Just As I Thought (23 page)

              
window of my mother’s home

to home in the evening

Here are about fifteen things I might say in the course of a term. To freshmen or seniors. To two people or a class of twenty. Every year the order is a little different, because the students’ work is different and I am in another part of my life. I do not elaborate on plans or reasons, because I need to stay as ignorant in the art of teaching as I want them to remain in the art of literature. The assignments I give are usually assignments I’ve given myself, problems that have defeated me, investigations I’m still pursuing.

1. Literature has something to do with language. There’s probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you’ll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren’t a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of schoolteachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage.

2. A first assignment: To be repeated whenever necessary, by me or the class. Write a story, a first-person narrative in the voice of someone with whom you’re in conflict. Someone who disturbs you, worries you, someone you don’t understand. Use a situation you don’t understand.

3. No personal journals, please, for about a year. Why? Boring to me. When you find only yourself interesting, you’re boring. When I find only myself interesting, I’m a conceited bore. When I’m interested in you, I’m interesting.

4. This year, I want to
tell
stories. I ask my father, now that he’s old and not so busy, to tell me stories, so I can learn how. I try to remember my grandmother’s stories, the faces of her dead children. A first assignment for
this
year: Tell a story in class, something that your grandmother told you about a life that preceded yours. That will remind us of our home language. Another story: At Christmas time or Passover supper, extract a story from the oldest persons told them by the oldest person they remember. That will remind us of history. Also—because of time shortage and advanced age, neither your father nor your grandmother will bother to tell unimportant stories.

5. It’s possible to write about anything in the world, but the slightest story ought to contain the facts of money and blood in order to be interesting to adults. That is, everybody continues on this earth by courtesy of certain economic arrangements; people are rich or poor, make a living or don’t have to, are useful to systems or superfluous. And blood—the way people live as families or outside families or in the creation of family, sisters, sons, fathers, the bloody ties. Trivial work ignores these two
FACTS
and is never comic or tragic.

May you do trivial work?

WELL

6. You don’t even
have
to be a writer. Read the poem “With Argus” by Paul Goodman. It’ll save you a lot of time. It ends:

The shipwright looked at me

with mild eyes.

“What’s the matter friend?

You need a New Ship

from the ground up, with art,

a lot of work,

and using the experience you

have—”

“I’m tired!” I told him in

exasperation,

“I can’t afford it!”

               
“No one asks you, either,”

he patiently replied, “to venture

forth.

Whither? why? maybe just forget it.”

And he turned on his heel and left

me—here.

7. Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious. Luckily for artists, they don’t require art to do a good day’s work. But critics and teachers do. A book, a story, should be smarter than its author. It is the critic or the teacher in you or me who cleverly outwits the characters with the power of prior knowledge of meetings and ends.

Stay open and ignorant.

(For me, the problem: How to keep a class of smart kids—who are on top of Medieval German and Phenomenology—dumb? Probably too late and impossible.)

Something to read: Cocteau’s journals.

8. Sometimes I begin the year by saying: This is a definition of fiction. Stesichorus was blinded for mentioning that Helen had gone off to Troy with Paris. He wrote the following poem and his sight was restored:

Helen, that story is not true

You never sailed in the benched ships

You never went to the city of Troy.

9. Two good books to read:

A Life Full of Holes,
Charhadi

I Work Like a Gardener,
Joan Miró

10. What is the difference between a short story and a novel? The amount of space and time any decade can allow a subject and a group of characters. All this clear only in retrospect.

Therefore: Be risky.

11. A student says, Why do you keep saying a work of art? You’re right. It’s a bad habit. I mean to say a work of truth.

12. What does it mean To Tell the Truth?

It means—for me—to remove all lies.
A Life Full of Holes
was said truthfully at once from the beginning.
¹
Therefore, we know it can be done. But I am, like most of you, a middle-class person of articulate origins. Like you I was considered verbal and talented, and then improved upon by interested persons. These are some of the lies that have to be removed:

a. The lie of injustice to characters.

b. The lie of writing to an editor’s taste, or a teacher’s.

c. The lie of writing to your best friend’s taste.

d. The lie of the approximate word.

e. The lie of unnecessary adjectives.

f. The lie of the brilliant sentence you love the most.

13. Don’t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman

                         Prince Kropotkin

                                                  Malcolm X

14. Two peculiar and successful assignments. Invent a person—that is, name the characteristics and we will write about him or her. Last year it was a forty-year-old divorced policeman with two children.

An assignment called the List Assignment. Because inside the natural form of day beginning and ending, supper with the family, an evening at the draft board, there are the facts of noise, conflict, echo. In other years, the most imaginative, inventive work has happened in these factual accounts.

For me, too.

15. The stories of Isaac Babel and the conversation with him reported by Konstantin Paustovsky in
Years of Hope.
Also, Paustovsky’s
The Story of a Life,
a collection of stories incorrectly called autobiography.

Read the poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” by William Butler Yeats.

*   *   *

Students are missing from these notes. They do most of the talking in class. They read their own work aloud in their own voices and discuss and disagree with one another. I do interrupt, interject any one of the preceding remarks or one of a dozen others, simply bossing my way into the discussion from time to time, because, after all, it’s my shop. To enlarge on these, I would need to keep a journal of conversations and events. This would be against my literary principles and pedagogical habits—all of which are subject to change.

Therefore: I can only describe the fifteen points I’ve made by telling you that they are really notes for beginners, or for people like myself who must begin again and again in order to get anywhere at all.

—1970

One Day I Made Up a Story

One day I made up a story. I imagined a wild old woman leaning on her elbows at her open window, next door to the schoolyard, making a speech to the street. She shouted: Listen. Stop! I must tell you that smart, greedy madmen intend to destroy this beautifully made planet. Listen! The coming murder of our children by these men has got to become a terror and a sorrow to you, and starting right this minute, it had better interfere with any daily pleasure.

Then the old woman shut the window. She played the piano for a while. Then she opened the window and shouted again: Stop! Listen!

That same day, I read about a laboratory in California called Livermore in which young men with extraordinary brains are using their imaginative dreamy minds to refine our present gross methods for disintegrating a body a tree a house a pebble.

Outside that laboratory, as we all know, there is earth fire water air. These are the essential garments of the people, Chief Seattle said, of the tribes of animals, of all growing creatures, as well as the blades of grass, their grainy seeds that feed us all. For the young men inside the laboratory (whose intelligence and ambition really shine in their newspaper faces), earth fire water air seem to be discrete problems to be interestingly solved.

Later that day I was part of a television panel that was as full of facts as laboratories are full of brilliant young men. Our side and the opposers kept tossing huge mouthfuls of nuclear numbers at one another. How many warheads, how many missiles, what kind; their quality was evaluated before each impassioned throw of words. In this language, the sorrow of the people and the suffering of this poisoned earth were not included, were not imagined.

Imagined! Imagination! That’s one of the gifts hundreds of generations of women and men working eating loving have given us. Why has it been used to break the world apart into smaller and smaller pieces? It couldn’t have been easy to do, because we—animals, bugs, trees—are connected to one another by streams of spit, water, necessity. The hard hug of sunlight holds us all. And we are attached to this earth by the fact of gravity as well as the invention of love. So the connectors have always been there.

I myself can’t imagine the lives of those young men or the lives of the corporate bosses of our economy, whose patriarchal dream is exhausting our mountains and rivers, scratching the sleeping elements like uranium out of the Navajo lands into wide-awake, terrifying energy.

I can’t imagine their lives, but I see they are the disconnectors. They have fed us despair. Still, at the edge of that despair there is a kind of determined light which has been called hope. Hope is not an ephemeral thing. It’s a reality created out of our long human history of birth and rebirth, in which bravery, mutual aid, stubborn struggle, and imagination have been powerful enough to shift the awesome downward trajectories of war and oppression.

And this is where we are now. The old woman cries warning to the street full of schoolchildren and grown-ups. We look up. We listen. We take the children by the hand and help them cross the dangerous streets. Then as life goes on we show them the earth under the asphalt, the surprise of water-eating grass and water-saving cactus, and all the colors and threads of this world the disconnectors have been laboriously snipping. Why do we do this? To keep our girls and boys from becoming smart, greedy madmen obviously. And this is one of the ways we may be able to start again and again, until the amazing year or decade or century in which, at home in our only world, we finally stay started.

—1985

Imagining the Present

I was trying to remember exactly how we started Teachers & Writers Collaborative. It was in 1965 or 1966 I think. I felt kind of shy with all those people: Anne Sexton, Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, Mitch Goodman, Tinka Topping, and Paul Lauter, and Florence Howe, who later created, with others, the Feminist Press. There were a lot of things happening around that time. We had learned about money becoming available from “up there,” you know, from that bad old state that people are always talking about these days, and that the money was for the children of our city, for literature and literacy. And as it turned out, the ideas that were discussed in our early meetings were being talked about all over the country, so that wherever you go now, you’ll find poets in the schools, and you’ll find different organizations bringing them to elementary schools, high schools, and community centers. The results were far-reaching.

Not long ago I gave a talk at the Associated Writing Programs. The AWP is not as much about children as about extremely grown-ups, specifically people teaching writing in the colleges. It has become a profession, with a whole bunch of degrees that one has to have. But even that—the idea that writing could be taught! How extraordinary! The idea of teaching writing seems very peculiar to some people. Anytime I speak in public, someone will get up and say, “You can’t teach writing.” What they mean is that you can teach grammar and spelling, but you can’t teach writing. They’re under the impression that you can teach math—the same people!—whereas writing is language, something you’ve been doing all your life, since you were a little tiny kid, right? So the idea of teaching writing: what does it mean, finally?