Beyond School

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books. [↩]

This is a picture of the Pattaya Beach I wasn't at that I didn't take. Who needs a camera when you know there's a picture on Flickr?

So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I wouldn’t choose to come to except that John, my best friend from my “professional college student/Bohemian vagabond years” from age 20 to 34, is here — I wrote about him and those years of our knuckleheaded intellectual awakening in the In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males post last year — and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other in 15 years, which is really cool. It was only a two-hour flight from Singapore to make this quick reunion. I’m pleasantly surprised we both made it this close to 50. And ditto that the conversations are as comfortable as if we just had coffee yesterday in 1994.

Anyway, this post isn’t about John. It’s about thoughts I had with him as we lounged on an empty stretch of beach away from the tourist-infested area.¹

John went the Ph.D. route and is now a philosophy and religious studies professor in the States. He’s a big Buddhism head, but he also teaches logic and critical thinking.

I watched a nice white cloud float across a nice azure sky, right up there above the palm fronds shot through with sunlight, and asked John with my own big teacher head, “So how do you teach critical thinking, anyway?”

The part of his answer that interested me most was: “The hardest part for me, and the most important part, is getting students to see in what they’re reading what the real issue is. Texts and writers often don’t make that clear.”

I said “hm” and watched more clouds, listened to the same surf’s voice here in Thailand that John and I heard under so many conversations in Los Angeles in the ’80s and Oregon in the ’90s. And I listened to some thoughts that I wish an interior monologue recorder would have recorded so I could play them to my history students (doesn’t it suck that our students get to hear so few of our many — for me practically constant – random thoughts about what we want them to learn, see, understand? That they can’t join us in interior dialogues?).

So I’m going to try to pull those thoughts back up. They’re pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to teach. It goes something like this:

You’re Learning Everything About European History Except What’s Important

I’ve tried to give you what we’ve called “the Big Picture” of how our species left Africa, populated Europe and Mesopotamia, started farming, made civilizations, spread those civilizations, got more complex, created institutions of politics and religions and economics and social organization and, as the Thais say, “Yak yak yak.” We’ve toured this pretty coherently, I think, in the first semester, all the way up to the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. I’ve tried to give you that coherent “Big Picture” framework because I never got it when I was in high school, and it took me way too long — into my 30s — to have it. That meant whenever I read or heard about a book or event or person from the past during the first decade-plus of my adulthood, I couldn’t “place it on the map,” give it a mental context — “Oh, that’s when the Reformation and the Age of Exploration and the Renaissance were going on all at once, so everybody was so confused with all the new knowledge when that happened” sort of thing.

Everything that happened before my life began, in other words, was something like an “historical orphan.” It had no relations with the other things going on around it when it was alive.

So I’ve tried really hard for the first half of our year together to make that story coherent, to make you see that A couldn’t have happened before B because B partly caused A, on and on. (I wrote about that a while back in Why History Isn’t Learned, and How Story Helps Change That.) I’ve tried really hard to give you that framework so you’re not the idiot I was for so many of my first college years.

And congratulations: Most of you, judging from your semester exam essays, seem to have got that hiStory in your heads.

But here’s the problem that I saw when reading those essays:

You Think “Western Civ” is About Learning “Western Civ.” It’s Not.

As John put it, you’ve read the text and understood it, but you don’t understand the issue.

And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all you’ve done is learn it. You seem to think that we’re teaching you Western Civilization because gee, it’s a great civilization.

It’s not. Like all civilizations, it has its strengths and it has its flaws. Just because it’s part of the dominant culture today doesn’t make it good. Maybe the dominant culture today would be much better if certain aspects of Western Civilization were different — or even non-existent.

Most of your essays saddened me because they were so full of cheer-leading for the West. Civilizations, Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern, don’t need cheerleaders. They need critics.

So in the second semester, let’s up the game. You’re going to continue learning that Big Picture. But I hope you’re also going to start forming your opinions about it, embracing parts of it, rejecting others, arguing some parts are broken and need fixing, and proposing how, if you were in the position of power to fix it, you would go about doing that.

Because many of you, when I’m losing my last teeth and blogging through bifocals decades from now, may very well be in those positions of power. And I hope you’re exercising that power not with pom-poms, but with sharp-eyed solutions to the problems you’ll inherit.

Otherwise this future old man is screwed.

Jeez, That was Heavy

So I’m going to go get a massage now. That’s one of the beautiful things about Thai civilization. They understand that a trip to the massage parlor is just as important as a trip to the shopping mall. The West could learn from that.

Image by piwaen

1. Thailand travel tip: rent a scooter your first day, then take it 30 minutes minimum from where all the tourists are to find an out of the way place where you can have some peace, quiet, and authenticity. [↩]

[I thought this post would be a farewell to Seoul. Instead, it wanted to be something I should have written three years ago, when I ended my six years in Shanghai. It won. I'll say bye to Korea later. And isn't writing a wonderful thing.]

*     *     *

It’s probably normal to hit a “regrets” stage when you close out your time in a foreign land. All the things you didn’t do, didn’t appreciate, didn’t explore. I’m certainly there. I leave Seoul for Singapore in a month, the next strange chapter in this stranger’s life.

I’ve made no secret over the last three years about my luke-warm to icy feelings regarding Korea. But really, Korea never had a fair shake with me. I came here after six years in Shanghai, for crying out loud, one of the most friendly and colorful and dynamic and blessedly cheap metropolises in the world. I learned enough Mandarin while there to be able to engage the Shanghainese in surprisingly meaty conversations, with the added entertainment value for my Chinese interlocutors that I carried them out with the vocab and grammar of a four-year-old. Learning babyspeak made it fun to be a stupid foreigner there.

And then there’s the fact that for China, a swarm of foreigners is a new experience. The Chinese borders were closed to the world until very recently, so we foreigners are items of extreme exoticism and curiosity there. And Shanghai and the other big cities have also seen an influx of migrants from the under-developed central and western regions of China – peasants who have never seen a weiguoren, a “white devil.” Bonus points if you’re of African descent: I’ve known such people who’ve told me the Chinese walked up to them and, without a word, touched their skin and hair in wonder.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant form of play.

And then there’s the flip side: China’s 50-year isolation after the Communist Revolution means that it’s blessedly non-Westernized. Away from the tourist and shopping districts in the cities’ shiny new centers, in the traditional city neighborhoods, the city outskirts, the small towns and villages, and the countryside, there are no signs of Western civilization consumerism. No Starbucks or Burger Kings or damnable WalMarts or Gaps. Instead, there are mom-and-pop markets, farmers’ markets, noodle shops, karaoke bars, fabric markets full of tailors, foot-rub and massage parlors. There are as many bicycles as cars in this purer, disappearing China – and these bicycles, often ancient, battered, rickety and wobbly, are a breed far removed from the status-conscious Treks and whatnots that would cost many Chinese a full year’s salary. Grandmas and grandpas ride these old bikes as their primary form of transportation, their “cars.” Young couples ride them tandem, the beau pedaling and his girl sitting primly sidesaddle on the rear rack, on sunny days topped by a lovely umbrella to shield her fair skin from the sun. They ride slowly, often well-dressed, and you can hear them conversing as they go. They often stare or doubletake at you as they glide by. “Weiguoren….hallo!” Toothy smiles. Play.

Grandmas squat on the sidewalk with their squatting grandchildren, steadying them so they can pee on the sidewalk without mishap. It’s normal – and really, foreigner, relax. How dirty can baby-pee be? Mothers carry their babies in jumpers designed to expose their bottoms, a daily parade of babies’ butts. Barber shops full of migrant peasant girls staring out the windows, almost never working, instead watching TV or chatting and eating together, or napping. They’ll take you upstairs and give you an hour’s massage for ten bucks. Sometimes “massage” is more broadly defined than it is in the West, without seeming seedy at all. The moral world is different here too,  much more accepting and far less ashamed of Nature. If massages are to relax all of the body, the thinking seems to go, then it only makes sense that the whole body be massaged.

And the wonder of the public parks in China: already at six a.m. they’re alive. Grandmas in military formation under a willow, led by a grandma with a ghetto-blaster playing traditional Chinese folk songs. They dance with swords, red fans, red scarves that fly in synchronous arcs as the old gals twirl. Grandpas carry their pet birds or crickets in bamboo cages, hang them on low tree branches, and sit under them with other grandpas on portable stools. Rainbow bridges arc over their upside-down reflections in the canals. The willows rustle, the birds sing. Peasants beat the sun to lay their daily harvest on the sidewalk, barter with the locals buying their daily vegetables. They weigh them on notched bamboo sticks suspended by a string, with counterweighing stones on one end. The big smiles, the missing teeth, the bowed backs from decades in the fields. The thatched hats.

The neighborhood park is also a free gym. More grandmas and grandpas, fathers and mothers, teens and children swarm the simple machines for their daily workout. They wear leather dress shoes with cheap gym suits or pajamas – pajamas, you’d been told, are a status symbol, since owning a pair means you have money to spare. They wear dress shirts and pants, they wear anything and everything as they do their sit-ups and back-stretches and presses. You see your neighbor – the one who had the chicken tethered to his front patio for several days until yesterday, when you happened by as he was wringing its neck in preparation for the night’s dinner – doing pull-ups. The sun is still not yet up.

After the sun goes down, these people fill the park for different activities. Young couples sit on its hillocks in the dark, next to the reflective pond and mechanical waterfall, away from their crowded apartments, to feast on their privacy together. Young and old alike fill the park’s circular center plaza, where yet another grandma with a boom-box fills the twilit sky with ballroom dance music. Old and young waltz, foxtrot, tango; they do it man with woman, man with man, woman with woman, young with old. They do it with four-year-olds. They see the weiguoren and pull him out to shake a leg, laughing at his baby-talk with those smiles, those missing teeth, those other perfections.

Looking at all of these people – the ancient ones most of all – it dawns on you that you, of all the foreigners teaching at your school and living in this neighborhood at the edge of Shanghai’s sprawl, may be the luckiest. Unlike you, they’ve been teaching algebra, or physics, or literature or phys. ed., while you, blessedly, have been teaching the history of China – the history of these very people dancing around you, dancing with you, at the park. Looking into the old folks’ bright and wizened eyes, at the lacework lining their faces, you’re struck by the fact that these very same people so happy around you now lived, decades ago, through the hardships of the Civil War, the Japanese Invasion, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution. How many of them have seen starvation, war, re-education, labor camps? How many loved ones have they lost – or been betrayed by? And yet here they are now, leading you in a dance whose steps finally, after a century-long nightmare, are light and joyous. Christ, the presence of old Chuang-tse laughing down the Tao,  and of the imperturbable old Buddha mindful that this too shall pass – both are palpable in them all.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant encounter with a truly different world. These people, with their cramped, dingy apartments and their dates on their battered old bicycles, with their bad teeth and their conspicuous pajamas, with their $100 a month incomes – they are poor, looked at with one set of eyes. But looked at through different eyes, that see wealth in terms unrelated to income, they’re among the richest people I’ve ever known.

If I ever have the chance to live there again, I’ll probably take it. No country – America included, America especially – has ever suited me like China has. If that luck doesn’t come my way, I count myself among the blessed for the experience. I know that’s sentimental, but it’s no less true for that.

The dance.

A simple grace.

A natural thing.

Morning Tai Chi at the Bund.

A storied face.

Primary transportation.

More photos below the fold… Read the rest of this entry »

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: Adam and Eve, Backwards ~ 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero, Backwards ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Dawn of Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays ~ 8. This Lecture ~ 9. The Original Original Sin ]¹

Gilgamesh - the Earth's Oldest Epic. Stephen Mitchell's fine 2004 adaptation.

I have a love-snore relationship with Book IV of Gilgamesh. On first read, in fact, it was snore-only, and no love. That changed on the second read, so stay with me.

First, the Snores

On the surface, it’s a tedious chapter that recounts the journey of Gilgamesh and Enkidu from the gates of Uruk to the edge of the Cedar Forest, home of the “evil” monster/”sacred” forest guardian Humbaba, whom Gilgamesh has decided to kill for glory. They travel a thousand miles every three days, only stopping for a lunch break at the 400th mile, and on the eve of the third day they pitch camp – where else – on the heights of a mountain-top where, closest to the gods in heaven, Gilgamesh apparently has better reception for dreams from the divinities. Enkidu encloses Gilgamesh in a magical circle of flour, a gust of wind portends a divinatory dream will indeed visit him. He goes to sleep, has by all appearances a very bad dream, wakes up terrified, and tells it to Enkidu. Enkidu then interprets the dream favorably, against all common sense, and Gilgamesh swallows it.

This happens five very repetitive times. The only thing that changes in each repetition is the content of the dream, and the outrageousness of Enkidu’s wishful interpreting.

In the first dream, Gilgamesh dreams a mountain falls on him and Enkidu. Enkidu tells him the mountain is Humbaba, who will fall like that mountain. (Never mind that the dream suggests they’ll both be crushed under him.)

In the second dream, the mountain falls only on Gilgamesh and pins him down, and a “shining man” frees him. Enkidu says the mountain is again Humbaba, and the shining man the sun-god Shamash (remember, Gilgamesh’s goddess-mother Ninsun prayed to Shamash to aid her son against Humbaba).

In the third dream, the heavens roar, the earth heaves, all goes dark and silent. Lightning incinerates the trees and all is ash. Enkidu really reaches on this one, saying the heavens are Humbaba, who is powerless to harm Gilgamesh.

In the fourth dream, an eagle with a lion’s head and flames shooting from its mouth attacks Gilgamesh, and a “young man” kills the eagle. Enkidu, *snore*, says the eagle is Humbaba, and the man is Shamash.

In the fifth dream, things get a bit “wtf”: a giant bull, whose bellow shatters the earth and clouds the sky with dust, pins Gilgamesh to the ground, but a man pulls him up, puts his arm around him, and gives him water. More “wtf” still, Enkidu out-does himself by interpreting the bull – get this – as Shamash, and the man as Lugalbanda, Gilgamesh’s father.

It’s not quite as bad as the “begats” in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Numbers (and if God wrote the Bible, this snorer proves He needed a merciless editor), or the Catalogue of Ships in Book II of The Iliad, but it’s close.

Next, the Love

I’m an English teacher. One of the more obnoxious parts of my job is getting all preachy to students who whine that this or that book is “boring,” and telling them that a bored person suffers from a boring mind. There’s always a way, I preach, to turn lead into gold. You just have to stop snoring and wake up, and do that little “reader-response” trick of bringing your own experience and mental connections to the text.

And when I do that with this chapter, it gets a little fun. Let me count the ways.

On Dreams, Magic, Gods – and Poets

That whole “dreams comes from heaven” bit, for example. On the face of it, this motif in Gilgamesh is one of thousands of examples in ancient literature of early humanity’s mental childishness. Faced with questions for which they had no certain answers – Where do we come from? What happens to us after we die? What are these visions we experience in our sleep, and what causes them? On and on – our earliest ancestors settled on answers that today’s toddlers might swallow, but not today’s adults.

The whole thing brings to mind an analogy that, while I know it’s facile, I’m still fond of, and find compelling on many levels: the metaphor of (Western? Intellectual?) human history as the development of an individual human. Antiquity represents our early childhood, gullible enough to swallow Santa Claus; the Middle Ages is our later childhood, accepting whatever we’re told by our authoritarian father-figures in the Church; the Renaissance is our adolescence, rebelling against those fathers and creating new identities, seeking new truths; the Enlightenment is the prime of our adulthood, the cooling of that rebellious passion as we turn more earnestly to our work; we could throw Romanticism in there as a mid-life crisis, though I won’t push it; and our own Modernity – say, 1850 to today – that’s us past our prime, muddled and venal, physically and mentally flabby, caring more about comfort than work, sliding into mediocrity and, soon, senility. (The divine Oscar Wilde points to the same thing in reverse order with his maxim, “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.”)

So our “young” Gilgamesh and Enkidu “know” that dreams come from the divine, are portents, omens, Things To Be Taken Seriously. Before you join me in a condescending smile, stop with me and ask yourself how many people you’ve known who are still so childish in their beliefs. Can you think of anybody like the man I met years ago who heard God speak to him from his television set – not once, but many times – and never once thought to ask himself, “Should I seek psychiatric help?” Or the good but hyper-religious friend who called me during my waiter shift at my Los Angeles restaurant to breathlessly tell me he had encountered God – and who over the next several months dressed – in Los Angeles – like Rasputin, cassock and Eastern cross necklace and all, and gathered a troupe of disciples around himself renamed after Jesus’ original twelve? Or any number of the no-less-extreme, though more socially accepted (and very well-fed) men on our radios, televisions, and megachurches who claim to talk to God on a regular basis? People who talk about auras, horoscopes, astrological charts, End Times, Nostradamus, on and on?

Ask yourself, better still, if you’re still childish in any similar way. I was once. In fact, I was just like Gilgamesh in this chapter: In my truth-seeking twenties, way back in the late 1980s, I went to an Oregon mountain-top, had a friend sit me inside a magic circle, and prepared to fast there for three days in hopes of receiving a vision from the gods – specifically, the Native American gods of the Pacific Northwestern Sundance religion. The punchline: we had to cancel the “vision-quest” because a) one of us had forgotten to bring a meat-offering for the bird-spirits, and you couldn’t have a vision-quest without a bird offering any more than Gilgamesh apparently could without that magic flour; and b) my helper-friend had a romantic crisis with his girl-friend, and had to run back to his distant town in order to patch things up.

(Gilgamesh was lucky Enkidu didn’t have a high-maintenance girlfriend.)

Don’t think for a minute that I regret those years. And don’t think, either, that I don’t enjoy being able to laugh at them from a completely different mental space 20 years later. Above all, to tie this tangent back to the “intellectual history as individual development” analogy, do think that the reason I was able to outgrow that childish stage was that I went on to study history from antiquity to the present in college, and to grow in that process to intellectual maturity – which, believe me, means much intellectual humility and skepticism, lest you think I’m prideful by saying this. (Nutshell: At the end of a semester of immersion in Greek and Roman studies, I wanted to be a Classicist; at the end of the next semester of Medieval Studies immersion, I wanted to be a monk – and actually called a monastery asking how I could; the following semester’s immersion in Renaissance and Modern Studies thankfully pulled me past that stage, and left me more of a Marxist than anything. Readings since then have pulled me beyond that stage too.)

So the childish magical thinking we chuckle at in Gilgamesh survives all around us, 5,000 years later, all over the world. I’ve traveled much of that world as an adult, and seen it. I saw it in my native United States, where spells said over water, bread, juice, and the like, are believed to magically transform them. I’ve seen it in Europe in the same manifestations. I’ve seen it in Kosovo, as a NATO peace-keeper trying to protect the people who drop to their knees five times a day on the streets to point in a magical direction and pray from being killed by their fellow country-men who believe in a different magic. I saw it in a Buddhist monastery in the Yunnan province of China near the Tibetan plateau, when an ancient monk put a magic string around my wrist. I saw it in Bali, Indonesia, at a Hindu temple full of incense and drumming with monkeys scrambling in trees overhead. I’ve seen it most recently at my Korean mother-in-law’s fresh grave-site, where her family visits and speaks no words of their own to her, but instead opens their magic book above her and reads from it, sings its songs, and then leaves. (I always talk to her at that point, fully doubting she hears at all, just because it seems so heartless to leave without saying a simple “We loved you.”) And I’ve wished for each of those countries that its people could have the opportunity to study history, or travel the world and observe it like I’ve been lucky enough to do, or both, so they could start questioning all the tribal, divisive magics separately claiming to speak their many One Truths on our inseparable, indivisible One Planet spinning through this One never-fully-explainable mystery called the cosmos.

Back to Gilgamesh, Who We Never Really Left – and His Poets

Reader-response. Connecting our experiences to what we read, riffing off the connections. All the above does connect, in this reader’s mind, anyway, to one thing about this snorer of a chapter in Gilgamesh that I love. It’s this: I can’t help but suspect the poets behind this work of being far less childish than their place at the infancy of civilization suggests they should be. Even more, I see signs in this chapter of a sensibility that is startlingly modern: I see these poets as laughing at the childishness of the religious beliefs of their culture.

The clues are in Enkidu’s interpretations of Gilgamesh’s five “dreams from the gods.” It’s not just that Enkidu gives different interpretations of the dreams – for example, Gilgamesh’s “helper” being Shamash in Dream Two and Four, but Lugalbanda in Dream Five. These are noticeably strange, and I always tell my students that if something is strange – is a “wtf?” – in literature,  the author(s) want us to notice them. The poets may indeed want us to notice how contradictory the interpretations are, and laugh at them a bit.

But the more laughable thing, the most interesting “wtf?”, lies in the increasing outlandishness of each interpretation. Dream One doesn’t raise a brow: the falling mountain represents the falling Humbaba – reasonable enough, so we’ll take it seriously. Dream Two doesn’t phase us either: the falling mountain is again Humbaba, and the god Gilgamesh’s mother prayed to for help, Shamash, is the helper in the dream. Enkidu’s interpretation of Dream Three gets more interesting, though, and upsets our expectations: Gilgamesh seems to die unaided in this one – it ends, remember, in “darkness, silence, and ash” – and Enkidu’s interpretation that the dream shows Humbaba is “powerless to harm” Gilgamesh doesn’t satisfactorily explain away that deathlike ending. Anybody awake in the audience, then or now, would presumably notice this slight “wtf,” and wake up a bit. It’s not reasonable enough to satisfy.

The interpretation of Dream Four, though, returns to reason, and lulls the alert reader’s misgivings: the eagle-monster is Humbaba, and its killer who comes to the King’s aid, Shamash – still delivering the help Ninsun begged him to give her son. This makes Dream Three’s interpretation seem a minor fluke. All is again as it should be in the land of story-telling logic. We should take this dream-interpretation stuff seriously. All that flour and favorable mountain-top wind works some serious magic to call down the attention of the divine.

Then comes Dream Five, which I swear strikes me as one of the grandest practical jokes ever played on priest by poet. No listener with the slightest hint of intelligence can take its interpretation seriously: Enkidu tells Gilgamesh the giant bull who almost kills him in this dream – who is his enemy – is not Humbaba this time, as we’d expect, but, wtf?!, Shamash, who in the previous dreams has been Gilgamesh’s divine helper. More wtf still, the helper in this dream is Gilgamesh’s father who comes out of nowhere and, though a former king himself, is still hard to see as a match for the sun-god from whom he saves Gilgamesh.

Remember, this poem was worked and re-worked over at least 1,500 years. That’s ample time for the court poets to find an interpretation for this dream less jarring on the audience’s imagination and less insulting to its intelligence. Yet there it stands, thumbing its outlandish nose at us all, with all its authorial authority. Why did the poets keep this detail as it is?

In my most mischievous imagination, they did it to confront their ancient audience with a choice: You either believe the authorities – us – and our sacred tale, no matter how absurd – or you learn the lesson we’re trying to point to here: sometimes you have to face facts, show some skeptical courage, and call nonsense by its name. This dream interpretation stuff is for the birds.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but wonder how many priests’ feathers were ruffled by this scene over the thousands of years of its telling.

A closing question: the interpretation of dreams – oneiromancy, for any students out there wanting extra points on their Gilgamesh essays – was a widespread religious superstition in the ancient world. The Hebrews did it, the Greeks did it, even educated fleas did it – but did any of those other “childhood cultures” do it with the implicit skepticism and ambiguity I argue we see here?

If not, those Sumero-Babylonians were awfully mature for their Age.

[Next: Lecture 9: Gilgamesh and the Original "Original Sin"]

1. This series based on the fine 2004 Stephen Mitchell adaptation of Gilgamesh. [↩]

My homey Dean Shareski, whose name fits Saskatechewan perfectly, tagged me for some sort of meme about something like “7 Things You Might Not Know About Me.”

Like Dean, I already did a similar meme about eight things, so pardon me for fiddling with this one for the sake of self-pleasuring.

I’m going to give it a musical bent.

7 Things You Might Not Know About My Musical Tastes

1. Joni Mitchell Slays Me

Blue Goddess.

I’ve been listening to almost nothing but Joni Mitchell’s Blue on my drives to and from my weekend work at the radio station for the past two months. I would marry Joni in a heartbeat for the mere pleasure of looking over her shoulder as she wrote her lyrics. They stand right up there with Keats and Shakespeare, *hrumph-hrumph*, mutatis mutandis,  in my book. Add to that the purity of her voice as it navigates the crushingly brave but fragile melodic lines of her songs, and you can add me to the list of those who are, to quote Keats in the “Ode on Melancholy,” “among her cloudy trophies hung.”

God, Blue is perfection. Where to start? “All I Want” should be sung at every wedding:

All I really, really want our love to do
Is just bring out the best in me and you, too….

I want to talk to you
I want to shampoo you

(–that “talk to you” / “shampoo you” rhyme slays me in rhyme, image, and whim.)

I want to renew you
Again and again
Applause, applause,
Life is our cause.
When I think of your kisses
My mind see stars.

I could go on and on, and will a bit more. (But you’ll have to click to read it below the fold:

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Oof. It’s Sunday afternoon. Since returning Friday night from a skipping-rock of a flight home from Koh Samui, Thailand – departed 6 a.m., layover and transfer in Bangkok, another layover in Hong Kong, a refueling layover in Taiwan, an arrival at Incheon (Korea) at 9 p.m., and an airport bus and taxi to enter the door at 10.30p – we gasped at the two-week-old dust bunnies bounding across our apartment, unpacked, and then I slept a few hours before driving through the brutal cold (oh Thai sun, please shine up here) to my radio job at 6.30 the following morning. Home again, write a post for Education.Change.org, sleep, more radio this morning, and finally, though sleepy, here to write a bit – *inhale* – about….

The Wonderful World of International School Hiring Fairs

It was wonderful, in a weird way. Talking for hours for four straight days to school leaders around the world about our views on teaching and learning (and most interestingly, though probably most damning for many of my job prospects, about technology in education) is an interesting way to spend the time.

Without naming names of schools or interviewers, here’s a random and sleepy-eyed report of lessons learned from the experience.

1. Bad interviews are good things

No matter the reputation of the school, the people sitting across from you in the hotel room asking you questions in that school’s name are a stronger indicator of how it would feel to work at that school. I talked to English department heads whose questions – and my answers – made it clear to both of us that we would, or would not, make a happy marriage. There was an unsurprising correlation between this marital element and the offering or non-offering of a position at each school. Schools touting themselves as “21st century schools” and banging their laptop program drums – and during interviews with which I expected flower petals to descend from on high – on an occasion or two turned out to instead voice sentiments belonging to, um, people who’d obviously never experienced the literacy magic that happens after a few months writing and conversing behind the wheel of a blog. No rose-petals there – instead, many mental leaves of wet cabbage fell, probably, in both our imaginations. Marriage for the next two years? We think not. Thank goodness for the bad interview, and for the “We’re sorry we cannot offer you a job at this time.” No apology necessary, really – good luck.

2. “Energy is eternal delight” – so its opposite is….?

(h/t to William Blake who, though dead, deserves eternal credit for the eternally delightful maxim.) If, like mine, your own heart seems to pump more espresso than blood, then it may be important to consider the energy coming from those interviewing you. I’m not saying interviewers need to be manic or anything; I’m just saying a lack of excitement, of a sort of buoyancy – of even a decorously restrained intensity – when discussing educational vision while courting for a temporary professional marriage may be, well, a screaming red flag. Granted, the interviewers are stuck in their hotel rooms interviewing candidate after candidate for many more straight hours than the candidates themselves, but still – we’re all teachers, current or past, so we should be pretty good at keeping our energy level up whenever a professional client enters the room, be it classroom or hotel room. The short version? Beware the droopy interviewer, and put a gold star by the inspired/inspiring one. You are, after all, bound to be sitting in many more meetings with them if you sign the contract to work with them. If they’re sleepy, chances are you’ll be a sleepy worker with them. But if they’re exciting – in a way that rings true (and we all have what Hemingway calls a “shock-proof sh!t-detector,” don’t we, to distinguish real from fake excitement, yes?) – then consider fishing your pocket for that ring, and dropping to your knees on the spot.

3. Interview questions make the interviewer.

By the end of the first of my four days of interviewing, it struck me how different interviews are based on the questions asked (and not asked) by the interviewer. Some of them seemed as stilted and scripted as the worst end-of-chapter questions from the worst textbooks (redundant?). They felt less like interviews than exercises in checking off the questions boxes. It wasn’t quite “schooliness,” so can we call it “interviewiness”?

The best interviews, on the other hand, were more free-flowing and responsive, characterized by give-and-take expansiveness as one party or the other heard something no script could predict.

4. Being yourself is better, come what may, than trying to be someone else.

Think about it. Not only does pretending to be what you’re not cheat your interviewer – it also cheats you. Show your true colors now, so you’ll know whether it’ll be okay to show them over the length of your contract. I love the fact that, at my second interview with the two interviewers for the school I chose, Singapore American School, I replied to a question by saying something to the effect of, “There’s no denying that people’s first impression of me is often, ‘Damn, Burell, you’re too intense!’ But after a while they see the rest of me, and realize I’m also mellow in my own way.” “Damn” is a soft enough word these days – and I certainly don’t toss out higher-level potty words like rhymes-with-fit or ends-many-limericks-about-Nantucket or leads-to-supposedly-eternal-damnation in professional company – and I wondered about the wisdom of the utterance after it escaped my mouth (and this was in like the middle of the second hour of the interview), but somehow the fact that the offer was still made left me feeling even happier than otherwise about accepting it when it came in hour three.

5. Check your ego at the door.

I got about an even mix of offers and rejections from the schools I talked to. One school in particular seemed so right after two interviews that getting the rejection note broadsided me with the force of a turbo-powered school bus. I bumped into one of the interviewers later, and he told me that choosing my competitor over me was the hardest decision they made the night before, and that it took them over an hour of group deliberation to make it. A rejection can happen for all sorts of reasons – maybe they needed yearbook experience you didn’t offer, or needed that administrator whose spouse happened to be a less-qualified candidate for the position you want. So don’t take it personally.

6. Remember to research.

I’m sure I blew one interview by expressing my desire to get experience in a program they didn’t offer, and expressing my distaste for the one they did. Oops. I’d mistakenly thought they did offer that program.

7. Benefits, preps, class sizes, and student mix.

You don’t offer a flight home after the first year? You don’t cover dependents? 70% of your student population is Korean? You laugh off the notion that four preps is too much for new (or old) teachers?

8. Courtesy is cool, good will is good stuff.

When it came down to thinking I’d be choosing between two very attractive schools, I told one of them how I hoped that saying “no” this time, if the decision went that way, wouldn’t close the door to a “yes” next time in years to come. The gentlemanly answer of the man I said this to was so winsome, I don’t know what to say, other than that it made me want to work in this man’s school even more. The answer was no less impressive for its simplicity, which was, simply, “Your saying no to us will offend us no more than we’d want to offend you if we said no to you. It’s the nature of the beast, and we understand that, so no doors will close at all.”

9. Remember to check yourself in the mirror before you leave your hotel room for the day’s interviews.

I can’t believe I forgot my belt. At least my fly wasn’t down.

That’s about it. Hope it helped, and fyi, Mr. Utecht, consider the assignment done

They pulled a fast one on me, for a very good reason, and launched the new blogs – including the education blog I’m partnering with – on Change.org.

I really, really, really beg you to come. (And I’m going to be begging some of you to guest-blog from time to time, to bridge the ed-geek world with the larger ed-world, if I can.)

If you haven’t seen change.org, you should find them interesting from the social media and participatory citizenship angles. There’s already a huge, incredible community of readers, commenters, and doers (I hope) over there.  I’m both humbled and fairly certain they meant to send the acceptance email to somebody else.

I won’t be unplugging Beyond School, as I said. Things more personal and literary-historical will stay here. Things more educational and reformist will be over at http://education.change.org.

FYI, I’ll be in Thailand interviewing with schools for the next week, then taking a long-overdue honeymoon on Ko Samui the week after that. But I’ll be back, goodness willing.

(This post is dedicated to the aspiring writers out there.)

Today, January 1, 2009, is the second birthday of Beyond School.

What a short, strange trip it’s been.

I’m not superstitious, but I love coincidences, synchronicities, and patterns as much as the next guy. So I’m going to trace those two years up to an announcement about some ch- ch- ch- ch- changes in my writing and non-writing life that will start this week. It’s not quite the death of Beyond School, so much as maybe growing beyond it. I’m not sure. Maybe I will be by the end of this post.

In my dreamer’s twenties, I often fantasized that….

….could I but scrawl across the sky, in letters stratosphere-high and coast to coast broad, an unknown writer’s plea to the world to discover my words – with contact info at the bottom – then some patron would do so. I had no connections, no money, no idea how to manifest my potential to the world. (College essays with a red “A” across the top and encouraging scribbles on the last page did not seem like manifesting to anything larger than the usually tired hired reader at the front of the classroom.)

That was in the ’80s. It lasted into the ’90s. And I’m fully aware of how lame that dreamer was, when others with more gumption did the work to figure out the publishing game, and got published. But that was me.

Then I collided with a White Rabbit in Shanghai,

- Jeff Utecht – around the autumn of 2005, and followed him down a certain rabbit-hole, and into the wonderland of blogging. (I still hate that word.)

During the winter break of that same year, Karl Fisch, who maybe knows this, and maybe doesn’t, offered me a Fischbowl full of red pills, blue pills, new-colored pills, and I fisted them up and gulped them down. For a couple of weeks, I read everything he wrote and started having trippy visions of an education that could be. I started a blog on Live Journal, of all things, and wrote a good twenty posts in a week. (I was single then, and it was an easy pleasure.) On New Year’s Day 2006, I waved a magic mouse and zapped those posts from Live Journal to Blogspot.

I wrote and wrote and wrote for months, mostly to nobody. The  occasional comment in those days was like a gold coin from the sky. I wrote visions of world-writing wikis that would turn into blog-book “blooks” and French Revolution wikis that made my head swim. I wrote about dystopian edu-futures in which teacher-vampires “sucked classroom blogging dry,” turned it into “a new way to turn in the same old homework.” I wrote and I wrote, for nobody and everybody.

By the end of the first year, I had written – and read, oh yes, so many of you – my way into ways of teaching that were candle-flames to my moth. I’m not saying they were anywhere close to great or perfect; they were just beautiful, bright forms of inventive play that frequently drew me too close and, because they were usually too ambitious and too big, burned me out.

I’ve always agreed with whoozits the great writer who said, “It’s better to burn than to rot,” so that was okay.

A healthy schizophrenia came….

….a Nietzschean “ball of snakes” of the mind, each contending for control of this here space. I was tired of writing of Things Two Point Oh. It felt like writing about the joys of a honeymoon, long after the newness had worn off. But I was an “edublogger,” a self-taglined “kicker of addictions to 20th Century teaching.” Stuck wriggling on my pin, how could I presume to write beyond Beyond School?

But the literary snake ascended triumphant. I started writing mad long posts about Gilgamesh, touching taboos untouchable in the schoolroom (possibly only because of my own ex-Southern Baptist unconscious).  I asked students to stay and teachers to leave. I wrote ten thousand words about an epic of about ten thousand words, and only got a quarter of the way through it.

The funny thing about succumbing to that snake: it worked. More people read those Gilgamesh posts than all the rest of my 600 posts combined. It made me want to stop writing about school(iness) altogether, and just write readings of the heights of human art.

Then Sarah Palin winked up the world,

and too many seemed seduced. Another snake ascended the ball, a political one, fangs thirsting to sink venom into that catastrophic hockey-mom’s neck – for the sake of America and the world. Grandiose, yes, but aren’t all our evangelisms? I wrote about nothing but politics for the next many weeks. (And if McCain dies, goodness forbid, in the next four years, don’t make me say “I told you it was important.” That Saks Fifth Avenue demagogue would be ruling the world – including that “country” she knows as Africa.)

Fully expecting my subscribers to unsubscribe in droves, I could only hope others would come to replace them. Water seeks its own level and all of that. (And I thank all of you who stayed.)

And then one day,

after weeks of nothing but manic and stentorian political blogging, I got an email from somebody about an editing / writing position opening up. It involved educational politics and activism. “I thought of you instantly,” he said. (And I thank him, and he knows who he is.)

I applied, interviewed, interviewed again. Glacial, painful waiting (and contemporaneous with the radio job I’d also been interviewing for).

And I got the job. Stay tuned for the URL when the site is ready to launch later this week. And expect me to pull many of your sleeves to help me push that vision of an education that could be – and that, because of so many of you, already is for a few lucky students.

Have I mentioned that long ago….

….I fantasized about writing in letters as large as the sky, “I write, I write – find me”?

That was B.W. (Before Weblogs).

Now, A.W., that fantasy has become possible. Instead of scribing on the sky, we write and write  on screens of light. And if we do it long enough, hard enough – instinctively enough – we can, with the right timing and wind conditions, be found.

This isn’t crowing, mind you. I’ll still need a day job. What this is, for any who need it spelled out, is a T-E-S-T-I-M-O-N-Y of the potential of writing yourself out there. Maybe those students who never believed it when I talked myself red in the face about all of this in theory will see it now. I started Beyond School with a freshman class two years ago; I wish I had them as juniors this year.

~   ~   ~

In the future,

I’ll be writing more on my new space than here. I want to continue making time to write the Unsucky English Lectures, but am not sure if I’ll post them here, or on a new blog, and just leave Beyond School as an artifact of teaching ideas.

(I wonder what Christian Long would advise. He bowed out of Think:Lab recently, if I’m not mistaken. And my god, I just searched for his blog and it seems he deleted it. Is that true? What a loss.)

Photo:
“Escribiendo el cielo” by anikaviro

More Winter cleaning. I’m going to be posting a lot of scholarly essays from my college years on these pages so I can toss the paper copies. Paper’s a bear to box and ship when you live the global vagabond’s life.

I took a Greek tragedy and comedy class in college. We studied, among other works, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The professor had a point of view – and a smugness about it – with which I strongly disagreed. He wanted to defend Sophocles as a believer in Free Will. I didn’t see it, and didn’t like his refusal (or inability) to see beyond his own interpretation. So this paper – a 14-page effort for a 5-page assignment, which was typical of me in college – takes it to him.

I haven’t read it since writing it in 1994, so the argument will be as new to me as to anybody else who likes this sort of thing. And that professor? He asked if he could keep a copy for his files. So maybe I managed to put a chink or two in his armor-plated head. [I just finished typing it. I like it, the academic Latinate notwithstanding, and the "sheer tedium," as I acknowledged in the essay, of cataloguing the millions of textual details supporting that Sophocles emphatically pushed his pen against Free Will in the play. My favorite part is the end, which goes into the political and intellectual context in which Sophocles wrote the play: the rise of humanism and atheism in classical Athens.]

I also went to great pains to link, using Apture, to Wikipedia articles that will pop up on the page for anyone wanting further reading about any of the characters, ideas, books, or scholars named. I did it as a demonstration of how much richer academic writing can be online than in print form. (Which is an interesting counterpoint to the Slow Blogging post from earlier today.)

Here’s the start, after which I’ll fold the rest into the permalink:

Of Kings and Strings:
Sophocles Contra Free Will in the Oedipus Tyrannus

Clay Burell
7 December 1994

Did Sophocles intend for his audience to understand the Oedipus Tyrannus [OT] as a “tragedy of fate”? Did he mean to demonstrate through Oedipus that freely-willed and self-determined actions are illusory through and through, that in reality they are the pulls of fate so softly on our puppet-strings that we don’t sense them?

To humanistic and Christian sensibilities, such a total denial of human freedom in the face of destiny is abhorrent. Very tellingly on this point, E. R. Dodds labels the fatalistic interpretation of the OT nothing less than a “heresy.” While admitting that “certain of Oedipus’ past actions [ie, his parricide and incest] were fate-bound,” here he draws the line: “everything [Oedipus] does on stage from first to last he does as a free agent.”¹ But when Dodds substantiates this claim with a list of Oedipus’ allegedly free actions, the very language he uses to describe each of these actions paradoxically undercuts his own argument: Oedipus freely chose to consult Delphi, Dodds asserts, because pity for the Thebans “compelled” him to; he freely chose to act on the Delphic response because piety and justice “required” him to; he made the free choice to extort the damning truth from the herdsman because he “cannot rest content with a lie, he must tear away the last veil from the illusion”; finally, he freely decides not to heed the advice of Teiresias, Jocasta, and the herdsman to stop the investigation because “he must read the . . . riddle of his own life.”² The compulsory adverbs – “compelled,” “required,” “cannot,” “must,” “must” – while not pointing to divine fatalism, suggest at least that Oedipus was determined by his own character. Being who he was, he could not act any differently than he did.

[Read the rest below the fold - especially if you want to argue about Free Will, about which I'm still a strong skeptic....] Read the rest of this entry »

1. Dodds, 42. [↩]
2. ibid., 43. [↩]

[Update: Oh my goodness. Seems the student writing below is, shall we say, not entirely original. I'm still thankful for the gesture, oddly.]

Call me slow. I’m spring cleaning in December. Old papers may as well follow old leaves.

And I come across this, which a 15-year-old student,  who never said much of anything (in a “still waters running deep” way) during his year in my Asian history class in Shanghai, gave me at mid-year.

Why he decided to re-write me as a character who’d been a poor villager in Nazi-occupied WW II, I’ll never know.

Before tossing the paper, I had to scan it. Call this post part of an “open file cabinet.”

My question: Why can’t I show this to prospective employers as a recommendation letter?  And my caveat: I can only hope he was serious. It’s hard to tell.  And my mis-giving: how much “light-reflecting into dark places” can you do in school – especially if you shine that light in places too close to home?

"This is the meaning of my life."

Life is interesting.