MLK Weekend

So many converging forces. A powerful weekend service at WRF showed clips of King's speeches that I'd never seen before, including this moving talk given at Montgomery, with a powerful refrain: "How long? Not long! Because no lie can live forever." I was in tears in the Meetinghouse, both of grief and of simply being moved by his faith. 

That night I watched the second episode of John Adams, the HBO series on the life of the founding father. It was the episode when the delegates to the first Continental Congress decide to declare independence from King George. Jefferson, an unassuming man with a ponytail, writes the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." 

That line was evoked by tonight's speaker at Earlham, Michael Eric Dyson. He spoke of how the all-inclusive term which really favors one segment of the population in our history and our present, must be expanded to include all those who would challenge it: women, blacks, LGBTQ+ individuals. He talked about the error or innocent whiteness, that knows nothing about its own heinousness. He talked about the discomfort that America feels with a black president that succeeds at all the challenges our society puts to white individuals: we can't stand his swagger while he deplanes from AirForce 1 and gives a chillaxed wave or throw of the dice. (The speaker was very, very funny and had the auditorium in hysterics many times, not least when he imitated Obama fulfilling the speaker's personal fantasy of getting angry and going off on all the nonsense he's had to put up with these 8 years. Dyson said, "It'd just be great, you know, on the last day.")

He evoked the period of slavery when black people had to learn everything about white people in order to survive, and white people knew nothing about blacks. It was the lack of understanding from whites about blacks, that led to such massive discomfort around King's ministry. White America felt uncomfortable with the upswell of black voices because they didn't understand what was going on. 

Both Dr King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Dr Dyson in his talk tonight referenced Reinhold Neibuhr, the theologian and political scientist whom I studied closely in my last year at Utah. Incidentally, Obama also draws on Niebuhr's wisdom, as we learn from this enjoyable article, the beginning of which I'll share with students tomorrow: "How Obama Survived the White House Years: Books". It's helpful that this article came out while we are studying Shakespeare in both grades, since Obama says that it was the Bard whose plays were “foundational for me in understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings.”

Now, school resumes tomorrow, and I will be returning to the social movement that Quakers and thousands of others carry out each day: teaching, preaching, nursing, ministering, administering, doing the quiet work of witnessing God's world and returning our gift of life by offering love and justice.

C.S. Lewis's theology/map analogy, and teaching

I am currently listening to an audiobook of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. I started reading this in the summer, and didn't finish it. It proved too dense for me to be able to pick up in the evening or in the early morning. I couldn't follow, while reading, Lewis's logic as he made his arguments. I needed to hear it. 

That makes sense, since he initially delivered the contents of the book on BBC radio in 1942. Lewis read the chapters to his audience in a way similar to what I imagine FDR to have done with his fireside chats. Hearing it helps. The Indiana Digital Library has it on audiobook- perhaps your local library ebook section does too. 

I find myself nodding fervently at points, and shaking my head in repulsion at other points (like this "The idea of the knight - the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause - is one of the great Christian ideas.") One part that I listened to today and which reminded me of the classroom was this section. It is long, and perhaps will be hard to read without hearing it. At any rate, it's the part I want to quote, and the whole thing pertains.

Lewis is talking in this chapter about Theology, a topic that many apparently attempted to dissuade him from including in his work. He did not listen to them.

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the RA.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, "I've no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I'm a religious man too. I know there's a God. I've felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real.

In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together.

In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God - experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map.

You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it In fact, that is just why a vague religion - all about feeling God in nature, and so on - is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones - bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God which are trotted out as novelties today, are simply the ones which real Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular religion of modern England is retrogression - like believing the earth is fiat.

For when you get down to it, is not the popular idea of Christianity simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if only we took his advice we might be able to establish a better social order and avoid another war? Now, mind you, that is quite true. But it tells you much less than the whole truth about Christianity and it has no practical importance at all.

It is quite true that if we took Christ's advice we should soon be living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because he is the best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow him.

If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the most advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.

But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, you find that they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that means). They say that those who give Him their confidence can also become Sons of God (whatever that means). They say that His death saved us from our sins (whatever that means).

There is no good complaining that these statements are difficult. Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult - at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same reason.

There are certainly claims here that I do not agree with, but I like the comparison between theology and a map. Let me explain why. I've been thinking this week, since I've become the lead teacher in the classroom, "What is the value that I add here?" Aside from providing the authority and the supervision that essentially forces the students to read what I give them, and answer what questions I have them answer, what do I add? Aside from synthesizing the comments that they make in discussion, what do I actually add to the discussion? Aside from guiding them through the experience of reading valuable literature, how am I helping them link that personal experience (like that of experiencing God on a mountaintop, or the ocean from the beach) to the larger picture of the reality of the world? 

I would like to think that in addition to providing the excitement of the "I just felt God!" moments, which in the classroom I think must happen when we feel the impact of something powerfully written, or we write something powerful ourselves, or we talk about an important topic, or hear a new perspective on a universal theme, 

in addition to creating those moments, I would like to think that the classroom also provides a map, that allows us to bring our personal experience into conversation with the larger truths that others have charted. We can see how our individual experiences are really reflected in the map of human experience as expressed in the literature. I guess I see this as happening on two levels. 

1. We experience something in our lives. For example, we experience ambition and decide to do something shady to achieve a higher position than we have. Then, we come into the classroom and read Macbeth. We read about his ambition, and his having done the same thing. We acknowledge that, if this appears in a work of literature, it must reflect the experience not just of myself and the author, but of others too. We locate, in a way, our experience in alignment with others'. 

2. We read Macbeth in the classroom and become aware of the power of ambition, the power of suggestion, and the power of persuasion. But these we are aware of in the fictional world. We have yet to identify these waypoints on the map of human history. For even if we ourselves feel them, we can't really see our own experience as having affected history. However, if we see how global leaders are affected by ambition and greed and persuasion, then we locate this literary experience on a grander map of world consequence. 

Those, I think, are the two levels that I want to provide in the classroom. That would be my value added: we must go beyond the thrill of reading something beautiful. The pleasures of Shakespeare's language are worth experiencing, but they don't, by themselves, prepare us to live in a different way to the extent that seeing his truths reflected in the real world does. 

I am still very much engaged in the first level of mapping - living my experience and seeing it reflected in literature, and having Hallelujah moments each time I resonate with a text. It is indeed "exciting," as Lewis describes experiencing God in the wilderness. I have precious little understanding, relatively, of the actual power of literature, of the role it's played in the formation of our race and of our society, and of the way privilege and power has been shaped by those who controlled it. I have a great deal more map studying to do before I understand the theories that help us map individual experiences of literature alongside the experiences of others who have looked at the subject longer, harder and more critically than I have. 

I felt as though I experienced God many times while working in Glacier National Park. I was in the mountains, and felt the unmistakable majesty of God's creation every day. But I didn't come down from the mountain feeling or behaving any differently. Since then I have done a lot more reading, a lot more talking, and a lot more thinking about God, and that has indeed influenced the way I act. 

One of my periods of tenth graders is struggling with Macbeth. In fact, they are struggling with their own mindset - they feel like throwing the towel in on a challenge, rather than rolling up their sleeves. I am going to try to find ways for them to map the story of Macbeth onto the world map that they are already aware of. 

Reading the Grapes of Wrath

If I move west to California, I will participate in the American tradition of migrating to California to seek happiness and a fortune. My fortune will be metaphorical, since I don't ever expect to make a literal fortune as a literature teacher. Despite my relative poverty in a state where the cost of living can be daunting, I will be moving to California in terms considerably better than most of my migrant predecessors, including the Joads, the Oklahoma family that makes the trek to California during the Dust Bowl in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

I read the Grapes of Wrath over this Christmas break. I was immediately drawn in by Steinbeck's archetypal characters, particularly Ma and Tom who hold together the gang of 13 who start out from Oklahoma (the family is considerably depleted by the end of the book).

I have never experienced poverty, and this book added significantly to my imagination's collection of images, tastes, and sensations related to poverty. One is exhaustion from being on the move. The family were tired so much of the time, simply because they were never allowed to properly settle down. "I just wan' ta set awhile" was an oft repeated phrase and sentiment.

My experiences in California:
The beautiful lake path around Lake Merritt in Oakland.
Lyft rides from people of all races and origins.
A Burmese lunch occasion, at a table next to two men talking about the plight of Palestine.
Flights that arrived on time and left on time from Oakland's airport.
Courteous Amtrak employees
A public bus to the airport on which people very actively helped me get to the right stop
A spiffy Trader Joe's
A lively breakfast cafe serving smoked salmon

These a far cry from  what the Joads experienced:

Roads which they traveled in a jalopy truck loaded with pans and mattresses
Harassment from cops and locals who cried "Okies!" and burned them out of the Hoovervilles where they set up camp
No lunch. Coffee for breakfast, maybe some biscuits fried in lard, and anything from cornmeal mush to pork chops for dinner, depending on how much money had been earned that day.
Flights in the night from cops, camp proprietors, ruthless employers, strike breakers.
Sassy orchard owners who exploited the flooded labor market by setting prices at rock bottom levels, telling the Joads and others that thousands of other workers would fill their shoes if they chose to pass up the picking jobs (true in every situation).
Company stores which charged higher prices than town stores for sub-par products like fatty hamburger full of gristle.
A sodden fireplace in a boxcar, threatened (and eventually overtaken) by flood waters.

I am grateful that my transition to California, if it happens, will be smoother than the Joads. I am sure though, that many an introduction to California in this age is similarly fraught. Hopefully I can, through being involved with Quaker Meetings and school systems there, help make it easier for some.

This is a picture of Olivia's Christmas tree, with real candles in the style of Germany.

Visiting Sacramento

I'm sitting at a Pete's Coffee and Tea in Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport. The seating area is so tight that this is reminiscent of Paris, complete with the Phoenix couple at the next table, who have, I feel certain, been to Paris together. I guess the difference is that it's 70 degrees here, and I can look out and see a remarkable skyline of jagged mountains, while in Paris it's 27 degrees and visibility is low.

Perhaps you can tell that I'm unabashedly in favor of warmer climes these days. This morning I went on a run around Lake Merritt in Oakland CA, where I've been visiting Tess for the past several days. There was nothing like it. This is exactly what the lake looked like at 7:23, before the sun officially rose at which precise moment the fairy lights turned off. It felt so glorious to be able to be outside on December 30th before sunrise!

I went to Sacramento on Wednesday. I am considering a move to Sacramento after this year of the MAT. There is a teacher shortage in California, and there is a temperature shortage in Indiana, and a shortage of a commodity in very tight supply anywhere outside California: Tess Marstaller.

I took the Capitol Corridor train to Sacramento. The ride was beautiful, affording many views of the water and of the countryside. It reminded me of the ride from Toulouse to Lourdes. Well, actually le Sud-Ouest is much, much more beautiful, but the similar climate pleased me. I loved the idea of living in the Southwest of France when I lived there, but could never figure out how I could adjust to living so far from family, and to being a foreigner all the time. Northern California seemed to be offering many of the same benefits, much closer to home.

I had been in touch before I arrived with the Quaker Meetings in Sacramento to see if there were any public school teachers in their midst. I was connected with Alison, who came to pick me up at the train station, and dedicated the next two hours to driving me around, touring schools and neighborhoods, talking school culture and district climate with regards to things like administrative oversight, emphasis on testing, and profile of student bodies. I'm overwhelmed by gratitude for this Friend who donated her time and energy to helping me make an inroad into this city.

Here's the upshot of the day: I want to live in Tahoe Park, and teach at West Campus high school!

My time with Alison and my exposure to the schools would have been enough to make me feel good about moving to Sacramento. A few other things glazed the cake with icing:

1. The art museum.
The Crocker Art Museum is phenomenal. Fairly small, but with wonderful traveling shows and a stunning permanent exhibition in the original mansion, which itself is an elaborate building like an art jewelry box. I felt like Mary Crawley walking down the grand staircase.










2. The waterfront walk.
A path goes for 32 miles along the rivers in Sacramento.




















3. The cops on horseback.

Nothing steals a girl's heart like seeing three cops on horseback. Rather gives the impression there isn't a ton of crime.

4. The park full of homeless people.
I had my picnic lunch in a park where homeless people had gathered to talk and spend their day. Alison told me that on Christmas there were three organizations providing food, and they had way too much. I liked at least that the homeless were allowed to congregate here, right outside the public library in the center of downtown, and that there are organizations, even if not exceptionally organized ones, to help them.

5. The flat whites, and coffee shop patrons like Lisa
At the end of the day I was at a Starbucks next to the train station, waiting for my train to board. A woman ahead of me ordered a flat white. I asked her what it was. I got one too, made with almond milk, and it was the best thing ever. I just had another at this Pete's. Lisa, the woman who explained flat white to me, had the most fantastic colored purple lipstick on. Feels silly to say a caffeinated drink helped secure Sacramento in my mind, but it did.

6. At this Starbucks I saw the headline of the NYtimes having to do with how CA is at the forefront of the climate challenge. Encouraging.

Autobiographical fiction; the importance of letters

Two recent articles in the New Yorker have profiled female writers who insert themselves unabashedly into their fiction. The first is Chris Kraus, and the second is Helen Garner (whom I mentioned in my last post). 

Kraus told an audience at a book talk in no uncertain terms that she is a writer because she is a person with a life: 

"It all happened. There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.”

A friend of mine objects to this kind of personal writing, which tends to be self-involved and doesn't tend to say much of significance about the state of the world, only the state of one's heart and mind. Those are good topics too, but can't they be incorporated into books that have something grander to say? 

Flannery O'Connor, who had much grander things to say, about black and white identity in the South in the 60's, believed she should not be present in her stories. She wrote:

To say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. . . . Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.

I think I agree with her. My experience is that I can be much more honest about what I find in myself when I read it in other people's fiction, not when I try to put it into mine. I don't have good enough vision of self to portray with any accuracy my own character, and I always end up feeling shallow and as though I'm trying to be "clever" by getting into my own head and subjecting myself to my own cynicism. 

How do we know that Flannery O'Connor felt this way? Because she wrote a letter to a friend, from which is pulled the above quote. What are we going to do without letters? How will we know how the great writers and thinkers were thinking? I believe that we cannot trust their blogs. 

In a recent paper I wrote for my MAT I quoted from journal articles about writing in the English classroom. One teacher wrote about the role of audience in writing: 

"It is precisely the acts of responding, analysing and reflecting that are required in the process of writing but, with no ‘real’ audience, these seem impossible for many boys."

(This entire, excellent article is available here.)

I wonder about the difference between the audience of a blog, and the audience of a friend. I am certainly more discerning and stylistic in what I write in my letters to individual friends than what I write here. Email has never inspired the same thoughtfulness as writing on paper. I flinch actually, to mention it in the same paragraph with real letter-writing, not because I object to writing emails, but because it is such a different endeavor from writing a letter.

Some of the best articles I've read about figures and writers I like include parts of their letters. This is an excellent one containing correspondence between Nabokov and his wife.

I think I shall start scanning and saving all the letters I receive from my few correspondents. I have some in boxes, but certainly not all survive, and I must be the change I wish to see in the world!

Brahms and Garner on Solitude

I love the public radio program Performance Today, but I often complain to myself that Fred Child a) speaks too quickly after the end of a piece and b) repeats the snippets of cocktail party knowledge about a piece both before and after it, which seems to me to render the sparkling gems of context rather less titillating. If something is said once on the radio, it is the precious possession of those lucky enough to be tuned in. If it is repeated, the club of the informed grows unpleasantly larger.

Brahms, when he was
"free and lonely"

Tonight I was the happy beneficiary of FC's repetition of the story behind Brahms' third symphony. He and his friends, when they were young, developed a slogan, which they snuck into their music, "free but lonely," to describe their single status. Brahms, a lifelong bachelor, wrote the symphony #3 when he was fifty, and in it re-configured the original slogan to be "free but happy." As FC points out, the symphony is not what my tenth graders would likely describe as "happy" music, but it certainly, to me, conveys the thoughtful contentedness that single life affords. 

Brahms, when he was
"free and happy".

I am single, and 26. Perhaps I can save myself many years of unhappiness by adopting the Brahms-at-50 version of the slogan. Here's the episode (hour 1), which has the story at the beginning, and the symphony (and again the story!) at the end of the hour.

No sooner had the symphony ended than I read this book review of Helen Garner's new book, "Everywhere I Look". Imagine my surprise on reading this excerpt:

“This isn’t really a story. I’m just telling you what happened one summer when I was young. It was 1961, my first year away from home. I lived at Melbourne University, in a women’s college on a beautiful elm-lined boulevard. I was free and happy. Everyone was clever and so was I.” 

How easy it is to be free and happy when young and clever. I wonder at what age free and happy became free and lonely for Brahms -- when it does for all those not entwined in matrimony. 

Incidentally, Garner's first book "The First Stone," which is discussed in the article, is about young women who were assaulted by a professor when they were in college. The title seems to allude to the parable in which Jesus says, "Let the sinless among you cast the first stone," when a woman has been accused of adultery. 

This parable ran through my head today when, in the tenth grade class, we discussed "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. Our first focus was narrative point of view, and I asked students to rewrite the climactic closing scene from the perspective of one of the characters present. (The entire story is told from a third person objective POV). 

(Spoiler alert) In the scene, the woman whose named has been drawn in the annual "lottery" is stoned to death by her neighbors.

One of the boys in period 1 wrote, "Everyone was looking at me to begin, so I had to throw the first rock." 

Another said, "As soon as I saw the first rock fly, I hurled mine at her as hard as I could." 

Both responses reveal the weight of that first stone. The story seems to me a comment on how much easier it is to act inhumanely when one is part of a group. I was first introduced to this idea in my Capitalism and Socialism class at Utah, when we read Niebuhr's "Moral Man, Immoral Society." 

Tenth graders speak wisdom. 

I wonder how many of them would describe themselves as "free and happy". Or, for that matter, either "free" or "happy". 

Appreciating professional symphonies

I was relieved this evening when, upon leaving the concert hall where Earlham's symphony orchestra gave its winter concert, that my companion was the first to say, "It makes you appreciate all those professional orchestras so much more, doesn't it?" 

The orchestra had put together a technically and technologically ambitious program, complete with film screenings of silent films to which they played the scores. Technical and logistical glitches were several; the orchestra had not rehearsed without the house lights, and when the film went on and the stage lighting went down, they discovered they could not see the conductor and had to stop. At one point the film score was playing over the orchestra- the sound tech had forgotten to mute the movie. At another point the play button could not be played in such a way that the film was the only thing on the screen, besides other elements of an Apple desktop. The conductor discovered, at the beginning of another piece, that his score was still backstage. When he called for the baritone featured in one piece to come forward, it appeared the singer was not in the room.

You have to love a small town, and no less a liberal arts college community, for its ability to play the loving and forgiving audience. "It makes it so much more interesting! I love getting to see how they deal with challenges. The more real, the better!" exclaimed my companion. To borrow a line from my reading in Emma today, "Emma (Mimi) denied none of it aloud, and agreed to none of it in private." I was exceptionally uncomfortable for the conductor, whose embarrassment and frustration must have been extreme, even with the loving audience. He handled each development (or unraveling) well, as did the musicians, but indeed I would prefer a concert that goes according to plan. 

They played Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 1, op 13, "Winter Dreams", which I was not familiar with and which I like very much. Here is a version of the whole thing. 

This afternoon while holed up in my room reading Emma I was struck by how unlike Emma's society of English nobility is from our own. So little emphasis on gainful work, so much leisure time to fill, such necessity to draw every bit of news or diversion out into something substantial to fill the otherwise unoccupied hours... it sounds pretty dull. Days and days spent looking forward to a picnic, and the picnic spent in the company of tiresome people (Mrs. Elton, Miss Bates, Mr. Elton). 

I remember when a high school friend told me, "I'm done hanging out with people I don't like." It is clear to me that evasion was an impossibility in Emma's circle - that people simply had to engage with people that they might not choose as friends, simply because of the size of the country circle. Mr. Darcy describes Hertfordshire society, as "confined and unvarying," and I think it would certainly seem so to those of us used to a wider social radius. 

As I sat in the concert hall before the performance began, I was struck by just how similar our society still is to that which Jane Austen so magnificently dissects in her novels. We were all part of a fairly small community, and with each grand entrance into the room of a new person, we, the seated, took stock of that person's beauty, attire, and social status - were they meeting friends? Did they look confident? Were they accompanied? Did they quickly make eye contact with a friend who was reserving seats? 

We haven't progressed too far beyond the pump rooms at bath after all.