Tag This Morning

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about words.

I’ve written about 700,000 words worth of books, over five (longish) novels. I’ve no doubt I’ve written twice that in blogs and essays and book reviews, and probably its equal again in journals and diaries, notes and letters and the various ephemeral thoughts that find their way onto paper. That means I’ve written somewhere above 3,000,000 words in my lifetime.

How many of them were the right word? The best word? Twain said that the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning-bug, and nobody has said it better. Not all of mine are the best words, not by any stretch; but I think some of them have been. Sometimes. and even where they weren’t the perfect word, the best word, quite a few of them have been good words. And when the total is 3,000,000 words, “quite a few” — well, that’s something. It’s something.

I wonder how many people have read my words. I’ve read my essays to students for as long as I’ve been teaching, and sometimes my short stories or even an excerpt from one of my books; that’s around 3,000 students over the last twenty years. Three thousand people. And of course, I’ve written notes and comments and such on their work, and answered their questions and concerns in emails now to the tune of thousands of words, tens of thousands of words. I’ve never sold a lot of books, but I have sold some, and I’ve had blogs, with some number of readers, for more than a decade.

How many times have my words made people smile? Made them widen their eyes? Made them feel angry, or sad, or touched? How many times have my thoughts made someone else think something truly powerful, a sky-shattering inspiration, a ground-shaking memory, a tidal wave of thoughts?

I think those things have already happened. I think I’ve done them several times. I have. With my words.

This morning, I’m proud of that.

This morning, I hope I get to do it more, and more, and more.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about my wife.

Today is her birthday.

I have presents for her, and I have a card, and I have my excited “Happy Birthday!” all ready to go. I’m going to take her out to dinner tonight, and I’m going to buy her something delicious for dessert, and I’m not going to tell the waitstaff that it’s her birthday because she hates when the waiters sing the song to her. Even if she gets a free dessert.

But I can’t possibly say all the things I want to say about her. I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the words: even me, even with all the words that I’ve written over the years, I still don’t have enough words to say how perfect she is. I want to use all the cliches, because (as good cliches do) they all fit: she is my everything. She is my queen, my angel, and my goddess. She is my better half, and my partner in crime. She completes me. She carries my heart.

None of that is enough.

But that doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter what I call her, what goes in the blank of “She is my ____________.”

That matters is the three words before the blank.

She is mine. And I am hers, but today I am thinking about the fact that she is mine.

There is nothing and nobody that I am happier to say that about, on this entire Earth, in this whole universe, in all of time forwards and backwards from this moment, this day that is her day. She is mine.

Happy birthday, my love.

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This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I want to be half as fascinated by anything as my dogs are by the smell of old shit.

And this morning, I’m wondering: why can’t I be?

When we go on walks (For those who don’t know, I have two dogs, Roxie and Samwise. Here’s a video of them going out in the snow.) my dogs will often stop to investigate interesting sniffs. Roxie prefers checking out holes, looking for small critters who will be her friends; Samwise is looking for markings from other dogs so he can understand them better and have meaningful dialogue. So it’s mostly  Sam who stands over old feces and sniffs it carefully, meticulously; I suspect he either has a very sensitive nose (even for a dog), which allows him to discover more interesting bits of smell than Roxie can, or a very sensitive mind, one that allows him to think more interesting thoughts about the smells he detects, and so he must take longer to think those thoughts through.

Now I don’t have an acute sense of smell; I don’t have any particularly acute senses, actually. I used to have remarkable hearing, but I’m 44 now, and it’s fading a bit. But I do have a very sensitive mind, and it allows me to think more interesting thoughts. Certainly more interesting than Roxie. (That’s okay, she is sweeter and more exuberant and funnier than I’ll ever be.) So while I don’t care much for the smell of old dog crap — or even new dog crap — or any crap, really — the things I do care for, I can take time with, time to think through my more interesting thoughts. I just have to let myself have them: have to pay attention to what is in front of me, and let my mind take it where it will, think whatever I can think.

I wonder where my mind will take me.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about pride. Where pride comes from, what makes it valuable and what makes it problematic. My central thought is this:

The price of pride is pain.

Christianity says that pride is a sin; I don’t agree, though I certainly recognize that pride can lead to sin —  arrogant dismissal of others’ value, nationalism, racial divides and conflicts, a hundred other ways that pride “goeth before a fall,” as they say. I also see where pride is strength: pride in my accomplishments, as a writer, as a teacher, as a human being, is often what keeps me going in the face of continued struggle and defeat. Pride lifts up the downtrodden and helps  them to fight back against oppression, often in the face of overwhelming odds. There is value in pride. It also may be that pride is essentially inevitable, that in a culture that constantly appraises the value of everything as good or bad, better or worse than everything else, there is no way a rational person could not see which of their traits are on the approved list, and feel a bump, or a jump, in their worth.

But like everything else that has value, pride has a cost. I think that pride has to be earned. I say it is pain, but I include painstaking effort in that; anyone who has fought hard for a skill or an ability or to overcome a prodigious obstacle knows that pain is not only limited to sharp injuries. There’s a great scene in To Kill a Mockingbird when Scout and Jem are trying to find anything in their father Atticus Finch to be proud of, and then they find that he is a crack shot with a rifle; when they ask their neighbor Miss Maudie why Atticus never bragged or showed off his ability, she says that Atticus knows better than to take pride in something that is a gift from God. His ability, the steady eye and steady hand that lets him hit everything he aims at, was not earned: it was inborn. (There’s an argument to be made that practice and training made him better, but this is both a simplification and a speculation on Maudie’s part. The point remains.) I am an American, but I did not work for that: it was an accident of my birth. I take no pride in accidents. I do take pride in the actions I have taken, the burdens I have carried, for the sake of my society, and which have made that society better; I vote, I pay taxes, I participate in the cultural and political conversations, and probably most importantly, I teach. I think that those who serve, both in civil society and in the military and public safety, have earned and deserve their pride in themselves and the country they helped to build and maintain. They (we, if I may be bold) have paid for it in effort and sacrifice, and often (they, not me) in suffering and loss.

I want to say that those who do not earn their pride before they hold it, flaunt it, and press eagerly forward to show it, chins out and hands balled into fists, will pay for their pride in suffering afterwards: that the fall will come, that they will be humbled and humiliated. But of course that doesn’t always happen. The universe is not just. There is an easy way that people with unearned pride can avoid the pain themselves, and that is simply to move the suffering off of themselves and onto others, and thus you have the Ku Klux Klan, and domestic abuse, and bullies. And Donald Trump.

But for those who are not that, who are not victimizers and warmongers, the point I want to make is that pride must be earned.

And the price of pride is pain.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, honestly, I’m thinking about how much I have to teach my students still, and how little time I have to do it. I’m thinking about whether or not literature can be parceled  into discrete packets called “reading assignments,” and whether there is any point to assigning reading homework to people who don’t read. I’m thinking about whether it’s better to comment extensively on essay drafts, or to hand them right back and just say, “Make it better.” Independence or guidance?

On the one hand I have the pedagogical establishment in this country, which wants me to differentiate and scaffold and make all learning student-centered, preferably student-generated project-based collaborative group multimedia discovery projects. I honestly have no idea how to do this, but I suspect it is both transient and unsustainable: that too much effort would go into planning and organizing the perfect project units, and in pre-teaching protocols for students to follow in generating their own discovery learning projects, and in trying to make the groups work fairly, particularly with low-interest students; and within five years, pedagogists will have discovered a new element that should be added — though nothing will ever be taken away. The new element will not make this more practical.

And on the other hand I have Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery Herrigel was a German philosophy professor who studied traditional Japanese archery in Japan, and his book is credited with helping to popularize Zen in the west. His archery master has the perfect system: he shows the students how to do the thing — how to draw the bow, aim, and fire at a target (Also, most importantly, how to breathe) — and then he has the students do it, and he points  out their mistakes. Then he does it again. And again. That’s it: modeling and expert critique. There is no explicit  instruction at all.

There is precisely one reason why I have to rush, why I have to assign reading packets rather than whole novels, or better yet, just read whole novels with my students and discuss them as we go, and it is time. The determination that one class lasts for fifty minutes, that one week is five classes, that one semester is eighteen weeks, that one year is two semesters, that an education is thirteen years. We are in a hurry, all the time, forever, particularly with our children. That’s what ruins everything.

If I could teach anything, I would teach this world to take its time.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about thinking.

This morning I am thinking about the brain like it’s a computer. (Which means that this morning, I’m right. Also that I got the idea from the author Myke Cole. On Twitter.) The brain can do almost limitless work, but it isn’t actually limitless: there are a finite number of thoughts that I can think in my lifetime. It’s a large number, an imponderably staggering number — but still finite. When I give my brain a chance, it can think of some excellent creations. But too much of the time, I decide that my brain is tired, and that it could use some downtime.

I don’t think my brain actually gets tired. I’m sure it runs out of resources, runs low on fuel and energy; but usually, I suspect that the issue is that I am tired of my brain, and I want it to stop. I want to shut it off. I try to sleep, and sometimes I fall asleep with no trouble, the brain flipping into Sleep mode with the press of a button, the closing of my eyes; but sometimes, it keeps going, trying to finish a particular thought-cycle; it is worst when that cycle gets stuck in a loop. Around my anxieties, usually. But just the fact that my brain can keep going even when my body and soul are entirely exhausted tells me: my brain doesn’t get tired. It’s a machine. It runs for as long as I keep it plugged in — and though I don’t remember my dreams, I have them, which means it keeps running even when I shut it down.

This morning I suspect that my brain is most insistent in those thought-cycles when I have not spent enough time paying attention to useful thoughts: when I have spent too much time wallowing in trash thoughts.

A computer is a powerful machine, but it is only as efficient and effective as its inputs: GIGO is the word, Garbage In, Garbage Out. (I learned that at summer camp when I was ten. I took a programming class. My summer camp was cool.) And my problem is that when I decide that my brain is tired, I input garbage so that the thoughts will become — less troubling, maybe? Less effective, certainly, in that the thoughts have less effect on me. I’m tired of thinking. I want to relax, and somehow, that has taken on the definition of “thinking about garbage.” So I watch TV, I play idiotic video games, I scroll through social media. Purposeless, but enjoyable. It feels relaxing.

But this morning, I think these inputs are viruses. They put their own information into my brain-puter, (Compubrain? Combrainter? This is all bad. You know what I’m realizing this morning? “Computer” is an ugly word. “Brain” isn’t any better.) and then more often than not, my own thoughts, my own programs and content, get shunted aside in favor of the viral inputs. I get caught up in video games — “Just one more! Just one more!” — and I find myself wasting hours, staying up later and later, turning to the video games during the day even when I’m not tired of thinking. The same with the social media, which is simply an eternal scrawl, requiring an active decision to stop zombie-plodding through it, and while I’m taking in images and words, I’m not going to stop easily. Even if — especially if — they’re bad images and words, uninteresting ones, because then I keep seeking good posts, good information among the mounds and pools of shlock. The movies and TV are even more insidious, as they worm into my thought-files and corrupt them with their own information, so that my brain gets stuck making references to movies and TV, repeating lines and scenes and images and other bits of viral data. Then even my ideas replicate the viruses’ ideas: and that, I suspect, is why Hollywood has become so very good at remaking remakes and sequelling sequels.

 

This morning I’d like to say that I am going to stop watching TV and movies, and stop looking at social media, and stop playing video games. But I don’t want to lie. I’m not going to stop. Not only are they important to me — as downtime, which whether my brain needs it or not, the rest of me does, and I associate it with those things; though I may try some new kinds of downtime, like easy reading or writing, or listening to music while I drink wine, or something like that — but they are a part of my career, as social media is the best way to advertise as a self-published author, and also a part of my society, which is steeped in pop culture, and I want to stay connected and relevant. But I want to do some simple things that will mitigate the effects of these viral inputs, this malware. First, I will build firewalls: I will set limits as to when and how much I take in. Second, I will dedicate more time to using my computing cycles more productively; yesterday I spent my walk with my dogs thinking about things; last night I read; this morning I am writing. (I’m going to do it again tomorrow morning.)

I slept very well last night. I also took a splendid nap yesterday. So I’m thinking now that when I’m tired off thinking, I should sleep: and when I am not tired, I should keep thinking productively. My brain will keep running anyway; I’d rather it thought about truth and beauty, than about Candy Crush and reality shows.