4/5 of the cast of the Druid Theater Company’s production of “Waiting for Godot”
This morning our local paper ran an article about audiences’ bailing during performances at this year’s Spoleto Festival. This happened at Thursday’s matinee performance of the Druid Theater Company’s killer production of Waiting for Godot. Certainly, I’m not one to mourn fewer philistines in my presence; I only wish the woman behind me. who found every furrowed brow tee-hee worthy, and the woman in front of me, whose incessant coughing brought to mind John Keats’s last days, would have left – or better yet moved to more advantageous vacated seats, because in all fairness, they seemed to be enjoying the show.
I could blame my impatience by claiming I’ve entered the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross anger stage of grieving. Certainly, in a less random, less bleak universe, Judy Birdsong would be sitting between Ned and me, but the truth of the matter is I have always been an irritable audience member too easily distracted by whispers, fake laughs, and lung-heaving coughing.
Now, you might be wondering why someone grieving would go to see a play that Brooks Atkinson described in his 1956 New York Times review as a drama conveying “melancholy truths about the hopeless destiny of the human race.”
Because misery loves company, that’s why. Sing it, Ponzo:
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. (emphasis Beckett)
Even in my woebegone state, I wouldn’t trade places with any of the characters.
Also, the play has more than its share of laughs, especially in this Druid production. Each actor, except for the boy, is a talented physical comedian. The twin protagonists, played by Aaron Monaghan (Estragon) and Marty Rea (Vladimir), are worthy of Laurel and Hardy, on whom Beckett modeled Estragon and Vladimir. Mick Lally in the Irish Times describes the two together on stage as looking “uncannily, like the marriage between a question mark and an exclamation point.” Like, well, Oliver and Hardy.
But most of all, I went because of the language of the play. Beckett’s own translation of his original French is quite beautiful, especially conveyed in the lilting Irish voices of Monaghan, Rea, and also in the voices of Rory Nolan (Pozzo), and Garrett Lombard (Lucky).
Beckett worked for a time as James Joyce’s secretary when Joyce was writing Finnegan’s Wake, and I could hear echoes in of that work in this production.
Here’s a snippet of Joyce reading from Finnegan’s Wake.
To me, tis lovely.
Here’s the trailer for the Druid production.
I suspect a bad production of Waiting for Godot would be wretched. If you don’t have an ear for the music of language, the plot might seem uneventful (and it is repetitive); therefore, it’s absolutely mandatory that you have topnotch actors like Bert Lahr, EG Marshall, Ian McKellen, and Patrick Stewart. The director (Garry Hynes), cast, and set designer (Francis O’Connor) all deserve high praise.
Pro tip: perhaps you should be familiar with a play before forking out $80 for a seat. I promise you, if you found this production boring, you’re not going to find a better one.
Of course, I’m no literary scholar, and you could overload an ocean freighter with various interpretations, but what Godot means to me is that the repetitiveness of life misdirects our eyes to a future in which we expect something different, not realizing that munching on a carrot across the table from your wife reading the paper can seem like sheer paradise in retrospect.
As Crass Casualty and Dicing Time[1] would have it, in the week of my wife’s memorial service, I have to box up the contents of my classroom for a move to a brand new Upper School building.
This chore is especially taxing because when I moved into a former colleague’s room a quarter a century ago, he asked if he could keep some of his books in the room, which were housed in three enormous bookcases that belonged personally to him. I said, sure. He eventually died without heirs. His collection includes some of his late mother’s books as well. There are inscriptions. “To Catherine S____________ 1925.”
Of course, I also have books, 31 years worth, not to mention file cabinets gorged with quizzes, study guides, lecture notes, honor contracts, resumes, book order receipts, etc.
So I’m in the process of sifting through the contents, recycling, shredding, and yesterday I discovered this anti-bullying speech I gave to the Upper School during the first Clinton Administration. I don’t know the exact date, maybe 1994. At any rate, I haven’t altered the text, so some of the allusions may seem odd or anachronistic.
At any rate, I think the speech holds up fairly well, so why not expose it to a wider audience than the 300 or so who originally heard it? I doubt if it will alter the behavior of bone fide bullies (like our current president), but it could offer the victims of bullies some solace.
I’ve also included the video clips that accompanied the speech.
[Note the original movie clip went a bit longer and depicted an older nurse who delivers the food the younger nurse was incapable of providing.]
John Merrick, the Elephant Man, is, of course, an extreme example of someone being shunned because of the way he looks, but we all know that every day all types of people are excluded for all types of reasons — it might be their race, their looks, the way they talk, their sexual orientation, the way they dress. I took a poll of my classes and discovered that 100% of my students, every single individual, has been made fun of here at Porter-Gaud, and I mean maliciously. I suspect everybody in this auditorium has been shunned, been put down at one time or another, been made fun of. We all know what it feels like, and it doesn’t feel good.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw Maya Angelou, perhaps America’s most famous living poet. She was being interviewed by David Frost on PBS. Maya Angelou is black and grew up in segregated Arkansas. So like John Merrick, she knows what it’s like to be excluded. Growing up as a little girl in Arkansas, she probably wouldn’t have been able to see the movie The Elephant Man because of the color of her skin.
When Maya Angelou was only 10-years-old, she was raped. After the rape, she refused to talk for over a year. Her pain was so terrible she couldn’t give voice to it. She remained silent, mute. I guess sort of like John Merrick, she couldn’t find the words she needed.
Fortunately, she eventually did find her voice and became a poet. In a poem she read at President Clinton’s inauguration, she linked humankind to extinct species such as dinosaurs and mastodons and voiced her concern that we may follow in their footsteps and become “lost in the gloom of dust and ages.” She sees a real danger in fragmentation. She writes
[. . .] the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
And what is the tree saying?
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
In the interview, David Frost asks Maya Angelou what the poem means, and she says, “It means we have to stop minimizing other people’s lives.”
We have to stop minimizing other people’s lives.
Look at John Merrick. The Elephant Man. An extreme case, as I said, but look how others minimized him. In the movie, the doctor Treves at first is more interested in John as a specimen than he is as human, but at least he treats him humanely. The younger nurse is so weak a person she runs like a child when she sees “the elephant man.” Runs screaming out of the room. [The following references don’t appear in the above clip]. Did you notice the second, older nurse? She never makes eye contact with Merrick. That’s what people do when they are uncomfortable; either they avoid eye contact, or they giggle, or both. This older nurse is beyond the giggling stage so instead she stays busy making the bed and talks about Merrick as if he were an idiot or weren’t there.
She is minimizing his life.
The head of the hospital is eager to get rid of Merrick. He is minimizing Merrick’s life. And not only John Merrick’s life, but his very own life. Because as it turns out, John Merrick possessed an extraordinary soul. His indomitable spirit has made him famous — the stuff of biographies, plays, movies. The head of the hospital would have been long forgotten if he had not encountered John Merrick. And how will the head of the hospital be remembered in these biographies, plays, and movies? His legacy lies in how he treated John Merrick. And I suspect that’s how we will be remembered after we leave Porter-Gaud. Others will remember us in light of how we treated them.
Now, this assembly’s not really about John Merrick. it’s about us — about you and me — and how we treat people. Do we minimize other people in the mistaken belief that we “grow” when we “put them down?”
That we grow when we exclude someone from our group?
Let’s face it. Everyone has weak points. We may be great at volleyball but lousy in math. Great in math but hopeless in history. We all have features we’re self-conscious about. Frankly, I’d just as soon not be bald, but like John Merrick, I didn’t have the luxury of choosing my parents. Nobody does.
Genetics deals us our facial features, our body types, our athletic prowess (or lack thereof), our intellectual potential, and even, according to the latest studies, our sexual orientation. We have no control over our parents’ wealth. Whether or not they’re getting divorced. Where we were born.
Of course, it’s really no mystery why people harass and pick on others. It’s obviously to compensate for low self esteem. Inevitably cowardice is also involved. Bullies rarely pick on the golden boy star quarterback who looks as if he’s stepped off the cover of Seventeen Magazine and sports 1550 SAT scores. The victims are going to be someone younger, smaller, less popular.
So when we hear somebody cutting someone else down, we ought to tell him or her to quit. We’ll be doing, not only the victim a favor, but also the bully a favor, because frankly, he’s making an ass out of himself. To those who see through the psychology, it’s embarrassing. Moreover, in doing nothing when we see unkindness occur we are abetting the creation of a climate that allows bullying to flourish.
We should be the heroes, not the villains, in the movies of our lives.
Of course, cutting people down isn’t the only way we can minimize their lives. Sometimes we shut others out because they are different. Ignoring someone is also minimizing his or her life. It’s obviously not as bad as being overtly cruel, but we do actually cheat ourselves when we hide in our little homogenous groups.
Let me give you an example.
I have a friend, Josephine Humphreys, who is a somewhat famous novelist. She wrote Rich in Love, a novel on the 9th grade reading list. You older students and faculty members might remember that her son Willy actually played Merrick in a senior play production of The Elephant Man a couple of years ago. Anyway, Jo grew up South of Broad, grew up in the Episcopal Church, attended Ashley Hall, in other words, lived a fairly typical Porter-Gaud-like life. However, she and her husband Tom are now in the process of producing records — cds that is — for local gospel groups. How did this come about? Through serendipity and the willingness to try new things.
About four years ago, Jo and Tom went to a gospel concert at Spoleto and were knocked out by this local quartet called the Brotherhood. They decided they wanted to see them again. The only thing was that back then the Brotherhood only performed in all black churches.
That didn’t stop Jo.
I asked Jo what it was like being a middle aged white woman going as a complete stranger to an all black church. She said she was nervous and that some of her white friends told her not to go, that blacks wouldn’t want her at their church, that it was intrusive. But she said to me, “You know, Wes, I’m 50 years old and that type of thing I don’t have time for.” So she and Tom went, were welcomed warmly, loved it. Over time, they became very good friends with the Brotherhood and their wives. Jo says that every time she hears them, they restore her faith in the world. She firmly believes that getting to know the Brotherhood is one of the very best things that has happened to her. And it’s been great for them, too. With Jo and Tom’s help, they’ve gained a wider audience and have toured Europe. Their European audiences loved them; they loved their European audiences.
The courage to take a chance and reach out has certainly enriched Jo’s life. The Brotherhood’s lives. And some Europeans’ lives as well.
But the thing is — integration isn’t only about mixing colors — it literally means “to make whole by bringing all parts together.” As long as we cut others off, as longs as we limit our peers by only seeing them as computer nerds, jocks, rednecks, math people, preppies, 7th graders — we too are cut off. We’re a piece of something. The stranger you see everyday at lunch sitting by himself may have an important gift to share — might possess a missing piece of your puzzle.
For example, in the film after Treves discovers that Merrick can speak, Treves leaves the hospital room and encounters Merrick’s sadistic manager, a man who exploited Merrick by exhibiting him in freak shows and who severely beat him. The manager threatens Treves by saying he will go to the authorities unless Treves does not release Merrick. The head of the hospital overhears the conversation and orders the manager out, saying he’s sure the authorities would be glad to hear of how he treated Merrick. The hospital head tells Treves he would like to meet the patient the next afternoon. Treves knows there is no chance keeping Merrick in the hospital if Merrick does not show himself to be mentally competent.
There’s no telling what wonders may exist in that person we have shut out. Merrick had already learned the “23rd Psalm” from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Where, no doubt, he also ran across these words, the wisest words I know of to be found anywhere:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Thank you for your attention. Any announcements . . .
When Judy was dying, I distracted myself by doing algebra, solving equations, but now she’s gone, I’ve been reading elegies, reminding my selfish self that losing a loved one is what happens here and all the time, as this link to a Facebook page abundantly demonstrates.
The old famous elegies don’t do it for me, not “Lycidas” nor “Adonais” nor “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” nor even Tennyson’s heartbreaking but morbid “In Memoriam.”
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
The seasons bring the flower again,
And bring the firstling to the flock;
And in the dusk of thee, the clock
Beats out the little lives of men.
O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
Who changest not in any gale,
Nor branding summer suns avail
To touch thy thousand years of gloom:
And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood
And grow incorporate into thee.
Auden, on the other hand, is closer to my taste, not his hokey “Funeral Blues” elegy quoted in Three Weddings and a Funeral, but this one called “The Cave of Making” for his friend and fellow poet Louis MacNeice:
Seeing you know our mystery
from the inside and therefore
how much, in our lonely dens, we need the companionship
of our good dead, to give us
comfort on dowly days when the self is a nonentity
dumped on a mound of nothing,
to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smacking
imps of mawk and hooey
write with us what they will, you won’t think me imposing if
I ask you to stay at my elbow
until cocktail time: dear Shade, for your elegy
I should have been able to manage
something more like you than this egocentric monologue,
but accept it for friendship’s sake.
But the elegy that has – forgive the phrase – slain me is Donald Hall’s “Without,” which captures so beautifully – an awful word to use here – captures the horrors of dying of blood cancer and the empty feeling for who’s left over.
Because I’m used to speaking in front of crowds and have a good ear for the sound of words, over the years, several people have asked me to deliver eulogies at their loved ones’ funerals/memorial services.
When I write a eulogy, I choose a text – for my father I opted for Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” I read the poem and pegged my father as a wild man “who caught and sang the sun in flight” but who learned “too late” that he “grieved it on its way.”
I offered examples of his wildness, like the time he captured a baby alligator and kept it in our bathtub, how he performed death-defying aerobatic stunts in an open-cockpit plane he had refurbished himself. I admitted that my father really didn’t care what other people thought, that he essentially gave the finger to the world.
Nevertheless, my father could be a man of immense compassion and adhered to an unimpeachable code of personal honor. I told about the time during the height of the Civil Rights movement, much to the chagrin of our neighbors, how he invited an abused ten-year-old African American boy to come live with us until a permanent safe abode could be found for him.
What I didn’t mention was that his last words were, “Get that goddamned light out of my face.”
Instead, I ended by saying that I thought Dylan Thomas’ exhortation to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” was bad advice and quoted some scripture that had been printed on my mother-in-law’s funeral program:
Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.
Having a text creates unity for a eulogy, helps coherence. What you want to do — or at least what I want to do – is to bring the dead back to life for a minute or two but also to help people come to terms with death’s predestined inevitability. Obviously, this last part is easier when the departed has lived a long life than it is when a life has been cut short.
from left to right, my father, an identified woman, my mother
When it became all too obvious that my love of 40 years, Judy Birdsong, was doomed to die of lymphoma, I thought about what I might say at her memorial service, what text I might use. Although these thoughts may seem self-indulgent to some, they provided me a chance to look back over our four decades together, back over the wooing, the establishing a household, travelling the world, begetting and rearing children, the various stations in the progression of our marriage.
About a week before she died, she looked over at me and said, “You’re not planning to do a eulogy for me, are you?” She delivered this question in the tone of voice she might use if I told her I was thinking about buying a thong speedo swimsuit for Folly Beach’s New Year Day’s polar bear plunge.
“No, of course not,” I said.
So now, of course, I’m not.
However, if I were, I would make use of quotes from the many sympathy cards we’ve received. I was sort of dreading reading those cards, but it has been so comforting, so life affirming.
Here’s her college and grad school roommate Veda who can’t “think of any times we really didn’t get along or were really mad at each other” but added “I guess she really didn’t like it when I would clean her room at our apartment in Columbia, but she really never got too upset about it.” [1] It was Veda who got Judy the job at the Golden Spur. Veda adds, “Sometimes it seems I can still smell the beer from mopping the floors after closing.” It was also Veda who played matchmaker inviting me to their apartment for fried shrimp sensing Judy and I had crushes on one another but were too shy to do anything about it. What an enormous debt I owe to her.
I’ve also heard from many of Judy’s colleagues I don’t know. A principal describes her as “so pleasant to work with and so well-prepared and good with parents.”
Our niece Beth nails it when she describes Judy as “kind, generous, funny, smart, and beautiful. But I think what set her apart to me was the serenity she always possessed. In this world which is increasingly so frantic, Judy always seemed calm and peaceful, happy in her life and content in her own skin.”
Perhaps the greatest solace I have received comes from others who have lost spouses. One describes us as “travelers on the same unwished for road, members of the same broken-hearted fraternity.”
The best advice comes from fellow widower Richard O’Prey who writes
It is in that spirit that I offer you this note. I hope it lends moral support to your heroic attempt to carry on without Judy. As I did with my wife Mary, I honored her by recalling her wisdom, her counsel, her courage in supporting me during our marriage. Now I urge you to honor Judy by continuing to consult her values, her directions, her unshakable faith in you [ . . .] As you are a creature of your early youth and the effects of those who loved you, think of Judy in the same way. Think of her often and ask what you believe her advice would be under the present circumstance. Perhaps that might be the best support I can offer at this discouraging time.
Judy absolutely hated being the center-of-attention. She wouldn’t let me put in her obituary that she was named Psychology Student of the Year at PC or that her EdS thesis was published in a respected journal and has been cited in other scholarly works. In fact, she really didn’t want to have a memorial service at all but thought it was necessary because it would help others receive some closure. It was always others she was thinking of, not herself.
I’m with Richie O’Prey. Rather than seeking closure, I’ll keep Judy always nearby in my thoughts,
She’s an impossible model to live up to, she who spent the week before her death recording passwords so I could have access to her accounts. To quote Shakespeare, she died
As one that had been studied in [her] death
To throw away the dearest thing [she] owned,
As ‘twere a careless trifle.
Like I said, she’s an impossible model to live up to, but I’ll give it my best.
[1] This, by the way, gave me the false impression that Judy was a meticulous housekeeper, an illusion that quickly disappeared after I carried her over the threshold of our first apartment at 17 Limehouse Street.
If you need a poem to help you cope with death, Emily Dickinson is your gal. I’ve read Richard Sewell’s 2 volume biography, and she was, as Robert Frost famously put it, “acquainted with the night,” or as my now-over-a-decade-dead friend Tommy Evatt used to say, “no stranger to heartache.”
During Emily Dickinson’s 56 years, lots and lots of people she dearly loved died.
She spoke from experience:
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
In my case, I’m not at the “formal feeling” stage yet, probably somewhere between “Chill” and “Stupor,” but by having read Tennyson and having read Dickinson, I know someday I can look forward to “the letting go.”
I can’t stress vigorously enough to my former students how the best poetry can prepare you for (in my case, the second worse thing I can imagine happening to me) by vividly making concrete the pain of loss before it actually happens and by underscoring the universality suffering.
Metaphors fail me – dress rehearsal, inoculation?
Anyway, Miss Emily, please accept this thank you note.
Since my wife Judy Birdsong’s death last Sunday, I have been unable to write anything but clichés. Courageous battle. Unending love. Flights of angels.
Fortunately, my friend Aaron Lipka was able to express what I am feeling in an email he sent to my friends and colleagues at the school where I teach. I’d like to present it as a prelude to the slideshow I made for the funeral home visitation.
I can’t express in strong enough terms the gratitude for all of you who have sent love, thoughts, prayers, solace. Now that my Judy’s gone, I don’t have a guide to steer me within the bounds of good taste, so please bear with me when I stray, which I’m sure I will. As they say, the past is prologue.
Here’s Aaron’s message:
One and all,
I have been thinking about what to say in this email. Sometimes, words are not what we need, and electronic consolation can seem cold and impersonal. Whatever I can say here today will risk falling sadly short of what is useful or necessary.
And yet words are all I have to give.
Death is sad, and scary. In the face of loss, I have listened to our school community reach out with compassion to Wesley, and I have heard others tell of the benevolent and graceful individual whom we knew as Judy Birdsong. The cumulative message I have received this week, however, is neither sad, not scary at all.
It has been a celebration of a life lived, full of love. It is a story that has refused to be marred in the face of hardship or sorrow. In the sharing of the story of her life, I feel her presence with us. Her memory is very much alive, and it is radiantly beautiful.
I consider myself fortunate to have known her, in my small way. And I judge Wesley to be a lucky man; not for his loss, but for the many years he had to spend with Judy. We should all hope to share such love in our lives.
I hope to see many of you at Chico Feo on Folly Beach this afternoon, 4 pm, and together lift a glass to commemorate the life and love of Judy Birdsong. In our shared words, she will be among us.
Shakespeare would begin his Trump play with the inauguration speech. We’re now in Act 2, and the Comey sacking is a very important complication in the plot. Although the chaos of the firing and its aftermath is not what Aristotle called the peripetia, the turning point of a tragedy, it is the equivalent of the murder of Banquo in Macbeth, a brazen act that deepens suspicion.
Now, no one but a Kool-Aid swilling soul-selling Party Person (e.g., Jeffrey Lord) can dismiss that Trump has obstructed justice in the canning of Comey. After all, Trump has admitted as much on national television.
Speaking to NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump contradicted the farcical original rationale that he was just following the suggestion of the deputy attorney general who saw impropriety in Comey’s handling of the Clinton email scandal. No, Trump admitted that he had wanted to fire Comey all along: “When I decided to [fire Comey], I said to myself, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story.” In other words, he canned Comey because of the investigation. Comey’s people have subsequently claimed that Trump demanded from Comey an oath of loyalty when he summoned him to dinner at the White House in the first week of the Presidency. Makes the conversation Bill Clinton had with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac seem way too much ado over nothing.
As one of my Twitter pundits put it, there’s a reason lawyers instruct their clients to keep their mouths shut.
The problem with this Shakespeare analogy, though, is that Trump lacks the stature to be a tragic figure. He’s more like Pantalone from commedia dell’arte than Macbeth or Julius Caesar. There is, however, something about him that evokes, at least in me, pity. He betrays a sort of childish vulnerability that suggests a boyhood devoid of love or attention. Like Willy Loman, he’s pathetic, not tragic. When he’s sitting down in an interview, I sense his insecurity in the shifting of his eyes and the movement of his hands.* He’s dying to be loved. Approval is his crack. He might be bigger than life, but then again he is so much less a man or woman than your average sympathetic bartender.
I suspect the peripetia is just around the corner in Act 3 when his taxes come to light.
Republicans will commence their ratlike run from Trump’s sinking ship, Spicer will continue play the role of the comic butt, and Bannon will eventually land a spot on Fox News.
In a tragedy, Bannon would hang himself.
We’re talking farce, not tragedy.
*Don’t get me wrong. Trump is a buffoon whose brain resembles a pinball machine. I’d love to see the above-mentioned pussy-grabbing hands stymied by a pair of handcuffs.
Note: Last week, and a very difficult week it was, our guidance counselor asked me to “offer some words of wisdom” for the upcoming senior milestone dinner, and I agreed, though it’s a difficult task if you don’t like trafficking in clichés.
So what follows is a sort of rough draft, which I’ll more or less memorize, and then deliver it to the seniors, their parents, my colleagues, and whoever else shows up.
Good evening and first I’d like to congratulate the class of 2017, and all of the people who have helped you reach this point: your grandparents, parents, siblings, friends, teachers, the obstetricians/midwives who brought you into the world, everybody — because no one who has ever made a speech like this has failed to mention that you had a lot of help along the way, and you did.
Mrs. Kimberly has asked me if I might convey some “words of wisdom” as you prepare to leave this familiar place, so I’m going to give it a shot, and at the very least end this talk with the best advice about succeeding in college there is. So stay tuned.
Here goes.
One of life’s biggest challenges is staying awake – and I don’t mean that in the literal sense of not dozing off as you’re tooling down the Crosstown but staying awake to the wonders of the world.
Wordsworth has a sonnet that starts
The world is too much with us, late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,
Little we see in nature that is ours,
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
What Wordsworth means, I think, is that the day-to-day grind blinds us to the miracles of being. Focused on the upcoming chemistry exam or speeding ticket court date, we don’t notice the wren perched on branch above singing its heart out or the glint of sunlight on the distant river or maybe even the river itself.
We forget [acid head voice] that, like, hey, man, we’re on the third planet from the sun swirling in concert with a spiral galaxy spinning like a Frisbee through interstellar space.
A had a jolt a couple of months that reminded me of my own place in nature. My son Harrison and his wife Taryn gave Judy and me a DNA test kit so we could check out our ancestry. When the results came in and I logged on to discover my makeup, the first thing I noticed was the drawing of a cave man and the message “You have 58% more Neanderthal DNA than the general population.”
illustration source: The New Yorker
“Ah ha. That explains a lot. My deep-set eyes, prominent brow, inability to factor quadratic equations.”
Now, Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago. Let’s for the sake of argument say a generation is 30 years. That means, in my case, it took 1,333 successful matings to come up with me. If my Neanderthal Mema had died in childbirth from an older sibling, I wouldn’t be here. Ditto if my sub-Saharan ancestor had stepped on a snake or my Norse ancestor hadn’t raped and pillaged that Irish village. You get the picture. It’s the same with everyone everywhere. That we exist at all is truly miraculous. We’ve all had miraculous births.
One of the most universal human myths – it extends from Borneo the Hebrides – is the hero’s journey. The hero, like you, has had a miraculous birth, and, like you, is called to leave his home on a quest of discovery. You’re at the part of the journey called “crossing the threshold.” Having mastered crawling, walking, riding a bike, reading, writing, calculating, solving equations, understanding the rise and fall of empires, conjugating another language’s verbs, it’s time to go.
You’re leaving the familiarity of your home to encounter new and strange beings, and, of course, it’s not going to be all smooth sailing. You’re going to be tested in more ways than one.
The good news is that you’ve been equipped with an excellent education, not only academically but also in the realm of ethics. My charge to you is not only to stay awake to the miracles surrounding you but to also strive to be a good person because I sincerely believe that if you don’t live a life of integrity you won’t be truly happy. I say this not only in the context of my own experience but also in what great literature tells us about the human condition.
Each night we go to sleep assured that the sun will rise again in the morning; however, of course, one morning it won’t, at least for us. Keep in mind the immense unlikelihood of your existence, your miraculous birth, the beauty of the world. Look up more than occasionally at that night sky Hamlet calls a “majestic roof fretted with golden fire.” Step boldly over that threshold into adulthood with your eyes and ears wide open. In other words, wide awake.
How great, how exciting to be just now venturing forth.
Oh yeah, that surefire advice about succeeding in college. I promise each and every one of you will be successful if you follow this one instruction:
GO TO CLASS!
It’s harder than you might think.
To all my former students, it’s been an honor teaching you, and certainly an honor addressing all of you tonight. I wish you all the very best.
A few posts back, I mentioned Practically Painless English, a grammar primer by Sally Foster Wallace, mother of the famous David Foster Wallace, the brilliant novelist and essayist who gave us Infinite Jest and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”
Here’s a riff from one of David Foster Wallace’s infamous footnotes, a description of his favorite “tablemate” on a luxury cruise that Harper’s sent him on, despite his being more than a touch agoraphobic:
Trudy was 56, the same age as my own dear personal Mom, and looked – Trudy did, and I mean this in the nicest way possible – like Jackie Gleason in drag, and had a particularly loud pre-laugh scream that was a real arrhythmia-producer, and was the one who coerced me into Wednesday night’s Conga Line, and got me strung out on Snowball Jackpot Bingo, and was also an incredible lay authority on 7NC Luxury Cruises, this being her sixth in a decade – she and her friend Esther (thin-faced, subtly ravaged-looking, the distaff part of the couple from Miami) had tales to tell about Carnival, Princess, Crystal, and Cunard too fraught with libel-potential to produce here, and one long review of what was apparently the worst cruise in 7NC history – one “American Family Cruises,” which folded after just sixteen months – involving outrages too literally incredible to be believed from any duo less knowledgeable and discerning than Trudy and Esther.
Look what I found: Jackie Gleason in drag!
In the above-mentioned post, I mentioned that I actually taught from Practically Painless English in the ‘80’s but that now copies were going for $138, but lo and behold, I have scored a copy of the second edition for pittance — $34.
What a hoot. Sally Foster Wallace is brilliantly subversive. Dig this explanation of the capitalization of pronouns:
Remember that I is the only pronoun that is always capitalized, no matter where it appears in the sentence. Capitalize a pronoun referring to God, too:
God’s eye is on the sparrow, but I know He watches me.[1]
Here’s an example with the polite instruction to “please circle each pronoun you find in these sentences”:
Lassie is teaching her pups to chew with their mouths open.
Another treat is that she creates a cast of idiosyncratic characters who sort of evolve – or at least provide behavioral motifs — as we travel from “Parts of Speech” through “Paragraphs.”
These include Peony McAllister, Rambo and Rambette, Inertia and Aphasia. Grandma and Grandpa Pringle, and Chively Sneed. Fedonia Krump and Mongo.
Here are a few of my favorite examples:
Please circle the adverbs in the following paragraph:
Peony McAllister was so excited about her extremely interesting Japanese flower-arranging class that she completely ignored the bright red stop signs randomly placed here and there on her route to school. Suddenly, her very cold ears picked up the hauntingly familiar sound of a skull-shattering loud siren, and she saw dazzling lights in her rearview mirror. Frantically, she began to create convincingly pathetic excuses for going too fast. As she slowly pulled over to the side of the road, she patted her motorcycle gently and smiled bravely at the very large person who was slowly approaching.
Brava!
Identify the part of speech of the italicized words.
Ezra pounded the steak and then smothered it in onions.
If you call your sister a dweebazoid again, I’ll be forced to turn you into a toad.
Obviously, no remedial student is going to pick up that allusion.
Identify the subject and verb.
Rambette took her parakeet for a walk.
Wild horses dragged the tall leprechauns to a boring movie.
Here’s one from a punctuation exercise.
Fedonia’s pet lion fell into the paving machine so she calls him Leotarred.
You catch the drift – DFW didn’t fall far from the maternal tree, at least as far as surrealism and an obsession with English usage (go, goes).
It’s interesting to note that when he taught college, he was, by his own admission, fanatical about correct grammar and mechanics. Here he is in another footnote, this one from the essay: “Authority and American usage” describing what happened every semester when he taught lit.
Once I’ve had to read my students’ first set of papers, we immediately abandon the regular Lit syllabus and have a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of teaching HIV prevention to intravenous drug users. When it emerges (as it does every term) that 95 percent of these intelligent upscale college students have never been taught, e.g., what a clause is or why a misplaced only can make a sentence confusing or why you don’t just stick in a comma after a noun phrase, I all but pound my head on the blackboard; I get angry and self-righteous; I tell them they should sue their hometown school boards, and I mean it. Every August I vow silently to chill about usage this year, and then by Labor Day there’s foam on my chin. I can’t seem to help it. The truth is that I’m not even an especially good or dedicated teacher; I don’t have this fervor in class about anything else, and I know it’s not a very productive fervor, not a healthy one – it’s got elements of fanaticism and rage to it, plus a snobbishness that I know I’d be mortified to display about anything else.
Good God, how I miss DFW. What a loss to literature.
David Foster Wallace world copyright Giovanni Giovannetti/effigie
[1] Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s consent. Matthew 10:29, Holman Christian Standard Bible
Shakespeare would begin his Trump play with the inauguration speech. We’re now in Act 2, and the Comey sacking is a very important complication in the plot. Although the chaos of the firing and its aftermath is not what Aristotle called the peripetia, the turning point of a tragedy, it is the equivalent of the murder of Banquo in Macbeth, a brazen act that deepens suspicion.
You Do Hoodoo 