Always more to teach (but not today)

And....it's a wrap! I'm done with the teaching but not with the grading, the pleading, the meetings meetings meetings, the proctoring and assessing and filing of reports. And in fact I'm not entirely done with teaching for the semester; I'm just done with the standing-in-front-of-the-class part of teaching. I'll still be engaging in informal instruction as I respond to students' questions and offer comments on their projects and do my best to push them across the finish line in one piece.

My American Lit Survey students started the semester discussing Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser, " a poem that rejects the call for poetry proclaiming the glory of war and instead draws attention to the nation's woundedness. We talked about the relationship between literature and history and what role literature can play in healing a nation's wounds, a topic we returned to  repeatedly throughout the semester. 

Today we closed the loop by ending with Natasha Trethewey's "Native Guard," a poem inviting us to see history as a messy palimpsest of crosshatched stories, sometimes written in ink on paper and sometimes in blood on the backs of powerless people. Students may have thought we'd finished with the Civil War back in February, but here's Natasha Trethewey directing our attention to previously disregarded voices, reminding us that there's always another story to unearth, always something more to learn.

Is there always more to teach? Yes, but not today. Today I'm DONE. (But ask me again tomorrow.)    

Salman Rushdie's "Knife": Conjoined contradictions

For decades, Salman Rushdie has resisted allowing enemies to define him. The Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa declaring that Rushdie should be assassinated after publishing The Satanic Verses sent the author into hiding, but for more than 20 years Rushdie has lived openly and peacefully in New York, aware of the lingering threat but not constrained by it--until August 2022, when a would-be assassin stabbed Rushdie fifteen times with a knife before an auditorium full of onlookers in Chautauqua, New York. 

If his life is a book, writes Rushdie, "The attack felt like a large red ink blot spilled over an earlier page. It was ugly, but it didn't ruin the book. One could turn the page, and go on." 

Going on is exactly what Rushdie is trying to do in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. He had hoped to return to writing fiction, but he found that he could not write anything else until he wrote about the attack: "To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art."

Knife is divided into two sections, The Angel of Death and The Angel of Life, and the book immerses readers in both the horrors of violence and the healing power of love, along with other linked contradictions exposed by Rushdie's experience. For instance, Rushdie praises the onlookers who rushed to his aid after the attack:

I didn't see their faces and I don't know their names, but they were the first people to save my life. And so that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason...and we also contain the antidote to that disease--courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

This horde of people devoted to his safety multiplies as he enters first a hospital and then a rehab facility, where he endures the humiliations of losing autonomy and agency over his privacy, his career, and, of course, his body:

In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won't sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body--to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness--so that you can live.

But even as he is dependent upon a hovering host of health-care workers, he finds that "When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness."

That loneliness leaves time for the author to mull over his peculiar relationship with his attacker, whom Rushdie never names but instead refers to as The A. In the twenty-seven seconds it took The A to stab Rushdie (in his eye, neck, chest, and hand), attacker and victim existed within what Rushdie calls "a profound conjoining." In an imaginary interview, Rushdie tells his attacker, "You put on the mantle of Death itself, and I was Life." Rushdie thinks of his attacker as a failure, a nothing, a hapless clown, but this haplessness is an advantage; one of Rushdie's doctors tells him, "You're lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife."

But there are many types of knives. The A's knife may have severed the author from his world, but Rushdie refuses the role of victimhood, instead wielding his own weapons:

Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, to make it mine.

He does this best while describing the attack and his long journey toward recovery as well as the role of his family and friends in carrying him through this journey. Despite the inciting act of senseless violence, Rushdie considers his story one in which "hatred--the knife as a metaphor for hate--is answered, and finally overcome, by love." In the end he travels back to the scene of the attack to convey an important message to his absent attacker--and anyone who might sympathize with the attempt to use violence to silence stories: "We're back, and after our encounter with hatred, we're celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life."

A handful of happiness

As I walked toward the front door one day after work, I was startled by the scent of lilacs. I looked to the left, toward the lilac bush we planted 20 years ago and gave up for dead a dozen times since then, and there they were: lilac blossoms, festoons of them blooming on a tall bush near the corner of the house. I could have cut a handful of stems to put in a vase and fill my house with the lovely aroma, but I'm happy to leave them growing where the pollinators can benefit from their long-awaited blossoms.

I could have cut a handful of stems but I can't comprehend a handful of scientists. Lately I've been listening to an audiobook in which the author uses the word handful over and over to refer to small groups of people or things, which is fairly normal I suppose, but hearing the phrase a handful of scientists produced in my mind a bizarre visual image of a bunch of lab-coated guys with Einstein hair squeezed inside a giant fist. Since that time, I've been experiencing cognitive dissonance every time I hear handful used to refer to things that cannot be easily held in the hand, like oak trees or elephants or Seventh-Day Adventists. 

This morning, though, I was happy to have my camera in my hands again. Nasty weather and a many-meeting marathon have conspired to keep me out of the woods, but this morning the sun was shining and I was determined to go out and see what I could see--and hear, starting with the brown thrasher running through its vast repertoire of songs high in a tree next to the driveway. Any day that includes a kingfisher sighting is a good day, but this one also included red-bellied woodpeckers, cardinals, towhees, all manner of sparrows, and a Louisiana waterthrush.

I thought I'd entirely missed bloodroot and twinleaf season this spring, but I found one tiny twinleaf blossom poking up out of the leaf litter in the woods. Elsewhere I saw mayapples budding and pawpaws blooming and all manner of blossoms: Dutchman's breeches, squirrel corn, trilliums, wild geranium, phlox, blue-eyed Mary, perfoliate bellwort, Solomon's seal, purple loosestrife, rue anemone, redbud, dogwood, mitrewort, wild columbine, purple violets and white violets--oh, and plenty of dandelions, of course. My daughter makes dandelion jelly that tastes like honeyed sunshine, so I refuse to see these cheerful blossoms as worthless weeds. 

Yesterday we watched a white-crowned sparrow gathering bits of dandelion fluff, presumably to line a nest. If the dandelions in my front yard can keep a sparrow happy, then who am I to complain? Especially when the whole place smells of lilac.

The clouds look quilted.

Restructuring a life's sentence

I had trouble this morning introducing my American Lit Survey students to some poems that can be counted on to choke me up--Yusef Komunyakaa's "Slam, Dunk, and Hook," with its young men seeking moments of freedom and beauty on a neighborhood basketball court while Trouble stands on the sidelines "slapping a blackjack / Against an open palm"; and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," featuring the poet's fruitless attempt to convince herself that the "art of losing isn't hard to master"; and Denise Levertov's "Making Peace," which argues that writing peace into the world is a responsibility we all share:

a line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

 

In class we focus on analyzing elements of form and meaning, but in the end I want poems like these to spark reflection and action. I want to ask students so many questions: Where do you cultivate beauty? How will you cope with loss? What sentence is your life making? What word is each act bringing into the world--and how do are you linking your words with others'?

 

I have reached the point in my life when I'm not satisfied by academic discussions of literature. Sure, I get excited about examining interesting metaphors and stylistic choices, but I also want to make it personal--or at least point out to students how they can take literature personally. My next essay is coming out in Pedagogy soon, and far from an academic exercise in name-checking all the trendy scholars and theories, it's an impassioned plea for the importance of continuing to teach what some call "divisive concepts."

 

Writing that essay gave me great joy, a quality often missing from academic writing. In an article in Inside Higher Ed today, Deborah J. Cohen and Barbara J. Risman ask how faculty members can "Cultivate joy in their writing." They argue that the pressure to publish or perish "discourages joy in writing--beyond focusing on a utilitarian means to an end, it creates fear, loathing and pressure. We're told that if we do it enough, our careers will survive."

Well, I've done it enough, but it's not clear that my academic writing has accomplished much more than to keep me employed. I'm happy when I see that others have cited my articles, but if I'm part of what we call the scholarly conversation, it's an infuriatingly slow-paced and unrewarding mode of communication.

 

Cohen and Risman ask us to discard the utilitarian approach and pursue writing as an art that we practice for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional:

 

The painter makes art to thrive, to share the meaning they find in the world with others. So, too, if a writer recognizes their work as their art, they sit down to do it to share their gifts with other people and society in general. And the process of writing itself becomes a way to thrive, to contribute to the world.

And that's what I want to do with my writing about literature--and also my teaching. As I near retirement, I've been toying with the idea of teaching a class I'm calling Lit4Life, focusing on literature that can help us create a meaningful life. But why not write about it too? 

 

All this to introduce my summer writing project: a series of reflections on literary works that challenge us to live meaningful lives. I'm calling it Life Lines at the moment, but that will change. Who is my audience? What readership shall I appeal to? Where do I imagine publishing? Not even thinking about those questions right now. I want to immerse myself in writing for the joy of it and postpone academic questions until I see the words on the page.

 

I'm tired of squeezing myself into the constricting mold of academic writing; instead, I want to take a risk, to follow Denise Levertov's plea, to restructure the sentence my life is making just to see if I can recover some joy, make some peace, and find a place to thrive in the long summer pause.

And that's why teaching poetry choked me up this morning: because the questions I wanted to aim at my students' hearts circled back and hit mine instead.

Don't let the birds build a nest in your brainpan

Here I am tackling piles of work two weeks before the end of the semester--the wrong time to be required to learn something new, but nevertheless men with tools are removing all our office phone lines so we can switch to team Teams. 

I suppose I ought to read all the information our IT people sent to prepare us for the shift to VOIP calling, but I don't wanna. Too many other things to do: teaching and grading and departmental assessment and hiring adjuncts (still) and dealing with issues before the Professional Review Committee (again) and planning the big end-of-semester pedagogy workshop. I don't want to learn a whole new method of phone-calling. Maybe Teams is wonderful; maybe it's the most excellent calling method ever invented; but I'm tired and my brain is full. 

But at least birds haven't built a nest in my brainpan. Yesterday I went out back to fetch the weed-whacker and found an elaborate bird's nest in the battery compartment. I had to clean it out before I could even start on the weed-whacking and mowing, and then of course the mower decided that it was tired too: it's self-propelled, but it wasn't self-propelling very well, especially on the uphill parts. Its get up and and go has got up and gone, with the result that every muscle in my body is now sore.

What kind of winter workout would prepare me for the first yard work of the season? I probably ought to just take the mower out and push it around the yard a couple times a week all winter long, though it wouldn't care for the snow. Getting out the weed-whacker and waving it around a few times a week might deter the birds. Then again, why not hire a landscaping company and spread the pain around?

This week everyone in my building will be sharing the pain of learning the new phone system, or non-phone system since it doesn't involve actual phones. So now I can make calls on my laptop, kind of like a Zoom call? And I can set up Teams to automatically transcribe all my voice mails into something resembling human language? And all I need to do is to click on this and configure that and check to make sure the audio is turned on? And this means I'll be able to respond to work-related calls everywhere I go?

I'll think about it tomorrow. Too much real work to do today. 

Dispatches from the staffing wars

I was talking to a prof from a different department who presented a dilemma: faculty positions have been vacated for various reasons but new searches are not being approved, so the department is scrambling to fill in the blank spots with overloads and adjuncts. If they do too good a job demonstrating that they can meet students' needs without filling vacant full-time positions, then the Powers That Be may decide that those full-time positions are surplus to requirements--but if the department does a lousy job covering essential courses, students will suffer.

I suspect that many departments across campus are in the same position. We can move heaven and earth to make sure our majors get the courses they need, but then it looks like we don't need to refill vacant positions; or we can make no extra effort to cover required classes and our students will be short-changed.

Somehow we need to straddle the fine line between too much and not enough. We need to provide the courses our students need, but in a way that shows how desperately we need to fill some empty positions. We don't want students to lose confidence in the program, but allowing them to feel a little discomfort would prove a point--except we don't want to use students as political pawns in the staffing wars.

We're all working hard to manage a difficult situation, but you know what they say: Accomplish the impossible and they'll add it to your job description. Maybe we need to be just a little less competent, a little less eager to pick up the slack--but not so much that we appear expendable. 

'E clips it

My grandkids had warned me that we might observe some unusual animal behavior yesterday afternoon, but the only unusual behavior I observedwas a group of small people running around in the dark shouting "The totality! The totality!"

Earlier in the day the little adorables were figuring out how old they'll be in 2044 when the next total solar eclipse comes our way. The smallest will be 26 and the oldest over 30, which seems impossible, but I didn't want to mention how old I'll be in 20 years because who knows if I'll be in any condition by then to don silly glasses and look at a sliver of sun?

So I'm glad I took a day off to observe the totality with my grandkids. We sat on a grassy hill near their house, a steady breeze blowing their kites high into the sky and producing festoons of bubbles from their bubble wands. We started off in t-shirts but donned sweaters and blankets as the sky drew darker, the wind cooler. Periodically my son-in-law made videos of the kids serving as amateur reporters, describing the sun as looking like a Pac-Man or a fingernail, predicting what would happen next, telling a topical joke: "How does the moon give the sun a haircut? 'E clips it!"

When the disc of the moon slid over the sun, the kids whooped and danced with abandon in the shadowless dark while I soaked in their infectious excitement. This week on campus I have quite a lot on my plate, including some stressful meetings and tasks demanding patience, insight, and self control, so just for a moment it felt good to be in the presence of unfettered glee. I'll be drawing on that reserve of energy for a while, but I doubt it'll last until the next eclipse arrives. 

Are we having sun yet?