the kind of associative logic (or illogic) of dreams. So this morning it was a matter of folding the new material into what was already there.

So this is where it is now, subject to further consideration.

Stealing Home

Put your arms around me
Like a circle round the sun
You know I'll love you baby
When my easy riding’s done
You don't believe I love you
Look at the fool I've been
You don't believe I'm sinking
Look at the hole I'm in
Stealing, stealing
Pretty mama don't you tell on me
I'm just stealing back to my
Same old used to be

- Gus Cannon/Arlo Guthrie

I’ve been away for a while. I’ve been elsewhere. I’ve been otherwise. I’ve been doing a lot of drawing and a lot of work and a fair amount of reading and thinking, but not a lot of writing. And now I’m back. Perhaps for a visit. Perhaps to settle in for a while.

My recent reading has included The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It’s a novel about baseball. Sort of. Three of the five main characters are in fact baseball players, and the novel spans several years in the trajectory of a particular college baseball team on a quest for the national championship. (The other two main characters are the president of the school, and his daughter Pella, a prodigal daughter recently returned home.) The book is in a very literal way a sports story, relying on familiar and somewhat reassuring sports motifs. But it is also in a very literary way an odyssey, relying just as much, if not moreso, on analogy and allusion and archetype. The history and intellectual identity of Westish College, for example, is linked up with Herman Melville, whose spiritual presence suffuses the pages of this book in playful ways (the name of the school team is the Harpooners, and the central character is named Henry Scrimshander), but also in more subtle and resonant ways. It’s a story about the heroic ambitions—not to say obsessions, although there are plenty of those—of ordinary people, and how those ambitions bring them to grief, but also somehow redeem them. Here, for example, is Henry Scrimshander, considering what condition his condition is in:

All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him... The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage; you watched the tape afterward and gained a little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything grew simpler, little by little. You ate the same food, woke up at the same time, wore the same clothes. Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts—whatever you didn’t need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever. He knew it sounded crazy when you put it like that. To want to be perfect. To want everything to be perfect. But now it felt like that was all he’d ever craved since he’d been born. Maybe it wasn’t even baseball that he loved but only this idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen. Could have made that happen. It sounded crazy, sure. But what did it mean if your deepest hope, the premise on which you’d based your whole life, sounded crazy as soon as you put it in words? It meant you were crazy.

The book does not limit itself to the realm of sport. It also considers, investigates, and in a sense interrogates other sorts of complicated dynamics in human relations, including not just the two most obvious, eros and thanatos, although both figure into the story, but the very act of writing itself: Here, for example, is (Westish College President) Guert Affenlight, looking back on his early ambitions to be a novelist, like his hero Herman Melville:

It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight’s mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him.

There’s a quote attributed to Dostoevsky that says “There are only two stories: a man leaves home, and a stranger comes to town.” He might have added a third, one which does not always happen but has an archetypal resonance when it does: the man finds his way back home. The Art of Fielding is that story. Among others. It’s a very deliberate, thoughtful, satisfying book.

And maybe this is that post as well.

Zentangle

So the other day I was in a meeting, and there was a series of ideas that were being tossed out in a sort of logical sequence. But what I found as I was listening was that each of those ideas was spinning off several other ideas in my head, which I was trying to follow as well, to the degree that that was possible each off into its own little rabbit hole into which it would disappear before I had fully grasped where it was going. While I sat there trying to keep one part of my mind aligned with the main thread of the discussion and more or less noting the other ideas popping up and skittering away, I was also doodling in my notebook, and what I was drawing on the page was actually more or less a loose schematic of the way my brain was processing the meeting. I put a series of little boxes representing the ideas, and then some zigzaggy lines coming off of each one representing the spinoffs. Then I colored in the background black so that the boxes and lines would be white on a black field:


That night, at home, I decided to put together a somewhat more composed and stylized version of the drawing. I've been working for several months on a series of small-format black and white abstract drawings (roughly 3"x5" on a 5" x 7" piece of paper). The challenge has been to try to invent a new geometry in each piece. Often I get the ideas for these more formal studies from things that spring up more or less at random when I'm in meetings, and that's what happened here. The resulting piece:


Then on Friday I was at a TEDx event at my school and a friend of mine was sitting behind me and looked over my shoulder and noticed another geometrical study taking shape on my notebook page. "Oh, do you do Zentangles?" she asked? I had no idea what she was talking about, but it turns out there's a whole subculture of obsessive geometrical doodlers of which I was unaware. In addition to the Zentangle web site there are about a bazillion videos on various techniques to create interesting-looking geometrical abstractions, including this one which illustrates the making of a circular "Zendala" or Zen mandala:



Cool stuff. Who knew?

Here You Start

Here you start here with this, keep working on this here and ah, that's done now how about this right next to that, work this angle, feather across to the corner, maybe a little darker something different here, maybe a borderline, okay, and now another another shape another texture another kind of line over here, moving in, moving out, moving around, but patiently (breath and line following the music as you focus down), this one light so this one darker here, okay work around the corner, and then swoop out over to the left and now there's field which wants to become... what? something you haven't done yet, the only rule, perhaps switch pens yes that will do, extending expanding exploring, moment to moment a world emerging from under to the point of the pen on the plane of the paper absent-minded, just one thing and then the next and the next until it's time to move on.

Somewhere Different Now

Now I don't mind saying, I believe in the waiting
In the visions of grandeur, and the random encounter
I'm not on fire, not burned out,
Just somewhere different now

- Tylan Greenstein (of Girlyman)

I'll tell you what, for the last three months I've been listening to essentially nothing else but Girlyman. I haven't gotten slammed quite so hard by a musical group since Counting Crows came out with August and Everything After in 1993. I've got about twenty of their songs on my iPod, and I've got a Girlyman station on Pandora, and my ears have not been so delectated in ever so long.

I've been in a different space with my artwork, too. Aside from doing whole series of Saturday morning encaustic panels of the kind I wrote about recently, I've been doing a set of sort of meticulous line drawings, using pen and ink on textured watercolor paper. I've been thinking a lot about Paul Klee's remark that "the essence of drawing is the line exploring space," and trying to explore drawing with that in mind. One implication of such a conception is that pre-planning is sort of against the rules. You proceed by putting the point of the pen down onto the paper and then pushing it forward according to whatever internal imperative presents itself as you proceed. The overall composition will ultimately be determined as a series of decisions made in process. In this way of working, it's important NOT to know where you're going. What you wind up with is something, well, different. Here's an example of one I've just completed:



The thing to see here (click on the picture for a larger view) is how each part is connected to the other through visual design logic which was arrived at in process, as opposed to being determined in advance. I started on the left, about a quarter of the way in, worked back to the left edge, and then added one section at a time, moving from left to right. I had two ideas in mind: first, to keep inventing new ways for the pen to work; and second, not to fall back on things I had already done before, either in this drawing or the ones I had done leading up to it. It goes back to Klee's dictum: "The essence of drawing is the line exploring space." I had that notion specifically in mind as I worked on this. It's really an incrementalist approach rooted in an act of faith in "the random encounter." This is a method of working I've been drawn to, both in writing and art, for some time now. It's a process I am using right now in the development of this post, which began at a point, with a quoted lyric, and is building itself around several related ideas which that lyric (as in many other Girlyman songs) both embodies and suggests.

I happened to run across a slide show on the subject of writing the other day and was arrested by this slide:



I can understand why people would be drawn to this way of thinking and working. It has a long history of pedagogy behind it, and it appears on the surface to be only common sense. But from the point of view I've been espousing today, it looks, as a matter of practicality and productivity, entirely backwards. Who sits down to ask herself, "What do I want my writing to do? Today I think I'll protest an injustice. No, on second thought, I think I'll describe nature's beauty." I can't work that way. I wouldn't WANT to work that way. I don't know any working writers who work that way.

What I would rather do, what I find both more enjoyable and ultimately more satisfying, is to sit down and write, and in the process of writing figure out what it is that I want to say. It's precisely because I don't know where I'm going that I find my way to places I would not have expected to get to. (I had a talk with Darin, a friend and colleague who is a musician, the other day, and he was saying his process of composition is much the same. It doesn't begin with a grand unifying vision; it begins with him _playing_ on the guitar, and then, when he finds a lick he likes, writing it down.) I'm not saying that that's the ONLY way to travel. Certainly there are some situations in which it is perhaps efficient to knock out a piece of writing (or a work of art, or a song) for a utilitarian purpose according to a predetermined plan. But where's the fun in that? And why is it that the narrow, un-playful vision of writing so dominates the experience of students in school? It's no wonder kids arrive at a spot where they think they are no good at writing, and claim that they hate to do it.

Another new space: I'm hip-deep in George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I've completed The Game of Thrones and am midway through A Clash of Kings. I'm reading in great hourlong gulps. I haven't been this drunk on words in a very long time. Martin is being compared, with ample justification, to J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K Rowling, Patrick O'Brian. (I'd add Dorothy Dunnett to the list, but nobody I know has read her, sad to say.) He's a fantasy writer for adults. His story, set in the fictional world of Westeros, is multifaceted and many-layered and character-driven and deeply satisfying right down the syllables themselves. Even purely descriptive passages having to do with food or dress have a kind of saturated richness:

Of food there was plenty. The war had not touched the fabled bounty of Highgarden. While singers sang and tumblers tumbled, they began with pears poached in wine, and went on to tiny savory fish rolled in salt and cooked crisp, and capons stuffed with onions and mushrooms. There were great loaves of brown bread, mounds of turnips and sweetcorn and pease, immense hams and roast geese and trenchers dripping full of venison stewed with beer and barley. For the sweet, Lord Caswell’s servants brought down trays of pastries from his castle kitchens, cream swans and spun-sugar unicorns, lemon cakes in the shape of roses, spiced honey biscuits and blackberry tarts, apple crisps and wheels of buttery cheese.

As a writer Martin is good with people, he's good with settings, he's got a great ear for dialogue. He works his characters into situations where they tear into each other with words as efficiently as they do with axes and swords. Although there's plenty of that going on as well. Anyway, the guy clearly loves telling tales, and he's very good at it. I'm glad to have found my way to his work.

Those of you who have been paying attention will, if you are still with me (bless you) may be moved at this point, to object that this post has evolved, or devolved, despite itself, into something that reads, in retrospect, suspiciously like a thesis essay, complete with a controlling theme and three concrete examples. And all I can say is, well, yes, that's how it turned out, because that's what it wanted to become. But it didn't start out that way. It's a happy little surprise, abounding, as life so often does, in irony: starting out somewhere different, and winding up at home.

E

Let’s begin with a letter. E, for example.
None commoner. For effort. For excellent.
For eerie, for Eeyore, for entrepreneurship.
Empathy. Electricity. Ecstasy. Twisted sister
to M and W. Bookshelves. Business end
of a pitchfork. Signifier of the virtual ( in -mail
and -tail, -cash and -zine.) Grade you get
when you’ve given up. Number 5.
Third prime. “Ay” to the Romans; Epsilon
to the Greeks. Third note in the C scale,
otherwise known as “mi.” Sound of the scream
that sticks in your mouth in a dream.
All of the above. None of the above.

Process Reflection:

I’ve been doing a little stint as a guest presenter in a summer school American Literature class, and I gave the students an assignment over the weekend: come up with a short piece of writing, in the neighborhood of one hundred words, that represents an attempt to use words carefully in a way that interests you. I shared with them the first in the sequence of the 30 posts on this blog that began in January of 2008 when I wrote 100 words a day for 30 days. That got me thinking of trying it again. This is the result. I opened up the file and had no idea what I would write about, so I just started typing, “Let’s begin with a letter.” The rest sort of wrote itself, as I looked at the letter “E” and kept turning it over in my mind, looking for words. Most of the work was in placing and re-placing sequences of words, tightening the phrasing, and adjusting the line breaks as I went along. I owe something here to Charles Simic for his “Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand.” Nothing too serious, just an entertainment.