1. At 10:00 this morning, Bridgit, Val, Bill, Diane, and I jumped on the ZOOM. We continued our exploration together of the literary genre of comedy. If you've been reading this blog over the last few weeks or if you have any memory of having read this blog between the years 2006-2012, when, on occasion, I taught the Literature of Comedy (was that the course title? How soon these details slip away. . .), you know that we aren't looking at comedy primarily as humor or as a source of laughs, but we are looking at comedy as a genre of poems, stories, movies, and plays that explore positive experiences like transformation, redemption, resurrection, connectedness, and, our focus for today, goodness.
I read aloud several poems to begin, poems that took us back to our earlier discussions of comic rhythm and of the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of comedy. I wanted to reiterate that literary works invite us to gain knowledge, that is, to know things, in ways other than empiricism and rationality. Often works of comedy open up avenues of astonishment, wonder, amazement, and faith as sources of knowledge and, in turn, help us see that reality is not merely what we experience with our senses, but is also invisible and spiritual. Here's a list of the poems I read. If you'd like to read any or all of them, all are available online and a quick internet search will take you right to them.
"Wild Geese" Mary Oliver
"Kindness" Naomi Shihab Nye
"Joy" Lisel Mueller
"Any Common Desolation" Ellen Bass
"Listening to Bach's B Minor Mass in the Kitchen" Elizabeth Burns
"Small Kindnesses" Danusha Lameris
Stimulating conversation rose out of these poems. I couldn't begin to sum it all up. Several things stuck with me. These poems are all grounded in physical experience and as we began dive into a discussion of goodness, we talked a lot about the reliability of our bodies and, thanks to Diane, chewed over Joseph Campbell's assertion in The Power of Myth that the mind is a filter, a secondary organ. Here's how Campbell put it:
This thing up here (Campbell points to his head)—this consciousness—thinks it’s running the shop. It’s a secondary organ! It’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body.
In addition to discussing the "humanity of the body", we also discussed dissolving, an image both Naomi Shihab Nye and Elizabeth Burns draw in their poems, "Kindness" and "Listening to Bach's B Minor Mass in the Kitchen". For Nye, the image of dissolving is connected to losing things. She writes: "Before you know what kindness really is/you must lose things, /feel the future dissolve in a moment/like salt in a weakened broth." In other words, kindness begins in knowing loss and desolation (echoed in Ellen Bass's poem "Any Common Desolation"). In Elizabeth Burns' poem, she experiences the voices singing Bach's B Minor Mass dissolving "a sense of time and place" "so that what divides us/from past and elsewhere, and from each other, /falls away, and everything's connected and we are all/drops of water in this enormous breaking wave."
Bridgit enlarged the concept of dissolving by zeroing in on lines from Lisel Mueller's poem "Joy" when Mueller explores the idea that the experience she has being moved by music (possibly by Bach's "Ode to Joy) combines happiness and sadness and what she feels is
. . . about
two seemingly parallel lines coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.
Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.
These lines reminded Bridgit of Teilhard de Chardin's thinking embodied in his phrase "everything that rises must converge" and the ways that apparent opposites, whether in comedy or in our experience, converge -- joy with terror, death with life, happiness with sadness -- has been a central theme running through our ZOOM conversations. We've been helped along profoundly by the short essays of Ross Gay and his collection, The Book of Delights. Colette introduced us to Ross Gay two weeks ago and, today, Val returned us to his writing and asked me to read aloud his piece, "Lily on the Pants". In it, Ross Gay describes pushing his face so close to a lily in his garden that he and the flower are kissing. He reflects on this convergence as a "particular kind of death", and writes that
the moving so close to another living and breathing thing's breath . . . . will, in fact, kill you with delight, will end the life you had previously led before kneeling here and breathing the breathing thing's living breath, and the lily will resurrect you, too, your lips and nose lit with gold dust, your face and fingers smelling faintly all day of where they've been, amen.
Dissolving. Converging. Kissing. Death. Delight. Breathing. Breath. Resurrection. Joy. Tears.
We discussed a lot thanks to these poems and Gay's piece on lilies.
And I hadn't even begun to present my prepared remarks for the day!
2. I dug into my brain's archives and recovered some of my research from back around 1985-86. I never figured out how to shape the work I did into a dissertation, but I spent many many hours reading published sermons from the late 16th and early 17th centuries in England in pursuit of better understanding concepts of goodness.
One passage, from a preacher named John Hales stood out, and today I presented this passage to my ZOOM mates and it led to a discussion of goodness as being grounded in a soft and sweet and flexible disposition and as rooted in that which bind us to one another, through compassion, communicating to the necessity of others, and extending ourselves to others and receiving others unto ourselves. In other words, Hales asserts that human goodness relies on our receptiveness of others and states that unlike other virtues and achievements which shine brightest when seen as individual achievement, goodness shine brightest when shared, when communicated, when it's experienced in community.
As part of my presentation I pointed out that the prefix -com (and sometimes -con) in the English language is rooted in the Latin word cum which mean with or together with. So the whole idea of goodness as that which binds us to one another is embedded in English words like compassion, companion, community, common, and several others.
To me, it's this exploration of our social existence that is at the center of the literary genre of comedy. In our fellowship, our ministering to one another, our love for others, and in our looking out for one another, comedy explores again and again that these social dimensions of human existence invigorate us, comfort us, and are at the root of our continuation as a species. Tragedy focuses more on individualism, isolation, and ruin; comedy on togetherness, community, continuity, and goodness.
As we talked more today, I experienced an old teacher's dream come true. That would be my dream come true.
A little background first.
Years ago, I was involved in a discussion about my mother and a person who has known her for many years claimed that Mom's need for control and having things done her way was because she'd been a teacher for so many years and, this person claimed, that's how teachers are. Even after they retire, they want to be in control and want to be in charge.
I thought to myself, "Hmmm. Not so fast my friend. I've been teaching for around thirty years and I want just the opposite. (And I have many fellow teachers who feel the same way.)"
The times I loved most in my teaching career were when my students took over class meetings, when I was more of an observer and a listener (and, at times, a director), and students were not relying on me for insights and understanding, but were making discoveries with each other and, in turn, becoming one another's teachers.
Yes, in our ZOOM meeting today, I got things underway by reading some poems and making a few prepared remarks. But, the majority of what we discussed and what we learned came from Bill, Diane, Bridgit, and Val. I brought up that I thought Bill's song "Comfort" (com- word!) and its line "We were immortal in a limited way" spoke perfectly to the ways we've been discussing the way immortality exists within mortality in comedy and suddenly Val or Bridgit or Diane asked Bill to play and sing "Comfort" and he did.
Our next focus is going to be on vitality and it's clear that while I'll have a few things to say to get us going that most of what we talk about is going to come from my ZOOM mates, not me, the "teacher". Diane has already posted collage she made accompanied by verses from Walt Whitman. She also posted a clip from the movie, Moonstruck.
Maybe this project began as a "class", but, as Bridgit said yesterday, it doesn't seem like a class at all, but more like a salon.
That's what I wanted my classes to be back in my days as an instructor. I didn't want control. I didn't want to be telling people what to do. I wanted to be the spark that got the fire going, but once things heated up, my goal was to get out of the way. I succeeded in some classes and didn't in others.
In this ZOOM project, I really feel like I'm doing some of my best teaching by not having to teach much at all.
3. I didn't see Phil Mickelson tee off to start the 4th round of the PGA Championship today. I was still in the ZOOM salon.
When I flipped on the Vizio, Phil had lost his third round lead and regained it. Soon he electrified the gallery when he holed out from a sandy area on the fifth hole for a birdie.
Surely most of you reading this know that Phil Mickelson won the PGA Championship today and surely you know that at age 50 and eleven months he is the oldest golfer to ever win a major championship.
If you've read my posts over the weekend, you know that I wondered if Phil Mickelson had the stamina, both mental and physical, to withstand the pressure of being chased over the weekend on a golf course, The Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, that is brutally long, shot through with water, alligators, and sand hazards, dry and fast, and under the daily siege of wind whipping all over the course.
Until this weekend (and I might be alone in this), I had never considered Phil a bad-ass golfer, an intimidator, a daunting presence on the golf course.
I've never doubted that he is one of the sport's very best players ever, but Phil always seemed like kind of a dufus to me -- to me, he has kind of a goofy walk and a goofy manner that was accented by how, unlike many players on the tour, he never had a sculpted or cut physique. I think of when he won his first Masters and upon sinking his final putt jumped into the air. Gravity did not flatter that jump. Phil got about four inches off the ground it seemed. With his red shirt on Sunday and cut body, Tiger Woods was always intimidating. Brooks Koepka saunters onto a golf course looking like an NFL linebacker and the lack of affect in his face is intimidating. But, Phil always looked to me like the goofy lovable uncle who you loved to go visit because he had a big jar of hard candy next to his recliner and when you hugged him you always remembered the smell of Sen-Sens on his breath.
But this weekend was different.
I hadn't seen Phil Mickelson for a while on television and his once roundish face looked angular. Phil's nickname is Lefty. Jim Rome used to called him Hefty. He couldn't call him that now. Phil's been in the gym. He's been more disciplined in the mess hall. On Saturday he wore a black shirt and, combined with his sunglasses, he looked, for the first time I can remember, like bad-ass Phil.
Not only had Phil imposed upon himself a physical discipline, he also imposed a mental one. Phil walked the course deliberately. Before each shot, he went through a meditative process, settling himself down, envisioning the shot he wanted to hit, thinking through what he wanted to do. Phil has always had the instincts of a riverboat gambler who liked to walk on the wild side, but this weekend he was less Brett Maverick and more Kwai Chang Caine, centered, calm. The fire in his belly burned at a constant heat. It didn't flare up. Bad ass Phil was focused, purposeful, and would not be deterred. He imposed his will on the pace of play. Nothing, not an errant shot into the swamp, a drive that landed up against a golf cart tire, the impatience of Brooks Koepka, nothing broke Phil's determination to play this tournament on his terms, at his pace, with his devotion to focus and middle age bad-assery.
It worked.
I never dreamed I'd see Phil Mickelson win another major tournament, but his physical and mental fitness paid off. He hit some of the week's longest drives. He never, to my way of thinking, played a reckless shot. His touch around the greens was deft and he made a number of testy medium range putts. The only real sign I saw that goofy Phil still lived inside this weekend's bad-ass Phil was his almost compulsive thumbs up gesture again and again and again to the gallery.
He gave a souvenir golf ball to a kid in a wheelchair. He unnerved the usually unflappable Brooks Koepka with his deliberate Zenmaster Phil pace of play. He talked to wife on a cell phone after he signed his score card, repeatedly telling her he loved her. I half expected him to assure her he'd pick up a carton of milk on the way home.
When Jack Nicklaus won the 1986 Masters, I didn't think I'd ever see such an incredible moment in golf again.
When Tiger Woods won the 2019 Masters, I didn't think I'd ever see such an incredible moment in golf again.
Now, Phil Mickelson, at nearly 51 years old, has won the PGA Championship and I don't think I'll ever see such an incredible moment in golf again.
I'll keep tuning in though.
Golf's an incredible game.
