The Long Goodbye

In preparation for my retirement in January, I've been going through my books and papers and files and making a preliminary selection of what I might want to keep and take with me, and what I want to give away or (gulp) throw out. Doing this sorting a little at a time has been a way of gradually preparing myself for the departure, and has also given me the chance to look back over what has been accumulated and think about what it all adds up to. 

Many years ago, when I was first teaching middle school English in Massachusetts, I had a file folder in which I put photocopies of poems that I ran across that I thought might work in class. Over the year the file grew fatter and I had to break it down into sub-files, which I organized alphabetically by author, eventually winding up with a folder for pretty much every letter of the alphabet. Today I went through files A-F and began the process of culling. Some poems have become old favorites, ones I've used over and over again in class to illustrate an idea, a way of thinking, or a strategic approach to the problem of what to do when facing a blank page. Others, having been used once, have sat in the folder for years. A lot of those wound up in the recycle bin today, and there will be more joining them as I work through the files for G-Z in the days ahead. 

It's a slow process, because it's not just a matter of sorting. It involves at least skimming, and in many cases re-reading with some care, in order to determine why I kept the poem in the first place, and whether it is something that I might conceivably want to use this fall in class, or keep for my own pleasure or instruction in the future. Some of the best poems resist skimming, they draw you down onto the page and into the writer's stream of thought; they invite you in and make you want to stay. So in some ways it's been hard, a process you can't rush.

Even harder has been the need to go through my artwork, much of which I have had stored in cabinets in my office at work, and decide what I want to bring with me, and what I want to let go, either by giving it away, if there are takers, or by tossing it into the dumpster, which is what I did today with about a dozen pieces. On the one hand I really didn't want to toss them. On the other hand, there are way too many for me to take with me—several hundred at least—and what would I do with them anyway once I get to California? There isn't much of an audience for the kind of work that I do, which is mostly abstract collage of one kind or another. Of the limited number of people who do have even a passing interest in any kind of art whatsoever, there are only a very few who would even bother to look at the work that I do, and fewer who would find it interesting. Of that number, those who would go one step further and say, "Yes, that's something I would like to own" is even smaller. And of those, probably not a single soul is left who would be inclined, even if I were to gift a particular piece, to fork over the outrageous amount of money people are charging in order to get the gift framed and ready for hanging. (I recently took a small collage I had purchased from Crystal Neubauer, whose work I greatly admire, to a local frame shop, and the cost of the frame exceeded the cost of the artwork by a factor of three. I don't begrudge the expense. But I can see why others might.)

So, on the one hand, I can't take it with me and I may not be able to give it away. On the other hand, every single one of the pieces I have, even the ones that others would think are a joke, has an autobiography, an evolutionary history, a link to a time and place and a mode of thought that means something to me. Putting those pieces in the dumpster today felt like some kind of ritual of self-abnegation, the cutting of one kind of emotional bond as a rehearsal for the other bonds that will inevitably have to be severed, in January for sure, and then again in the not unforeseeable future. Part sobering, part liberating, part ominous, part joyful.

I'm not complaining. I get it. If there's one thing I've learned about art as a discipline, it's that doing the artwork is its own reward. The time I spend working on something I'm interested in working on is the best part of the whole enterprise. Yeah, I've sold some things over the last few years. And I've also given some away to friends who have taken an interest. There's no realistic scenario I can imagine where a market for my work might emerge that would allow me to sell enough to able to pay for my materials, much less my time. Perhaps once I'm retired I can build a little web site or arrange for a page on Etsy or something. But none of that really drives me. I'm not ambitious in that way. I just like making art, even if eventually it has to be thrown away. That's the way it is.

Now I know that among the (in all likelihood purely hypothetical) readers of this post, a certain percentage of you are probably gnashing your teeth and asking what used to be called, in simpler times, the $64,000 question: given the number of things that need to be done in this world, would you choose to spend your time puttering around and producing work which by your own admission you can't even give away? Why don't you find something to do that you're actually good at, something that creates value in the world, something that has the potential to do good for others?

That's a really good question. I've got some answers, which may or may not satisfy. I may tackle some of them tomorrow. We'll see.

Circuitry

I

Tissue, earphones, ink and brush, notebook, dictionary,
eyeglass case, face cream, wallet, digital recorder.

II

Dining room table, four chairs.
  
III

Two lemons, sweet potato, fan, pencil box, power cords,
electric stove, paper towels, bananas, small painting of mangos,
handmade teacup (Rengetsu), chrome teapot, three knives,
fork, scissors. Dishrack with dishes. Washcloth. Sink and faucet.
Collage: Everyday Transcendence. Detergent, hand soap, toaster,
cutting boards. Dishwasher. Cabinets. Refrigerator. Calendar, pictures.

IV

Three fishprints on the wall. Switch plate.

IV

Scroll: Poem by Li Po. Sword and Bo in black lacquer rack.
Butsudan. Chest. Candle, incense box, greens.

V

Bookcases lined with books. Leitner, Kaven. Occasional chairs
(two). Window, drapes open: view of houses on Round Top.

VI

Television, remote. Two collages: Giglio and Tidwell.

VII

Louvred windows opening on lanai. Solar panels on Thurston.

VIII

Sofa, two extra pillows.

IX

Laptop. Fingers. MS Word, Document 2. A list: What I see.

X

Why? An exercise. Floor. Walls. Breath. Air. Murmur of cars
on Punahou Street. Coming down. Learning to be at home again.

Reading Can Kill You

I spent 16 hours in transit from Florida to Hawaii today, so my brain is a little closed down this evening. Becca sent this along yesterday and I liked it a lot. It is by Barbara Hamby and was published in the Summer 2013 Southern Review. I thought I'd share it as my not-so-labor-intensive post for the day.



Reading Can Kill You

My husband and I are at a restaurant with another couple,
         and after a few drinks the other man and I are talking
about how much we love The Master and Margarita,
         a novel we've both read many times in different translations,
but it soon becomes apparent his wife and my husband are stewing,
         as if Bob and I had discovered we had a former lover
in common, let's say a woman, and we were more passionate
         about her than our spouses because she was Russian,
and instead of no, she said nyet, which sounds like a sexier yes,
         and yes was da, which is so much more yes than yes
but with a twinge of nyet, and it was winter, a freezing Siberian
         blizzard with days that began at ten and ended at two,
and we sat in the dark next to the blazing enamel stove
         and for breakfast drank tea from the samovar sweetened
with jam and talked about Gogol's sentences and Mandelstam's
         despair, and then at night it would be love and vodka,
so when Satan showed up with his entourage, we were borne along
         on his cloud of smoke, joining his diabolical magic show,
flinging rubles into paradise, cuddling at night with his giant cat,
         watching the dawn rise, reciting Pushkin and Akhmatova,
thrilling to Mayakovsky's rants, and in the white nights of summer
         we became poetry, every breath an iamb, our cries of ecstasy
the nyet that is da, and I can see why my husband is silent and sulky,
         so I return to our table, sip my Sancerre, talk about Paris,
because all four can agree we'd rather be lost in that city
         than be found in another, and the steppes recede,
but in the middle of my oysters I think of my great-grandfather,
         who worked in the mines of Kentucky, and one night
was supposed to be watching the furnace, but he was reading,
         and the furnace exploded, killing him, which led my mother
to threaten that all my reading would destroy me, too, and I pictured
         my teenaged self in that dank little room, the fire roaring,
reading a newspaper, a union tract, "Kubla Khan," or maybe
         Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, whose heroine,
Bathsheba Everdene, was so rich and beautiful and stupid
         I could hardly be blamed for not wanting to be anyone but her. 

Still Testy

(Further thoughts on testing.)

Norman Augustine argues (see previous post) that testing has a role to play in "motivating and guiding students and teachers." He seems to be assuming that the existence of the test somehow supplies motivation where it might otherwise be lacking. I don't buy it. In 43 years of teaching, I've had my fair share of students who had issues with motivation. I don't recall that any of them magically became more motivated upon hearing the magic words "This is important because it's going to be on the test."

Students are not generally any less motivated than any other subgroup of the human species. If anything, the opposite is true. Most students have not yet arrived at the levels of discouragement, cynicism, and negativity that characterize a large proportion of the the adult population.  (Don't believe that adults are like that? Pick up a paper. Any paper. Try look.)

Students, unlike many adults, still have the capacity to care, often passionately, and are often ferociously interested in what they care about. In my experience, when students lack motivation it's because they cannot see any clear connection between those things they do care about and the things that they are told they must learn in school. That's the problem with the Common Core Standards, and other such laundry lists. As soon as you tell a student "This is what you must learn," you've done two things. First of all, you've lied to them outright. There is not a single thing I can think of that would qualify as a deficit so dire as to make a happy adult life unsupportable. Perhaps, once upon a time, a stronger argument could be made that you needed to learn something in school, because you'd never learn it anywhere else. But in today's world, even if I can't read, or can't add, or can't solve a quadratic equation, or can't recite the causes of the civil war, I can get ready access to anything I might need to know about those things on the internet in a form that I can understand. Furthermore, I now can leverage whatever I do know and can do much more easily than ever before into a business or a career, provided I have the inclination and the determination to do so.

Which is where the second thing comes in. As soon as you tell a student "This is what you must learn," you've sent a very strong message that decisions about what is important and what is worth knowing come from outside, and that the student's own sense of what might be worth learning or doing is irrelevant. By supplying the answers about what is important, you are actively undercutting the likelihood that the student will ask his/her own questions about what is important. The irony is that this approach doesn't work for anybody. The students who hear it and believe it learn that all they really need to do is just follow somebody else's directions and they'll be good to go. Which is simply untrue (For a forceful argument about why it is not true, and examples of how the untruth of it plays out in mathematics, see Paul Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament.) And the students who hear it and don't believe it are forced to spend a ton of time doing work in which they have no interest, learning material that they in fact do not NEED to know, in preparation for batteries of tests that people like Norman Augustine have decided will "motivate" them. Then when they fail to perform well on the tests, as so many of them will, the Norman Augustines of the world will call for longer school days and a longer school year and and higher standards and more rigorous tests. Doing more of the same thing you were doing before and expecting a different result: that's an operational definition of insanity.

So what's the solution? Should we just throw up our hands and let people do whatever they want? No, not exactly. But I would argue (and have argued, as far as seven years ago), that a good place to start is by asking the students themselves what they care about, what they think they can already do well, and what they want to learn. And once we find out what that is, we can try to help them do THAT, and help them put the work they choose to do in front of others—their peers, their families, their communities—who are in a position to give them feedback that will actually matter to them. It's not clean. It's not easy. And it's not cheap. But it works.

Getting Testy

There's an op-ed column in the Tampa Bay Times in which Norman Augustine of the Washington post  attempts to make the case that the critics of standardized testing "fail to grasp testing's valuable role in motivating and guiding students and teachers." Augustine, who apparently took his high school instruction in essay writing very seriously, argues that opponents of testing offer three (count 'em, three) "basic arguments," which he serially refutes:

• that exams detract from the larger goals of education by encouraging teachers to "teach the test."
• that standardized tests drive educators to cheat
• that high-stakes testing places too much pressure on students.

I'll leave it up to you, gentle reader, to determine whether his refutations of these three arguments are convincing. The point I would like to make is that the strongest case against standardized testing does not seem to have occurred to him. He has, like so many dutiful high school students before him, come up with three talking points which happen to be the ones that sprang to mind when he got started. Either it never occurred to him to ask whether there might be more, or he just cherry-picked the ones that suited his purpose and ignored the rest. Welcome to a very large club, Norman. That's how we teach students to write and think; so that's the way we should write and think. Right? Well, no, I think not.

The problem with testing is not that teachers feel obliged to teach to the test, although, in my experience, they most often do. (I taught pre-AP and AP English for years and often found myself in the position of having to make a tough call as to whether we would have time to pursue some interesting line of thought initiated by the students or allow for a project to develop around a generative idea, or whether—knowing that their performance, my performance, the department's the school's performance, the town's performance, and the state's performance would be judged by the test results—we really had to get back to preparing them for what was going to be on the test. I often found myself saying, that's really a good idea, but we have to get back to the work at hand.) Nor is the problem primarily that testing pressures create conditions where educators—knowing that their performance, the department's the school's performance, the town's performance, and the state's performance will be judged by the test results—are tempted to fudge the results. You can pick up the paper almost any day of the week and see irrefutable evidence that that is true. It's hardly surprising. It's completely predictable. But it's not the real problem. Nor is the problem of pressure. Students, teachers, parents, businesspeople: we're all under pressure of some kind all of the time. That is, more often than not, a good thing. Pressure is what makes some things more urgent than others. Part of learning to be an adult is learning how to respond to pressure. So deal with it.

No. The REAL problem with testing is that the tests that we have available are reductive in the extreme. They measure a very small subset of what it is that good teachers try to teacher and good students try to learn. They measure what is measurable. The omnipresence of multiple-choice testing as the method of choice in assessment has nothing to do with how effective the tests are. It has everything to with the fact that they are easy to administer, easy to grade, and easy to compare. And cheap. They count what can be cheaply counted. And as no less a luminary than Albert Einstein—not a very good test-taker himself, as you may remember—has pointed out, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." 

What do I really want my students to learn? I want them to learn to ask good questions. I want them to learn to be creative problem solvers. I want them to be good at face-to-face communication and collaboration. I want them to have enthusiasms. I want them to be good self-advocates. I want them to be thoughtful and reflective and compassionate. I want them to have some sense of what they value and what purposes they would like to have their life serve. I want them to read well, write well, and think well. And so on. If they manage to learn those things, then I am very confident they will be engaged, productive, lifelong learners able to master any granular subject-area content they encounter. The problem is, not one of those things is easily measurable, and certainly not by any multiple choice instrument known to man. 

Would it be possible to devise assessments that honor those educational goals? Sure. But those assessments are performance driven, project-based, interpersonal, and only really effective or fair at the moment of readiness, which may or may not be at the end of the quarter or the semester or the year. And they take time, a lot of time. They're thought- and emotion- and labor-intensive, both for the tester and the testee.  I'd like to see some of the pundits and legislators who wax so righteously indignant about falling standards volunteering more (any) of their time to participate personally in the kinds of project-based assessments discussed in books like Ron Berger's An Ethic of Excellence.

I'm not against tests per se. I'm against making tests the final measure of accomplishment. What we choose sends a message to students about what we care about. Do we really care only about what students can do on a Scantron? Is that what the American educational system now boils down to?

Taxonomics

There's a pretty cool resource on Tumblr called Explore which features daily posts on all kinds of subjects having to do with science, technology, art, design, history, literature, creativity, innovation, thought, opinion, and other such stimuli for the mind. Today they posted a listing I've seen a couple of times before, one that always cracks me up and seems like it might serve as a jumping-off point for a certain kind of thinking-writing experience in the classroom. I've not used it before, but I am adding to my list for the fall. It's the Celestial Emporium of Knowledge from Jorge Luis Borges's 1942 short story "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins":

Animals are classified as follows:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Preliminary Remarks:

• This list lacks the logical structure one would normally expect or demand from a "classification." Normally, we would expect that the categories would be divided in such a way as to account for all animals, include nothing that is not an animal, but make distinctions between them that would put them in sections that do not overlap. In other words, leave nothing out, include nothing that does not belong, and count nothing twice.

• This list doesn't even pretend to follow the expected rules. Instead, it begins with a randomness that is accelerated as we move down through the list, the only apparent criterion being that each one should be even more surprising and interesting than the next.

• There are fourteen items in the list.

• The list is playful in a way that evokes playfulness: at least it does in me. This looks like fun. I'd like to play.

Possible self- (or classroom) assignments:

• Assume that the list is incomplete. Write the next ______ items in the list, keeping consistent as best you can with your spirit of what has gone before.
• Taking this list as flawed, draw up a better list, whatever better might mean to you.
• Write another list of about the same length that begins with the line "____________ are classified as follows:"
• Take any one of the items in the list and write a poem, story, or vignette in which one of these animals (for example, an animal that has just broken a flower vase) appears.
• Brainstorm another list on any topic that interests you, with an original logic of its own.

Regimentation

Okay, here I am on Saturday night, writing at this point for no real reason other than I've posted something eleven days in a row and having gotten this far I don't want to break the string. It's actually not a bad reason, and highlights the importance of establishing a regular working rhythm, even when it may not be immediately clear what the nature of the work will turn out to be. I am actually less interested at this point in what it turns out to be on any particular occasion than in setting in place a set of rhythms, behaviors, and habits that will foster the production of work of some kind getting done; my grounding assumption is that if I keep at it from time to time something surprising and interesting will show up. That's proven to be true in the past.

It's not unlike going on a diet, another set of behaviors and habits I'm attempting, after some gentle chastisement from Dr. Houk last week, to adopt. If I diet today and binge tomorrow, I'm not gonna lose weight, or even maintain the weight I carry now. I have to establish a set of parameters and stick it for as long as is necessary, which may turn out to be the entire rest of my life. Another truth, inconvenient thought it may be, proven true from my own experience. The operative question becomes, do I have the self-discipline needed to stick with it? Am I that kind of person? Well, sure I am. Except, of course, when I'm not.

So there's the writing regimen, the eating regimen, the exercise regimen, the art regimen (currently suspended), the work regimen, the prayer regimen, the sleep regimen. And then there's the likelihood that somewhere along the line all this regimentation is not going to sit well with that other part of my brain that resists robotization, that wants to break out once a while, that wonders, in the midst of all the earnestness and self-discipline and willed productivity, the fun is. I'm writing, but hey, I'm on vacation. I'm dieting, but hey, what's one cookie, more or less, going to matter? I need to sleep regular hours, but there's a poker game tomorrow night. If you want to play, you have to pay. Those are the rules.

So consider this my Letter from the Land of Dutifulness. Today I've walked, I've eaten in moderation, I've written. I haven't fallen off the wagon. Yet. Tomorrow is another day.

A is for Ox

Was walking this afternoon and discovered an old-school, high-shelved, narrow-aisled, used bookstore in the center of town. I walked around for a while and pulled a few books off the shelves from time to time. Found one I had not seen before in the art section entitled "A is For Ox," by David Goldman (Graphison, 1987) which turns out to be a profusely illustrated history of letters and typography. On the inside cover paper were these lines from Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Typography":

...the letter
was the mother
of the new banners;
the letters
begot
the terrestrial
stars
and the song the ardent hymn
that unites
peoples;
from
one
letter
added
to another
letter
and another,
from people to people went bearing
its sonorous authority,
and welling in the throats of men
it imposed the the clarity of the song...

There's something odd in the syntax toward the end (I'm not sure what the antecedent for "it" is in the last line, for example; might be a wrinkle in the translation, nor, more significantly, the subject of the verb "went"); but still, I liked it (the poem - especially the part about how the letters begot the terrestrial stars, which you have to admit is an original thought) and bought it (the book), as a souvenir and a spur to further investigations.

The title? Turns out the Hebrew word aleph, which meant ox, and being that oxen were often used as a means of exchange, there was a little graphic of an oxhead that eventually got simplified and turned into the letter we now know as "A." You learn something every day.

One Definition...

On the road today. Here's something pulled from the slipstream:

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being – not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses – but a human being, we call it poetry.

- Ted Hughes

Via 3wings

Still Life

One of the things that has happened during the several years now that I've been following various people with an interest in art on Tumblr is that I've become much more broadly aware of and attentive to still life as an artistic subgenre.

There's a tumblr blog called Still Life Quick Heart which consists entirely of still life postings. Here's one by an artist named Petra Reece that hit my dashboard today:

In any painting, abstract or representational, in doesn't matter, there are a limited number of variables to work with. You've basically got a blank space, a rectangle, and you need to put paint on it. Before or while doing so, you need to make some decisions about shapes, some decisions about color, some decisions relative proportions of light and dark, some decisions about texture and the extent to which the paint is recognizable as paint, or becomes a vehicle of some other content that so fully reaches the eye that the is essentially invisible. This painting is way over to the right on that scale. By way of contrast, this one, by Cezanne is further over to the left:

Cezanne is not trying to disguise the fact of the paint, on the contrary, he's left the brush strokes visible and rendered the whole thing in such a way that the handling of the paint is as much a part what is appealing about the picture as the three apples. 

Taking it one step further, Yuri Konstantinov puts together what at first glance looks like it might be an abstract, except that in the center the colors resolve somewhat gesturally into a tabletop, some roses, a window.

Then, way over on the left, you can find something like Nancy Gruskin's "Tablescape," which comes across mostly as a arrangement of pigment on a plane and only secondarily as a plate and a pear on a table.

I don't have a preference. I like all of 'em. But I'm intrigued by the various ways that individual artists answer the challenge of making a still life that makes us want to keep looking at it.

Flight Plan

So, yesterday. The crow thing. Goes back a ways, lot of angles. Standing at a kiosk at Tower Records in Cambridge (remember them?) one Saturday afternoon in 1993 sampling one track after another on August and Everything After, each one as good or better than the last. Further back, going out in the fields in Hillsdale at age thirteen with my .22-.410 over-and-under thinking maybe to shoot a crow. As if. First of all, they've got amazing eyesight. They have sentries posted, and they talk to one another. Raise a gun, raise your arm so it looks like it might be a gun, and they're in flight and out of range before you get a bead. Impressive. And curious, too, how they evolved the communal brain thing. Then there's the mythology angle. Familiars. Messengers. Harbingers of doom, croaking in a language no one understands. All those ravens bearing messages back and forth across Westeros.

Six years ago now—crows fly, time flies—I wrote a post about a poem: Grace Butcher's Crow is Walking, one I sometimes ask a new group of students to read and reflect upon, often as preliminary step toward Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Once I got going with Pinterest, it occurred to me to look and see if there were any pictures of crows or ravens out there. Little did I know. The thing about Pinterest? If you can conceive of it, there are people out there—probably a lot of people out there—who have boards devoted to it. So I started following some of those boards and accumulating my own little blackbird archive. Which is where the pictures from yesterday's post came from. Something different. A little exercise in juxtaposition.

What first got my attention with Counting Crows was the way their lyrics often broke free of literal sense in ways that felt both exact and exhilarating. When I think of heaven... I think of flying down into a sea of pins and feathers and all other instruments of faith and sex and God in the belly of a black winged bird. Yes. Yes. God, yes.

Counting Crows

When I think of heaven
Deliver me in a black-winged bird
I think of flying down into a sea of pins and feathers
And all other instruments of faith and sex and God
In the belly of a black-winged bird...

One for Sorrow

Two for Joy

Three for Girls

Four for Boys

Five for Silver

Six for Gold

Seven for a Secret Never to Be Told

There's a bird that nests inside you
Sleeping underneath your skin
When you open up your wings to speak
I wish you'd let me in

Lyrics from Counting Crows, August and Everything After
Pictures via Pinterest

Collage and Composition

Having written yesterday about the Tao Te Ching and the inadequacy of linear thinking in general and words in particular in helping us to process and understand reality, I was thinking this morning again about how collage works as a medium, how the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated elements can create in-between spaces that are suggestive and generative.

By way of illustration, here's a collage I put together last night:

The elements of this collage are mostly recycled from old books. The exceptions are the stamp, the target, and the two pieces of red paper which happened to be on my desk as I was working on this. I had no idea in mind as I was putting it together. I would not say that I have an idea in mind now that it's finished, either, although there are certainly several kinds of logic at work: a logic of materials, a logic of method, a logic of composition, a logic of color. That much said, there's also a randomness about collage that I like. Max Ernst said, "Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them." I've spent hundreds of hours over the last few years both making collages and observing and archiving digitally the collages of others. I've also thought a lot about the connections between the compositional processes of collage and the compositional processes of certain kinds of writing. 

I have sometimes asked my students to do an exercise where they are asked to attempt to write a page of prose that makes no sense at all. (It's an exercise I return to frequently myself because the results are almost always interesting in unpredictable ways.) The thing is, it's a lot harder to do than you might think. Our brains are wired in a particular way, and even when we consciously attempt to undercut the literal sense of what we are writing, as for example John Ashbery often does to brilliant effect, our brains do not toss up entirely random alternatives; there always seems to be some sort of shadow logic at work. The ultimate point of an exercise like this, of course, is not to write nonsense, but rather to write in a way that offers the promise of pleasant surprises and at least the possibility of insight. It is, or ought to be, a playful, exploratory process. It is not helpful to have too clear of an idea in mind at the start. Robert Rauschenberg: "I'm opposed to the whole idea of conception-execution—of getting and idea for a picture and then carrying it out. I've always felt as though, whatever I've used and whatever I've done, the method was always closer to a collaboration with materials than to any kind of manipulation and control.

Another example. This morning, as all of this was taking shape in my mind, I sat down to write in my commonplace book as I generally do on weekend mornings, and so with the intention of having something to share here, I began writing with the intention of Not Making Sense:

If only because lasting locks one (you)
Down and what if keeps you (us) up—
rock, paper, scissors too simple a circle,
what about teapot or parrot or ocean?—
so yes an unfolding or perhaps a flight,
hands out front, tentacular antennae,
the possible check by jowl with oblivion
or worse (how foolish to expect other
wisdom), we (all) must needs from time
at least to time try to fly (unfolding)
against the grain, paste purple over green,
see what might be seen (harpoon, flower,
cube, plane) arrive again (surprised?)
where we have been but not the same.

I had come up with the first four words (if only because lasting) while I was doing my morning stretching and was trying to come up with a sequence of words that would be appropriately incoherent. The word "locks" suggested itself mostly because I was thinking of using some element of sound correspondence, in this case the L sound, to bind the words moving forward. As I continued to write, I was pleasantly aware of the dynamic tension between my own self-assigned task to avoid making sense, and the compositional imperative to make the whole hold together. Somewhere around line three several things became apparent: first, that there was in fact an unanticipated logic emerging that it might be fun to play with; second, that it had begun to feel like a sort of sonnet, which then gave me several constraints to work against: the length of the line, and the length (14 lines) of the poem; third, that there was another game that wanted to be played having to do with parenthetical interpolations of a certain sort. Alert readers may have also noticed that some of the elements of last night's collage also leaked, not entirely accidentally, into the poem, which, as it turns out, makes more compactly and perhaps more obliquely much the same case that I have been making in this post: sometimes you just need to put one thing next to another, and then another thing after that, and see what happens.

(4) The Way

On December 31 of last year I began what I had intended to be a series of posts on the books on My Ideal Bookshelf, an idea which I borrowed from the book of that name which I was given as a Christmas present. I completed three posts in that series, shifted gears for a couple of more posts, and then dropped out of the writing life for a while. Now that I'm back, I'd like to pick up the thread with this post, number four in the series.

My mother was born a Methodist. In order to be allowed to marry my father, she was required to convert to Catholicism, and to promise to raise her children in the Catholic faith. This despite the fact that my father was in fact a non-practicing Catholic, who spent Sunday mornings at home while the family went to mass. By the time I had reached what the church referred to as the age of reason (age seven), I had been made to commit to memory the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Apostles Creed, the Salve Regina ("Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our Life, our Sweetness, and our Hope..."), and I had to recite them out loud to my mother each evening. I knew these prayers by heart before I had any real notion of what the words might mean. From third to fifth grade I attended a Catholic School administered by the Sisters of Mercy, and received further detailed instruction in the finer points of Catholic doctrine. I knew the ten commandments, I knew the difference between mortal sin and venial sin, and my imagination had been furnished with the topology of the afterlife - heaven, hell, purgatory, and limbo - and the angelic denizens thereof: on the good side the cherubim, the seraphim, the thrones, the dominations, and on the Other Side Satan and his minions. After a brief respite in a public junior high school, I spent four years in Catholic High Schools (two with the Benedictines and two with the Jesuits) and enrolled in 1965 at Fairfield University, a Jesuit college.

By the time I started college I had what I considered to be more than adequate reason to be skeptical of the teachings which had been impressed upon my brain. I remember taking a course in high school on Jewish theology, taught by a rabbi, and being impressed by the fact that there was in fact at least one alternative Vision of Truth. I also remember reading several books about Buddhism while in high school, and writing what I think now was perhaps an overly academic paper about the origins of the Mahayana and Hinayana traditions.

So it was maybe not so surprising that during my sophomore year at Fairfield, having declared myself as a philosophy major, I signed up for a course in Oriental Philosophy. The course was taught by a first-year teacher named Lik Kuen Tong. Dr. Tong turned out to be one of the most influential teachers I had at Fairfield, a brilliant mind and brilliant lecturer. Last I heard he was still teaching at Fairfield. Anyway, the course began with a survey of the core texts of oriental philosophy, which necessarily included Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching. I do not think I can adequately convey how completely that book, in the terminology of the era, blew my mind.

Open to page one, and what do you see? The first four lines:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Hold on! That's it? That's the way things are? The whole idea of naming, of wrapping reality up in words, is erroneous from the start? It was like, well, pick your metaphor. A lightning bolt. Scales falling from my eyes. A whole new ball game. I had a new way of coming to grips with the existential questions: What kind of world is this? How should we live in it? In place of the view of the world I had inherited, and which I had assumed was more or less universal, there was suddenly an alternative, one that immediately resonated with me and felt closer to my intuitive sense of the ways things must actually be.

Taoism has a very simple (which is not the same as simplistic) view of the nature of the world. The Tao, or the way, is a process, a flow, a stream of karmically freighted events. One attempt either to live one's life in harmony with that flow, or to try to change its direction, an enterprise which is fraught with all sorts of dangers. One of the core concepts of Taoism is wu-wei, which can mean emptiness on the one hand or non-action on the other. Much of the Tao Te Ching is devoted to giving counsel about how it is just as important, in some situations at least, NOT to act as it is to act:

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.
...The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it... (29)

or

The softest thing in the universe
Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
That without substance can enter where there is no room.
Hence I know the value of non-action.
Teaching without words and work without doing
Are understood by very few. (43)

or

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
The world is ruled by letting things take their course.
It cannot be ruled by interfering. (48)

What I've started to sketch out here is the tip of a very large iceberg indeed. The Tao Te Ching is a book I still go back to from time to time when I feel the need to reflect and center myself. The teachings of Lao Tsu had an enormous and liberating effect on my own thinking as a young man, and have helped to shape, in ways that are in some cases obvious and in others quiet subtle, both my personal philosophy and my pedagogical philosophy as I have gotten older.

(Numbers in parentheses above are references to the numbered poems in the Tao Te Ching. The translation is by Jane English and Gia-Fu Feng.)

Transatlantic

I've been having a harder time of late, for some reason, finding things that I really want to read. In the last six months, while I've been waiting for George R.R. Martin to get around to finishing book six, I've started way more books than I've finished. So I was happy to find, about a month ago, that Colum McCann had a new novel out. From reading Let the Great World Spin I knew him to be a writer of formidable gifts, and so when I saw Transatlantic at the local B&N I snapped it up.

Transatlantic comes at you in two parts. Book One weaves together three stories based on actual public events: the first transatlantic plane flight from Newfoundland to Ireland by Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown in 1919; Frederick Douglass's extended visit to Ireland in 1845 and '46; and the 1998 peace negotiations brokered between the Irish and the British by American Senator George Mitchell in 1998. McCann imagines his way into the minds and lives of each of the public figures in ways that are informative, entertaining, and entirely convincing.

Given that the events seem to connected only by virtue of the fact that they really took place, in Ireland, the reader is led to wonder, where are we going with this? McCann raises that question in order to be able answer it in Book Two, which focuses on the decidedly non-public but very clearly connected lives of four generations of one family of Irish women, who appear as very minor and apparently unconnected figures in Book One, but whose stories, as they emerge in Book One, have every bit as much drama and weight and resonance as the lives of the more famous people who have gone down in the historical record. In this sense, the book is a work of excavation, of correction, of restitution, paying homage to the lives of ordinary people who turn out to be not so ordinary after all. It's a book that honors the dedication and bravery and capabilities of women who play out the drama of their lives with little hope or expectation of notice or acknowledgement by those in charge of keeping the historical record.

Along the way there is also pleasure to be taken in some remarkable writing. Here, for example, is a passage describing the arrival in New York City of Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who has been inspired by the visit of Frederick Douglass (in ways he had not intended and might not have wished for) to leave Ireland and seek the freedom in America that she senses she will never have at home. She's seventeen years old and has just spent eight weeks on the ocean:

New York appeared like a cough of blood. The sun was going down behind the warehouses and tall buildings. She saw men on the wharfside in the ruin of themselves. A man barked questions. Name. Age. Birthplace. Speak up, he said. Speak up, goddammit. She was sprayed with lice powder and allowed entry. Lily jostled her way along the waterfront among the stevedores, police officers, beggars. A stench rose up from the oily harbor. The brokenness. The rawness. The filth. She had met only a few Americans in her life—all of them in Webb's house in Dublin—but in New York the men were adherent to shadows. The sloping Negroes were bent and huddled. What freedom, that? Some still wore the branding marks. Scars. Crutches. Slings. She passed by. The women along the docks—white women, black women, mulattos—were rude with lip paint. Their dresses rode above their ankles. It was not at all what Lily wanted the city to be. No fancy carriages pulled by drays. No men in bow ties. No thumping speeches along the waterfront. Just the filthy Irish calling out to her in all manner of disdain. And the silent Germans. The skulking Italians. She wandered amongst them in a haze. Children in rags of unbleached cotton. Dogs on the corner. A mob of pigeons descended from the sky. She moved away from the cries of teamsters and the cadenced call of peddlers. Pulled her shawl around her shoulders. Her heart shuddered in her thin dress. She walked the streets, terrified of thieves. Her shoes were filthy with human waste. She clutched her bonnet tight. Rain fell. Her feet blistered. The streets were a fever. Brick upon brick. Voice upon voice. She passed dimly in lit lofts where women sat sewing. Men in top hats stood in doorways of dry-goods stores. Boys on their knees set cobblestones. A fat man wound a music box. A young girl made paper cutouts. She hurried on. A rat brazened past her on the pavement. She slept in a hotel on Fourth Avenue where the bedbugs concealed themselves beneath a flap of wallpaper. She woke, her first morning in America, to the scream of a horse being beaten with a truncheon outside her window. (163)

It would be a day's work to enumerate the various ways in which this language works to bring Lily and the world she has found herself in alive in our minds. But just for starters, I note the punchy, abbreviated syntax, the density and variety and authority of the imagery, and the way McCann conveys the movement of Lily's thoughts at the same time that we follow the movement of her body.

Like I said, I've been having trouble finishing books. I didn't have any trouble finishing this one.

Little Enough

Ah, Thursday. The sun shining
on the leaves of the trees outside
my door, the hum of the AC,
the splashes and shrieks of
tweener girls in the pool across
the way.  A perfect day
for writing a poem, for floating
an idea out into the void, for
figuring out first this, then what
comes next. Stand up or stay
seated? Putter or grind? Stay
or go. Never mind; no matter.
Enough to be here. Today's mantra:
I have arrived. I am home.

Process Reflection: What you see. I had a few minutes waiting for Matt to come by, and was sitting at my computer, and the thought occurred to me that if I could write something that would make three days in a row for Throughlines. Just trying to keep the ball rolling. This morning my wife sent me a press release for Thich Nhat Hanh's upcoming world tour which contained a little explanation and endorsement of mindfulness:

Mindfulness is the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment. It is the continuous practice of touching life deeply in every moment of daily life. To be mindful is to be truly present with those around you and with what you are doing. We bring our body and mind into harmony while we wash the dishes, drive the car, take our morning cup of tea, or prepare for a retreat. 

“I have arrived. I am home” 

... It is the practice of dwelling happily in the present moment. We are no longer grasping at the future, regretting the past or being swept away by our feelings of despair or anger. We have arrived at our true home, our true self, no longer seeking to be something else.

So that's the occasion and the inspiration. No big thing. Only words.

Beginning

There was a poem in the April 29 New Yorker by Lia Purpura that I liked, clipped, pasted in my commonplace book, and subsequently committed to memory:

Beginning

In the beginning
in the list of begats
one begat
got forgot:
work begets work
(one poem
bears the next).
In other words,
once there was air,
a bird could be got.
Not taken.
Not kept.
But conjured up.

It was an easy poem to memorize because it's so tightly and logically organized. First there's the context, when (in the beginning) and where (in the list of begats), then the core assertion: they left out something important (one begat got forgot): "work begets work." As, for example, in the act of writing, one word leads to the next, or, as Purpura offers, "one poems bears the next."

My guess is that in the composition process, the assertion "work begets work," is what came first. It's the kind of phrase one might hear and then begin turning over in one's mind. Taken by itself, it's a truism. An apt and perhaps useful or insightful truism, but a truism nonetheless, and certainly not one that would initially suggest itself as being the basis for a poem, except for the way the syllables move. Work begets work. All that crackling. And then there at the center, the word "begets," with its procreative denotation, its biblical associations, and its (at this point latent) metaphorical power. Given the phrase "work begets work," I can easily imagine how a writer with a playful spirit, and alertness to sounds, and some knowledge of the bible might reverse-engineer the rest of the poem's first sentence.

What interests me more is what happens in the second act. "In other words..." is an interesting move, the move that says, essentially, let me clarify my assertion. Let me come at it from another direction. Let's try an example. "In other words..." what?

"Once there was air, a bird could be got." The key word in that sentence, the loaded word, the word in need of yet further clarification, is the word "got." It's an everyday word with a long history and a lot of possible meanings. (Its definition in my copy of the American Heritage Dictionary takes up sixteen column inches of very small print.)  The syntax demands that we read it in its old-fashioned sense as a past participle; current usage would be "gotten," but the two word sequence"be got" is clearly intended to echo (and extend) the one-word "begets" and "begets" we've already seen and heard.

So what does "got" mean here? Purpura anticipates the question, and answers it. Not "taken," which would be one plausible interpretation. Not "held," which would be another. But "conjured up," which comes as a surprise, right? Suddenly, unexpectedly, we're talking about conjuration, about magic. Given the existence of air, it is within the province of the imagination to conjure up birds.

So in one sense this is a poem about how poems get written, about how writing itself works. Given something, given anything—a phrase, a sequence of sounds, the existence of air—the imagination is capable of conjuring up whatever it might be that would follow. The poem is also an endorsement of the writerly work ethic, and a demonstration of how that effort sometimes pays off. The work itself is what generates the product, and the point of "conjured up," as I take it, is that at the end of the process there is at least the possibility of a discovery, the kind of surprise that poems can (and this poem does) deliver.

Another thing: I love the way the texture of the poem shifts with "conjured up." "Conjured" comes as a relief after all those buhs and guhs and tuhs. But different as it is, it's integrative as well: the "ur" sound occurs earlier in the poem in two places: "work begets work" and in "bird," both of which are relevant: the work leads to something being conjured, and what's conjured is the bird. So there's a kind of sonic binding going on, a kind of ur-sprache, an incantation.

Purpura is having a lot of fun with sounds, it's hard not to notice that. For example, the final "P" sound brings the poem to a satisfyingly clean conclusion. Having noticed that, having been prompted by the arrangement of sounds in the poem to pay attention to sounds, it's hard not to notice that that "P"sound occurs only once before, as in initial sound in the word "poem." The Poem begins the process of conjuring which in this case ends with the word uP. Sonic binding again. A beginning and an end. The poem enacts exactly what it is talking about. It begins in the mundane and ends in magic.

In another sense, this is also a poem about evolution, even cosmogenesis. Given the space-time continuum, shall we not expect energy and matter? Given planets, shall we not anticipate planetary creatures, real or imagined? Given ocean, shall we not expect fish? Given air, shall we not expect birds? Or in their absence, be inclined to imagine them?

This poem gets a lot of work done in a very short space. It's compact and clean and makes a point about the "work" of writing with elegance and grace. I'm considering asking my students to take a look at it this fall, see what they think.

Long Time Coming

Okay, so I get it, it's been six months. No excuses. I've been elsewhere, and more or less avoiding doing any writing at all. But I'm thinking it's time to climb back into the saddle. Why now? Well, my tenure as an administrator is coming to an end. As of the start of the school year, about a month from now, I'll be back in the classroom for one semester, at the end of which I will be retiring. One of the reasons I began this blog in the first place was to have a space to be reflective about my teaching practice. But then I wasn't teaching, and what I was doing did not often lend itself to public reflection and sharing. And then I got hijacked first by Tumblr, and then by Pinterest (links in the sidebar, I'm too lazy to work them in here) and a lot of the time I would have been spending writing was going there. And the things I did feel inclined to write about all wound up being Big Ambitious Projects that I never wound up following up on. So here's the new paradigm. Shorter. More informal. More regular. Try to work my way back into shape. No shortage of things to write about, once I get going. I'll be back tomorrow. Promise.