What we've got here is failure to imaginate

Not a standard word, of course, and there's really no reason for imaginate to exist when imagine works perfectly well, but this morning in class I was thinking what we've got here is failure to communicate. I didn't dare quote the line because I feared that none of my students would be familiar with Cool Hand Luke--and why should they know anything about a film that came out decades before they were born?

I don't know who I represent in this scenario--the prisoner or the brutal captain--but I know I struggled to get students to imagine themselves in the starkly unfamiliar scenario presented in Natasha Trethewey's poem "Native Guard." I had to stand there and endure the awkward silence when they refused to look up unfamiliar words or read footnotes about unfamiliar historical events, but the most awkward silence occurred when I asked them to find the first mention of the word history in the poem. I had told them that Trethewey loves to examine gaps and erasures, stories left out of received histories, and I wanted them to think about how the poem employs history itself. It's a long poem, but history first appears in the tenth line:

Yes, I was born a slave, at harvest time, 
in the Parish of Ascension; I've reached
thirty-three with the history of one younger
inscribed upon my back. 

I endured the long silence as my students stared at the text hoping someone else would find the line, and then the silence grew even more awkward when I asked what sort of history a former slave might have inscribed on his back and how we might go about studying that sort of history.

I get it: it's the wrong time of the semester to ask students to think too much. They're tired. We're all tired. But we started the semester with Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser," which took us on a guided tour of a hospital ward full of soldiers wounded in the Civil War, and I like to end the semester by taking another look at the Civil War to see if there's still anything left to learn. 

There is, but it requires some imagination. Trethewey suggests that poetry can help us understand gaps in the historical record by drawing us deeply into imagined lives, but do I really have to drag students kicking and screaming into engagement with imagination?

Some students you just can't reach--and I don't like it any more than they do.

The day you deserve

Among the bumper stickers on the battered little car in front of me was one that said Have the Day you Deserve, and I'm not sure what more a person can ask for. 

Today, apparently, I deserve to drive along a tranquil river reflecting abundant sunshine, and I deserve to enjoy the rhododendrons and azaleas that make Marietta the prettiest little town on the planet this time of year, and I deserve to walk past fragrant lilacs and see the peonies just beginning to bloom on campus, and I deserve to nab the parking closest to my office--so close, in fact, that I can look out my office window and wave to my adorable little car, not that it would notice.

I parked next to the President's residence, which still shows signs of damage from the nasty hail-and-wind storm that battered Marietta last month. All over town I see fly-by-night hail-repair services popping up, and I hear about scam artists offering great deals on repairing roofs and windows. I don't know what my colleagues did to deserved pockmarked cars, leaky roofs, or broken glass panes in the greenhouse dangling overhead like the sword of Damocles. The storm was very localized and selective, smashing holes in siding and windows all over one side of a house but sparing the others. On one street I saw three houses in a row with big blue tarps over holes in the roofs, but the next street over has none.

I missed the big storm because I was in Columbus helping my son wend his way through chemotherapy and all the indignities of cancer treatment. Not sure what any of us did to deserve cancer, but that's not how it works, is it? If the book of Job tells us anything, it insists that rewards and punishments are not equitably distributed--that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Or the hail, as the case may be.

What did we ever do to deserve cancer is just as ridiculous a question as What did we ever do to deserve peonies? Gratuitous suffering lives on the same block as gratuitous beauty. But I can't think about that this morning. Instead, I plan to accept the peonies as one small part of the day I deserve, even though I did absolutely nothing to earn it.

 

Friday poetry challenge: a shove out the door

Second-to-last Friday of the semester and my students stand ready to dash off into summer, to jobs and internships and adult responsibility, or perhaps to sleeping late, doomscrolling, and soaking in the summer sun. They stand at the threshold of something new, in a liminal space much like that described in the Anne Sexton poem we discussed on Wednesday, "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman," in which a mother addresses a daughter who stands in the passage between childhood and adolescence. 

Earlier in the semester we'd read the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, in which a mother uses the occasion of her daughter's first period to tell her a terrifying story about a village that rises up violently against a woman who bears a child out of wedlock. It's a "story to grow up on," warning the daughter that if she steps outside of bounds, the village will watch and take revenge.

Anne Sexton's poem provides a more gentle message from mother to daughter. The mother recalls her own transition to puberty, when she heard "as in a dream / the conversation of the old wives / speaking of womanhood," but she adds, "I remember that I heard nothing myself. / I was alone. / I waited like a target." She wants her daughter, on the other hand, to be wrapped in love and surrounded by supporting words. "Your bones are lovely," she says, adding, "there is nothing in your body that lies. / All that is new is telling the truth." The final stanza urges the daughter to seize the burning power of newness with a confidence set in stone.

Just before that final rousing word, though, the poet describes herself, as if in afterthought, as "an old tree in the background." When newness springs forth like a vine in a bean patch, it's easy to ignore the old tree in the background, but that's where I stand right now. My students are working hard to finish well and in a few weeks they'll scamper off to experience newness, and at that point my only job is to stand in the background stolid as an old tree and trust that we've equipped them for whatever lies ahead. 

With just a few more class sessions to prepare them for the journey, what words of wisdom might a tired old tree impart? Let's keep it brief with a little haiku:

Roots burrow deep while
limbs seek the sun: a bare tree
bursts with fresh spring leaves.

Now it's your turn: share some words of wisdom with the young folk who stand in the doorway, and give them a little push as they pass through.

A sharp wind blowing through academe; or, when chickens fly the coop

I drove through a lot of wind yesterday but saw no signs of damage at home--only because the resident chicken fancier had already done his work.

When I arrived home he was down in the meadow fiddling with the chicken run, and it wasn't until later that he told me what I'd missed: the wind had lifted the chicken run and lofted it across the meadow, leaving the chickens free to take a walk on the wild side.

I don't know which was more difficult--restoring the chicken run or retrieving all the chickens--but he got it done. Not without drama: There's this chicken the grandkids call Pineapple because they say it looks like it's wearing a Hawaiian shirt (because of course they do), and sweet little innocent Pineapple had escaped detection by hiding in the tall grass. It might have remained there all night if the guineas hadn't squawked at the hiding place, bringing it to the attention of the chicken fancier. Yes: poor Pineapple got ratted out by a pair of officious guineas.

That's the way we live these days, both at home and at work. This morning I stumbled into the never-ending discussion about the difficulty of counteracting students' reliance on AI for everything. It's clear that a sharp wind is blowing through academe upsetting all our tried-and-true methods, and many of us are running around trying to corral the chickens and restore the structures while a few wily chickens hide in the tall grass. Do we strengthen our containment structures, give the chickens a good talking-to, or import some guineas to squawk at the miscreants? 

Or is it time to declare victory and depart from the field? Retirement is just seven months away. Why can't someone else take charge of these chickens?

They look innocent, but don't be fooled.

 

Tag-team parenting, in and out of the rookery

A great blue heron soared toward a sycamore tree and landed near one of many massive nests. It poked and prodded its partner on the nest, which rose up, shook itself off, plodded out onto a limb as if to take stock of the wider world, and soared off as the returning partner settled onto the nest. Tag-team parenting: as good a way as any to get it done.

I thought we'd reached the empty nest era in our house but my husband and I have been doing some tag-team parenting of our own, taking turns dealing with our son's health problems so that we can maintain some semblance of ordinary life. He's home from the hospital once again and rejoicing in the news that the tumor has shrunk to nearly nothing, but he still needs help getting to treatments and tests and we need to be alert in case he takes a turn for the worse, as he did last week. 

Today it was my turn to soar off into the distance to see my daughter's choir concert. Two hours driving, 90 minutes of music, and two more hours driving back--but worth every minute on the road, just to fill my senses with beauty in the company of my grandkids. 

An added bonus: the performance space was five minutes away from my favorite heron rookery. Family, music, beauty, birds--food for my soul to sustain me through a busy week. 

Random bullets of Wednesday, with sighs and howls

The accreditation team has left the building. Repeat: the accreditation team has left the building. And the entire campus heaves a sigh of relief.

My last time teaching "Howl" this morning and I wonder how today's students will react. So many words! So many opportunities to take offense! Taking offense would be evidence that they've actually read it, but I suspect that "Howl" is tame by today's standards of discourse. 

I wanted to howl myself yesterday, and yet here I sit in my office quietly not howling--but I'm howling on the inside. My son was in the local emergency room yesterday (not the main one in Marietta but the branch in Belpre, which I wish I'd known before I spent so much time circling the horrible parking garage at the Marietta hospital) getting tested and pumped full of electrolytes before they sent him off (in an ambulance this time, not a helicopter) to Columbus with possible pancreatitis, which is a common side effect of one of his chemotherapy drugs with a name that sounds like asparagus but isn't. I spent some time with him in the ER (in Belpre!) before he left. My husband left this morning to be with him at The James, and I'll drive up tomorrow or Friday if he's still there. When I'm with him I think about all I'm not getting done on campus, and when I'm on campus I think about the need to be with him in Columbus. Howling on the inside wherever I am.

Meanwhile, yesterday I shot the best photo I've taken in years, entirely by accident. I stepped out of my building in the afternoon, looked up, and noticed sun shining through dogwood blossoms while storm clouds passed over. Raised my phone. One shot. There it is. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time (and sometimes every place is the wrong place)--but you won't get the shot unless you look up. 

 

Correspondence concerning "The Correspondent"

Dear old friend,

I've been wanted to send you Virginia Evans' novel The Correspondent but right now I can't seem to organize my life enough to put it in the mail, and on second thought it's the kind of book I look forward to reading again so maybe you should find your own copy. Sending you the book would be the kind of gesture that, over time, builds a friendship like ours, but you're the kind of friend who will understand that sometimes it really is the thought that counts.

How are things with you? Kind of difficult here, with frequent disruptions due to my son's health problems, although I hesitate to call them disruptions because it sounds so negative, as if I resent him for getting cancer. I would gladly take the cancer away from him if I could but since I can't, I'll drive him to Columbus for extra tests, cook the foods he likes best, clean up his vomit, and closely monitor my phone throughout an important meeting with the visiting accreditation team because my husband took our son to the emergency room while I was still barely awake this morning and I need to know what's going on. (Electrolytes are low. Maybe something more. Who can say? Nothing I can do for him at the ER so I'll keep busy here as much as possible considering multiple distractions.)

One of the things I really like about The Correspondent is how our main character, Sybil Van Antwerp, deals with the distractions that interrupt a life she considers alternately mundane and miraculous. A retired attorney and judicial clerk, she devotes her life to writing letters (some by hand, some by email) four mornings each week, an ongoing "correspondence that is her manner of living." She writes letters to friends and family members; to famous people like Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Larry McMurtry; and to strangers, some of them hostile, whom she somehow manages to transform into friends over time.

But that makes the book sound too saccharine. She's a feisty old lady, revealing fragments of herself to a variety of correspondents and requiring readers to assemble the puzzle of her complex character. Her voice is, by turns, angry, prickly, condescending, sarcastic, self-righteous, cranky, curmudgeonly, conciliatory, tender, and loving, and in the end she's a character with whom I'd gladly spend more time--hence my desire to re-read the book. 

You might enjoy this book because Sybil shares our love of reading. Nearly every letter refers to some book she's reading, and her letters to famous authors reveal how reading helps her understand herself and her world. In a letter to Ann Patchett, for instance, Sybil explains why she appreciates a particular character in State of Wonder: "I saw some reflection of myself in her. The agonizing ethical questions for which the reader puts her on trial. That amazement one feels at this stage of life--a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear, I guess. How did we get here?"

And I see some reflection of myself in Sybil's seeing some reflection of herself in Patchett's book, making the book a Russian nesting doll of character analysis. 

Like Patchett, Evans invites readers to put her main character on trial. Sybil has always welcomed the clarity law provides; at one point she explains why she pursued a career in law at a time when the field did not always welcome women: "The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order...well, of course it's appealing. There's nothing quite like the comfort of the law, black and white."

But the letters reveal that nothing is quite as black and white as it appears. Feisty Sybil first resists admitting culpability for both minor blunders and major disasters, but over time the blinders come off her eyes--even as she is literally losing her eyesight. She tells various versions of the truth to different correspondents but reveals the whole truth over time only to a correspondent she calls Colt, whose identity is revealed late in the book in a tender but harrowing revelation of personal pain.

Moving toward the end of an eventful but misunderstood life, Sybil seeks connection and significance. "I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction," she admits, adding that it is

a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I'm getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

She returns to this image late in the book, after her correspondence has brought together disparate people from all over the globe, people who would not have known each other except for their connection with Sybil, who has transformed these isolated nodes into a rich and thriving community, including one character to whom she reveals her shame over a long-ago tragedy, a character she tells, "it's taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that."

And that's another reason I wanted to send you this book: you have been on this road with me, have welcomed me into a comfortable space with a warm fire and a table laid, and I'd like to thank you for that before it's too late.

That's ultimately why the correspondence exists: to share the bumps in the road with someone willing to walk alongside. For Sybil, the letters she has sent out and those she receives 

are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn't there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one's life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it's a very small thing, to someone?

And that, I guess, is why I write to you and why I'd like to send you this book, to scatter puzzle pieces or chain links or dandelion seeds across the miles in hopes that some meaning will survive beyond our separate selves. If I can't send you the book right now--well, you're just the kind of correspondent who will understand.