Woofer

So maybe it's time to reawaken, renaissant, and respond. Thinking about what Cornel West's version of Great Hearts would look like, and if it isn't probably already out there somewhere, and what he'd think of Chandler Prep and the seniors' Straight Outta shirts. How to reform the school's curriculum to make it inclusive, without sacrificing the bulwarks of a tradition it's so painstakingly attempting to restore. Is it a wall against the barbarians among us they're building here, or a peristyle, a colonnaded courtyard for gymnastics and poetry to flourish?

My doubts on this score are sufficient as well as necessary for making my imminent departure willed entirely, though the community likewise taking root around this school's dubious mission is one I'm still conflicted about leaving for the greener pastures of the Northwest. Geography and theory, place and pilgrimage are still much on my mind these days, with our DC trip fairly fresh and the Innocents Abroad Michael lent me, along with the Canterbury Tales still echoing from our seminars, and Rios' poems and short stories about this place from the Piper Conference and workshops, and Robinson's essays and West's work from the Northwest and East, respectively, haunting me, contemporaries I'm only just discovering--that is, bothering to read, or listen to. With all this, finding I have things to say and no one to say them to--making conversation on the senior trip proved impossible for a myriad of reasons--I'm wondering again about posting twitters and youtubes, getting started in earnest on my book about schools and teaching, returning to my novella from this fall, and most of all sitting in my lawn chair while it's not yet too hot, reading: my favorite conversation of all.

It would be a shame to actually write anything on twitter, after successfully using it to be silently present in that virtual world for all these years, but perhaps it is time to start speaking and listening with those media--posting videos of chalkboard stories and audio of reading aloud, to go with those few recordings of interviews and urban tribes from Uruguay and the neighborhood which feel so long ago. To stir up attention to things worth attending to, if everyone really seems to be on their phones and devices constantly, to remind them there are things out there truly worthy of looking at that much, of listening to that closely, even maybe worth setting the device down for thinking awhile.

Thought has been an interlude in human development. Thought has been--already merging into technology from the moment we accompanied it with media. Our immedia, ourselves, are already becoming an afterthought--our focus is continually diverted.

Socrates knew this long ago as he walked with Phaedrus outside the city walls, and he went so far as to write nothing, only speaking and questioning, listening to others and to that voice within--recollecting, contemplating. Like Jesus, he wrote in the dust on the ground, kneeling with Meno's slave--did West call him Meno?--and that story from John's Gospel was the subject of the priest's homily on Sunday, overheard as we walked through the aisle of the Shrine of the National Basilica, with Christ Pantocrator gazing down. I'm concerned still and again with instilling reverence, respect, virtue through Socratic questioning and Christian faith--the immediacy of the paradox--after time spent in the Holocaust Museum, in the presence of its eternal flame and those of Kennedy's grave and Gettysburg's battlefield, and at the Kennedy Center, where the Montreal Symphony performed for us their world-class interpretations of Debussy, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky--yet at the time when it debuted, the latter caused a riot in Paris! and in our time, we patiently sit through it, only to be back on our phones, heading to the bar or restaurant for pie and finding nothing to say about the concert, the museum, the monuments! Is it that in the presence of what we know we must reverence, we are cowed? Is it that I am now becoming such a respectable figure that people are awkward in my presence? Students and other chaperons alike take on a certain stilted way of speaking to me, maybe trying to flatter me, as if I mattered, and I have a hard time speaking to them quite naturally, as if I knew what that meant.

I try to recall, on the plane looking out the window, say, the way I know it used to feel to travel, to fly, to encounter people and have conversations and see neighborhoods and visions, but though something of all that remains, I find that so much has changed.

Though there is less of the dream, maybe there is more of the urgency, and though words come readily to try to point at the images and sensations life used to evoke, even more readily comes the certainty that sharing and inspiring those experiences is more important than trying to recapture or rejuvenate their like in myself. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, and yet Eliot wrote that at about my age--and he's taught these days alongside the geniuses he aspired to, Dante and Virgil, as well as the poets who live today, Rankine and Rios, only not at Chandler Prep. I'd rather not grow old here, though admiring and hoping to keep in touch with those who do.

The doubt that assails me is how I can do more, how I could have done more here. Writing up reviews of the plays at the Mesa Arts Center, like Wittenberg; getting involved sooner and more deeply with the writing program at ASU; volunteering with literacy and especially translation with the people around here, in plain view--only hardly at Chandler Prep; making more of a commitment to the writing Joe was trying to get done and made available through his organizational efforts, colliding against the dearth of leadership among his cadre of writers and artistic temperaments. But the poets are the legislators of the world, and there are poets out there, crucially significant voices, all but unheard. Surely by now those I had the great good fortune of listening to that day in Boston have gone on to study with some excellent teachers, or have had their talents squandered some other way--what opportunities like the poets in schools program mentioned by Rios still exist anymore? What jobs other than waiting tables or applying to MFAs and post-docs exist for those apolitical statesmen and women of the pen? And would one more purveyor of 140 character haiku and uplifting short videos of animals cute and culture beautiful make an impact there? The pets are the legislators of that world!

There's a bird's nest of grass up in the corner of the eaves, a little bird goes into it and sings from it from time to time. Would people be interested in hearing it?

What other prophetic voices such as those many mentioned by West are out there, and what place should they have in a liberal arts education? or in the media consumption of the masses, for that matter? How is it that so many people read the Bible and so few read these prophets of our time? or listen to the music of Sufjan?

What did it mean when the rockstars of Metric were introduced by Joywave's lead singer acknowledging their own mediocrity and punctuated by a chorus of fans who sang accompanied by acoustic guitars? If mediocrity can and must be more popular in the moment than brilliance, can't there at least be more of this tragicomic humility about it? We love not what is high, but what moves us--and there is a virtue, nobility, greatness in everything, once we look at it. This is democracy's lesson, Dickens', Lincoln's, Wilder's, and Great Hearts would do well to hearken to the Hearts, not just fixate on the Great, if it really cares about making liberal arts the inheritance of a democracy, not an oligarchical element within it. And if fatigue played a role in our flagging conversations, if stress sealed our lips and wrapped gauze over our senses, inner and outer, then true leisure--schola--is in order in the curriculum somewhere. This quarter we have time to read something current, and still do justice to The Brothers Karamazov, surely.

Someone could lead tours of such pilgrimages as Chaucer's to Canterbury, Great Hearts' to DC, figuratively as well as literally, that were conducive to this wise rest. But in the midst of everything we do from here on out, there is that urgency to serve, to share, to translate, to converse, and perhaps convert. A certain amount of controversy seems demanded: any article out there about Khan's Servants of God other than the one on the Plough site? Any recent work in preparation for the opening of the African American Museum in DC? I know my timeliness with such contributions is miserable--Ireland, China, Brazil languish for me to say something about them--and soon, now, Cuba! Holding their breath! Based on the students' research in their projects recently, the quality of offerings out there for national and cultural history is really execrable. Work in libraries, perhaps? And articles about Obama's legacy consisting chiefly in the fact that he lived, that he was elected, governed, and was not assassinated--the President who Lived! In the way that he has presided over the rise of demagogues and popular movements both--this dialectic can't have gone unnoticed. And these fields opened up by West--prophetic leadership, jazz and blues as metaphors, and deep democracy rooted in Socrates and the Bible underlying it--who is working in them today? What cultivation methods do they delve in, what fruits have they borne? If schools don't yet exist with them as a model, how could they be founded? Could it be through collaboration and good intentions, as Ed Denny dreamed, or must it always go through some established community, as Great Hearts has managed to establish itself, at least rhetorically, on the Catholic scaffolding of Tempe, and situate itself for rapid expansion, rather than staying small, autonomous as he had hoped. Is this a conversation worth having, worth recording with him, to include the history portion of this book or series? Sketches of people, while it's fresh!