The White Whale

Lessons from The Black Snake

While some English teachers shy away from it, I love poetry. Every year I teach two of my favorites, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. I never lose interest in them, and while teaching, of course, I become the student, too, seeing these poets and their work through the eyes of my high schoolers. I practice beginner’s mind, according to Zen, coming back to these poems with a fresh perspective that deepens my understanding.

Most recently, I’ve come back to Mary Oliver’s “The Black Snake,” a poem included my textbook for English 9. This was my introduction to Oliver, the first poem I ever read by her. When she died this past January, the language and imagery of this poem flooded my thoughts, and rightly so, because it’s a poem about death. Its suddenness. Its terrible weight. Its certain coming. Those are the words, especially, that I couldn’t shake.

To summarize, the poem relates finding a dead snake killed in the road by a truck. The poet uses some interesting and ironic imagery, describing the snake as both “beautiful as a dead brother” and “useless as an old bicycle tire.” The speaker, who is moved by the snake’s death, going so far as to place it at the edge of the road, uses the snake to reflect on the nature of death. “Its suddenness. Its terrible weight. Its certain coming.” It’s heavy stuff. But she also writes about that instinct, that something deep inside us, keeping our thoughts of impending death at bay. In the poem, she calls it the “light at the center of every cell.”

When I taught this poem a couple weeks ago, the students seemed captivated. Maybe it was the topic, since the day before we were discussing a rather innocent poem, Vachel Lindsay’s “An Indian Summer Day on the Prairie,” and now we had moved on to something more serious. Or maybe I simply lucked out, chancing upon the right words to draw them into the lesson. I spoke about the likelihood of dying in a car crash versus a plane crash—how driving is probably the most dangerous thing we do—and statistically far and away more dangerous. Yet, we all showed up to school, most likely without giving a second thought to our possible death that morning. And yet again, statistically speaking, there were probably several people who didn’t make it to their destinations and already died that day. But all of us, everyone in the classroom that morning, we safely “crossed the road,” unlike the snake in the poem.

At the time, although my students didn’t know it, my beginner’s mind was in overdrive, because I hadn’t preplanned these remarks. Sure, I had written “discuss the poem” into my lesson plans, but I hadn’t worked out my comments or the connections I wanted to make with my students. It was happening in the moment, as I read the body language of my classroom full of students. At least one student, too, had recently been affected by the sudden death of her grandmother. She had missed an entire week of school, and as I spoke, that consideration twined itself around my thoughts. When I taught the poem in the afternoon class, some of the magic of the earlier class had already faded, because now I had hoped to recreate the script from earlier, expecting a certain outcome that would either fail or succeed. That afternoon class was good, but it was different, having become a more deliberate act by then. The beginner’s mind had passed.

The next day we moved on to more poetry, but the lessons from the black snake don’t end there. This past week, when the Notre Dame cathedral burned, the poem was on my mind again. This time, as a reminder, of the things we often take for granted, the things we assume will be around generation after generation, but then suddenly disappear. The Twin Towers obviously come to mind, but Notre Dame seemed immortal, having been around for so many centuries. It’s easy to assume, like the black snake, that crossing the road, that moving forward, there’s nothing to worry about. But then a fire brings sudden and certain devastation, reminding us once again of the true nature of our world. As Robert Frost has said, nothing gold can stay. That’s the dark reality of the black snake, but the other lesson is that our indomitable spirit, the light at the center of every cell says, no matter that reality, we cannot remain curled up, hidden away from the world. We continue to move forward, and most of us, maybe with a little more caution, always cross the road again.

The Things We Carry

I had just enrolled in the graduate program at The Ohio State University when I read “How to Tell a True War Story” for the first time. The author, Tim O’Brien, was unknown to me, but I found the story, included in the book I’d be using to teach freshman composition, both fascinating and challenging. O’Brien tells the story of Curt Lemon, a Vietnam soldier who steps on a landmine, exploding high into the trees of the jungle. But the story isn’t really about Curt, but rather how the remaining soldiers cope with his death. And the narrator readily admits, the details of the story, well, they aren’t necessarily true, but stretched and edited and even changed to better get at the real truth, which is the feelings these soldiers carried through Vietnam.

Soon I encountered another story also by Tim O’Brien, “On the Rainy River,” anthologized in a book I was hoping to give my students as a supplement to the required reading. Here, O’Brien tells the story of a young man, barely out of high school, who drives to the edge of Canada hoping to dodge the Vietnam draft. It’s a surreal story that gave me chills. By the time I had read The Things They Carried, the novel comprised of woven short stories about Vietnam and the proper place where these two stories reside, I had fallen hard for O’Brien. My final semester teaching freshman composition, I taught the entire novel for the first time.

Fast forward, almost twenty years. Eventually I knew The Things They Carried would end up in my high school curriculum. When I ordered brand new textbooks a few years back, I was also offered copies of O’Brien’s novel. I jumped at the chance, eager to dive right in, but wary, too, knowing that the subject matter is sometimes graphic and provocative. The stories cover, among many other things, witnessing death for the first time, not living up to your parents’ expectations, and facing the despair that comes with failure. Tough stuff, not only for high school students, but adults, too. O’Brien has said in interviews that he wrote this novel for adults, and he’s surprised so many young people are reading it in their English classes. I’d say, however, that’s where the book belongs. Like the characters in the novel, my students carry so many things, often traumatic and disturbing, that I can’t see.

Reactions to the book have been positive. Having carried this book for a long time now, I’m still intrigued. I’m still trying to make sense of it, noticing again and again its beauty, complexity, and pattern. It has had such an effect on me, so much so that for the past two weeks, I’ve been listening to the book on Audible, mostly while driving back and forth to work. It’s only deepened my love. Last Thursday, while driving the dozen or so miles to soccer practice, I said to my son, who’s a Breaking Bad fan, that’s Bryan Cranston reading the novel. I can’t think of anyone else I would rather hear deliver the novel, and before we had parked the car, Nate had already asked if there was a copy of the book at home.

Next week, my students begin new material, moving on from their study of the novel, but I hope some of them carry it with them longer. Not long ago, I felt fortunate to hear Tim O’Brien give a reading in Binghamton on a rainy Saturday night in March. My wife, who came along with me, found herself captivated by his sincerity. In his remarks about The Things They Carried, he said, “A story helps us to feel and not just to think. It appeals to our whole being, our emotions and our intellect.” With that in mind, as a culminating activity, I assigned my classes the task of writing about something they have carried. It didn’t need to be a physical object, necessarily, but I told them it couldn’t be their phone. In the past, students have written about so many interesting things—a long held depression, the suicide of a close relative, and objects, too, such as a wallet passed down from father to son or a simple smooth stone that touching lightly provides comfort. I’m always surprised by what they share with me, and I’d like to think that reading the novel inspires the courage for students to tell their own stories. It’s my hope, at least, that as O’Brien said, students will see that telling stories helps us feel with a deeper understanding.

Since I always show my students a model essay, here’s mine. Those who have been reading my posts for the past few months will probably recognize some common themes.

The Pen I’ve Carried for Over One Hundred Days

It doesn’t seem like much, but for me it’s a big deal. I’ve been carrying the same pen around with me for over two marking periods. Over one hundred days. And no, the pen is nothing special. On the first day of school, before all the students—all of you—arrived, I went to a meeting empty handed, and someone lent me a black plastic pen, which I promptly bogarted upon leaving the meeting. It was shiny. It had black ink. It had a push-button tip. It felt comfortable. Most importantly, I later realized, it had a clip where I could attach it to my shirt. I think it was a promotional giveaway, too, because it also sports a little PSEA logo, which is the teacher’s state union organization to which almost all teachers belong.

Somehow, the pen has stayed with me. That’s unusual. And we’ve grown quite close. It may be in my school bag with all the papers I need to grade. Ugh. Other times it’s in my pants pocket, safely out of sight but right where I need it. Usually, I clip it to my shirt, and I’ve found I like it there. It’s handy. It makes me feel prepared. I’m ready to sign my name to that all important pink pass, to write one hundred at the top of a perfect paper, or to copy that ten word vocabulary bellringer assignment. And the clip, the ALMIGHTY CLIP atop the black plastic pen, has made it possible, at least it feels that way. It is the scabbard to my pen sword. When I have that pen clipped to my shirt, I am prepared for battle.

But all joking aside, though, there is an important lesson I’ve taken away from carrying that pen. I’ve always been a teacher that burns through boxes of pens like a wildfire. I typically lose them left and right, hand them out like candy at a parade, and generally buy them in bulk at the beginning of each school year. But this year, something clicked, and I’ve used almost one pen exclusively; and although I’ve almost lost it a few times, it’s still with me. For me, I guess, it proves that I’m capable of changing something about myself, getting better at something that I failed at, miserably. It reminds me of that line we read from Thoreau’s Walden, that this may be the year that drowns all your muskrats. Those lost pens, year after year, in a way were some of my muskrats. And yes, there are still other muskrats to be drowned but carrying the pen—weirdly enough—makes me feel better about it all.

Becoming a Transparent Eyeball

Often a good example brings about fresh understanding. As I wrapped up my teaching of Transcendentalism this year, I had a chance to watch Free Solo, which recently won an Oscar for best documentary. It was incredible, in the very real sense of the word, but I also found that I had a new reference point for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous metaphor, “I become a transparent eyeball.”

Some context, first. In a nutshell, Emerson wanted to build an appreciation for the positive role that nature plays in our lives. In his essay Nature, Emerson sees the natural world as a restorative force, one freely available to everyone. He writes about nature making us feel younger and renewing our faith in the world. It’s easy to take this for granted today, because this seems so obvious, but in 1836, that viewpoint was radical.

Take the forests of Pennsylvania, for instance. The whole state of Pennsylvania, Penn’s Woods, was almost entirely covered in trees. Nearly 29 million acres of virgin forest stood here at one time. By 1900, about two thirds had been clear-cut, stripped bare right to the ground. Nature represented a commercial resource.

Emerson fought against that mindset, writing about becoming a “transparent eyeball” in the woods. This metaphor suggests a deep connection to nature that’s still new for people in the middle of the 1800s, for a transparent eyeball blends into the landscape, becoming one with its surroundings. It’s neither agricultural nor industrial, and the metaphor suggests a kind of harmlessness because the eyeball can’t be seen—it’s “transparent.” Of course, even calling himself an “eyeball,” suggests that he’s more passive observer than active participant. He doesn’t go into nature with a chainsaw or the thought of filling an empty wallet, but rather a sense of wonder.

Drawing of Emerson's Transparent Eyeball from Nature

So that brings me to Alex Honnold, the climber at the center of the documentary film Free Solo. His story is fascinating, in part, because Honnold represents a kind of ultimate observer. He has spent his life climbing mountains. For Honnold, however, the pinnacle of his universe is the free solo, climbing alone without any ropes. The danger is obscene. Imagine clinging to a bluff 3000 feet above the ground, and any false move, any mistake plummets you to your death. That’s how Honnold spends much of his time.

After watching Free Solo, I can say that Honnold is not only about taking extreme risks. He’s about observing something so carefully, so exactly, that the danger dissipates over time. The movie chronicles his free solo ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, and as I watched the film, I could see his sport was built on keen observation of natural environments. Indeed, he becomes Emerson’s transparent eyeball. In his quest, he attends to every single depression, every minute change in the rock face during his climb. It took him weeks of practice to learn his route up the mountain, to observe every detail along the way, memorizing the holds and body positions to be able to make the climb without the aid of ropes. And when he finally does it, his connection to the mountain can be seen in his unhesitatingly sure movement to the top. To say awe inspiring is an understatement.

And at the end of the day there’s nothing left behind on the mountain. It’s clean. It’s non-destructive. It’s transparent, like Emerson says, in contrast to those who scale Everest every year, leaving behind all the human signs of their presence. In Honnold’s world, there are no ladders, no permanent rigging, no air canisters left behind on the mountain. He’s touching the rock face with his bare hands and pushing his toes into tiny holds overlooked by most of us, and that’s the greatness of his climbing. He’s able to see something in nature that many of us cannot even imagine.

I sketched the drawing featured with this week’s post. Every year, as my students read excerpts from Emerson’s Nature, I include an assignment where they must illustrate a piece of figurative language and then explain its meaning. My sketch alluded to some classroom happenings, such as one student’s love for fancy shoes and another student’s Walt Whitman test, which I had misplaced for a time. The axe in the stump is from another famous metaphor, the speckled-axe in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which my students learned about earlier in the year. Like good real life examples, drawings also push us toward deeper meanings.

The Pink Floyd Connection

It’s been almost thirty years since I first wrote about Pink Floyd. To be honest, I never felt compelled until last Thursday, when my friend Dave, who co-teaches my English 11 class with me, mentioned Pink Floyd while we reviewed the words for a vocabulary test. More on that later, but for now, let me take you back to 1989.

I’m in seventh grade, reading about Pink Floyd for a report for school. I listen to a lot of their music, not the deepest cuts, but the best stuff. The Dark Side of the Moon. The Wall. Wish You Were Here. And more recently, I’ve bought the live album Delicate Sound of Thunder on cassette, which fascinates me with its pictures and liner notes. I’m also learning to play guitar, which is mostly due to my love of David Gilmour, the lead guitarist from Pink Floyd. Naturally, when Mrs. O’Connor, my English teacher, assigns a report, I pick my favorite band, and she lets it ride. I find an article or two and complete my outline. Soon I’m writing the essay, and when it’s done, I slip it into a blue folder, decorating the front with a couple pictures and blazing the band’s name neatly across the top. I can still remember walking into class with that report in hand.

Thoreau in the Dark Side of the Moon Album Cover

Here’s the reason that story’s important. After publishing last week’s post about Walden, I thought I had finished with Henry David Thoreau for a while, but then the Pink Floyd connection surfaced. We’re reviewing the vocabulary for our Transcendentalism test, discussing the word fritter, which means to waste money and time on inconsequential things—a thoroughly Thoreau theme—and Dave, who often surprises me, brings up the lyrics of “Time” from The Dark Side of the Moon. Boom! There it is, in the opening lyrics no less, and I’d never made the connection. Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day / Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way. And with that revelation, I get nostalgic about that essay I wrote so long ago, when I was listening to Pink Floyd almost every day. It’s not déjà vu, but some other feeling, suggesting the hidden connectedness of our actions. Maybe a happy coincidence, though I’d like to think of it as more than that.

Later I keep digging. I’m reading the lyrics to “Time” when I make another connection: Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way. It just keeps getting better; I mean this is surely a direct allusion to Thoreau’s famous line in Walden, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Soon I’m Googling keywords, digging for more confirmation, and I’m beside myself when I find an entire essay comparing the themes of Thoreau to The Dark Side of the Moon. I’m scrolling pages, looking at blog posts mentioning the same thing, too. I even learn that Thoreau’s famous aphorism about “quiet desperation” may be not entirely original. It’s all good, though, and pretty soon, I’m up in my attic, digging through boxes, looking for that old report. I still have it after thirty years.

So where does it all begin? Was it with the mention of the word fritter? Was it the moment I chose to include the word on that vocabulary list several years ago? Or was it when I heard The Wall for the first time, playing through my father’s car stereo? I’m not sure, but there’s this line from Walden that comes to mind. “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us . . . There is more day to dawn.” It’s from the final paragraph of the book, and suggests the end is really not the end, but perhaps only a beginning. There’s something more to see, more to understand, more to connect. Maybe we’re just on the dark side of the moon.

From the Raven to the Muskrat

A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting at a desk in the back of my classroom. My students sat quietly, each working to complete the test before them, and it was one of those rare moments where I could just relax, observing everything around me. I took a deep breath. I’m a high school English teacher. This is my classroom. It’s a Tuesday.

And as I looked around, I noticed all the birds. It’s been organic, I might say, but I’ve collected quite a few over the years. My oldest is a large drawing of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the book cover with a ball of string and the tree’s knot hole. I also have a smaller mockingbird picture, more recently given to me. There’s a scarlet ibis, often mistaken for a flamingo, that one of my students painted for me after reading the story by James Hurst. Of course, I have a few ravens. One is a cardboard prop I made long ago, and every year while teaching “The Raven,” I run across the floor, jump as high as I can, and slap it to the wall above my door. Sometimes it stays there all year. A couple years ago a student painted me a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe with a raven superimposed on his face, so that’s up there on my front wall too. That’s a total of five birds, but there’s more. This year, I finally learned how to string the origami cranes that I make with my students as part of their study of Hiroshima by John Hersey, and some of those hang from the ceiling.

All this gets me thinking about animals in literature. In addition to those already mentioned, we read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire” almost every year. Sometimes we read The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver, which uses lots of bird symbolism. There’s Of Mice and Men, too, where Steinbeck describes the death of Candy’s old dog at the hands of Carlson. And of course, when I think about epic stories and animals, Moby Dick rises to the surface.

The raven, however, might be the most recognizable of these literary creatures. After all, only one sports team, the Baltimore Ravens, is named for a poem about a fictional animal. I find this very satisfying, and I think Poe would be honored. That bird, most indeed, refused to fly away, and never-nevermore did Poe find a better symbol for despair that just doesn’t quit.

Henry B. Kane's woodcut image of a muskrat

But there’s another favorite of mine, Henry David Thoreau’s muskrat.

In recent years, this muskrat has become more sentimental to me than ever. It’s found a home with me alongside the other animals. And whereas my last post about Thoreau focused on a passage from the beginning of Walden, the relevant passage here comes from the last few paragraphs of the book. Thoreau writes, “The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.” I just love this passage, especially for its stark contrast to the raven.

Whereas Poe’s raven is all about hopelessness, the narrator’s failed attempt to recover from the despair caused by a dead lover, Thoreau’s muskrat is a symbol of hope. He says “the life in us is like water in the river,” trying to make us understand there’s always more, always greater possibilities within the confines of our lives. And those pesky habits, those troubles we’ve come to live alongside like varmints in our house, those “muskrats” so to speak—well, Thoreau says, yes, we can get rid of those. To me, that’s so hopeful. Perhaps that’s the most powerful lesson in all of Thoreau, one which Poe’s biography, to the best of my understanding, suggests he never seemed to learn. We can change our lives. We can drown our muskrats.

The picture included with this week’s post is located at the end of a 1951 edition of Walden published by W. W. Norton & Company, which was illustrated by Henry B. Kane. He is known for his nature drawings. The muskrat seems to be afloat, at least for the moment, while the flood waters rise.

I Would Fish Deeper

It’s almost that time again when I teach Thoreau’s Walden. For me, it’s become a perennial favorite, and as we all grow more and more connected to our phones and other digital devices, reading some Henry David Thoreau may serve as an antidote. At least that’s what I hope for my students. I suffer no illusions, however, for at best, it’s barely a scratch in the surface of their worlds.

Nevertheless, Thoreau comforts me. At its heart, Walden is about recognizing the superficial lives we all too often accept. Yet it’s easy to misinterpret his words about living “deliberately” in the woods, as my students often do, as a call to live life to the fullest. I try to set them straight. Thoreau didn’t want us to gorge ourselves on experience, to drink in everything without measure, but rather to slow down, to simplify, and to live a deeper life.

Walden is filled with metaphors for this deeper life, and every year I find more. One of these has both challenged and plagued me so much that I’d like to spend a few minutes discussing it. Many readers will probably recognize the familiar line. “Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.” It’s just perfect—ready to be ripped from the page and plastered on a shirt or a hat. My father-in-law, in fact, has a decorative metal sign with those words neatly set against the backdrop of a man fishing in a stream.

Fishing on the Meshoppen Creek in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania

But here’s the rub, for as I understand it, Thoreau draws this metaphor to describe our shallow and superficial lives. I admit—I was taken in by the turn of phrase, too, and it took me a long time, years really, to understand that what comes after that line is ever more important. He actually writes, “Time is but a stream I go a fishing-in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one.” There’s still more to that paragraph, but this should suffice my purpose here.

With greater context, the true meaning of these words takes shape. The first sentence is really just a prelude, and a contrasting metaphor, for the imagery of the second half, which contains the point of his message. Indeed, Thoreau proposes something more from life than just a stream. He uses the familiar metaphor of time passing like a river but changes the direction. He turns it vertical, reflecting upon the shallow nature of the water before him. The march of time seems weak, too, as Thoreau reduces the river to merely a “stream” and a “thin current” for the fisherman.

“I would drink deeper,” Thoreau says. And that’s the important part.

Thoreau wanted a deeper understanding of life. He wanted to strip away superfluity to better explore what lies at the core of our experience. He wants to “fish in the sky,” because in contrast to the stream, there is no bottom, but rather an infinite deepness. And for him that’s exciting. The stars in the sky are so far away, so very deep, that they become foreign and unaccountable. The deepness actually confounds him, which as I have said, Thoreau finds thrilling.

And in the end, it’s all quite beautiful. It gets the job done, so to speak, but only when the reader realizes the first line is only scratching the surface of the message. I think it’s interesting, too, that the structure of the passage even mimics Thoreau’s theme. That sentence that starts the paragraph with a familiar metaphor seems to suggest the way we lead our lives, looking for meaning at the top of our paragraphs rather than taking time to read through the whole thing. We skim along the surface, taking the easy way, avoiding complexity, because it takes time and patience to understand the world. Once in a while, we get lucky. We catch the meaning, but most of time we need to fish deeper.

Thanks to Bill Kern from the Countryside Conservancy for providing the picture of Meshoppen Creek in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.

John Jacob Astor

The weekend before Christmas my family and I went to NYC to see a college basketball game at Madison Square Garden. The trip was sponsored by the basketball booster club at my son’s high school, and besides watching the game, we had a few hours to explore the city on our own. I knew it would be crowded, but I didn’t realize the horde of tourists who descended upon the sidewalks at this time of year. And of course, we were part of that mass pushing our way toward the tree at Rockefeller Center like pilgrims on their way to Mecca.

Besides the people, the basketball game, and the gifts still needing to be purchased, I had Bartleby on my mind. My juniors were reading Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener” at the culmination of our unit on Dark Romanticism. It was their first encounter with Melville.

As for me, I’d been reading about Bartleby since college. I’d shared the story with some of my high school classes over the years; other times, I preferred just moving on to something a little more palatable to their tastes such as Emerson and Thoreau. Maybe just as difficult, but certainly less enigmatic.

This time around, instead of reading the story, I decided to listen on my Echo while I graded papers, figuring why not get two things done at the same time. What stood out, at the beginning of the story, was the narrator’s esteem for John Jacob Astor. You sense that this man was someone influential, someone well-respected by the narrator, and who obviously becomes a sort of foil to poor old Bartleby and his preference for doing nothing.

As I began to fall under Bartleby’s spell, my daughter, who might be a bit precocious for a sixth grader, wandered into the kitchen and quickly began interrogating me. As I tried to explain, she said, “And you’re making your class read this? Your poor students.” I chuckled. She may have been right. “Well I prefer not to listen,” she said, leaving me alone once more.

Call me weird, but contrary to my daughter’s opinion, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Melville’s story, and now, with it fresh in mind, I was pushing and pulling my family through the swarm at Bryant Park. Eventually, we found some breathing room in front of the New York Public Library, and after some quick photos on the steps, I spotted something special in the building’s facade. There, at the top of the building, was inscribed a dedication to John Jacob Astor.

john-jacob-astor-inscription

He wasn’t fiction. He was real. John Jacob Astor! I shouted his name, letting the sound roll off my tongue as Melville writes in his story. John Jacob Astor! He was real. I shouted his name again, risking that I might be disowned at that very moment by my family.

I should have known, perhaps. But no one ever told me, there wasn’t a footnote or anything to suggest the reality of John Jacob Astor, and I had never been to the New York Public Library until that day in December. Now, of course, I know that Astor, at the time of his death in 1848, was the richest man in America, and in his will, he left the equivalent of 11.6 million dollars to build the city’s library. Now I know. And yet I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is something so beautiful about chasing the truth, especially when it’s serendipitous. It was definitely better, and I prefer it that way.