Burning It

You say “It’s not what we pictured”
(autumn hills in lugubrious flame)
So I say steal all the pictures,
I say smash their cheap glass
break frames & cheap flowers,
the graceful cheap bamboo fronds,
the cheap birds winging over cheap forests,
the soundtrack paintings, all the filler fields of wheat,
the fungible bulk colors signed by machine,
pre-recorded guitar solos over drum machines
clicking with the intelligence of a roach,
the stiff, formal hug of our personal ambitions.

Take them to the parking lot of that cheap hotel,
the one where we made love with an eclipse
outside our window then froze all night.
Make a pile of our garbage can plans,
pour turpentine into them, diesel and alcohol
until it soaks deep. Climb up on the dump.
See how the cold air trembles with excitement?
Scratch the last match fast against the sandpaper.
I love you. Now drop it.

DIY

He’s looking in The Family Handyman
for the device, the perfect jig
to hang a week, letting it dry and twist, curl up and air out.
The hanger must be clever and strong,
an ingenious clevis, toggle bolt or cotter pin

to handle days loose as layers of cardboard tied
with silk scarf, as an aquarium of marbles,
as scalloped waves fastened with irridium glue and salt,
a week composed of Plato’s Phaedrus, an iffy power steering pump,
the smell of distant burning and a new MAC OS, shorn cornfields,
crumpled student sentences and junk mail.

The miracle hanger is not in the table
of contents, the index, nothing online,
nothing under the cushions, no tips
in the junk drawer. It was here, though.
The apartment is studded with bent nails.
A dizzy auger left holes in the bed and walls
before it sucked blood from the dog
and left in your new car.

The Hat: A Christmas Story

Warning: it's not pretty, there's obscenity, and what I'm shooting for is not to sneer at the holidays, but to play with some realistic fiction. You were warned.

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The Hat

Though it rained all night and melted most of the snow, grey-white ice lay in the shadows between houses. Detritus of the winter emerged: a blue-and-white child’s glove, flattened cigarette packs, bits of black plastic. The couple was walking their dog now that the rain had stopped. Christmas lights burned in the windows. The woman wore a long blue wool coat and immaculate hiking boots. She walked with her arms crossed and her bare hands tucked under the woolen arms of her coat. She held the blue leash in her right hand and their new dog darted back and forth on the bare sidewalk. Her husband walked beside her. They didn’t speak. He wore a large furry Russian hat and smoked a cigar. The smoke billowed up behind them as they walked, grew thin and disappeared.

“Fucking dog,” the husband growled when the animal lunged in front of his feet. When it squatted in someone’s yard a moment later, the sudden stop jerked the woman’s leash arm open, making her twist stiffly. She made mewling sounds to coax the dog to hurry while they waited. It strained and trembled, then bounded onto the sidewalk. “Goddamn fucking dog” the husband said. The woman jerked hard at the leash but the dog pulled away at the end of his collar anyway, choking and scrabbling.

A man had come out on his upstairs porch to smoke a cigarette now that the rain had stopped. His house had a giant candy cane cutout hammered into the front lawn. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted down to the couple. “You want me to clean that up?” he said. The dog started barking at the man. The couple kept walking without speaking. “Hey!” the man said. He was barefoot and leaned on the banister with both hands. “You gonna leave that shit there for me to clean up?” The tiny dog lunged into the collar and in so doing its blue leash tangled around the legs of the husband, forcing him to stumble. The dog yelped and ran from him, forcing the woman to spin on one heel. Blue smoke from the cigar filled the air.

The husband grabbed the collar and neatly flipped the dog over. He held it to the ground by the throat with his left hand and made a fist with the right. His gloved hand hit the dog in the belly, the chest, the face. He stood over the animal and twisted his body to put all his weight into it. The dog yelped and struggled and the skin on its face was cut against its teeth. The husband’s fluffy hat fell to the wet sidewalk and rolled against his wife’s boots. Blood spattered on the husband’s coat and when he stopped, the knuckles of his glove had been cut open. “What are you doing?” cried the man on the porch. He stood up, cigarette still between his fingers. “What the hell are you doing?” he said. “It’s not the fucking dog’s fault, you asshole,” he said, his voice thin and trembling. “It’s not the fucking dog’s fault” he repeated. The husband and the wife stood still for a moment. The dog huddled at the extreme end of his leash, mouth open, panting. The woman bent to pick up the husband’s beautiful hat.

“Where do you get off being so vulgar?” said the woman to the man on the porch. “Just who do you think you are?”

Haiku October '09

Writing in Coffeehouses

A room with a view

Music no one listens to

Words I do not share.

The Teacher

Jacqueline's small hands

explain a huge story

to her computer.

Nulla Dies Sine Linea

Today's frantic grab

for the rip cord, miss, miss:

such a lovely fall.

Finding Eli's Favorite Hat

Between the buxom

hay bales, E's hat, lost in play:

when did he grow up?

After Rain

Parking lot puddles

plain, flat, cold limestone, simple

reflect tree, cloud, mind.

Moving to Tully, NY

August 29, 2009

Hi,

Writing you from this cheapo chair, bought from a Goodwill store in rural New York and still smelling like a clean, dry grandmother’s house, is a pleasure. The chair is in our living room, a large, old boiler-heated room in beige. You can’t tell from inside the room whether we’re in Syracuse or Binghamton or Cortland, but when I look out the window it’s pretty obvious we’re in Tully, NY.[1] This town has about 867 people, but we’re not even inside the city limits. We live in a cornfield. The house looks like it was set down here somewhat accidentally, as if an outtake from the Wizard of Oz. You can see Jacqueline’s kids’ school from the upstairs windows (Drew’s 13 and will be going to the middle school; at 9, Jackson will be going to Tully Elementary). There is a large flat grocery distribution plant a few cornfields over, several crucifixes from the churches emerging like periscopes from the corn—and lots and lots of green.

The fields are striated, now that we’re in the last inch of August; the farmers have peeled back alternating swaths of alfalfa. The combines are coming for the corn, and the whole scene reminds me of that sort of magical painting style of rural scenes by that Iowan painter Grant Wood. We’re in a valley about five miles wide with hills on either side that rise away to the east and west. Everything slips north and south between these ridges: the river, the railroad, the interstate, the minor highways. Cut east and west, though, and it gets weird. And interesting. You go through several geographical anomalies caused by the glaciers. This region is where they stopped, dropped their gravel, dug deep plunge pools, and created a series of hills that look exactly like ships turned upside down, their keels exactly the same arc.

We’re already started to explore these places. My Joe and Eli will be down here from Syracuse for as often as I can get them (they are not moving), and every other weekend; Drew and Jackson Deal are 24/7. The six of us have vague plans to travel to Tinker Falls with the dog (always the dog), go hang-gliding off the Morgan Hills cliff, ski at the several local downhill slopes, and canoe down the Tioughnioga River. Some of these seem more likely than others, but they are all possible.

Everything is possible. Getting your hair cut here, going to the doctor or dentist, eating at a family-owned diner, going to the bank, the library, the used bookstore. You can’t go to the local bars—there are none. There is a good meeting on Wednesday nights, however. At school I have a gym and a pool, and work is now only 15 minutes away—for the first time in ten years, my commute is shorter. Jacqueline has uncomplainingly stretched her commute out to 50 miles each way. In fact, there has been very little complaining in this whole venture. Leaving schools, families, neighbors, close friends, houses and all that has been a difficult. GF (GirlFriend) and I grew up in our respective towns and have ligatures there. I’ve been in Syracuse since 1983—and now that seems long ago. They play music from that era on the oldies stations now! It’s not fair! So this is a season of exhilaration and extremes. The mental soundtrack is tearing a worn sheet into dishrags. That making-by-ripping—that’s what it feels like lately. Not bad, just bit changes, lots of bits.

Even making a new life is possible. Buying a house in Tully is possible. Getting married is possible. Fall is possible. Writing is possible. The line between what’s possible and what’s inevitable is blurry. We are going to practice steering by bright rural stars.

Oh, and I didn’t mention the train, which runs next to the house and scares the hell out of me daily. It’s only mournful and soothing from a distance, through the rain, when you’re holding a steel guitar. Up close it is very much like God’s own two-note soundtrack for the Apocalypse.

---

[1] David Franke and Jacqueline Deal. Formerly of 361 Rt. 11 South, Apartment 1. Tully, NY, but now in our new house at 793 Tully Farms Road, a very cool place if I say so myself!

Fashion Blues

I’ve always had trouble getting dressed. I no longer scream when they pull a shirt over my head like I did when I was little. I don’t generally struggle any longer to tie my shoes. But I still face problems, serious challenges, every day when standing in front of my closet. Where others might see a field of sartorial possibilities, I see nothing but a matrix of subtle rules and conventions at work, vague and implicit lines in the sand of fashion, brightly colored invitations to cause some sort of stylistic misdemeanor.

Negotiating these tripwires takes a sensitivity and determination I have trouble mustering before breakfast. I try to get the upper hand by enforcing upon my clothing a strict hierarchy in order to control the chaos. That’s why, except for those on the floor, all my shirts face the same direction. It lends a sense of order and helps me in my private moments, those long minutes when I peer into the dark closet at a thousand errors waiting to happen. I feel every day so much like I did when I used to try to write essays in college. So many mistakes just waiting to happen. So many hidden rules. The malicious grammar of clothing rustling in my closet, waiting for me to pick something wrong. Often, I find myself exhausted by the time I sit down to my humble bowl of cereal, wearing only underwear at the breakfast table, utterly defeated.

Like writing, dressing is generally a private business. Nobody wants to see you in the midst of the process: the agonizing, the trying on, the tearing up and throwing away. The tears. The recriminations. Nobody wants to see you trying to balance on one foot, metaphorically or actually. They just want to see the product, and don’t want to be shocked by it. The recondite flowchart that steers us from error is of course quite secret, as I’ve mentioned. I have yet to find anyone who is brave enough to tell me about it. They’ll even deny that there are any rules, defaulting to the tired line that “It’s just all about how you feel.” But this is plainly not the case. There are, for example, a whole set of tacit and unspoken guidelines about matching things up and the way they go together. Some are plainly not recommended any more than mixing chlorine bleach and ammonia, or oil and water, or my brother and your new car.

Imagine attempting to wear an innocent checked blue and green shirt with blue and green pants. Nothing good will happen there, but you must admit that, at the level of theory, there is nothing wrong. Blue and blue, of any shade, are sanctioned. They have the same name, even. It has to be safe. Green with green is an approved combination. Blue and green are both good friends, the colors of the water, of the ocean, even of pirates. Put them all together, and you may think you have found a combination that will make the pretty ladies give you their hungry glances – but no. I have had women move to the far side of the hall when I strut by dressed in this checkered celebration, this profusion of plaid. Why? Because I violated a rule that everyone knows but no one will admit to: one must wear only identical checked clothing. Don't ask why. Just accept this as fact. Thinking will only exhaust you. Likewise, you cannot wear perfectly identical colors lest you be accused of wearing a pantsuit. I do not know what a pantsuit is, but when I bought a pack of RIT dye and dyed several shirts and jeans all the same color, I was not celebrated for my inventiveness. Ditto with khaki shirts + khaki pants. No one smiles in a good way when you wear five shades of brown (shirt, tie, pants, shoes, hair). What is wrong with brown?

We have established that identical colors are somehow bad, and that there are certain toxic combinations. Green and orange, for instance, are anathema for reasons no one wants to talk about, though I swear I have often seen lovely red-haired Irish women wear green and orange at the same time and no one laughed at them. In fact, people wanted to talk to them all the time! Another hole is torn in the rules for fashion. Red and green are apparently forbidden also — my best guess is that together they are redolent of Christmas. Though countless flags combine red and green -- South Africa and Italy and even Lithuania Minor come to mind -- does anyone ever think of South Africa as “The Christmas Country”? They do not! Perhaps someone can explain why, then, it is nearly illegal to wear red and green into the secular American classroom.

There are more rules. Pink and blue are bad (perhaps inducing gender confusion?), black and white are bad (waiter?), blue and black are bad (makes you look like a giant bruise?), yet the same fashion liberals will aver that “black goes with everything.” It plainly does not.

There’s more. Dark colors must go on the bottom of an outfit because they are heavy; if you wear, say, white pants and a black top, you are not only imitating a waiter in reverse, but you also seem imply to passersby that you might suddenly and uncontrollably capsize. Fear of witnessing me flip up in an extraordinary fashion misadventure is, I assume, what has driven my colleagues and students to avert their eyes when we ride up on the elevator together. Yet I was never warned of this danger, not once.

But I’m trying to tell you something important here.

There are many people who know these rules and are either unable, unwilling, or afraid to talk about them. Think with me for a moment about frequency, the issue of frequency. You can wear new clothes for the first time only after you have thoroughly washed them. The theory at work here seems to assume that rodents or pests crawl through new clothes, and that not until being run through the spin cycle should we risk putting them on (a theory that conveniently ignores the fact that we try on clothes in stores and don’t feel we need to bathe afterwards).

There is clearly a bit of duplicity at work here.

What baffles me is why we hide the rules with a straight face. I know a woman who would slather her nude self in oil-based house paint before she’d wear the same outfit for a second day. So there is to be variety. One is expected to dress a bit differently M-F, but not too predictably. For instance, if you dress Italian one day and Mexican the next, you are likely to be ostracized; in contrast, if one plans to eat spaghetti on Monday, and tacos on Tuesday, people assume you reflect good middle class household organization skills. Furthermore, it is tacitly forbidden to assign a certain outfit to each day of the week. Though in my experience it will take some months for people to catch on, when they do figure out that you have sequenced outfits by workday, you will be eating your lunch at the only empty table in the cafeteria for the rest of the school year. And nobody will help you revise your essays for English class.

I know of which I speak.

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.

The Second Orality

Dear Reader,

Today I am writing you with my words. I am using my words to communicate. Communication is an essential element of every student’s tool box. Without the ability to communicate clearly, jobs will be lost. There will be a losing of jobs. Attention will waver, employees will drop parcels, some citizens will become lost in their pursuit of happiness, ending up in such places as the employee break room of a large supermarket in Lincoln, Nebraska. Newspapers will be printed merely for the paper, which people will use for starting fires they sit around, roasting buffalo on a stick. Sentences will be as worthless as Weimer-era money. It will take a shopping cart of them to write your child a note for school, and the sad children will complain bitterly as they wheel the racked wagon of rationalizatons from home through the snow to their principal’s office. All songs will have an oral version only, and they will be sodden with rhyme. Prose will be dismissed as too difficult to remember. Assembly instructions will, of course, remain unintelligible. Our greatest truths will be reduced to catchy phrases, and the President will wink and say “Working hard, or hardly workin’?!” This will seem familiar to many who lived through the Bush era of war and economic decline. Jerry Springer will be elected to the Supreme Court by a show of hands and quickly turn the vexing process of adjudication into a more playful, user-friendly process of argument that anyone can relate to. Size of biceps and breasts will become an important legal principle. There will of course be buffalo meat on sticks and popcorn served in the chamber, cooked over a fire of law books. Happily, photography will continue unabated, and classrooms will become entirely a based on Powerpoint and movies. Reflecting and revising will become suspect, and students will be expected to write one-word adjectives that reflect their experience of the subject only. Eventually this will be seen as too demanding, and they will draw simple pictures that express their feelings about historical, political, medical and social concerns.  Exams will be multiple choice, even at the graduate level. In this, education will remain unchanged. The apprentice/Master relationship will be central to medicine and dentistry. Research will be discouraged, but the docent will be invited over a lot for Sunday dinners to soak up wisdom from the Master. In rhyme.  After a few years of this, primitive scientists will develop special chants to curse and heal, and diagnosis will descend to the level of schoolyard taunts, with the evil spirits of illness shouted out in modified rap songs.  And of course, most of of the patients will die of any number of preventable illnesses, leaving not a trace.  In fact, anyone dead more than ten years will be completely and effortlessly reabsorbed into the obscure, undulating sea of forgetfulness and the camp fires will burn all night.

Gratitude

didn’t appear with angels,

though they’d be nice, all that hubbub

and buzz about visitation

and the implicit august nod from above.

It’s more like the flump at the top

of a flight of stairs

that runs out of steps

before you do,

or the basketball

you threw in desperation

that hits the rim for three

bounces, then finds its way

through the simple middle.

Or this morning,

unfolding myself from a dark bed

like a letter to the day

and knowing what to do,

happy to carry a thermos of coffee

to the car and stand fixed in the black pre-early morning,

stars like bullet holes

letting in light

over new snow.

The car that starts.  Steam

rising slowly from a thousand chimneys

in this polluted valley and all the sleeping people

fills me.

Creativity/Aristotle/motive/writing

I haven't written for a while, and that's given me the space to turn my gaze to look at my blog from a new POV and notice how strange it is that we should think of creation as "backwards" and daily life as "forewards" by contrast. Weird. Seems to me that this is analogous to the mistake kids often make when they try to understand vision--they see vision as something coming out of them, out of their bodies and consciousness, and it's very hard for them understand that in fact vision goes in the other direction, from the surfaces of the world first, and into their eye as an accident. Our consciousness, then, an accidental catch by a one millimeter circle of black.

I've been listening to Aristotle and have never locked in to anything so wonderful while driving. It may seem a stretch, but to me, Aristotle is talking about the same thing I've been trying to understand, the necessity of practicing and inquiring into the human imperative to create. His logic is not as recondite as I always feared. He argues that we understand things from good examples, and a good example is something that is well suited to its functions and purposes. Hammers make good nail-drivers, for instance. The focus on form and design allows him to ask what tools, animals and even humans so particularly well. For humans, that especiallyy characteristic attribute is that they reason. This reasoning we do is not necessarily philosophical, but could be; it includes all types of decision-making in all trades. In other words, it involves making.

The end of human activitity, then, becomes enhancing and shaping this rational ability, this ability to choose what to make and how to make it. Birds don't exactly do that with their nests, or dogs with their howl (my examples, not Aristotle's). But we do. When we put in a car stereo, build a house, write a book--all these are forms of making that reveal what is uniquely human about us.

My interest is in the uniquely human activity of writing. Not only are there a huge number of specific choices to be made--letters, words, order of phrases, tone, topic, revision--which is fascinating (and a joy to participate in), but there is also the implicated sphere of how one creates the conditions for this writing to happen (teaching). But the real issue is the most nebulous: what sponsors writing? What makes it necessary? What sorts of effects can it have on others and the self? Who exactly is writing? Is writing always good (maybe we should not write as much as we do)?

These seem to be questions of motive and purpose, and as such they are and are not rational activities. So I'm not sure where to go with this...

DF

Writing as Crashing/process/good work

On writing as crashing:

This sort of "dancing," this accretion of new beginnings, the overgeneration of new framing schemes, is a probably a symptom of something very simple: I find ideas *while* writing, not before. For me, writing is a mode of discovery, and though I revise all the time, I revise as I'm writing. Invention and revision are the same moment for me. My writing process moves like a crayfish (backwards). I crash into my ideas that way, running a full-tilt boogie backwards, rather than stalk them. I'm hell in those writing process china shops.

It occurs to me that I've been trying to understand for a long time what it means to develop finished and coherent art: the finished poem, dissertation, curriculum, class, assignment. I think there is something very valuable about the organization and formal qualities of a something well made. But what occurs to me is that such organization is probably not at all as fixed as we are taught to think about it in school. The "well-wrought urn" image is misleading because, like all fundamentalism, it forgets to account for change.

Fundamentalism often gets mighty righteous when it starts to defend form (as in "form-ality" or "in-form-ation").  Form is always understood as "final" form, but that word "final" gets skipped over, doesn't it?  The result is that you start to be oriented by an ever-elusive picture of perfect form.  Audience, process, joy, purpose and discover, in the form-worshipping model, tend to seem like stupid impediments, problems of individual distraction and ability, stopping to pee when you're trying to make time on the interstate.  I see this in teaching a lot. Just tonight I was surprised and disappointed to see a peer nominate himself as the adjudicator of a student magazine project because he knows better and could "increase the quality" of the magazine.  That's no doubt true.  But is it the quality of the final form or the quality of the process that we're after? Sure, it's both.  But it's hard to value the lambent act of learning, as fast to lose its center as a drop of oil on water.  But I'd argue it matters more.  Our job is to teach learning, not form.

What would happen if the focus was on the process of making meaning--on the dynamics (communities, populations, technologies, classrooms) where meaning was made, not on the individual final products? What if instead of focusing on the final and canonized form of great issues, we were actually trusting enough of students to ask them to address the issues that they consider most pressing?  Love, sex, religion, living a meaningful life, excitement, autonomy, authenticity might figure as a pretty serious start--at least these were my issues and in many ways still are.  Are they yours?  If not, isn't it your responsibility to find them?  The big goal of a composition program, it seems to me, is to provide for students a real audience (not real-ish, but real, people who read their stuff with care) and to make the writing important enough to enlist the thoughts of other thinkers (that is, to "write with sources"). Finding older teachers who can read kids writing is very hard.  Richard Haswell has a book that starts with that challenge or paradox.....

I was listening to the radio today.  For the folks at the station, what brought true happiness was not just pleasure, which is ephemeral as everyone over the age of 12 knows, but engagement. In class I call this the difference between "fun" and something that's "interesting." In love relationships, it's the difference between flirting and being in a serious relationship.  In writing, it's the difference between inspiration and revision.  And as anyone who has ever been in a marriage knows, there is nothing about the final form of the union with all its legal guarantees and strictures and allowances that makes it valuable.  What makes is valuable is the day-to-day process of making it valuable, and it's a painful process sometimes because you have to admit your thinking and behavior might need to change.  So it is with true writing: the day-to-day process of sustaining your thinking eventually challenges you to grow up.

More and more, I don't think the final form matters much. Excellence matters, and the process of revising and reflecting will bring about excellence in most cases if pursued sincerely.  Let others worry about the final form.  Let them say Lou Reed is too talky, Kenneth Burke is too dense, Steven King is too derivative and gross, etc.  My brother and I were talking today about workmanship -- he is an excellent craftsman and honorable worker, though he charges WAY too little everything he does -- and he said the most interesting thing, that when he's working on a house he is always thinking "what would someone think if they came behind me and looked at how I decided to solve problems?"  And yet, he is able to take risks, be creative, and stay in the moment.  He has good products because he has a good (and sustained) process.  This is perhaps all another way of saying, hard work with take care of its worker.  When it doesn't then we need to kick the system in the teeth.

DF

following the rules/breaking the rules

Last time I was asking about finding a trail that would wind between the extremes of nihilism and fundamentalism. There is a sort of allergy or sensitivity, a proclivity, a readiness that comes from asking certain questions repeatedly. In Zen today, my teacher talked about this very issue. How do you go for things without pushing for *that* particular goal? In Christianity, they talk about God moving in mysterious ways, and though it's too often spoken as a weak salve against tragedy, I think it could also be a way to acknowledge that it's very hard to let go of our intentionality.

This is connected to teaching and writing in at least three ways. First of all, a course is a creation, a composition, and you have to be able to develop it with an eye toward some *general* goal, but you also can't have a narrow notch for the course to fall into, not if you're trying to experiment. Secondly, writers certainly know that the hardest thing to learn is not how to control the writing, but how to trust that there is a process of meaning-making that will, by impulsion and molecular *frisson*, push the work into a new place so that new ideas fall into a resonance with other ideas. This trust--is it faith?--is tested by every blank, austere page and the cheap satisfactions of images and storylines that chicken out before they actually risk. Third, with writing in particular, people tend to assume that quality is *either* a matter of following the rules of grammar and the conventions of topic *or* a matter of abandoning the rules in an ecstacy of inspiration and a cloud of incense.

I want to argue for the practical politics of the middle way.
I want to talk about politics as creation, but done in public.
Following the rules versus making the rules is my Big Life Theme of the moment.

More later.

David

Freud/creativity/the arrogance of nihilism

My partner is reading Freud's *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* and it's exciting in two ways. First, it's a thrill to hear her summarize in a breath what I'd be groping for in infinite regression; second, it's exciting because it resonates with some of the thinking I've been doing about writing and thinking and the way thoughts are connected.

Freud seems to be puzzling about why people do things that debilitate them, that interfere with pleasure, immediate or deferred. Instead, they will get tangled in myths and practices that don't do them any good and make them unhappy. What logic is that? But the answer, that we seem driven to engage in a sort of imaginative control over events we can't actually control, rings true for me. It seems to be another way of arguing for the utility of myth--that we create stories because they give us something even more valuable than pleasure: they give us meaning. Usually I think of "making meaning" as a pretty definite and constructive act: figuring out mysteries in science or just personal memory; finding a form that will enable you to engage in a certain kind of conversation (such as a blog!); noting the results of long effort and planning for the future based on that feedback. Making meaning--as opposed to just doing stuff--is something you have to intend to do, right?

Or not. And here is the problem. For creative acts, including meditation and love, the most important events of making meaning are not all about achieving a goal; lots of times, it's more a matter of falling into a conclusion, discovering something, not just driving toward it. So does uncertainty matter? Can it be a necessary part of making things meaningful? What does it do for people (like me!) who are very goal-directed and serious? How can I encounter the limits of my own control without succumbing to either nihilism or fundamentalism?

These two poles--nihilism and fundamentalism--for me are about the same. Nihilism is cynicism at the ground-out end of a bad week of drinking. Nihilism is quietly histrionic, but also ironic, unintentionally. It rejects meaning (curiousity, patience, change) by displacing it with a flat assertion, a kind of flat certainty about the ultimate failure of meaning (a paradox that would be funny to anyone but a nihilist!). It's an intellectual response to being depressed (and depression is often a lack of oxygen and sleep, I've found). In this way, nihilism is a instantiation of going *beyond* the Pleasure Principle: one finds meaning, in this case, in the conviction that there is no meaning that can, certainly and enduringly, endure or redeem us. It's a kind of absolutism.

Fundamenalism is the same assertion flipped on its back. Fundamentalism claims that there is an ultimate order that stitches all events together ("even the hairs on your head are numbered"); it's an extrapolation of one's own hope for absolute, guaranteed meaning. Fundamentalists, unlike nihilists, have heaven to retreat to; their actions are guaranteed and sanctioned.

Both nihilists and fundamentalists tend not to be very curious or humorous, in my experience. Both nihilism and fundamentalism are struggles: one professes losing the struggle to make meaning; the other professes to have won. They are ultimate states, imaginative absolutes taken as accurate descriptions of a shared world (but a world only the wise can see clearly, they claim).

So how do you do it, negotiate between a deep anticipation of ultimate order (fundamentalism) and a disparing nostalgia for absolute order (nihilism)? How do people do this? How also do you teach this (I'm a teacher, so I use an image of teaching it as my way of making sense of it)? How do you construct a college classroom, a writing class, a writing assignment sequence, a curriculum, a college so that people can make sense of things?

More tomorrow....(I have an agreement with my class to write daily)....

DF

Dancing Madly Backwards

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