22 posts tagged “life + text”
In August, I have to take my comprehensive exam for my MA. I'll grapple with the list of 136 literary and theoretical texts my faculty has assigned, and write two short essays in response to two questions that arise from that list. I will also write one short essay of my own design, based on 10-15 texts I feel I can own thoroughly. I will write this essay about Rukeyser and the total response mode of reading as a framework for teaching/studenting in such a way as to make beneficial use of personal response in interpreting text, specifically in the college-level literature course. I will hopefully also address the importance of student writing and teaching writing in this context.
I make this choice because it is what I care about, because it arises from my moral imperative. I believe that this is what my field can offer students that is of use in their lived experience, both personally and at the level of making positive collective change. I make it for my friends and loveds, with whom I have collaborated to survive difficulty and to emerge into a new range of agency for good. For friends who also survived and grew, and for those who did not.
As you may have guessed by my overwrought tone, if you read this with any frequency, I have spent the last week re-reading the Harry Potter books again, and have just finished the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here is one of the epigraphs:
Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.
--William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude
I always do my best work when I am invested in helping others do theirs; that is just a simple fact of how my motivation apparatus works. So I will succeed in passing this damned exam by helping every single one of my classmates pass it too. And I will succeed in passing it, too, because in doing so and writing what I believe to be true for an audience of people who are ultimately teachers, who will be continuing to teach more students, I am able to feel like I honor my hearts who have gotten me this far:
SLP
PTM
X
AMSW
GE
BC
DAY
ME
and
Michael Kelly
and
Emily Brooke Harmon,
both of whom I miss every day
Pema says that, on the CD set I listen to all the time. It's a series of teachings called Learning to Stay. In brief, her focus is on illuminating the phenomenon of shenpa--the ephemeral quality of hookedness that tends to send us running away from presence. For example:
I've been working on this research project for my 18th-Century Brit Fiction course for a few months now. Research projects are hard work, and I tend to bitch and whine about all my horrible suffering when I'm working on one, especially in this space. But the real truth is that research projects are really fun--I get to dig into all sorts of interesting texts and theory, mix 'em up with the lived-world scenarios that matter to me, and arrive at new insights and apprehensions. Along the way, I get to use writing to think it all through, and then I get to share that writing/thinking with at least one other person. This is not the kind of sweet opportunity that regular life offers, usually. As a full-time waitress, I rarely got the chance to think deeply, with great focus, about something that really interested me, with other people who also really cared about it, who brought their talents and seriousness to their work and my own.
This term, I happen to have gotten a professor who has not been a particularly sensitive or supportive team player in my process. In fact, I have been describing her teaching practice as 'cuntiferous' quite a bit, at pretty high volumes. The volume and intensity with which I have responded to her arises from this shenpa business. Her gestures of response have pushed on buttons that I am ego-invested in. In essence, she has hurt my feelings, and I have a really hard time not rising into a lot of avoidance behavior (read: rage, nasty comments, etc.) when I get my feelings hurt, especially when my feelings are getting hurt about something I'm sensitive about. So the shenpa is the ego-investment, the quality that somehow hooks me into a reactive experience of unpleasantness or discomfort.
Pema teaches that shenpa is value-neutral. It is unpleasant, but it isn't bad, per se. In fact, she teaches that shenpa can be read as an opportunity to develop mindfulness, insight, and warm regard for both oneself and whoever it is that's offered the opportunity in the first place. This is how I understand her interpretation of the concept of prajna--the experience of compassion-based wisdom that can arise simultaneously with shenpa. She points out that when a person's behavior elicits shenpa in me, it is often the case that that person is hooked into his/her own shenpa in the first place. She suggests that it is possible, when shenpa arises, to experience prajna about it at the same time--to feel warm and kind toward my own shenpa and the other person's. Hence, she cites her teacher who tells her, "when shenpa arises, sheer delight."
I listen to these CDs in the car, and they help. They help me get some quiet and mindfulness before I teach, they help me gentle down on myself when I'm ramping up stress, and they help me work on what Jimmy Carter famously referred to as sinning in my heart. Calling my professor a cuntiferous whore, and really going into that utterance with whole heart, is shenpa unrecognized, is sinning against someone else in my heart.
I know this. I knew it Monday, when I got my proposal back from my professor, covered with nasty, unhelpful feedback. I knew it when I flew immediately from feeling really hurt to blathering about her being a cuntiferous whore for 8 hours. Indulging in 8 hours of hate is exhausting on a number of levels, so I started trying to get some prajna going on by the time I got home that night. Wasn't overhwelmingly successful--I did manage to unhook from the intensity of both the hurt feelings and the flight-rage, but didn't really make it to compassion. So I skipped her class Wednesday night, in order to at least avoid doing any more damage, or getting re-hooked.
This whole time, intellectually, I have had the framework of compassion--the intellectual apprehension of my professor's likely suffering that makes sense to have given rise to the unkindness she does as a teacher. I even got so far as to be able to see that it is a suffering I have spent a lot of time in myself--perfectionism, which in my experience arises from basic self-loathing, and the enrollment in the kind of snotty, quasi-abusive hierarchy thinking that forms the basis for so much academic culture. But I have just been having a really hard time getting the rest of compassion--the open, tender heart, the softness and warmth of experiencing the basic goodness of another sentient being, and honestly giving a shit about that sentient being's pain.
And so. This morning, I am taking it nice and easy before I get back into my work. I'm drinking my coffee, smelling the spring coming in through my window, digging the sheer niceness of SLP. I'm reading Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my every-summer books. It's a pretty shenpa-free situation, and it's pretty nice.
So then I turn to page 274, and discover the only annotation I made in this whole book through all the re-readings since I bought it in 2000 or 2001:
It made for a long, lonely life, this business of getting things right.
I love this book--it's a long, luxurious read through lush mountains and country fields, with plenty of 'slow-hand' sensuality, and just enough loss to give everything a keen edge. It's chock full of terribly smart sentences, but this is the only one I underlined. In fact, I underlined this one in ink.
Because that sentence has been so true for me, because "this business of getting things right" has hurt, hurt, hurt for me. That loneliness, that despair, that sorrow at just being such a suck-ass person who'll never be able to get things right enough to make up for all her flaws, never get things right enough to be ok, to be loved, to just get some fucking rest and have an easy laugh and whatnot. And that, I'm sure enough, is what my professor is suffering through, and that I can feel for her through, and genuinely desire not to add to that suffering by hating her in order to avoid letting my feelings hurt a little bit.
Yep.
In the past few days, call it spring, I've been thinking about baby names. Jews name their kids after folks who have passed--we take the first letter of our dearly departed's name, and riff a new one on that initial. SLP's grandma Anita, a wonderful, lively, loving woman, passed away last year at Christmas. My grandma Sophie, a dynamic, powerful, brilliant woman, has been gone almost a decade now. So I'm kind of in love with Ari Shein LP. Shein was my grandma's maiden/middle name, and I love that when you say it out loud, it sounds like "shine," which is what this maybe-kid's dad does.
I have been doing an excellent job of following my plan of last night today. Occasional wafts of anxiety arise about not working obsessively through the mean reds (how can it possibly have taken me all these years to realize what Holly Golightly was talking about?), but I've just followed the teachings (touch them and let them waft on), and all is pretty much well.
At the community college, I worked with the most lovely woman on her persuasive essay, which gave me excellent ideas for and confidence about the section of Argumentative Writing I'm teaching in a few weeks. For the rest of hte time, just sat around and chatted with two of my fave coworkers, S and B. Got some healthy lunch, and sat in the sun with other doll-ightful folks till class. Students were rowdy and dear and totally focused enough for the second-to-last day of the term, so we went outside for Reader Review, and a good time was had by all.
And now have been home for a while. Chit-chatted with SLP, and when he went off for poker with his boys, went back to my book. I read Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver every summer now, and that's what I've got my nose stuck in tonight. I've just come to page 48 (that's all I'm going to say, lest I give something away for anyone who hasn't read it yet), and am now prompted to say:
SLP is just the most remarkable, wonderful, kind, decent, honest, playful, hardworking, funny, loving, fanmotherfuckingtastic husband of all time, and I am a most blessed woman.
And it's been 70 degrees today.
:)
(All the long parenthetical bits go out to the lovely Navelgazer.)
I am tired, menstrual, and hugely not-writing the last two papers of my MA. I'm not completely wallowing in the great mudpuddle of cyclical depression, worry, despair, and self-recrimination yet, but I can feel myself slipping.
Here's a little Rukeyser poem I'm clinging to like a mudpuddle life-raft:
Indeed. If I can rely on anything, it is the rhythms of my cycle. I know them by heart--I should; I've been riding this roller coaster for 22 years now. What happens this week, what always happens this week, is that my mood goes deep and wide, with occasional wild ups and slightly less occasional serious dips. I certainly cry at nearly anything. I also get progressively tired, although I just realized, with help from a friend, that I get some interesting bursts of productive energy, earmarked exclusively for cleaning the house.
THE OVERTHROW OF ONE O'CLOCK AT NIGHTis my concern. That's this moment,
when I lean on my elbows out the windowsill
and feel the city among its time-zones, among its seas,
among its late night news, the pouring in
of everything meeting, wars, dreams, winter night.
Light in snowdrifts causing the young girls
lying awake to fall in love tonight
alone in bed; or the little children
half world over tonight rained on by fire--that's us--
calling on somebody--that's us--to come
and help them.Now I see at the boundary of darkness
extreme of moonlight.
Alone. All my hopes
scattered in people quarter world away
half world away, out of all hearing.
Tell myself:
Trust in experience. And in the rhythms.
The deep rhythms of experience.
My cycle used to just make me insane and insane to be around, but, all praise to therapy and an over-thirty-changing-body, I ride it pretty well anymore, and even enjoy a lot of it--the slowing, the internal turn, the opportunity to be keenly present to experience. The unpleasant parts--being a huge bitch, etc.--I've gotten pretty good at just letting be, not feeding them, and also not fearing them. In essence, I've done this enough times to know the rhythms of my experience, and trust them to come and go.
Oh, but fuck it's a bitch this week. I'm feeling so much pressure to finish these papers, because they're the last two. And the professor who I was pretty sure was being a huge control-freak bitch about the one has indeed turned out to be a ragingly huge control-freak bitch, and that's making me even more loathe to do anything. And being loathe to do anything and having a wet-cotton, cycle-end brain is making it really hard to relax and believe I will actually come out of this and get them done in time.
But of course I will. I always do, and I'm not about to start not-doing now. So, I'll take me a deep breath and trust my damned rhythms.
Plan:
- Recognize that no amount of worrying or needing to work is going to help right now
- Give in to my body's demand that I just be fucking nice to it
- Let it fucking go
- Pack up my work and go home
- Eat something
- Help SLP with his paper
- Watch TV
- Fall asleep
- Sleep well
- Go to work tomorrow and do as little as possible, while maintaining as even a mood as possible
- Read/write tomorrow night, hopefully, because by then I should be experiencing the upsurge of serotonin or whatever that usually follows the first day of my cycle
- If not, do it anyway
- Chant "B's get degrees" over and over until April 28th
This here meme's a riff off the lovely Farfaraway and her delightful reading-memior post.
What're your top-five works of children's literature you still re-read at least once a year, now that you're grownup? (Or at least taller than you used to be, and pay taxes.)
- The Anne of Green Gables Series
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy
- The Ramona books
- The All of A Kind Family books
- Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Will the Circle Be Unbroken
I tag y'all. Tag yerself, tag a friend, enjoy.
Since reading Een's VoxMemoir post, I've been phasing through moments of warm reflection on the connections--intellectual, creative, and very, very dear all around--I've been making as a Vox reader. I say reader because, although I'm entirely delighted by the lovely writerly accommodations in the neighborhood, it's the opportunity to listen and respond that I've been really getting into lately.
I'm developing a real collection of people I like to think with here on Vox, and that's my all-time favorite kind of people.
I've just read Random Musings' post on "January in the frost belt." It's a jewel of a post--concise and tightly structured, but with great sense of spaciousness within. This formal aspect of the post sums up what she's expressed in language and imagery perfectly--"concise and tightly structured, but with great sense of spaciousness within" is pretty much what winter in Michigan feels like.
Sometimes that's the sun through a cluster of icicles when it's bitter cold, but shining so bright it dazzles and awes. Sometimes it's thick, low, gray clouds and tires endlessly rolling through slush. Something about winter up here, its incessant endurance, slows time and opens it up: sometimes into an inner warmth; sometimes to a great beauty. Sometimes, though, to a keen and unsettling sense of timelessness, of the eternal stoplessness/startlessness.
Seasonal Affective Disorder. Honestly, I don't know anyone up here who doesn't meet the DSM criteria for this one. I don't think this is as much a psycho-physical disorder, as it is a geographical disorder. When you live in a location where it's really, really fucking cold and dark and gray and windy and wet and cooooooooold a lot of the year, feeling depressed at least part of the time is just really, incredibly, mindbogglingly likely.
I've always said that God doesn't send the weak to be born in Michigan. Winter up here can break even the most determinedly macho son of Dixie, and the keen edge of winter can even be sensed in the culture of the other seasons. But the emotional/spiritual strength this climate requires and develops offers rich rewards as well.
Up here where winter is long and gray, we have the opportunity to engage with the rough edges of the human life span. This opportunity is often not a pleasant experience to be sure, but the more we are able to meet it anyway, to sit with it and greet it with warm regard and lively interest, the more we just breathe into it--then--the longer our summer moments grow, and the deeper and richer our ability to stay present to that luxe warmth, that languid greengold...
So I'm actually too late on this one to properly post in response to the question, but I still wanna chime in.
What do I do for fun when I'm broke?
Well, pretty much everything, 'cause I'm pretty much always broke, so I try to make everything fun. That's the trick to being poor, in my experience. This, though, was fun without even trying:
Sigh. I'm sitting at my keyboard, with my office-mate's semester overview staring up at me. She has every single day of her term planned, in a color-coded table. Along with the "Date" column, which I don't overly resent, she has "Prep," "Due," "In-Class," and "Homework." It's fucking color-coded, people. Sigh. Sigh. And sighhhhhhhhh again.
Until I downloaded her stuff, I was feeling pretty good about being able to get the term ready. I taught this course last year, after all, and it really went remarkably, amazingly well. Given that it's my second time around, it simply stands to reason that this term will go better than the last time, at least in some ways. I did get inordinately lucky in the great Yatzee Cup of Registration last year--the students I got were all just such terribly impressive, smart, caring folks, who were largely unafraid to take risks and act the fool. I'm not counting on a repeat of that luck, of course, but I am reasonably confident about the way I conceive the course and realize that in assignments. I'm also pretty sure that I'm going to be better at the mechanics of the course, given the almost two years of practice I've had teaching now, as well as better at innovating in response to things not going as planned.
But now I'm having a terrible time trying to push away the temptation to borrow my office-mate's learning organization and strengths as expectations for myself. I know it doesn't make sense--she and I are very different brains. She's exceptionally gifted at details and organization and structure; I'm exceptionally gifted at global thinking and the research process and intuitive, relational knowledge construction. She's also almost a decade younger than I am, and therefore a decade more awake, energized, and smart than me, which is good and fine and natural. Beyond all that, I'm very, very fond of her, and very devoted to seeing her blossom and grow. It's easy to recognize my lifelong tendency to self-doubt as it manifests as a competitive impulse here, and to tell it to get lost, at least on the intellectual level. But to actually resist the slide into fuck-it-turns-out-that-I-do-suck depression, well, that's another level of challenge altogether.
The thing is, I'm tired still. I certainly have slept a huge amount this break, and watched hours and hours of restoratively mind-resting television, but I could so use another two weeks of relaxation and rejuvenation. So when I confront the fact that school starts up again on fucking Monday, and the level of sharp I need to be in order to be ready on fucking Monday, an anchor of fear that I won't be able to pull it off drags on me, and my tired little heartmind sinks into a melancholy certainty that I'm just not good enough to make it in the grownup world of professional teaching.
Well, with all due respect and warm regard for my fears and sadnesses (and I really do mean that), I simply can't afford to keep sinking. I hereby choose a reality: I am a reasonably good teacher; with time and practice, I probably will become a very good teacher. The frame I've already got for this term is a really good frame. I am going to limit my objectives for making positive change to this frame, because it is already very good, and trying to massively overhaul it is both unnecessary and unlikely to produce positive results. I'm going to trust my experience, trust my heartmind and imagination, and trust my limits.
Why not, really? The worst thing that can happen is that the term will go awfully, but that's also the worst thing that can happen if I make myself crazy trying to work as though my brain were a not-as version of my office-mate's brain, as though in order to be good enough, I have to be just like her. The only difference is that I'll have made myself crazy, which sucks for me and everyone else who relates to me, and that it'll be even more likely that the term will go awfully.
Do think good thoughts for me and my poor students. :)