Just a Little Hibernation

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I wrap the Snowman blanket snugly 

About my perennially frozen feet,

Its twin ready to soften the armrest 

That will soon lie beneath my head.

Next I select Nature Sounds or Spa Radio 

From the Pandora list and stretch out 

In the corner of this leather expanse

Called a Conversation Nook,

In which conversations, beyond comments

On plot and performance, rarely occur.

I close my eyes, which only serves to highlight 

The phrases marching behind their lids.

They refuse to hold hands and become sentences.

Rather they are content to circle like 

Incompetent clusters of crows that

Lack the will to become a murder.

I am surprised to be awake.

This is, after all, nap time 

When I, no less predictably 

Than a two-year old, should rub my eyes 

And blink off to Nod or some other nap world.

Instead I lie here, concerned that 

More will be expected of me, come evening,

Than my nap-deprived self can deliver.

Conversation - even repartee?

Decisions of which I will be barely conscious,

But to which I will  be committed?

I feel a strong sense of kinship 

With a bear I have never met.

Still wandering snow-swept slopes 

In November's deepening cold.

Unable to find a snug cave for winter's nap,

He grows anxious that, deprived of hibernation,

He may never see another Spring.

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Patchwork Quilt

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There are those, I suppose,

Whose lives roll out like

Fitted sheets upon an antique bed.

Neatly tucked about the corners,

All covered with an elegant duvet.

Needlepoint cushions, and perhaps a cat

Lie artfully arranged at the headboard.

Mine is more a patchwork quilt.

Laughter and tears stitched together 

By scattered threads of memory.

Far more pillows than necessary 

Cushion the lingering lumps.

And a dog's sleepy eyes wink down 

At distant unfinished edges.

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Meditation on a Shooting Star

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I was first struck by how deeply those of us who dwell in cities are afflicted by light blindness. Here, floating in a midnight hot tub at a friend's cabin midway up the ridge above a small town in West Virgina, the sky blazed. At first it was just me, the soothing water, and the luminous sky. The tub's jets were off. While the pulses would have been welcome, the hum of the pumps would have marred the tranquility.  So I floated there, feeling very Van Gogh-ish, but without the angst. Then suddenly the first one flashed behind the ebony branches etched across my field of vision.  Giant lightening bug? Too bright. Airplane? Too white. Shooting star? Yes, really. 

So I stared up, focusing on everything and nothing, the way you do when you are trying to see one of those optical illusions in a book or magazine. "Look, but don't focus," the instructions read.  Another streaked by. More "unfocused staring without looking" and two others played connect the dots across the Big Dipper - or maybe the Little Dipper. Astronomy is not my strong suit and the constellation was so bright.  .  .  

I am currently reading Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality as well as a couple of magazine articles about the restarting of the LHC and chasing the particles that could confirm supersymmetry.  So you'd think this celestial show would lure me down the seductive path of cosmology, multiverses and the like. Strangely, no. Instead the shooting stars led me back to a high meadow in Northern California, where, half a century ago, under a similarly staggering sky, I had futility pursued the affections of a bewitching French exchange student. Tonight that recollection brought a smile to my face, where, 50 years ago, the tears of teenage heartbreak had been angrily dashed aside. I had been young enough to believe that "real men don't cry."

So as I floated there staring up through the steam I sought not astronomical events, but the manifestations of memory. The heavens did not disappoint. With a randomness that felt regular, more silver streaks knitted up the night. Faces and places from times past and at varying distances, drew as close as the more stationary stars caught there in the branches swaying gently above my head.

Way back in 1957 Perry Como urged us to "catch a falling star and put it in your pocket." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5t_PDU5RmBw. It is a pleasant "oldie," that pulls you back to soda shops and poodle skirts, saddle shoes and The Hit Parade.  But Perry would not recognize these celestial visitors. These were not falling stars that transfixed me. Falling stars, one assumes, fall back to earth, and we would notice - as did the dinosaurs. Rather, these are shooting stars, born in memory that beckon me forward. Shooting stars transcend, reviewing for us pure harmonic moments, treasured souls who; for minutes or hours, days or months or years, held our hands and hearts as, together, we harkened to the infinite song of existence.

The show faded slowly, as if my starry friends has somewhere else to be.  I was sad to see them go. But as they blinked out of sight, it was as if they were winking back over their shoulders. "Patience," they whispered. "We'll be back for you. For now you know what you must do. Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm."

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The Luxury of the Long Form Composition

I was, thank God, raised in the old "sage on the stage" era. For those of you outside the academic world, that means when you went to college most of the classes were lectures. If you did hands on things like cutting up frogs or building sets for King Lear, those were specifically designated as "lab sessions," often overseen by "lab instructors" who differed from the professor who delivered the lecture. Lectures were lectures. You went in, you sat down, you opened your notebook, you listened to someone with expertise in the subject area, and you took notes - or at least you pretended to. I always divided my notebook paper in half, one column for notes, the other for doodles - which, research asserts, focuses our attention as opposed to distracting us. But the lecture was the main event. Sometimes it was painful. Not every prof understood the difference between oral presentation and droning. But it was part of growing up, of learning. Big Bird had not yet convinced us that education was supposed to make you laugh.

Nowadays it is much more in vogue to be the "guide on the side." Those who practice that version of the craft of pedagogy are far better able to describe it than I. I believe it involves presenting the skeleton of a task or concept to a class, and then nudging them to fill in the missing pieces for themselves. There are those who swear by it. At least I don't swear at it, I am just driven to follow a different model.  You see, there is just so little time. Let's say they are taking a "3 hour class" from you. In my world that means that, in theory you see them for three hours a week. But an academic hour is actually only 50 minutes. So a three hour class is really a 2.5 hour class.  Furthermore, given "settling in" time and "shuffling before leaving time" and taking role, etc, let's call it 2 hours and 15 minutes a week. 16 weeks quickly becomes 14 or 15 with Spring Break and weather and whatnot. When you run the numbers, that comes out to about 31 or 32 hours per semester. About three-quarters of a "normal" work week out of their entire life!

Given that stark reality, I simply cannot settle for nudging. I need to use that brief burst of time we have together to share with my students whatever I might know that could ease their way in the world beyond college.  It is possible that I would choose a different model if I taught small clusters of eager, more mature, grad students. But my audience is for the most part 18 to 20 year-old undergrads in groups of 75 to 150.  It is theater. And they are younger and far more callow than my own children. They are close to half a century younger than I. If I do not know far, far more than they about the subject matter under consideration they should sue me, the department and the university for academic malpractice. My job is not to explore with them, my job is to teach them what I have learned in that half century. So I become the sage on the stage. I lecture.

A lecture is a long form composition, a performed essay, crafted just as carefully as any piece of prose, any poem, play or painting.  Like these posts I send to you, which are usually long form compositions, a lecture may recount the Renaissance, the standard model of particle physics, the nature of being - there are no boundaries to the objects of its attention. It need only, in the end lead the audience, if not to a conclusion, then at least to a reasonable new beginning.

I should point out that lectures, essays, any long form compositions confront the current, digitally-influenced norms of communication and conversation. Literature would lead us to believe that, in earlier eras, the pause had a place in conversation:

Darcy: But surely, Miss Bennett (He pauses, turns aside. Turns back. Pauses again.) Surely you can see why .  .  .  

Try that at a dinner party today and four people will jump in with their contributions, related or not, a second course will have started, someone will be googling something, and the nuts and wine will be passed around - leaving you with your mouth open and poor Darcy and Elizabeth forever estranged by their pride and prejudice.

But of course we must realize that the models for conversation presented in literature or on screens large and small have nothing to do with real life conversations precisely because those media models are all embedded in long form compositions - novels or movie scripts. Hence, the written narrative controls the random vagaries of real short form conversational bursts. Yet even the long form occasional gives in to the short form's need for speed. How many times have you read some version of this phrase: "and the conversation dragged." What does that mean? For me it always calls up the absurd image of a question somehow cross-dressing as a declarative sentence. A conversation in drag needs lots of sequins. The more common interpretation is that the phrase implies that the characters have ceased interacting with the suave glibness of Noel Coward or the intricate byplay of Ms. Austin - both masters of long form composition. Even long form compositions, it appears, occasionally feel the need to "pick it up, pick it up."

That is not to say that the long form composition is without it's own illusions. Primary among these is the illusion of attention. The poet Billy Collins encourages his book Aimless Love to "stay out as late as you like, don't bother to call or write, and talk to as many strangers as you can."  One does not go to the effort necessary to construct a long form composition, and a book of poetry certainly qualifies, without clinging to the belief that someone will attended to it; read it, view it, listen to it. When I videotape a lecture for my students, or for you, or for DistilledHarmony.com, in my mind's eye I see an audience of one or hundreds, enthralled, pausing only to laugh or cry or stare thoughtfully off into space before diving back into the composition before them.  It is a lovely and harmless illusion. 

My life-long love affair with the lecture, with the essay, with the long form composition is not without its drawbacks. You see, with so much I feel moved to share, I have trouble remembering that others, too, need their time upon the stage.
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