Old Month, New Place

September: Wrong to call it timid,
I remind myself, shambling
into work.  More of an alertness
reflected in the bright black eye
of starlings.  Flocks massive and light
in the sumac at the edge of the lawn.
Or Tibetan prayer flags attentive
to the smallest change in breath
coming now out of the door
labeled north.  I can see
the whole valley as the leaves
give up.  Morning is dark. The heart
crumples and expands
like a paper bag.
It wakes in a dark room, 
my September body,
with light trickling in
the windows of my eyes.

HEAT

Got it going, the 100,000 BTU furnace.  Something primal there. Saying HEAT to the cold, saying NOT HERE to the phlegmatic winter. Watched them set the tank full of propane with their small crane.  A beluga whale full of liquid gas explosive. It is smaller than I thought, and I am actually rather fond of it, sitting like a good dog next to the storage shed. I could take a picture, but there are so many dumb details of the actual reality that a photograph would distract you with: errant blackberry branches, bits of wood, irrelevent tufts of grass, shanks of broken pipe. If I were to paint the scene of tank-and-shed I would clean it up by running it through my consciousness, and that would organize the scene, simplify it. Maybe attention is like an ore, needing to be refined and tempered. It takes a long time to learn to do that, and then it gets called something voodoo like art or skill or expertise or taste or wisdom. Observing simply and simply observing is an accomplishment. 

All this is to say that I know I’m a bit strange in my enthusiasms. Rather German, perhaps. The register boots are new and when you look down the grates you can see light—reflecting back from the shiny new tin. The boots are in turn connected to new big pipes, also shiny, running in parallel between the joists. They are connected to square heat runs from which the runs sprout. The whole thing is sort of like a very shiny beetle with pipe-like appendages extended everywhere. The entire assembly links up to the furnace, of course, and it’s a very good furnace. When it’s on, you can barely hear it, and it sucks new air through a 4 inch straw from outside and vents through an identical pipe.  It’s amazingly efficient at putting heat into the air, leaving none to slop around, so the exhaust can run through PVC pipe (!) to the outside. The blower ramps up very slowly and then, at eight minutes, kicks in to high power, all very quiet, though the force is so strong it actually blew one of unscrewed register grates off the wall upstairs to clatter into the hallway and scare the kids.

I enjoyed that very much.

So we have heat now, very fancy, state of the art, but down in the basement we also have an old inefficient wood-burning stove that will, if you keep it stoked, heat the entire house and it smells good – though consuming literally tons of wood and creating piles of ash. I’m going to use it this winter. I look forward to overcast days down in my newly created high-ceilinged basement, six-foot florescent lights and 1,000,000 lumens falling from between the free joists, banks of screws, bolts, caps, pipes, boards, nails, screws, springs, washers, and tools all on one wall, books on the other, a chair, a table saw, a big-ass vice bolted to a sturdy workbench, fire in the woodstove, and all around me the silent and odorless backup of propane heat, thrumming through the pipes over my head, running heat to my family above me while I work on interesting solutions to interesting problems written in wood and wire (and paper). Re-threading, leveling, connecting. Breaking things down and making things coherent. There is a certain joy in that, leaning against all that is insubstantial. 

Wheel inside a Wheel

This morning I parked my car in the lot and got out into a light rain. Nothing surprising. The sky was low and the asphalt was riddled with dots. In contrast to the car’s coffee and exhaust, the parking lot, near a stand of trees, was fresh and sharp, wet and cold. Fall in the air and the same sort of feeling that drives the geese to array themselves and travel hit me as it does every year. Must be the slant of light, the cold, the smell of autumnal weeds fizzing at the margins of fields and yards, the colors: raspberry and yellowpurplecrimson, the sort of colors that make me think of dyed wool and medieval celebrations (not sure where that last one comes from). Doesn’t matter. At my age there is a certain resonance to fall that gets deeper every year. The urge to travel, to find horizons, to build fences and fires. Maybe I can blame it all on my pituitary gland. Circadian rhythm. The earth is a drum.

And as I get out of the car I’m thinking vaguely of Yeats’ political theory about the gyres, two intersecting spirals that represent the apposition and opposition of everything, that explain history and my place in it. I think it’s cool Yeats found an image, a figure, an emblem to crystallize his feelings about growing older in troubled times and the poet’s role in that turmoil. Such a literate mind at work, it invents an ideogram.

My ideogram is a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel. These appear in clocks and car transmissions as far as I know. There is a complicated mathematics to the synchronized wheels, as any kid using a Spirograph can sense, but my feeling as I get older is that there are many, many wheels, maybe an infinite number, that all spiral, spin, and revolve. At times, a master wheel – in this case, the seasons – pulls the contraption around to a particular notch and the inner and outer wheels turn madly on their frictionless pivots in response, compensating and adjusting. So the wheels today are being 50, fall, the beginning of the day, the end of rain, the opening up of a new part of my heart work in my new house, the death of my acquaintance Matty, the end of the book, and the like.

This entire system can be ported to language, where rhymes (slant, rich, and full) stand for the various synchronicities that the wheels carry. Where characters and their motives are the distances between stars. Where genres are the toothy wheels. (Caution: Extreme number crunching needed to communicate between these two systems. See the formula at the right).

Regardless of the system, today I felt in the balance. I remember learning to ride a bike and realizing that it’s not in the hands and head, it’s in the butt. You drive with your ass. It’s correcting on the fly, not pointing, stiff, white, and vector-like, at the end of the driveway. It’s pointing and cycling, spinning and wobbling. Balance is dynamic. Look again at the formula above. It’s obvious.

Sometimes in poems there is attempt to talk about the plentitude of accepting what’s around us. I remember the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young lyric “Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice / But to carry on” or the poems of Stevens, and I found it again recently in a poem from a friend of mine, Brian Fay:

The sun shines over the bare branches of trees
unconcerned with autumn, unafraid of the cold winter,
focused only on buds, blossoms,
and cool green leaves in all this sunlight.

So for me, this morning, there was a moment when the constellations aligned. When my age was exactly the time of year, of day, of the decade, of my waking hours.

Locking the car, I hefted my books and walked inside.

White Geese

In the beginning, just the barn. The barn and the old house, left there by the absent owners, a broken and fascinating thing, an artifact lit by bare bulbs over a floor my father forbids us to walk across. You might fall through. Falling through a floor is absurd. Behind the kitchen sink, outside the window there, a high pile of cans and weeds, broken glass and blue-bottle flies, tall nettles, wild hemp and ragweed grown over my head, a forest during the day, stalks thick as my arm.

They never spoke. Or I don’t remember them speaking. My father rented a dumpster and worked hard in the way parents do, invisibly, on the periphery of a child’s awareness. My mother stayed home, I think. I spent most of my time in the field of the new farm, tracking down a litter of rabbits who died one by one in my bedroom later. I would also walk down to the fence where the bull used to kill people. Or that's what they say. Down the way a ways was a thin vein of water and I followed the creek, oblivious to the mosquitoes, hoping to get ticks I could pull out of my scalp when I got home.

It was weeks we drove out to work around the abandoned farm, pulling up nettles and bed springs, rotted clothing and chicken bones, plows and gears and cardoors, milk jugs and tin pans burnt thru. Manure three feet deep in the barbed square paddock where they cows had been kept and ignored until they starved was fuel for the weeds that grew madly there, their enthusiasm and joy arching over the kid paths we created. My parents kept working silently on the cinderblocks and broken chairs, and we kept getting warned about exploring the dilapidated house until one night my father drove off with a red tin can of gas in the trunk of his Dodge Dart and that evening the whole farmhouse—the bare lightbulbs, the pornography stuffed in the walls, the swaybacked floors, the whole flimsy tinderbox of it all went up in a scorch of fumes and fire and light and burned for three days even after the tornados and rain came. He said teenagers in a white car did it, and I believe him. The heat made the air ripple hard, it radiated too hot to stare at even through the carwindows and you had to turn your head as if seeing something shameful.

My parents separated and then got back together and she said her nose broke from tripping on a toy or a chair. And we went back to the farm to continue working, my mom more gone this time but me left with new pants striped all the way to the ends of the bell-bottoms but they are the wrong size but they fit. We are ported to Bible camp where we learn how to believe and about true faith. We learn about Muslims and Jesus and memorize daily verses for a prize at the end -- a framed picture of Jesus -- and I find thrilled smile and there may be a picture of skinny me somewhere smiling with long hair and striped jeans with Jesus looking sidewise at me over my head in a box in some little Iowa church in Altoona or Napier or Nevada or Boone, but I’m pretty sure there is no way to find it, I hear the whole town was sucked up in a tornado, the windbreak poplars and the buildings and mobile homes and the spare junk we leave lying around.

That tornado stepped around our farm. The barn stood empty, that is what we were told by the former owners. There are many more days of cutting and hauling, trees to cut up. Not till long after dad he bought the place do we finally fight down the debris and underbrush and my dad he is at the barn door, exploring, and opens the door and inside he is horrified, he sees a dozen white geese penned up for weeks no water no food burst out of the half door screaming for water this is what I saw and clamor down to the creek there this is what I remember and drink and flutter and crash about I saw this they have been there all along weeks now this is true, we ignored them, our derogation, terrible to contemplate and I feel inside what it means to be captive and the barn is empty finally, the door hanging open and blackness inside and the geese escaping down the creekbed, white bodies smudging the creekbed and for years the dreams that burst out late at night in the summer that the white geese are penned and waiting for me, still there, and I should do something but it’s too late, should have rescued them, should have opened the door to something I did not yet know how to name.

Powerlines / Endicott / rhetoric

Powerlines

The powerlines up above the place where I'm staying in Endicott, NY is one of those torn up places that give off an odd mix of sense of desperation and possibility. You know the sort of place: wheel ruts dug deep in the clay from stuck jeeps, small pools of tepid water, green bursts of opportunistic weeds surging up in the margins. It's the sort of place that makes you want to toss your beer bottles against rocks or the horizon. The sort of place that attracts teenagers and pigeons. It’s a broken place where anything can happen. And it’s hard for the cops to get to.

I always appreciated such places for their moon-like beauty. My S.O. said she once went up to these same powerlines and punched a guy in the face when he dared her. Then he dared her again and she hit him again. I guess he hadn't worked out the nuances of flirting quite yet. She's not a teenager now, so that must have been...a long time ago. But the powerlines haven’t changed much, she says. I suspect it’s one of those permanently scarred places that will always elicit a sense of poverty so powerfully that it almost makes you giddy. It elicits blunt force trauma. I imagine my S.O. and this guy taunting each other near the fence at the top that surrounding the buzzing electrical exchange station. It hogs the best view, but you can stand with your back to it and look down on the whole city to see the distant, symmetrically carved hillsides that slope down to the rivers like the keels of capsized boats.

This must have been an invigorating place a hundred years ago. Imagine overlooking the confluence of the Chenango and the Susquehanna rivers and the long undulating wooded valley they muscle through. The possiblity! The exotic distances brought close! The fecundity of 10,000 trees!

It's still beautiful here though it's a rust-belt city that’s been exploited for jobs, polluted, and ditched. We have a brownfield down the hill from here where IBM dumped trichlorethylene for years, creating a carcinogenic plume under the city. The New York Times says the case is now to the Supreme Court, but regardless of what happens there, people aren't going to move. Where do you go? Hawaii?

It's sort of numbing to see how the place has been torn up and how people have been treated. We’ve lost a sense of possibility here, of futurity. It's hard to imagine this place supporting people (much less indigenous creatures and forests) in the future. My dad says that Michigan, where he grew up, used to be a vast woodland; now it's mostly an interstate with some nice ranch-style houses. Oh, and there's Flint and Detroit, making the pollution of Endicott and Love Canal look like nothing. Yikes. Now that GM is bankrupt and they've closed the plants in MI (highest unemployment in the nation, the web tells me), I suspect powerlines all across that state will be teeming with teens.

It's hard to overestimate the weight of the American Dream when it breeches and capsizes on a city. Cortland, where I teach, has been waterboarded for years as various industries left or died (Smith Corona and Corning Glass chief among them). Here we have the abdication of IBM, Endicott-Johnson shoes, and many others. The effect is not only on specific companies and the network of tangential organizations connected to those companies (restaurants, parts suppliers, public works projects, schools and on and on), but it's felt in the heart as well. When we lose communities and neighborhoods, it's vastly alienating. It tends to strip those who remain of any sense of shared enterprise. Thus there's no speed bump that slows your thinking as you sit in your car contemplating the erection of yet another Walmart in the last green lot left. It doesn't matter anymore. The fact that what seems like a good idea today will be a tax-barren empty shell in 20 years literally isn’t conceivable.

As the economy dies down, daily life is eventually lit only by the blue flickering of our own individual desires, which sometimes can be stoked enough to illuminate our immediate family, sometimes not even that. When you're only worried about surviving day to day, you can’t notice ugliness of culture, architecture or food. When you're in it for yourself, you lose your senses. We become inured to the needs of others and the inner lives of other people. People and events that stand outside our lifetime fade like photographs and atrophy. Family disappears from our stories. We lose a sense of our grandkids and great grandparents. Reviving receding phantoms is a hard sell for a culture that has trouble meeting the demands even a short book represents to the imagination, for a culture that can’t picture what hundreds of gallons of trichlorethylene does for generations of kids in your hometown.

Sometimes I think we're spiders. We're in a web, a net of relations that ties us together in various forms of cooperation, even in the midst of competition. What's easy to forget when things are going "well" (that is, when we can ignore the fact that everything changes), we can also ignore that we depend on each other. The irony of a working system is that the very systemicity that gives it identity tends to fade from view, the way a novel or movie can lose its material immediacy when we're caught up in it. It's ironic when that happens, but it's also unreal. Problems bring us back to our fundamental interrelation (Kenneth Burke talks about this irony in the context of war).

So I'm up at the powerlines that day, stone cold sober but not bitter. Looking at the city I see a lot of desperation. I told a friend once that driving into Cortland (also in central New York) and seeing the thick opaque plastic over the house windows gives me a feeling like I just took a big hit off a cigarette. The depressing rush. The wave in the pit of the stomach.

So we tend in teaching to be too territorial. We are so busy building careers and speciality knowledge that it's hard to think big, to solve real-world problems. This is hardly a new complaint, but it's newly acute for me.

The discipline of rhetoric, though, is a pretty strong solvent, and hard to keep walled up in the academy. It was never meant to be an academic discipline, anyway--it kept failing to meet the standards of rigor and rarity that astronomy or geometry might. Rhetoric is cross-disciplinary, as is a student’s experience. We don’t have enough models for using rhetoric is high school or across disciplines, though I was thrilled to read Steven Johnson's new book and hear him discuss ecology as a cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary science, using insights from physics to farming, a practical and somewhat transgressive move discussed also by Jim Zebroski ("Rewriting Composition as a Postmodern Discipline: Transforming the Research/Teaching Dichotomy." Ronald and Roskelly. 168-182). What are the problems that we face, and how can students pull from their education to address the problems of their lives? I'm the first to say that in some ways we adults know more than kids do about what might be a valuable resource, so I'd argue that Shakespeare, as "useless" as it seems, is in fact useful for solving problems of understanding character and developing a sense of the beautiful and eloquent--ditto physics. But we each have a responsibility (literally response-ability) to find our own topics and audiences.

To look down from the powerlines and see, with "open eyes and open hands" the city one lives in can be terrifying. I'd rather get hit in the face (twice!) than flirt with the idea. But kids know what hurts and deserve a sense of interconnection and promise. They deserve a chance to tell their stories. Schools can give this to them much better than they do. I'd like to see schools provide kids with a chance to ask the hard questions about the difference between what is and what should be, and not lavish too much respect on the tidy divisions between disciplines ("content areas"). I'd like to see schools as places where kids and adults work together to make shared sense of shared problems--which automatically implies a rhetorical, problem-posing, and community oriented learning. It implies a different way to think about the center or coherence of a school in its practice.

One of the models we can use for this is both ecological studies and composition studies. Why not invite (and support!) teachers--who tend to be disposed to interdisciplinary study already--in the practice and inquire into these questions? Here is a really radical question: why not have them work together across levels, districts, and subject areas? Now that would be powerful.

--David

revised 7/16/10

50th birthday

Tomorrow I turn 50, a milestone. Or fifty of them, stretching back to when Eisenhower was president and the Beatles were unknown. Penicillin was rare and the birth control pill was approved by the FDA. The interstates were just being built. Hawaii had been a state for only five months. John F. Kennedy was just elected and took the reins. The US sent the first troops to Vietnam.

One of my first memories was looking at the far away mountains in Texas from the steps of graduate student housing. My parents would tell me elaborate stories about how lovely it was there and the bridge and road that took you there. I remember watching TV when JFK was assassinated. My dad got work in Iowa. I remember the many space shots and the moon landing. I lived through Vietnam, Woodstock, Kent State, and the drug culture. I started driving (usually with my parents) when I was 13 and on my own all the time in a 1967 VW Beetle by the time I was 16 (12-volt engine finally, but still the funky tubular bumpers and no head restraints). "Women's Lib" was a big deal. I remember The Whole Earth Catalogue I poured over at the house of a neighbor in Iowa, a bearded man who lived with two women. I worked "walking beans" for weeds, detasseling corn and wandering through the fields, exploring. I was always exploring. I hated school, wore a headband to class in the early '70s at my deeply rusticated school, and felt strangely out of place. I read all the time, was sick a lot, was very interested in science (I cut my teeth on bio textbooks), read more, loved waterbirds, and beat up on my brother mercilessly. There weren't a lot of people around. We didn't have a color TV until I was maybe 14 or so. My dad would come home with stacks of punched cards that he used for his dissertation research; there were no personal computers. The first new car he bought was a 1967 Dodge Dart, no carpets, no radio, bench seats. I wonder if it had seatbelts.

We moved to Tennessee in the 1970s, and I felt a little out of place. Worked in a bar there, had a pretty girlfriend, never studied. Took root in English studies, though, esp. poetry and literary theory. Got into grad school in Syracuse, got married, had two wonderful boys, got my Ph.D. at S.U., and found work at nearby Cortland. Took over my dad's finances as he got older and my sister and I found him a place to live in Little Rock. Got divorced, bought a house, met my soulmate, met a son that a high-school girlfriend had by me and gave up for adoption. Trying to sell my house in Syracuse and am looking to buy with here here in Tully.  [footnote: found a house as discussed in other posts].

Nathan is 29. Joe is 15. Eli is 13. My girlfriend's kids are Drew (14) and Jackson (9). I'm blessed in every way: I have a job, enough money, an apartment, a car; my parents are alive and they love me. So do my friends and family. I even have a dog who loves me. I know how to write, I'm in a 12-step program that has changed my life and will do so for the rest of it, and I'm healthy as a horse. A fifty-year-old horse, maybe, but I can still gallop, rear and buck.

That's it. Some of the best things have been the kids and Jacqueline. Good friends. A good education. Music. I'm 49 tonight and I want to learn how not to take things personally, to let things go, to let other people take up more of the load, to be in the moment. All work I have to do, good work. I don't want for anything material, and I'm not bitter or resentful, frightened or obsessed. It's been a good ride. Though "sometimes all the light's on me / Other times, I can barely see," I'm grateful. Not Dead. So far, this has been one of the most interesting periods of history, both lacking in some fundamental securities and oversewn with too many insulations against danger. The environmental exploitation I see discourages me sometimes. But it's always on the edge. I've been lucky.

The Notebooks

So forgive the set up: a summer evening with distant thunder, cool wet breeze sloshing in the windows, trees filing up the sky like a tattered scrim, and me at my computer.  Almost too romantic to be endured.  If there were a few fireflies (or better, a moon or the tracers of distant fireworks) the metaphor of my passion would be stapled to the genre FOREVER.

But that’s what I’ve got to work with.  And in the little garret of my head the writer there has six worn notebooks open, each lit by the flickering light of one single, solitary, solemnizing candle.  Around him the yellow pages glow dim as various phases of the moon, and at his back stained-glass windows are squared out and high up in the castle:

The notebook for “business.”  In it is a description of the young hairy woman and a scratch-and-sniff spot with $1800 in new bills.  Along the side are lists of objects found for cheap by the side of the road.

The notebook devoted to “sex and women.”  In it he has a long digression on the admixture of excitement and loss that he feels when he wakes before his lover does.  It is parsed out in the style of John Donne.

The notebook in which he writes about his children, how impatient his has been and how he drove his motorcycle (horse-powered, of course, to keep with our pre-post-modern writer-in-the-garret metaphor) over to his sons’ house and left there on the stoop two cans of their favorite soda because he felt like there was nothing else he could do (and the mourning dove cooed a haunting cry, cry, cry!)

The notebook where he writes about writing, teaching, and learning.  He writes in this one with his left hand because suffering makes you honest (or so he says in the notebook, though it’s pretty much illegible and might just be talking about his desires).

The notebook where he writes the themes of his reading: how his joke about “printing a test page” made him think how academics spend time perfecting the printing of their ideas, not living them; how Dave Hickey makes him very uncomfortable because he admires and covets that mind and stance; how Benjamin Franklin has been worming his way into many conversations in the months; how his newly purchased book talks about how the humanities change when they go digital, an idea he never considered before;

The notebook where he talks about the English department his colleagues.  This notebook is torn and mud-scuffed, and he throws it against the wall repeatedly before picking it up to scribble a line or two;

Then a wind comes up and snuffs out the candle with its long, invisible fingers.  The man sits there for a moment, watching the lightning, then strikes a match and lights

The notebooks.

David