Not seeing

I looked down and saw my brother’s face without eyes. The lids were there, but they were closed over empty space.

I had empty space inside, too. How could the world exist without my brother in it? He was so big. He filled every room he entered. People were instantly aware of him when he walked in. Eyes turned to the door. That’s the way it was everywhere while he lived.

Eyes missing. A corpse left behind.

Not possible.

Too small.

Dead people are really little. He was really big while he lived. The difference was unacceptable.

We never get over not seeing.

speedwriting

In my comp class this morning I asked them to do a speedwrite. There is nothing special about this, I suppose, though early in my career I wouldn’t have done that because I wouldn’t have expected anything worthy to happen in something done that fast.

I told them that I was pleased with their papers so far, but there was one difficulty some of them were struggling with and that was fluency. They didn’t write enough. So I asked them to write fast, really fast. I told them to write the word “once” on their paper and then to go like blazes.

One guy wrote about nothing at great speed, and then told me he was really happy about that assignment and was going to use it in his other classes because he hadn’t realized before that it was possible to make that many words appear. I wasn’t sure how to think about that.

Then a young woman read her piece. She wrote, and read aloud at great speed, of witnessing a traffic accident when she was twelve. She and her mother ran to the crushed car. She called the police while the mother held the injured woman’s hand and reassured her. My then-twelve year old remembered her Girl Scout training. She took off her long-sleeved shirt and made a tourniquet around what was left of the driver’s right arm. The driver said “I hope my baby turns out like you,” and then died.

I discovered tears running down my face. That hasn’t happened in a long time.

I asked the student if writing fast had helped make that piece come out. She said yes. She wouldn’t have written it otherwise.

Now I’m in my office after class trying to recover from this unexpected excellence.

Katie

Sweet, funny, cheerful Katie read her paper aloud. It was the story of her rape. The parents and teachers who didn’t listen. The long silence in her life. When she finished the class had its own long silence. I looked around the room and saw students with solemn faces staring at the floor. I didn’t know what to do.

Which of the composition or rhetoric classes teaches teachers what to say after a student finishes reading the story of her rape? I’m sure there’s a manual on this somewhere, but I think I missed class the day they handed it out. No, come to think of it, I never missed class. There was no manual.

Beautiful Katie sat there with her face brilliant red, her trmbling hands vibrating in her lap, and all I knew to do was say “I’m sorry that happened to you.” Eloquent, huh. My mind was gone. It was back in her story. When I looked at Katie I saw her story. I didn’t know how to do her any good beyond acknowledging that I had heard her.

Part of her piece was about how writing was her salvation, and how her teachers had failed her by concentrating on five paragraph form rather than listening to what writers have to say. The writing that was useful to her was writing she did outside school. Her description of what high school writing had been for her infuriated me, made me want it to have been better. And yet, when she finished reading this stunning piece, I had nothing better to say than an inane “I’m sorry.”

She didn’t seem to hold that against me. She kept coming to class, she kept writing papers–always superb papers. She was cheerful, friendly. She took more classes from me, graduated as an honor studnt.

Always she reminded me of my own inadequacy, my own inarticulate helplessness in the face of a story of rape. That was several years ago, and I can’t say I’m any wiser now than I was then.

A few years ago I published that story in a book of essays. I read it again today. It still kicks me, still makes me mad. And I still don’t know what I should have said.

Coaching advanced writers

I think about an advanced course in writing, the students’ desires, their aspirations as writers. My sympathy grows. They have passed the simpler fears and wonders of the beginners, the ones I write with, the ones I know how to guide, the ones I know how to invite into the life. These advanced ones have had their early successes, been startled by themselves and their own work, have tasted that wine of unexpected wisdom, of unpredicted insight. Now what? They don’t know where they are going.

I read an essay explicating Chekhov’s four great plays and find the revelation that through those plays is the theme of despair, the despair of “misspent existence.” This is the existential angst of longing for some life far greater than that lived so far.

I leap between Chekhov and advanced students and wonder what their greater desire for their writing might be, what now, right now, they would reach for if they knew what was there to be reached. This I can’t know. Beyond the beginnings, writers scatter in directions as unpredictable as is insight. This I can’t invite any longer. These have already joined me. These also now join me in wondering how to spend existence such that the Chekhovian despair does not become theirs.

“Advanced” is a term of so much greater burden than “beginner.” Even the sounds, the vowels, in the former weigh more heavily. Advanced. Beginner. Heavy. Light.

As a teacher of advanced students, I no longer guide, no longer invite. Now I provoke.

I am reminded of coaching. When I was a young man I coached track. I was a distance running coach. My method of coaching was to run long distances with my team, inviting them to join me, watching and advising as they learned the mechanics of form and technique. We ran hills, ran repetitions of quarter mile sprints. We did this until they grew stronger and faster than I was, and then I urged them on to their personal successes. I provoked them to meet new levels of running prowess. Even though I couldn’t reach those levels, I knew what they were. They were measurable. I knew which events they were in, and the distance between beginning and finish.

In advanced writing classes I urge students on to their personal successes. I provoke them to meet new levels of writing prowess. Unlike running, I don’t know what new level the writer might strive to achieve because I don’t know which event they have entered. They’ve run the distances, the hills, the repetitions. There are fine tunings of technique still to be learned, always more to be learned, but the event is yet to be chosen.

Now my job is to provoke the advanced runners to select their directions, to choose their events.

gorges

We’re on the Yangtse. It is very hot. We enter the first of the three gorges. One thousand foot mountain cliffs on either side. It takes twenty or thirty minutes to go through. The river steams.

A break, and then we enter the second gorge. Much longer. Stunning. It is very hot.

The ship stops. We transfer to a ferry and take it up a tributary called the Shen Yung or Shen Yang–I couldn’t catch which. So stunning I stop taking pictures. I don’t know what to do with the camera anymore.

Then the Shen Yung/Yang gets so narrow and shallow that we transfer to shallow draft homemade boats.

It is beyond comprehension. We are being swallowed by China. The heat stuns us.

We’re in a narrow river between cliffs two thousand to twenty-five hundred feet high. The boatmen paddle with great vigor.

Then it gets so shallow that the boatmen start using poles. Then it gets so shallow that they get out and start pushing the boat while standing on the river bottom.

Then it gets so shallow that they get out bamboo-woven ropes and hitch themselves up and start pulling the boat over the river bed and rocks.

The men, aged 16-70, are slim and muscular. They smile and laugh and sing, all at the bottom of gorges so spectacular that to look is to have difficulty breathing. As they pull their muscles stand out in sharp relief. The river steams. The air is full of mist.

Our local guide sings a folk song to us in the front of the boat as we are returning. Then the boat “second captain” stands up in the bow and sings another. He is missing teeth, very slim, late middle-aged, dressed in a shabby, formerly white t-shirt and dark shorts and rope sandals. He is supremely confident. He sings out to cover the sound of the wind and the water.

We reel in the heat.

Chungching

Chungching is now the largest city in China. The national government decided to make it that by deciding that the countryside around it should be organized into a municipality independent of the surrounding provinces and directly administered from Beijing. They made the new municipality so large in both landscape and and actual metropolis that it became the biggest city. It has thirty-one million people, which some enjoy boasting about. The Chinese government is willing to make large decisions about people’s lives.

It is also an enormous sauna. Geography makes it a heat sink. The young Yangste, far from the sea, is surrounded by mountain ranges, which hold in the moisture evaporating from it. Chungching is built on mountainsides steaming in water vapor. The day we arrived it was 44.9 degrees centigrade. The day before it had been notably warmer. At a 115 degrees Fahrenheit, with air so full of vapor that visibility is sharply limited, being outside is not a happy experience.

This is the home and origin of Szechuan cooking. More than one guide told us that the people eat cooked chilis in order to make themselves sweat–to cool off. We tried it. It worked. Blistering hot food is their defense against the brutal, humid heat.

All of which is weird, as they had had no rain in three months. In the midst of all that humidity they were in a terrible drought, so terrible that they had electricity only every other day.

The city is all on its side, to the point that there are no bicycles to speak of, unlike the other cities we saw crowded with them. They would have to carry the bicycles up those grades. As a result, goods, such as grocery bags, get carried by porters called “stickmen,” who move cargo on poles up and down the mountainsides in ferocious, sodden heat.

Heat is the biggest impression, bigger than the city itself.

Last night I had my debut as a soloist with a chamber music ensemble. I sang the bass part to an early Baroque piece with five trombones and a pipe organ behind me. Very weird sensations. My previous solos have been with piano or electic organ or orchestra. Five trombones right behind my ears made some really strange effects.

Good times, though. My mom was in the audience, as good moms do. She said she could hear me clearly over the horns, and that I didn’t look nervous at all.

It’s good to know that you can fool your mother.

The classroom written large and small

Bright fall days in September are good for the breath. Today my lungs fill easily, my body feels light, and so does my mind. Flexible, appreciating my surroundings. The kayaker wearing a jungle hat paddles by without speaking and I like him for it. We share the day.

The tall blonde girl in orange sweats notices, stays silent, writes. We share the day.

I suppose we always share days but rarely think about that. Each day a beginning, but we rarely think about that either.

I notice moored sailboats and think about possibilities, the wandering waiting to happen, the new views we can achieve if only we move, if only we notice. Boats are good for people.

Sailboat, motorboat, canoe, or kayak, each can take one on a lake such that every moment gives a new vantage point. The water tower on the far shore is always the same watertower, but the view changes, and its relationship to its surroundings also changes, as the viewer’s position changes.

This is the offering of boats.

We can accomplish this on our feet too, which is why I love walking. I walk Diamond Point park and see it differently each time, but especially when my breathing is free, my body light, my mind open.

All of us can share the day, learn water towers and girls in orange sweat pants and kayakers in jungle hats in this large classroom of parks and lakes and beyond.

In smaller classrooms of words and writing, we must try to achieve this easy September breath, share each day’s offering of orange sweats and jungle hats, encourage new views of water towers and the people who view them, the people who make the classroom matter, the people who make the viewing matter.

Xi an

They stand in dusty ranks, row and row, stoic in their waiting for the resurrection. Their emperor buried them two thousand years ago, with their armor and their topknot badges of rank and their chargers and chariots. Each face leans over its cheekbones toward the millenium–and the next.

Five hundred thousand people come one day, witnessing the pride of their first emperor, meeting eight thousand different impassive faces.

Then the five hundred thousand leave.

Often I fall into the illusion that I am today the person I was yesterday or last year. In teaching we gather experience as a term advances, a year grows and then ends, years pass and a career is invested. We think that experience carries us. Perhaps it does, but Monday morning appears and it is this Monday morning, not last week’s, not the third Monday morning of the fall term of 2005.

Today must be faced today. The students are not the same students, and I am not the same teacher. I’ve had a trip to China that on that third Monday mornng of the fall term of 2005 I had not even thought of yet. I’ve been deprived of my sister’s company for months and then savored it again. I’ve read a book on creativity that opened my eyes to aspects of creativity in teaching and in society. The book rewired my brain; China rewired my brain; my sister, in her absence and presence, rewired my brain.

I bring a new Mark to this day; I make a new mark on this day. And so this Monday of the third week of the 2006 school year is a beginning; I go to my first class as a beginner, wondering what I will hear, what I will encounter. Will Robb come crashing into class late with a goofy grin again? What color will Gr’s hair be? What will I say?

This is today, and in the teaching life, there is no other.