The title of this entry comes from an obscure song on an obscure album by Captian Beyond (1972?), a cold, hard, driving jam that celebrates the IMpossibility of making connections with others (another song on the album is Raging River of Fear, for example). The song is good, though the sentiment sucks, but Dancing Madly Backwards is exactly, for me, what it feels like to write, for I am always writing new prefaces and introductions, openings and framing statemnts to what I have to say. Many times I've actually inverted the order of a page the same way you play with a baby, picking him up by the ankles. Dancing Madly Backwards is therefore about writing. It's also about making connections with other people. I want to know if it's possible, and (if so) how you go about doing it.
This is the value of writing: no sooner do you begin than you find a new beginning. In this case, I find that no sooner do I begin talking about connection than I invert that idea. I mean, it may not be just the noisy act of "making a connection" that actually matters; it may instead be a more quiet activity. We're sort of set up, as Americans (and we're all Americans now in this sense) to make and elicit noise, claims, arguments, protestations, persuasions, confirmations rather than to enjoy and (to us) endure silence. The moments my son Eli and I are drawing small thumbprint figures or my love and I are lying in bed, not talking, are perhaps moments of greatest intimacy. Making a connection, then, seems to be less about pursuing and more about allowing.
I'd like to make a connection between this idea of allowing / pursuing and writing. Yesterday in class we were talking about the writing process. It was an exciting conversation though we were all exhausted, so it moved with the lumbering grace of an animal in water, but steadily, and flexed through several topics: how to sponsor a "flow state," how to get started, where ideas come from, how you know when you are writing something good (or bad), and the like. My student Steve said at one point "The thing about this class is that all this talk about writing makes me want to get up and go *do it*," and I couldn't agree more (here I am!). Don, speaking about how he gets to a "flow state" said that he will open his writing with a fairly controlled, "informative" voice and then, at some unpredetermined point, it will switch unexpectedly to some other voice, often a surprising voice, that will truly carry the piece along.
What is this switch? In class we talked about it as a moment of "crisis," a place where the usual strategies don't work any longer and yet there is a huge urge, an imperitive and exigency, to continue forward, to keep going. This crisis, where one voice goes silent and before another speaks up, the muddled confabulation of statements like the undertalk in a Pink Floyd album, the gap between one hand tight on the baton and the anticipatory hand reaching for the catch, is exactly what I think a writing class is supposed to introduce & induce. It's a scary spot, where one administration changes and the other hasn't kicked in. It's the spot between the exhalation and inhalation. It's the fight that ends the marriage and begins the age of uncertainty. It's the volta in a sonnet, the perforations in a sheet of stamps, the last wobbling harmonic of a bell's fading ring before the next bell is struck.
I say that this is the point of a composition class in part to be provocative. I find the insistance of sanctioned meaning in most composition classes 1) completely irrelevent to most kids' lives and 2) irrelevent--no, antithetical--to my goals as a teacher and 3) a kind of superstition. Maybe it's just my personal experience that has come from evaluating maybe a hundred classes of other teachers and that for almost every one the teacher chose to start with a long dry session on the manners and decorum of writing--that is, on grammar. Oh, it is painful to sit through, but that is often the only small "content area" (as we say in this school) that a lot of writing teachers feel they have to depend on. When I come in as an administrator, panic reaches for grammar. But when we are working with other writers, the problem isn't correctness, it's practice. How do we begin a practice that we will continue to practice? I mean, how do we teach writing practice with full emphasis on the term as both a verb and noun (if you want to get grammatical!) How can we use writing to find our own beginnings, and follow them? And if they ramify and recede, if they start dancing madly backwards, then how can we be calm enough to turn to writing when everything seems to exceed us one June day, to use write about the excess, the world outside anything we can contain, that any one morning, the sun spilling in and strange animate jewels outside the window -- titmouse, mourning dove, grosbeak, bluejay, cowbird -- are nothing we can ever really begin to explain?
DF
This is the value of writing: no sooner do you begin than you find a new beginning. In this case, I find that no sooner do I begin talking about connection than I invert that idea. I mean, it may not be just the noisy act of "making a connection" that actually matters; it may instead be a more quiet activity. We're sort of set up, as Americans (and we're all Americans now in this sense) to make and elicit noise, claims, arguments, protestations, persuasions, confirmations rather than to enjoy and (to us) endure silence. The moments my son Eli and I are drawing small thumbprint figures or my love and I are lying in bed, not talking, are perhaps moments of greatest intimacy. Making a connection, then, seems to be less about pursuing and more about allowing.
I'd like to make a connection between this idea of allowing / pursuing and writing. Yesterday in class we were talking about the writing process. It was an exciting conversation though we were all exhausted, so it moved with the lumbering grace of an animal in water, but steadily, and flexed through several topics: how to sponsor a "flow state," how to get started, where ideas come from, how you know when you are writing something good (or bad), and the like. My student Steve said at one point "The thing about this class is that all this talk about writing makes me want to get up and go *do it*," and I couldn't agree more (here I am!). Don, speaking about how he gets to a "flow state" said that he will open his writing with a fairly controlled, "informative" voice and then, at some unpredetermined point, it will switch unexpectedly to some other voice, often a surprising voice, that will truly carry the piece along.
What is this switch? In class we talked about it as a moment of "crisis," a place where the usual strategies don't work any longer and yet there is a huge urge, an imperitive and exigency, to continue forward, to keep going. This crisis, where one voice goes silent and before another speaks up, the muddled confabulation of statements like the undertalk in a Pink Floyd album, the gap between one hand tight on the baton and the anticipatory hand reaching for the catch, is exactly what I think a writing class is supposed to introduce & induce. It's a scary spot, where one administration changes and the other hasn't kicked in. It's the spot between the exhalation and inhalation. It's the fight that ends the marriage and begins the age of uncertainty. It's the volta in a sonnet, the perforations in a sheet of stamps, the last wobbling harmonic of a bell's fading ring before the next bell is struck.
I say that this is the point of a composition class in part to be provocative. I find the insistance of sanctioned meaning in most composition classes 1) completely irrelevent to most kids' lives and 2) irrelevent--no, antithetical--to my goals as a teacher and 3) a kind of superstition. Maybe it's just my personal experience that has come from evaluating maybe a hundred classes of other teachers and that for almost every one the teacher chose to start with a long dry session on the manners and decorum of writing--that is, on grammar. Oh, it is painful to sit through, but that is often the only small "content area" (as we say in this school) that a lot of writing teachers feel they have to depend on. When I come in as an administrator, panic reaches for grammar. But when we are working with other writers, the problem isn't correctness, it's practice. How do we begin a practice that we will continue to practice? I mean, how do we teach writing practice with full emphasis on the term as both a verb and noun (if you want to get grammatical!) How can we use writing to find our own beginnings, and follow them? And if they ramify and recede, if they start dancing madly backwards, then how can we be calm enough to turn to writing when everything seems to exceed us one June day, to use write about the excess, the world outside anything we can contain, that any one morning, the sun spilling in and strange animate jewels outside the window -- titmouse, mourning dove, grosbeak, bluejay, cowbird -- are nothing we can ever really begin to explain?
DF
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