Love the Questions

I answered some questions for the school newspaper, since I (among others) am leaving next year for other ventures. They wanted to know if I had any words of wisdom. I thought about it, and here’s what I’ve got:

1) Never use the verb “is” in your writing.
2) Don’t fear ambiguity. Relish it.
3) When in doubt, the main character symbolizes Christ.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

-William Butler Yeats

The sixty-one year old Yeats is writing about his desire, in his old age, to leave behind the natural, bodily, sensual delights and values of youth–”the young in one another’s arms,” the “mackerel-crowded seas”–for the “artifice of eternity,” the “monuments of unageing intellect.” Byzantium is his city of the mind, where tender and mutable flesh is shed for the glittering, imperishable gold of artistic creation and intellectual achievement. When his body begins to break down, when he begins to become “a tattered coat upon a stick,” a scarecrow to frighten the young and impetuous, he pleads to be reborn. His heart, “fastened to a dying animal,” is no good to him anymore: he must be exchanged for a golden bird, a clockwork imitation of the natural world that transcends it. He will speak timeless truths from a vantage point that is beyond time.

I love this poem, though I feel as though I’m looking at it curiously, from across a broad gulf. It’s not just that I’m really young, it’s that I’m really into being young at this point: the new love and big plans and nice legs and stupid mistake parts of it. And with this awareness–”wow, it’s really fun being young, actually”–comes the insidious realization that it won’t last forever. I’ve always known that I was going to die, even though the young aren’t supposed to know that. Somehow, though, it’s never occurred to me that I would get old first.

So I like this poem. I like the idea of the old and worn-out body becoming a chrysalis for something altogether new and more splendid. I like the idea that we can transmute ourselves into a pure artistry, that we can transcend what is flesh. Flesh is lovely. Being young is lovely. But this poem speaks to me of something even better–something eternal–and whether that’s religion or art, I’m not sure and I don’t think Yeats is either. As we retreat from our failing bodies, we enter into a deeper knowledge, and we discover that what we have lost is far less than what we have won.

That’s the hope, anyway.

It’s really going to happen, apparently. Sooner than I think, I will be packing all my books into boxes, renting a U-Haul, loading up all of my stuff AGAIN, and driving it to my new, as-yet-unfound apartment. (That’s not even counting the likely move to Williamsburg for the summer.) Only this time, unlike the moves I’ve made every year since I was 14, I will not be trundling up and down the I-95 corridor, but to someplace far stranger and more frightening–South Bend, Indiana. Google Maps tells me that it is 800 miles away, about a 12-hour drive. At current gas prices, that’s about $280 one-way. A round-trip airfare is less than half that. That’s right. I’m moving where it’s officially cheaper to fly to than to drive.

I have–not rituals exactly, but customs–for moving. My books are the first thing I pack and the first thing I unpack. Probably this is just because books are an easy place to start, but I like to think that it’s because home is where my bookshelves are. And certainly I feel more secure, connected, belonging in a place where my books are all out on the shelves. And as soon as I have taken all of my books down and put them away in boxes, I find myself caring less about the space. It is not home any more. There is nothing stopping me from packing the rest.

Also, this time, I’m getting a dog. I’ve wanted a dog or cat (I go back and forth) since I was in college. I wanted one when I moved to Richmond, but ended up renting a place with no pets allowed. This was a good idea this year, since I really haven’t had time for a pet, but it’s gotten past the “that would be really nice” point and to the “I am willing to make major sacrifices and life changes in order to have a dog.” Rent, for instance–I will have to pay a lot more, probably, for a dog. My housing options are limited. I will have to arrange my schedule around spending time with the dog. It will be expensive. Etc., etc. And yet I can’t wait. It’s all I can do to keep myself from smuggling a dog into my apartment right now, much as I tell myself that a cross-country move isn’t exactly the best thing for a new animal.

Big changes ahead. I have the same feeling you get in a canoe as you approach a rapid–you can hear the rapid, but you generally can’t see it, since it’s a downhill drop. All you can see is the smooth calm of the river stretching forward to a foreshortened horizon, and then nothing beyond–only perhaps one or two rocks jutting up, and the occasional flume of spray. All you can do is listen to the roar and try to gauge how big it will be from rapids past (who always sound much quieter by comparison), keep your oar in and dig your paddle deep, agree with your partner on the best-looking V, and go for it.
[Edit: Apparently I need to clarify that rapids are a good thing. Indeed, most of the time they're the high point of the trip.]

Big changes ahead.

So, I have a plea, to people everywhere who may or may not be reading this:

If you are upset with me, please tell me. If you are angry, let me know. If I am making a huge whopping mistake, alert me to it. I am not a person who relishes confrontation (far from it), but I am also someone who cannot read minds. And I hate being put in the position of having to guess whether my actions or words are pissing people off. It pushes all my insecurity buttons, of which I have approximately thirty-seven thousand, at the same time. So most of the time, at least, I just don’t play that game. If you don’t communicate your displeasure to me, I will blithely assume that all is well in our relationship. I will not try to decode your sighs and glances and silences.

This does not mean that I am not receptive to criticism–I think, for the most part, that I do my best to please people, and I will make a decent effort to make any changes that I think are reasonable. I will apologize. I will stop cracking my knuckles. I will try to let you get a word in edgewise. I will stop dismissing your feelings. I will be on time. And I will not hate you for letting me know what I’m doing wrong.

But I am not at all receptive to criticism that is not communicated in some clear way. I do not care about your martyrdom. I would rather make the occasional scene than walk on eggshells. And I will not seek out things about which to be insecure.

This has been a public service announcement from the Society of How to Get Along with Mary. Thank you.

Yes, I know the semicolon is incorrectly used. Sometimes, I feel, a semicolon is just a classy and ambiguous version of an emoticon. Also sometimes I like to pretend that if I know the rules it’s cool when I break them. Makes me feel all dangerous like Virginia Woolf.

Here’s the thing: I have been moping all evening. I’m not going to go into my reasons here–they’re not bad, but the point is, they’re not good enough. I have no excuse for moping. I have a comfortable, one might even say indulgent, lifestyle; I have dear friends and a boyfriend who defies adjectives and an offer from a great grad school. My spiritual life makes me mostly joyful and occasionally uncomfortable; I ran my first 10k last weekend; I am getting my teeth fixed; I am going to be just fine. So stop whining, Mary.

April is Poetry Month. Maybe if I’m feeling especially risk-taking I’ll share some poetry.

“Not Waving But Drowning”

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much farther out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

-Stevie Smith

What I like about this poem is its simple haunting rhythm and the image of the white hand out in the breakers. I like the combination of dialogue that’s attuned to real speech and utter spareness of words, the odd slant rhymes, the lurching meter that nonetheless hits all the right beats. It reminds me of Emily Dickinson. It’s also a poem I connect with personally, which always helps. I rarely need an excuse to feel sorry for myself, and the image of someone drowning and unable to prevent his plea for help from being misinterpreted–well, I like to pretend I understand.

The season of Lent draws to a close, and it’s been a pretty slack one on my part. Since I was raised an Episcopalian, and I pretty much believe in God these days, I figure I’m supposed to do the Lent things–give up something that I love but that’s bad for me, take on some kind of prayer routine, try to purify myself body and soul for the celebration of that strange and compelling and credibility-stretching event that is the resurrection. And I’ve been truly sucking. I managed to come up with something that would be actually good for me to give up (since giving up fattening/sugary foods doesn’t make me holier, just grumpier), namely, unnecessary spending. Then I decided that enjoying my time with loved one over food and delicious beverages was absolutely necessary, and well, the momentum has just run out on that one.

But I did have a bit of a Lenten epiphany, albeit a last-minute and a slow one, and it all came from my visit to the dentist.

I have terrible teeth. Terrible. Comes from poor/nonexistent brushing habits as a child and a 5-cup a day habit of tea with milk and sugar. I know that the tea is a bad habit, but I justify it to myself by saying, well, it’s my only real vice (I don’t smoke or get plastered or do pot) and I lead a stressful life and I need it to stay awake during the day and it’s even kind of classy, right, I mean, hey, tea is so British. And I keep on sucking it down, cup after soothing cup of black tea (Ceylon and Earl Grey or Chai if I’m at Starbucks), with an ideal mix of roughly two teaspoonfuls of sugar per eight ounces. And I don’t give myself a hard time about it, for the reasons described above.

But the dentist does not understand that tea is British and that I am a virtuous person otherwise. What he understands is that my teeth are decaying. (I’m not even going to name the number of cavities because I’m embarrassed. Suffice it to say that they will require more than one visit.) And, in the most charming way possible, he has given me an ultimatum: no more sugary drinks. Ever. Period. No excuses.

As I try to adjust to life without sugar, I find myself thinking about my other bad habits. I spend more money than I can afford in an effort to convince myself I’m not as poor as I know myself to be. (Yeesh, that’s a scary one.) I never ever do the dishes. I rarely clean my apartment, period. I ignore work that I don’t want to do in the hope that it will go away. I waste time on the internet when I’m at work. I don’t take care of myself, physically or mentally. I never ever learn my Coptic/Hebrew/Greek vocabulary. I say that I’m too busy to do things that I just haven’t bothered to do yet. I somehow, despite all of this, manage to feed my already-overlarge ego by feeling superior to other people. I look at myself in mirrors as I walk by. I go to bed an hour later and leave the house 15 minutes later than I intend to…every single day. I feel sorry for myself. I bite my nails. I drink too much tea.

Maybe I should work on these. The spending diet helped, and I think I’m going to try to implement a modified version for the rest of the year (while allowing myself to buy things that I need, just not right away). I don’t bite my nails as much any more; ever since the dentist fixed my chipped front tooth, I can’t get a really good hold any more. Training for the 10k is helping, too, though I have allowed myself to get behind with that. I have actually kept 2 to 3 days ahead all week (though, granted, it’s the first week of the trimester). But that leaves a lot still to work on.

On the other hand, I found that giving up sugared tea–which, as anyone who knows me can attest, is almost unthinkable for me–has been easier than I expected once the stakes got high enough. And if I can give up sugar in my tea…either I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was, or there really is such a thing as divine grace. Or perhaps both.

The decision has been made.

Next year, I’ll be going to the University of Notre Dame. I’ll be working toward an MTS (Masters in Theological Studies) with a concentration in Biblical Studies. From there, I’ll apply to Ph.D programs, hopefully going to Notre Dame again, though there are several other good schools in the area.

Blondie, meanwhile, will probably be at the University of Illinois, which is about a 3 to 4 hours’ drive away.

Potentially unfortunate things about this: 1) It’s an MTS program, which means that they can’t offer me a fellowship, so while they’re giving me full tuition, I have to take out loans and probably get a job to pay for my living expenses. 2) We’ll be paying for 2 apartments and doing a buttload of driving. 3) ND is definitely a school of theology rather than religious studies, so it might possibly be somewhat oppressively Catholic, and I might reasonably expect to encounter people who have a distaste for healthy skepticism. 4) I will have this as a school logo.

Potentially wonderful things about this: 1) It’s a really, really good school in terms of size and track record of faculty. The Biblical Studies concentration alone has 14 professors, about 3-4 times the size of most of the other programs I was looking at, and most of the faculty members seem to be at the top of their fields. 2) U of Illinois is also a top-notch program, with lots of different kinds of electron microscopes and other cool machines that make Blondie happy. 3) South Bend is super cheap–apartments are around half the cost of those in Boston. 4) Because of (3), I’ll be able to afford a dog, which is increasingly high on my priority list. 5) Notre Dame’s Ph.D fellowships are quite generous, meaning that I’ll be able to afford my life after 2 years, assuming that I get in. 6) I really like the idea of being in a consciously religious community, even if it’s not necessarily my religion. And I’m almost sure that at Notre Dame I won’t run into many people who think I’m silly or irresponsible or biased to try to study in an academic light the beginnings of a religion that I also count myself a practitioner of.

So all in all, a good deal. And now I find myself with 10 weeks to go at St. Catherine’s, feeling anxious to go one minute and anxious to eke out every minute with my students (whom I dearly love and thoroughly enjoy) the next. It helps that we’re doing Romantic poetry, which they really really get, right now; the last three days have been a breeze of sunshine and daffodils.

During yesterday’s Hebrew reading, Lee and Gail and I chatted about numbers in foreign languages–specifically, why they are so freakishly difficult to remember. I certainly find this to be the case–number words are the hardest vocabulary words to learn and the quickest to slip away when I let a language lapse. I was relieved to find two such eminent linguists, both of whom have spent their professional lives learning and teaching languages, admit to the same difficulty.

This got us onto the topic of language learning itself, and its affinities with both the “left” and “right” sides of your brain (not that I really buy that “left/right” divide, but it’s a handy shorthand). Lee has said that he finds both “English people” and “math people” doing well in Latin, though they tend to approach the material slightly differently. And I am all about the artsy-fartsy big-picture intuitive learning and am still addicted to language learning, whereas Blondie is a straight-up logician for whom Latin is a grand and beautiful puzzle.

Maybe the solution is to teach language and mathematics in conjunction in some way–to trick the students who are into math into thinking they’re in a math class, and trick the students who are into humanities into thinking that they are in a language class. By the time they realize that both language learning and mathematics require the same type of thinking, it will be too late: they’ll have all the multiplication tables memorized in French, and have learned to do the quadratic equation in the finest Attic Greek, and they’ll never mix “three hundred” and “thirty thousand” again, and they’ll never again be able to put themselves in little boxes labeled “bad at math” and “bad at writing.” That, I think, would be a good thing.

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting and quite thorough article on single-sex education, which is on a dramatic rise in public schools (apparently). It addresses both the biological and social arguments for single-sex ed, the former of which goes something like “boys and girls have inherent physiological and learning differences that make them benefit from different types of instruction” and the latter of which goes something along the lines of “boys and girls are raised with such different social expectations that single-sex ed is necessary to counter negative influences and encourage positive ones.”

I’m not sure where I stand on the matter, having both learned and taught at an all-girls school, but having found that I thrive quite well in a coed or even predominantly masculine classroom. Certainly I relish being able to do Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice in the same year without sending the class into rebellion, and I vividly remember seeing a friend (whom I knew to be intelligent, perceptive, and hard-working) dissolve into giggly helplessness for the benefit of the boys in a coed chemistry class. But when I think about the differences in learning styles within my own classrooms, I wonder whether championing single-sex education might not cause problems as well as solve them. The Language Log has a nice discussion of the perils of statistics; the line that stuck out the most to me in the article was, “gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds.” I have girls who simply salivate for competition; I have girls whom competition terrifies and shuts down. There are girls who work well within the interpersonal/conversational learning that educational psych touts as a peculiarly female strength; there are also girls who would much prefer to be working a problem out on their own. And I worry that categorizing girls as less comfortable with what we’re now calling STEM–Science, Technology, Economics, Math–is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I guess what I’m saying is that I become deeply suspicious when people implicitly take the male/female divide as prescriptive rather than descriptive, as I have seen them do. Maybe most boys will function better in a specific type of environment; it doesn’t mean that the teacher is then exempted from trying to find what environment will work best for the specific group of boys that she has. It’s one thing to try to predict what a student will be comfortable with, but it’s quite another to demand that our students match their natures to our predictions.