The stress
of leaving
everything behind
is replaced
by the emancipation
of leaving
everything behind.
I recently read a poetic hypothesis by Anne Porter , suggesting what she might say to our Maker on a day of judgement. It's in contrast with the image painted for me during my upbringing. And that's in sharp contrast to John's belief that St. Peter will greet him at the pearly gates with a balance sheet accounting for all those beers bought for him versus all the beers he bought for others. If the balance is in the black, he's allowed in; if he's in the red, well, then he's in the red.
Being more and more plagued by a lack of confidence in what to believe, I imagine that there are too many possibilities for how I could be judged. Even here on Earth the possibilities are numerous and changing every five minutes or so. Porter's plea gave me another possibility:
A Plea For Mercy
When I am brought before the Lord
What can I say to him
How plead for mercy?
I'll say I loved
My husband and the five
Children we had together
Though I was most unworthy
I'll say I loved
The summer mornings
I loved the way the sun comes up
And sets the dew on fire
I loved the way
The cobwebs shine
On the tall grass
When they are strung with dew
I'll say I loved
The way that little bird
The titmouse flies
I'll say I loved
Its lightness
Lilt
And beauty.
Given this suggestion, I wonder: What would I say? My answer is the result of the tug of war between two sides of the spectrum. I suspect, pulling from the right, would be my tendency to blather on and make things up as I go along. I'd sputter out some kind of panicked reply, the fires of hell licking my feet from below. On the other hand, I could call upon my educator instincts and have prepared for the inevitable and most appropriate means of assessment: a rubric. The trouble is that there seems to be some disagreement regarding what exactly this rubric looks like. I suspect it's a simple pass/fail evaluation, although there may be a score reserved for purgatory. At any rate, it's still hard to image (or maybe I'm not committed and faithful enough) exactly what the criteria are for a passing grade. Being kind? Being pious? Being devoted? Being prophetic? I don't know exactly, and that's why I imagine that it would go something like this:
First, I'll start apologizing: I'll say I'm sorry that I yelled at the dog. And that I lost my temper with the kids. I'll have to admit that I kicked the dog, but never the kids. I'm sorry that I would even feel the urge to throw something, usually a piece of technology through a window. I'll say it was wrong for me to use that bookstore gift certificate that I found, knowing it wasn't really mine, to spend on myself. I should have been more patient; I could have done more to help others; I should have listened better the first time.
And then, because I'm me, because I'm human, I suspect I'll make excuses. Maybe because of my training in academe, I'll try to find explanations (just like the "Maybe because of my training in academe" preface to this very sentence) for all of my inadequacies, as though it would help me at this point: The dog wouldn't listen and was about to get mud all over the house; the kids' room was such a mess. And I didn't actually throw anything through a window, so perhaps that counts for something? Patience, helping, and listening -- I believe I was getting better at these, slowly. And the gift certificate I spent on two books of poetry, which I suspect You can appreciate.
But if I really had my wits about me -- and who's to know that I would -- I might cut myself off and just cut to the important parts. It seems likely that a trap door would fall out from beneath me well before I get to this point, but if I had the chance: I loved the poetry, and I shared it with a friend. I loved how the land I stood on fell out from under the face of Earth that towers above me to the east. I marveled and I laughed and I cried and I was more privileged than I deserved to have the family and friends that I do. And, more than once, I saw a child's face light up in a smile, and I think it was because of something I did. And maybe that's the rubric: How many smiles were there trailing behind you? In essence, it's not any different than John's hypothesis of the tabulation of beer debt. Either way, I hope I pass, not so much because I understand what I'll enter into, but because of what I'd leave behind.
Anna, at nine and a half years of age, disarms me completely sometimes. Her pixie-esque voice, from out of nowhere, has created this habit of saying so convincingly "I love you" as she is dropped off for dance, as I'm leaving for work, as she's being tucked in for bed. I don't know where she's gotten this. Sure, we say this in our home, but it isn't the ritual that Anna's established. Actually, it isn't even a ritual for her, but part of her nature, so that it comes out of the blue but simultaneously fits her, just like her red hair, her gangly legs, and her tendency to have a book wrapped around her nose.
Grace is different. Grace explained to me the other day as we were listening to a Billy Joel favorite of ours that It's Still Rock and Roll To Me "used to be my favorite rock and roll song before I heard [Kanye West's] Love Lockdown." Grace sings along with the electronica infused rap hip-hop from her booster seat in the second row of our car; and when her 6-year-old flute of a voice emotes, "I've been down this road too many times before," I smile every time.
I could try to further describe the difference between my daughters -- hair, eyes, voice, tendencies, posture, interests, etc., but the contrast between "I love you" and "love lockdown" mostly sums it up. Nor does it even scratch the surface.
A couple of weeks ago I spent time paging through papers in folders in file boxes. I'd never imagined that when I was told that the records of the office I'm taking over now/not-until-July (long story) were "archived in the Library" that this was going to amount to more than a two-inch binder. Imagine my surprise when the archivist wheeled out two large boxes filled with file folders that documented only the first two years. I sat down and started paging through things that had been long forgotten: hard copies of emails exchanged and workshops announced. It was amazing how much information was there, literally in my hands, right before my eyes. After half an hour (25 minutes more than I'd thought I'd be spending) I realized that I needed to come back, but now with a new appreciation of the archived record.
On the weekend of my birthday, Karyn gave me an expansive volume of poetry, complete with CD recordings of the original authors' readings, ranging from the late 19th century to present day. It's like a tomb of poetry with the corpses of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath, their own voices called out via CD from the grave. I sit down with just the book and open it, randomly, and begin paging through. Where do you start? Page 1? Or in the middle? Or at the end? And then once that's figured out do you start by reading or listening, or both? Or back and forth? So far, I've mostly just been pondering the presence of "Nothing Gold Can Stay" somewhere not at the beginning nor at the end, and considering the lives of the poems themselves. I have a sort of awe for this book because it feels to me like some kind of preservation of something that people got just right, just so that you'd want to read them again and again.
Back to my new office, down the hall from the archives of the library, there's a giant shelf of books belonging to the office itself. These are all books that have been used in faculty discussion groups and other workshops. A few I've read, although most of these are in hardback and I wonder if I could trade them out with my softcover versions. Mostly, though, I realize that these are here not as archives for something we need to preserve, but a trail of breadcrumbs . .. or maybe cobwebs. There is a pile of suggestions for other books that we could read for professional development, and I wonder where I'm going to find room for them. Which perfectly good book needs to get moved away to provide room for the latest up-and-comer? I suspect the copy of Dewey's Democracy and Education is the oldest title on the shelf, but I'll protect it and let the other fly-by-night philosophers get discarded long before.
Down the hall and up the stairs and around the corner, in another office of the library, I found myself paging through a stack of books from Q181. Our librarian asked me to see which of these we absolutely needed to keep, because otherwise they were on deck to be discarded . . . because nothing gold can stay, I suppose? Some have sat there for eight, nine decades, watching the university itself move lumberingly through the 20th century and beyond. Many, many texts document the late 1950's and '60's, and in particular it was interesting to note those dated to 1956 and one with the prologue dated January of 1957. These were printed immediately before the launch of Sputnik, and being texts in science education, they seemed almost as though they had a false start. Each text for the next decade or more notes the "post-Sputnik" world and all that's associated with such a new political order. I wonder if the pre-Sputnik books felt foolish, as though they arrived at a party too early and in the wrong clothes.
I started saving these refugees from Q181, some returned to the shelves for some historical significance -- like my own anthology of poetry, they tell a story that documents where we've been, with voices that probably aren't too different from what we utter now. And a few other texts have made it to my personal collection, rather than the trash bin. I saved these because a few are historically significant, but most of them are just irresistible. How could you throw away a text with diagrams and full instructions to make your own overhead projector? Nothing gold can stay, but I'll do what I can.
The trouble with poetry, as Billy Collins says, is that it encourages more poetry. "Like baby rabbits," it propagates itself by instilling the desire of the reader to write his own poetry. On a recent trip into the desert with some teachers of writing and science, I experienced exactly this. But on return and upon looking at my own writing, I realized the other trouble with poetry: It reveals my own work for the pedantic blather that it is. Collins himself is but one example of this. I further made the mistake of reading Robert Frost, who not only paints a picture, sets a mood, parables a lesson, but does it all with elegant meter. Nothing Gold Can Stay is brilliant not only because it retains meaning through generations (I continue to associate it with The Outsiders), but because it is so lyrical. As I was working on my own piece, an assignment from our class trip, it became increasingly clear that it was not to be The Great Poem I dream about, the one I thought it was when the first seeds of it were planted in my head. The beauty of so much already written, so much to read, set amongst so much yet to be written, so many empty pages, became the final theme of the verse. A great poem? No. I'll admit that the writing is just as inspiring (or less so) as the moral of the poem itself. And maybe that's where the potential lies, and the other trouble with poetry: so much room for improvement.
Potential
the chime of brass
opens the door
and I plod into the bookstore
on 78 N. Main,
a floorboard creaking,
welcoming my presence.where
the potential of print within
all the darkness between
the closed covers of
books written,
neatly organized,
calls to me.while
the potential of space within
the leather covers around
the stark blankness of
unfilled pages,
acid free,
begs for fulfillment.so
after some thought
and furrowing of brow
and pacing of feet
I decide,
and order a
cappuccino
to go.
I wonder if we aren't anything without reflection. This comic, displayed for me today, reminded me of this idea:
An old friend, visiting for the week, asked me about my writing and this space in particular. She asked, kindly, if I ever wanted to do anything else with this kind of writing. And my answer is, sheepishly, "of course." But I couldn't begin to imagine what that would be. The point of having the space right (write) now is to have a place to reflect upon myself. And maybe to make fun of others. But mostly to look at myself so that I remind myself of who and where I am, and maybe a little to figure out where I'm going. The trick is to not become too transfixed with my own image in the puddle or the journal entry, so stuck to this that nothing else gets done. This reminds me that I have some paperwork to get signed, a shopping list to flesh out, and some papers to review; so I need to step away from my puddle.
Some words are just on some cusp of almost-understood for me, some zone of proximal verbal development. If you say the word in context, I kind of understand it, and I like the word so much that I'd like to be able to use it myself more often. I just don't get them well enough to spit them out, and sometimes I'm not even sure how to pronounce them. These words include:
Tomorrow I leave on a science and writing workshop. As I'm a co-leader, it seems that I should try to put some of these words to good use. And others as well. But perhaps I'll just be using words like "spaghetti," "windy," and "tent stake."
And there are other words that I can use just fine, but I still don't understand them. These include things like:
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