Northwest Inland Writing Project Summer Writing Retreat: Day 3

Day 1
Day 2
Interlude
Days 4-5

Our third workshop opened splendidly with several members of our group reading their experiments with being lenient.Deep wishes, strong dreams, and wistful tinges of regret surfaced. Our retreat’s inner beauty took shape: those sharing their writing were unconstrained as was the atmosphere of support and respect.

From my perspective, the retreat was moving into a realm of experience deeper than simply getting some writing done. The retreat was becoming spiritual. Not only the spirit of trust, but the spirit of creativity, innovation, experimentation, and exploration pervaded the room. Writers reading freed up other writers to write more bravely. Our retreat’s inner beauty was taking shape.

When, as a teacher, I lay out principles of writing, I know they are also principles of teaching. I have to be authentic. I must be awake and receptive. I’ve got to let it rip. My instruction cannot just be cerebral: it must be located in the body.

In positing the idea of leniency as a central ethic of writing, I was also, implicitly, establishing an ethic central to my work as a teacher (or a visiting writer). In all my years of studying and acting Shakespeare, again and again and again what impresses me most deeply is his generosity. Shakespeare endows character after character after character with a full range of human traits and in all of them, no matter how unlikeable, Shakespeare creates at least a teaspoon of humaneness or at least a sliver of something that moves us to feel some sympathy or empathy with them all.

So, on Day 3, I felt an obligation to deepen our collective understanding of and experience with leniency and, above all, generosity.

When Robert Grudin, in his book On Dialogue, digs deeply into the idea of copia, he opens to door, to those who will enter, into the joy and generosity of thinking and writing about a subject as fully as possible.

The most helpful image in Grudin’s reflections upon copia is when he suggest that the mind is like a prism and when a single thought or idea or image comes, like a single beam of light, into the prism of the mind, the thought or idea or image refracts into countless other ideas or images or thoughts. If, for example, I put the single idea of my newly born granddaughter Olivia through the prism of copia, the idea of Olivia breaks into everything that she stands for in our family’s life: joy, new life, obligations, hospital fees, unprecedented responsibilities, crib, diapers, high chair, nourishment, nurture, beauty, anxiety, clothes, unity, exhaustion, vulnerability, strength, and on and on. One cannot exhaust an idea as full of life as Olivia and to even begin to arrive at the truth of her new life requires a form of thinking that is generous, full of vitality, and at ease with infinitude: such a mode of thought is copia.

In other words, Day 3 of our retreat focused on expanding. Expanding possibilities. Expanding thinking. Expanding feeling. Expanding consciousness. It was about mindfully becoming more generous as a writer.

Together we looked at a poem by George Bilgere. It’s “The Table” and in it you can see how he copiously and generously explores the man dimensions of a family dining table, even as helps to destroy it:

The Table

I’m helping my brother-in-law
Knock apart an old table
By the tool shed, a table they’ve loaded
With planting pots and fertilizer bags
For years, until a decade outside
In wind and rain has done it in,
And suddenly, as in a myth
Or fairytale when the son
Recognizes his lost father under the rags
Of an old beggar, I realize
It’s the kitchen table of our childhood,
Where my mother and my two sisters and I
Regathered and regrouped inside
A new house in a new state
After the divorce, where at the end

Of every day
We talked about our day,
Practicing our first fictions
Over pork chops and mashed potatoes
When mom had a job, or fish sticks
Or fried Spam, or chicken pot pies
When she didn’t.
Where we dyed
Our Easter eggs, and played through
Rainy days of Scrabble.
Where I sweated over algebra
And German verbs, and our mother
Would drink a bottle of wine
And lay her head down and weep
Over everything, terrifying us
Into fits of good behavior,
Of cleaning and vacuuming, until
She snapped out of it,
As if nothing had happened
And made it up to us
By doing something crazy,
Like making pancakes for supper.

The table where my uncle
Got me drunk for the first time
And where I sat down for dinner
For the last time with my grandmother.
The table where my sister
Announced she was pregnant.
Where I said that, on the whole, Canada
Looked a lot better than Vietnam.
Where the four of us warmed ourselves
At the fire of family talk.

Plain brown table of a thousand meals.

I’m starting to sweat now, the hammer
Overmatched by iron-grained walnut
Bolted at the joists. It takes a wrench
And crowbar to finally break it down
To a splintered skeleton, to the wreckage
Of an old table, built
When things were meant to last,
Like a hardcover book, or a cathedral,
Or a family. We stack up what’s left
For firewood, and call it a day.

George Bilgere

The prompt that grew out of this poem was simple, but would inspire beautiful work: it was to look at a family table or some other item and copiously explore that item’s (or that place’s) many aspects, its copious dimensions.

On Day 4, the workshop opened with another beautifully copious poem, Joy Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses”:

She Had Some Horses

byJoy Harjo

---

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with long, pointed breasts.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren't afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."
She had horses who called themselves, "spirit." and kept their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

Sibling Assignment #73: Shakespeare and the Mystery of the Meaning of Life

It's time to really get back in the swing of things on this blog. I'm dreadfully behind in writing sibling assignments, so one of the first things I'll do is caught up.

InlandEmpireGirl raised this question for Sibling Assignment #73:

As the school year here is the assignment. Write about a school experience that was significant to your school life. Describe the experience and why it was significant.

InlandEmpireGirl remembers being a public poet in the sixth grade here and Silver Valley Girl explores arriving at a deeper understanding of the relevance of essay writing, here.


When I enrolled at Whitworth College in 1974, I don't know what I thought I would discover through my study of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare course was required for my English major. Eileen, whom I would marry in two years, loved Shakespeare and we decided to take the course together.

In my two years at North Idaho College, almost all of my study of literature was concentrated in the twentieth century. I fell in love with the modern study of stories and poems that explored the lonely, alienated condition of the human being in an empty and meaningless world and the great weight of responsibility the modern human being carried to make meaning out of h/her existence in a world devoid of essential meaning.

I had experienced this meaninglessness in the summer of 1973 when I was nearly killed at the Bunker Hill Zinc Plant. The accident resulted from a random human error. It was purposeless, unprovoked, and unrelated to whether I was a good person or to anything I did.

I was blinded. During the days I was blind, my eyes turned inward and within myself I saw the very nothingness that modern writers explored as the one universal truth about life. I confronted the benign indifference of the universe within myself.

I came to believe that forging meaning in such an empty world was up to me. Through my study of literature at North Idaho College, I obsessively worked to figure out the meaning of my life and life itself.

When I commenced my study of Shakespeare, I thought I would find in Shakespeare's plays a well-ordered world, free of the absurdity of the modern world. I thought I would find these plays outdated, irrelevant to the struggles of my existential crisis.

The first day of the course, our professor, Dean Ebner, introduced Shakespeare by telling us that we would be entering into an exploration of the meaning of life. I gasped. Why would studying Shakespeare's plays and his characters involve exploring life's meaning? I thought that "back then" it was figured out and that it was thanks to the obliterating impact of the two world wars in the twentieth century that the meaning of life had been erased. I thought the question of life's meaning was a modern question.

Early in the course, the plays did not shake me up. I didn't feel the tremors of anxiety and doubt about the meaning of life I had felt studying modern literature.

But then we studied Othello. Iago began to shake me. I couldn't believe that an "old writer" from the turn of the 16th into the 17th century could have imagined and created such an amoral and duplicitous character so energetically committed to evil. I couldn't believe Iago's glee.

I was reading Othello in the basement of South Warren Hall and began to tremble. The character Othello was in an existential predicament. The world of loyalty and trust that Othello had assumed to be intact started to unravel. Absurdity, chaos, unpredictablity, all engineered by Iago became the dominant reality of his world. He couldn't make sense of it. Fear and rage fuelled by his outrage at the deterioration of his world view began to destroy him from within himself. Othello lurched from extreme distraction to murderous calm, unable to forge meaning out of his disillusion.

I was getting it. There is no such thing "back then". It hit me. Human beings have always wrestled with how to make sense out life, out of the excruciating demands of mutablility, out of the pain and disillusion of things in life never being what we might idealize them to be.

As we moved forward to Hamlet and especially King Lear, I spent more and more time leaving my dorm room and walking through the November fog that encased the towering pine trees on Whitworth's campus, feeling the passion of Shakespeare's tragedies, exploring how my life at this very young age paralleled the uncertainty, painful self-exploration, loss of idealism, and riddling mysteries Shakespeare brought to life in the actions and interior monologues of these characters.

To this day, thirty-four years later, Shakespeare is the philosopher and artist I look to with the most trust to help me understand what a dicey, often unfair, and inherently contradictory experience human life is.

Shakespeare's plays and poetry helped light my understanding of all other writers and all other philosophers I've studied.

It was through my study of Shakespeare that I have come to understand the complexity of the stories of the Bible and the parables and poetic words of Jesus.

No other writer has so profoundly shaped my perceptions, insight, wisdom, or understanding of love, war, politics, despair, redemption, restoration, human nature, and the condition of human life itself.

Three Beautiful Things 07/09/07: Pontification, Potato Salad, Packed

1. It was fun getting on my Mt. Everest high soap box about Shakespeare in a g-chat with Faith.

2. Hiram turned twenty-two today and we had a good dinner, especially because the Deke make a find potato salad.

3. I'm packed and ready to head to Kellogg in a few hours.

Three Beautiful Things 06/22/07: Cleaning, American Shakespeare, Pancakes

1. I've spent much of the day cleaning and organizing my office at home which means sorting through books and reacquainting myself with cd's and dvd's I haven't thought about for a while and looking at book titles, remembering the experience I had reading things, wondering why I haven't read others. Indeed, an archaeological dig.

2. I listened to a radio program Sparky downloaded on a cd for me entitled, "Shakespeare Becomes American" and it verified one thing I've read and heard before: before large performing halls became popular and Shakespeare became sacred, robust and bawdy and shortened versions of his plays were very popular among the working class as popular entertainment. Recent movie versions have, possibly, moved us back in that direction again.

3. Molly made pancakes late in the afternoon. They were powder out of the box pancakes. I hadn't had pancakes for a long, long time. Mercy, I enjoyed them with butter, peanut butter, and honey on the first two, and as I prepared the other two, I remembered where the Karo syrup was and poured a bunch of that over the peanut butter. It really hit the spot and made me want to fix some not powder out of the box pancakes and get some real maple syrup.

2 x Three Beautiful Things 06/06-07/07: Terence Blanchard, Jefferson Radio, Alexie, Imagination, Classroom Pub Scene, Comedy

1. Terence Blanchard's "Over There" coming on Channel 70, XM Satellite Radio.

2. Rededicating myself to listening to Jefferson Radio, AM 1280 in my car. This comes after my decision not to listen to Colin Cowherd any more after his "bombing" of The Big Lead blog.

3. Listening to the "On Point" interview with Sherman Alexie as he dicussed his new novel, Flight.

4. Talking with my Shakespeare class about Shakespeare's portrayal of the imagination in The Tempest and how Shakespeare makes the audience the deliverers of Prospero back to Naples by imagining his trip back home into being.

5. Thursday was the last meeting of Working Class Lit/Research Writing. When class ended, many students did not want to leave and stayed in the classroom for over a half an hour talking with each other, mostly, and with Margaret and I, too. Not only did a very good educational experience happen, but a social one, too, in this class.

6. My Literature of Comedy students did a great job Thursday night with writing and telling the class what their definitions of comedy are. We compiled a comprehensive understanding of this magical genre by pooling together all the insights of this wonderful class.

Three Beautiful Things 06/03/07: Research, Contact Zone, Jazz

1. I've spent a large portion of today reading student research essay drafts, emailing them back with comments, and then reading Shakespeare and Literature of Comedy essays and emailing them back with comments. Oh! And grades. I've read some beautiful work today. It's been inspiring to see the variety of ways my students come at different questions about labor, poverty, poetry, anarchism, suffering, reconciliation, and a variety of other matters they write about. I think they are learning.

2. K-Doe had some questions about her research and it led me into an online discussion with her about Mary Louise Pratt's lecture/essay "The Arts of the Contact Zone". I haven't assigned this essay for nearly ten years, but our conversation brought so much of it back and I enjoyed finding out I still had my "Contact Zone" chops.

3. XM Satellite Radio's Real Jazz (Channel 70) has become the soundtrack to my life in the study lately and it just quietly sinks into me while I work and I enjoy it deeply.

Three Beautiful Things 05/30/07: Flowers, Fellow Feeling, Photos

1. It was really fun to take some time and look at the flowers at Lane Community College more closely and to photograph some of them.

2. I think we did a pretty good job in Shakespeare class today seeing how Prospero becomes more fully human by learning fellow feeling.

3. I haven't been very good about writing file names for my pictures on my hard drive. I started doing that tonight and will continue, even though it is tedious and a bit arduous.

Three Beautiful Things 05/21/07: Walt Gaby, Prospero, Voracious

1. Walt Gaby, KHS class of '46 sent me his book of memoirs containing a ton of history and memories of Kellogg along with details of his fascinating career and other things. He also sent the booklet he put together for the class of '46 sixty-year class reunion. He graduated with friends of my mom and dad's and it's a wonderful document as well.

2. It was really fun today in Shakespeare class to enter the world of The Tempest and to begin discussion of the relationship between art and nature, knowing we are laying the foundation for Prospero's huge insight into himself in Act V. I can hardly wait until my students see Prospero's progress to this life-changing realization he has.

3. I bought Snug this long beef strip of treat that you'd think he could chew on for hours and he devoured it in about twenty minutes. His voracious joy was remarkable!

Love of Reading and Writing: Sibling Assignment #21

My friend and regular kelloggbloggin' reader Jane King wrote me an email not long ago. She told me that she had also been reading my sisters' blogs (links to come) and wondered how the three of us had all come to love reading and writing so much. Her question creates the framework for sibling assignment #21. You can find Silver Valley girl's response here and InlandEmpireGirl's here.

I first learned that a book could make me cry when I read Where the Red Fern Grows in the fifth grade (the impact was diminished some when I got kicked out of class while giving my book report to the whole class...Mrs. Denlinger didn't approve of my description of a scene when a bubble of blood comes out of a character's mouth).

I first learned how books could transport me to another world when Miss Kero read us both The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time in the sixth grade.

But I didn't really do much about these experiences. Through junior high and high school, I was much more interested in playing basketball and baseball and being active in other activities. I read school assignments and read sports magazines and books, but that all changed at North Idaho College.

During the second semester of my freshman year, I began to experience something I never had before. The poems we read were putting thoughts and insights I had had into words. I'd never known that others saw the world in ways similar to my own. I'd thought I was alone.

Suddenly the wall of isolation broke.

T.S. Eliot was the first. When I read the opening of his poem "The Hollow Men", I couldn't believe that someone else had thought or wondered if this is what people were:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with
straw

It might seem like an immature-freshman-boy-from-Kellogg-discovers-existentialistism
moment, but those four lines have fueled my reading ever since.

What is a human being? Are we hollow? Stuffed with straw? Or is there more? If there is more, what is it? Is it up to me to fill the hollowness with more than straw? Where's God in all this?

My desire to explore these questions has never been satisfied. It's what led me to read and study the theater of the absurd; it's what led me to read more poetry and to find I needed the poet Richard Hugo.

It was these questions that led me to see that Shakespeare was not an antiquated writer of popular plays, but that this very question regarding the nature of human life and what gives life meaning is at the heart of this plays. I have never discovered a writer better than Shakespeare in exploring these questions, so I devoted my life to studying and teaching Shakespeare.

I also discovered that the Christian faith is more than obeying rules regarding behavior. When I began, at Whitworth College, to discover that the Bible wrestles with these very questions of life's meaning and the nature of human nature, I became ingnited with enthusiasm about the Bible and living a Christian life. I even discovered that biblical characters had times when they wondered if humans were hollow men, empty, and had to work out those questions.

Seeing passages expressing uncertainty and raising questions about existence in the Bible drew me to a faith I had always thought was a faith of certainty.

So I read more. I read stories, poems, plays, theology, philosophy, works from religions around the world, history and other books and articles that helped me wrestle with the fundamental questions of meaning in human life.

This reading led me to become a spiritual and intellectual wrestler. I dove deep. The deeper I dove the more questions I had. I read more.

For years, I rarely read for entertainment or escape, except when I read Sports Illustrate or another book in my futile attempts to learn to play golf.

My wrestling nature fueled my graduate studies. I never read anything in graduate school just to get it out of the way or to jump through a hoop. I read everything in my serious pursuit to learn more about the meaning of life.

My graduate studies in Literature and Composition could be seen as secular seminary studies. I was very serious and demanded way too much of myself.

I demanded so much that I found writing very difficult because I could never write to the level of insight that I thought a piece of writing ought to express. In my dissertation work, which I failed to complete, the way I researched was so intense that I didn't know how to forge it into words, let alone chapters, or a book.

My seriousness in reading stifled my writing.

Once I quit graduate school, I couldn't write. I read. But I couldn't write.

Then I had a breakthrough. One day I visited a Yahoo chat room called "Professors Chat". I began to engage people in conversations about Shakespeare and other matters. I did join in some of the silly talk, but I really tried to write serious insights about things and when people came looking for help with papers, I wrote out help for them.

My writer's block ended. Writing fast in the chat room loosened me up. I was invited to give sermons at church. I wrote a couple of lectures for a lecture series I had put together. I published some articles. I published three poems. I found reasons to write and it kept getting better.

Then I started this blog and began to write something every day, even if only Three Beautiful Things. Writing has become a habit and I've relaxed about being profound, as if there is such a thing.

That's my story, Jane. It all goes back to T.S. Eliot and four lines of poetry and my introduction to Shakespeare.

It all goes back to trying to figure things out.

Credits: The artwork is "The Hollow Men" by sanithna phansavanh. To see the pieces as they appear online, go here.

Post Script: Soon after I was introduced to "The Hollow Men", I suffered a serious industrial accident which left me blind for five days. This accident fueled much of my passion for reading and trying to figure things out. I wrote about it and the impact in had on my search for meaning in a seven part series in this blog.

If you'd like to read my series "On My Blindness", you'll find Part 1 here, 2 here, 3 here, 4 here, 5 here, 6 here, and 7 here.

Three Beautiful Things 05/16/07: Hugo, Never, Flash

1. I gave a written lecture on my indebtedness to the poet Richard Hugo in October, 2002, to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death. I reworked it tonight to deliver to our students in the American Working Class Lit/Research Writing class.

2. Reid claimed he had never written poetry before and presented a most insightful poem to the Shakespeare class today, built around King Lear's utterance of "Never, never, never" as he grieves over his dead daughter, Cordelia.

3. It's a small thing, but it felt really productive and good today to consolidate three flashdrives of files into one. I have a much better sense of where things are!

Three Beautiful Things 05/14/07: Straddlers, Lear?, Giddy

1. I have nearly finished the compelling book, Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dream by Alfred Lubrano, a book of over 100 interviews plus Lubrano's excellent insights into the way people feel who have moved out of the working class into the middle class. I don't know when I last related so deeply to a book.

2. Is the conclusion of King Lear nihilistic? Inspiring? What do we learn from King Lear? These questions anchored today's thoughtful discussion in class.

3. Snug goes jumpity, yelpy nuts when Molly comes home because she often takes the dogs out back to play "ball".

Three Beautiful Things 05/09/07:Beauty, Lear, Limbo

1. Jane King wrote me a lovely email. It included the following passage:

I'm a part of this little group that meets each Wednesday to discuss
the lectionary texts for the week. This is a comment for this week
in connection with Psalm 67 that I read this morning in DISCIPLINES,
an Upper Room Publication. I believe the author is Rene A. Perez:

"Many years ago I heard about a high school teacher whose husband
unexpectedly died of a heart attack. About a week after his death,
she shared some of her insight with her students: "Each of us is put
here on earth to learn, share, love, appreciate, and give of
ourselves. None of us knows when this fantastic experience will end.
It can be taken away at any moment. Perhaps this is God's way of
telling us that we must make the most out of every single day. So I
would like you all to make me a promise. From now on, on your way to
school or on your way home, find something beautiful to notice. It
doesn't have to be something you see, it could be a scent--perhaps of
freshly baked bread wafting from a house or the sound of the breeze
slightly rustling the leaves in the trees or the way the morning
light catches one autumn leaf as it falls gently to the ground.
Please look for these things and cherish them. For these things are
the "stuff" of life, the little things we are put here on earth to
enjoy, the things we often take for granted. It becomes important to
notice them, for at any time it can all be taken away."

2. I received the kindest email from my student Katy who had done a fiercely beautiful painting of King Lear during the storm on the heath. She was grateful that making art was a project option.

3. I listened to a superb radio interview with Artur Lubrano, author of Limbo: Blue-collar Roots, White-collar Dreams. He discussed how his book explores the difficulty of blue collar family kids making the move out of the working class into the middle class. I have written about this about myself and his work more than validated some of my insights about the limbo people like me feel having made this move.

Three Beautiful Things 05/02/07: Snails, Art, Authentic

1. Melinda came to my office to talk about her Works Cited page, said so long, and returned about five minutes later with a photograph on her cell phone that she had to show someone: it was three snail surrounding a cigarette butt. It was really funny and I was glad to be the lucky person that she had to show!

2. Poetry, paintings, music, a short, original and acted monologue, a graphic design of King Lear in act III: talented students presenting artistic projects today in Shakespeare class, as an alternative to demonstrating their understanding in written essays. Gorgeous work.

3. I finished Catch-22. Yossarian rises to the occasion as an existential hero and his final deed in the novel is his most authentic, the only thing he can do to be true to himself in a meaningless and absurd world. (What did he do? I'm not spoiling the book's ending!)

Sunday Scribblings: I Rooted for the Giants: A Look at Shakespeare's Comedies

This week's Sunday Scribbling prompt is rooted.

---

When I was a boy, Dad rooted for the N.Y. Yankees. I'm not sure why. He loved Mickey Mantle, maybe because legend had it that when Mantle got called up to play in New York he arrived with a cardboard suitcase and an Oklahoma way of doing things. Being a small town Kellogg guy, maybe Dad felt like he and Mickey Mantle were rooted in a similar way: beer drinking, late nights, uncomplicated world view, love of sports.

I parted ways with my father in 1962. I rooted for the San Francisco Giants. My hero was Willie Mays. Mays and I could not have been different in how our lives were rooted. I found Mays electrifying. He was an acrobatic player, powerful, fast, agile, and dramatic.

I began rooting for the Giants in 1962. They played the Yankees in the 1962 World Series. Dad rooted for the Yankees. He seemed more than disappointed in me. He was repulsed. Wasn't I like him, rooted in Yankee lore and love? Why, at the age of eight, had I betrayed him? Why did I become a fan not only of the Giants, but of the National League?

I can't explain it very well. All I know is that with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, with Matty Alou on third and Willie Mays on second, Willie McCovey tatooed a line drive off of Ralph Terry that Bobby Richardson, the Yankee second baseman, played perfectly and speared. The Yankees won.

I was heartbroken. My baseball rooting became rooted in heartbreak. The Giants would not return to the World Series until 1989, a Series shattered by the earthquake of that year. My sports fan life became rooted in rooting for the underdog.

Somehow, then, in my twenties, having rooted for underdog sports teams led to my love of Shakespeare being rooted in the comedies.

I began to realize, first of all, that most fellow students and professors thought of the comedies as inferior to the tragedies. They were the underdog plays to me.

As I studied the comedies more, I realized they were about timelessness, about time going on forever. They ended in marriage; marriage promised procreation. The comedies promised continuation. They often took place in a green world where miracles and reconciliation and forgiveness occurred, making the marriages and continuation possible. In the green world, time seemed to stand still. We were in a world made real by dreams and wishes and imagination.

In my twenties, my thinking was more rooted in baseball than Shakespeare. The two met. Time in baseball is not rooted in clock time. It's measured in outs. If no outs occur, the game continues for ever. Like in the comedies, where forgiveness and marriage bring characters to a place of security within themselves, bring them home, baseball is rooted in players leaving home and returning again.

Baseball is a green game, played on pastures that became enclosed by stadiums. I experienced baseball as a game of miracles, unexpected twists of fate. I understood comedy because of how my thinking was rooted in baseball.

Toward the end of his life, my father no longer rooted for the Yankees. They became too corporate, no longer a green world team, but a team of the city. By the time he died, we had come to reconcile ourselves to each other. I no longer rooted for the Giants, but even if I did, I think we both knew that our relationship was rooted in something much deeper than what baseball team each of us rooted for.

(I don't know why "comments" is disabled on this post. If you'd like to comment, email me: billy1227@gmail.com)

Sunday Scribblings: Secret Identity

Sunday Scribblings posts a new prompt each week about Friday/Saturday and invites submissions. If you like writing assignments for your blog, check it out. This week's prompt: Secret Identity.




IMMEDIATELY, I think of Shakespeare's play King Lear. In the first act, the eighty-year-old king, in a fit of rashness, banishes the daughter who loves him most, Cordelia, and the subject most loyal to him, Kent.

Kent leaves. He returns. He disguises himself as Caius. Caius becomes Kent's secret identity.

I've thought long and hard over the years about Kent being in disguise and I've concluded that Shakespeare intensifies the chaos and danger of this world of King Lear by portraying the way that in a world of evil, those who are good must assume a secret identity in order not to be killed. But it's more than survival. Kent must deceive the king to serve him. He cannot do the good he wants to do with his actual identity. He must mask it. He must assume a secret identity.

It's one of my favorite and most complex ideas the runs through Shakespeare's play: virtuous deceit. In order to be good and to try to do good, characters like Rosalind, Friar Lawrence, the Friar in Much Ado About Nothing, Hermione and Paulina in The Winter's Tale, Puck, and others cannot be openly good. They have to apply poison to poison and cure deceit by being deceitful.

Shakespeare seems obsessed with how can one be moral in a mutable world. He distrusts the idea that moral codes should remain fixed or static when the world itself is always in flux. He never asks it outright, but implicitly he suggests that to make the best and most moral response, characters, and, in turn, we must be morally alert and flexible. We cannot apply the same moral code to each thing that happens. Shakespeare almost always portrays flexibility as morally superior to rigidness.

I act on this a lot in my work as a community college English instructor where I work with myriads of different students who come to my classes from a wide variety of contexts. Many of my students are in deep trouble of one kind or another. They might be freshly released from prison. They might be in deep poverty. They might be recovering from drug addiction. They might be starting over after divorce. They might be trying to gain confidence and purpose after having been beaten up and trapped in a cruel marriage.

As I work with these different students together in the classroom, I portray a fairly consistent identity as an instructor. It's an identity (or a persona) different than my one at home or when I'm playing poker with friends in Kellogg. It's a secret identity to people who don't know me as an instructor. My identity elsewhere is a secret to my students.

As an instructor to these many different students, I sometimes assume a secret identity with some of these students in my office or away from class. It's an identity I can't always show the whole class. More often than not, it's a more lenient person, a person who is willing to bend institutional rules, deceive the college, in you will, in order to help the student and possibly give the student a break.

Like King Lear in the beginning of Shakespeare's play, officers charged to run institutions are very suspicious of rules being bent or broken. They operate in an imagined reality where to treat people equally, you must treat them the same.

I know this isn't true. To treat people equally is to treat them justly. I treat my students equally in this regard. But justice and fairness can have multiple faces, and often in order to do the right thing, I must assume a secret identity, and like Kent, do what I think is right from behind a disguise or a mask.

This virtuous deceit, in my work and elsewhere, has done more to help me live with a clear conscience than any other factor in my life.

Three Beautiful Things 03/02/07: Shakespeare, Sleep, Champions

1. When was the last time I had my own course to teach in Shakespeare? I can't remember. But I get to teach Shakespeare this quarter and it was really fun looking at the opening thirty-five or so lines of "King Lear" and see how much of the whole play of Lear is in those opening lines.

2. I slept this afternoon in a kind of coma, thanks to my late arrival in Eugene last night and my getting up early to go teach.

3. The Florida Gators beat the Oregon Ducks in the round of eight in the NCAA tournament. Tonight Florida won the national championship and it felt good to have the team that eliminated the Ducks be the national championship.

Three Beautiful Things 03/17/07: ACT-SO, piano aria, Grace Laughs

1. The NAACP has a youth Olympics of the Mind program called ACT-SO. I have served as a judge for poetry and essays for about ten years. Today Macque's reading of her silver medal winning poem stirred me, as did listening to her explain what she hoped her poem's impact was.

2. Siv became Portia tonight in her Merchant of Venice scene. It would have been better had her aria been a bit more forte rather than piano, but it was her first outing acting and first outings seem to always bring out the piano in new actors.

3. Grace attended tonight's Shakespeare Showcase. I hadn't seen her since the last time I noted running into her in a January 3BT's. She's really fun and we laughed and laughed before the Showcase began, especially as I made light of my need for anti-depressants.

Three Beautiful Things 03/16/07: Aria, Fragrant, Eeeeek -- a Duck

1. Siv is playing Portia in the "Quality of mercy" scene of "The Merchant of Venice". I am the speechless Shylock. Siv is a singer. She had a breakthrough performing the speech when I suggested she perform it as Portia's aria.

2. Plum blossoms sweeten LCC's air.

3. The Oregon Ducks eke out a win in round one of the NCCAA men's basketball tournament.

Othello Melts Into Air, Into Thin Air

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air . . .

Prospero's words sum up the feeling I had after we our last performance of Othello. If you've performed live theater, you know what I mean. The weeks and weeks of rehearsal, of the tech crew working to get properties on and off the stage, the hard work getting the stage lit and the many sound cues right and getting the images right that our production projected on silk screens and the hard work the costumers performed to dress us up in our roles all vanishes into memory and into thin air when the last performance is completed.

When I performed in my first play in Eugene, it took me a whole day to let go of Prospero, the character I played. I was morose. I didn't want Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to vanish. I wanted to hang on to it. I was attached to it. But, then when I played in other plays, I began to enjoy the idea that like the pageant of life itself, there is actually very little that happens in a given day that we can hang on to.

Life is transitory. Live theater magnifies this reality. It is futile to hang on to the moments and events and experience that pass. Yes, we can have a record of them in pictures or verbal description or on video tape, but these records are not the thing itself. The thing itself is always gone, vanished, into thin air.

So, Othello is gone. It touched our audiences. Our cast had fun together. I hope the tech crew had fun. They were under more pressure than the actors. Their work, too, has vanished.

Saturday night's performance was video taped. I doubt I will watch it. I'd like to keep the memory of Othello in my mind where I will stretch it, magnify it, give parts of it special emphasis, and move away from the documentary truth of the play. In many ways I would rather have the truth of this play live in the subjective reality of my mind. I'm not that interested in the objective truth of the video tape. I want to live in the experience of our performances vanishing. It's the mystery of live theater that so much pleasure is derived from something that is worked at so hard and turns out to be so impermanent, something that vanishes into thin air.

No Longer a Shakespeare Scholar

Twenty-five years ago I was, in the small world of the University of Oregon's English Graduate Program, a promising scholar of Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in England. For several ensuing years, I read Shakespeare scholarship, studied Shakespeare under terrific professors, attended a few national and international conferences of Shakespeare scholars. I became a teacher of Shakespeare at Whitworth College, the University of Oregon, and Lane Community College.

To me, what has marked much of my study, my attempts at writing, and my teaching during these past twenty-five years has been a lack of immediacy in my experience with Shakespeare.

My experience with his plays became so heavily guided or mediated by the writings of scholars and the instruction of my professors, that I often found myself wondering whether I was really working with Shakespeare's plays or if I was experiencing the writing about his plays come to life.

I went to many many performances of Shakespeare's plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Often, in watching the performances, my mind was so crowded by interpretations I had read of the plays, that I came to the performances with fixed ideas of what the plays ought to convey. For example, when I went to the play *Othello*, I had a fixed idea, largely formed by reading scholarship, of who the character Othello ought to be and had trouble enjoying portrayals that did not fit with my preconceived ideas.

I had some confidence in these preconceptions because they had the stamp of scholarship on them.

I am playing a very small role in *Othello* right now. I am watching more than acting. I am having a glorious experience. Because I have not been reading much *Othello* scholarship and because what I have read has receded from my immediate consciousness, I am having this unusual and most welcome experience of having this play come alive as if I've never seen or studied it before.

I have lost any preconceived notion of who or what the character Othello ought to be. Therefore, as I see Will, our production's Othello, develop this character, I'm seeing an Othello I've never really imagined before come to life. I can't be specific right now, but I'm seeing a whole different physical Othello, an Othello with mannerisms, facial expressions, emotional qualities at particular times in the play I have never thought about before.

It is exhilirating to experience this learning about Othello come from a live embodiment of this character as Will brings him alive. Will is reading lines in ways I've never heard them. I'm hearing words, lines, passages in ways I've never heard them.

When I was a scholar, I would have assessed Will's creation of this character based on what I'd read. Now, since I've resigned my scholarly pursuits, I am not assessing. I am seeing and enjoying an Othello come to life as Will creates him. It's a new Othello. I'm not measuring this Othello against a literary understanding of the character. I am enjoying him as he emerges, accepting him just as Will creates him.

In other words, I'm having a more immediate experience with this character and with this play than I ever did when I studied it in my office. I'm not thinking of the character or the play in terms of a class essay or in terms of interpreting the character or the play for a class of students. I'm simply experiencing the wonder of this complex creation of Shakespeare and Will.

I find it very hard to teach Shakespeare as literature any more. It has been the lifeblood of my professional life, and it seems an insufficient undertaking to me. I want to be a part of the immediate life of these plays and that occurs in performance, in being a part of seeing the play's production come alive in every aspect, from the boards and nails to the moving bodies creating action.

Maybe I'll get scholarly again with Shakespeare. I don't know. But, for now, I want to learn more about these plays from being a part of plays being produced and from acting. It's more immediate. It's more unpredictable. It's more risky. It is, in the end, for me, more alive.