I am revisiting an old essay, though this urge was brought about by the recent school shooting in Georgia. Now I’m editing and expanding it as my birthday weekend begins. This revived draft seems to reflect some of the world’s pervasive sorrows and also reflects how I spend a great deal of my time: with my high school students, in a classroom they help me decorate, using varied texts to generate discussions while also hopefully learning stronger strategies for writing, reading, and communication.
This week, two students showed me pictures from their summer quinceañeras. What glowing pride and colorful fashion and communal happiness! They were some of the most joyful images I’ve seen in a long time. My students are also teachers. We keep circling back during the week to those moments in their lives that I can learn from.
This expanding essay reflects what happened in that school in Georgia and what keeps happening to children in Palestine for almost a year now. It attempts to try to tap into feelings of disgust, disappointment, despondency, shock. I feel unfit to write about anything harrowing. When I do, I can’t go too far, knowing I don’t know enough, but that maybe my students do. Or that we can attempt to learn together. Here I want to make some connections and explore strange possibilities, based on a season in my life when a community I was a part of banded together in the wake of a collective tragedy.
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On the day that followed the October 1st 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, my role as “UNLV English instructor,” felt meaningless and absurd. Normally, my job was to guide freshmen college students through interconnected practices of reading, writing, and critical thinking. I helped them write persuasively and, sometimes, even beautifully about the world. Since the world contains a surplus of the paradoxical, the unjust, and the unspeakable, they had to learn to discuss those things, too. Most of them needed no introduction to the world’s barbarities. But learning to speak clearly and sincerely about these things, to make sense from them, to even fashion some kind of art from them required my guidance — and the guidance of my ancestor-writers.
When that horrible night happened, it was a first for me. I had never lived in a city that had been stricken by such a harrowing and unifying tragedy. I had never woken up to see dozens of missed calls and texts before, most of which asking me whether I was ok. Neither had most of my students. So our respective roles – as students and teacher in a collegiate institution – were suddenly thrown into abeyance. My initial idea, as I walked to class the morning after the event, was to allow them to discuss their thoughts and feelings however they needed. This has become a cliche now in my public school life: safe spaces, circle conversations, restorative practices. All of which is wonderful in theory and comes from ethically sound motives. But many other options need to be available. Like art, like escapism, like wild and imaginative projects.
An English class can create space for thoughtfully directed yet open-ended dialogue. Whenever a shared language is developed and honored together– in a classroom, a city, a boardroom, or a temple –common possibilities can be discovered – for alliance, for progress, for joy, and for repair, among others. But after starting class, I soon realized this sincere desire to “discuss” the events felt unhelpful, even disrespectful. Too scripted, too programmatic. So I began to think of other options.
“Reality is ugly and we just got to get through it however we can,” a mass shooting seems to suggest. Ugly in a way in which all meaning and peace is swept aside. What’s left is spiritual exhaustion — at best. To think about ugliness then was one task I set myself that morning in Vegas almost seven years ago. However, I decided I needed to come at the problem from what appears to be the opposite direction. So I decided to start a conversation about “beauty” – which in light of the shooting seemed stupidly, blithely ironic. Mostly, I wanted to insist that our speechless vulnerability could become the foundation for some kind of renewal. Even as I thought that, I began to be angry at myself for such pedantic motives. So I stopped talking and showed the students a famous work of art and then I asked them to make something out of it. But first they laughed at it.
When I unveiled Satellite by the American abstract expressionist/Neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg the room erupted into groans, guffaws, and laughter. And I was delighted. As the jovial mockery subsided, I gave a thumbnail description of abstract and Dadaist art. Then I described some of the materials Rauschenberg used in his “combine,” his term for this kind of hybrid painting-collage-sculpture: wallpaper, textiles, a doily, a comic strip, photographs, as well as paint – and a stuffed pheasant. Since the students hadn’t really been exposed to art movement theories and such, they didn’t grasp how this mess of “things” could be appropriate for a painting or art work. Nor did they conceive how this painting could be viewed as “real art,” since it appeared chaotic and meaningless. All of which made sense. For maybe this isn’t art, maybe this is magic, maybe this is spiritual sorcery.
It had taken me a long time, lots of reading, and lectures on ideas and theories to come to appreciate this kind of art. But I told them that I absolutely loved this art piece. I still do, today. Part of that appreciation, I explained, was that I had consciously been paying attention to it for at least five years now. And, even more importantly, I had been paying utmost attention to what others, namely former students had seen in the painting. My love of the painting was a cumulation of hundreds of other observations; the painting, itself, an index of varied perceptions.
At the time of the shooting, I’d been showing this “combine” art work to my English composition classes for five years. But this time, on that somber day, the act took on special poignancy. The initial resistance to Rauschenberg’s piece was matched by equal enthusiasm when I asked them to write an imaginative interpretation of it. The challenge was clear: could they wrest from this apparently random muddle of heterogeneous material something coherent, meaningful, and even beautiful – whatever that might mean? Or even sublimely weird and wonderfully ridiculous?
I still think of all they saw in Rauschenberg’s art work that day, and all the things that I had failed to see, even as I had been admiring this work for so many years. As their faces brightened, their voices relayed to each other what their imaginative seeing brought to life. Witnessing this shift from gloomy silence into antic wonder made me again grateful to work as this kind of mediator between active and latent forces. If only for the duration of class, the stories, the ideas, and the implications each student had plucked from the orchestrated mess on the canvas became vital and life enhancing. All I had to do was create the context where we could experience this unusual work of art together. And not to experience it as critics, or as students, or even as writers necessarily, but as perceivers and imaginers bound by yearnings for adventure and meaning. Nothing I’ve come up with over the years has inspired as much sincere and enthusiastic writing as this Rauschenberg combine – and particularly on that day.
One woman saw a parable of class struggle told solely in colors, splotches and lines; another saw a child’s bedroom on a boat voyaging across a raging sea; a young man in the military reserve saw an idyllic farm in France, or possibly Portugal, where a little girl was stealing apricots. Some students saw a myth of the end of society, while others saw the myth of its beginnings or renewal. They then speculated whether origins and finales might just look the same.
Some saw a cosmological fable told from the point of a view of a rebel pheasant. Some saw worshippers robed in red and yellow making their annual pilgrimage across a desert – much like the one our city was built upon. Indeed many student beheld variations of pilgrimages, sacrifices, and scenes of religious reverence. But then they also saw on the canvas the soul’s capacity to hold space for conflicting emotions. This mess, they said — this mess makes a lot of fucking sense now that I’m really getting into it.
And they understood why such complicated emotional hodgepodges need to exist. The clashing paints and textures expressed for many the spasms of a wild and creative tension – mathematical, amorous, athletic, or spiritual. And many were comforted that some violence and tension could be generative instead of destructive. Many saw the unfurling of an average day filled with trivial frustrations and inconsequential encounters, things that had Rauschenberg not painted, or suggested through paint and other materials, they wouldn’t have given a second thought to. Most powerfully I believe that the painting reassured them, if only a little, that messiness, conflict, disorder, and confusion could be OK in this stupid-amazing adventure of mortal life.
Recalling that surge of creative exuberance after I asked my students to look at something ugly and chaotic and make sense of it, I also recall a feeling of slowly spreading communal relief. This relief is at the heart of a good classroom experience as it is at the heart of a shared religious space, artistic space, or political space.
Like my students, I needed to find and cultivate that relief with and among others. For it was that unifying relief that comes when something collaboratively created is held, reverentially, in common.
I think now, and perhaps thought in some form then: from this muddle of disparate matter and clashing energies we call “life,” we create alliances, some more surprising than others. Some days our most cherished values and meanings collapse; while on others, we shock ourselves by making meanings in the most unlikely places, with the most surprising of accomplices. Often, both of these can happen in the same day. This is the stupid-awesome-magical-dullness of the adventure.
We all wanted some fun, uplifting alternative to feelings of alienation and senselessness. And maybe almost just our angry sense of boredom with the fact that atrocities were now so commonplace. While it was certainly right to make space for those darker feelings, it was not right for them to tyrannize our capacities. As an English teacher, I feel the imperative to argue that alternatives can exist for most, if not all of the hindering realities that so many of our lives buckle under: shame, depression, insecurity, financial instability, trauma, parental pressure, school pressure, loneliness, poverty, violence, prejudice, etc. This takes me, along with my students, into the realms of science fiction and speculative fiction; into anarchistic and utopian dreaming; into poetical and theoretical world building. Mass violence was becoming one of the most over-determining realities in America. While never advocating we should ever look away from such violence, I believe we also must look more closely at what might undermine and run counter to that violence. What are the alternatives to violence that we know about but aren’t listening to?
After the excitement subsided, a student asked me why I liked the combine-art piece so much. I knew at a certain point I would need to defend my choice more convincingly. Many thoughts came to me, as they do now. Still, I think my answer was more or less some version of the following:
“Do you ever get those days where so much, even too much happens?” I asked them.
Yes! They all nodded excitedly.
“Not just big and important things; or big and terrible things; but big, important, terrible things along with small, dull or curious things, strange and subtle things, absurd and neutral things? To the point where your day is overflowing with so many different qualities and details that you’re bending over backwards to honor all of them with the right thoughts and the right emotions and the right connections. Now, does this mean that an excess of events actually happened, or rather that I had somehow managed to expand my attentions so that I could see and appreciate the truly dizzying diversity of any day’s content, even ones that seem, on the surface, stupid, dull, and ordinary?”
“Both!” they said, to which I enthusiastically agreed.
Now I’m embellishing the answer I gave that day. But the spirit of what I said remains true. Even as I explained myself imperfectly the students all grasped what I was getting at. Each of them was striving for adulthood in a society addicted to technology and entertainment; while the array of distractions and pleasures at their fingertips was seemingly endless, they admitted to finding much of it trivial and useless. Yet they couldn’t look away, either, even when they knew they might be happier, more focused, and less anxious if they did. When I explained my love for “Satellite” then – rendering it as a powerful allegory for a common day – many students were reminded of the actual abundance that hides within their own twenty-four time frames. The relief that so many felt that day arose from the fact that we weren’t talking about all the images and values that our lives were already inundated with and overly determined by. Instead we spoke about an abundance that was often subtle, hard to appreciate, and often drowned out by the noise of our environments.
Different pleasures are had when we attend to things or situations that are not transparent or obvious. The speed of scrolling and quickly reacting to something shocking or amusing can be replaced, if temporarily. This connection between pleasure and subtlety is the ongoing adventure in patience and perseverance. The closer we come to this understanding the harder it takes to maintain.
Maybe this is because it’s not always pleasant at first when you realize that pleasure and joy are qualitatively different experiences, or that a building you live in isn’t always a home, or that sometimes not describing something in detail is the only way to make it vivid. Or that talking indirectly or obliquely about a tragedy is often the only way to make any sense of it.
Many students dislike writing because it doesn’t come with the same inflexible rules as mathematics. Instead, writing feels native to those slippery, grey areas that largely compose life itself – everyday contexts in which complexity, nuance, and vagueness are the most dominant factors. So often, as with thinking or seeing, writing can balk when it is confronted by the subtle and the ambiguous. We look away or, in what amounts to the same thing, we resort to clichés, simplifications, slogans, and generalizations. As both a writer and a teacher, I believe it benefits us to see things that we have been taught not to look at or consider, situations or contexts we have been told are not present, have been allegedly resolved, are too obvious and common, or are, on the flip side, unthinkable and untellable.
In the wake of a catastrophe that shakes a city to its roots, the questions always come back to attention. While the shooting on October 1st brought new wounds into our lives, it also illuminated wounds that were already there. And these wounds were often right under our noses, bleeding in plain sight.
How did they get that way? Why have we been letting them fester? Why would we rather speak of far less urgent things? With any questions involving attention arise questions of value. Since we only attend to what we value, how do we know what to value?
Many students over the years have told me that most Americans value status, success, money, sex, and power above all else – even though most of these Americans, based on the criteria for happiness they themselves have created, lack those things or struggle to have enough of them. The resulting dissonance – and the material privations and sufferings that go with it– means that the majority of Americans now feel alienated and unhappy, while admitting that their own criteria for happiness and inclusion might be flawed.
A question that naturally arises next in the classroom is: so what if we valued other things instead? Like beauty? Like goodness? Like community? Would changing our dominant values perhaps change and maybe even improve our feelings and experiences? While these questions may seem obvious or impractical, they can often lead to very real changes in perception, at least in a classroom setting.
An artwork like Satellite is an interruption of the familiar and the legible that interrogates our assumptions and values. Becoming attentive to and (eventually) appreciative of its abstract mixture of colors and materials can allow someone to see things that are not there.
The invisible and the impossible have so much to teach us. But we need the seen and the known to be the mediators. Worlds and images and revealings that exist in the Imagination as she is brought to life by signs and and visions. Depths and profundities show themselves. The world feels larger than its legible scripts and routes.
This scrupulous, and even sometimes painful kind of seeing brings us closer to something we might call beauty, which isn’t just a harmonious quality inhering within certain things, persons, or ideas, but this very holistic way of seeing into the depths and undersurfaces of anything.
Beauty as method, both ethical and aesthetic, imaginative and pragmatic.
For beauty, as I have learned from my students, is never quite what we think it is. For one thing, beauty is never static, nor is it something you can possess and keep. The moment you speak of beauty you begin speaking instead of possibility and potential: i.e. everything that remains when beauty seems to have vanished (which it generally tends to do) and ugliness or ruthless neutrality has taken its place.
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A beautiful poem shows or emphasizes different aspects of its beauty upon each rereading. After our writing activity with Satellite, I remembered a poem we had looked at a week earlier. On a hunch, I decided to show it to them again. While the class is structured around essay writing and reading, poems help students understand how units of language can create significance, suggestiveness, concision, and harmony, ends which all writers might seek no matter what genre they work in.
So we looked again at the poem, “The Layers” by Stanley Kunitz. I first heard this poem in upstate New York, in November of 2016, a few weeks after Trump’s election. I had gone to Hastings to participate in a weekend retreat organized by writer, poet and hypnotherapist, Kristin Prevallet. Over three days, along with five other people I had never met, I learned about and participated in therapeutic storytelling, guided writing and trance work. It was a wonderful and heart-stirring journey that I remember fondly and vividly. I went to this retreat to see how my interests in writing, pedagogy and spirituality might possibly be reconciled. In the process, I discovered that, indeed, they already are, but I simply needed to commit more to their intimate collaborations.
On the last night of the retreat, five of us gathered in front of a bonfire in the backyard of Kristin’s home. Together we lit the fire and performed blessings and ablutions. The fire was a purgative and cathartic experience for us. It was a cold autumn night, which made the fire all the more nourishing. Our short weekend had brought all of us closer into a kinship of shared mourning and shared dreams. It had become an extension of the classroom, a context in which several of us worked. This fire ceremony was the culmination of our sudden alliances. Our bond was political and pedagogical, poetic and ethical, forged by both hope and despair, strengthened by our collaborative vulnerability, emboldened by our resistance. Around the fire, we told stories, we read poems, we listened to the calming crackling of the wood; we passed around hot tea and food; we created the context for contemplative, reassuring enchantment. A single mother who lived in New York decided to read a poem, “The Layers,” which I had never read or heard before. She explained that this poem had comforted her during the darkest of times.
And now, she said, is one of those times.
She read the poem slowly and, at certain lines, tearfully, her face lit by the fire. I was moved by her words as they cut through the smoky air. As a woman and a mother, she was much more vulnerable to the reactionary toxic resentment that was dragging our country down. Yet her voice expressed an abiding courage through which despair becomes part of the foundation for overcoming. All of us sitting there were emboldened, consoled, uplifted. She had forged a memory to strengthen us in the future, no matter what terrible uncertainties that future promised:
“The Layers”
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
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Many years later, a couple months away from the possibility of another trump presidency, and as I inch more resolutely into middle age, the poem still moves me, reassures me, breathes with me.
On one level this is a poem about an older man looking back upon his life, and on what he has lost, and on those who have fallen by his side; and it is also a poem about anyone, at any age, navigating the setbacks and surprises of an initiatory journey; and it is a poem, too, that shows how even the sparsest poetic metaphors can fortify us in the midst of suffering and chaos. This poem’s unifying argument is that poetic language is inherently navigational, especially when the world we are wandering in feels so unresponsive to our heart’s hungers.
As the fire blazed and leaves shook down in the wind, we speculated that our country was on a terrifying journey. It would require the wildest courage and most arduous collaborations for us to endure. As much as we disagreed with this journey’s trajectory, we had no choice but to follow it and fight it at the same time. In Kunitz’s words, we had to “live in the layers” of this political event, even as we sought to thrive in the layers of each other’s beautiful yet imperfect lives. Our alliance around a fire in the November darkness, after a weekend of exploring traumas, fantasies, dreams, and fears, was a moment I’ll forever associate with Kunitz’s poem and the young woman who so movingly brought it to life. It is a moment, now, years later, beset with the prospect of a second trump presidency, amidst ongoing genocides and pandemics, that I associate with the magic of community.
I relive that night in all its tenderness whenever I feel my world has become less tender. Keeping the heart both tender and strong is the work. Now this poem has migrated from a ritual fire in theHudson River valley into the college English classroom of Las Vegas, compelled to resonate there because of a kindred painting called “Satellite.” And now as I revise this essay in San Diego, I turn my memory back to that autumn fire, and my desire sharpens with a hunger for those moments, here, again.
The connection came about accidentally. Suddenly, as the students began interpreting the pheasant in the painting, I was struck by how the implications of Kunitz’s poem echoed the glorious disarray of Rauschenberg’s combine. While “The Layers” is abundant with concrete images – angels, campsites, fires, wings – it is also animated by more abstract conceits: “a feast of losses,” “some principle of being,” and the central metaphors of “layers” and “litter.” As we looked closely at the poem, it was clear to everyone that it was about a journey, and an apocalyptic one at that. This metaphor of the Apocalypse was also apparent to many students when they wrote about Rauschenberg’s combine.
What wasn’t as clear, however, in “The Layers” was what the poet “meant” by “live in the layers/not on the litter.” My study of poetry over the last few years had convinced me that poems help us realize how much meaning and beauty can hinge on the precise use of prepositions, despite being the shortest, most unassuming words in the language. So I suggested we think about Kunitz’s own prepositions: to live “IN the layers/not ON the litter.” Why is this distinction so crucial?
“Maybe,” a young woman suggested, “being in the layers means you’re participating and you’re involved in your life and the lives that make your life meaningful. It’s like an onion, only you’re inside the onion and you can’t get out. And you shouldn't even try!”
“And to be on the litter,” another student said, “is kind of like that dragon who sits on his gold and jewels, and is so worried about protecting his treasure that his whole life flies by and he never did anything cool?”
“I think to be in the layers is a way to forget yourself, which we have to do if we want to get through the day. I mean if we were always thinking about ourselves, that would be terrible. We would be miserable assholes.”
“The litter is all the past things that we keep guarding but without actually processing. It’s all the trauma that holds us back, especially because we are removed from dealing with it.”
“Yeah I think with the layers it’s like you can’t really live life without getting messy, without risking wounds, without putting yourself out there. But the litter we don’t want to get too involved with.”
But then a student began to draw a very direct parallel between the poem and the painting – something I vaguely thought might happen, but not in the brilliant way that she suggested. According to her, the pheasant’s position outside of the painting was quite unnerving, because it appeared that the pheasant had abandoned its responsibilities.
The pheasant, she added, had forsaken the layers to sit, instead, on top of the litter.
As she shared her unease about the pheasant’s rescinding of its devotions, other students joined in, until the painting and the poem began to fuse together. The analogies they created were not in service to some hazy generalization. Rather, they expressed alliance and dialogue, modes of collaboration that can only happen when individual differences are honored. Rauschenberg’s “combine” and Kunitz’s poem remained different entities, pursuing separate lives, but their proximity brought out moments of meaning that energized all of us.
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I ended that horrific day with an enduring twinge of beauty that I helped create and share with my students. And at the end of each of the day’s three classes, I asked the students if they still thought Rauschenberg’s painting was “ugly.” Almost everyone said yes. Frankly, I was a little disappointed but I also reminded them that each of them were still able to conjure “meaning” from the ugly mess I asked them to look at. And that they chose to see. Through. Under. Beneath. And Everywhere.
I begin this weekend thinking of a shared fire I want to create with others soon, maybe as the autumn starts creeping in. I think of the violences and murders, especially against children, women, and the most vulnerable, that nauseatingly persist while our leaders seem incapable of doing anything to help. It’s all too harrowing for my commentary. As my life enters a midpoint, I wonder about the book of transformations whose unknown pages I’m now in the midst of and the lives that aren’t my own I will soon become a part of and others I will wander away from. It is a strange mess of feelings, a wild combine of colors and nerves. I’m remembering, too, because of my students, that gratitude is another force that cuts through so much of it. And that is magic of a difficult, earthly variety.