Teaching: 34 Days In

by Lucy S.

I tell my students that writing IS hard work, that what they're trying to do with this first essay - due this Friday - is difficult.  Meanwhile, the last time I grappled with writing in the ways that they are now gets further away.  I start posts for this blog all the time that I don't finish because I want to write something quickly. I don't want the hard work of returning to something to craft it, or the work of stacking books around me and really carefully weaving their passages in to put myself in conversation with.  And I'm nut sure why.  I suppose it's because I feel that I need a long time to write that way, but since I started teaching, I feel that my mind is never more than a half hour away from that endeavor - from teaching.

Is the reward for getting through the particularly hard writing that I won't write much anymore?  I don't want that reward.  But I don't know how to make myself write those sometimes grueling academic papers when there is no audience for them anymore anyway. Finding an audience for them when I wrote them for classes was hard enough; now, I can't imagine how I'd ever find one.  But writing those papers, I grew.

Now I try to help my students find their way to their own version of that experience. One day, I gave them a handout with one of my favorite Audre Lorde quotes on it, and I read it to them:

This is my life.  Every hour is a possibility not to be banked.  These days are not a preparation for living, some necessary but essentially extraneous divergence from the main course of my living.  They are my life … I am living every particular day no matter where I am, not in what pursuit.  It's not as if I'm in struggle over here while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living it again (152).

I tell them I don't believe in grades, but that here we are, trapped in a system dependent on grades. I tell them this is why - what Lorde says - that our real life is happening right now, and that grades are a hollow goal to strive for, that if they strive for grades instead of savoring their experience in these classes, they'll always be waiting for some other time - end of day or semester, summer, graduation - only to find that after that, they'll soon be nostalgically looking back at these college years as 'the good old days' that are gone. We've talked about these kinds of things quite a bit.

But I'm too tired to keep writing and I have to get up at 6 am, so I will let this post be whatever it is for now.

***

After 7 am, day 35 begins.  For the pedagogy group I'm in, this month's reading includes a chapter from The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz, originally published in 1950, I believe.  In the beginning of the following chapter that is visible (entitled "The Dialectic of Solitude"), I read this:

Solitude - the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself - is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future.

I'm inclined to finish transcribing the paragraph - it is amazing - but I want to stop to think about that last sentence.  There is no escape, then, from this solitude.  Trying to stay fully bound to what we were is impossible. Even if we do the same things in the same place, what we are will change and what everyone else is around us will change, and even in the present, we feel the moments dripping away. 

This makes me think about a Wendell Berry poem I encountered yesterday. 

The Peace of Wild Things  

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I read it to Sean and Ryan yesterday.  Ryan said the sentence that particularly stood out to him was "I come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief."  It was the same line that I too was taken with.  I thought then most of all of how "wild things" aren't conscious that death looms in the future. But reading Paz made me think more about how this consciousness of inevitable future grief comes not only from knowing that physical death waits in the "mysterious future," when "what we are going to be" is largely a done deal.  It comes from knowing that there is a future we will live in that inherently carries loss in its forward movement. 

But this is greatly multiplied by the destructiveness of industrial and "post" industrial society. (We aren't "post," of course - as Berry makes clear in focusing on mountaintop removal in West Virginia or the willows that no longer can grow along the river where he farms in Kentucky, or we could look instead at fracking, or at the violent efforts of the Indian government to displace 100 million indigenous people, ultimately, in order to let the multinational mining companies extract bauxite and other minerals from the ground, decimating that vast forested ecosystem...)  

And it's time to go soon, to try to teach.  Already, we too are changed from who we were when we first came together in that class on September 4.