39 Microlectures, page 6
Performance, culture, and pedagogy, the three words that define this symposium, are three concepts into which we must find our own personal avenues. If we travel into any one of them far enough, I believe we will also find the other two.
Start with the biggest dictionary in the library. This is what I tell my essay-writing students. Then, if you reach the definition, you’ve gone too far. The really insightful part comes before that, in the form of the linguistic root. Take, for example, the word pedagogy. It shares its lineage with the obsolete Latin word pedaticum, which was once the term for “a toll paid for passing through a place or country.”
Who paid the toll? Who collected it? How substantial was the cost? Would there be a greater toll, or a lesser one, exacted on those travelers who did not only pass through, but stopped, and stayed? These are questions even the biggest dictionary cannot answer. They are the questions posed by Dubravka Ugrešić, the contemporary writer from Zagreb, in her essay “The Confiscation of Memory”, in which she wrote, “We may still pity, but it is hard for us to comprehend the true dimensions of other people’s loss.”
Learning to comprehend other people’s loss, and calculating the cost of that comprehension, is itself a kind of pedagogy of the imagination. As the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe has pointed out, “only the imagination can teach us another’s pain.” For there can be no learning without the presence of others. The individual does not exist, except in relation to another individual. And where we find more than one individual, we also find more than one culture. Our pedagogy – our teaching and learning – is after all part of these cultures.
Victor Weisskopf, Professor of Physics at MIT, wrote in his essay entitled ‘Teaching Science’, that “we must always begin by asking questions, not giving answers. In this way we contribute to the joy of insight. For science is the opposite of knowledge. Science is curiosity.”
We may take Dr Weisskopf’s idea further, and say science is the art of not knowing the answer. Thus, when a teacher asks a question, and a student gives an answer, there can be no incorrect, as long as there is curiosity. We might say a becoming has transpired. There is no longer teacher and student, but rather teacher-becoming-student, and student-becoming-teacher. When pedagogy becomes the toll the traveler pays for crossing into unknown territory, we might say the classroom and the world have ceased to exist, replaced by the classroom-world becoming. Where we find the becoming, we also find the occurrence of learning. The question and the answer become the question-answer becoming. It happened in a flash, a sudden downpour. It was a performance.
As the composer George Crumb has said, “I think I am a cultural maximalist, because I find Indian music as impressive in its own right as the late Beethoven quartets. The world, the universe, is teeming with life. So what’s going to happen when we confront all those extraterrestrial musics?!” The ceremony of that intercultural traffic jam will certainly become a performance with pedagogical implications.
In the end, we cannot begin to comprehend the true dimensions of other people’s loss without also beginning to comprehend the true dimensions of their joy. In this moving toward comprehension, we find also the joy and the loss of the very act of moving toward comprehension, starting, like a seed, when two who are different come together and ask a question, and approach a comprehension attended by the presence of the uncomprehendable. As the poet Russell Edson wrote,
With ceremonial regret I lowered a seed into the earth …
If this seed live again then so shall I.
Which, of course, is sheer nonsense …
4. BEGINNINGS
4.1 The first chapter
4.2 The first line
4.3 The first beginning
4.1 THE FIRST CHAPTER
Early in life, I came to the realization that books naturally divide into two parts – Part One: the beginning of the book; and Part Two: the rest of the book. Part One usually comprises the first chapter, and maybe the first half of the second chapter. The second half of the second chapter, along with all the other chapters, make up Part Two. As a young reader, I often did not bother with Part Two at all, and devoted all my creative attention to reading and re-reading Part One.
My childhood summer days I often spent indoors. Because of severe allergies, I had difficulty opening my eyes and breathing if I ventured outdoors on clear sunny days. Rain improved matters. This led not only to a large amount of reading, but also to confusion when I would hear people use the expression, “It’s a beautiful day.”
Maybe I was drawn to any book’s Chapter 1 because at the time I felt I was in the first chapter of my life. Or maybe, in fulfillment of a fateful pattern of odd and mundane reversals, I was simply beginning a lifelong confusion between beginnings and endings. For after all, doesn’t a book’s beginning mark the end of that which is not the book?
What is a book? In a documentary film made shortly before her death, French writer Marguerite Duras asked herself this question. Sitting alone before the camera in her small house, she asks, “What is a book?” And suddenly she answers herself, “A book is the night.” Her own answer seems to take her by surprise, and softly she repeats it, “Yes, that’s it. A book is the night.” And she begins to cry.
If a book is the night, then isn’t Chapter 1 the sunset? But isn’t the sunset also the last chapter in the book that was the day? Or is the day not a book, but something more like a song? And when the end of the song dissolves into the start of the book, we have Chapter 1, the sunset in whose fading light the attentive reader might imagine in the convergence of two states, multiple pathways, all the time knowing there must be only one, because the book after all has been written. But longing to keep those twilight possibilities unresolved the reader refuses to cross the threshold into Chapter 2, remaining instead forever circling in Chapter 1 like Joshua, who, empowered by the word and by music halted the very sun in the sky and suspended time itself in an infinite sunset.
I am describing my experience with the novel Dracula. Because in those days I read Bram Stoker, not Marguerite Duras, but I only read the first chapter, and I read it many times, lingering on and rearranging my favorite lines from Jonathan Harker’s journal, as he tells a story that begins when the sun goes down.
The sun sank lower and lower behind us, and threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the Carpathians wind ceaselessly through the valleys.
"It is the eve of St George’s Day."
When it grew dark he lashed his horses unmercifully.
I was now myself looking for the conveyence which was to take me to the Count.
A calèche with four horses drew up beside the coach. I could see from the flash of our lamps that the horses were coal-black and driven by a tall man, with a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us.
One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s “Lenore":—
"For the dead travel fast."
The driver helped me up with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel.
Without a word he shook his reins, the horses turned, and we swept into the darkness of the Borgo Pass.
As I looked back I saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected against it the figures of my late companions.
The carriage went a hard pace straight along, then we made a complete turn and went along another straight road. It seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same ground again.
Suddenly, away on our left, I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment; he at once checked the horses, and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer; but while I wondered the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey.
I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly.
As you can see, the first chapter of Dracula, itself looping in an endless journey, lends itself particularly well to repeated readings. And now, as I look back on that childhood journey into the book, I realize there was another ending I wished to put off. For each word read brings to an end the life of the reader who has not read the book, ushering in the life of the reader who has, and when my friends at school saw me carrying my paperback copy of Dracula, and asked me if I had read it, the answer I wanted to give, and that I imagined I would want to give my whole life, was, “Only the first chapter.”
4.2 THE FIRST LINE
In September, 1980, at the age of 20 in Kalamazoo, Michigan I went on assignment from my college literary journal to interview a writer who lived up the hill named Stuart Dybek. In the interview, Stuart recited the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
“This,” said Stuart, “is one of the finest first lines ever written. It immediately gives you that sense of memory and time passing, and then it ends with the word – ice.” As he said ice, Stuart tapped the rim of his wineglass with his fingernail, and for a moment the pinging sound hung in the air.
The afternoon’s conversation at once validated and modified my childhood fascination with beginnings, for here was a published writer whose stories I admired, who had also thought about such things, but had refined the notion of beginnings to the point of zeroing in on the first sentence only. Suddenly my fixation with first chapters seemed oversized and unmanageable. But as the concept of beginnings reduced and narrowed its focus, the narrowing paradoxically produced an infinite widening of possibilities. “I always loved Billie Holiday,” said Stuart, “Nobody could sing the first note of a song the way she did.” Or furthermore, “Have you ever heard the music of Béla Bartók? From the very first moment, the music takes you into its own world.” My head spun as forms I had never considered presented themselves in a vertiginous list of first moments.
Jorge Luis Borges had written, “My feeling is that first sentences should be long in order to tear the reader out of his everyday life and firmly lodge him in an imaginary world.” As I investigated, I found first lines, whether long or short, that proved in their own way Borges’ dictum of a threshold between worlds. And thus the college library became a labyrinth of first lines.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July, a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place, and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Her doctor had told Julian’s mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y.
The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in getting into bed.
The Sun had not yet risen.
Call me Ishmael.
Mother, today there comes back to mind the vermilion mark at the parting of your hair, the sari which you used to wear, with its wide red border, and those wonderful eyes of yours, full of depth and peace.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named tuckoo.…
I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.
Then, on the evening of November 3, 1982, I read what was to become for me the most fateful first line of all.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Calvino, a contemporary Italian novelist, had created a book made up of ten first chapters of ten imaginary novels, written by ten imaginary authors, strung together by the intermittent story of two diligent readers who perpetually and unsuccessfully seek a second chapter, only to encounter another first. Each first chapter grows more engaging and mysterious than the last, accumulating an inexplicable sense of sadness and loss. Calvino himself distilled this mood in a ten-line poem, made up of each of the first lines of each of the first chapters, which assemble to form not only the book’s table of contents, but also a complete sentence.
If on a winter’s night a traveller
Outside the town of Malbork
Leaning from the steep slope
Without fear of wind or vertigo
Looks down in the gathering shadow
In a network of lines that enlace
In a network of lines that intersect
On a carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
Around an empty grave
What story down there awaits its end?
I knew then that my quest for beginnings was over. In fact, until Calvino brought it to apotheosis, I hadn’t even realized it was a quest. But now, the lesson was clear. Somewhere on an early road something might stop you. It is only a distraction. But the distraction grows into a fascination, and the fascination becomes a passion. Then, at last, the passion becomes your life’s work. On that day of the first onset of the distraction, when there seemed to be so much future ahead, you never imagined that your work was to discover your work, and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.
Today I’ve been drinking instant coffee and Pet milk, and watching it snow.
This was another first line, written by Stuart Dybek that same year. As I read it the first time and arrived at the final word, snow, I thought of García Márquez’s ice and Stuart’s fingernail ringing his wineglass.
Marconi, inventor of the telegraph, came to believe at the end of his life that once a sound has been generated it doesn’t die, but simply grows fainter and fainter, and given a sensitive enough ear and the right place to listen, one could hear it forever.
4.3 THE FIRST BEGINNING
The consciousness of time is inseparable from that of change. If nothing changes, then no time has passed. But while the awareness of change has always been one of the most pervasive and omnipresent features of human experience, the consciousness of time, especially in its conceptual form, appeared much later. Just as it was difficult to separate space conceptually from its concrete content, it required a considerable effort of abstraction to differentiate time from changes and events “taking place" in it. Thus, before Western thought could reify time, Western thought personified time. Time became a person dragging all things into ceaseless flux. One can readily see how this unnamed tireless laborer developed into Sisyphus, the trickster of Greek mythology, whose punishment for defeating Death was imprisonment in that same infinite present for which his entire life had been a quest. Rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again, he repeats this labor forever. As writers from Camus to Enzensberger have pointed out, subsequent conceptions of time have not improved upon this image. The rebel is Sisyphus. The rock is peace. And we in his place might find ourselves of the mind of the Buddhist monk who made the famous statement, “Now that I have attained enlightenment, I’m just as miserable as I was before."
Forgive me for all this philosophy, but what I’m trying to say is, in reaching the end of our road of beginnings, we now realize that beginnings are all there is. But in that moment of realization, we also find that beginnings cease to exist, replaced by that which is unbeginnable. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev certainly understood this humbling thought, in the following episode described in Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim — The Early Masters.
They asked Rabbi Levi Yitzhak:
"Why is the first page number missing in all the tractates of the Babylonian Talmud?"
He replied:
"However much a man may learn, he should always remember that he has not even gotten to the first page."
But what about the practice of everyday life? In the end, we must ask ourselves how to apply this philosophy of beginnings. I will conclude with one last story to illustrate an answer. And since this story offers my favorite beginning, it is only fitting that I saved it for the end.
After the war, the temple lay in ruins. The old monk began sorting through the rubble. The young novice approached him, overwhelmed and dispirited.
“How can we ever hope to rebuild the destroyed labor of countless generations?” asked the novice.
The monk replied, “Although we may not expect ourselves to finish the work, we must never excuse ourselves from beginning.”
5. HAIR
5.1 Two invitations
5.2 Our Cancer
5.3 Learning how to leave the world
5.1 TWO INVITATIONS
On a sunny morning in July, 1987, I sat up in bed, and most of my hair remained on the pillow. When I ran my hand through it more fell out, but many strands would not let go.
“Don’t worry,” said Lin, “We’ll cut it all off.”
This moment seems insignificant in comparison to the onset of symptoms that April, the diagnosis in May, the operations and months of treatments, the deaths of patients I had befriended in the ward, the slow recovery. But because of an invitation, I now realize this moment, although it occurred in the middle of the story, belongs at the beginning.
Everything we do, we do by invitation. The invitation comes either from oneself or from another person. This microlecture appears because of two invitations: the first by Brigid Murphy in 1994, the second by Anne Wilson in 1996. I have had my invitations to this world, and thus my life has been blessed. I will describe the second invitation first.
Invitation #2: Anne Wilson
Anne Wilson did not extend her invitation to me personally, but rather to the entire world. In a piece called an inquiry about hair on the World Wide Web, she invited answers to the questions,
