Beyond School

Annotations of Obama’s 2004 Interview on His Religious Beliefs

Obama is a year older than me, and that’s only the beginning of the list of ways I relate to him. Here are more things we have in common:

He didn’t grow up rich and privileged. When he got out of college, he drove a car with a rust-hole in the passenger side through which Michelle could see the sidewalk, but he didn’t seem to care: it got him from Point A to B. I had a ‘66 VW Bus in the late ’80s with rust-holes too, and loved it as much as the ‘68 Plymouth Valiant and ‘66 Mercedes 220S I drove in the ’90s. (I especially loved the Mercedes because I found it covered in moss under a tree, where it had sat for years, and bought it for USD $700. I washed it, pulled its engine, learned auto mechanics by rebuilding it [call it a reaction to too much book-learning and not enough manual skills], dropped it back in, and drove it cross-country from Oregon to Tennessee the summer before I entered Boot Camp and the US Army.)

He studied philosophy, religion, politics, history, literature in college. He was seeking wisdom. That’s what I did too. I took my sweet time getting my college coupon – my Bachelor’s Degree – because I wasn’t in college to get out of it, but to get as much out of it as I could. So I took 16 years between my freshman year and my graduation date, studying whatever looked interesting in each semester’s catalogue, and dropping out altogether when I needed a break, or wanted to study more deeply than college permitted. The best drop-out year came after a philosophy class in which we read only a few chapters of Nietzsche. I dropped out to read all 16 or so of his complete works, plus a few biographies and scholarly studies. That took about a year. Then I went back to college for more. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was the same way, describing himself as a “college drop-in.” Obama read the Bible, read Nietzsche, and more, as a young adult. So did I.

Obama smoked, read, and wrote. So did I. I hope his writings were better than mine, but that’s not the point. The point is all of that reading and writing (the smoking was a fix to stay seated, awake, and focused) were self-compelled manifestations of a desire to make sense of life, history, and the world. Others were frying their brain cells in frat-house keg parties and sailing through classes they hoped would make them rich. I know that sounds self-righteous, but there it is. At 46 years old, I am thankful for all of that seeking. It has paid off in a daily happiness I never would have had otherwise. And when I compare myself to the rich parents of my students, who seem to have chosen those get-rich college classes and succeeded in reaching their goals – but at the expense of having a reading, writing, and culture life at all – I become even more thankful. They have more money than me, but they also seem poorer. I wouldn’t trade places.

Finally – the wrong word, since I suspect I’ll be fascinated by this man for the rest of my life, and will never delete the Google News “Obama” feed in my RSS Reader until Life deletes me – Obama says, in the interview below, that his life-long quest for values he felt right to live by (call it his “quest for God,” if you will) did not reach solid ground until he reached his fortieth year. Same here, roughly, though my years teaching Asian history in Shanghai threw some Buddha and Tao headily into my own mix, and very influentially, when I was 42 or so.

But the point is this: We talk, in our edu-lingo, about the importance of constructing meaning from our studies, not just swallowing and regurgitating received information.  What I love about the interview below is the same thing I (humbly) love about my own path: It shows an understanding of questions about God, the Sacred, and the Good and Right that are eminently constructed. This interview is an example of critical thinking about traditional religion at its best. And while I don’t share Obama’s views about many things below, I do admire that he seems to have gone through the hard work of reflecting his way to those views, instead of just believing the things he was taught by parents, preachers, and all teachers of old dogmas in his life.

Put another way, the interview below is an example of that other (rightfully) sacred cow of modern education, project-based learning – with a vengeance. Because the project was a life-long one, and so authentic it had nothing to do with assignments and grades – nothing to do with school at all. It had everything to do with authentic learning for its own sake, learning for the highest purpose of all: a life of wisdom. And if that sounds high-flown to you, it does to me too, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The guy just made history, after all, by becoming the first mixed-race president of the still very racist United States. If that doesn’t suggest a wisdom, I don’t know what does.

Before I tell you to “enjoy,” note the format of the below: the hollow bullets are snippets from the interview; the square indented bullets are my occasional annotations.

Now: “Enjoy.” We’ve got a life-long learner as our next president. Happy days are here again.

• Obama’s Fascinating Interview with Cathleen Falsani – Steven Waldman – Annotated

  Full transcript of a 2004 interview Obama gave to a religion columnist about his religious beliefs.

• tags: obama, religion, christianity, politics, elections08

  • part of my project in life was probably to spend the first 40 years of my life figuring out what I did believe – I’m 42 now – and it’s not that I had it all completely worked out, but I’m spending a lot of time now trying to apply what I believe and trying to live up to those values.
  • My grandparents who were from small towns in Kansas. My grandmother was Methodist. My grandfather was Baptist. This was at a time when I think the Methodists felt slightly superior to the Baptists. And by the time I was born, they were, I think, my grandparents had joined a Universalist church.
  • • Universal/Unitarian is my favorite denomination. – post by cburell

    [Read the rest below the fold....] Read the rest of this entry »

Georgia:

“One good thing about Jennifer Hudson’s family tragedy – two less Obama voters.”

A 57-year old grandmother is killed in her home, as is her 29-year-old son. A seven-year-old child is missing and there is every reason to fear for his survival as well.

And [a reader who commented as] “Dagny and John’s Love Child” expresses pleasure that two Obama voters are now gone.
–Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

North Carolina:

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — The Cape Fear BBQ and Chicken Restaurant. Some powerful and at times ugly interaction today.

12:33 p.m. Sen. Barack Obama entered the barbecue joint where an older and majority white clientele of dozens was eating lunch after church services. At the other end of the restaurant, Diane Fanning, 54, who works at a discount club, began yelling: “Socialist, socialist, socialist -– get out of here!”

….Later, Obama came to the long table where Fanning and other members of a local First Presbyterian church were gathered. He held out his hand to her to shake it and asked, “How are you, ma’am?” but she declined to shake.
–LA Times

Tennessee:

Korea:

It’s after midnight and my wife thinks I’m brushing my teeth and coming to bed. Instead, I’m holed away here in my writing corner, needing to get something off my chest at what, you’ve surely noticed, may be a world-historical moment, whether you’re an American or not. I’ve tried to get it right and don’t feel I’ve succeeded. But I want to put it out anyway, in time to meet that moment.

~ ~ ~

Last Things First

I’m a 46-year-old man, a white minority in an interracial marriage in Korea.

Many people in my adopted country look down on my wife for marrying me. They look down on me too. They stare. They occasionally try to menace. They say things in their language that they think I don’t understand. I catch enough words to get the gist.

Other people here, though – my in-laws above all – accept me, value me, and show me through their actions things that feel like love. They help me when I don’t even ask.

You need to know that before you read on.

A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist

The Winner’s Ticket

I spent my first eighteen years in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a scenic little rhinestone studding the Bible Belt in the American South.

When I was about eight years old, around 1970, I was the bat-boy for my older brother’s baseball team. I wore the team uniform with pride, indifferent to the laughs it drew for being several sizes too big.

One night, the team played a city championship game of some sort in the city’s semi-pro Lookout Stadium, in downtown Chattanooga. It was a big affair for us little boys.

Two things were interesting about that night.

The first is trivial, though I want to read meaning into it, and it’s simply this: out of two thousand or so tickets drawn from in a raffle before the game, my ticket was a winner. I remember the laughter as I went onto the field in that oversized uniform to claim my Louisville Slugger baseball bat, emblazoned with Hank Aaron’s signature. The 34-inch bat was as oversized for my eight-year-old frame as was the uniform, but I was proud of that Hank Aaron. Aaron was a Southerner on a Southern team – Go, Atlanta – and even though he was black, he’d set the world on fire by breaking Babe Ruth’s record for most career home runs.

I’m convinced my ticket was drawn because, having no idea what a raffle was and thinking that ticket was just an admission ticket, I had wadded it up as trash and thrown it under my seat as soon as I sat down. When someone came to our section to collect the tickets, a teammate of my brother’s – his name was June, and he was African-American – helped me find it, and tossed it in the box for me.

To this day I still maintain there was a lesson there: The hand that drew my ticket felt something different when it hit that wadded thing among all the flat, straight ones. My ticket won because it was different. I’ve wadded my tickets in every raffle from that day to this. And since then – though usually not by accident – I’ve also wadded up and discarded much of what I was taught was right in my childhood.

The Loser’s Joke

The second thing that happened that night occurred as we rode home after the game.

There must have been more than one vehicle taking the team back to the school, because I was surrounded on that ride home by only white players. June and the other black players were not in the back of that truck with us.

We sat in the open bed of that truck riding under a very fine night through the very worst slums of the city. My brother’s team must have won, because spirits were high all around. These bigger boys hooted, they hollered, they filled the night with their voices. Some of those voices, as we drove through this poor neighborhood, cried off-color things.

I must have wanted to impress them, and so gave it a shot – with the earliest instance of rhetorical sophistication in my entire life. At the appropriate lull in the noise, I filled the silence in that sad neighborhood’s night by yelling, at the top of my eight-year-old lungs:

“Welcome to Nig*ertown, USA! Population: Too many!“

“Population: Too many!” – What a great line. Almost as good as “Two less Obama voters.”

Citadel Yearbook 1977

It was a hit for many of the older boys. They slapped me on the back, congratulated my brother for having a little brother with such wit, and for that brief moment, I was on top of the world. With that one joke, I seemed to have suddenly grown into that uniform.

But that world was the wrong one, and there are hopeful signs it’s dying now. And that uniform? It’s wrong too, and too small for us all.

I’m a 46-year-old man, a white minority in an interracial marriage in Korea. Many people in my adopted country look down on my wife for marrying me. They look down on me too.

Thinking back on that childhood moment, I wonder if any darker-skinned boy or girl, sitting on one of those anxious porches or stoops in that fine night, heard that happy line. I suspect several did. And I wonder if they still remember it, like I do, almost forty years later. Again, I suspect they do.

It’s too late to say I’m sorry to them. But it’s not too late for a different amends.

Baptised in Bigotry

Monday School in Dixie

Though my family didn’t go to church beyond the occasional Christmas or Easter service, my childhood was nonetheless suffused with the Southern Baptist brand of Christianity. I’ll only point at the regular visits to my elementary school of a sweet little lady we called “Mrs. Methuselah.” Her real name I’ve forgotten, but not her blue hair and palsied voice, which croaked out Bible stories as her bony, blue-veined hands manipulated felt Bible characters on an easel – all at taxpayer expense. Because of her visits, I remember to this day the names “Shadrach, Meschach and Abednigo,” though I’ve long since forgotten their story.

I also remember this verse:

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the glory of God lasts forever.”

I wrote that verse in crayon in a little state-sponsored, constitution-violating scrapbook she assigned us to keep. I Scotch-taped some grass from the school lawn underneath it that obligingly turned brown after a few days. Beside the grass, for good measure, I taped a dead flower, and drew above them both – framed with a jagged border I hoped suggested lightning – a stern, bearded God. I was a very good student in those days, doing whatever teacher told me to do. Being a Good Boy was for some strange reason extra-important to me. It still is today, with the difference that now I want to be a Good Man.

Anyway, this was 1968, probably. My first year of school. First grade.

At that time, of course, I had no idea my country was dropping napalm on peasant farmers and their families in thatched huts on the other side of the world – surely at the very moments this good woman was giving us these lessons. John McCain probably had no idea he’d soon fall from those skies himself, alongside his payload, while I was still learning my ABC’s, Matthew Mark Luke and Johns, and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigos in a public school.

Scott’s House

Scott was my best friend in those years. I spent as many days at his home as I did in my own. Scott’s mother and father were second parents to me, and good people. The bookcase and side-tables in their living room were full of books by an author whose name I, the good first-grader, was proud to be able to read: the Reverend Billy Graham.

Scott had a couple of sisters, though, who were already in high school when we were in first grade. Scott and I would often go into their bedroom when they weren’t around, and I can still remember other names I first became aware of in that household, names attached with images on the sisters’ many vinyl LP records: Joan Baez. Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Jimi Hendrix.

I remember being struck with how different these names felt in comparison to Reverend Graham.

Desegregation is "communist" work of "anti-Christ": Some things don't change. Little Rock, Ark., protest, 1959.

Stefon, Cedric, General, and Scott’s Father

Elbert Long Elementary and Junior High School must have been desegregated a few years before I entered first grade there. At eight years old, I was as clueless about that milestone in American history as I was about those Asian farmers in thatched huts who were daily aflame, literally, via the same tax dollars that paid the good old lady to teach me about fading flowers, withering grass, and glory of God.

All I knew was that I was a six-year-old with classmates who were about 50% dark-skinned and 50% light-skinned. My otherwise decent grandparents called the dark-skinned ones “niggras.”

~

I'm front row, center. Stefon and General are in the third row.

Besides Scott and some other whites, I had friends whose names were as different as their skin-tone: Stefon Talbot, whose spondeed first name was as distinctive as the long-lashed white eyes shining like pearls from his smooth, jet-black face; Cedric Winston, so much bigger than the rest of us we called him “Big Boo,” whose preacher-father equipped him with some hymns that made us laugh to tears when he performed them; and most memorable of all, General Lee Webster. General was not a nickname like Boo – it was birth-certificate official. General had a tougher life than Stefon and Boo – not as handsome as Stefon, not as gently parented as Boo, and infinitely more beetle-browed and bug-eyed than both of them, with a forehead twice as high as normal – and it showed in his hair-trigger temper. Thinking back on him now, General was a black Mercutio to my Romeo, and I loved him.

We all lived near school, and we all walked to and from it. Often, after school, we’d walk together to each others’ homes, to the mall, to all the places we roved in those days.

One day at Scott’s house, his Southern Baptist, Billy Graham-revering father pulled me aside and, with great concern and gravity, asked me, “Clay, why did I see you walking with that black boy on E. Brainerd Road?”

“That black boy” was General.

Coach Moser Teaches History

I’ve changed all the other last names in this story, but I’m not changing Doug Moser’s. Mr. Moser was my junior high art teacher and, more importantly, baseball and wrestling coach. He was new at our school when, now age 12, General, Scott, Stefon, Boo, and I entered seventh grade in 1974.

Coach Moser, seated left. Scott behind him, left. Me standing, right.

I don’t know much about Doug Moser’s background, beyond that his accent marked him as an outsider to the South. Thinking about him now, I’m struck by the fact that he coached several sports but didn’t, like most coaches, teach health or physical education – he taught art. And that suggests he had something in him refined, something cultured. I know that now because I’m a teacher, and know that teachers teach subjects, typically, that they liked in college.

Doug Moser was also, I suspect, fairly new at teaching. He looked to be in his twenties, so he couldn’t have been that far out of college, and while he was married, he and his wife had no children. But the biggest clue to his newness was his classic “new teacher” attempt to create true, caring, authentic relationships with his students.

He invited General, Scott, and me to come with him and his wife to a college wrestling tournament one weekend. He paid for the tickets, he paid for the cokes and hot dogs – and he paid with the disillusionment. My friends and I were too young and immature to appreciate his gesture; instead, we slurped the cokes and wolfed the franks while obsessing – for a ridiculous thirty minutes at least, as we sat in the bleachers two rows behind him and his wife – on some stupid chant we’d created around his name. “Middi-mo, middi-mo, middi-mo.” We chanted it over and over, laughing hysterically at this unfunny play on the name “Mr. Moser,” while he sat awkwardly with his wife, pretending it wasn’t happening. We never had a decent conversation with him that whole day.

He never invited us to a second outing. A teacher now myself, I understand why: I tried similar things, and got similar results. I’ve experienced that sad gap, as Joni Mitchell would sing, “from both sides now.”

But I liked Mr. Moser. In his art class thirty years ago, I was drawing a still life of an ear of corn. He eased up behind me, and very quietly said – I think this is verbatim – “Nice. You’ve got a good eye.” And that felt calming, affirming, good to hear – so good, I remember the corn and the man and his words now, at 46. I remember very little else from those years so clearly.

In short, Doug Moser seems to have been an athlete, an artist, an outsider, and an idealistic young man. And while my bone-headed friends and I disappointed his idealism at that wrestling match, we later, he told us, redeemed it.

Baseball and Race, Take Two

It happened at another baseball game. I was about the age of my brother that night I disgraced myself in the back of that truck by shouting my harmless little genocidal joke.

We had lost the game. We were in the locker room, sullen and self-important over this bit of stick-and-ball-centered trivia, when a few boys walked in who weren’t on the team.

They were all African-American.

One of them spouted some trash about our loss that rubbed me the wrong way, and I told him to shut up. A cliche stand-off followed and we finally came to blows. As usual, I probably took more punches than I threw, but who cares. All my fights back then (and I hope it’s so for kids today) were always broken up before they got dangerous, and this one was no different – with one exception: My friends separated us by pulling me back by my arms. This rendered me defenseless, and my enemy took full advantage of this by landing a free punch or three to my face. The punches didn’t hurt, and it wasn’t serious. Soon that whole gang was persuaded to leave the locker room.

We went back to showering and changing clothes, until somebody came into the locker room with some news: There was a gang of black boys waiting to jump me outside the building.

Again, though I didn’t understand it then, this was 1974 – exactly a decade after the Civil Rights Act ended Jim Crow and racial segregation. My friends and I were guinea pigs in the progressive “social engineering” decried by so many conservatives and reactionaries.

My teammates – not only Scott, but also Stefon, “Boo”, and General – surely didn’t understand this either. They just did what was natural to them: they protected their friend by walking out with him, and stood by him when that gang appeared – and they faced that gang down. I got home safely because of them.

The next school day, there was the schooly disciplinary thing, with the predictable slapped wrists and all of that. But afterwards, at baseball practice, Coach Moser gathered us up for a talk. And in that talk, he interpreted what was just a schoolyard fight to us as the slice of progressive American history it was. He told us that he was not proud of the fact that there was a fight, but that he was proud that in that fight, watching the white boy’s back against the black boys, were other “black boys”: Stefon, Cedric, and General. They had taken sides based not on skin color, but on something deeper. And he was proud of them.

Years earlier, in a little harmless American genocidal humor, I had joked that the black population should be decreased.

Coach Moser interpreted that moment in my young life in a way that taught me something important.

First Things Last

I’ve left my Southern roots and, like that raffle ticket, become something different. Many other Southerners have too, thank goodness, as the polls show. They’re voting for the more intelligent and respectful candidate – who happens to be darker-skinned – instead of the reactionary ticket indulging in smears cloaked in unAmerican Stars and Stripes and unChristian Crosses.

So goodness bless Ms. Betty Waylett, the fellow churchgoer of Ms. Fanning, the lady who refused to shake Obama’s hand in that North Carolina diner, and bless the church’s Pastor Bremer, too, who’s voting McCain for reasons other than race, for their remarks in that LA Times article:

[Obama] spoke at length with many of the other parishioners at the long banquet table, however, and got a much friendlier reception as he spoke about healthcare, taxes and Social Security. Fanning told the pool reporter, “Some of them are just nicer than I am. I know how some of them think.”

But several of her fellow churchgoers said their support was genuine. Betty Waylett, 76, told him, “You’re doing a great job.” She told the pool reporter she is a Republican but will vote for Obama because she likes the way he speaks and his manner.

Waylett, who is white, said Obama’s race was not a factor. “I never thought about it one way or the other.”

Pastor Randal Bremer, also at the table, said Obama told him, “Whether you vote for me or not I’ll need your prayers.” Bremer told the pool reporter, “I’m very impressed by his ability to meet people on a down-to-earth level” and that he would pray from him but that he planned to vote for John McCain, mostly because he prefers smaller government and McCain’s position on the Iraq war.

Scott’s father was a good man, but – Reverend Billy Graham and all – a weak one. He couldn’t apply the Golden Rule of his faith unto all others. “That black boy” – “that one” named General Lee Webster – was closer to any god than the good Southern Baptist father of my white friend.

A different ticket, a welcome change.

Stefon, Cedric, and General sided with me against their skin color because they knew I was on the right side. I was on the wrong side when I poisoned that childhood night in a poor neighborhood with that shameful “Rebel Yell.” And I’m siding with Barack Hussein Obama because I believe he’s on the right side as well.

Doug Moser saw history when the desegregation experiment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 redeemed itself in our schoolyard ten years later. That was the beginning. I didn’t think I’d live to see the culmination of that experiment in the election of an African-American president of the United States in my lifetime.

I’m awed to discover I may be wrong. I want to see more history on November 4. I want to see an America – and my American South, in particular – that has learned that race, while nothing we should vote for, is also nothing we should vote against.

Images:
Hank Aaron by Jaboobie
Citadel Yearbook
Little Rock Brown v. Board of Education protest: Lib. of Congress

Gilgamesh - the Earth's oldest religious epic - in Stephen Mitchell's brilliant 2004 translation.

[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. ~ 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man ~ 7. A Goddess Prays 8. The Modern Mischief of the Gilgamesh Poets]¹

Let me state at the outset that this lecture is about Gilgamesh, though at times it will be so only north by northwest – because this lecture will be speaking of Gilgamesh in the context of a death in the family, and that family’s attempts to make meaning of life in the face of that death.

It’s the same struggle Gilgamesh experiences in the world’s oldest religious story.

~     ~     ~

Death, Consolation, and the Problem of Evil

My wife lost her mother two weeks ago. Her mother was a good woman, and passionately Christian. Yet her life was ended at a young 64 by a stroke followed closely by a terminal cancer. My wife, on the one hand, cannot understand how the god her mother loved so much would end her life so early; and on the other hand, my wife now feels pulled to explore her mother’s religion in order to understand and, she hopes, experience the happiness this religion gave her mother.

The question my wife keeps asking is “Why?” It’s an old and bedeviling question in Christianity, one that theologians have a term for: theodicy, “the problem of evil,” in a universe purportedly controlled by a god said to be both all-powerful and all-good. If he is these things, then how could he stand by and watch this devout woman die such a slow and tragically early death?

Had this death occurred before I began this series on Gilgamesh, I probably would have offered insights about our reaction to death and loss from Buddhism and Taoism.

I’m not a Buddhist because I find reincarnation as improbable – and as devoid of compelling evidence – as I find notions of heaven and hell (though Buddhism’s lack of a permanent hell makes it a more humane metaphysics than Christianity or Islam, in my view). But the Buddha’s teachings on how we create our own suffering by letting our fear and desire master us strike me simply as psychological, not religious, wisdom.

Fearing death is unwise like fearing old age is: it’s part of the natural order – and there’s the Tao – so fearing it is unprofitable. Add to that that death is an unknown, and as far as evidence goes, most probably is nothing more than oblivion on the order of an eternal and peaceful sleep without dreams, and there seems little cause for fear. Sadness, yes, but not fear.

Desiring immortality or, more to the point, to see our deceased loved ones again in an afterlife, is equally painful. In our most honest, quiet, interior moments, I can’t help but suspect that we all harbor extreme doubts that there’s an eternal reunion of friends and family in any heaven. But our desire that this be the case, despite our secret honesty, sets the stage for inner conflict, for anguish, as hope battles skepticism and desire battles realism in our breasts. Resolution favors doubt on this question, and thus, so long as we side with our desired fantasy over the evidence of our senses, we don’t find peace.

It really boils down to a conflict between naturalism – what we guess or reason by observing nature – and supernaturalism: the teachings about unobservable things from ancient tribal books and their interpreters in today’s various priestly classes.

But to repeat: I would have offered the above perspectives had this death occurred before my studies of Gilgamesh. That’s not the case. And I am as surprised as the next person that I find myself now believing that Gilgamesh offers a wisdom about death and how it is best dealt with that is superior to that of Buddhism.

As I mentioned in my last post, the three days’ mourning and funeral for my Korean mother-in-law here in Seoul was dominated by one book: the Bible. There was one other book present during those rites, and it was my copy of Gilgamesh. As the Korean mourners and I sat on the floor with the Christian preacher leading her flock in readings, songs, and prayers – none of which I could understand, of course – I found it entirely appropriate to read this other ancient meditation on mortality and the meaning of life, since it was, after all, from a religion and a book that lived in people’s hearts for four thousand years at least – twice as long as Christianity has lived so far – and which informed and influenced the Bible as well.

When I was told that it looked disrespectful to be reading this book as the Koreans looked to their own ancient book for guidance, I put the book away. When in Rome and all of that.

But I got the chance, later, to explain to my wife why that book was profoundly relevant to the occasion. Call it a rehearsal for this post. Here goes.

A Bit of Homosexuality and a Macho Fight Scene: Ho Hum

The last lecture concluded with Shamhat – the temple prostitute who played a “holy Eve” by sexually elevating the “animal Adam” Enkidu into civilization – leading Enkidu to the city to experience its glories and to meet Gilgamesh, its king. We noted the contradiction of Enkidu’s feelings about meeting the king.  On the one hand, he looked forward to Gilgamesh satisfying his new yearning for “a true friend”; but on the other hand, he declared he would challenge Gilgamesh to a fight for two reasons: first, to stop the king’s unjust practice of taking each new bride’s virginity before her husband on her wedding day; and second, simply to show he was physically mightier than the king.

I find the story from this point to the end of the fight scene only marginally interesting.  Gilgamesh has a few dreams portending Enkidu’s arrival that disturb him, and we see the unsurprising evidence that this ancient culture, like so many others, saw dreams as possible messages from the divine.  Beyond that, we see hints that male friendship in this culture might be homosexual – which won’t surprise anybody familiar with similar hints about Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, practically all the Athenians of classical Greece’s Golden Age (these normal homosexuals – who gave us democracy, philosophy, tragedy, comedy, and so much more – considered straight men queer), and the Bible’s King David and Jonathan.²

Then comes the big fight scene: Gilgamesh shows up to taste his latest bride, but Enkidu blocks his way. Their fight is predictably over-the-top, half saloon-brawl in a cliche cowboy movie, half the Incredible Hulk, and finally Gilgamesh pins Enkidu. Enkidu’s a good sport: he acknowledges that Gilgamesh is his superior, that he has the right to rule, and declares his loyalty. They kiss, hold hands, and walk back to the palace.

Another WTF Plot Twist: The Quest to Kill Nature’s “Evil” Guardian

I’m intimidated at this point, because the plot turn that happens here, just a third of the way into the story, connects to everything that happens from this point forward. It’s a huge and intricate tapestry of meaning from this point on, and I honestly don’t know if I’m equal to the task of holding all the threads together. I’ll do my best, though.

The plot turn I speak of is this: After an unspecified period of time during which Gilgamesh and Enkidu cement their friendship in the city, Gilgamesh gets a wild hair up his behind and announces to Enkidu that he has a new mission: He and Enkidu are going to travel to the Cedar Forest, a sacred place which men are forbidden to enter, in order to kill its “evil” guardian, the “monster” Humbaba, and chop down the tallest cedar tree in the forest.

Enkidu, remember, was originally a semi-animal in the wild, running with the gazelles and fighting off the lions that preyed upon them. He knew the Cedar Forest, knew it was sacred to the god of the wind, Enlil, and knew that Humbaba, being appointed by Enlil to protect the forest, was thus not a creature so easy to label as “evil.” So Enkidu begs the hot-blooded young king to drop this idea.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu argue about this, and the interesting thing about the argument is this: Enkidu frames his argument in terms of the sacred. The forest is holy, Humbaba is its divinely-appointed guardian, and so to kill Humbaba would be a sacrilege. Gilgamesh, though, frames the argument not in terms of the sacred, but in terms of the heroic.

Let me assure you that, as an English teacher, I’ve always inwardly groaned at how often other English teachers trot out the unit on “the Hero’s Journey.” It’s not a bad thing, this theory. Anybody who’s read books like Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces knows how fascinating the subject is. What makes me groan is its popularity. It’s the “Hotel California” or “Stairway to Heaven” (or, god help us, the “Free Bird”) of English units, trotted out so many times that even the wormiest of us booky types must get tired of it after the thousandth listening. The other thing that makes me groan is that, in the wrong hands, it becomes as formulaic as the dreaded, crappy five-paragraph essay. There’s something dangerous about prescribing to students that they take every story under the sun and shoehorn it into the Hero’s Journey formula. By reducing stories to that framework, we can ignore what’s unique or surprising that doesn’t fit so nicely into that shoe.

So trust me, I offer the following as one of the few times I want to talk about a story in these terms.

What’s interesting about Gilgamesh to me, more than anything, is really the mind of the poets who polished and revised this story from its early Sumerian version around the 23rd century BCE to its later Babylonian version in the 12th century BCE. Unlike other ancient books that were edited and revised by countless hands over many centuries – the Bible comes to mind more than any other book I know – Gilgamesh seems to have gained in coherence and consistency of vision over time, rather than becoming, like the Bible, more contradictory and less coherent.

And the vision all these Gilgamesh poets so sharply refined is one that, contrary to appearances, is deeply anti-heroic.

You don’t realize it in the current scene. Gilgamesh answers Enkidu’s religious argument with an argument based on heroism. His motives boil down to these two: first, he wants to achieve something no other mortal has achieved, and so – since “none of us can escape death,” he says – gain immortality for his name, in stories of his exploits; and second, he wants to rid the world of “evil.” He doesn’t respond to Enkidu’s arguments at all. Instead, he chides Enkidu for being cowardly, and finally wins Enkidu over by this shaming tactic.

So the “Hero” argument wins the day. We’ll see, by the end, that it was a fool’s argument as well.

Before closing this installment, a couple more observations:

The “Double That Balances” Motif, and Another “Genesis, Backwards” Trope

To step back from the canvas for a second to take a larger view, we should review the original “wtf plot twist” so far: the god Anu’s “solution” to Gilgamesh’s oppressive behavior as king by creating Enkidu as a “double that balances” him, and “so brings peace” to Uruk.  In the first stage of this pattern, we saw Gilgamesh as symbol of the city, and Enkidu as symbol of nature; Gilgamesh as civilization, Enkidu as animal; Gilgamesh as two-thirds divine, one-third human, Enkidu as two-thirds animal, one-third human.

Now, though, we’ve seen Enkidu seem to upset that balance by crossing over to Gilgamesh’s side. Sex with Shamhat erased his original animal innocence and replaced it with full humanity; his journey to the city took him out of the realm of nature; and though he resists Gilgamesh’s urge to kill Humbaba and violate the Cedar Forest, his ultimate submission again places him now on the same side as Gilgamesh, rather than opposing him as a “balancing double.”

But look what is about to happen:  Gilgamesh is about to lead Enkidu out of the city – out of his own territory – and into Nature, the original domain of Enkidu. So in a sense, we see Enkidu cross into civilization only to – wtf – see Gilgamesh now “balance” this by entering Enkidu’s territory.

Note, further, that something is imbalanced about all of this nonetheless: because while Enkidu, when in his original state of animal innocence, protected the other animals from predators and, more significantly, human trappers, Gilgamesh is entering nature with the opposite intention: to conquer it, to kill its guardian, and to exploit its natural resources - the “tallest cedar” – for the benefit of civilization.

That was wordy, I know. I’m getting tired. But I hope you can see how very, very deep this is.

As I said in the very first lecture, this is the story of possibly the first walled city in human history. That means it’s the story of the first civilization to wall itself off from nature, and radically exploit nature in order to develop its civilization.  Since pre-civilized humans worshiped nature for hundreds of thousands of years in the paleolithic and neolithic ages, it seems quite reasonable to suspect that the people of the first city, cutting down forests for buildings and mining the earth for gold, silver, and the lapis lazuli so loved by the Sumerians, must have felt a certain fear as they violated Nature for the good of their city life.

That’s what’s so radical, to me, about the coming episode in the Cedar Forest. It’s holy to the gods. Man should not violate it. Humbaba is only “evil” from the viewpoint of the city people who want lumber for more housing, temples, markets. From the viewpoint of most of human pre-history, Humbaba is closer to an angel of the lords.

And Gilgamesh wants to kill him.

To pre-empt the type of comment that I frequently get accusing me of one-sidedness, let me make this clear: Civilization is glorious in this poem, according to its poets. They sing its praises with unambiguous adoration. And they surely understood that civilization thus required the lumber, the minerals, the precious stones, and all the other natural resources sacred to the gods.

And that’s one of the beauties of this classic: we see the earth’s first advanced civilizations rightly celebrating its achievements while at the same time worrying about its effects on the natural order around it.

In that sense, Gilgamesh feels closer to me – as I read the daily accounts of global warming’s acceleration and the death of the seas through acidification and over-fishing – than any other ancient book. If we’re the Omega of civilization, due to our unrestrained exploitation of nature in the name of civilization, then Gilgamesh is the Alpha. And that’s deep to me – and another reason this classic doesn’t suck.

And it’s just the beginning.

As for the “Genesis, Backwards” thing? We’ve seen how Gilgamesh is the opposite of “Genesis” in terms of woman and sexuality (both good), and in terms of most of the “Seven Deadly Sins” (not deadly, not sins).  Now we see another radical difference from the Judeo-Christian in this older religion: In Gilgamesh, the gods created nature and forbade mankind to violate it. In “Genesis,” though?

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:26

While there are various ways to interpret this text – and ReligousTolerance.org gives a nicely balanced overview of those ways – it’s beyond dispute that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god comes nowhere close to the Sumerian and Babylonian position on nature in Gilgamesh. In this book, nature was not created for humanity at all; on the contrary, the gods defend Nature from us.

Wtf indeed. It’s an ancient wisdom never more relevant than now.

And if you haven’t noticed, let me spell it out: in my view, the Tanach (what Christians call “The Old Testament”) seems, more and more, to be the polar opposite of Gilgamesh.  Up to now, I’ve been playing with phrases like “Adam and Eve, Backwards,” and “The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards.” But really, since both of those things come later than the culture of Gilgamesh – and the Biblical Judeans were conquered by the Babylonians, deported by them, and had their temple destroyed by them – it seems far more accurate to call the Bible “Gilgamesh, Backwards.”

More on that later too. And oh yes: death.

~ ~ ~

The Gilgamesh Series So Far:
1. Gilgamesh: 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 and Evil, Nature and the Hero – Backwards
6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man

1. This series based on the beautifully poetic 2004 Stephen Mitchell translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
2. Please note I that I speak here of “hints” of homosexuality. Google or Wikipedia will give you more info. [↩]

[Rarely in the last 21 months have I let more than two days go by without writing in this space. It's been a full week, though, since my last post. There are a number of reasons, and I just want to explain one of them by telling this story:]

~     ~     ~

New readers might not know this, but I’m somewhat of a newlywed, having married my Korean wife on March 8 of this year.  One Sunday morning five weeks after the wedding, my wife’s mother suffered a catastrophic stroke from which the doctors doubted she would recover at all – though she did pull through, that tough woman.  Six weeks after that, though, still in the hospital, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  For the following nine weeks, we received regular urgent calls to rush to the hospital to say goodbye.  All of them were false alarms, until another Sunday morning two weeks ago, when my wife’s mother finally passed away.

My wife’s family, though Christian, is still deeply Confucian in its devotion to family. You Westerners and Anglos who think you know what a close family is would probably agree, after living in China or Korea, that Confucianism takes family ties to depths unknown in the West. And because I’m married to the oldest child in the family, I was a bit shocked to discover that I was now looked upon as the “oldest son” of my wife’s family, outranking her two brothers – in theory, anyway. My inability to speak Korean soon made it clear that I could not play that role, so I receive much honor from my brothers, but little of the burden they’re having to bear.

This became clear, especially, during the three days’ mourning at the funeral home. Korean Confucianism dictates that the sons of the deceased spend two full days in black mourning suits, welcoming all who come to pay their final respects. (The daughters are not allowed to do this, but instead linger outside the altar room in their own black mourning dresses.) The visiting hours extend from roughly 8.00 a.m. to midnight, and the sons spend that entire time seated next to the altar, until a visitor arrives, at which point the sons stand shoulder to shoulder.

At first, my brothers-in-law insisted I welcome guests with them in this fashion, and I did my best – but it was confusing. Sometimes, visitors would come, we would bow, and then the visitors would turn to my mother-in-law’s portrait, place a white chrysanthemum on the table in front of it, then bow their heads and pray. They would then turn back to us, and we would both bow to each other from the waist, shake hands while exchanging a few words of thanks, and say goodbye.

At other times, though, guests would come in and go through the same process up to placing the flower – but then, instead of bowing their heads and praying, they would stand upright, fall to their knees, then place both hands on the floor in front of them, and touch their foreheads to the floor between their hands for a few long seconds.  Then they would stand up, and repeat that ritual a second time, and stand back up, bow toward the portrait from the waist, slowly, then turn to us.

The first time this happened, I thought my brothers-in-law and I would bow from the waist the way we had with the earlier guests. So I was surprised to see them instead spread out a bit, face the guests, and then, together with the guests, do the two full head-to-the-floor genuflections all over again, followed by the final bow from the waist.

I thought this second form of reverence was beautiful. I couldn’t understand why it was performed less frequently than the first.

Anyway, after we and the visitors performed that rite, the visitors would then shake my brothers-in-laws’ hands down the line, and usually, when they got to me, look quizzically at me and either ask my brothers-in-law a polite “who’s the foreigner” question in Korean and then shake my hand, or else look at me coldly, turn their backs without a word, and leave.

To digress for a second, I can’t recommend highly enough that second experience to any white Anglo, because it was the first time in my life I had experienced what it feels like to be looked down upon and rejected because of your race. I’m fully aware, in retrospect, that my interpretation of these people’s reactions to me could be wrong, that possibly it was just discomfort, confusion, or any number of other reasons that they didn’t treat me as equal to my brothers-in-law. But the feelings I experienced during those moments were new. I felt a new appreciation for the experience of people of color, or in interracial marriages, in the U.S. and other white-dominated countries.

My brothers-in-law noted the awkwardness, and seemed to come to grips with the fact that I was not Korean, that I was a somewhat distracting presence for all, and gave me permission to basically come and go as I pleased while they kept the stricter vigil.  I pretty much did that for the rest of the mourning.

Back to the story, though: After a few hours of sometimes kneeling – kow-towing, to give it its Chinese name – and sometimes only bowing, I asked my brother-in-law: “Why do some people kneel and touch their heads to the floor when paying their final respects, while others don’t, but instead only stand, pray, and bow?”

His answer saddened me: “The ones who kneel are traditional Koreans. That’s the way we’ve always done it. But the ones who don’t kneel are Korean Christians. They were taught by the missionaries not to kneel to their ancestors, because that was worshiping them, and the First Commandment in the Bible forbids that, so it would displease God.”

My wife had told me, in the first days of our courtship, that her childhood was marred by family fights over whether to pay respect to ancestors the traditional way or, in following the teachings of their new Christian faith, to refuse to do so. It’s an issue that has caused a lot of strife and discord in many Korean families since the missionaries came, and continues to do so. The funny thing is, though, that as I watched this custom being enacted by mourners toward my mother-in-law, it never entered my mind that they were “worshiping” her. They were paying respect, they were honoring, they were expressing reverence for this woman they loved and her path on this earth, as far as I could see – and doing it in a very touching, beautiful, humbled way. And now, because some long-ago foreign man of a foreign god had interpreted their culture in terms of his own, they were fighting about it.

My wife’s family, again, being Christian, themselves did not pay their final respects to their mother in this traditional way. Instead, they constantly pulled out their Korean translations of the English (King James) translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek Bible, read verses from it, prayed to its god, and droned Western hymns (again in Korean translation) from its hymnal. I found that sad.

On the third day, we were called to watch the Korean undertakers wrap my mother-in-law’s body in the traditional silk binding-cloth, from head to toe, layer after layer, each layer tied tightly across her body with silk ties, until in the end she looked as if enclosed in a silk cocoon. A few hours later, we were at the funeral grave-site. The Christian preacher read a few verses from the Bible, they sang a few more hymns, the Korean grave-diggers covered the coffin with dirt and trotted in a circle of four to pack it down, in a cheerful way that made the children laugh and me think of the wry grave-digger in the Yorick’s skull scene in Hamlet. They said one last prayer – I kept my eyes open, as always when people pray, and took in the beautiful view of nature from this hilltop site, thinking appreciative thoughts the whole while about nature’s beauty, my in-laws’ decency, my mother-in-law’s well-meaning life – and then we all left.

We were all exhausted. I thought that was the end of it. But soon I learned that Korean Chusok – “Thanksgiving” – began two days later, and we would be spending another three or four days with the family at my father-in-law’s apartment on the outskirts of Seoul.

During Chusok, I learned that families visit the graves of their ancestors to have a meal “with them” there – so back we went to the gravesite, only three days after the burial. For some reason, my wife’s family didn’t bring a meal to the grave, but at many of the neighboring graves speckling the rolling hills of the massive cemetery, families were all picnicking by the burial mounds with rice and chopsticks and kimchi and the whole Korean spread. It was a cheerful sight on a beautiful, sunny, late-summer day.

We kept our visit short. Father-in-law now read from the Bible instead of preacher. I noticed he read from Revelation, the last book of the Christian New Testament, which Martin Luther himself rejected and opined should not be included in the Protestant Bible because he “saw no God there.”  More hymns were sung and prayers said, as I again surveyed the view of nature, and mentally surveyed the path of all our lives, and its common destination.

I found myself wondering again, as I had many times over the past week, if anybody in the family found it sad that all the words being spoken were not from the hearts of the family members, but the pages of a foreign book; that no words at all were being spoken by any but the elder men – preacher, then father; that the words were not about this kind woman in the ground at the end of her good life, but were instead about a “jealous God” and a crucified teacher in that foreign book. Even the tombstone inscription was not the family’s words, and its subject not the family’s mother and wife: instead, it was a cliche verse glorifying the god of that book. It seemed so impersonal to me.

I remembered, too, all those rushed “last visits” to the hospital bed, the family thinking so many times they were sharing their last moments with her, and each time wishing that someone would simply speak to her – would tell her she had been a good mother, a good wife, that she was loved, that her life was well-spent – instead of incessantly weeping and praying above her to the god they hoped would save her. I don’t think she ever got to hear her family express such things. Religiosity kept getting in the way.

The final Chusok prayer was said, and the family turned to leave. My wife stayed, and so did I. I told her I didn’t want to offend anybody, but that I wanted to pay my respects to her mother in the most beautiful way I could. After I explained what I meant by that, I was surprised that my wife approved.

So, though it felt slightly foolish, this foreigner – whose culture’s book and customs had dominated the life and death of this woman – he faced his mother-in-law’s fresh grave, went to his knees, touched his head to the earth at her feet, lingered, stood. Did the same thing again, stood again. Then he bowed his head, inwardly thanked her for her selfless life as a good mother and wife and neighbor – she really was all of these things – and rejoined his family.

~     ~     ~

Thanksgiving is over now, and we’re back home. But things are fragile, and it’s hard to concentrate. I’m almost ready to tackle the next three books of Gilgamesh, but not quite. To complicate matters more, I’m both job-hunting and writing a non-fiction book proposal, which is about a 40-page task.

So bear with me. I hope to be the regular old writer soon.

[I can't write about Gilgamesh right now. The funeral needs time to recede into the past before things here are stable enough for that type of writing. What I want to write about now is the weirdness of being an American abroad - a "stupid foreigner" - for the last 12 years. Don't worry, it's not bitter. It's funny to me, and an interesting window into the hazards of cross-cultural living.]

Don DeLillo wrote in some novel or other about how world travelers are, by the very nature of being an outsider bumbling through strange daily transactions the natives find normal, largely forgiven by the locals for being “stupid foreigners.”  DeLillo’s term was different, and his paragraph about this reality was typically smart and droll, but I’ve forgotten his term and long since lost or sold the book.  Personal libraries tend to lose weight when you have to pay for their transport from country to country. And since most fiction is always available (and who am I kidding? I won’t re-read most novels anyway), novels are the first to be tossed.

Anyway, I adopted the “stupid foreigner” nickname a couple of years ago here in Korea because DeLillo kept coming to mind every hour or two as I bumbled through one faux pas or another. Like the morning I took the elevator down to the parking garage for my daily drive to work, and discovered someone had parked behind my car and blocked me in, making me late to work. I honked, called out, got increasingly angry at the insensitive jerk who would do such a thing. Discovering the car was in neutral ten minutes later didn’t cool my temper. I pushed the car back a few meters, got in my car, and as I backed out, expressed my disapproval not by kicking a dent in the car or breaking a window, both of which crossed my mind, embarrassingly enough, but they would have crossed yours too (we’ve all got an Id) – but by instead resorting to a civilized revenge, in my book, which would only inconvenience the offender in rough proportionality to his/her offense of me.

I spat on the car several times, aiming particularly for the driver’s window and windshield. You’ve never seen a grown man spit with such passion.

When I arrived late to work, I saw the (Korean) business manager of the school, told him the story of the shocking offender and how angry I was, and he said: “No, that’s the Korean way. We don’t have enough parking here, so we leave our cars in neutral so people can push them out of the way.”

I wish my school would have told me that during orientation week for new hires.  And if you’re Korean and drive a black four-door Sonata, I really am sorry. I try not to be an Ugly American, but it’s almost impossible to avoid being a Stupid Foreigner sometimes.

And I owe you a car wash.

End of stupid foreigner story one.

[The Unsucky English Gilgamesh series so far: 1: Dangerous Questions ~ 2: The Day I Thought Gilgamesh Would Cost Me My Job ~ 3: this post~ 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]

~     ~     ~

So there I was: caught, before all my new 14-year-old students’ eyes, with Enkidu’s pants down – and his mythic Sumerian wee-wee in hoo-hoos I knew nothing of.¹ And because so many of these Korean kids were evangelically Americanized, I wondered if it would cost me my job.

When we would come to Genesis later in the semester, I knew I’d be walking the netless tightrope over the heads of the many 14-year-olds who had predictably swallowed whole, since before their first teeth, their literalist childhood teachings about Adam, Eve, and the Six Days’ Creation.

But I had no idea I’d be dealing now, in tender Week Three of their high school careers, with this whopper of a sex scene between Shamhat, the temple prostitute, and Enkidu, the innocent, half-neanderthal and half-Adam “wild man” – and his jaw-dropping seven days’ erection: ²

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.³

Again, in the schooly translation I read when I was in high school, somebody had forgotten to include that part.

But the alley cats were out of the bag. Since we were all reading this translation for the first time together that night, half of my students were surely at that very moment in pop-eyed sync with me, “wtf?”-ing their margins and asking the same questions:

Would the “good people” students tell their parents? Were those parents emailing or calling the principal at the very moment we were all sitting there gawking at these lines? Tomorrow, when the monster lumbered into the school-building to corrupt their young, would a mob of torch-bearing parents send this poor, misunderstood Frankenfreak to his tragic end?

"Help! It's that English teacher!"

All that monster wanted was to give their kids the deepest, most relevant, coherent, and beautiful year of literary studies they would ever receive. And now, because of an unexpectedly graphic scene about what birds, bees, and each of these parents do – or did, at least once, when they made the shiny-eyed wonders brightening my classroom – would it all come down in flames?⁴

And would they make allowances for the fact that I first found the book in the school library? If I went down, should I bring the librarian with me? (Joking. Joking.)

I was jealous, suddenly, of math teachers. They never had problems like this.

But there was nothing to be done, for now, but finish the homework by finishing Book One. In the end, I realized, it all depended on whether these three-week-old high schoolers could handle it. I couldn’t wait to check the chapter annotations I’d assigned.

I finished the chapter and went to sleep.

The Next Day

“Beautiful.”

“Profound.”

“Deep.”

“Lovely.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. All the students’ annotations sang this section’s praises. Not a single immature reaction.

I was so proud of them. And I was saved.

The class discussion was even better.

“It’s a different culture, so it’s not surprising that sex would be treated with a different outlook,” said one.

Answered another: “The sex scene itself is wonderful for its simple narration of the events we study in biology – the voice is so objective, it’s almost scientific.”

A third: “And that shows how radically different this culture saw sexuality. It’s just another thing in life, described as simply as the weather, or a flower, or a beautiful sunset. It’s not pornographic or anything. It’s just part of life.”

A fourth: “But it’s more than that.”

“Explain that,” I said. “What do you mean?”

This student went on to give the most perfect explication of what happens after the sex scene, and what a deep, beautiful, mysterious, and alien point of view the world’s earliest civilization had, 2,000 years before King David and 3,000 years before Jesus, about the meaning of sexuality.

Before Shamhat

Shades of Shamhat?

“Look at what happens to Enkidu after the sex scene,” he said, “and compare it to who he was before it.

“Before it, Enkidu was this weird wild man, created by the goddess Aruru – in exactly the same way, by the way, that the later god of Genesis created Adam – from clay – which makes me wonder if this isn’t another Judeo-Christian-Islamic borrowing from the older Sumerian/Babylonian culture.

“He was ‘one-third man, two-thirds animal,’ remember: the perfect ‘double,’ just as the god Anu ordered, for the ‘one-third man, two-thirds divine‘ Gilgamesh. And I mean ‘perfect’ in the ‘balancing’ sense too. Remember, Anu said Gilgamesh’s ‘double’ should ‘balance’ him – to bring ‘peace’ to Uruk by making Gilgamesh stop snatching all the new brides from his subjects’ beds.

“But the ‘balancing’ doesn’t stop there,” he continued. “It gets deeper.”

“How?” asked another.

“Setting, basically. Gilgamesh is the king of the first city in the world, and he knows that and is proud of it. He’s proud of civilization.  I would argue he sort of symbolizes it.

“But the setting associated with Enkidu?  ‘Wilderness’ – Nature. Enkidu drinks with gazelles at watering holes, runs with them (and as fast as them), and knows nothing, literally, about cities and civilized humankind.

“So Enkidu ‘balances’ Gilgamesh by symbolizing Nature – the opposite of the city, and its civilization, which literally has a wall to keep Nature out.

“But it gets deeper still, this ‘balance.’ Because contrary to what we’d expect, ‘civilized’ Gilgamesh is not superior to ‘wild and natural’ Enkidu. We see that because Enkidu saves the other animals from the ‘civilized’ hunter’s traps. He’s compassionate, this natural man. And he’s innocent. Gilgamesh, though, is screwing the brides of every groom in town. The civilized king is glorious, yes – he built Uruk’s walls and is semi-divine, after all – but he’s also really flawed by his heartlessness. Enkidu ‘balances’ this, too.

“Finally,” he continued, “Enkidu ‘balances’ Gilgamesh in his physical strength. It’s like Achilles and Hector in the Iliad – perfectly matched superhero types. So that’s it: Aruru did a bang-up job of creating exactly what Anu ordered – a ‘balancing double’ to Gilgamesh.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Who was this kid? I had to break in: “Did you steal my annotations?” I asked. “Who are you? I haven’t memorized all of your names yet.”

“Not now, Mr. B.,” he said. “I’m on a roll. Don’t interrupt. I’ve only covered the ‘before Shamhat’ Enkidu. I want to get to the ‘after Shamhat’ stuff now.”

Could I adopt this kid? Buy him from his parents? He was too good to believe.

“Wow. My apologies. Go for it.”

After Shamhat

“I’ll keep it short. It’s this: Gilgamesh’s mysterious ’solution’ to the ‘problem’ of the wild man worked brilliantly – though I don’t quite get why. Sex with this prostitute from the goddess Ishtar’s temple transforms Enkidu. And it does it in clear stages. I numbered them when I annotated.

“First, this sacred sex lifted him above the other animals that he used to hang out with. He doesn’t realize it – this is the weird thing – but the other animals do. They all run away from him when he tries to rejoin them at the watering hole.

“It’s mysterious, for sure,” he said, while I fought back exultations over this kid’s genius. “But the best guess I can give is this: All animals have sex, so it can’t be the simple sex that makes the other animals realize he’s no longer like them. So the only thing I can figure is that the poet is trying to say that sex seen as a holy thing – initiation into Ishtar’s mysteries, maybe? – is what separates man from animal. Seen this way, it’s not a brute act with Shamhat.

“And did you notice,” he went on, “that thing where Enkidu tries to run after the fleeing animals – before Shamhat, he was as fast as them, remember – but now he can’t catch up with them? Where is it . . . . yeah, here:

He tried to catch up
but his body was exhausted, his life-force was spent,
his knees trembled, he could no longer run
like an animal [he emphasized this line], as he had before.

–doesn’t that remind you of the story of Samson and Delilah in the Bible? It did me. I tell you, Mr. B., you’re right about that one. You see a million things in Gilgamesh that you thought were unique to the Bible. My preacher says the Bible is ‘the word of God.’ Well if that’s true, God sure seemed to plagiarize a lot from the Sumerians and Babylonians.

“But he also reverses them. Because in the Bible, Delilah is bad for Samson, while in Gilgamesh, Shamhat is good for Enkidu.”

“I never thought of that,” said another. “I think I see what you’re saying.”

“Yeah. It’s all there. The next thing that happens because of Shamhat is deeper still: Enkidu realizes – where is it -

‘his mind had somehow grown larger.
He knew things now that an animal can’t know.’

“So what are these things he ‘knew’? It doesn’t say. But it reminds me of the scene in Genesis where Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and it doesn’t tell us what they learned either. All it does is show us that they covered their private parts.

“But here, they don’t cover anything, and no god gets angry. Instead, Enkidu just keeps transforming. Since the bell’s about to ring, I’ll rush: the next thing he learns sitting ‘at Shamhat’s feet’ is language and communication:

‘He understood all the words she was speaking to him.’

“And man, those words were interesting:

‘Now, Enkidu, you know what it is
to be with a woman, to unite with her.
You are beautiful, you are like a god.’

“‘You are like a god‘” he repeated. “So what’s happening here? Gilgamesh is ‘two-thirds god,’ remember. Is it okay, Mr. B., to read into this that sex with Shamhat maybe makes Enkidu less of a ‘balance’ to Gilgamesh now?”

“It’s okay to read anything you want into it, as long as you can justify your interpretation with good evidence. And you’re doing fine so far.”

“Because I was thinking that again, it was Gilgamesh that sent Shamhat in the first place. He wants to bring Enkidu over to his ‘civilized’ side. And it seems like it worked.”

“How?”

“Because the next thing that happens is that Shamhat tells Enkidu that he should not ‘roam the wilderness and live like an animal,’ but should instead come with her to Uruk, to Ishtar’s temple, and to Gilgamesh’s palace. And he goes. Because of Shamhat, a temple prostitute, Enkidu is no longer an animal. He’s closer to the gods now; and because of Shamhat, Enkidu is about to become civilized.

“And that’s like Adam and Eve upside-down and inside-out.”

Bizarro-World

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s obvious,” he said. “Eve seduced Adam and the result was God’s curse. Shamhat seduced Enkidu and the result was Ishtar’s blessings of godliness and civilization for Enkidu.”

“Strictly speaking, weren’t Adam and Eve cursed for disobeying their God?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s still pretty opposite. After all, the gods here aren’t giving any orders at all – the absence of orders is the opposite of their presence, right? – and the result of the seduction is a blessing, the opposite of a curse.”

“Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see what happens. It’s been ten years at least since I read this story, remember – and I’ve never read this version, either. I’ve forgotten most of it. So I’m as clueless as you about what will happen next.”

“There’s just one thing I wanted to ask, though,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“The plot’s really weird. The gods create Enkidu to make Gilgamesh change his ways.  But now, instead, we see Enkidu changing, not Gilgamesh. What’s going on?”

“It’s a mystery to me, too. We’ll see. But you left one thing out.”

“What?”

“You didn’t mention the last way that Enkidu changed: when Shamhat described Gilgamesh to him, isn’t his reaction confusing? The narrator tells us Enkidu ‘felt‘ something ‘deep in his heart . . . . the longing for a true friend.’ So that’s one more point for your theory that Shamhat civilizes him – he wants to escape his solitude and join human society, enjoy friendship.

“Again, that’s what he felt. But what he says is totally unexpected:

‘Take me with you
to . . . the palace of Gilgamesh the mighty king.
I will challenge him. I will shout to his face:
I am the mightiest! I am the man
who can make the world tremble. I am supreme!’

“Those hardly sound like words of friendship to me,” I said. “So maybe the gods’ plan for Gilgamesh is not as off-track as it seems.”

End of Class

The bell rang.  I turned off the alarm, and rose to get ready for work. An interesting bit of fantasy that was. “Too good to believe” indeed? I could only hope. I’d find out after the shower and drive to work.

~     ~     ~

Just kidding. I wouldn’t pull that on you. Here’s the real story:

Most of the annotations from the girls in the class were minor variations on: “ewwwww.” Sometimes three w’s, sometimes ten.

The boys? Smiley faces in the margins.

I wonder if those gender reactions for this age group are cross-culturally similar, or different. And I don’t know.

I imagine I tried to elicit discussions like the points made by the dream student above.

When I explained to them that I was as shocked as they were to read the scene, and was afraid they wouldn’t be able to handle it, they all assured me it was unexpected, yes, but nothing they hadn’t seen before online, on TV, in the movies.

“But it was weird to see it in English class.”

Next episodes: 4. The Seven Deadly Sins, Backwards ~ 5. Good and Evil, Nature and the Hero – Backwards 6. Gilgamesh and the Birth of the New Man

~     ~     ~

Can You Take a Minute?

If anybody has made it this far, I’d appreciate feedback on the three approaches I’ve tried so far in this Gilgamesh series. Number One was straight lecture style; Number Two was told as a “teacher story,” but in the second-person “you” point of view – I wondered if that would make the experience more immediate for readers, but also feared it might get old, especially if I continued it for months. This one was still a “teacher story,” but told in first person, with heavy Socratic dialogue.

If any of you care to share which of the three you think I should stick with, I’d be very appreciative.

Photos:
Belly-Dancer by macwagen
Bizarro World © DC Comics,
used under Fair Use Law

1. I stole this “wee-wee/hoo-hoo” line from Bill Maher’s brilliant “New Rules” rant about how American Puritanism silenced John Edwards, the most important voice for the poor “since Robert Kennedy,” per Maher. It’s very relevant to the discussions we’re having in this series. [↩]
2. And did I later joke in class, “This guy’s a walking Viagra commercial”? Or, “And you thought the Six Days’ Creation was impressive”? Or, “Talk about needing a rest on the seventh day”?  I don’t remember. But if asked, please say that I did. [↩]
3. all excerpts taken from Stephen Mitchell’s admirable 2004 translation of Gilgamesh. [↩]
4. If you think I’m exaggerating, check out this and this from readers who have seen it happen to other teachers. [↩]

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.

–

(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.)

–
Photos: blind distortion by bashed; mexican puppets by abhijit

Web Legacies Audience

1. Why I Like the Assignment

Again, this series was originally assigned by Dr. Tonya Huber, for a multi-culturalism in education class I took in Mallorca, Spain, five or six summers back. It was an intensely engaging project, so let me summarize the process for anybody interested in the pedagogy:

1. Select any personal belonging as an “artifact” of who you are – or were.
2. Write about it in the personal narrative genre, but connect it in some way to teaching and/or learning.
3. Identify key factors of culture represented by your artifact, and the experience for which it is an emblem. Touch upon those when you write.

That’s about it.  Though not part of the assignment, my own decision to select “artifacts” from early childhood to all later stages of my life made the assignment much richer.  At the end of the ten pieces I wrote over eight weeks (and I decided against publishing the last two here because they seemed sub-par), I’d sketched out a series of memoirs that formed a skeletal autobiography.  It’s not every class that affords an opportunity to write your entire life.  And this is why, I think, those papers didn’t suffer the fate of most of my college writings, which I’d never dream of inflicting upon general readers.  This assignment was different; it didn’t suffer from . . . what’s the word? . . . oh yes: schooliness.

2. How It Felt to Write Personal Narrative Instead of Edu-Stuff

Crickets aside, I have to admit it felt good. It raises an interesting dilemma for a guy who feels a bit cramped by the “edublogger” pigeonhole: Deliver what the imagined audience expects, or what the writer feels like writing?  Just writing that opposition makes the dilemma less interesting by far: it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?  As soon as I begin writing for someone else, I lose the essence of writing.  So I suspect there will be more of these tangents in the future, and let the readers fall where they may.

Because I have to say:  More and more, I feel like we get the technology and 21st century skills thing, and it’s threatening to become old hat.  In a nutshell, with 30,000 or so new applications in development as we speak – and the number will surely only grow – it seems a fool’s errand to try to grab at them all. Further, all our tools seem reducible to a few modes  (visual, textual, aural, kinesthetic), and a few skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening, and info-finding, -evaluating, and -managing).  More and more I wonder if a few tools for each of these purposes aren’t easy enough to find at will, or simpler still, if most of us don’t already have a sufficient number in our tool-belts.  I feel like I do, anyway, at least somewhat.  And I feel a pull to pull back from the tools, and gravitate more toward meaning when I write.

I’m really much more interested in thinking critically about cultural factors that retard education than I am about tools that, used retardedly, enable us to learn conventional unwisdoms more efficiently. In other words, I want to fight the idols of the mind that we worship instead of question. Since I’ve quit education school-teaching and won’t work for schools again, I can speak the unspoken without fearing for my livelihood – which is the only explanation I can find for the deafening silences in educational weblogs about such idols as religion, patriotism, consumerism, workaholism, and the educational system itself.  It seems to me that “21st Century Education” needs to question ideologies from the Hebrews and Romans to the Cold War far more than it needs to teach the uses of Twitter.

Still, I do use technology when I teach – have been using it in new ways over the last two weeks in my freelance teaching, in fact – so I’m sure I’ll share the occasional item about tech from time to time.  But be warned: I have a box of old journals from the past 30 years. I suspect they’ll be fodder for more Web Legacies, more reflections of my history, and the roles of education and ideas in that history.

3. A Few Take-Aways I Offer from This Series

If you hadn’t noticed, I revealed in these posts that I was a pot-smoking, school-skipping, low-achieving high school student. For those of you who think punitively, that’s cause for suspension and a “bad boy” label. If you got nothing else out of reading this, just notice that that behavior was a mechanism for dealing with the hell that was life incarcerated in a public high school institution.  If I’d had the choice to escape the two-years’ bullying by simply absenting myself from that environment, I quite likely would have felt little need for the pleasures of sedation brought by that weed. (It’s also interesting to note that the popular kids were all heavy drinkers, but that was somehow morally less scandalous than smoking marijuana, though to this day I don’t get the double-standard. I’ve always argued that “stoned drivers” at worst are a hazard because they drive a little too slow, as opposed to your daredevil drunk drivers. And rarely do you find a belligerent stoner getting in your face and wanting to fight¹, the way our worst drunks do. Instead, you get a giggler or navel-gazer, who I’ll take, if forced to choose, every time.)

You also might notice that the only hero in the bad high school years was a closeted gay athlete. Yet another “bad sinner” to punish or, goodness help us, “convert” – or good young man to understand.  Your choice.

I also revealed that I became an above average language user during my teens not by doing homework or assigned readings – I rarely did either, though it was easy enough to get that “A” on that Iliad paper by writing an essay on the Classics Illustrated Comics version of the epic – and that my literacy grew instead by reading (stolen) comic books and sci-fi/fantasy – and later, after high school, literature – with my friends, outside of school. So again, I’m left questioning the value of mandatory high school. I still lean toward the position that it retards growth, rather than accelerating it.

That’s about it for now. Finally:

4. Links to the Entire Web Legacies Series

1. Fear and Trembling at Camp Joy: Unborn Again
2. The Hulk Leads to Hamlet: Reading Despite Teaching
3. Of Jocks and Fags: The High School Bullying Years
4. In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males: The Beatnik College Years, pt. 1
5. Human Sacrifice: The Academic College Years, pt. 2
6. Learning the Enemy’s Language: The Army Years, part 1
7. Teaching Killing: The Army Years, part 2
8. Stereotyping Soldier-Students: The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Classroom

–

Photo credit: bramblejungle

1. or alternately, get a cheap lay [↩]