The hitchhiking columbine: finding hope in the midst of loss

A year ago the campus grounds crew dug up a neglected ornamental garden plot and replanted it with hardy sustainable plants employees had brought in from their home gardens, and now we are seeing the results: Solomon's seal, ferns, hostas, and peonies ready to burst into bloom. I walk by every day to see what's new, and this morning that garden plot rewarded my patience with vivid pink columbine blossoms.

The thing is, nobody intended to plant columbines there. The groundskeeper believes the columbine seeds hitchhiked to campus in the soil of another plant from his home garden. So a whole bunch of people worked together to fill a gap on campus, and the effort produced unexpected dividends.

Today I saw this spirit in action at another campus event. We've suffered so many losses--budgets slashed, positions cut, valued employees moving on--but we don't have any formal ritual to help us recognize those losses and support one another through the pain, so a few creative colleagues got together and came up with Cookies and Caring. Employees were invited to spend casual time together being a supportive community. We sat and talked and shared plates of cookies; some wrote notes expressing gratitude while others did some therapeutic coloring. (A few of us kept breaking crayons. Maybe we're a little tense.) 

And in the middle of it all, word came out that we've hired our new president. Most of us know very little about her but if I could speak to our new president today, here's what I'd tell her: We've suffered losses, endured storms, and struggled to know how to grow, but when we all come together to fill in the gaps, beautiful things can happen.

 

Always more to teach (but not today)

And....it's a wrap! I'm done with the teaching but not with the grading, the pleading, the meetings meetings meetings, the proctoring and assessing and filing of reports. And in fact I'm not entirely done with teaching for the semester; I'm just done with the standing-in-front-of-the-class part of teaching. I'll still be engaging in informal instruction as I respond to students' questions and offer comments on their projects and do my best to push them across the finish line in one piece.

My American Lit Survey students started the semester discussing Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser, " a poem that rejects the call for poetry proclaiming the glory of war and instead draws attention to the nation's woundedness. We talked about the relationship between literature and history and what role literature can play in healing a nation's wounds, a topic we returned to  repeatedly throughout the semester. 

Today we closed the loop by ending with Natasha Trethewey's "Native Guard," a poem inviting us to see history as a messy palimpsest of crosshatched stories, sometimes written in ink on paper and sometimes in blood on the backs of powerless people. Students may have thought we'd finished with the Civil War back in February, but here's Natasha Trethewey directing our attention to previously disregarded voices, reminding us that there's always another story to unearth, always something more to learn.

Is there always more to teach? Yes, but not today. Today I'm DONE. (But ask me again tomorrow.)    

Salman Rushdie's "Knife": Conjoined contradictions

For decades, Salman Rushdie has resisted allowing enemies to define him. The Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa declaring that Rushdie should be assassinated after publishing The Satanic Verses sent the author into hiding, but for more than 20 years Rushdie has lived openly and peacefully in New York, aware of the lingering threat but not constrained by it--until August 2022, when a would-be assassin stabbed Rushdie fifteen times with a knife before an auditorium full of onlookers in Chautauqua, New York. 

If his life is a book, writes Rushdie, "The attack felt like a large red ink blot spilled over an earlier page. It was ugly, but it didn't ruin the book. One could turn the page, and go on." 

Going on is exactly what Rushdie is trying to do in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. He had hoped to return to writing fiction, but he found that he could not write anything else until he wrote about the attack: "To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art."

Knife is divided into two sections, The Angel of Death and The Angel of Life, and the book immerses readers in both the horrors of violence and the healing power of love, along with other linked contradictions exposed by Rushdie's experience. For instance, Rushdie praises the onlookers who rushed to his aid after the attack:

I didn't see their faces and I don't know their names, but they were the first people to save my life. And so that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason...and we also contain the antidote to that disease--courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

This horde of people devoted to his safety multiplies as he enters first a hospital and then a rehab facility, where he endures the humiliations of losing autonomy and agency over his privacy, his career, and, of course, his body:

In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won't sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body--to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness--so that you can live.

But even as he is dependent upon a hovering host of health-care workers, he finds that "When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness."

That loneliness leaves time for the author to mull over his peculiar relationship with his attacker, whom Rushdie never names but instead refers to as The A. In the twenty-seven seconds it took The A to stab Rushdie (in his eye, neck, chest, and hand), attacker and victim existed within what Rushdie calls "a profound conjoining." In an imaginary interview, Rushdie tells his attacker, "You put on the mantle of Death itself, and I was Life." Rushdie thinks of his attacker as a failure, a nothing, a hapless clown, but this haplessness is an advantage; one of Rushdie's doctors tells him, "You're lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife."

But there are many types of knives. The A's knife may have severed the author from his world, but Rushdie refuses the role of victimhood, instead wielding his own weapons:

Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, to make it mine.

He does this best while describing the attack and his long journey toward recovery as well as the role of his family and friends in carrying him through this journey. Despite the inciting act of senseless violence, Rushdie considers his story one in which "hatred--the knife as a metaphor for hate--is answered, and finally overcome, by love." In the end he travels back to the scene of the attack to convey an important message to his absent attacker--and anyone who might sympathize with the attempt to use violence to silence stories: "We're back, and after our encounter with hatred, we're celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life."

A handful of happiness

As I walked toward the front door one day after work, I was startled by the scent of lilacs. I looked to the left, toward the lilac bush we planted 20 years ago and gave up for dead a dozen times since then, and there they were: lilac blossoms, festoons of them blooming on a tall bush near the corner of the house. I could have cut a handful of stems to put in a vase and fill my house with the lovely aroma, but I'm happy to leave them growing where the pollinators can benefit from their long-awaited blossoms.

I could have cut a handful of stems but I can't comprehend a handful of scientists. Lately I've been listening to an audiobook in which the author uses the word handful over and over to refer to small groups of people or things, which is fairly normal I suppose, but hearing the phrase a handful of scientists produced in my mind a bizarre visual image of a bunch of lab-coated guys with Einstein hair squeezed inside a giant fist. Since that time, I've been experiencing cognitive dissonance every time I hear handful used to refer to things that cannot be easily held in the hand, like oak trees or elephants or Seventh-Day Adventists. 

This morning, though, I was happy to have my camera in my hands again. Nasty weather and a many-meeting marathon have conspired to keep me out of the woods, but this morning the sun was shining and I was determined to go out and see what I could see--and hear, starting with the brown thrasher running through its vast repertoire of songs high in a tree next to the driveway. Any day that includes a kingfisher sighting is a good day, but this one also included red-bellied woodpeckers, cardinals, towhees, all manner of sparrows, and a Louisiana waterthrush.

I thought I'd entirely missed bloodroot and twinleaf season this spring, but I found one tiny twinleaf blossom poking up out of the leaf litter in the woods. Elsewhere I saw mayapples budding and pawpaws blooming and all manner of blossoms: Dutchman's breeches, squirrel corn, trilliums, wild geranium, phlox, blue-eyed Mary, perfoliate bellwort, Solomon's seal, purple loosestrife, rue anemone, redbud, dogwood, mitrewort, wild columbine, purple violets and white violets--oh, and plenty of dandelions, of course. My daughter makes dandelion jelly that tastes like honeyed sunshine, so I refuse to see these cheerful blossoms as worthless weeds. 

Yesterday we watched a white-crowned sparrow gathering bits of dandelion fluff, presumably to line a nest. If the dandelions in my front yard can keep a sparrow happy, then who am I to complain? Especially when the whole place smells of lilac.

The clouds look quilted.

Restructuring a life's sentence

I had trouble this morning introducing my American Lit Survey students to some poems that can be counted on to choke me up--Yusef Komunyakaa's "Slam, Dunk, and Hook," with its young men seeking moments of freedom and beauty on a neighborhood basketball court while Trouble stands on the sidelines "slapping a blackjack / Against an open palm"; and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," featuring the poet's fruitless attempt to convince herself that the "art of losing isn't hard to master"; and Denise Levertov's "Making Peace," which argues that writing peace into the world is a responsibility we all share:

a line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

 

In class we focus on analyzing elements of form and meaning, but in the end I want poems like these to spark reflection and action. I want to ask students so many questions: Where do you cultivate beauty? How will you cope with loss? What sentence is your life making? What word is each act bringing into the world--and how do are you linking your words with others'?

 

I have reached the point in my life when I'm not satisfied by academic discussions of literature. Sure, I get excited about examining interesting metaphors and stylistic choices, but I also want to make it personal--or at least point out to students how they can take literature personally. My next essay is coming out in Pedagogy soon, and far from an academic exercise in name-checking all the trendy scholars and theories, it's an impassioned plea for the importance of continuing to teach what some call "divisive concepts."

 

Writing that essay gave me great joy, a quality often missing from academic writing. In an article in Inside Higher Ed today, Deborah J. Cohen and Barbara J. Risman ask how faculty members can "Cultivate joy in their writing." They argue that the pressure to publish or perish "discourages joy in writing--beyond focusing on a utilitarian means to an end, it creates fear, loathing and pressure. We're told that if we do it enough, our careers will survive."

Well, I've done it enough, but it's not clear that my academic writing has accomplished much more than to keep me employed. I'm happy when I see that others have cited my articles, but if I'm part of what we call the scholarly conversation, it's an infuriatingly slow-paced and unrewarding mode of communication.

 

Cohen and Risman ask us to discard the utilitarian approach and pursue writing as an art that we practice for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional:

 

The painter makes art to thrive, to share the meaning they find in the world with others. So, too, if a writer recognizes their work as their art, they sit down to do it to share their gifts with other people and society in general. And the process of writing itself becomes a way to thrive, to contribute to the world.

And that's what I want to do with my writing about literature--and also my teaching. As I near retirement, I've been toying with the idea of teaching a class I'm calling Lit4Life, focusing on literature that can help us create a meaningful life. But why not write about it too? 

 

All this to introduce my summer writing project: a series of reflections on literary works that challenge us to live meaningful lives. I'm calling it Life Lines at the moment, but that will change. Who is my audience? What readership shall I appeal to? Where do I imagine publishing? Not even thinking about those questions right now. I want to immerse myself in writing for the joy of it and postpone academic questions until I see the words on the page.

 

I'm tired of squeezing myself into the constricting mold of academic writing; instead, I want to take a risk, to follow Denise Levertov's plea, to restructure the sentence my life is making just to see if I can recover some joy, make some peace, and find a place to thrive in the long summer pause.

And that's why teaching poetry choked me up this morning: because the questions I wanted to aim at my students' hearts circled back and hit mine instead.

Don't let the birds build a nest in your brainpan

Here I am tackling piles of work two weeks before the end of the semester--the wrong time to be required to learn something new, but nevertheless men with tools are removing all our office phone lines so we can switch to team Teams. 

I suppose I ought to read all the information our IT people sent to prepare us for the shift to VOIP calling, but I don't wanna. Too many other things to do: teaching and grading and departmental assessment and hiring adjuncts (still) and dealing with issues before the Professional Review Committee (again) and planning the big end-of-semester pedagogy workshop. I don't want to learn a whole new method of phone-calling. Maybe Teams is wonderful; maybe it's the most excellent calling method ever invented; but I'm tired and my brain is full. 

But at least birds haven't built a nest in my brainpan. Yesterday I went out back to fetch the weed-whacker and found an elaborate bird's nest in the battery compartment. I had to clean it out before I could even start on the weed-whacking and mowing, and then of course the mower decided that it was tired too: it's self-propelled, but it wasn't self-propelling very well, especially on the uphill parts. Its get up and and go has got up and gone, with the result that every muscle in my body is now sore.

What kind of winter workout would prepare me for the first yard work of the season? I probably ought to just take the mower out and push it around the yard a couple times a week all winter long, though it wouldn't care for the snow. Getting out the weed-whacker and waving it around a few times a week might deter the birds. Then again, why not hire a landscaping company and spread the pain around?

This week everyone in my building will be sharing the pain of learning the new phone system, or non-phone system since it doesn't involve actual phones. So now I can make calls on my laptop, kind of like a Zoom call? And I can set up Teams to automatically transcribe all my voice mails into something resembling human language? And all I need to do is to click on this and configure that and check to make sure the audio is turned on? And this means I'll be able to respond to work-related calls everywhere I go?

I'll think about it tomorrow. Too much real work to do today. 

Dispatches from the staffing wars

I was talking to a prof from a different department who presented a dilemma: faculty positions have been vacated for various reasons but new searches are not being approved, so the department is scrambling to fill in the blank spots with overloads and adjuncts. If they do too good a job demonstrating that they can meet students' needs without filling vacant full-time positions, then the Powers That Be may decide that those full-time positions are surplus to requirements--but if the department does a lousy job covering essential courses, students will suffer.

I suspect that many departments across campus are in the same position. We can move heaven and earth to make sure our majors get the courses they need, but then it looks like we don't need to refill vacant positions; or we can make no extra effort to cover required classes and our students will be short-changed.

Somehow we need to straddle the fine line between too much and not enough. We need to provide the courses our students need, but in a way that shows how desperately we need to fill some empty positions. We don't want students to lose confidence in the program, but allowing them to feel a little discomfort would prove a point--except we don't want to use students as political pawns in the staffing wars.

We're all working hard to manage a difficult situation, but you know what they say: Accomplish the impossible and they'll add it to your job description. Maybe we need to be just a little less competent, a little less eager to pick up the slack--but not so much that we appear expendable. 

'E clips it

My grandkids had warned me that we might observe some unusual animal behavior yesterday afternoon, but the only unusual behavior I observedwas a group of small people running around in the dark shouting "The totality! The totality!"

Earlier in the day the little adorables were figuring out how old they'll be in 2044 when the next total solar eclipse comes our way. The smallest will be 26 and the oldest over 30, which seems impossible, but I didn't want to mention how old I'll be in 20 years because who knows if I'll be in any condition by then to don silly glasses and look at a sliver of sun?

So I'm glad I took a day off to observe the totality with my grandkids. We sat on a grassy hill near their house, a steady breeze blowing their kites high into the sky and producing festoons of bubbles from their bubble wands. We started off in t-shirts but donned sweaters and blankets as the sky drew darker, the wind cooler. Periodically my son-in-law made videos of the kids serving as amateur reporters, describing the sun as looking like a Pac-Man or a fingernail, predicting what would happen next, telling a topical joke: "How does the moon give the sun a haircut? 'E clips it!"

When the disc of the moon slid over the sun, the kids whooped and danced with abandon in the shadowless dark while I soaked in their infectious excitement. This week on campus I have quite a lot on my plate, including some stressful meetings and tasks demanding patience, insight, and self control, so just for a moment it felt good to be in the presence of unfettered glee. I'll be drawing on that reserve of energy for a while, but I doubt it'll last until the next eclipse arrives. 

Are we having sun yet?

 

Heavy lifting in the flood zone

Sure, we had an unexpected day off this week, but that doesn't mean people weren't working. Students, staff, and faculty volunteers helped downtown businesses move merchandise into storage, furniture out of basement dorm rooms, and tarps onto playing fields prone to flooding. I didn't do any heavy lifting except to move assignments around on my syllabi to compensate for the cancelled classes.

Our students are too young to remember the last time campus flooded this badly and some didn't quite believe it when they were warned to move their cars out of low-lying parking lots, but fortunately we had plenty of advance warning this time. The Ohio River peaked last night, so the waters ought to recede to more manageable levels by Monday. Meanwhile, the clean-up continues.

Our creek didn't rise high enough to cover the driveway but it left behind plenty of wood below our bridge. Flooding was worse on the Muskingum River, which backed up into our creek and covered our road and a few stretches of the state highway. I couldn't get home Wednesday night and so stayed with a friend, but by Thursday afternoon the water had receded from the roads on our end of the county. But that didn't mean the danger was over--all that water was moving downstream toward the Ohio.

My social media is crowded with photos of water covering roads, parking lots, parks, and playing fields in Marietta. We were sitting high and dry on Friday when the announcement came through that classes had been cancelled due to flooding, but while water lapped at the steps of the Fine Arts building, our property was dry enough to allow a wildflower walk, though the ground is still too mushy for mowing. Not that Im' complaining. After days of sudden violent downpours, high winds, and hail, we're ready to enjoy some spring sunshine. 

Where my road meets the highway.

The river should not be visible here, but it's all over the place.

Now blooming: trilliums and Dutchmen's breeches.

My creek looks pretty harmless after all that fuss.

 

Raymond Carver delivers, even when UPS doesn't

I love the point in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" when the blind man explains what little he knows about cathedrals: "I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build....The men who began their life's work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that sense, bub, they're no different from the rest of us, right?"

But in this case he's not right, because the "bub" he's addressing devotes his life to--well, nothing much. He hates his job, he avoids his wife, he has no friends, and his chief pastimes are drinking and smoking weed. He's involved in nothing that arouses any sense of passion or purpose, and he appears to be building nothing that will outlive him--which is why it's amazing when, at the end of the story, he and the blind man join forces to "build" a cathedral. It's a small step--a minuscule moment of connection and epiphany--but it's the only point in the story when our nameless narrator seems anything other than irrelevant.

I thought of this guy this morning as I devoted an absurd amount of time trying to connect with someone--anyone--at UPS. I knew before I started that this would be a frustrating quest  resulting only in vague promises to do better next time, but somehow I felt driven to dedicate a chunk of my life to this exercise in futility.

Here's what happened: All day yesterday our area was assaulted by severe weather, with a dire forecast calling for high winds, rain, hail, flooding, and even possible tornadoes. What kind of idiot leaves a small cardboard box with a book in it on the grass next to the driveway in those conditions? Our UPS driver, that's who. 

None of us saw the box when we drove up the driveway yesterday (because that's not a place where a box belongs), but my husband found it early this morning when he walked down the driveway to see whether our bridge was under water. (It wasn't--yet. But the river is still rising and backing up into our creek, so who knows whether I'll be able to get home later?)

The soggy box was crawling with pillbugs but the book was mostly undamaged. Still, when I spend my hard-earned cash on a hardback book of poetry, I don't expect curly, rain-damaged pages or pillbugs, so I resolved to file a complaint with UPS.

We used to have a really great UPS driver who could be relied on to drive the truck all the way up the driveway, leave packages safely on the front porch, and even toss our dog a treat. But he retired. Our current UPS driver (or drivers? Who knows?) sometimes leaves packages on the porch but sometimes leaves them in the drainage ditch next to the mailbox, in a bag tied to our bridge, on the ground next to the garage, or, one time, on a mound of plant matter next to the bridge on a day when snow was falling, covering the package so that we didn't find it for three weeks.

I explained all this to the Customer Service rep I finally connected with at UPS this morning, and he said yes, he could see from his records that we've had problems with packages being delivered to inappropriate places, but he promised to notify the local UPS people and encourage them to behave themselves. He must have made an impact because the local supervisor called and tried to find an excuse for the driver's unwillingness to put the package on the porch: "Do you have any mean dogs that might have scared him? How about low-hanging branches?" If I tell them about the angry dragon living in the garage, will they stop delivering packages there?

I feel for the UPS driver who has to make an unceasing round of deliveries without ever unwrapping the wonders contained within those boxes. Is he building something that will outlast him? He may never know. What I know is that the time I spent on the phone this morning accomplished nothing but made me feel as if I'd taken a stand for doing good work and making it matter. Maybe I'm not building any cathedrals today, but at least I'm trying to leave a mark.

When Percival Everett meets Mark Twain

After reading Percival Everett's new novel, James, I can't decide whether Mark Twain is too busy rolling over in his grave to be envious of Everett's clever reimagining of Huckleberry Finn.

Percival Everett is having a moment. His 2001 novel Erasure inspired the 2023 film American Fiction, which won Cord Jefferson a bunch of awards, including the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. While the reclusive Everett struggled to avoid the Hollywood limelight, his new novel James arrived on the scene, sparking the kind of attention rarely lavished upon an author of clever literary fictions that generally appeal to a niche audience.

Erasure dealt with racial passing and so does James, but this time the passing occurs on multiple levels too complicated to unravel without spoilers. Every review I've read discusses how Everett plays with slave dialect. In Huck Finn, Twain uses dialect to mark Jim as part of a subservient, ignorant, infantilized class while allowing his basic human decency to shine through; in James, enslaved characters speak standard English amongst themselves but assume typical slave dialect in the presence of white people, who are happy only when they feel superior. This disparity creates amusing moments, such as when Jim tutors his children in proper pronunciation and deference. At the end of the lesson, the children recite, "The better they feel, the safer we are," which one child translates thus: "Da mo' betta dey feels, da mo' safer we be."

Intelligent people passing as ignorant to ensure their own safety: these passages are wryly comic until it becomes clear that such safety is ephemeral. At one point James gets separated from Huck and sold into servitude with a group of white men who perform minstrel shows in blackface; to appear on the stage, James must be disguised as a white man wearing blackface, which works well enough until an audience member insists on touching his hair. Here, his mastery of slave dialect can't save him and in fact only makes the danger more dire.

As the novel goes on, James encounters very un-funny dangers of the sort that Twain mostly elided: whippings, lynchings, rape, child rape, murder. James emerges at the end with his own name, family, pencil, notebook, and story, but each gain comes at great cost in pain and suffering.

What would Mark Twain think of this book? On the one hand, Everett has fleshed out Jim's story in a way that feels true and convincing, providing some laugh-out-loud moments and insightful critique of aspects of the era that Twain didn't feel comfortable including. On the other hand, he introduces some plot twists that may permanently alter the way we read Huck Finn. 

Everett's characters take a very different kind of journey from the one Twain provided them, but in the end I believe Twain would appreciate the way Everett shines a new light on the world Twain illuminated. Everett ends the acknowledgments with this line: "Heaven for the climate, hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain." After reading James, I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear that conversation.