Beyond School

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: this post ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]

[Note: This and the next post take a detour from "lecture" to "story-telling." Gilgamesh is still the focus, but I want to show with these two posts the ridiculous pressures teachers are under to not offend anyone when trying to teach classic literature. I'll return to lecture mode in post #4.]

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So you’re in Week Three of your two World Literature classes for those wonderful, squeaky-clean ninth-graders.¹

You spent Week One warming them up with a couple of fun David Sedaris shorts.  “Big Boy” – the story of Sedaris’ epic Easter Sunday struggle to flush someone else’s stuck turd down the toilet, so the person waiting outside the door won’t think it was his – is only a page and a half long, and is suitably light and hilarious for a first read. It’s also the perfect story to trot out for the lesson on plot.

And schooliness aside, it serves to start the conversation about how real literature finds grist for its alchemical mill everywhere, from the ridiculous to the sublime, and is not the trite moralistic stuff they’ve probably been taught to believe it is in k-8 English classes.²

“From the bathroom to the bedroom to the throne of God,” you intone, “literature knows no limits. Get used to it. You’re in high school now.”

Sedaris’ “Us and Them”³ is equally fun but infinitely more subtle, with its narrator making his bad self seem good and his good enemy seem bad, and is another perfect vehicle for trotting out the “unreliable narrator” lesson:⁴

“Beware of the authority of the author, kids,” you warn them, “in every book you read and speech you hear - including mine.

Suspect the narrator.

This story’s narrator made a fool of you. Worse yet, he made you a hateful fool.

Sedaris showed you that narrator was a hateful ass, but had his narrator tell you that he was the good guy.  Sedaris also showed you a good, kind character,  but had his narrator tell you this kind person was the bad guy.  And every one of you believed the narrator instead of your own eyes.

You followed the bad guy, and joined him in hating the good guy. All because you are suckers who trust the authority of the written word.

Look how dangerous books are, how books can blind you if you don’t think. Sedaris just showed you that books can turn you into hateful followers of hateful writers – while all the while thinking you’re the “good people.”

Can you think of any other books that do that?  They surround us. Maybe you’ll notice them after experiencing this story. But you probably won’t.

Learn from it. It’s probably the most important lesson anybody could ever teach you in life, but you won’t get that. Learn to see with your eyes, instead of continuing to try – as all of you did in this story – to see with your ears.”

Wickedness Incarnate: David Sedaris

You don’t tell them that Sedaris, being gay, knows from experience how many bad “good people” find it good to hate good “bad people.” One thing at a time. Almost all of these kids have been conditioned once a week since infancy to hate gays and other types different from them. Let them read more Sedaris on their own for now – they’re all begging to borrow your personal copies – and come to love him as a person first.

Then tell them.

~     ~     ~

That was all good fun. You like them and they seem to like you. And they’re annotating the margins of what they read, as you require, more than they text message their friends in a year – thinking back at the text, inscribing it with their own interpretations. Life’s good.

In Week Two, you’re ready to lay the foundations for the chronological survey of (mostly Western) literature you’ve been lucky enough to design from scratch. You’re not yet ready to plunge into mythologies of Gilgamesh, Genesis, Hesiod and Homer, because you want them to write their own myths first – from the imagined perspective of the pre-historic, pre-literate, pre-scientific, and pre-iPod tribes that originated all those myths in the Stone Age.

The best way you can figure to bring fire to the imaginations of these 14-year-olds is not with an ancient book. Instead, you dim the lights, draw the blinds, fire up the LCD projector, and show them “The Dawn of Man,” that great paleolithic prelude to that great space-age myth in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(The Youtube clip below leaves out about half of it, but it’s a good taste:)

As they watch, you’re driving them crazy by pausing the film, pointing to details and asking questions, probing and pushing.

“What is that? … Exactly! Paleolithic war!”

“And what is that? … Brilliant! The discovery of tools, of technology!”

“And that? Yes, yes, yes – the first murder. ‘Cain and Abel,’ the evolutionary version.”

When it’s done, the lights go up, and you ask them if they understand now why Kubrick is a name to remember. Then, you give them their first major writing assignment of the year: decide on some aspect of the natural or subjective world that you, like the homos in Kubrick, don’t understand, that fills you with maybe wonder, maybe fear, maybe both – but above all, with the need to “explain” it. “Points taken off if any of your explanations are drawn from what was claimed or known in later stages of human history.”⁵

When they turn in the final drafts of their myths, my god are you impressed with their imaginations. Daniel, particularly, blows you away with that scene in which his god reaches into his own mouth, drives his hand down his throat into his chest, withdraws it with a fireball he then flings into the sky – and which has stayed there to this day, giving light to us all. You want to throw a parade for his brilliance, and really don’t care that the grammar is non-standard. He’s Korean, after all. You’ll take broken grammar with perfect imagination over a broken imagination with perfect grammar any day. Broken grammar you can fix.

Now You’re Ready for Gilgamesh

You’re so excited you can’t stand it. The Kubrick and the creative mythologizing maybe, just maybe, prepared these young imaginations for the world’s oldest story.

You’d read Gilgamesh yourself in college, maybe a time or two since then, in uninspired translations, but you haven’t read the Mitchell translation from 2004 that your students are reading. You’d ordered it the year before after skimming a copy in the school library. You know Mitchell from other works he translated, and this one looks fine indeed.

You’ll read it for homework just like your students do. It’s a stimulating thing to do anyway.

The first chapter was fun: a “Prelude” that was both an introduction of the hero (with nice rhetorical use of the “delayed subject” to create suspense, using the pronoun “he” for several pages before ever telling us “he” was Gilgamesh), and an ode to that other star of the story, Uruk: the primal city itself.

Good enough, fun, interesting.  We’re just warming up.

“Tonight I want you to read Book One,” you tell them. “And be sure to annotate it. I’ll check next class.”

You go home that night and read Book One yourself, just like your students.  And just like them, no doubt, you have one of the most unforgettable experiences of your years in school – as a student or teacher.

Because you read about the stuff covered in the last post – Gilgamesh outraging his subjects by helping himself to their brides, the chief god Anu telling the goddess Aruru to solve the problem by creating a double for Gilgamesh “to create balance and bring peace,” and Aruru doing just that by creating the one-third human, two-thirds animal named Enkidu – but you read more, too, that you hadn’t counted on.

It’s all good stuff at first. Finally, this 2004 translation dresses this regal story in the stylish regalia it merits. You’re annotating like a madman:

“Enkidu wild, an animal drinking among gazelles at a watering hole. Shades of Darwin – and Kubrick!”

“Hm. Enkidu as ‘animal rights activist?!’ – he frees animals from traps, saves them from hunter.”

“Hunter goes to Gilgamesh to complain.”

On you scribble. You notice an interesting parallel between Anu and Gilgamesh, and it makes you really admire the Sumerian story-tellers who crafted this story, and wonder at this second piece of evidence of a radically non-punitive and jarringly humanistic response to law-breakers or disturbers of civic order in this old culture.⁶  Because just like Anu dealt with Gilgamesh’s excesses by setting him up for an experience that will presumably give him the wisdom to outgrow those excesses,⁷ Gilgamesh reacts to the news about Enkidu with a similarly unexpected twist.

He doesn’t send out a posse to capture or kill the wild man, and he doesn’t gird himself for battle with the wild man himself.  Instead, you read, he tells the farmer:

Go to the temple of Ishtar,
ask them for a woman named Shamhat,
one of the priestesses who give their bodies
to any man, in honor of the goddess.

“WTF?!” you annotate in huge letters.

What you read next is intriguing too – but gosh, you can’t help but get a bit uncomfortable imagining your 14-year-olds reading it that night too:

“Take her into the wilderness. [-Gilgamesh continues]
When the animals are drinking at the waterhole,
tell her to strip off her robe and lie there
naked, ready, with her legs apart.”

Another huge interrobang – ?! – in the margin. A bit more graphic than that Victorian version you read years ago.  You’re nervous now, and read on:

“The wild man will approach. Let her use her love-arts.
Nature will take its course, and then
the animals who knew him in the wilderness
will be bewildered, and will leave him forever.”

End of section, you note with relief. Thank goodness.

~     ~     ~

A few pages later, though, when Shamhat does accompany the farmer to the watering hole, the jitters come again.

Shamhat and the farmer wait for three days, and Enkidu finally comes. “The man was huge and beautiful,” you read. “Deep in Shamhat’s loins / desire stirred….”

Then the bomb drops:

Shamhat stripped off her robe and lay there naked,
with her legs apart, touching herself.
Enkidu saw her and warily approached.
He sniffed at the air. He gazed at her body.
He drew close. Shamhat touched him on the thigh,
touched his penis, and put him inside her.
She used her love-arts, she took his breath
with her kisses, held nothing back, and showed him
what a woman is. For seven days
he stayed erect and made love with her,
until he had had enough.

Undeniably beautiful, wonderfully erotic, but again, nothing like those Victorian versions you read back in the day. And my god, you wonder how you’re going to deal with the lecture tomorrow. Most of the kids go to Sunday school (we’re talking today’s Korea here, where you’ll see more crosses in a city block than you’ll see in all of Alabama) – and yeah, they’re all “in high school now,” but only three weeks in. And they’re all only freaking fourteen.

“Touched his penis, and put him inside her”? – wtf indeed. Interrobang.

Sweat.

Next: Shamhat’s Lessons: On Civilizing Sex (Or, “Adam and Eve, Backwards”)

The “Unsucky English Lectures” Series So Far:

1. Gilgamesh: Dangerous Questions
2. (This Post)
3. Adam and Eve, Backwards
4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards
5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero – Backwards
6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man

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David Sedaris photo by Sporky

1. for you non-Americans, those are 14-year-olds in their first year of high school [↩]
2. “Big Boy” is from the laugh-until-you-bleed Me Talk Pretty One Day. [↩]
3. full story here, great student webcam-review here [↩]
4. “Us and Them” is from the also-brilliant Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. [↩]
5. You put them through their paces by familiarizing them with the writing process, using the Six Traits of Effective Writing model that they will follow all year. [↩]
6. But “beware the author,” you remind yourself. The story might not reflect the reality of Sumerian life. Yet it still reflects, if nothing else, an intended motif on the part of the poet. These unexpected reactions of Anu and Gilgamesh to troublemakers do clearly share, at root, a belief that experience, not authoritarian “Thou shalt nots” and punishments for disobedience, is the key to self-improvement and social order. And you’re deeply intrigued by this. [↩]
7. that “wtf plot twist” we discussed this in the first Gilgamesh essay [↩]

“Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read!”
So he vanished from my sight,
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy song,
Every child may joy to hear.
–William Blake, Songs of Innocence

“And I stained the water clear”: look at that line a few times, and see the beauties of that exquisitely ambiguous modifier, “clear.”  It’s a line to cherish.¹ And it has to do with the thoughts below – after which, in the next post, we’ll get to an also exquisite sacred sex scene (and I’d like to call it a love scene to avoid the appearance of sensationalism, but it’s not a love scene) from Gilgamesh, along with laughs, I hope, about trying to teach it to today’s teens, in today’s classrooms. But first, an interlude:

When “Corrupting the Youth” is Good

“Good people” can be dangerous.

Socrates and Jesus, for example, in the eyes of the “good people” of their times,  were both criminals. ² They were criminals because they challenged those good people’s conventional views of religion, of the sacred, of moral right and wrong.

How do you know?

They both attacked the gods of their day. Socrates questioned both the truth and the righteousness of the Olympians; and Jesus (though less consistently) similarly questioned the teachings and the righteousness of the Hebrew priests and the “good” church mosque temple-going Christians Muslims Jews around him.  Both were reviled by the good people back then, and both paid with their lives for the same “sin”: critical thinking. The good Athenians killed Socrates with poison, the good Hebrews – the Romans, actually – killed Jesus on the cross.³

Today, we do well to revere Socrates and Jesus for pushing human thought forward.  We would also do well, though, to see their examples as reminders of something else we tend to forget: namely, that good people of any age often appear, in historical hindsight, to be the opposite of good. Again, good people – pious people – killed these two men.

Socrates today is held up to students as the model of that practice called “critical thinking.”  But in his own day, that very act, critical thinking, led to criminal charges against him for this :  “Corrupting the young by teaching new gods.”

Look at that. Socrates was killed why?  Because the adults in his society didn’t like the questions he was entertaining with their kids – about religion.  He was killed for asking, around young people, what we all see as a common sense question today – “Why do we believe in Zeus?”⁴

As a teacher who loves common sense, finds it less common than we think, and loves the idea of giving more of it than of grammar to the young in my classrooms, that story has always made me nervous.

I love critical thinking for many reasons, but the biggest one is this: it requires, always, an honest awareness in the thinker that he or she may be wrong.  Socrates, while less a hero of mine due to recent readings I’ve done about his politics, still wins my respect with this classic one-liner:

I only know that I know nothing.

Scientists understand the wisdom of that statement, and so do philosophers.  Priests and their “good people” followers, though, show no understanding of this wisdom. They assert truth-claims without evidence, and worse, they attack modern-day versions of Socrates and Jesus for thinking critically about their beliefs.

Schools are very bad places for a teacher to promote critical thinking about anything important.  The cliché “critical thinking” in schools is only allowed for safe subjects – an oxymoron I’ve mentioned many times in these pages.  Touch a subject that will offend a single parent or student, and your job is at stake.  That’s why so many classes are so boring.  They refuse to acknowledge the many elephants in the room, or to state that the emperor is wearing no clothes – especially when it comes to whichever god and flag are flying above your country.

And that’s why so many types of hugely influential beliefs that make no sense persist today.  Kids go through twelve years of school without those beliefs ever being touched by a serious question, they graduate, and bam: the beliefs live on for yet another generation: Bush really is communicating with God, while in the same universe, Bin Laden, in another country’s school system, really is obeying the Word and will of Allah.  McCain and Obama consent to be interviewed on national TV with Rick Warren, and thus legitimize a man whose ministry supported a “Left Behind” video game in which post-Rapture Christians kill non-Christians on the streets of New York – and they’re the good guys.  To question these things is not important?

I say it is. We see the Crusades of the 11th Century  being re-played now in the 21st.  Maybe questioning will reduce their chances of continuing into the fourth millennium, if we make it that far.

*    *    *

Critical Thinking as a Litmus Test

Reading the comments on my last post (the first Gilgamesh essay), and of the people who also commented on it on StumbleUpon,⁵ it occurs to me that critical thinkers serve as litmus tests for the people who disagree with them.  They fall into two categories:  those who challenge the thinking, and thus pass the test and prove themselves fellow critical thinkers; and those who attack the thinker instead of the ideas, and thus fail the test and show themselves to be non-critical thinkers, like the poisoners and crucifiers of old. Thank goodness free speech is now protected by law.

If the first Gilgamesh “lecture” had happened in a classroom instead of here, those non-critical thinkers would have been demanding my resignation – because they don’t want their children to think beyond what they, the parents, believe. ⁶ It’s funny how parents don’t care if their kid goes more deeply into, say, math than them; that’s fine. But have my kid go more deeply – and more critically – into religion than I ever did?  Into politics and my country’s history?  That’s a different beast altogether.  As a rule, parents aren’t okay with that at all.

So that’s the challenge to critical thinking in so many of our classrooms today, and a reason for its boredom-inducing absence. If only teachers felt secure in speaking their minds, there could be incredible discussions in classrooms.

And for the record: I share my questions about sacred cows not because I delight in doing “ee-vil.”  We may as well accuse Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Voltaire, Darwin, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and millions of other reformists dead and alive of “loving evil” for imagining – and speaking of – better visions of the Good or more sensible versions of the True.

I share these questions because first, I love asking them; second, it’s my way of supporting others who are asking them; and third, imperfect as all of us are, I believe these questions have vital value for happiness, intelligence, well-being, and, um, education. In my eyes, as much as your preachers or your parents, I am trying to do good. I’m just doing it by my own lights, instead of by the teachings of childhood.  I left those teachings long ago, by reading more than the preachers showed me. (I also discovered, in the cult of the early Christian leader Valentinus, an extinct version of Christianity I actually admire. It’s almost Buddhist. See Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels’ eye-opening, and very readable, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas for more.)

How can we think? Magic-based science (Creation Museum, Kentucky, USA)

And then there’s the issue of fairness. Millions of preachers clog the airwaves daily with their claims. Creationists attack science and infest science classrooms and textbooks.  It’s only fair that equal time is given to those of us who want to challenge them with critical thinking.

My last point:  Critical thinking can “corrupt the youth” on one condition: that youth fail to think critically themselves, as they read.  As long as the young think – chew – before swallowing this, or any, adult’s words, they’re not “corrupted” at all. No matter what those adults say.

I don’t know if any of this helped “stain the waters clear.”  I hope it did.

*    *    *

Now on to more fun with Gilgamesh, one of the wisest and – in the “sacred sex” scene that is the next post’s topic, also one of the most beautiful – books I’ve ever read.

Wait a minute. It just hit me.  My god, I’m about to discuss the oldest sex scene in the history of mankind.  Not a bad way to spend an evening.

It should be up in a day or two.

Please keep the comments critical, and thanks for doing that in such a friendly way in the first post.  And sorry for the length.  This was no fun to write, but I had to get it out.

–

Photo credits: Human Questions by AmberflyKezzie ; Creation Museum by rauchdickson

1. See the word as an adverb modifying “stained.” [↩]
2. They were both considered something like “bums” by the good people too – Socrates wore tatty clothes, Jesus was a homeless guy – but that’s a different story. [↩]
3. Since this crucifixion episode, by the way, has been used to justify Christian Antisemitism and the slaughter of Jews for over a thousand years, I have to add this point to keep my conscience clean: Jesus may not have been crucified at all; he may not, in fact, have ever lived at all, according to many serious scholars. (A comprehensive discussion of the evidence is laid out, among many other places, in a long chapter of The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?, by ex-minister and professor of New Testament Greek Tom Harpur, who seems to want to radically reform Christianity the way Jesus, if he did exist, wanted to radically reform Judaism.)  It’s a fascinating question for those who care to think critically about important things. If it’s true, after all, that means the Jews were framed and persecuted by the Christians for an execution that never happened, and that American voters today are electing leaders on the basis of faith in a phantom. [↩]
4. It goes deeper than this, really, since many used it as a pretext for other grudges. But the interesting thing is that this pretext still held in a court of law, and it’s what he was convicted and killed for: teaching common sense. [↩]
5. and for the record, as I’ve already said, I agree that the tone in that post is lame at times, and will work on that, and find such feedback helpful, when polite [↩]
6. My own resignation was demanded once by a pair of parents – from a long line of preachers – for including the ideas of Bishop Spong as a contemporary descendant of Martin Luther in a history unit about the Reformation. Maybe I’ll tell that full story one day. Right now, I’ll just say that my assistant principal at the time commendably held firm and told them they were free to leave. Instead, they pulled their son from my class and put him with another teacher.  No chance he think beyond his parents’ beliefs that way. [↩]

Come on in, Ned. And bring your kids.

[This post had major problems in its original draft. I heavily edited it for all you stumblers. Later posts in the "Unsucky Gilgamesh" series: 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero - Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets 9. The Original "Original Sin"]

To My Few Student Readers: Please Stay

I’m bored writing for adults these days, and most of my readers are adults. If you’re a student, can you send this link to your friends, put it on Facebook, Stumble it, etc? I want students as my audience for this series, because I want to share with you all a series of posts, beginning today and continuing for years, probably, about:

Why the Classics Only Seem to Suck

I don’t blame students who think classic literature sucks.¹

They have millions of good reasons to think that. They may, for example, have:

1. teachers who aren’t that great at reading, writing, or teaching, or
2. great teachers at not-so-great schools that are afraid to let them read the most controversial literature (almost all schools are really afraid of students and their parents), or
3. English worksheets that turn literature into anatomy tests (“Identify which phrase below is an example of onomatopoeia” and similar dentist drills), or
4. five-paragraph essays to write in which the teacher in #1 tells them that they “must not use ‘I’, must have a topic sentence in the first line of each paragraph,” and a million other rules that real writers (we just excluded most teachers there) ignore altogether, or
5. a lack of time to read the books assigned in English class, what with all the other homework (they want to have a little time of their own to just live their life, after all, to maybe read stuff they want to read – so why not just read the Sparknotes summaries?), or
6. over-their-head levels of language complexity or adult content that they really shouldn’t be expected to comprehend (language) or care about (a middle-aged housewife’s psychology) until they’re well out of high school, or
7. dry lists of words and terms to memorize for that most ultra-sucky thing of all – that thing which more and more schools and parents seem to think education is now – the S.A.T.

My Promises for This Series

I promise not to bore you with trivia or showy diction – to use “use” instead of “utilize.”  And I promise to try to give you enjoyable ideas of why, despite the pain of many English classes, this thing called literature, played with naturally, gives pleasure.  Much classic literature is wonderful.  I get more pleasure out of a used one-dollar copy of a Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde play than I do out of my $5,000 home theater.  When I want a buzz, I choose books over booze and bongs. Good literature is the best drug out there.

Added Bonus: I’ll throw in a “big picture” tour of the history of literature from the earliest story ever told – today’s post – forward through the centuries to the Greeks, the Hebrews and their Bible, the Romans, the fascinatingly whacked Middle Ages and the lovely Renaissance, the supremely dangerous Shakespeare and the often-kinky Romantics, straight on up to a few choice books from our modern times. (That’s another thing that annoys me about so many English classes I’ve had to teach: they rip all books out of their historical context, and disconnect them from their times and each other. It’s like studying butterflies pinned under glass instead of watching them fly among the flowers.)

I’ll also avoid constipated scholar-talk in favor of the conversational, occasionally dangerous style of a teacher who can tell you the truth, as he sees it, about these books without fear of being fired for ruffling the feathers of the fearful “three P’s”: parents, principals, and preachers.

Great books are often door-openings to dangerous places, places polite society fears and deems off-limits.  When those doors open in a classroom, teachers often refuse to enter.  There’s always the student who can’t handle it, who complains to one of the three P’s, and forces the conversation to remain, safe and proper, in the well-lit hallway.

Not so here where, away from school, we can touch the taboos, and experience how literature can be a threat and a danger to who we are, to how we’ve been conditioned to see life, to our culture’s status quo.

Doris Lessing really nails the connection between schools and the status quo better than I could dream of doing, so I’ll close this section with her:²

“You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.” – Doris Lessing

Now here goes.

Starting at the beginning – literally: c. 3,000 BCE

Let’s start with the oldest story ever told (or at least that we have written down), the first story in the history of our species, the story whose title, tragically, will make your eyes roll and your feet head for the exit door the minute you hear it, because it’s associated with your lifetime of aversion to classroom classics.

I’m talking about Gilgamesh.

Don’t leave.

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic - in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

It’s one of the coolest books you’ll ever read.  It comes from one of the earliest cities, literally, on Earth – but it’s so alien to everything we Judeo-Christian types have been conditioned to think of as “good and evil,” “right and wrong,” that it seems a work of science fiction or fantasy more than anything else.

Really, don’t leave. You’ll miss the part about a religion that sees sex as a good and holy thing.

I’m not making this up.  Here’s the background:

Gilgamesh is the story of a Sumerian king who actually lived and ruled around 2,700 BCE. That’s almost 5,000 years ago. The city itself was a thousand years old when the story was written, so we’re talking a story from a civilization 6,000 years ago.

Stop and let that sink in.  The Bible is only half that old, with the “Old Testament” reaching its final form around 400 BCE, and the “New Testament” not being slapped together until around 330 CE (or A.D., if you’re out of touch with proper scholarly conventions).  So Gilgamesh is more than twice as old as the Bible. The Bible’s a pup compared to this story, and as I’ll argue, the Bible is less wise, in many deep and fundamental ways, than this Sumerian book as well.

Moving on:  The king’s city, Uruk, was such a walled and templed and terraced wonder that the citizens themselves were blown away by it.  Since the story is from an age close to the agricultural revolution, when we stopped wandering around as nomads and living more like herd animals than humans, we get a sense, when we read this story, that the people who wrote it are totally aware of what a cool thing they’ve accomplished by making one of the world’s first grand cities – first, do you hear?

Looking out from Uruk’s walls across the sandy plains of what is today Iraq (Uruk was not far from later Babylon and today’s Baghdad³ ), you would have seen no other cities.  Cities, to repeat, were new, and Uruk was one of the first.  When you read this story, it’s like the story-teller remembers the days before the city was invented, the days of wearing animal skins and being goat-herders or hunter-gatherers.  And you can clearly tell he loves his city all the more for the different kind of life it makes possible – the civilized life.

It’s a story, then, of humanity basically crowing its pride over creating civilization by creating that Most Needful Thing for civilization to exist at all: a city.  If someone were to have written a blurb on the back of the book back then (which he couldn’t have done because the “pages” were actually baked clay tablets stacked like bricks in the library, all covered in reed-imprinted cuneiform), he would have written something like,

Unlike our neighbors in every direction, we aren’t hunter-gatherers, goat-herding nomads, or farmers in country villages.  We’re civilized. We built a city.  And we’re damned proud of that.

Luckily, since Uruk was civilized, it had court poets instead of flag-waving idiots to tell the story a bit more gracefully, and to tweak it and revise it over a couple thousand years to make it just so.

On Sex, Good and Bad

I have to be careful about sex here, because the story itself is.

Rendering of a ziggurat in Uruk (PD-self from Wikicommons)

On the one hand, the city had temples (like the ziggurat pictured right) dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, the goddess of love, fertility, procreation, and – strangely – war. (Aphrodite is basically the Greek version of the much older Ishtar, and Venus the Roman version. You knew that.)

We’re so blind today to the seeming magic through which sexual intercourse leads to pregnancy, and pregnancy to the creation of life from the womb of woman, that it takes a bit of imagination-work for us to appreciate how much sense it would make to pre-civilized and first-civilized humans to consider sex, pregnancy and birth, and above all women, as magical, sacred things.

That the Sumerians did consider sex sacred is clearly shown by this fact:  the temples of Ishtar were staffed with priestesses whose role was to have sex there, in the temple – whether only with the king or other elites, or with everyone, I don’t know.  These temple prostitutes were not “sinners,” were not “immoral”; they were respected every bit as much as Pastor Teds and Imam Abdullahs in churches and mosques around the world today.

And sex was not a “sin.”  It was a holy thing.  Check out “heiros gamos” on Wikipedia for the juicy (but deep) details.  (And stay tuned for my own theory, when we get to the Bible one of these days in this series, of how Ishtar and the Sumerians influenced the Jewish priests who wrote the Bible’s Genesis to make Eve such a bad character in the story, and sex – everybody’s favorite hobby, to riff off Woody Allen – such a bad, guilty act.)

So in Uruk, it may have been your duty as a good, gods-fearing citizen, to go to “church” occasionally to have sex with a temple prostitute.

In class, this point would get giggles from the immature or freak-outs from the ever-present class prudes, and the following idea would never sink in – which is sad, because it could lead to possibly deep and beautiful ideas such as this:

Think of how different it must have been, as a young person entering puberty, not to be shamed for suddenly discovering sexuality, but to instead, I imagine, be congratulated by family and society, maybe brought to “church” – the temple – to have that sexual awakening honored and instructed through some religious initiation.  To be welcomed into this magical new stage, rather than met with the silence and denial puberty is usually met with in our own culture.  “Abstinence-only” sex education would be laughed at in Sumer, and priests, parents, and schools would be comfortable with this natural thing.  There were far fewer locked doors, hidden materials, and guilt-burdened consciences for boys and girls back then, I suspect.

But it could also lead to less “beautiful” but still “deep” questions like this: For the “prostitute,” how was “temple prostitution” then different from prostitution now? Since sex wasn’t shameful then, was prostitution also not shameful?  Were the temple prostitutes abused and frowned upon the way many prostitutes are today?⁴  Or were they protected from abuse by the temple, and by the reverent treatment of those they served there – treated less like today’s “whores,” in other words, than like today’s preachers?   Since they surely thought of sex differently than we in the West do in the Judeo-Christian framework – and we inherited much of that framework whether we’re religious or not – it’s not an easy question to answer.⁵

(Do you see the “science fiction” side yet?)

But on the other hand, there was such a thing as “bad sex” in this story – and it’s what gets the plot rolling.

King Gilgamesh was a bit of a jerk when it came to sex.  Because he was king, and above the law, he had more choices than his wives or the temple prostitutes.  And the choice he made struck everyone involved – even the gods, who looked on from heaven – as really, really wrong: Gilgamesh chose to treat himself to the bed of every new bride on her wedding day – before her husband did.

So the people of the kingdom get understandably offended by this cocky king, and their complaints finally make it to the ears of the gods: the big-daddy god in particular, Anu (think Zeus and you’re close enough).

And here’s another place I think it gets deep and beautiful – but first let me take a detour to mention a couple of important things that connect to the beliefs of Jews and Christians and Muslims today.  The “deep and beautiful” stuff won’t work unless you know this.

On God, His Leadership Style, and His Fore-Fathers

First, the Gilgamesh epic is from a culture⁶ that spoke a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, and that dominated the Middle East for thousands of years before Judaism, the religion of the Bible and of Jesus, even existed.

Second, the Hebrews who first settled Israel over a thousand years after the Gilgamesh story knew this dominant culture, and included many Sumerian myths in the Bible; two well-known examples are the Six-Days’ Creation and Noah and the Flood in Genesis (the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, will be a major character by this story’s end, by the way – and will tell the original and much older Sumerian version of the Flood later adapted in Genesis). You can read the Sumerian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, yourself to see the similarities.  It’s only a few pages long.

But the differences between the Sumerian and Judeo-Christian gods are even more interesting.

The most interesting difference to me is that the Sumerian religion had male and female gods and, more importantly, that the main Sumerian “god the father” type was, like most fathers, married. It’s always seemed weird to me that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is alone, unmarried.  Zeus had Hera, the Sumerian Anu had Aruru, but Yahweh, the “God” of the Bible?⁷  No female for him.  You have to wonder why the Hebrews took the female from heaven, who did it, when, and how.  I do, anyway. But I’ll share those thoughts down the road.

The other interesting difference is in the morality – I almost want to say “leadership style” – of the two father gods. To see the difference, let’s do a thought experiment:  pretend Gilgamesh did his wife-stealing stunt in Jerusalem, that Gilgamesh was a Hebrew and his god was not Anu but Yahweh, the god of the Jews and Christians.

When that God hears that Gilgamesh is deflowering all the wives of all “His people” – “coveting” more than his neighbors’ (and subjects’) “asses” and therefore breaking one of the Ten Commandments – how do you think that God would react?

People will argue with me here, but I don’t see how they can win: that God deals with sinners, rebels, and others who disobey him with this “leadership decision”: punishment.  He’s an “angry God,” as he says himself. ⁸ It’s hard to see that God doing much but using angry force to punish Gilgamesh and make him change his ways.  Human obedience is what matters to that God, as I read him; human wisdom comes a distant second.  You want evidence?  God’s instructions for dealing with people who disobey his laws, over and over (in Deuteronomy especially), is to simply kill them. And Adam and Eve received one hell of a punishment because of their disobedience, too.

Back to the Story: “What Would Jesus Anu Do?”

But the earlier Sumerian god, Anu?  His reaction to Gilgamesh’s adulterous outrage is totally intriguing, and in my view, totally cool.  I like this god.

He doesn’t say “Punish him.”  He doesn’t say “Kill him.”  Instead, he turns to Aruru, the goddess who the Sumerians believed created humanity from earthly clay, and tells her to do it one more time.

He tells her, more interesting still, not to create any old human, but instead a special type. “Now go and create,” he tells her,

“a double for Gilgamesh, his second self,
a man who equals his strength and courage,
a man who equals his stormy heart.
Create a new hero, let them balance each other
perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.”

And so she does.

I’m going to stop here for the moment, and just share why I think Anu is a god worthy of the title.  Because by creating a “double” for Gilgamesh instead of simply killing him on the spot, he shows that to him, “sin” is a lack of wisdom.  As you’ll see, he creates this double so that Gilgamesh may have the experiences he needs to grow wiser.  I also think he’s just plain smooth for not freaking out and throwing a temper tantrum, but instead coolly coming up with this mysterious idea:

“Make a double for him. That should do the trick.”

What a wtf plot twist. Love it. Suspense accomplished.

And it’s a wonderfully optimistic view of man for a God to have: not “fallen” and in need of salvation, not infantile and in need of a list of Commandments to unthinkingly obey, not tainted by any “original sin,” but instead: capable of growing through experience, of learning and finding his own way, of finding “balance” that brings “peace.”

That “double,” by the way?  His name is Enkidu – and he’s Gilgamesh’s double in a curious and fascinating way: Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human; Enkidu, on the other hand, is – get this – two-thirds animal, one-third human. Gilgamesh is the king of civilization; Enkidu is a wild-man living naked in the wilderness, alone with no human companionship.  But this animal-man is actually innocent and good – shades of some pre-Biblical Darwinian understanding that, hello?, humans are indeed animals in the animal kingdom, and that that bit of natural obviousness is nothing to freak out about?

Before Closing:

Challenges, corrections, extensions, additions, and anything else are welcome. More on Gilgamesh soon.⁹

Next: 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero – Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets 9. The Original “Original Sin”

~     ~     ~

1. thanks to Tom, by the way,  whose post partly inspired this and who turned me on to that article. [↩]
2. and thanks to R. Greco for this gem [↩]
3. that’s right: the US military is occupying and bombing the earliest civilization in the Middle East, and for any of you familiar with Mosul, that’s where the clay tablets holding the Gilgamesh story were uncovered, after two thousand years of sand-buried silence, by a British guy in the late 1800s [↩]
4. And – are there prostitutes today that don’t feel ashamed, aren’t abused or frowned upon, and actually find fulfillment in their profession?  Aren’t the questions endless? [↩]
5. Thanks to the Salon.com forum that mentions this post for pointing out this angle. [↩]
6. it’s complicated: the earlier Sumerians, whose language was not related to the Semitic Hebrew and Arabic, were overthrown by other races, including the Akkadians and Babylonians, whose languages were both dialects of Semitic Assyrian, and who kept the story alive [↩]
7. Yahweh is a Hebrew name for what English-speaking Jews and Christians call “God” [↩]
8. And boy, I just opened the floodgates to a million evangelists to explain how Jesus marked a change in God’s law, a new covenant, with mercy replacing wrath, et cetera. But I’m going to side with the Jewish people on this one, for the sake of argument, and stick only to their original, non-Christian texts. The Torah above all.  I’m talking about that God as the literary character we read about in Jewish religious literature. [↩]
9. and if you decide to buy the book, be sure to buy the Mitchell translation pictured above. All the other ones I’ve seen are pretty crappy in comparison. This one’s fantastic. [↩]

[See here for Part 1: On the Death of Genius for the Sake of College]

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lost their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless and depressed.
–Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 21

No Control

Psychologist Gilbert cites in this section an experiment in which two groups of seniors in a nursing home were given plants for their rooms.  The first group was given the responsibility for watering and keeping the plants alive; the second group was denied any control over the plants’ care, which was the responsibility of the nursing home’s staff.

Six months later, 30% of the seniors with no control over the plants had died; only 15% of the group with control died in the same period.

They did a follow-up study with the same “control” variable to study the roles of control and autonomy in fostering mental and physical health. In this study, youth volunteers began a weekly visitation program to seniors in two groups. The first group was given the autonomy to schedule the visits and decide their durations themselves; the second group had no choice: the young visitors came on a schedule prescribed by the nursing home administration (in cahoots with the experimenters).

Again, two months later, the group with control and autonomy was healthier, taking fewer medications, and showing various other symptoms of increased well-being compared to their state at the beginning of the experiment.

That’s interesting enough¹ – but the more interesting thing happened next, and was completely unexpected:  when the visitation experiment was over, the visits stopped – and so did the exercise of autonomy and control enjoyed by the “happier” seniors.  And within a few months, “a disproportionate number of [seniors] in the high-control group had died.”

Gilbert concludes:

Only in retrospect did the cause of this tragedy seem clear. The residents who had been given control, and who had benefited measurably from that control while they had it, were inadvertently robbed of control when the study ended. Apparently, gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any control at all (21-2).

Implications for Schools

It should be obvious, but more and more I learn that the obvious should never be taken for granted.  So here goes:

1. Students given some control over the content and demonstration of their learning are happier.

This is an old saw in education, but it doesn’t hurt to support it with psychological research.

2. The basic structure of schools – prescribed course selection, prescribed schedules and durations, prescribed timetables for learning and moving on – are innately “depressing” for students.

In other words, even those students given the freedom, in this or that class, to choose their content and design their own projects to demonstrate learning, are still stuck within a larger system of no control.  For these students, the autonomous classroom is an anomalous blip on the screen of a much larger matrix of no choice, no autonomy, no “passionate control.”

3. If not the norm in schools, student experience of autonomous learning under one teacher may do more harm than good.

Graham Wegner and I touched on this in an exchange a while back², and it bears repeating here: Graham told of hallway talks with students to whom he had given this autonomy the previous year, students now back in the passive mode in their current classrooms. And the students were predictably uniform, if memory serves, in their doldrums. Like the seniors after the visitation scheduling was taken away from them, the students who had control and lost it may have been worse off for that brief moment of learners’ happiness.

The Law of the Fall

Let’s call it the Law of the Fall:  the higher you climb, the harder the fall – especially if you’re pushed from that height.  And the pushers here are the teachers who keep control of everything that happens in their students’ experiences in their classrooms.

The bigger pushers, though – aren’t they the administrators?  I don’t mean to admin-bash here, but only to ask the obvious question: if autonomous learning is the miniscule exception in a school instead of the norm, who is ultimately responsible for that, if not principals?

Conversely, if the loss of autonomy is more damaging than the benefits of its brief possession, might that not mean that administrators have to make a choice? Namely, the choice between requiring all teachers to provide autonomy, or else, paradoxically, requiring that no teachers do?

–

Photo: Waiting by RebelBlueAngel

Bonus: TED Talk with Daniel Gilbert

Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is my kind of scholarship: witty, playful, devoid of the constipated, jargon-stuffed voice of most academics. Reading it, you laugh as you think along.  Here’s a TED talk for those of you interested in learning more about this guy:

1. and you statisticians and scientists are welcome to weigh in with criticisms of the experiments, because I can only trust the authority of a Harvard professor’s citation of it here [↩]
2. and Graham, if you can give me the link to that, I’d appreciate. I searched but did not find [↩]

A permanent present – what a haunting phrase. How bizarre and surreal it must be to serve a life sentence in the prison of the moment, trapped forever in the perpetual now, a world without end, a time without later.  — Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 14

Call me crazy, but I couldn’t help but think of students when I read this earlier tonight.  A particular kind of student, anyway.  The Korean kind, for sure, and possibly, from what I read, more and more American ones too.

I mean the ones who are so over-scheduled with schoolwork, homework, SAT test-prep cram schools, and all the other madness that keeps them focused on memorizing the data and pounding out the grunt-work, one assignment and one GPA-increment at a time, year in and year out – from what, grade 9? Or is that too late to begin worrying these days? – that they rarely have time to pull back and reflect on anything at all. ¹

“A permanent present.” Isn’t that what the overload of content, testing, homework, and extra-curricular bullet-gaming for college applications is creating for our young?  It makes me wonder if school itself is not the cause of “A.D.D.”: when attention is constantly hurried in seven different disciplines from unit to unit, no option to pull the cord and get off the train, is it any wonder attention is deficient and understanding is, to quote an old Bowie line, a series of “one-inch thoughts”?

Maybe I’m wrong. I know I am with some teachers, bless ‘em. The ones that choose thought over coverage, choice over prescription.

That permanent present, by the way?  It’s a description of people who have had lobotomies or other traumas to the frontal lobe.

*     *     *

American college students expect to live longer, stay married longer and travel to Europe more often than average. They believe they are more likely to have a gifted child, to own their own home and to appear in the newspaper, and less likely to have a heart attack, venereal disease, a drinking problem, an auto accident, a broken bone  or gum disease.  Ibid., p. 18

Kids, I hate to break it to you, but my experience of you college-bound grade-junkies is one, overall – again, let’s bless the exceptions – of pity and disappointment.  You’ve got great grades, yes, but so little else. No driving passion for anything unique or original, no budding genius.  It’s more schools’ fault than yours, but you’re not completely free of blame.  You’re the ones allowing yourselves to be turned into carbon copies of “competitive college applicants.”  You can choose else-wise.

I hate to break this to you too:  the college of your dreams is no guarantee of happiness. You may already be decreasing your chances of future happiness by your daily compromises to get into those schools.  It’s hard to have a soulful life, if you sold your soul before graduating high school.  Souls are hard things to buy back.

*     *     *

Genius Defined (It’s not what you think):

Let’s take a quick detour into the meaning and origins of that word, “genius.”  Most of us don’t know what it means when we use it. Apple’s dictionary gives us a good etymology:

ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin, ‘attendant spirit present from one’s birth, innate ability or inclination,’ from the root of gignere ‘beget.’ The original sense [tutelary spirit attendant on a person] gave rise to a sense [a person's characteristic disposition] (late 16th cent.), which led to a sense [a person's natural ability,] and finally [exceptional natural ability] (mid 17th cent.).

Wikipedia gives us a little more:

In Ancient Rome, the genius was the guiding or “tutelary” spirit of a person. . . .

In Roman mythology, every man had a genius and every woman a juno. . . .

Originally, the genii and junones were ancestors who guarded over their descendants. Over time, they turned into personal guardian spirits, granting intellectual prowess.

Wikipedia closes with this intriguing gem:

Sacrifices were made to one’s genius or juno on one’s birthday.

And that gem strikes me as crushingly ironic today, because today, we don’t sacrifice to our genius at all; instead, we sacrifice that genius itself  - to our schools.

Look at the emphasized words in the passages above, and tell me if I’m wrong when I say: the essence of genius is precisely what schools exclude.  What does that essence consist of?

1. Individual Inclination, Innate Ability

Note the root “gen” in “genius.”  Genius is present in our origin (same root), our genes, our genesis – our nature.  These shape and determine our individuality.  In this sense, “genius” is not about being brilliant, but about having a cognitive-emotional-creative fingerprint that is entirely unique from the moment we’re born.  To get homespun for a second, it’s just that thing that makes us tick, that piques our individual interest or curiosity.

Sir Ken Robinson tells the sad tale of the researchers asking six-year-olds if they were artists, and all of them saying yes; but asked four years later, deep into the assembly line of generic curriculum and one-size-fits-all learning, only a fraction of hands go up; and by adolescence, almost none do.  You may quibble with the difference between artists and geniuses, but to me they’re deeply related in this simple fact: artists pursue their own “individual inclinations and innate abilities” – their own genius.

2. Genius as “Tutelary Spirit”

More fun with definitions and etymologies: “tutelary,” defined: “serving as a protector, guardian, or patron.”  Its etymology: “from Latin tutela ‘keeping’ (from tut- ‘watched,’).”

So to the ancients, our individually innate inclinations and abilities, our”genius,” was that thing that protected us, guarded us, “kept” us, “watched” us and, most interestingly – playing with the sense of “patron” – fathered us.

To be clearer, to the ancients, the only teacher you needed was your own “genius,” your own curiosity and drive to satisfy it – whatever “it” is, which depends on who you are.

Quit reading if you’re not into this line of thought, because I want to follow it down another linguistic byroad to the obvious and, today, ubiquitous derivative of the old world “tutelage”: you guessed it – “tutor.”  It’s another crushing irony: though derived from “tutelage,” the deep old word associated with letting our genius be our teacher, the word “tutor” today has nothing to do with inborn genius, and everything to do with its opposite: school-manufactured uniformity and anti-individualism, anti-genius.  Again, the dictionary is my witness:

tutor |ˈt(y)oōtər|
noun
a private teacher, typically one who teaches a single student or a very small group.
• chiefly Brit. a university or college teacher responsible for the teaching and supervision of assigned students.
• an assistant lecturer in a college or university. [emphasis added]

Goodbye, genius; hello, schooliness.  Gone is the language of spirit, of nature, of self-tutelage now, and in its place is the lexicon of schools: “teacher, student, university, college, responsible for, supervision, assigned, lecturer.”  Genius, the once-”tutelary guardian, protector, and patron” of “natural, innate inclination and disposition” is overthrown, and in its place now is the academic teacher, the master of a classroom, stuffing the headpieces of the young with the straw that will be transformed into golden grades.  To hell with your genes, your nature, your curiosity.  My job as a tutor is to help you advance to the front of whatever class you are forced to take.²

The Why of this Rant: To Students

flowers, drowning

College will not make you successful.  A degree that gets you a good job will not make you happy.  Unless: you remember your genius (if any has survived your schooling), and let it drive your educational choices.

I can’t tell you how many well-heeled parents I’ve spoken with at length in parent conferences over the years, parents wealthy, attractive, full of status and prestige and awash in luxury, who have nonetheless left me, again, feeling little more than pity and disappointment.  The sparkle in their rings and watches did not extend into their conversation, their wit, their eyes.  They had succeeded at the college game, made buckets of money, but with all of that success, had failed to find happiness.

The exceptions? Bless them, they seemed to choose an education in line with their genius – not their parents’ or their society’s wishes.

And all of this comes from a few pages from a book on that wonderful new field of psychology, “happiness studies,” and its wonderful news that, when it comes to making choices that steer us to happy futures, we’re our own worst enemies.  Check it out. It’s a good read – and hey, it will also impress your SAT essay reader, since it’s by a Harvard professor.

–

Photo credits: Progress by ~BostonBill~ ; Roses by Tio

1. I read recently that the ETS is now floating a PSAT clone for the middle school years.  Great work, bastards. Rob even more living and learning from childhood by making them obsess on indelible test scores even earlier in their childhoods.  Pocket more profits from your stupifying study guides for tests that kill curiosity and implant the quest for the safe, right answer. [↩]
2. And let me tell you: my tutoring experience so far has been fun, but shocking too. The parents are generally indifferent to the growth of any passion or wisdom or skill in their children that is not related to helping them ace this or that class or test.  They seem no more concerned, in other words, with the genius of their children than schools are. [↩]

In my perfect America, the evangelical radio stations choking out the dial are spreading the gospel of Science, not that of a religion of the downtrodden classes of the Roman Empire.  Yes, science has its dark side, but so do the evangelicals’ “gods.”¹  In my book, churches and laboratories are close to tied on the scoreboard of Good and Evil.²

In my perfect past, the high school English teacher in Tennessee, whom I called from Los Angeles years after graduating to share with her that I had discovered literature and declared it my major in college, would not have answered that long-distance announcement with, “But Clay, the only thing I want to know is if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior” – she would have instead answered, “But Clay, be sure to take a lot of science too. In its own way, it has as many wonders as poetry and mysteries as religion.”

In my perfect k-12 years, I would have come to admire science then the way I do now, and would have dedicated my life to becoming a scientist.  Too late for that now.

But if I’d had Doyle as a science teacher – or even been able to just read Doyle’s wonderful stories and thoughts about science – chances are strong that I would have seen that light before it was too late.

In other words, Doyle is a science teacher whose writings about that subject are addictive. Half Steinbeck, half uncle you’d always wished for, the voice and perspective just do me right. He makes his back yard, his New Jersey coast, the trees outside his classroom window come alive like only a good science-storyteller can.  Do yourself a favor and check him out.

1. sorry, but I count “God” and “Jesus” as two, and Christianity as polytheism. Nobody gets the Trinity thing – not even the theologians. Which makes sense, since it doesn’t make sense. [↩]
2. Just read Deuteronomy or Revelation, or study history or current events. [↩]

John Larkin in Oz nudged me to consider playing with the idea he so creatively played with on his own site: “How Far I Roamed as a Child.”

John’s post gives the full background of the idea, and a nicely visual guided tour of his own childhood using personal photos and satellite imagery from Google Maps¹. But this excerpt from John’s post brings out the historical and educational thrust of the idea:

[An] article in the Mail online, ‘How children lost the right to roam in four generations‘, is particularly telling. It sets out quite clearly how from one generation to the next children are not roaming as far as their parents and grandparents.

Firing up Google Maps and revisiting my elementary and junior high years’ stomping grounds in Tennessee was a blast – and as John seemed to understand by inviting me to play with his idea, it has all sorts of engaging applications for the writing classroom. One example is all I have time for at the moment, and it’s this:  By typing in my childhood home address on Google Maps, then clicking “street view” and zooming and panning around a bit, I found, of all unremarkable things, the street-drainage ditch in front of my house, with its tunnel under the street to the other side, which I crawled through as a child surely hundreds of times – and up the hill from that, in what was once my yard, the grandest hickory tree you could ever imagine, whose autumn leaves I and my brother and sisters and parents and dogs raked into piles (okay, the dogs didn’t rake), dove into, splashed around in like leafy surf, on and on.  Here’s a screenshot:

The Ditch, the Hickory, the Memory Flood

Wouldn’t This Work in the Writing Classroom?

The photo above may not do anything for you, and it shouldn’t.  But me?  I can hear the flung rocks echoing from the tunnel, smell the algae in its puddles, remember the sense of mystery of the world opening out at tunnel’s end.  For autobiography and personal narrative, again, this beats the utter hell out of brainstorming with pencil and paper about my childhood.  Never in a hundred years would I have even remembered that ditch and tunnel. But now that I do, the related memories wax exponential.  That ditch, for example:  after a heavy rain, it was a child’s river, and so, with my best friend Gary (who drowned with his father a few summers later), we named that “river,” in a bit of blood-brother name-combining, the “Clary.”  Again, just an example of how this goes beyond brain-storming to brain-flooding.

How Far I Roamed

Anyway, like John, man did I roam as a child.  I must have walked four or five miles a day on average.  Here’s Google Maps, with my first attempt to use Adobe Illustrator for labels and arrows, to show the details (click image for larger view, and note the key in the lower left corner):

How Far I Roamed: Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1960s and '70s

(And for the students out there who read this, let me know: do you roam as far these days? Or have you “lost the right to roam”?  And Dad: you can comment too, you know. How far did you roam as a child, on a daily basis?)

If you decide to play with this meme, by the way, please link it to John’s original post. It’s his baby, and it’s a good one.

1. including the astonishing “street view” which, as the name implies, puts you in the perspective of a photographer standing on whatever spot of road you choose, and allows you to pan 360°, tilt up and down, zoom in, “walk” up or down the street [↩]

I feel a need to pull back from the tools, and gravitate more toward meaning when I write.
–Web Legacies Wrap-Up, 9 Aug 2008

The Jocks and Fags personal narrative was meaningful for me. In its original context¹ – written for a class whose professor read it, penned a glowing comment on the bottom of the last page, and gave it back to me – it was only meaningful for one other person besides me. And since it was nothing more than enjoyable homework grading for her, it’s hard to characterize that essay’s meaning for her as anything more than a pleasant diversion.

In its changed context – published a couple of weeks ago here, after a good four years of mouldering in a box stuffed with other orphaned writings – the character of its meaningfulness changed as well. It had different readers, reading it for different purposes. Especially the readers who found it because they searched for such stories on Google.

And look at how what was once homework that did nothing became, through the power of this new medium, a story that did something. The comments to that post tell the tale:

Barry Bachenheimer wants that post to do something at his school district half a world away in New Jersey, and I can only hope it will:

Clay – Our district has set a summer administrative discussion topic on the “At Risk Student”that we don’t know about.”  I’m sharing this piece with them, as it is illustrative of a larger issue in our schools as a whole.

Thanks for sharing.

Phil seems to want something similar in his context:

We all need to try to save one child, one day at a time. I too will share this with my teaching colleagues.

But look what happens next:

I was searching for something to help me out with my son. He is going into the 7th grade at a Parochial school and having some serious problems on his football team with kids he knew back when he went to public school. They gang up on him, tease him and generally make him feel like he is worthless. The problem is, he loves football. He has to play with these kids if he wants to play, as it is the only league in our area. He has a couple of friends from his current school, but they are now starting to avoid him due to the disease the other kids are causing. His coach is also starting to pretend he doesn’t exist, because it is hard to put forth an effort when you are teased incessantly, and the coach ignores everything. The issue is, he really is a great player. Please help, if you have any ideas.

I replied to JJ the way I expect most people would:

It’s hard to help from across the Pacific, and situations like this are tough anyway, with no easy solutions.

And I’m no therapist.

Obvious options, none guaranteed, are:

1. Parents talk to school admin/coach.
2. Parents involve kid in discussion of how to solve the problem. There’s a life lesson here.
3. Kid stands up against main persecutors, and fights back.

I wish I could help more. But the point of my post is, growth can come from this stuff. It’s just not visible in the short-term.

Then meaning seemed to create change:

JJ wrote back,

Thanks so much for your advice. We have since talked to the coach and another administrator. The coach acted fairly unconcerned, but the admin. was quite helpful. We found out that others were having problems with these same kids! They are splitting the team and he assured us the “bully” kids would be on a different team. Your story really helped us out. I read it to my son. He felt like he wasn’t alone. He felt a sort of relief, I could hear it in his voice.

So anyway, they are splitting the teams in a few days. My son, after reading your story sacked the QB (main perp) at least 4 times last practice. The coaches cheered, the “bully” kids protested, and my son’s friends are all acting normal again. I don’t think it is over yet, but it is getting better. I want to thank you again. God/Goddess Bless You, Namaste’ … and a heartfelt hug across the Pacific.

What I’m about to say is another reader’s Rorschach Test. Sour types will roll their eyes and see this as self-congratulation, but types with purer eyes should understand:

Reading JJ’s story of the boy reading my “homework-cum-public-speech-act” was, in a quiet way, a high point in my writing life.

It fulfilled the hope of that essay’s final paragraph -

And he will come to understand, late one night in Spain while writing a story about a boy, that he owes it to that boy to always watch over the new student, and the one who doesn’t fit because he is too pretty or she is too large, and the one who doesn’t fight, and the one who doesn’t know how the present shapes the future. And he will try to help them learn what he was never taught.

- but it fulfilled it in a way unimagined when that essay was written, because I didn’t self-publish then. I could only think of my very circumscribed, fourth-floor-of the-schoolhouse and only-during-teacher-hours sphere of influence when I wrote that. But now, again, due to the change of context effected by the rabbit hole of this writing revolution we demean with the vile term, “blogging,” a piece I poured my heart into years ago was now pouring into someone else who needed the reading, because he was now going through something I went through three decades ago.

Insert your graphic of space-time warps here, and color it a warm red.

Coda:

It all brings me back to the power of this new medium. I tire of hearing people call it “transformative,” but I can’t find a better word.

I can find an analogy, though:  Superstitious people read everything from tea-leaves to stars to Tarot cards and whacked-out books of Revelation to try to discern their futures. I’m not superstitious, and don’t need to be to say this:  “Blogging” – which really just means daily writing² – has, for me, often approached the level of prophecy, in very personal terms, that I have again and again self-fulfilled.  Does it make it clearer by describing it as an act, when done at a certain depth, of writing one’s own future?

No superstitious woo-woo stuff is implied here. There’s a logic and causal explanation that we can very simply label a “reflective habit” – or maybe, to put it in Buddhist terms,  a “mindfulness” – that daily writing produces. That sort of habit surely works wonders with mere pen and paper, but those wonders multiply, as the story of JJ’s son shows, when they are shared.

Key examples of “writing my  future” on this space: I wrote my quitting school-teaching six months before I did it.  I wrote of launching a global student blog six months before I did that. The writing preceded the doing.

And key examples of the effects of this “quantum” online context:  Will’s snatching my off-hand paragraph about quitting teaching, and the discourse that swirled around that on both our spaces, and 500 good people around the world on Twitter lending their sinews to the Students 2.0 launch in an astonishing two hours one Seoul Saturday morning – that context, with its unpredictable and often wild instant feedback, has its own fateful force. It is the world taking notice of one small person’s words, and that notice, again, can transform.

And I am simply blown away.

To JJ’s son, I’ll just share that I wrote this other little thing, too, a few months ago, and his story connects to that piece of writing in ways I hadn’t imagined when I wrote it.  It went like this:

More and more I wonder: is school a good place for teachers who want to make a difference in the lives of their students, and to the future of the world? Is there a way to leave the daily farce of gradebooks, attendance sheets, tests, corporate and statist curriculum, homework assignments, grade-licking college careerist “students” (and parents), fear of parents and administrators, and fear of inconvenient socio-political truths – and at the same time, to make a far more meaningful impact on the lives of the young?

I’m thinking yes. I’m thinking, moreover, obviously. I’m not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I’d so much rather teach. [Emphasis added]

So again, to JJ’s son, I hope I’m not wrong in seeing “blogging” as a way to continue teaching without working for schools, and to contribute to learning in a way other than, and more meaningful than, grades.

And I would love to hear updates from you, if you’re ever so inclined.

And to everybody else: Half of what I do, I realize, is with an expectation that when something worthwhile is modeled, others will learn that they can do it too – and will do so.  I’d hoped to see more momentum for student voice after showing that (the currently beleaguered) Students 2.0 was both possible and easy. If that momentum has happened, I’m unaware of it, and will thank anybody who chimes in with other examples of the elevation of student voice in our adult-centered discourse.

And now this personal narrative instead of edublogging thing, this pull to the meaningful instead of the technological: I’m sharing the above not only because I love the story, but also because I hope others might consider a similar pull. (Diane Cordell already does this wonderfully, by the way.)³

And now I sound preachy, so I’ll close by having a nice warm cup of shut-the-heck-up.  Thanks for reading.

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(Beautiful) photo by *L*u*z*a*

1. Will’s post, and the link to George Siemens on context, was a flywheel for this post, though I drive the idea of context in a different direction here [↩]
2. okay, there’s more to it than that, but the habit is the thing [↩]
3. And Mark, I tried to comment on your post about feeling that, but quit after three tries. [↩]

[In my Web Legacies Wrap-Up post, I said I'd decided against publishing the ninth and tenth "Culture Clip" pieces I wrote that summer in Spain a few years ago. I changed my mind.  I didn't like the Vet piece, but readers seemed to, more than they did the ones I preferred over it (to which replied one cricket): Shirky's "publish, then filter" principle in action.

I'm equally unhappy with the piece below, but not so much because of the idea as of the writing, which just seems to miss. But in the spirit of Shirky, and of "fluff and fun," here it is anyway. Since the readership on this space is international, I'd be curious to hear any multi-cultural testimonies to the travel habits of your own countries. Are they similarly "blind"?]

~ ~ ~

Artifact: International Boarding Passes
Dates: 1998-present
Elements of Culture: Ethics; Traditions; Surface Cultures

Am I the only person who has noticed how easy, perhaps even normal, it is for us to travel or live in other countries—and never see them? Or worse yet, to confirm in our travels our stereotypes of the places we visit, because . . . those stereotypes were what we looked for in the surface culture in the first place?

We go to China, for example, and choose to experience it how? By lodging in Western hotels and taking tours designed for herds of Western tourists.

And am I crazy, or are the locals at the tourist shops strangely savvy at knowing what stereotypes we Westerners hold about them? In Mexico, for example, you can find, at any tourist market, shop upon shop in which the merchants, who look as if they’d never seen or worn a sombrero in their life, sell dolls and puppets of Mexicans wearing nothing but sombreros!

The more I think about it, the more absurd it is:

1. I go to Mexico to explore a different culture;
2. I want a souvenir to commemorate that exploration;
3. My stereotype defines what is most distinctive or essential about Mexico;
4. so I buy a puppet in a sombrero playing mariachi (and looking faintly drunk?); that

A Mexico of the Mind?

5. doesn’t represent a single Mexican I’ve seen in Mexico (outside of the tourist restaurants that hire depressed Mexican musicians to dress like Disney Mexicans from an American’s childhood memories); but
6. must have some truth in it because why else would the Mexicans themselves sell them? when really
7. they sell them because that’s what these crazy Americans always get off the plane/out of the tourist bus and ask for; so
8. back goes the American to America with his drunk, sombrero-wearing mariachi-playing puppet, where
9. s/he puts it on the shelf to collect dust; and
10. show it to the kids/grandkids/neighbors/etc who
11. years later go to Mexico and
12. remember that damn puppet and
13. return to 3), above.

(–ad infinitum and ad-freaking-nauseum. I’ll never shop again.)

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Photos: blind distortion by bashed; mexican puppets by abhijit

"Go, Tom, Go" (Clay, 2d from left, joins Redskin Cheerleaders to cheer Tom's latest post)

Look, I know I plug Tom a lot on this space, but it’s because he can make me laugh at the madness of public schooling like nobody else.  Ever since discovering Nietzsche 20 years ago, I’ve sided with laughter over solemnity, with gods that can and do dance over those that can’t or won’t.

Here’s Tom’s latest dance: “Do It the Right Way, not the Wong Way.” Send it to any first-year teacher who’s been force-fed Wong’s First Days of School.

It’s not unusual to be smart. It’s not unusual to be funny. But to be smart and funny? Not so easy. That’s why I like this guy.

–that, and that my heart goes out to any NY liberal transplanted to teach in a small Southern town in Virginia – Camp Joy territory in spirit, if not geography.  There should be a sitcom.

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Photo: littlerottenrobin