Summertime/working vicariously

Richard Hugo writes somewhere about the compressed academic year, how the years and even the hours are abbreviated, and how time moves so quickly through them. I'm at the point where I've waved goodbye to enough semesters to already be imagining the first day of the next one, much as a cool day in spring mirrors its cousin in the other equinox.

The irony of the calendar is that what I teach and what I do are almost exactly inverted. From August to May I do a lot of writing, but all of it is rushed and fragmented. Memos, emails, reports, applications, reviews, syllabi, comments on papers, minutes, recommendations, presentations, and more email. None of it develops any narrative line or builds to shared or linked visible product. It's these days (aggravated by lots of unfinished business in other departments of my daily life) that make me wonder if I'm really a writer at all. There is no scholarship, or very little; there is no blogging, letter-writing, memoir writing, writing of poetry, essays, or arguments. It's as if the frontal cortex were entirely given over to striated and anxious detail management. There's no narrative, and definitely no lyric. I get worried when the heart of what I am paid to do starts to feel like the work I used to do in a fast-food restaurant. When "customers per hour" is the criterion we measure ourselves by, then I might as well be the manager of a Wendy's. The fact that I'd probably get paid better for that sort of work is unnerving--but it just goes to show that work in higher education is expected to compensate us with other, less tangible rewards, such as the ability to wrestle with ideas and watch kids learn. So when that part is taken out, as it seems increasingly to be, then Wendy's starts looking like a smart option.

I love my job, but the center of it isn't coherent. The things I try to engender in my students--a sense of play, of curiosity, of competence through practice, revision, wonder, doubt and all the rest of the thinking asanas--are the very things I check at the door when the semester begins (well, by the time the first papers come in). I end up teaching "about" things I'm not myself actually experiencing. My lectures on rhetoric and writing during the semester become--at least to me--somewhat abstract, something I recall for my students, not something I embody. Of course I have my students reflect on their own writing. They practice reading closely. They take risks. But I only understand this vicariously. I feel that I'm being paid for having a degree, for managing the status quo, not for being a writer or scholar. Thus this tends to encourage posturing. It encourages asserting one's authority, though authentic authority comes more from modeling and immediate action than knowing stuff.

I'm hardly the first to notice this incoherence, and if I were to blame my college (or all academic institutions), I again wouldn't be the first. That's not needed, though. Those hoarse diatribes of how "the college is being run like a business!" really leaves me cold. The college IS a business. I want it to be solvent--hell, I want it to be rolling in money so that we can do all sort of good and interesting things.

That is not going to happen in SUNY Cortland, however. We are a small rural state school that survives on the margins. If the Ivy Leagues were Manhattan, we wouldn't be even in the suburbs. We'd be in rural Nebraska. We tend not to plan for the future because we're so preoccupied with surviving, and the latest budget issues have made it worse. Now there really ain't nothing to get by on. Our "funding stream" is taxes.  College is a state business built on a certain imaginary destination my state students will pay handsomely to achieve: "success." In my way of seeing it, "success" means often a) getting married, ideally to a person who looks good enough to be on TV b) getting a good job (read: a job that makes me more money than I know what to do with) c) buying a house and starting a family with my money and hot spouse.  Life of the mind, a sense of history, good work (not just well-paid work, but meaningful work done well) -- those things are not the values that organize my students or the campus.  When I feel their tug I feel anachronistic at best and stupid at worst.

What's assumed in all of this, of course, is that a, b, and c will cause happiness. That's a stretch (I assume most of our students don't look at their parents as models for happiness, for their parents, from what I hear, are often not such happy people). My sense is that "success" means not being one of "them," the poor, the have nots. "Success" is defined by an invisible and unspoken absent term, the lower class. No one is sure what that is or where those people are, but they sure seem to be a scary lot.  One of their few identifying characteristics is assumed to be poor grammar, which is why we worry about grammar at all in college.  But that is the subject of another post.

I am often a middle-level bureaucrat and my best energies go to supporting some very abstract entities called "the department" or "the college" or at its most grandiose, "higher education in the United States." I do not often feel as if I am participating in supporting, influencing, or developing these entities. Mostly, I feel like an "administrative assistant." I have an advanced degree, but spend more of my time collating than reading; more time deleting email than preparing lectures, more time in meetings than I spend with students.

This is ironic. Not evil, not oppressive, but ironic. I got into this business because I was fascinated with the ways you could say things and the way that ideas fit together and the way people make ideas over time. The best way to be immersed in these things this is to teach writing (and to write). I'm happy as a clam in the classroom, though I find it exhausting. I love to write and read for the same reasons.

How does this change?  I try to change it 1) by doing less in my college, less administration.  I put my energies into the classroom.  2) I try to create places with my colleagues to talk about our values (we recently (2010) had a great discussion of The Shallows by Nicolas Carr, and many said it was the FIRST TIME in their stint at Cortland that they had had an intellectual discussion on campus with their peers and 3) I try to do a good job and say not control things out of my control and 4) I keep myself sane by writing.

Or, better said, I try to stay sane when I'm not writing.

Two Boys at a Kitchen Table in the Mojave Desert (Found Photo)

Before he wrote his regrets

On the back, apologies for not seeing them grow up,

Their father must have crouched down

In the cold December desert sand

To frame his two grown sons, their four boots up

On a table they trucked down from town,

Two chairs, too, and a half-gallon of rum

In the half dark, both waiting for something magic,

Maybe some Mexican waitress, to bring them another drink. 

In their background wires thick as a man’s fist pulse

With juice bound for Las Vegas.

 

The boys watch their father’s failing smile,

His spirit slipping down like chair legs into sand. 

He regretting his lost chance, his boys’ loss, the wonders

Of the young & etc., and the boy on the left

 

Is already looking beyond the camera

At the truck he bought and paid for.

It’s gray and the flawed paint is peeling and behind it

The vast valley yawns like the jaw of a prehistoric ocean,

 

Which it was, crocodilian and omnipotent.

A distant sun rises over the hills’ knuckles

To the southeast, pouring light down the hill behind him

in a great wave, curling at the lip:

He holds his breath while he waits for it:

The picture is snapped up and the days of his future begin

Passing over him like water.

 

 

 

Baseball, Flowers, Beard

Attached is a picture that I took with my phone. The quality is low and the composition is rough. But it says a lot about the spring here in Syracuse for me this 2009. You’ll see the flowers which give the month away. Like a hiaku (in which one technically must mention a season), there is an allusion to this early tentative spring. Like the Indians, I can frame this period not by the mechanical techniques of a calendar, but by the flora or fauna that are expressed. I decided to go with flowers because if I went with animals like the Indians, I’d have to call it “moon of the smeary road kill corpse,” and that has little zing to it. So flowers it is.

These flowers (are they daisies?) were growing wild by the side of road where I commute. This is what they look like when you stop. Usually they are a tiny smeary field of white dots; usually I’m travelling at 70 mph. Today, though, I looked around at the bottom of the empty exit ramp and threw the car into reverse. I once knew a guy who liked to race his car in reverse, and he sort of scared me. But I was channeling him today as I expertly whipped my car up to nuzzle the curb (and the flowers). And I picked some. To hell with rushing.

To hell with rushing, he said. But he lies. He rushes where ever he goes. He even rushes when he sleeps. It is not healthy.

There is an innocent baseball there, partly because it by default in American culture stands for innocence (kids, moms, healthy competition, growing up, families, America, and summertime) and partly because that particular baseball has done nothing wrong. It did not participate in an bombing attack on cat or dog, nor was it smeared with a dab of vasiline to make the curve ball curve. So it’s clean. And it also reminds me of my kids’ baseball games, in which they stand for hours in the field or succeed or fail so very visibly and powerfully. It’s the summer of baseball, with both of them in it.

There is a picture of the building where I work for the Seven Valleys Writing Project, a wonderful place, and I like the wobbly, wavering quality to this picture, originally taken on an iPhone and sent to me, then printed at home and rendered in a picture I, in turn, took and posted here with my own cheapo phone. Something uncertain, something unusual about the image. It looks like memory would look if it were visible as it fades. It looks like the word "redolent" and "adumbration" together.

So that’s spring here. Sort of quiet, full of the holes that early spring leaves in the day, moments of quiet and reflection.

Love ya.

DF

Losing Himself

So this is a picture of why I teach writing. It's not a dramatic scene: no train wrecks, space walks or plummeting arrows on the economic chart: just a picture of a kid writing, losing himself in writing. I think it's lovely. It was one of the first times I caught my eldest Syracuse child writing (well, drawing, I guess). It's simple, quiet, and the concentration is so intense that I can almost smell the crayons. There is also a very profound mental and social engine that he's driving (and being driven by). Writing is changing his ability to know the world, both abstracting him and bringing him into a deeper connection with it. I see all this happening in this picture, and it thrills me because I understand what that's like, to be changed by writing, to have your identity start to form around & by words, by the practice of using words. His mind starts to understand things as a literate mind does, looking for names, lists, abstract orders not visible in the objects themselves. Remember those paintings where the people are made out of food (apples for eyes, that sort of thing)? He's becoming more himself as he becomes transposed into words and sentences. He is a wordle, but not just any wordle. He's his very words themselves. I like this picture because evening is coming on and he is lost in his creation, becoming more abstract and more himself at the same time.

Burning It

Today I watched a man my age

Walk by again with his dog, old dog

On a contraption with wheels and a platform

For the dog’s failed legs and spine.

It was pathetic and wonderful, but

The only poem in it was when the dog

Fell off the platform, apologetic

And helpless. The furious man.

Who grabbed the animal by the tail

And jerked it back on the wheeled

Sled. Who would have shot the fucking

Dog if he had a gun. Or maybe the poem

Begins when my son heard about this later and said

The man is angry because he can’t help the dog

Any longer. And went back to growing up.

Today my father thinks he woke up completely

Homeless and wandering the hospital

Searching for someone to take care of him.

His new papery voice reminds me of wasp

Nests under the eaves, which they used to burn

With matches and somehow, by some miracle,

The whole house didn’t burn down.

Every spring the same blank-verse miracle,

Burning what you can.

Praying for the rest.