What I Assume

In several ways, I want to be like Chris Lott when I grow up.  I don’t know him terribly well–I think we sat at the same dinner table at WCET in 2006, and we banter and blather back in forth via blogs and Twitter–but he never fails to make a good impression.

Seemingly out of the blue Chris opened up another window into his mind, using a Whitman quote as a clue to explain his “inconsistencies”.  Using recent examples of how he’s changed his mind on perceptions or aspects of his world view, Chris justifies his so-called inconsistencies by implying that alternating positions, and the fact that people change their mind, can be reasonably explained.

But no explanation is needed. What I think Chris knows but would be naturally loathe to admit is that he is able to practice what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the test of first-rate intelligence”:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Too often “…and still retain the
ability to function” is left off this quote but I daresay it is a critical component of Fitzgerald’s argument.  At the risk of sounding like a Chris Lott groupie, I’ve seen Chris do this, even alternately arguing different sides of the same issue while still being grounded enough in reality to get the job done.  So many “big-thinkers” in ed tech get either too attached to one side of an argument, or are so caught up in the argument itself that they fail to move anything forward.

This laudatory exercise was unexpected, but that’s alright. What I really want to answer is Chris’s question, what have you changed your mind about?

Here’s are two:

Being elite and
critical is not as important as being encouraging and kind.  This is a pretty damning statement, but I daresay anyone who knows me understands that a certain degree of elitism is just part of my personality.

This is
not to say that I no longer believe in the power of the critical eye,
or the struggle for excellence, afronting relativism, it’s just that
I’ve realized–and this is pretty recently–that Most Normal People Are Doing Their Best, and if they are
at all of  like me (despite the hardened facade I often put forth to
resist weaker emotions), they want to hear the positive more often than
the negative, they deserve to be applauded when they earn applause, and
that should be louder than the boos when they deserve booing.

Second,

The thing I’m learning about writing (and after many years struggling I thankfully am still learning) is that every day the simple act of writing begins like a fistfight with myself.  I have to defeat myself, I have to beat my brain into submission, I have to tenderize, exercise, and endorphinize.

Most days pit my Heraclean Ambition vs. Lenarean Self-Doubt (my brain, I suppose, the contradictory quagmire of sulfurous intellect and poisonous emotion?).  As I grow older the heads of the beast grow more plentiful, despite my struggling, as if each year I slice one off to find two growing back in it’s place.

“Good Morning. How may I thwart you?”

And so the more years that pass, the more difficult the challenge of finally conquering the Hydra.  The completed novel, published.  The collected poems, edited, selected, all good.  The finished play, revised, rewritten, readable aloud.  I’d like to think it’s a struggle between age and youth, a la E. E. Cummings’s old age sticks:

old age sticks
    up Keep
    Off
    signs)&
    youth yanks them
    down(old
    age
    cries No
    Tres)&(pas)
    youth laughs
    (sing
    old age
    scolds Forbid
    den Stop
    Must
    n't Don't
    &)youth goes
    right on
    gr
    owing old

But even if it were as simple as that, I am no Heracles, and I have no firebrand. Where is my Iolaus? And, if he were to come, shouldn’t I shun him for fear of Eurystheus’s judgement?  For my part, I can only bare-fisted show them what I’m made of, and in the showing make of myself whatever can be made.

What began as two lines for a longer poem that I never was able to finish have become two lines of a short poem. Is doing so a “cop-out”? Or a service to prospective readers? I prefer to label this edit the latter, if only because it increases attention to the first line, which (as an alternative to “I wish I had spent more time at the office…”) could acceptably constitute my Dying Words:

Riddle

I'm the tangled rope you wish to cut,

The minotaur's snort in the morning;

    Without trying, just by
    Being I untwine
    the labyrinth of sleep.

A sufferable confessional-style poem. It was meant to only be a list of things going wrong this morning, but it turned into something slightly better (at least until the last line).

Brawling (A January Morning)

Alarm went off, for once I was OK;
I hit snooze anyway.
Half-an-hour later I was in the shower
And hot water drowned out my head.

But Words battered back in my brain as I dried.
I hated them, the busy head.
I said, I don't need caffeine.

Took clothes, took food, took bag, took keys
Frost was on the ground, ice was on the windshield

Bad news on the radio, but
I listened anyway in the parking lot of the cafe
Just to keep myself from going inside.
I took a deep breath, I went inside, ordered with pleasure,
sat myself down nervous beyond measure.

And I avoided writing, I avoided the story
I glanced at the poem and hated it too.
I took a sip and was, though not inspired,
subdued

Thusly I sit, subdued and sour
While still frost preys upon the ground
"But not yet on me,"

a muttered mantra
of the scrubbed clean, the self-soiling.

Myself, I woke up late, wanted some punk rock in the car on my way
to lunch, found the iPod was dead, flipped on the local High School
public radio station to hear the opening chords of Social Distortion’s “Ball and Chain“.

Though I don’t relate to all the down-and-out scenarios in “Ball and
Chain”, the thrust of the song is surely the same for me as it is for
songwriter Mike Ness. We’re each stuck with the life that we’ve made,
and because of the burdens we’ve forged for ourselves it’s damn hard to
start anew.

I do not pretend to be immune to the symbolism of the New Year, and
in synch with the song my mind hovered about all the useless burdens in
my own life that I’d like to leave behind this year, and of course all
the work it’ll take to cut just another few links off that self-made
chain. Dickens’s Marley said of his own heavy, spectral chain, “I made
it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will,
and of my own free will I wore it”. It’s amazing how resonant these
words still are, and how universal the imagery is as shown in both the
20th century punk rock song and a 19th century classic of fiction.

One should take warning that there is a paradox inherent in attempts
to break away from the old and redeem one’s self in the new: even as
one files away at the links of one’s chain, one must simultaneously
stave off the gradual but constant formation of new links. These links
come from ourselves, our imperfections, our vices, our bad habits. It’s
certainly the same cold iron Mike Ness of Social D gnaws at when he
sings, “But wherever I have gone / I was sure to find myself there.”

This begs the question, If you can’t escape yourself, can you ever
be free from self-made chains? Doing it on one’s own is a constant,
exhausting, and precarious struggle; it’s no surprise that many in the
US choose to ignore their own chains, and reject the redemptive hope
that can still be found in New Year resolutions.