I don’t do resolutions. But I do intend to write more regularly in the coming year.
2013
Leave a reply
Category Archives: Writing
My philosophy of education
Edited to correct some grammatical mistakes.
The new school year is about to start, and it’s customary to take a moment and philosophize. But I’m really busy, so I’m going to dust off something else and let that stand in. Back in 2010 December, I was nominated for a prize offered by Princeton University Teacher Prep. Part of the process was to submit a statement of my “philosophy of education”. I’d never actually put down on paper my educational philosophy, so I had to write it fresh.
I didn’t win the prize 
but I did get to spend some time thinking about why I’m doing what I’m doing. That’s worthwhile. And since I was once instructed by a very wise professor that anything worth writing is worth using at least three times, I figured I’d recycle my statement here. Enjoy.
The Burning Moment
or, Mikey’s Last Night
I’m scared now.
Everyone is scared now — they’re scared of me because of something I did, and now they look at me with new eyes, and I’ve caught their fear the way I’ve caught their scent. I can’t hear Little Little crying anymore, but that’s because Big Lady and Little Little are gone. But I know that Little Little is crying, somewhere, and it’s because of what I did, and the memory of her crying is breaking my heart. And breaking my heart, too, is Old Lady, who is sitting on the fluffy bed and weeping. I love Old Lady; she gives me treats and rubs my belly and grooms my fur, which I love even though I pretend it kills me. And now the Old Lady is weeping for what I did, and that is killing me. I love the Old Lady, I have loved her my whole life, and now she is weeping because of me.
I can’t remember.
I don’t know what Little Little did that brought on the burning moment. Maybe she didn’t do anything. Maybe this was just something inside of me. Maybe it’s always been waiting to get out. Everything’s been so jumbled lately. Nothing’s been the same since the Big Ride. Patty and I love to ride, to get out into the world and see it rolling past the windows like magic. But this Ride was different, so long, so long. After a while it seemed like we had lived our whole lives in the car, escaping only briefly each day on the leash, jetting outside to do our business and then back, until that night’s motel and the tomorrow’s ride. And when the Big Ride was over, we were somewhere else, not home, not in our usual world. Somewhere big and open and dry.
We never went home again.
I don’t know why, but Old Lady took us away from Loud Old Man — which was no loss at all — but she didn’t go home. She took us somewhere else, even hotter, even drier. And then another Big Ride past all the world that we didn’t know, to somewhere that wasn’t home. Things are shaped wrong here. They’re not like I know at all. Things are too cramped, and too tall. The air smells different. But that doesn’t matter, because there was no Loud Old Man, and there are children — Big Little and Little Little, who takes care of Lucky and took in Patty and me. Big Little gives us treats when she thinks Old Lady isn’t looking, even though Old Lady is looking and just smiles. Little Little plays with us all the time. Old Lady is happy and so is Big Man and Big Lady. This isn’t home but it was even better.
But I did something.
Patty lies on her bed, whimpering and watching me, and Old Lady is weeping, and Big Little doesn’t know what to do. She holds Old Lady’s hands, and then she walks away, and then she runs upstairs, into the big house that isn’t our house. And then she comes back down and holds her hands again. They’re all so scared, and I want to waddle over there and nuzzle Old Lady and comfort her, but I can’t, because they’re scared because of me. I did something, something that made Little Little cry and bleed and Old Lady weep. Something that I know is wrong, that I knew was wrong when I did it, and I can’t take it back and I can’t make it right.
The burning moment just came.
I don’t know why I did it, I didn’t want to do it, I want so much to have not done it. The burning moment just came and it took me. My jaws and my teeth did what they’ve done my whole life, what they’ve made to do, what it’s right that they do. But just then it was wrong. The burning moment just came and Little Little was there at the wrong time and I did the most terrible wrong I’ve ever done. And now Big Lady had to take Little Little somewhere else to get made better, and Old Lady sits and wrings her hands and weeps, and Patty whimpers in her bed. I just lie in the corner, silent and heartbroken, my ears flat against my skull, my tail a dead weight, my world ending.
The burning moment just came and I don’t know when it will come again or what I might do then.
I meet Patty’s eyes and I can see that she sees in mine what I see in hers, what we both know. There is a Pact, a deal from time long before anyone remembers, and I have broken it. I have broken it in the worst way imaginable, and there is no walking home from that. I have taken these people that I love and I have made them cry, made them weep, made them hurt — I have made them unsafe in their own home. I am the proud descendant of a proud line of watchers and keepers, the eyes in the night who keep the hearth safe, defenders and companions. And tonight I am the danger, I am the menace, because the burning moment just comes and I don’t know how to keep it back.
I meet Patty’s eyes and there I see understanding of what must come. I meet Old Lady’s eyes and see there infinite sadness and loss, and I know she knows, too. I have broken the Pact and I might do it again, and worse. The walk from here leads only one way and it doesn’t lead home. The Old Lady loves me, and it will be the breaking of her heart to do what has to be done. But she loves Little Little and Big Little even more and it does have to be done, because the Family must be safe. Yet it will be the breaking of her heart and I wish, oh, how I wish that I could pad over to her and say to her, I love them too, I love them because you love them and you love me, and they must be safe. You must be safe, and I cannot protect you from the burning moment, because it comes and it takes me, and I don’t know how or when. I love them because you love them, so I cannot be here with them any more. I love them because I love you.
But all that escapes my throat is a low, mournful whine, a half-note that will have to convey all my shame and remorse and love. I cannot move to her because it will make the morning that much harder, for both of us. What comes tomorrow will put so much distance between us, more distance than there is in the world, and yet not so much as I feel right now. But when the sun comes, I know, Old Lady will be strong, for her Family, and will do what must be done. And then there will be peace — peace in the house, peace in me. The burning moment will never come again and I will never hurt anyone I love again. The burning moment will dissolve in the soothing wind and I will feel peace again, forever.
I hope Patty will come, someday, and play with me again.ikoniИкониПодаръциикони
Blaze
A thrill runs through them –
swarming in the darkness cast by the night sky –
as a man steps to the microphone
And harangues..
A moment before they were a hundred lives
with a thousand cares
milling about in momentary association.
A moment later they are a seething oneness
with two hundred eyes
but a single vision that is somehow
still blinded.
It takes just a moment,
the tiniest sliver of time,
no longer than a spark takes
to ignite a blaze.
With it they blaze,
their murmurs become chants,
their chants become roars,
their roars become silence
of the most thunderous kind
full of intent
empty of craft
finding meaning in their meaningless
taking shape in their formlessness.
Through it all their leader
provides their words
massages their emotions.
validates their prejudices
In charge but not in control
he is just another expression
another organ
of the dark spirit animating their shouts
which fears the light
but revels in the fire
and loves to see it consume.
A will emerges in the crowd
Not the will of the leader
or of the people
or of any person
but the Will of generations
of a hungry jealous impulse
born of starving days,
of freezing nights,
of countless unformed terrors
of millennia of slights real or projected
of infinite loves offered and rejected
of all the individual scars borne in common
with their parents and their parents’ parents
and even unto the first generation.
This Will emerges from the crowd
diffusing from their pores,
their mouths, their eyes,
and looks upon the fire that blazes still
the center of attention yet curiously
unheeded.
The Will looks upon the leader
calling out the slogans
stoking the crowd.
The Will looks upon the crowd
Feeding the leader with their adulation
Feeding the fire with their anger and fear
Feeding the darkness with their tainted light
The Will looks upon this
small patch of world
and deciding it is good
returns Itself to slumber
knowing Its time has not yet come
But it will
again.
Drift
A single moment is a glistening sparkle
Drifting playfully on the sighing wind
Individually insubstantial, melting at your gentlest touch,
Your slightest attention,
Escaping by your very attempt to capture it
Destroyed by your every attempt to preserve it
Yet
All those moments that evade your eye
That fall around you, unnoted, unknown
Softly silently settle to the sleeping surface
There to band together in mutual company
To build and pile and grow
To dampen sound and narrow focus
Alone they were each ephemeral
But together they are brutally eternal, grown
Into an obstacle, a hindrance, making
each step an effort.
So you make an effort
Dragging one foot after the other
Crushing together these crystalline moments
That somehow landed outside your notice
While you struggle toward a place
You once knew as home
Dulled by a transcendent weariness
Knowing that should you pause to rest
You will end your days there
Smothered beneath the accumulated weight
of your frozen dreams.
The Walking Man
The walking man keeps walking through fire and through ice
He never doubles back or walks the same path twice
Though there may not be tolls, there always is a price.
The walking man keeps walking through fire and through ice
The walking man keeps walking and will not be deterred
Every step with growing pace of strides too long deferred
With every mile he leaves behind the places where he erred
The walking man keeps walking and will not be deterred
The walking man keeps walking on dirt and grass and stone
Occasionally with company; more often times alone
His footsteps ringing echoes of the troubles he has known
The walking man keeps walking on dirt and grass and stone
The walking man keeps walking not slowly nor too fast
Not shying from the future, not running from the past
But taking every step as if it might be the last
The walking man keeps walking not slowly nor too fast.
From Arizona to Missouri
In the summer of 2007, I had an epiphany. It was about, of all things, Rock, Paper, Scissors. Rock, Paper, Scissors is a non-transitive method of decision between two people, wherein each secretly picks one of the items and they compare. The key bit is that each item ties with itself, loses to one item, and beats the other. The traditional phrasing is, “Rock blunts scissors; scissors cut paper; paper covers rock”. It’s that last one I want to focus on. Paper covers rock? What the heck does that mean? How is that a win? Truth be told, it’s bothered me for literally decades; but I’ve finally come to an understanding I can accept.
In 2007, I had the opportunity to visit the national Pearl Harbor Memorial in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Commemorating a naval attack, it is fittingly primarily a naval monument. The two great anchors of the monument are the USS Arizona and the USS Missouri. The Arizona was a battleship sunk during the Pearl Harbor attacks. Though most of the Pacific Fleet was refloated and rebuilt in the years following the attack, the Arizona could not be salvaged or moved. It sits at the bottom of what was once Battleship Row. The Navy operates a tender from shore to the stark elegant observation station that has been constructed above the wreck. From it you can look down on the coral-encrusted hulk of the Arizona, watery tomb for the majority of the servicemen killed that day.
The Missouri was BB-63, the last battleship ever constructed by the United States. Now a museum ship docked at Pearl Harbor, the Missouri is still an intimidating sight. Towering over the shoreline, she bears three turrets each with three 16-inch guns capable of throwing an explosive shell a distance of 20 miles and landing within a circle of radius six inches. The Missouri was a great and terrible engine of war, and everything in her design speaks to the awesome destructive powers that could be marshaled by an enraged industrial democracy. But standing on her deck, I found the most stirring and moving part was not her giant main guns, nor the anti-aircraft machine guns still deployed on the side, nor even the capped tubes wherein Tomahawk cruise missiles had been installed in the 1980s. It wasn’t the sweeping bow or the grim turrets or the majestic bridge. It was a simple golden circle fixed to an otherwise nondescript spot on the mid-decks.
In September 1945, at that spot on the decks of the Missouri, in the waters of Tokyo Bay, representatives of the Empire of Japan signed the formal documents indicating their surrender to the forces of the United Nations, ending the Second World War. In a brisk twenty-three minute ceremony, a band of perhaps twenty men — Japanese, American, Canadian, British, and Russian — affixed their names to two copies of the surrender documents to enact the armistice. From that point on the Missouri, you can just see the alabaster arc of the Arizona memorial. Between Arizona and Missouri lie a few hundred yards of open water and a few hundred thousand American casualties. They bookend the American involvement in a war that spanned a decade and a half and claimed upwards of sixty million victims — a number that, even living at the dawn of the most dangerous century, must give us pause.
Standing on the Missouri in mid August, I overhead a museum guide relate a story that struck me immediately. It’s one of those little tales that museum guides love, a tidbit that uses the mundane to illuminate the immense. Signing the Japanese surrender document was, as you might imagine, an event of great import in anyone’s life and, as you might also imagine, it could be the source of great trepidation. The representative of Canada, L. Moore Cosgrave, was apparently overcome by his nervousness and, while signing the Japanese copy, signed on the line for the French Republic. This forced everyone following him to also sign on the wrong lines. Eventually, concern over the implications of this error lead General Richard Sutherland to cross out the names of the nations and pencil in the correct ones.
It was a minor, totally banal detail. Yet it was also a striking, astonishing thing. At that moment, General MacArthur stood in supreme command of the largest, most powerful military forces in the history of the world. Having brought the Empire of Japan to its knees, the Allied Powers held uncontested dominion over East Asia and the Pacific. How truly bizarre was General Sutherland’s consternation – between them, these men standing on the deck of the Missouri had fought the most devastating war ever known, had overseen barbarities of a nature hard to contemplate, had rained down obliteration on entire cities and had sent millions of men to their deaths to do it. Yet here they were, worried that somehow, a signature in the wrong place could render the document worthless and the exercise moot — that somehow, a misplaced name could unmake the surrender.
And that’s the hidden key. The Missouri, the last and greatest battleship, the apex of naval construction, serves as a very present icon of physical force — standing at the head of an unbroken lineage stretching all the way back to the first rock lifted by a semi-evolved ape in assault upon its brethren. Our long and bloody history attests to the power of that rock. But on that day in Tokyo Bay, it was not the battleship that mattered, or the airplanes or submarines, or even the atomic bombs looming in the background. To the assembled warriors of the most terrible conflict, what mattered was the document. Paper trumps rock.
And isn’t that the way, when you think about it? We often mistake the things as the drivers of history: wheat and salt, gold and oil. But somehow it’s the pieces of paper that seem to truly matter, to truly steer the course of human life. In 1914, a relatively minor Balkan War was transformed into the First World War by German violations of Belgian neutrality, codified in the Treaty of London of 1839. Informed that the British would go to war to defend Belgium’s neutral status, German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg expressed his shock that they would expand the war over what he infamously dismissed as a “scrap of paper”. That scrap of paper shook the foundations of Europe and remade the world order. Its spiritual successor, the Treaty of Versailles, would help engender the next world war.
The Declaration of Independence. The Constitution of the United States. The Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter — mere words on a page, just scraps of paper. But nothing more feared by tyrants, more despised by despots. It was no accident that the Soviets registered every typewriter and decreed unauthorized use of a photocopier to be a felony offense, punishable by jail time or even internal exile. They knew in their bones that they faced a greater existential threat from little scratches in black and white than from all the nuclear missiles in the world.
In a very real sense, the most disruptive weapon ever invented has been the printing press.
And there, under glass, on the gently rolling deck of the mightiest warship ever constructed, was a piece of paper that had ended a war merely because it said so. The history of the war was written in the blood of its combatants – but it was ended through ink. The document contains little in the way of soaring oratory or grand pronouncements. It is a legal thing, a dry thing, a weary thing yet resplendent. That piece of paper recognized a changed reality and so created it.
Words on a page. Scraps of paper. They give form and life to the ideas they contain. Through them we transcend the oral and enter the eternal.
Paper trumps rock — may it ever be so.
The Memory of Pain
Awhile back, I had a toothache.
I don’t mean a sort of ache-in-the-gums, vague, “oh, I’d better brush more regularly” toothache. I am talking about a full-blown nuclear meltdown in my teeth. Throughout my life I have been blessed with pretty strong teeth but now the evil forces of dental decay had their vengeance. It caught me entirely by surprise and totally unequipped to deal with the sudden implacable demands made upon me by my screaming nervous system. For more than a week, the rest of my life receded to the periphery of my cognition and I became absorbed with finding any relief whatsoever. I learned, too late and to my regret, that in matters of dental hygiene, the wages of laziness is agony.
But my agony, per se, is not what I want to write about. During this ordeal I suffered through every shade and flavor of physical pain I can imagine. At times the toothache was a dull pressure in my jaw. Other times, without warning, a spike of pain would impale me, a localized burst of misery shrinking my world down to one malfunctioning molar. There were even occasions when my ears hurt, a smooth sine wave of suffering slowly sidling from the socket of my tooth along my jaw, into my inner ear, and back. Sometimes I suffered stoically; sometimes, lights went off behind my eyes and I jumped into motion unable to bear sitting still with my pain.
There were respites. A steady stream of cold water provided fleeting but effective relief. Zinc tablets helped, apparently by poisoning the nerve or some other awful thing. A fourfold dosage of Motrin came to my rescue on multiple occasions. In the end, exhaustion itself served as a palliative. Through it all, the toothache remained – sometimes chained off in a dark corner of my mind, like a long-forgotten nightmare, but omnipresent and always trying to claw its way back into the light. I was aware of it, every texture and hue of misery, and it was aware of me. I might achieve a standoff but I knew we would keep wrestling.
That’s when I became conscious of something which I suppose I’d known but which I’d never really comprehended: The human mind cannot remember pain. We can remember the fact of pain but we (or at least I) don’t re-experience the actual sensation. This is quite different from other memories. At this moment I can cast my mind back to a concert and relive Marc Cohn leading an audience in a Gospel rendition of “Walking in Memphis”. I can feel the sunlight on my face and I can feel the excitement as I walked onto the field at Stanford Stadium to receive my degree. I can still taste the cake from the wedding of my best and oldest friend. But for the life of me I cannot recall, cannot reconstruct, cannot relive the pain of this world-shattering toothache, from a bare month ago. Even during the toothache, during those moments I was pain-free, I was conscious only of the fact of my toothache and the likelihood of its return.
I’m not complaining, of course. Pain is not the sort of thing one asks for in life. Once done with, it is happiest consigned to the past. But I still find it curious. I don’t particularly want to relive my car accident from December but I can. There’s a moment where things moved too quickly for me to comprehend, and so I do not remember anything but a blur. But my memories of pain are different. They’re not missing, exactly. It’s more like they’ve been covered by clear plastic, visible but not touchable – the difference, I suppose, between a window and a picture. Although I know that I experienced such moments, they still seem to belong to someone else. Stability and equanimity are gained by severing the connection, but something, too, is lost.
When I was twelve going on thirteen, on one ordinary June day, my father committed suicide. It happened out of the blue – my father was never moody or depressed, at least to the eyes of a twelve-year-old – and it sundered my world. I have the distinct memory of the fact of vertigo, the sudden sensation that the floor had been pulled out from under me. I can remember that I received the news at the screen door near the kitchen in the house that, up until this point, we lived. I remember clearly that I had just opened the first issue of a new magazine devoted to the then-hippest computer, a Commodore 64, and I can even recall a flash of irritation at being called away from my current article over to the kitchen door, where I was told my father was dead.
I can’t remember who told me, though, and I can’t remember what they said. My next memory is of lying sprawled face-down on our old couch, on the other side of the house, keening a wordless cry. And now, more than two and a half decades later, I might recall that moment – and I feel sympathy for that almost-teenage boy – but I cannot bring the feeling back. Without quite intending to, I have lacquered over that bit of my life mosaic. It took four years, and several intense sessions with a counselor, for me to even admit to myself that I had painted it over. I now know I felt these things, but I cannot now feel them again, not even in echoes.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t particularly want to experience pain, but once I have, I don’t want to have wasted the effort.
Takings and Leavings
Let’s just take a moment
Take stock of where we stand.
I could take you all the way
If you’d just take my hand.
I can take direction
When your writing’s on the wall
I will always take your side
But I won’t take the fall.
When you leave me, you still take me by surprise.
When you take off, you leave me holding just tears and lies.
When you take flight, I’m left lying on the ground
But when you leave me, I won’t take it lying down.
Leave us an escape route
Leave yourself some breathing space
Leave a trail of breadcrumbs
If you must leave this place.
Leave off from your crying
Leave your sorrow far behind
Leave the past in the past
Let the ghosts leave your mind.
When you leave me, you still take me by surprise.
When you take off, you leave me holding just tears and lies.
When you take flight, I’m left lying on the ground
But when you leave me, I won’t take it lying down.
Meaning Between Extremes
The fact I walk in darkness
Doesn’t mean I love the night
And the fact I didn’t see it
Doesn’t mean I’ve lost my sight.
The fact I won’t surrender
Doesn’t mean I want to fight.
And the fact it all went wrong,
Doesn’t mean it wasn’t right.
The fact I never said I love you
Doesn’t mean I didn’t care.
And the fact you never judged me
Doesn’t mean that you were fair.
The fact I never touched you
Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t dare
And the fact I had to leave you
Doesn’t mean I won’t be there.
You only spoke in Love and Hate, you dealt in Black and White
And you knew that something must be Wrong if you couldn’t prove it Right.
You found certainty in simplicity, and meaning in extremes,
And I was just another thing misplaced among your dreams.
The fact our feet were off the ground
Doesn’t mean we ever flew
And the fact you held all the cards
Doesn’t mean you ever knew.
The fact you never spoke a lie
Doesn’t mean that you were true
And the fact you chose to say good-bye
Doesn’t mean I said it too.