Sunday. More gorgeous weather. 70ish and swept skies. We're at Blue Monday; one of us is asleep and the other would like to be. We're a family of mild head colds. Itchy throats and snuffly breathing and deeper bags below our eyes. Your father and Thisbe spent the weekend at Grandma Judy's farm gathering apples from her tree and making waffles and watching Peter Pan. You came with Gak and I to a writing festival at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
We slept in a clean but slightly stuffy hotel room, your snuffling and deep-sleep mewling waking me more than normal, an orange street light shining through the parted curtain and across your face as I nursed you at 1:30 and 5:00. You, sweet boy, were a delight at the conference, snoozing in your stroller or staring wide eyed at the students hustling by in short-shorts, room keys looped around their necks.
I got to hear Mark Saltzman talk about his shifted perspective on the writing process, about how he now assumes he is always doing the best work he can, that sitting down to write (even if you don't write) is enough, that now facing the empty page is a time during the day he looks forward to rather than feeling anxious about. Anne Lamott talked about writing too. Mostly what she already wrote in Bird by Bird, but I liked listening to her so much. She walked onto the stage in front of hundreds of people wearing baggy jeans and scuffed clogs and a long-sleeved cotton shirt and black hoodie. She didn't ever look at her notes. She just talked--and it was meandering and the content was not new or life changing but it didn't feel like I was listening to the persona of Anne Lamott or author Anne Lamott, it felt like she was her real, genuine person-self talking to us. Most authors, you will learn, do not behave like this when they read. They are purposely polished or purposely unpolished; purposely sharp and witty or purposefully nonchalant and unperturbed. It's a little like reading a memoir, where you get a version of the author that is not really the author. But somehow Anne Lamott actually felt like Anne Lamott.
I've been thinking this week about these personas, these variations on ourselves that we present at different times. If and when these personas are useful and if and when they're not. I struggle a lot with this, especially as a teacher. I want to present myself as someone who's smart and self-assured (and, of course, hip, talented, and supremely confident). As a (fairly) young, female professor, I've felt that I needed to present that persona--in part to protect myself. To keep students (especially cocky young male ones) from taking advantage of me.
Then, on Thursday, for the first time ever, I got choked up and teary during class. It had been a week of loss. Jennifer died last Friday, Charlie and Becky and Lucy and Hattie celebrated their last day at Bethel on Sunday, and then Jim's memorial service was on Wednesday. I didn't get to hear all of the memorial service because I was outside the chapel, peering through the windows, walking you back and forth in the Ergo carrier, pressing the green nuk between your gums and shushing repeatedly. But I got to hear bits and pieces and I was reminded of Jim's view of the student as co-professor, of his insistence on bringing his own values into the classroom, not to force those values onto his students, but so they could understand why he taught what he did, why he taught the way that he did.
We were talking about odes in class. I asked the students why we write odes. It's easy to understand the need to write poems about love or death, but why the urge to write poems that elevate? Then I wrote the end of a Howard Nemerov poem on the board:
"Oh Swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind's eye lit the sun."
And the students did a good job responding to all this. We talked about how the writing of an ode focuses the eye, requires a re-seeing of the world. And then I said that I know no one thinks of poetry as the critical class in college, that it is interesting or lovely or fun but not necessary (and that's OK). But that this act of re-seeing a thing, this act of elevating, (Hopkins' inscape, instress) means that we are learning to see more and more of the world as sacred and that when we come to see an object as sacred we are far less likely to destroy it. I said that's why I show up to class every day.
And that's when I got all choked up. And I named Jennifer and Jim. And the students got quiet and wide-eyed.
As I walked home with your father I told him the story. I said I was feeling embarrassed and vulnerable. He said that was probably a good thing. I'm still not sure. There are good reasons for certain boundaries between professors and students and sometimes it's hard to know exactly where those are, exactly how much of the self is allowed to show up in the classroom.
I have felt a lot of grief over the loss of Jim and Jennifer and the truth is that I didn't really know either very long or very well. Many of my colleagues had taught with Jim for years or had been in book clubs or mother/daughter groups with Jennifer. I only knew them peripherally, really. But maybe the loss feels greater because interactions with them felt persona-free. It didn't take hanging around with Jim or Jennifer for five years to get a glimpse of each person's bright self. Which perhaps is what let the rest of us be our own broken, authentic selves in their presence.
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