Honeymoon Sharks

Honeymoon Sharks

I learned to swim in Iowa, a skill that’s about as useful there as knowing how to skin a platypus.  There are no lakes in Iowa, or if there are, everyone assiduously avoids talking about them.  I suspect that’s because you can’t plow or plant a lake, and as we all know, Iowa is crops. Lakes are anomalies and appear on their maps as large blank wet useless blotches.  I’m not sure they are even named. Just: blotch, as if someone set a wet coffee cup on your new oak table.  Lakes are a faux pas in all that rich cropland.  A true Iowan's attitude is: Yes, it happened.  Now what, really, is there for a person to say about it?

I was wrong about all that, about the problem with lakes.  The main reason we eschew lakes, I came to realize on summer evening in 1975, walking out of the theater, clutching a strangled box of popcorn with both terrified hands, is that in water, as the movie Jaws had just amply proved, is where large, really large, really really large hungry animals can and routinely do swim up from the unnamable dark grainy depths to eat people.  I can still feel on my skin the shift of temperature a swimmer must realize as cooler water is pulled up behind some great carnivore. I can picture the glimpse of the line of fin or tooth just under the rippling surface.  I can enter the realization that you are going to die in stereo -- both by being pulled under the surface gripped by the creature’s enormous teeth until you drown as well as being simultaneously torn limb from limb in water so deep there is not even enough light to see your own blood.  This is all scary, but the final words in your head would be “Gee, I could have lived if I had only stayed on land.”  But you chose instead to sit there, bobbing up and down like a cork or a worm on a hook, your little legs dangling down and kicking feebly.  No matter what horror you feel, there is no way can you climb on top of the waves, no way to outswim this cylinder of muscle that is squeezing its way through the water to your defenseless thigh.  You’re screwed.  Rather than learning to drive a tractor, you chose swimming lessons.  Great choice, white boy.

           

For me, this image slowly hardened into one small lesson: don’t swim in the ocean.  Lakes, streams, and even bathtubs were suspect, but swimming in the ocean was just asking for it.  I never looked at this very hard.  The choice between violent wet death and a long dry life seemed pretty stark and simple.  Furthermore, if you make it a rule never to swim in the ocean and you live in Iowa, there’s not much to lose.  As I grew older, though, I found that not all the things that scared the bejeesus out of me were geographically sequestered.  Getting married, for instance, made me pale with anxiety for about a decade. Raising kids, and, later, getting divorced took a long time to accept as part of my path.  I drew it out as long as I could, with agonizing slowness.  I never was one to plunge into something new.  It took me thirty years to quit partying, which is the pace of a glacier, especially given the amount of evidence I had to work with that it was time to stop.  But the biggest challenge, even bigger than eating sushi for the first time or dancing in public, was getting remarried.  I had met a woman I couldn’t ignore, one who was a lot less cautious than I was, and a lot less interested in figuring it all out than I am, and I found that delightful.  After eight years of courtship, we had moved in together, mixed our books together (a shockingly intimate gesture, it turns out), and even gotten married. 

I am standing on the lip of a ship with my huge black foot fins bouncing inches above the cold Pacific ocean. I’m wearing a wetsuit that makes me look like a seal and my face is crammed into an scratched and translucent snorkel mask.  Below me the water is broken into loose triangles, like pieces of pie, and we’re surging up and down.  I’m the next-to-last passenger on the boat but for my new wife, and I think how ironic and irresistible a story it would be if we were eaten by a great white shark on our honeymoon.  I reflect back on our wedding presents, some still unwrapped, our thank-you cards just begun, her wedding dress still hung up in our closet.  Everyone would say what a great wedding it was and someone would give all my vinyl records to my brother, who would cry a little and probably play Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” really really loud in his own little cathartic ritual.  Everyone would be so sad.  But before I can really complete this fantasy, a guy pops out of the water and yells to the first mate SHARK!

I take a small step back from the edge. 

Soon, the boat is full of parents and kids, honeymooners and tourists, all talking but also scanning the water, looking for the thin line of a fin or tooth just under the water, or breaking through the water, or a dark shadow travelling under the boat, perhaps nudging it just a little, enough to make the bell in the crow’s nest ring once or twice.  We all know the narrative.  We all saw the movie, and some of us had expected this all along.

To his credit, the first made suited up and jumped into the suspect water.  I waved goodbye and wondered who would get his vinyl records.  I was also proud of him, doing his job like that.  When he finally emerged, he was ecstatic.  “It’s a Thresher Shark,” he exclaimed.  “You never see them! It’s got to be four feet long! I haven’t seen one in years!” At some level, I shared his excitement.  It had been a long time since I had seen a Thresher Shark – my whole life, in fact.  But at another level, I thought he was being careful to leave out some important information.  “Tell me,” I said to him quietly, when he returned alive to the deck.  I leaned in so as not to embarrass him or cause him to lie if he didn’t want to share this information with the others onboard, “Have you ever heard of anyone, anywhere, ever being hurt by one of these sharks?”  He paused just a second and said “Nope.” I looked back at my wife, and at the one other guy in the water who seemed as scared as I was, but kept trying to convince his wife to jump in as a way to conceal his own nervousness.  “That’s good enough for me,” I said.  And I jumped.

           

It’s hard to breathe.  The mask blocks your nose. The snorkel is full of water and when you come to the surface you have to blow all that water out, not inhale, it’s unnatural, you desperately want to look down to see the shark coming up at you but you also want to look up to see where the heck the boat is.  You’re a lot further away than you expected.  There is a forest of kelp here, leaves sliding across your goggles.  Breathe.  Breathe – you can hear your breath in the tube.  Words "esophagus" and "trachea" come to mind, as do works such as "blood," "calm," "swim," and "air."  The splash behind you is your wife -- you hope -- and when you whirl around you see she’s having trouble with the mask, can’t make it work, doesn’t breathe right.  You bob alongside of her and wait for her to figure it out, your four legs dangling down, mindful that you are ignoring everything below you, and you wait to feel the rush of cold water that you’re sure precedes the inevitable attack. Her hair is tangled up in the fittings.  You wait.

It’s still tangled up and she tells you to go on, but you wait more and you can see that she is grateful.  When it’s worked out, you both turn your faces to the depths and immediately lose track of each other, watching instead the desultory schools of bright yellow fish that wander like strange goldfinches in the undulating clumps of kelp.  The yellow fish give way to blue ones, bright as flowers or jewels, and they seem neither afraid nor inattentive.  I realize, suddenly, that I’m in a forest, at the very top, and the water is clear all the way down, 30, 40, 60 feet to giant rocks that have rolled out of the hills from the nearby cliffsides and ended up here eons ago, now covered with green and yellow plants I can’t name and have never seen before. The school of blue fish slip silently and frictionlessly along the bottom.  I see green mottled fish that look like the mottled green clouds before a storm -- “maculate,” I think they call it.  The fear of the shark has faded.  I’m in an ancient forest of water-trees, staring down at the wild animals, and they don’t care.  I’m starting to regret, just a little bit and in the abstract, not seeing the shark.  Maybe just a glimpse of it as it shot out of this area toward deeper water.  Or the manta rays they say scuttle along the bottom of these waters or even, maybe, just saying, a whale, for there are supposed to be whales all over around here, and I’d like to see one, just for a moment, lying on its side, sliding by, making me feel how light and insubstantial my body is in the water, how unprotected all these animals are, and because of that, how beautiful.  

What I do for a living and why I do it

Today was the my college's first day for Tuesday/Thursday classes, and I went in excited after the summer, full of more ideas for our first day than you could shake a stick at. I am one of the few people I know who can honestly say he has "good work." I know what I want to do, I know what the challenges are, I know what not to waste my time on, and I know what a good risk feels like. But what puzzles me is something simple: how is it that my understanding of what I do and others' understand is so very different? Or to put it in another way, what sorts of assumptions do my students and peers have about what I do that don't match up to my own experience? Even more simply: why do people have such odd ideas about this job?

First of all, I should come clean and admit that I'm a writing teacher. I might be called a "comp" teacher when I teach comp, a "tech" teacher when I teach technical writing, or a "creative writing" teacher when I teach that. For each role there are some subtle differences in the picture. The creative writing teacher might be expected to elicit people expressing their inner selves, a sort of Dr. Phil with a degree in English. A tech writer might be expected to teach one rigorous and methodical quiver of invariant forms for gaining Success in the Workplace, the holy grail. And on. Each role has its own costume and clichés.

But as a writing teacher, the biggest umbrella, I think of myself as a rhetorician.

What's that? Since "rhetoric" usually means showy style, the opposite of substance, I should take a minute to defend the choice of the word "rhetoric." It doesn't mean bullshitting people, nor does it mean tricking them, being self-serving, or being insincere. Plato comes out and condemns rhetoric for these things (and implies them) in such dialogues as the Gorgias, the Phaedrus, and The Seventh Letter, and he was not exactly a fuzzy thinker, so there is a lot of momentum to this assumption. Today it is almost impossible to use the word "rhetoric" without it carrying a pejorative spin, as in "Johnny told the truth, but Billy just used rhetoric." Like the words "liberal" or "intellectual," it's difficult to say what you mean when you use these words.

But the tradition and the potential for useful meaning is such that I think "rhetoric" is a word worth using. For me, rhetoric, straight from Plato on down, implies a love/hate affair with our own power to use language. It's a frightening thing when you think about it to realize that we as humans live in a world that is more made up of the words that people use together, oral and written, than the physical world itself. We live in a world of signs, surrounded by human sounds and sights. If someone says something particularly nasty to you, probably that will be as real as (or more so) than the sting of a bee. It's in skillful language that the Hitlers and the Ghandis galvanize great change in huge populations. Skillful use of language is volatile. These folks are powerful. Rhetoric -- and here I'm thinking of it as "the ability to get others to take you seriously" -- is dangerous.

It's also natural. We can't avoid our attempts to get others to take us seriously. My kids were literally born with the skills and desire to get their mother and me to take them seriously. Still are! When they are young, rhetoric is all about making sure the self is fed, clothed, and loved. Without getting to far afield, it seems to me that rhetoric is also about giving love, too, as that seems to be a fundamental human need (not just a nice thing to do).

So if rhetoric begins as persuading people to take you seriously, that has two big implications. First, it seems pretty selfish. Getting humans to do what you want (using that unique system, human language) is an interesting, challenging, endlessly engaging activity, but it has little to do with their well being. It's all about maintaining and increasing your individual capital. In this, rhetoric is power, like muscle power or military power, to get what you want (though of course you can get what you want by cooperating with others, too, the motive is the same). What do we do about this rhetorical selfishness? Is there room to look at motives and ethics with rhetoric, or is it all manipulation? Is teaching kids "rhetorical" skills the most crass sort of education?

Secondly, if rhetoric is about getting people to take you seriously, what sorts of things do you want to get people to consider? That is, how do you know what you want (even when you want it for others) is a good thing? How do you choose your battles? How do you choose your words?

These are not new questions. Plato asked most of them, and there are entire continents of interesting stuff done in the 20th century that revived these questions [need bibliographical link to starting places here]. What this implies for me is that 1) rhetoric can be deliberately developed through education. 2) In fact, education IS rhetorical in several senses, and it is rhetoric that brings up these questions about ethics, motive, and judgment 2) writing is where the rubber meets the road in questions about expression, learning, developing a concept, etc.