subtext

We have always lived
among the ruins

civilization’s continual cascade
a spring wells up again
and flows away recursively

pick up that fallen stone
see fragments of figures
dancing in half turns

we can make something
from the scraps of nothing
remaining

“Language is a virus from outer space,” William Burroughs wrote. The panoply of symptoms this virus produces determines how we create and view the world we inhabit. Language, like a virus, replicates itself and mutates as we attempt to control it, or perhaps, adapts to our attempts to control it. More often language controls us; and, we let it.
Sitting in an aisle of a local bookstore in Austin, I read, in a book on Derrida, “Meaning is Fascist.” I laughed out loud. Totalitarian perhaps, but fascism is not the only ideology meaning takes on. Ideology, whether political, religious, social, academic, or poetic, controls through cliché. Cliché controls through limitation of thought; self-satisfied set pieces that defy interpretation, interaction and interpenetration with a reader. Tom Raworth said he did not write down to his readers because he was one of his readers. I prefer my own clichés, a totalitarianism of myself. I rarely set out with any direction in mind; meaning manifests itself without my help. I place two words in proximity and meaning appears, despite myself.
Meaning is ambiguous; ambiguity is attractive. In ambiguity, the poem is opened to multiple readings, depending upon which facet sparkles the reader’s eye. As it comes forth, the multiplicity inherent in ambiguity dazzles like light through a prism. Which half of a metaphor is being compared? The subject/object dialectic fuses rather than divides. Infinity unfolds in a grain of sand. Meaning is never set; it shifts, not evasively, but transcendently: transcendent of any one reader or writer. Variant readings occur simultaneously; each brings depth and complexity to the other as strings in a piano create and sustain resonance.

Came back to work today after having a sub on Friday (actually 3 subs on Friday because of a sub shortage in the district). After reading the notes left by the subs I thought, “My god, what did my students do.” But once again after listening to the kids as they came in randomly telling me their side I thought, “My god, where do they get these people.” My classes run on a set pattern, that I can improvise on, it is flexible yet gives enough structure that the students know what to expect. My students work. They knew what to do, but the sub would not let them; they wanted complete silence and all of the seniors sitting in little rows. When a girl who was sitting on a bean bag paused in her reading the sub fussed at her for not doing as she was told. I hate being absent. Today we had a fairly good discussion on W. Blake’s “The Schoolboy.” I am trying hard to wait longer and longer before I say anything and that works. One period when no one voluteered, I said, “Cool, let’s read our books.” One boy said something under his breath about the poem. Another one added a comment, then they were off for about five minutes. All of the comments connected to the poem and the purpose/usefulness of school. It made it a good day.

Been reading bell hooks, “Teaching to Transgress,” most of the day today in between grocery shopping for the week, cleaning house, cooking and spending some face time with the children. I think I read too much, most of what hooks says does not seem all that radical. Yes, the banking model for teaching is still the main model in my school, but then things don’t change in education. In “Schoolteacher’ Lortie describes teachers from a sociologists perspective. What I found depressing about it was it was written in 1975, based on research done in the 60’s. Not a whole lot has changed. I recognized most of what he wrote about in the school where I work. But then one of the things he wrote about was how hard it is to cause change in the school system, because the very structure of the school makes it difficult to change. So, I guess even though I have read most of what hooks says in her book before, it is still considered radical because the schools are so conservative.

A long weekend. Yesterday I sat through a professional development day. I know it is hard to meet the needs of teachers ranging from no experience to thirty plus, but it would seem that more would be offered than how to set up a word wall, or a quick look at a computer program, photostory (a more user friendly powerpoint). As I read Ladson-Billings, Successful Teachers of African-American Students, I think: Yes, this is good teaching. I have seen people doing this for the last eighteen years, sometimes I even think that I manage to teach well; then I sit in the PD day and listen to so many of my collegues ooh and aah over simplistic activities that they can use to fill time. I shudder to think of the two and half days one of the presenters spent in the computer lab having her students (high school) make a photostory slide show about five vocabulary words. It seems that more could have been accomplished by having them simply read a book. Sigh.

It has been seven days now where my back has not been a major concern. It gives me hope. Now if I can just avoid doing stupid stuff like weed eat the yard, which I did four weeks ago, which caused this last spate of pain. Work is going well; I only have a couple of butt-headed children this year. Friday I had two, count them two, “sometimes a shining moment” moments. A girl whose first book was a box car children book, (keeping in mind these are seniors in high school) after reading her second book ( a book about abuse where she identified with the girl because she had been abused before she was put in a foster home), decided to try a book she thought would be too hard, but she was interested in it, and since she didn’t have to have another book read for five weeks, she thought she would give it a try. Letting the students pick the books they are reading does so much more than forcing them to read books they are not ready for. That girl, who wants to go to college, has done more for herself as far as college prep is concerned, by deciding on her own to read a harder book, than I could have done all year forcing them to read the usual Brit lit books seniors normally read. The second “moment” was another girl who made the deeper symbolic connections in Alice Hoffman’s “Green Angel” as she was talking to me about the book. The stereotype of a light going off in her head as she talked stunned me: her eyes became bigger and brighter she smiled, and said,”Oh, man, I get it. That’s wild.” All unprompted by me, except for a single question about the character’s tattoos. Sometimes my job is great.

Work began and my attention to other things falls away. It is such an odd all consuming job; especially in the first few weeks as the routines and procedures are being taught to a new set of students who know you, at best, by reputation alone. A reputation relayed through the warped view of past students. “He’s cool.” “He’s mean.” “He’s hard; you have to read too much.” “He’s easy; you don’t do anything.”
During the passing period between first and second period, I said hello to a student I remembered from last year because he had been in the journalism class next door and I felt as if the intervening summer had not occurred. Even though I had had a long slow summer with back pain, physical therapy, no doctoral classes, and travel in New Mexico, it felt, as the cliché goes, as if I had not left. I think it is because, as I start my third year here at the high school, I finally feel comfortable. At least that is the positive spin I am putting on it for now.
Tomorrow (Monday) is open house, where the parents come to inspect the teachers. The more obnoxious, if there are any, will question me on grammar and research projects. But most will already be influenced by the opinions of their children, which, in all modesty, has been very positive for the last ten years or so. I have never taken compliments well, so I find much of their comments to be slightly embarrassing. It will be a long day.

The opposites and paradoxes return as in the prologue, as do various characters with whom Zarathustra interacts. I think it would pay off to look at each section as a whole, rather than as a simple series of events that are interpreted on their own without regard to the order in which they are placed or the section that contains them. If as Mark, the organizer of this little book klatch, says and Zarathustra returns at the end of the book to speaking to the sun, bringing his interactions with “others” full circle, then it would seem to me that the book is structured in a purposeful manner. Again I return to the question of why Nietzsche chose to write this book as a “fictional” narrative? By doing so he opens up the text to even more levels of interpretations than if he simply maintained an authorial/authoritative voice. Using the mask of Zarathustra, and the “others” Z. speaks at allows a multitude of personae from behind which Nietzsche can speak. I wonder how much, if any, the play of masks in Greek Drama is in play in this little tragedy? I don’t have an answer to this, but each scenario seems to allow space for quite a distinct performance on Zarathustra’s part. I certainly don’t think one can read what happens simply on a surface level, or at face value, as one of the reading group’s members suggested when “Of Old and Young Women” was discussed. Nietzsche provides a context, the larger framework of the section of the book, placed within the larger framework of the text itself. Wheels within wheels, with an attempt to avoid, or at least obfuscate, a single “god” position from which to view or control the meaning?

“But you yourself will always be the worst enemy you can encounter; you yourself lie in wait for yourself in caves and forests…
You will be a heretic to yourself and a witch and a prophet and an evil-doer and a villain.
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flames; how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?” (Zarathustra Penguin, Hollingsdale trans. p. 90)

The fool, the prophet and the the saint: where is Fred in all of this? Why, he’s the author of course. The author is dead, or so say lit crits since the mid 60’s. Should we care that he went nuts soon after, does it matter now to how we read the book? Yes, no, both of course simultaneously and neither. It is a narrative, not a philosophical tract, yet it is, as is Plato’s construction of Socrates and his “talks” with his boys. I think a good question to ask is: what is afforded by writing Zarathustra the way it is written? Fred could have explicated his ideas in a standard philosophical treatise, no? Why a narrative that uses the genres and tropes of religion, tragedy, quest, parables, and riddles? In the prologue Zarathustra gripes that no one has the ears to hear what he is saying, perhaps Fred was trying to embed the need to interpret the world as one will in a book where “God” a prevailing world view “is dead.” When what one is saying is being interpreted in ways unintended, as Zarathustra to the crowd waiting for the tightrope walker, and one has already declared that an absolute meaning (god) does not exist, then isn’t the only path open one where any number of creative interpretations become legitimate. All ways are my way as the Queen told Alice. We are all the center of an infinite universe, as I have said before. All ways are one way: kind of like Joe Campbell and the Masks of God, I guess.