“My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.” –Russell Means

                There are several stories I love, and love to tell, and can never quite write down. Every once in a while I try: just imagine you’re talking to someone, I tell myself, and write down what you would say. I start writing–sometimes I even start talking to myself–and it sounds stiff and serious, or lazy and unimportant, or–impersonal. It sounds like a dead bird’s wing locked in a glass box.
                When I tell a story out loud, I get to listen to (and with) whoever’s listening. We get to share whatever comes up, whatever grows in the words: the wild weeds and playful flowers and sorrow’s somehow-sweet sharp thorns. Afterwards I often want to say, “Thanks for telling that story with me.” (People often respond, “But you’re the one who told it.” And then I’m either quiet, or I try to explain that, really, it was something we did together). I like telling stories. I like it more than anything, it’s tempting to say, but that’s not true: I like it so much because I like you. You. Whoever you are. The person who’s reading this, who’s standing on the other side of a (however shaky, however short lived, however thin) bridge we make from words.
                I love writing. I love reading. I love the worlds they open up. But deep down, inside all that, I like relationships. I like conversations: person to person, wind to leaf, foot to stone. I don’t write these words to write them. I write these words so someone might read them, and then they’ll come alive. Maybe the very act of writing is dangerous. I can mistake the dark shape on my screen for the sound, or the sound for the moment–shared–of speaking to each other. I think it’s important to remember that the abstraction is an abstraction, and that beneath it, outside it, around it, the world is breathing. All the same, if we’re careful, I think we can use this abstraction to move closer to each other, like a ship returning home by looking at the stars.
                And by the way, I really do want to tell you those stories. Ask me sometime. We’ll try telling them together.

                “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence.”
                -Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

                I’ve always admired Sherlock Holmes. An adoring child, I’ve wanted to be like him. I’ve lionized his habits, his need of fuel for the furnace. I thought that made his mind shine bright. I thought something like that would make my mind shine bright. I still love him, but I don’t think I want to train my mind like that anymore.
                Sherlock’s mind is always working. He sees, observes, deduces, understands. He burns problems to make light: without a problem, he needs something else to burn. Opium. Cocaine. I always thought this was part of his (perhaps tragic) heroism: this fiery intellect, this mind that cannot rest.
                I usually think I need to be working. I turn ideas over in my head, again and again; I make lists and check them; I form and reform sentences, trying to make them balance. I plan future classes and relive past mistakes, poking at what I did wrong so that tomorrow I can do right. If there’s a workbench in my mind, scattered across with hammers and wrenches, I spend most of my time at it. For a long time, I’ve taken it as given that I should. I’ve assumed that’s where I–where all good people–where Sherlock Holmes–belongs.
                Detective fiction often suggests a world that can be figured out if only we work hard enough. That’s what the hero does: he comes into confusing, convoluted lives and he figures out the lies and emotions, figures out who did what, and why. In that world, always working is the cardinal virtue. It’s what lets you move forward. The thing is, I’m not sure I want to live in that world. I’m not sure I always want to be a detective. I’m not sure I want people to be billiard balls, bouncing forward in action and reaction as I solve for the collisions. I’m not sure I want to spend all my days at the workbench. Isn’t there something else?
                Perhaps today, in the world of caffeine spiders spinning broken webs, my stagnation–my “dull routine of existence”–comes more from my obsessive work than from the quiet moments. I keep going back to the garden, keep walking the paths of my mind, checking and rechecking the sprouts I’ve planted, lugging water, looking for bugs–and along the way, I’m trampling something that was growing up between the cobblestones. I have my head down, and don’t see the sky. Maybe a good farmer sits in the grass every now and then. Maybe he lets the creek of his mind run, and he lets it slow and gather. Maybe Sherlock Holmes, were he alive and breathing, would learn something from stillness, from silence, from slipping in to quiet waters.

                “Resolve to be always beginning–to be a beginner!” -Rainer Maria Rilke

                Whatever else I’m working on, I think I’d like to keep adopting new habits so that I’m always a beginner at something.
                A few weeks ago, I got to hear Professor Robert Sapolsky discuss when and why human beings stop doing new things. He’s done a lot of research. He called radio stations and asked for the average age of their listeners, and the average age of their music. Most people, it seems, cement their musical tastes by age 20, and if you haven’t explored a type of music by the time you’re 35, you probably never will. He talked to sushi restaurants. On average, the people he studied tried sushi around 25–and if you haven’t tried sushi by 35, you probably never will. He talked to piercing parlors: the average age for getting a tongue stud is 18, and if you haven’t by 21, you probably never will. Our openness to novelty seems to shut down with age. Highly creative people usually get less creative over time, and they usually get less open to other people’s creativity.
                But that wasn’t a conclusion: that was a step along the way. (There were lots of steps, all fascinating and off-putting and hilarious–fascinating because he helped me understand my mind’s mechanisms, off-putting because those mechanisms have more influence that many of us would like to think, hilarious because life is funny and so is Sapolsky. I need to watch more of his lectures). His research suggests there are lots of other factors that either shut down your interest in novelty–or keep you curious. One of the worst “no new stuff” forces, hilariously, is becoming eminent in your field: the more eminent you are, the less likely you are to accept new advancements in what you’re supposed to already understand. The opposite is true, too–if you happily and purposefully switch fields, and start learning something new, your interest in novelty tends to reset.
                All that makes a lot of sense to me (at least, it does now that Dr. Sapolsky explained it), and it brings me back to Rilke. Being a beginner reminds us that there’s more to learn. It puts us in a place of not knowing, and gives us the opportunity to make that into a fun place to be. So I want to learn a song on the piano, and take some dance lessons. I want to try painting, and make something out of porcelain. I won’t ever make money with those things. I won’t become a master. I might be a bit of a better person, a bit happier, and a bit more open to something new–because I’m a beginner, beginning, and there’s so much to wander through.

                “Cum On Feel The Noize.” -Slade (I’ve struggled with their spelling for a month, but there it is)

                A few weeks ago I went to see Rock of Ages. The friend who took me described the show like this: “There’s not really a plot. Well, there’s a plot, there’s a music bar and a love story, but all that’s an excuse to sing some 80s music.” I wasn’t sure what I would think of that. I wasn’t sure what it would be Saying, what ideas it would be exploring, and art Says stuff, doesn’t it?
                Two minutes in I was smiling. The next day I wanted to write. I wanted to see it again. I wanted to call the people I love, and start loving new people. I wanted to learn to dance, to play the guitar, to climb trees again. I wanted, dare I say it, to rock.
                The show didn’t have a whole lot to say, and whatever comments it did have–about love, instead of fame, maybe–were washed over by the electric guitar and undercut by the show’s happy awareness that it is, in fact, a show. I don’t know what we would discuss, if we were supposed to discuss it in class. But it was fun. It was playful. It was alive.
                I can get too caught up in thinking. Thinking, of course, is pretty wonderful: it helps us build water locks to take our boats upstream (which is so cool), and irrigation canals to water our crops, and sprinklers to dance through. In thinking we shape the world around us. In being we’re part of the world. We’re pushed as much as pushing, created as much as creating. Too often I try to be the musician: I try to play the strings. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Rock of Ages told me to be a string for a little while. Come on, feel the noise. Shake with it. Be sung by it.
                There’s an old joke: sometimes you’re the dog, and sometimes you’re the fire hydrant. I feel that way sometimes. Still, I think the pattern could do more than it’s doing. Sometimes you’re the harbor, and sometimes you’re the wave. Sometimes you’re the singer, sometimes you’re the song. Sometimes you’re the sailmaker, and sometimes you’re the storm. It’s tempting to say that thinking is how I work, and that the world–loving, being, ringing; the noise–is why. I don’t think that’s quite true: it’s limiting. Thinking can be my why, and and being can be my work. Then again, there are so many ways to be, to stand, and to sing. Thinking doesn’t get you to all of them. Sometimes you’ve gotta feel the noize.

                A few weeks ago, I found myself trying to explain how stories fit into my life and into our lives. Two moments came to mind: a conversation I had with an eye doctor, and a lunch I shared with a homeless man. Here they are.
                The eye doctor showed me a game. Find a friend (or someone else; maybe he’ll be a friend, soon) and tell him to look straight ahead, without moving his eyes. Standing behind him, reach slowly into his peripheral vision until he can see your wiggling fingers. Then take a colored pencil (which you had in your pocket; clever of you, knowing where this game was going) and put it into the edge of his vision.  Ask him if he can see it, and he can. Ask him to tell you what color it is, and he can’t. Humans don’t see color in their peripheral vision. (Our retinas have two types of photoreceptors: rods, which perceive movement even in low light, and cones, which perceive color and fine details. The edge of your vision comes through rods, the center through cones). Right now, the edge of your vision is in black and white. Most of the time your brain fills in the colors that “should” be there, or else doesn’t really mention that you don’t know. (When I do this, people are surprised they can’t name the color). If you showed your friend the pencil, and then held it back in his peripheral vision, it would “look” the color it is. But he’s not seeing that: his brain is painting the world with the color he thinks is there.
                I think we see stories the same way we see colors. Stories tell us what’s valuable, what’s allowable, what it means to be a hero, and then we paint the world to match what we think is there. I grew up in America, so as a child I thought of the man who builds his own log cabin in the wilderness as free. My friend grew up in Vietnam, so she thought of him as lonely–people belonged in communities, with responsibilities and ties. Neither of us decided that; the stories we heard told us to look at the world that way, and then we thought it was obvious. We thought we could see it. We thought it was the just color of the world, but we were seeing through our interpretations. Playing with stories, writing or rewriting or arguing about stories, gives us a chance to step back and think about how we paint the world, and how else it could be painted.
                Years before the colored pencils, I shared a sandwich with a homeless man. Once it became clear that I was listening, he wanted above all to talk. He wanted to tell me who he was, where he’d grown up. He wanted to tell me about all the friends he’d had once. “I’m still here,” he repeated. “They’re the ones who’ve gone.” His story saddened me. It frightened me. It was fractured, with events and timelines never quite fitting.His need to be heard overwhelmed me. His story wasn’t just a way of organizing information, of fitting events into a narrative we call a life. He didn’t tell it just for fun. It was his shell, and the door he opened for me, and the ocean he swam through. Telling it was necessary in some way that I didn’t understand.
                On the one hand, as I listen to one of my high school students define himself by the sport he plays or the career he wants, I see how a story shapes a life. I wonder where he got his story; I wonder if he would write a different one, if he realized that he could. On the other hand, I’ve never understood stories. I’ve loved them. I’ve been terrified by them. I’ve laughed with them. I’ve written them down because they were in my head, and I’ve read them and listened to them. We drink stories like we drink water. We share them like we share the atmosphere. You can diagram nitrogen and oxygen molecules, but that’s not the same as breathing.
                Essays–statements–even anecdotes arranged to tell you something–push us to say this or that. Stories let us walk with what we love and fear through everything that’s in between.

                “Right up to that afternoon at my grandfather’s bedside, […] I believed (and for the most part still believe) that silence was darkness, and that naming shone alight. I believed that a secret was like a malignancy and confession a knife, a bright hot beam of radiation that healed as it burned. I believed it was good–this being among the few things that truly did go without saying–to ‘get it all out.’
                Then I heard the bitterness of defeat in my grandfather’s voice […]. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.”
                -Michael Chabon, Moonglow

                As a writer, Michael Chabon is in the business of naming, of speaking. Moonglow is his 428 page attempt to understand his grandfather by retelling large parts of the man’s life. It is as deep-hearted an attempt as I have ever seen to meld one’s heart with another’s. It is a revelation that revisits old wounds, and discovers wounds previously hidden. It is part confusion and part love song and very, very honest. On page 243, that honesty leads Chabon to question the value of finding the words, of “getting it all out.” Two-hundred and forty-three pages in, he questions the very task he’s doing.
                I want to learn from Chabon’s courage. I think it’s important, every now and then, to step back and question some of your most fundamental beliefs.
                Often, when I stumble into those questions, they hurt. I start wondering if my work (teaching, writing) is like trying to hold back the tides with sandcastle walls. I wonder if I’m like the child who moves his hands on the fake steering wheel of a rollercoaster, pretending that he’s directing the car.  Asking that hurts me. Why doesn’t it hurt Chabon?
                I think it does–but that’s not all it does. (And of course, our perspective can change the experience of pain. I don’t mind my hands hurting when I’ve been rock climbing. When I’m holding a friend who hurts, I don’t mind when I cry). Chabon’s questions do more because he’s actually willing to move, to reconsider, to learn. Hopelessness comes when I can’t trust words, and words are the only thing around to trust. Fear comes when I question my path, and still believe it’s the only path I could ever walk. If there are other things, if I could trust silence or music or movement, then learning that words can’t do everything is just an opportunity to learn more. If I’m willing to learn more, than questioning the things I believe in is an opportunity to look carefully and see some new facet, some new face.
                A little sand wall probably won’t hold the wave–but sand, and rock, and grass will. The little boy on the rollercoaster isn’t driving the car–but he is part of the movement. He’s learning that things change, that there are things he can touch, turn. If we hit ourselves with the questions, then questioning what we most believe breaks apart our world. If we’re open to the questions, and thoughtful with them, then they lead us to new possibilities and refine the possibilities of what we’ve already found.
                Speaking is wonderful. It isn’t everything. Words can do a lot. They can’t do it all.

The Soul selects her own Society –
Then – shuts the Door –
To her divine Majority –
Present no more –
                -Emily Dickinson

                My friends know so much that I don’t. One of them understands the intricacies of muscles, nerves, and fascia. (I, on the other hand, looked up “fascia” to make sure I was spelling it correctly). Another can explain the differences and similarities between Freud and Jung. Another can look at the oxygen isotopes in rocks to figure out what temperature the ocean was a long, long time ago. And all that has me thinking.
                I’d like to write a fantasy story where there are many worlds, worlds within worlds beside worlds, but you can only navigate the ones that you (to some extent) understand. The geography of each landscape would be based on connections within that understanding: the similarities between Freud and Jung, for instance, would become literal paths that you could walk, like passes through the mountains. In another world, the lay of the land would depend on the relationship between oxygen isotopes and heat. If you understood that, you could walk through this rock world. You could walk through the mountain. If you entered a world you didn’t understand, it would be worse than being lost. Here on earth, we use a magnetic field to determine north and south. It works pretty well. But in another world, your compass could work by complementary colors or musical scales or metal alloys. Enter a world you didn’t understand, and you wouldn’t know what bit of landscape sat next to what. You wouldn’t know what was up and what was down. You wouldn’t know where to set your feet.
                The idea’s rough. I’m still playing with it. But I like it because, like all true magical frameworks, I already feel like I’m walking through it. I feel like I’m living in different worlds: people are people, but we behave differently, value things differently, see things differently if we’re chefs in the kitchen or birders in the forest or athletes on the field. We use similar sounds, maybe even the same words, but we speak different languages. (I realized that when I first heard Professor Keller discuss the “motion” of a sculpture; a few days ago, someone tried to teach me a few steps of Irish dance, and they had to start by teaching me their words). On the one hand that’s obvious, but on the other hand, whenever I stay in one place for a little while, I start thinking that this world is the world. I start thinking that the values, worries, and habits I’ve taken up here are the only values, worries, and habits that are possible. I don’t mean to say that those values are wrong. (This isn’t an argument for moral relativity; courage could be courage, and still not be the only possibility). But here I stand, in one Society–and on the other side of the Door there are so many, many more. I think it’s nice to try to step through, every now and again.

                “I don’t wait. I prepare.” -Mrs. Hapsteade in Ted Sanders’ The Box and the Dragonfly
                “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” -the Water Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows

                I wait a lot. I wait for the weekend to come around, and then I wait for the week, and work. I wait for my classes, and I wait for after my classes so I can write or read or sing embarrassingly. I wait for other people to start conversations. I wait, impatiently, for the microwave to finish it’s 90 seconds of BBBRRRRR-ing. (I wonder if there’s something wrong with my microwave). Over years and years I’ve built this habit of waiting. I’ve gotten angry when I was waiting, because it felt like wasting time. I’ve gotten frustrated with other people when they “kept” me waiting, and then, a bit BBBRRRRR-ish myself, I’ve been worse company when they showed up. And I wonder why I’ve done all that.
                (A note: resting is wonderful. Resting leaves you recharged, reanimated, reimagined, perhaps even realized or revitalized. My questions are for waiting, not resting).
                In wondering what else I could do, I’ve been looking at these two examples. First: Mrs. Hapsteade, who prepares. She aims from today to tomorrow. Earlier in the novel, Sanders comments, “Everything the future is made of is happening right now.” When I’m waiting, I’m usually preparing to keep on waiting. I’m setting myself into a holding pattern that stays a holding pattern. But I could be picking out a tree to climb, and looking to see how I’d climb it; I could be laying a foundation; I could be shifting my hips, and then when disco came back I’d be ready.
                Second: I don’t think the Water Rat’s aiming for tomorrow, like Mrs. Hapsteade, but he’s definitely not a waiter. He’s (sorry) a wader. A swimmer. A splasher, diver, paddler, laugher, talker, mocker, meandering thought-er in the water. He’s doing something, even if it’s nothing much, even if it’s “just” messing around.
                Maybe waiting is putting yourself on hold, and preparing is learning how to hold onto something. Maybe waiting is seeing the river as something that doesn’t have much to do with you, and boating is jumping in, because it does. Maybe the next time I’m waiting, I’ll prepare or mess around instead.

“[…] And re-enact at the vestry-glass
Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show
That had moved the congregation so.”
                -Thomas Hardy, “In Church”

To be natural is “such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
                -Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

                We have this idea that people should do what they’re good at, and that what they’re good at will come easily to them. I think that’s a lie.
                In Hardy’s poem, a girl from the Bible Class watches the priest, her teacher, as he speaks and inspires. She watches his gestures, hears the emotion of his voice. She trusts him, looks up to him–and then sees him step back into his vestry. The door doesn’t quite close. He turns to the mirror of his private office and recreates the motions and emotions of his sermon. She watches. It was all practiced. That makes it all seem like an act. This moment of “seeing behind the curtain,” in Hardy’s hands, is a moment of distrust and disappointment. At best, the performance feels disingenuous, manipulative. At worst it feels fake.
                I don’t think that’s fair. People can mislead us, they can lie to us, but work, practice, and revision are not in themselves misleading. I think we all work for the things we’re good at. If you read through Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, you’ll see him shaping his most powerful lines in speech after speech. Those phrases that sing themselves didn’t just happen: he shaped them, time after time.  If you look at a dancer and see grace, see a body that almost floats, you’re seeing practice and effort, too. At sixteen I watched a modern dancer perform David Parsons’ “Caught.” (You shouldn’t google it: its not itself on a screen). The dancer moves through a strobe light, and the flashes make him fly: we see his shape, caught again and again in the act of leaping, as though he wasn’t landing, stepping, breathing. But then we get a single spotlight. Inside the dancer stands “still,” but he isn’t still at all. His chest heaves. Sweat runs down his skin. We see how hard he’s working.
                I think most art is like that. Talents, too. (Whatever arguments Capote and Kerouac have, they both revise–Capote’s revisions happen in his next draft, and Kerouac’s in his next piece). We can act to hide ourselves, and we can act to show our hearts. We can practice speaking so that our lies sound convincing; we can practice speaking because there are hard things we want to say.

                My friend Aaron and I were once in Richard Wilbur’s office at Amherst College. A few months before, Wilbur had opened his Poetry Writing Seminar by saying, “It would be churlish of me, indeed, to start this by saying that you all propose to distinguish yourself in the same field as did Shakespeare and John Donne. But the fact remains that it would be true.” Sitting in his office, Aaron (himself a budding poet) asked Wilbur, “How do you find something to write about? After thousands of years and so many brilliant, talented people saying brilliant, insightful things, how do you find something to say?”
                As I remember it, Richard Wilbur looked out the window. He was a tall man, and it was easy enough to see that he had been strong when he was young. Still, when I knew him, a few quick steps up hill were enough to take his breath away. So he paused, watching the trees.
                I’d heard how Wilbur had started his class: “It would be churlish of me,” and so on. I’d wondered why. It felt like an impossible challenge to offer college undergraduates. Looking back, I think that’s why he offered it–because it felt impossible, and it wasn’t. Everything from an airplane to a representative democracy to a poem was made up by someone. The constructions around us can feel inevitable, invincible, but they aren’t. They were made by children and adults, by inspiration and compromise. They might be intricate. They might be solid. They might’ve been made by Shakespeare and John Donne. But when we reach down, we touch the same field where they worked.
                Back in the story, in the office that day with Aaron, Wilbur smiled after a long pause.
                “You know, Aaron, with any luck, you can spend sixty years saying the same good things. I know I have.”

                Richard Wilbur, a guide to me and to so many others, died last Saturday. He was playful, attentive, and kind. He was as fully immersed in art and the possibility of art as anyone I have ever known, and, brilliant himself, he deeply, truly, hopefully opened to the art of others. He taught me that the same good things–compassion, awareness, dedication, joy, respect–are needed, again and again and again. He taught me that talking and writing are like planting crops for the community. He taught me that, in one way or another, we all share the same field, and what we’re growing is a world.