More: nymphs and satyrs

Then she also mentioned the other gorgeous language teacher, saying she and I should talk, as she's also a big traveler, trying to go to Australia or somewhere like that, and has been everywhere else. So I'll have to talk to her. But what about all these people who never travel anywhere at all? Inviting Ms Speed to visit the campus, especially the art gallery where they have a good exhibit of Lois Maillou Jones right now; but when she does won't she also see how few of her kids will ever get to experience this mind-expanding education she respects so much? and I wonder if that won't be even worse to see than the other side of it you're confronted with in the dining hall and all the custodians--race, class, and all this: mind, dream, which is bereft and curtailed by those strictures and divisions.

And as I write this listening for a change to music at the same time, present neither here nor in the kitchen or the quiet lobby of the auditorium with those black men and women, not in the school with the black boys and girls, but far away in Brazil or the Caribbean Sea swaying to the Starman song off the Life Aquatic by Seu Jorge, appropriating along with the producers his talent and soul for the benefit of my own--but not actually going anywhere. And this is the same as anyone might do--listen to a, read a, talk about a, dream about a--song, book, idea, place. I need to talk to the teacher; and I need to talk more to Ms Speed. There is that--to have access to each other, to really talk, read, listen, what have you.

And there was that time talking to the dude at the coffee shop about God, but so many other times he plays the buffoon. As we all do, in our own way. I think he does because he thinks we expect it--white people, students--and in fact part of what it was that started that conversation was his seeming sad and real for a change, and I asked him if he was feeling down, but he lit up, and said, no, just tired, but not down, because how good is God, or however he said it, this is where he ended up, the goodness of God and his happiness. But I did not relent so fast, but asked if he had always believed, and never sometimes doubted. But I think he said no, and meant it, though he must have answered more slowly. So the sadness or fatigue or whatever it was that made me try to sympathize and really understand him, at least briefly, was the same as a moment of stillness and reflection that reminded or woke him up to his faith, and placed it back into movement, but that in turn, once going, could not have led me to sympathize with him, unless I already knew the start of the motion--which now I feel like I see a little way into and do--or, on the other hand, if I were in a less pensive, more bright and rejoicing mood myself, kindled by his smiles and remarks, and it weren't the other way, too.

But none of this is so evident to me, as is a kind of pretend-jocularity affected by both him and the students in their interactions at the counter, which amounts really to a substitute and a barrier to this real thing, and I don't know how else to say it simply than that, going back to that old shorthand of 'artificial' and 'genuine,' 'superficial' and 'sincere,' 'external' and 'internal,' which seems in a way right, but so bound up with the most natural prejudice of them all, our being inside our individual souls looking out from that perspective onto everything else, and, sure, then we'll set ourselves off and mark ourselves out in every way we can. But as Chesterton is fond of saying, the label 'artificial' is only a misleading one, papering over all sorts of fully natural drives and insecurities, hiding them with something false but right in line with our lived situation, false from the standpoint of such moments when we do see through all this and stake out a value for such moments over all the rest, and for this way of seeing over what usually happens instead, and the nearest words at hand for that, then, are 'fake' and 'artificial.'

But this does point at a real difficulty, and a real danger. Lately I've been feeling both of them quite keenly. The difficulty comes down to just this, that even here, in the express pursuit of truth and the good life, and indeed it seems attracted by that same thing that attracted me, are still people so manifestly unfit for the open-hearted search, for asking questions and listening, but so content with shamming and hamming with our man in the coffee shop, or toadying up to any tutor they can get within range of.

The sibyl of Annapolis Middle

Ms Speed is that, speedy, yet never in a rush. To sub for her this morning, then for some of the other teachers in and out, is to see the salient needs of the the school today. How the spanish teacher was already there downstairs in the auditorium helping with rehearsal for the Alice in Wonderland show, wearing the same orange t-shirt as all the kids performing. Then she came and told me all the parts of the class, but had nothing written down. Then getting the walkie talkie and hanging out a couple hours, first watching the open rehearsal, then in the principals' office overhearing snatches of their meetings and official radio correspondence.

  And this is when Ms Speed, there in the hall, was back, saying something about books and art and Christ, and was it Herman Hesse the person she was talking to had said? Then there she was, going on about ring things, for her 11th grade godson had is ceremony that morning--what it means that fewer people are getting them, and to turn it in or out, this way or that, 12 people together and the 13th the other way which locks it somehow--did she say that?--but everything she says or doesn't passes across her face like clouds flying, and scraps of windy day, her glance over here, over there, always vaguely upward, her hair and face shining, her eyes laughing, thinking.

As I was reading the Ethics, she shared what she was reading--the book on teaching with poverty in mind all the teachers have, her notes on epigenetics--what gets ingrained by generations of circumstances, what thus can indeed be changed the same way; and the importance of being there with a teacher dealing with some tough kid, so they know they're not going crazy, or something--not even doing anything sometimes, intervention with a time-out, but just being present in the room, supporting in that way. And her steps for the next few months, to know a couple things about each teacher and staff member in the building--with that she brought out her cards, which she's used with kids and grown-ups for years, and they looked it, like all the cards from Granny's board games, and I picked one on family, muttering something about marriage not applying to me yet. Tell about a happy family that you know, ok, the first thing that comes to mind: the family by the park, a big one, and all the kids like the parents going to St John's, how I first heard about this place, and why I'm here, and traveling maybe my dream, as she was talking about that.

Teaching being a calling for her, as at the church, where for some it might only be a job--still, she has one of those, too, at Pennie's, but she'll quit once her social security kicks in in this her 66th year, and have time for more, and more to give to church and school. What kind of thing is school, then, a job or a calling, a paycheck or a life? And the best teachers, are they the ambitious educated young, or the elders who know the realities of their students' lives, and bawling them out and kicking them out into the hall, or talking to them and giving them words of advice, shouting them into line or building them into all kinds of truth for which discipline is only a structure? Her gestures for talking about different possible lives she tries to inspire or connect to the kids with--the people who go to Hawaii because they love to surf, and every day after work they go surfing, or move to Utah to live, so they can ride mountain and dirt bikes (at first I thought her pose looked more like skiing, but then I saw it--her, they were all her, in a helmet and visor, zooming down the dirt hill and through the woods, and in a bathing suit surfing the clearest ocean wave).

What a wonderful woman, at least as cool as Mr Eppeldauer back home. And to talk about dreams in those terms, as they both do, at once realistic and deeply personally imagined, a kind of retirement active through as much of a lifetime as possible, and physical activities emblematic of properly soul-felt happinesses--this seems in line with the best American thinking, and as such is apt to capture the attention of young Americans across all bounds with sneaky philosophy--not detached from but fulfilling life.

Dismal housekeeping

Our familiar circle at St John's is various enough, I suppose, students coming and going from year to year--but among the tutors, now, how long can they really go back and forth amongst themselves and feel like that is sufficient--Touchstones, executive seminars, etc, because these ideas need to be heard, these stories told. When the teller is a book, it matters how we read it--and the Book, or the Qu'ran, how much more! Finally, that lingering question about Jonah's experience in the deep, and under the gourd--what about that righteous person, a kind of Meno, in whom no amount of talking and questioning and signs avails to give the understanding, the humor? the Pharisees, the Furies, like the poor, will be with us always?

For almost as long as I've been looking for jobs, the jobs have been getting more elusive, giving some kind of semblance anyway to the fact of the ever-existing and -growing difference between haves and have-nots. Yet that a place like this persists, small as it is and apparently purposefully so, has to mean something, too. Does it have to be so grand and expensive, relying on the rich, who have not only money but taste and a certain philosophic bent? Could it not be adapted to the needs of others starting at a much more basic level of reading and means both? Or is a certain amount of economic well-being prerequisite for the interest in so many unsettling questions?--unsettling up to a point, but your house and bank accounts are still safe from them. Or is the current and recurrent crisis the voice crying out in the wilderness for just these questions to be asked, and that the answers have some real bearing on lived experience its demand? We are so detached here from the world, the protests, repressions, board rooms, wars, and the necessity of working within that whole complex of forces; but we are so nourished here with ideas that when we do become aware of it waiting for us out there, we can't help imagining all the impact our ideas will have, leaping over by thought the rift, the disconnect, of privilege and circumstances. What is the project but to bring these two, ideas and the world, more into harmony? But can it be done unless somewhere each of the extremities is practically unmitigated?

The real questions about economics are all yet unasked--what our needs are and where they shade into wants, as if it were not a need in us to want and desire; how these require our living together, and only up to a certain point can we live together before we no longer feel connected with each other, or positively hostile to the people around us; and why there should be some analogy between the individual and the collective of which the household is primary and gives its name to the dismal science? What conditions we live in now, what these impose on us as far as our ability to think about the origins of our socialization and exchange--for at this point we are so abstracted from the grounds of need and nature, and full of history of things and thought, and so dependent on machinery for our lives' running smoothly which we never installed for ourselves but were more installed into. Even the household is not its owners', even the state is not its citizens', but the weighted time of money in electronic channels flows between and links all these, as if for its own purposes and not ours. What if this is not just rhetoric now but a real impasse--and the analogy of individual to state is rather an opposition and a conflict? How do we work, not from origins to it, but from it and where we are now back to where we can be?

Whether I might not be a monster "more multiply twisted and filled with desire than Typhon"

Having to ask whether there is any such thing as a natural scholar, or whether it would be desirable for there to be, even; or anyhow what it is, then, that does lead us to read rather than to the various other ways of spending the time--in some people, it begins to look like a kind of pride and pedantry, but this can't be the only thing, because in others it is nowhere near strong enough to have overcome those other claims on our attention, other pastimes or vocations. And sure enough, some of us like to believe we, at least, read in meekness, for the sake of that wonder, and to become better--not better than others, not so as to lord it over them and berate them for shiftless dolts, but better than ourselves, a better being ourselves.

Something halfway between self-knowledge and self-creation, yet not in service of the self meanly, but surely drawn on by that love of the good; it's just that here we have no other vehicle, so to speak, than the body and the self, to go after it. So that we have to say what we mean by those, and in what sense they are ours: the body, the body politic; the self, and its varieties of metamorphosis--moods, as simple as that; feelings, memories, reveries, those voices in books and conversations and conversions. What is meant by those enthusiasts who could so lightly outright reject the self as an efficacy, with all its categories, and call it merely a construct?--because this movement, too, it seems, is still part of what the self is, and among its capabilities, perhaps one of the most devious. And devious for what--or whom is the self helping? Is it out for itself, or does it proceed with irony or with calculation, or are more of its motives buried in its own unconscious, or in the labyrinthine structures of the race, what is past gripping and shaping what is to come, or else in airy concatenations down and up from the divine, a Jacob's ladder, and we participants in those ineffable purposes?

Nabokov and the Anne Arundel Public System spell it out for us

Barr and Klein and Harrell and us

A question I'd wanted to ask, if I hadn't been so engrossed in observing what was going on there between the tutors and the few bold students, bringing in their Socrates and their Strauss, went to that experience of wonder, but not as a philosophical concatenation, but as the older intimations of self and world, the careening learning of childhood--to what stage in life should we assign such an education as this? and then, prior to that, in what sense can we educate in wonder? Is the child's wonderment at all comparable to the adult's? to the philosopher's? or is each, while unmixed, somehow apt to its place? On the face of it, you might say the wonder of childhood is prerequisite for the free play of intellect, for it to develop later in life at all, rather than becoming ossified and scared into confines. Then the sort of education that would allow for that free play of intellect (proto-intellect if you prefer) in a child really looks nothing like a curriculum of great books, but something close to what someone tried to sketch out from the hispter's phone's lines of Shakespeare's Arden, a learning how to read, and to read between, so as to create meaning. The work of refining that, vis-a-vis sedimentary assumptions, if we permit it at all, comes later, once some basis is esablished--a tree after all is rooted in a soil--and prehaps unconsciously at first, while the wonder is all-embraing, and self-consciousness nil. Questions of confidence hardly arise, only avoiding fear and seeking delight. Personally, my great books as a child were legos, swing sets, and videogames. Books at school were preferable to the waste of time of most of the lessons, then a good in themselves later.

At stake in the life of the mind lecture and question period was the freedom of the intellect, the capacity of ordinary non-great writers to have insights, but also the girl sitting up close who goes out for drinks with the tutors every week, and the option of sitting outside watching the same sunset as glows there in the great hall, but with the rabbits and birds. All told, the discussion of the questions lasted much longer than the representation of the two ideas--both the question why is it so? why is there something? and the audience questions around the table, where there were attempts to muddy the distinction or cast it as a tension, or ask what the outcome should be, or how palpable assumptions and this sediment are--even tentative revisions for the college involving Lady Gaga or film, which sound excellent even if they were made in jest--but for all the disagreements and quibbles, to me it looked like a lot of the same assumptions were still at work, and wonderment at original creative insight balked at, and too many old white men sitting around, whose institution pays them to do so, and if it is at controversy over its idea of itself, it will be from that homogeneity rather than from the fruitful diversity of thinking.

Love-biting the hand that feeds

The way to enlightenment is more manifold, I want to say, if there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. So that sitting around a table, leaning back in the chairs with the front legs off the ground like dogs begging or playing, and the reading that at least here, at least almost always really does get done before the class and really gets discussed there, and even the occasional pieces of writing which we stress about out of all proportion to their actual difficulty and to the detriment of the real merit they ought to have as tools for clarifying thinking--there must be more to be meant by liberal education.

The music and labs and languages, of course, the extracurriculars, sports and games, dances, shows--these are all there, but the what you might call life experiences, work and travel and meeting people so different from you, I'm not sure these are possible there where the classes are happening, or if the structure of the classes is somehow inimical to them, rather than fostering them. Certainly there are no grades given for any of these sorts of learning experiences, but the results of them should show in a heartbeat, the difference between a cultivated person and a merely well-read one, or again a very hard-working one, one who has never had leisure to get taught in discussion-based classrooms or felt capable or interested to read a great book instead of relaxing by the TV or at the bar or finding fulfillment in their home and kids and possessions.

 But if there is some value in liberal education in the sense of books, these are just the people who stand to gain; or if there is some value in the experiences themselves, it is the reading and discussion that should make it felt, expressed, understood somehow; and in turn, their voices in the discussion could testify to the world outside of the books so as to make those puny readers among us go out to learn and act in a more down-to-earth way. Which to incorporate into a curriculum would change the meaning somewhat of the word--would give the reading a more concrete direction in tension with its significance as contemplation, the end-in-itself side of things. But even this contains an outward aspect, as a candle is what it is, burning, yet casts its little light and heat, so that whatever is around it, if it is of a certain kind, aspires to catch the fire, reflects the illumination.

Anyone contemplative, it seems to me, who has not forgot their humanity, would also consider it well to try and share that experience, and sympathizing with the experience of others, nevertheless resolutely strive to draw them into the like contemplation, for themselves and for what they stand to discover and share thereby. Again, if this is something good in itself, they should naturally aspire to it, and if they can't or don't do it for themselves, there must be conditions in the way, chaining them to ignorance. And if those conditions yet make up their life, and whatever significance it has, we great readers would be equally ignorant not to investigate that, but to be content to read and discuss in our dwindling numbers, seeking forgotten potentialities of the human all alone. To philosophize and create something beautiful has to be in reach of anyone, if democracy is to be believed in for its part; but then actually thinking and making something beautiful must be done, if democracy is to be realized.