Many of our schools continue to be resourced by scores of self-sacrificing, valiant, and courageous educators who are dedicated to nourishing the common good as they empower young hearts and minds with the skills and awe necessary for a full life. Nevertheless, education at every level now resembles Star Trek's "the Borg" more than Plato's Lyceum: when students are rendered replaceable cogs manufactured merely to serve the machinery of consumption rather than discrete beings created just a little lower than the angels - and when students themselves only see school as a hoop to jump through to qualify for employment - education no longer helps us all rise to the call of illuminated citizens crafted the common good. Back in 1985, Gary Trudeau prophesized this in his "Doonesbury" cartoon:
In his 1992 anthology of poems for men, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, the late Robert Bly makes this case in his foreword:
The relation of poetry to culture has been debated as far back as Plato's attack on Homer, through the Renaissance and the Puritan's Reformation, and continuing with the Romantic Shelly's Defense of Poetry and today's argument's for a core curriculum of great books. While our European-American traditions questions and argues, and has to teach poetry to sullen students in English classes, other cultures speaking Spanish, Russian, and Arabic, to say nothing of the many tongues of African and the India subcontinent, grow up inside poems, drenched through with poetic metaphors and rhythms. As we learn to criticize, to take a poem apart, to get its meaning, they learn to listen and to recite. By drawing this sharp contrast with other cultures, we are pointing to a defect in ours. Men blame their own lives for a deficiency in the culture. For, without the fanciful delicacy and the powerful truths that poems convey, our emotions and imagination flatten out. (Bly, p. xxix)
One of my life's transformational epiphanies took place on a miserably cold night in a bookstore in Cleveland when I stumbled upon this very volume of poems. I was in the midst of a complicated divorce looking for a distraction. Outside, the freezing rain mimicked my inner bleakness when I inadvertently (or so I thought) stumbled upon these words from Rilke:
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.
It was, for a time, as if I were in a trance. I don't know how long I went missing. All that was clear is that when I returned from who knows where, my heart had been warmed and those long-feared tears that freely ran down my face had become friends. Biblically, this was akin to what Job confessed to the Holy in the final chapter of that wisdom tale: Once I had heard, but now I know from the inside out. For twenty seven years I have cherished Bly's anthology for this awakening - giving it as gifts to countless other men struggling for light in the darkness - and continue to claim its contents as holy ground. My experience with poetry, however, seems to be shared all too rarely these days as all too often men and women move all too fast to linger in the land of poets yearning to freely share their hard won blessings with those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Inevitably, our DNA insists that before we can see beyond the obvious, we must face a death, a descent, or some other depravation. Only then are we able to discern that our "time in the ashes" is simultaneously a searing loss as well as sacred portal to new life. Michael Blumenthal puts this positively in "A Man Lost By A River."
There is a voice inside the body.
There is a voice and a music,
a throbbing, four-chambered pear
that want to be heard, that sits
alone by the river with its mandolin
and its torn coat, and sings
for whoever will listen
a song that no one wants to hear.
But sometimes, lost,
on his way to somewhere significant,
a man in a long coat, carrying
a briefcase, wanders into the forest.
He hears the voice and the mandolin,
he sees the thrust and the dandelion,
and he feels the mist rise over the river.
And his life is never the same,
for this having been lost -
for having strayed from the path of his routine,
for no good reason.
Rumi offers an ironic take on the path of descent.
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
and end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
and fall in.
I should be suspicious
of what I want.
And Goethe covers the same terrain in tragedy in Bly's translation of "The Invisible (or Erl) King":
Who rides at night, who rides so late?
The father rides on, his child in his arms.
His arms are curled and firm round the boy,
He keeps him from falling, he keeps him warm.
"My boy, why is it you hide your face?
"Dad, over there do you see the King?
"Dad, over there do you see the King?
The Invisible King with ermine and staff?"
"Dear boy, what you see is a rolling mist.
"HEY THERE, MY BOY, COME ALONG WITH ME! there, my boy, come along I HAVE THE NEATEST GAMES YOU'LL EVER SEE.
ON THE SHORE MY DAISES BLOW IN A LINE.
MY MOTHER HAS SHIRTS ALL GOLDEN AND FINE."
"Dad, is it true you don't hear at all
The little gifts the King is offering me?"
"Calm down, my boy, no need for all this -
It's a dry oak leaves making noise in the wind."
'CHILD, GOOD CHILD, DO YOU WANT TO GO?
MY DAUGHTERS WILL CARE AND WAIT ON YOU, SO.
THE GREAT CIRCLE DANCE THEY DO EVERY NIGHT,
THEY'LL SING AND DANCE AND TUCK YOU IN TIGHT."
"Dad, it worries me that you don't see
The Daughters there at that ugly spot."
"I see the spot very clearly, my boy -
An old gray willow, that's all there is."
"YOUR BODY IS SLIM, AND I LOVE YOU
COME NOW, OR SEIZE YOU IS WHAT I'LL DO."
"Dad Listen, please Dad, he's got hold of me!
He's done something bad to me, he has!"
The terrified father rides wilder and wilder;
The boy i now groaning as he sits slumped over;
In grief and fear at last the father got home.
The boy lay dead in the father's arms.
Bly suggests that in the wisdom of the romantic era, "the rationalist father denies, frantically, any suggestion of the 'other realm' or the spiritual world, and the result is that his son dies. This poem is a miniature history of Europe." I would add it is also an agonizing example of our current addiction to an ethics of atavism which lures us towards the lowest common denominator and starves our souls of tenderness in the process. When everything and every one becomes a commodity destined for purchase, God's inclination to help us evolve beyond our most primal urges is twarted.
Cut to Ted Gioia's insightful observations in s Substack essay: The Three Bad Typses of Humanities Professor. (https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-3-bad-types-of-humanities-professor?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=296132&post_id=213132923&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=49p8n&triedRedirect=true) I'll leave it to you to enjoy his description of what makes for a good and bad professor. It's his closing comments that are particularly enlightening for me as he notes that helping students go deep, encouraging them to listen to their hearts as well as their head, and seek out what previous generations once discovered to be true, virtuous, and beautiful is vital. Sadly, this style of teaching is no longer normative in the United States but IS in... China!
I call this to your attention because my life was changed by one most excellent humanities professor. To say that I was an uneven high school student would be a gross understatement. I was energized by history and literature, but captivated by rock'n'roll and miniskirts. So, what I didn't like or understand, I just skipped. I negotiated with my teachers, as was possible in the swinging 60's, to write my own poetry and music rather than endure the sentimental slop being crafted by some of my peers who were in love with Rod McKuen. I cut a deal with a young social studies teacher to record a history of American topical songs rather than endure the pro-Vietnam War propaganda rants of our Phys. Ed. coach - and weekly travelled to the University of Bridgeport with him to access their historic vinyl recordings. I was able to do an independent study of French songs so that I wouldn't fail that subject yet again. And, when all else failed, snuck away to hang out on the beach with my bandmates as we listened to the Stones, Beatles, and Yardbirds as it was far more satisfying than enduring one more interminable study hall. All of which is to say that I graduated in the bottom third of my high school class with limited college options. Yes, I'd read Kafka's In the Penal Settlement, all of the theater of the absurd plays by Becket and his peers, to say nothing of most of the fiction penned by Albert Camus, Eldridge Cleaver, John Steinbeck, and Richard Farina with a healthy doss of Ginsberg, but I was not on the fast track for success.
Thanks be to God for the attention given me by my high school guidance counselor, a former Franciscan monk who was once employed to do espionage for the US during WWII, who managed to get me accepted at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, WI. There, as part of our core curriculum, I took humanities and basic English writing with a young professor not a lot older than myself: Ms. Martha Baker. There's much too much to tell about her influence, so let me just note that her January seminar designed for upper class people on the works of both D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf changed my life. Eight intense novels in four short weeks, combined with hours of lengthy afternoon discussions, broke down all the barriers to higher education I'd ever constructed. Mother of God, it was heaven on earth! Finally, I was empowered to listen carefully, read profoundly, have my lazy ass challenged time and again by students dedicated to wisdom, and invited to become a part of a cognoscenti that had never been open to me before that bitter Wisconsin winter.
Somehow, by passion and the Holy Spirit, passed some of that drive and verve on to my two daughters - both of whom became master storytellers in their own right. These dedicated students with creative minds are now writers and educators entering middle age who are paying it forward. It thrills me to say that I literally passed on some of those life-changing Lawrence/Woolf novels to these precious women. So now, we are entering a second decade of ignorance, prejudice, anti-intellectualism, and fear-mongering. Having studied history, spirituality, and the arts, I know it won't last forever even as I accept that it will all become more cruel and violent before it gets better. My solace is to become ever more monk-like in my quest to keep the light of the classics burning.
Check out Gioia's essay when you can. Send me a note of your reaction. And reach out to an educator who saved your life and give him or her thanks, ok?
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