“When I start one of these [writing] projects, I am pain-fully aware of my inadequacy. But the arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.”
                -James Michener, who in his “arrogance” tried to tell pieces of history as a story; “The Michener Phenomenon,” The New York Times, September 8th, 1985

                My mother was driving. We were on our way home, and I was twelve or thirteen. Some kind of protest had closed a street. That meant traffic. Our trip probably took an extra five minutes. As we sat there I thought, frustrated, about all the people slowed down by whatever was causing the commotion. I thought about the few people who were gathered in the closed street. How many minutes, all together, was the city losing to this traffic?
                “It’s not fair for a few people to take time from everyone’s day,” I said.
                My mother gave me a sharp smile.
                “What are you doing that’s so important that you can’t spend five minutes?” she asked. “Do you know what the protest is about?”

                A few weeks ago, students, faculty, and families sat down to hear ten different students talk about their ISPs–year-long independent studies projects, which, with the support of  a faculty mentor, take an idea and explore it. This year, one of those students wanted to talk about religions: what’s shared between them, and how people with different beliefs can come together to make a better world. Depending on who you ask, students were supposed to present for somewhere between 10 and 25 minutes. This young man talked for 43.
                A lot of people were angry. A lot of people saw arrogance in the way he held them all there, sitting, while really they wanted to finish things up, congratulate the speaker, and go home. I wasn’t there, but I get that. My friend, a teacher, was there: he gives the students around here most of his life, but he also has a family. I get angry when I think about someone demanding even more time from him.
                I also know the student. I admire him. I respect him. For him, those 43 minutes were about making peace with his parents, about seeing a way for American society to heal. They were 43 minutes to acknowledge the horrors we lead ourselves into, and look for a way out.  They were a transcendent experience. My friend, the student, felt only the opportunity to teach and learn. My friend, the teacher, wanted to go home.
                Eventually I talked to the student about all this. I thought he should know the word I kept hearing: “arrogance.” And it was arrogant. My student understood that. It would have been different (he said) if people had specifically come to hear him, but they hadn’t; it was a school event. When I talked to him about arrogance, he was also, as I expected, hurt: he looked back on that night as a source of inspiration, of possibility, and I handed it back in a different light. We got mad at each other. When he insisted he would do the same thing again, I got really mad at him–how could he demand even more time from the people who gave him so much? He got mad back–we spend so much time on this award or that award, on this self-aggrandizement or that empty tradition; don’t we need time to look at an issue that’s tearing us (his family, his country) apart?
                And I’m stuck. I don’t know how to balance those. Those who presume to understand, who trust themselves to touch the world, and change it–they are arrogant, aren’t they? They risk hurting things. They should remember that. And we need them. They hope to heal.

“He who defends everything defends nothing.”
                -Frederick II of Prussia

“The wise stay behind, and are thus ahead.
They are detached, and thus at one with all.”
                -Lao Tsu in The Tao Te Ching, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English

                I remember sitting near abandoned American airfields in Vietnam, talking to a Buddhist monk about peace, world history and his beliefs. I remember the coffeeshop he showed me a few hours later, where my cup had almost as much condensed milk as coffee. I remember a story he told me about Buddha, a river, and a thief. I remember that I didn’t understand what he meant by non-attachment. There was something there, beyond his words, inside his kind eyes, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
                I thought I was supposed to care: about my family, the environment, the world we’re creating. I thought non-attachment meant not caring about anything. Maybe I had that backwards. To be detached, Lao Tsu says, is to be connected with everything. Defending this village or that ideal chooses it, highlights it as more important than other villages and ideals. That’s one kind of value. That’s one kind of caring. It gives me something to grasp. Lao Tsu, I think, doesn’t want to give me something to grasp: he wants me to open my hand, and breath. He wants my work to be a part of all things, and to care, in a small, attentive way, for all things. There’s more to breath than I could ever hold.
                The wise “are detached, and thus at one with all.” Fortresses and troops must defend this city, or that one; this idea, or that one. Maybe hearts and minds have another way of being.
                I’d like to sit with that. And I like that this thought about a Vietnamese man’s teaching comes to me, an American, through Chinese writings. There is a lot of hurt and anger in the history of those three countries. There are plenty of moments in which we’ve gone off, to fight, to win, to defend whatever we’ve decided is worth defending. But there is also a look of calm compassion, left in my mind by a far off monk, and this quiet passage from a man long dead. A look left behind, and so ahead of me, ready for me as I walk by looking for a way forward.

                “I only know what I am taught,” I whispered.
                “That’s not true,” he said.
                                -Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: Home

                In the first book, Binti, a young woman from earth, traveled the stars and became the point of contact between two sentient species. In the second book she goes back home. She visits the “Desert People,” an ethnic group who live in villages not far from where she grew up. Her own people don’t like the Desert People: they all have a strange degenerative illness, or so it’s said. They’re uneducated, superstitious, dirty. In talking to a young man from this group, Binti slips into these learned prejudices. When he notices, she defends herself with the line: “I only know what I am taught.”
                “That’s not true,” he says.
                So what else is it that she has? Some innate understanding of compassion and prejudice? Her own experiences? A long time ago, Binti met an old woman. That woman was one of the desert tribe. When Binti talked to her, she found a person, not a savage. Is that what else she has? Or is the “something else” simply the chance to think for herself, to build something with the bits she’s been given, to hold “lessons” against each other and try to balance them? We’ve all been taught–but we’re all still learning. That means, like Binti, we have the chance to learn something new.
                Whatever else Binti has, she has the young man she’s talking to. Half a page later, he shares a chuckle with her. Perhaps that’s a kind of knowing, too.

“I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful.”
                -Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

                At first, I didn’t understand why my high schoolers were so excited about doing Night of the Living Dead. That’s probably because I wasn’t excited. I didn’t like zombies; I didn’t like the play. As we read the script, I wondered why I hadn’t insisted we do something else. I could have. The zombies surged through the windows, stumbling in their rotty-fleshy way. I should have, I thought to myself.
                The thing is, my students loved it. The young women loved it most of all. One of them, a sophomore who’d never been on stage, asked to play one of the zombies in the big finale. Another, who’d played leads with us before, had a slow death scene as she succumbed to the virus–and then came back as a zombie to bite her mother’s throat. As I told this thoughtful, compassionate young woman what she was supposed to do, her smile got wider and wider.
                “Can I really?” she asked.
                Looking back, I think I’m starting to understand. My students spend most of their time in a world that demands they be beautiful: that measures them for it, ranks them, sets them aside or admires them for their width and complexion. It’s a world that tells them they should listen, and follow, and be good. The play asked them to be something else. It asked them to be terrifying. It asked them to be strange, to stumble, to rot and fall apart and come back twisted. Whether I liked the play or not wasn’t at all important. It set them free.
                The Essex Serpent is about a widow who, as a near child, was married off to a well respected politician. In the silence of her polite Victorian society, she felt the cruelty he hid from others. She thought that was how love worked. She didn’t realize that she could try to leave until he was already on his deathbed. Then he died, and she looked at herself. She looked at the obligations she’d been handed, the ones she carried, thinking they were hers. She put down some of them, deciding she was free.
                Fulfilling our duties can show who we are. So can the obligations we push towards others, and so can the “obligations” we consciously put down.

                “I didn’t get my dad. I could never guess how he would react to things. Not ever.” –Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

                My niece, not quite two, was leading us on an adventure to the beach. It was a gentle day, with little swells licking along the shore. She wandered into the surf zone and plopped down. She looked out to sea. She looked at the sand, and stuck her fingers in it. Then a wave knocked her onto her back. She immediately twisted around to look at us–okay, not us, but at my brother standing beside me. My brother, her father, smiled.
                “Yay sweetie!” he said.
                Sometimes I think that young children live as much in our reactions to the world than in the world itself. Reading Sáenz, I don’t think that’s quite right: they live in the world, they’re hit by the wave, but they look to us to see what to make of those things. Their look asks, is this a scary thing? Is this a happy thing?
                As we get older–Sáenz’s Aristotle is in high school–we have more choices. The machinery of our own mind, our own evaluation, sits on top of what our parents see. But we still look at them. We still wonder what they see. I can’t shake the feeling that, in looking at his father’s reactions, Aristotle is wondering about one reaction in particular. What do you think of what I’m doing, dad? What do you think of me?

                Henry II: “You know, I hope we never die!”
                Eleanor of Aquitaine: “So do I.”
                Henry II: “Do you think there’s any chance of it?” -James Goldman, The Lion in Winter

                When I was younger, and my parents were recently divorced, I would travel back and forth between their cars, their houses, their lives. A hike with one would turn into lunch with the other. When I was with my mom, I often missed my dad. When I was with my dad, I often missed my mom. “Maybe you should focus on being with the one you’re with,” someone wise once told me. (I can’t remember who). Somehow my heart didn’t usually manage that kind of alchemy. I missed them. I missed the one I wasn’t with.
                I started to draw a strange conclusion. I wanted a perfect home that I pretended to remember and really, I think, imagined. I wanted my parents to be always-available and focused on me. I wanted things to be this certain, other way. They weren’t. Because they weren’t, I started thinking that finding what my heart desired was impossible. I started thinking that having desires of my own was pointless.
                In some part, of course, that’s true. The ‘ideal’ family I imagined doesn’t exist. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be healthy–just like so many of my immature fantasies (eating as much cake as I want, fighting dragons, finding universal adoration) wouldn’t be healthy. I think a big part of growing up is recognizing where desires have turned damaging, inconsiderate, or self-defeating, and growing in another way. (The desire to have power over everyone else can become the desire to have control over yourself; the desire to be the best can become the desire to share what you have; the desire to be the most loved can become the desire to love). Still, I think there’s another side.
                In The Lion in Winter, Henry and Eleanor’s lives are far from ideal. She led a civil war against him; he’s locked her in the Tower of London. They hurt each other, sometimes with what looks like relish, out of confusion and pain and habit. They use their children as pawns between them. They still, in their own bewildering way, love each other. They love their kids. They love the world and its possibilities. As a child that confused me. Their world isn’t like what they wanted, what they expected to get. They still want more time in it. Recently, that makes more sense. In that scene, in the middle of their loss and their pain, Henry and Eleanor feel something that makes them call out to each other, makes them smile, makes them laugh. The way they go about loving might be broken. Their love is not. Sharing all this–wanting and stumbling, wanting differently, and falling short–is a delight. Whatever else our world is home to, it’s home to the kind of vibrant love that hopes, together, to live forever. Feeling that isn’t pointless.
                Some desires are childish fantasies, impossible creations that would break under their own ugliness if I started fashioning them in the real world. Henry and Eleanor’s laughter tells me that some desires shine. Some desires find that this world is a fitting home, and live in it harmoniously. They’re worth feeling. They’re worth shouting about. They’re worth sharing.
                You know, I hope we never die. Do you think there’s any chance of it?

                “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.