Charon & Me

"What do you think we do? We take them over a river of despair, until they can see a glimmer of hope, and then we push them out."

# # #

In August, I had one of those abrupt, life changing moments that come unexpectedly now and then. Perhaps to you it will seem a little thing. And perhaps it is just a little thing. For me, however, it was a seed crystal. You know about seed crystals - in a super-saturated solution in a chemistry lab, for example, a seed crystal is what can suddenly transform a beaker full of liquid into a solid lump. Or, though of another way, a seed crystal (say, a grain of sand) when paired with an oyster, is what gets you a pearl. For me, though, on this day, the crystallization was very rapid. And the pearl was priceless.

I was sitting in one of the far booths at Bob's Barksdale Restaurant, eating breakfast (best breakfast in Memphis, and don't you forget). I was eating there most mornings because Kira was still in Nashville, finishing an internship. I had just gotten the first issue of a new magazine called AFAR. It's sort of an existential take on the old travel magazine model. Lots of interesting articles, but most of them are pretty pedestrian in terms of, you know, life impact.

There was a one-page feature, though, under the heading "NOMAD." A brief piece, intended to focus on someone in medias res, with a snapshot of their life on the road. The nomad featured in this first issue was web designer Mark Salvatore. One page of interview was on the right, and on the left was a picture of Mark. He is sitting on a table, somewhere in an apartment he rented down in Mexico. He's sitting cross legged, and to his left and right are several pairs of pants and some shirts, folded and piled. There's a camera, a laptop, some computer accessories, a flashlight, and a couple extra pairs of eyeglasses. On the floor in front of him are three pairs of shoes, two bags, and a tripod.

The caption to the photo reads, "Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions."

# # #

Let me back up a minute.

Ten months ago, my mother died.

There's a lot I should add to that sentence. However, if you're human (and, if you're reading this, I suspect you probably are), chances are quite good that you, too have had a complex loss occur in your life. Meaning you will understand me when I simply say that Mom and I had a fair amount of unfinished emotional business between us when she shuffled off this mortal coil. So let me leave it at that, and press on to the most pertinent aspect, for this writing, of her passing. That pertinent aspect would be, of course, a rented house, full from floor to two storeys of ceilings, with stuff.

When Kira and I arrived to deal with funeral home arrangements and such, we had about four days before we both had to be back in Nashville. That meant we had a lot of very hard decisions to make in a very short period of time. Decisions about all these various items, from my mother's artwork and drawings to tchotchkies and knicknacks. Some of these were tied up with my childhood memories. All of this had had some sort of inscrutable significance, for her, in her life. It must have, right? Why else would it all be held on to?

But I couldn't hold on to it. We had one small car - a backseat and a trunk - that was all. The trick was finding the things we had to keep, no matter what. The rest, at the end of the four days, was turned over to an estate company. It had to go.

# # #

Have you ever read Anne Sexton's poem, "All My Pretty Ones"?

Years ago, maybe I was sixteen or a little after, I first read, it, and had the uncanny experience of being moved to tears by words alone. I'll leave others to recite it whole for you. For now, these words will suffice. I was thinking these words throughout those four days, and I have thought them again and often again, after:

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.

Is this your father’s father, this commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.

I’ll never know what these faces are all about.

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

What saddened me the most, standing as I was beneath that mountain of items in my mother's house, was that I had there, in front of me, all the locks, but no keys. To my mother, these may well have been treasures; to me, they were but ciphers. How to know what is wheat, what is chaff?

The answer, of course, was now dead. My mother held those keys, and took them with her to the next world.

I remember all those bad detective dramas I watched on TV when I was a kid. Remington Steele, Hart to Hart, Quincy. How many times did I watch a variation on the theme of someone murdering someone else so that they could get their things? Here I was, then, in the exact reverse situation. It wasn't the things that I wanted; I wanted to have had a relationship such that I would have known these things, and their significance. Without that relationship, the things really meant very little. In fact, the things I kept were the very things I could connect, in some way, to her life, or our life together.

Only in this hoarded span, Sexton wrote, will love persevere.

But what are we to hoard?

# # #

I cried again at words on a page, that morning in August, when I read, "Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions."

I don't think my mother ever had the kind of relationship she had wanted with her family. In fact, I know she didn't. I don't think my father ever did, either, though he may still be working to correct that. But because they lacked these essential relationships, they did what many, many people do. They filled the hole with things.

I can make that claim with some authority because, you see, I am my mother's son. Like her, and like many, I also spent a ton of years (and I mean exactly that) collecting, hoarding, holding, and hauling "my stuff." Books. Records. CDs. Posters. Knicknacks. Tschotchkies. Clothes. Shoes. Hell, I even held on to broken and busted items because, well, you know, I might fix them someday.

Or maybe I was holding on to all this stuff because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I believed that one day Someone (who? I'm not sure. But Someone) was going to be coming around to check up on my to make sure I had kept up with all this stuff, had shepherded it and hauled it like a good little boy.

Because. Because, when you don't have actual relationships with human beings to anchor you, that's what you do. In lieu of actual praise, you anticipate the praise that will come on that day, whenever that day comes, when Someone, whomever that is, arrives to check up and sees what a good job of hoarding and hauling you've done. Well done. Well done, thou good and faithful lummox.

Sitting in my mother's house, that scared me. That pile of stuff scared me, because I knew what it meant. Even though I didn't have the stories, the keys, to unlock all the locks, I knew what the whole thing meant.

Mom had died alone, in a town she hated, far from a family she largely no longer talked to, in a big house, surrounded by this mountain of inscrutable stuff.

I did not want that to be me.

# # #

After those four days dealing with Mom's things, Kira and I got back to Nashville and started trying to fit what we had brought home in the back seat and trunk into our apartment. Photos, mostly, and lots of artwork my mother had drawn, and all of her personal writings and correspondence was the bulk of it. I spent some weeks sorting through boxes, organizing it and getting it re-packed into manageable containers that could be stored, and hauled. It took some time, but I got it settled.

Then a new job came up, here in Memphis. Kira and I got ready to move. We tried to pare down and weed out things as we packed. We made a lot of trips to Goodwill, and had a yardsale or two. We got rid of a lot of things. It felt good.

But on moving day, I was chagrined to find that I was still not done packing all the stuff. Our plan had been to have everything ready to go, and I was not ready. Like so many times before, little things were getting shoved in boxes without good labeling or organization. Every time I looked up from the latest sealed box, I saw the pile of what was still to be packed. It seemed huge.

(Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.)

Then there was the move itself. We had budgeted for eight hours. It took closer to twelve, and that was only because I stopped caring whether the movers put things in the right place, and just told them to get the stuff off the truck as fast as they could. I helped. Neighbors and Memphis friends helped. But there was still so much stuff. So much to move. So many things.

# # #

On Christmas Eve Kira and I went to see the new George Clooney movie, Up in the Air.

I'm not going to spoil it for you, because I think you should go and see it for yourself. Because I think it's worth seeing. So I'm not going to spoil it. But I will tell you this. Part of the way through the movie, George Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, makes a speech about a backpack.

You can get the gist of it here.

Suffice it to say that I was with Bingham through the first half of the speech. In the movie version, after he talks about putting the sofa and the furniture into the backpack, he pauses, and then asks the audience to imagine setting the pack on fire. Liberating, isn't it? Yes, it is.

Imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. I have imagined that. And more than waking up to it, I have dreamed it. Longed for it. Mark Salvatore, surrounded by all his earthly possessions. Yes.

But then the next part of the speech (you hear them blended together in the video): put all the relationships in the backpack. Feel the weight.

Bingham's answer, get rid of it all, may or may not ultimately work for him (that's the crux of the movie; I told you I'm not going to spoil it for you. Go see it). Regardless, sitting there in the dark of the theater, I had to ask myself, just what do you want out of all this paring down anyway, Dault?

Is it to get away from everything complicated, including and especially the relationships in my life?

Maybe one day, maybe in my twenties, I would have answered yes. Not now.

# # #

The other quotation from Mark Salvatore's interview, that kept me crying there at breakfast, was when he said (look - see - I have it written down here on a notecard. I carry it with me now, in my left pocket):

"I consciously decided to lower my expenses to have a higher quality of life."

# # #

Here's what I want you to do. The next time you're at a football game, or out at the big box bookstore, or shopping for groceries, or anywhere there's a crowd, I want you to pause for a moment.

Now this is going to be a little difficult, so stay with me.

When you pause, wherever you are, for that moment, I want you - just for that moment - to imagine to yourself the death of each and every one of those people you see. Not in some ghastly way, not in an accident or a massive explosion. Just imagine the reality of them, in graves and urns, all at once. Gone. Passed. Buried.

Don't linger on it too long. Being morbid is not the point here. The point is the brute fact of it all. Each person enjoying the football game, every soccer mom buying beets in the produce aisle, every bespectacled teenager waiting for the new Harry Potter book - each of them - they are going to someday be dead and gone.

And you. And me, too.

Do you hear that sound, Mr. Anderson? That sound is... inevitability.

# # #

It wasn't the things that I wanted; I wanted to have had a relationship such that I would have known these things, and their significance. Without that relationship, the things really meant very little.

What does it mean, at the end of it all, to have had a "quality of life"? I may never get to the point where all my earthly possessions will fit around me, crosslegged on the table. That is not the point. And I hope I am never so buried by my possessions that they are, at that last breath, all that I am left with on this earth. That also, emphatically, is not the point - at least not for me.

Too much is not the point, and too little is not the point.

You are the point. You, and my mother, and my wife, and my soon-arriving child. My friends. My lovers, past and imagined. My brother. My father. My step-mother and my in laws. My cousins - even the ones I don't talk to anymore for reasons that are probably locked up somewhere in those things of my mother's that I either kept or let go. My colleagues. My students. Hell, even the folks I need to say "I'm sorry" to - even them.

The point is, in that fleeting moment of seeing where we're all headed, really and truly and inevitably, to allow yourself - just for an instant - to imagine your own death. What kind of death do you want? What, in that final breath, will be acceptable - to you - as a "quality of life"?

We're all part of that grocery store crowd. I know that. We're all goners. We're all lost. We're all going to leave such big, big holes when we go. I know that. I don't care.

You are what matters. To me. To each other. Don't forget.

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.

Books that changed my life: How Children Learn / How Children Fail, by John Holt

Years ago, during the first couple years of high school, I had a pretty cool English and Literature teacher, Mr. Youngblood. Being who I was at the time, I didn't particularly care much for English, or Literature, or sitting in a desk to listen to much of anything being taught to me (so goes adolescence). I did, however, care about Mr. Youngblood. Mr. Youngblood was pretty cool.

I guess he thought I was okay, too, because when he was packing up to move (he left for new horizons and opportunities between my sophomore and junior years) he invited me and a couple other kids to his house to get first crack at a bunch of his stuff before he pared it down in a series of yard sales.

Mr. Youngblood pointed me to a stack of albums by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - and since that moment there has not been a day gone by that I am not eternally grateful for that gesture. He also had a large and unruly pile of unsorted books, and, being who I was at the time, I didn't particularly care much that they were unruly or unsorted. I dove in.

Turns out a lot of those books in that pile were about education, and it turns out that a lot of them soon made it into my car and eventually into my personal library. Mr. Yougnblood had been schooled in the sixties and early seventies, and a lot of the education books I found had a sort of granola/hippie uselessness to them (I was them, as I am now, essentially a punk rocker at heart, and I distrust mightily all that "peace-love-dope" crap). These were eventually read, considered, and discarded from my own unruly pile. Wheat and chaff, after all.

Despite my skepticism, a handful of the books were worth keeping, and reading, and re-reading. Among these - the top of the unruly pile, certainly - were two books by John Holt: How Children Learn and How Children Fail.

The books are actually collected excerpts from a series of journals Holt kept during the early-to-mid sixties, as he was observing classrooms as part of his own training as an educator. His reflections on what he saw was revelatory to me - both concerning my own difficulties at the time with my schooling, and in years hence as I have worked with students of my own.

A basic thesis of the books can be boiled down to the fact that what a teacher believes is happening in an educational moment, and what the students believe is happening, may be profoundly different - even alien - from each other.

Education, of course, always involves discrepancies of power. Teachers are more powerful than students in that teachers have the power to grade. The difficulty arises in the fact that, in our culture, grading a student's "performance" feels (in many, if not the majority of cases) from the standpoint of the student herself like a summary judgment of her worth and quality as a person. This is not just true of young children; think about adults you might know who hear criticism as attack or disrespect - these responses are similar to how students, young and old alike, feel in such moments. Our culture blends ontology (the state of one's being and worth) with how well one "performs."

Holt argues that the result of this unspoken blending is a situation toxic to learning.

It works like this:

1. the feeling of being judged and found unworthy is uncomfortable, and it is an understandable and shared human trait to want to minimize or eliminate this discomfort as quickly as possible Schools subtly use this discomfort, especially in early education, to keep students "focused on the problem" they are given (as Holt puts it, "We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do even for an hour" [HCF 198]). Teachers use the unspoken threat of disapproval and rejection to corral young students into "working hard."
2. Instead, students - motivated to minimize or eliminate the discomfort of feeling judged as quickly as possible - redirect nearly all their energy away from the educational moment in favor of working on the real problem, as they perceive it: how to stop feeling, as quickly and decisively as possible, the discomfort of being judged and the threat of being rejected or disapproved of as a person.
3. As a result, what students really learn from these exchanges are simple strategies to end the discomfort quickly. This learning is reinforced, again, and again, so thoroughly that by the time most of us are out of kindergarten they are already fully formed defensive maneuvers.

For some of us, the strategy is to simply learn whatever details will help us answer the questions we are asked so completely that we can always "perform" properly, and thus be praised and rewarded (we all know folks like this growing up. I remember in my class in second grade when one of them I knew got his first "B" - the terror and the tears of the tantrum that followed showed just how much pressure this poor little kid felt he was truly under). Others - perhaps the majority - learn how to "fake it." That is to say, they make a good show of pretending to wrestle with the problem, all the while watching the instructor for subtle, nonverbal clues about what the right answer might be - all amounting, in the end, to a highly theatricalized guessing game. Still others simply quit trying altogether, and just take their lumps, put their heads down on the desk, and tune out (I was one of those).

What is common to the entire spectrum of responses, says Holt, is that whatever the motivation for the student was coming in - curiosity, love of learning, enjoyment of community - it is very quickly replaced by fear.

What is essential to understand - and what is most brilliant in Holt's analysis - is that in every educational moment learning is always taking place. The problem is simply that what is being learned may not what the instructor, or the institution, thinks is being taught.

As a teacher, I may think I am neutrally teaching "a subject" like Algebra or Theology. Some of my students may have come there out of an actual interest in the subject. Many others are simply there because they were told they had to be there (and this is as true in college and seminary classes as it was in grade school). The subject is complex; I give what I think is an adequate and sufficient explanation - some of the students' brows furrow, and I glower at them. "I explained it once already, people - aren't you smart enough to get it...?"

The problem, of course, might not be in my students. The problem might (and often is) in the way I have structured the course, or my examples, or communicated my thoughts. But here we are in a situation where I have the power to make my judgement that some of them are stupid (not me) a matter of permanent and semi-public record. It is a lot easier (and advantageous, in the short run) to perpetuate the illusion that my teaching and reflection on teaching is up to snuff, and it must just be that some folks are too stupid to get it. They simply failed to learn.

But Holt makes this a much more complex interchange. The students are aware, as I am, of this power dynamic at every moment. The difference is that the students are often much smarter about how this dynamic can be used to their advantage. Many of them, from the very first moment of class, are undeniably learning: they are learning to fool me. Most of them will be able to make me think they have learned something, despite the confusing and mis-thought manner in which I have presented the information. I will, unconsciously, communicate enough of my likes and dislikes that students will feed me exactly what they, very perceprively, have learned that I want. In that case, the subject of the class is no longer "Algebra" or "Theology," but rather "David's [or fill in any other instructor's name's] ego." I know, when I was a student, I sometimes got a decent grade in classes exactly this way - I imagine some of you have, too. It took a lot of study and critical thiking to get that grade - but not study of "Algebra" or "Theology." As Holt puts it, "[Students] in the right-wrong situation will naturally grasp at every available clue. We teachers have to learn to present [our educational tasks for the students in such a way that] irrelevant clues will not so often lead to correct performance" [HCF 183].

Other students, by contrast, develop elaborate strategies to outwit the educational expectations entirely. This may be for a variety of reasons. For some students, the instructor presents the material in a manner that is fundamentaly disrespectful or demeaning to the student's background or culture. The strategies developed in such a situation are no less elaborate, but they are much less pleasing to the instructor's ego. If you have been a teacher and ever wondered why certain students, who seem to be so alive and intelligent outside the classroom, suddenly become to dull and unresponsive when they sit down in the chair, it is likely that this is a strategy. By "playing dumb," the student allows herself the means to "preserve a small part of their integrity in a hopeless situation" [HCF 195]. As Holt goes on to say:

Subject peoples both appease their rulers and satisfy their desire for some human dignity by putting on a mask, by acting much more stupid and incompetent that they really are, by denying their rulers the full use of their intelligence and ability, by declaring their minds and spirits free of their enslaved bodies [HCF 195].

I think both Holt and I are pessimistic when it comes to the institutions of education currently in place in our society. Far too many of our classrooms reflect the unspoken dynamics of power mentioned in the quotation above. What I learned from these two books, however, is that I could work to be a better teacher than some that I had (and don't get me wrong - I have had some excellent teachers, and I'm not just saying that on account of the Captain Beefheart albums), and that it might be possible in some moments for actual, real and good learning to take place.

If you are an educator (like me), Holt will give you some concrete lessons in learning to listen to what is not being said (though it is very loud and apparent, once one has ears to hear) in your classroom. If you are a former student who has difficulty remembering multiplication tables and long division (like me), his books may help you unearth what went awry in your own learning all those years ago.

What I think you will most gain from Holt's books, though, is the hope and possibility that (whether student or teacher), even at this late hour, we still might learn something new and useful, together.