We read Whitman today and I breathed in some good air. We spoke, my students and I, of the yawp that Uncle Walt demands of himself, that we need to sound for ourselves. And I found myself being accused by the spotted hawk. Why, gentle reader? Because I am a gabber and a loiterer.
So was Whitman, so I suppose I am in good company. And he doesn't apologize for it, so I will not, in a vain attempt to stay even. Therefore, I feel released from my own contradictions. After all, it is legal to be many things. We are large, we contain multitudes, and if we do not, well then shame on us. I, for one, wish to carry with me the love of loafing poets shoulder to shoulder with a disgust for general laziness. Can those things calibrate?
How do we draw the line between multitasking and schizophrenia; between varied and fake; between many-layered and evermore-hollow? Do we need to? Across the pond, Wordsworth said that "we murder to dissect" and while I don't disagree with him (heck, I do it all the time!), I don't prefer it. I find no comfort in murdering or dissecting; I find comfort in the yawp.
It sounds like something Beowulf would have done quite well.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
He's being mean, right?
I must admit it, gentle reader; today I got frustrated. Apparently the third "chapter" of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a horrifying, violent, disturbing narrative of Jewel Bundren beating the crap out of a horse. Apparently he's not breaking the horse, but only hitting, punching, and verbally abusing it like so much meat.
Apparently.
Of twenty-six souls in the classroom, only one -- not myself -- had any experience around horses. Only one had actual experience in breaking horses. She spoke as an authority, describing that the process is a balance of forceful physicality and trust-building. I believed her. Her classmates did not. She must have been wrong, gentle reader, or at least that was the final position of the class.
Huh?
Why the reticence to concede? Why the obstinance, in the face of bald fact, to be right? Why the unwillingness to yield? It is not as if we are discussing personal religion or a political view. Nope. Horse-breaking. Something these students will never come within twenty miles of. Something these students will never again encounter in literature unless by accident. Something, I believe, not worth the effort of resistance. Yet we resisted.
Major premise: We fear what we don't know.
Minor premise: I don't know horse-breaking.
Conclusion: Horse-breaking scares the living crap out of me and I will reject all versions of it, both in print and on the big screen. Not until horse-breaking is presented as a rat in a cage stuck on my face will I ever concede the awful, honest truth:
I love it when Big Brother Horse-Breaks.
Apparently.
Of twenty-six souls in the classroom, only one -- not myself -- had any experience around horses. Only one had actual experience in breaking horses. She spoke as an authority, describing that the process is a balance of forceful physicality and trust-building. I believed her. Her classmates did not. She must have been wrong, gentle reader, or at least that was the final position of the class.
Huh?
Why the reticence to concede? Why the obstinance, in the face of bald fact, to be right? Why the unwillingness to yield? It is not as if we are discussing personal religion or a political view. Nope. Horse-breaking. Something these students will never come within twenty miles of. Something these students will never again encounter in literature unless by accident. Something, I believe, not worth the effort of resistance. Yet we resisted.
Major premise: We fear what we don't know.
Minor premise: I don't know horse-breaking.
Conclusion: Horse-breaking scares the living crap out of me and I will reject all versions of it, both in print and on the big screen. Not until horse-breaking is presented as a rat in a cage stuck on my face will I ever concede the awful, honest truth:
I love it when Big Brother Horse-Breaks.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Somewhere, but not here
"Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here."
My students and I ran into a log-jam yesterday trying to decipher Dostoevsky's paradoxical man is condemned to creativity rant in Part 1, chapter 9 of Notes from Underground. He claims that we all want to go "somewhere, but not here." It is our deeply rooted need to go that drives our creativity and our inability to define where that condemns us. We must graduate high school to get to college to get to the job to get to the house to get to the family to get to retirement to get to death. Whew. So what, you're saying. I can define my world. I know my destination(s). And I hear you loud and clear, gentle reader. But in many tries, my students could not, and I was not daring enough to attempt it myself. Our hopeless conclusion was that the Underground Man was right yet again, and that we did not like it.
Where to go from here? Does it matter, so long as we have some defined thing to live for? Surely that is a void not yet filled by Fyodor's mad ranter. I love my family. I will go where they go, and you can keep the creativity. Is that cheating? Surely that's too simple. Probably that's the point. If Dostoevsky's target audience was his new "modern man" and these men were too sophisticated for their own good, quibbling over politics, reinventing religion, casting down tradition, then perhaps a return to the simple is the best medicine. If I had to be honest, then I would like to be considered modern and sophisticated. But if I had to be very honest, I don't really care at all about that. How can one have such a love affair with abstraction?
My students and I ran into a log-jam yesterday trying to decipher Dostoevsky's paradoxical man is condemned to creativity rant in Part 1, chapter 9 of Notes from Underground. He claims that we all want to go "somewhere, but not here." It is our deeply rooted need to go that drives our creativity and our inability to define where that condemns us. We must graduate high school to get to college to get to the job to get to the house to get to the family to get to retirement to get to death. Whew. So what, you're saying. I can define my world. I know my destination(s). And I hear you loud and clear, gentle reader. But in many tries, my students could not, and I was not daring enough to attempt it myself. Our hopeless conclusion was that the Underground Man was right yet again, and that we did not like it.
Where to go from here? Does it matter, so long as we have some defined thing to live for? Surely that is a void not yet filled by Fyodor's mad ranter. I love my family. I will go where they go, and you can keep the creativity. Is that cheating? Surely that's too simple. Probably that's the point. If Dostoevsky's target audience was his new "modern man" and these men were too sophisticated for their own good, quibbling over politics, reinventing religion, casting down tradition, then perhaps a return to the simple is the best medicine. If I had to be honest, then I would like to be considered modern and sophisticated. But if I had to be very honest, I don't really care at all about that. How can one have such a love affair with abstraction?
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Going Daisy for Pizza
So. There is a new term about. It is called "going Daisy." It rhymes with "going crazy," is named after Gatsby's love interest, and they mean virtually the same thing, but the motivation which drives these two terms... well, that is miles apart.
Consider:
Tonight the worst snowstorm of the 2010-11 season rolls through my state. The roads are an impassable white fuzz due to terrible wind and incessant snow caking and crowding the lanes. Yet I wanted pizza for dinner. I love pizza, you see, but like any other sane adult, I enjoy my life, my warmth, and my car not in a ditch. But the pizza, you see. Well, drumroll please. I ordered the pizza and went out for it. Because I am a self-centered self-loather when it comes to pizza. Like Daisy. And like Daisy, I got through it scot-free. My wife, however, shoveled her back into oblivion so that I could get back into my driveway. So you see, gentle reader, there are consequences for all our actions. They just don't always find their way back to us, or worse still, they are not of us to begin with, like that terrible rain-cloud that lands on Andy Dufresne in Shawshank; or the virus of nihilism that haunts the fens in Grendel; or the friendship that claims both the mice and the men in George's life. I "went Daisy" for my pizza and probably won't think twice about doing it again in the near future because the world failed to teach me otherwise this time. I hope I get to "go Daisy" again sometime, and invite you to do the same. Just be wary of the time that such actions do claim you. Let us not be surprised. That would be just plum "Daisy" indeed.
Consider:
Tonight the worst snowstorm of the 2010-11 season rolls through my state. The roads are an impassable white fuzz due to terrible wind and incessant snow caking and crowding the lanes. Yet I wanted pizza for dinner. I love pizza, you see, but like any other sane adult, I enjoy my life, my warmth, and my car not in a ditch. But the pizza, you see. Well, drumroll please. I ordered the pizza and went out for it. Because I am a self-centered self-loather when it comes to pizza. Like Daisy. And like Daisy, I got through it scot-free. My wife, however, shoveled her back into oblivion so that I could get back into my driveway. So you see, gentle reader, there are consequences for all our actions. They just don't always find their way back to us, or worse still, they are not of us to begin with, like that terrible rain-cloud that lands on Andy Dufresne in Shawshank; or the virus of nihilism that haunts the fens in Grendel; or the friendship that claims both the mice and the men in George's life. I "went Daisy" for my pizza and probably won't think twice about doing it again in the near future because the world failed to teach me otherwise this time. I hope I get to "go Daisy" again sometime, and invite you to do the same. Just be wary of the time that such actions do claim you. Let us not be surprised. That would be just plum "Daisy" indeed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)