Digging

Photo by Alistair Christie-Johnston
Peat in Shetland Islands

In my email this week was a message from my uncle who lives in the Shetland Islands, far to the 

north of Scotland. He sent me this picture of his “peat bank” and wrote that, between his peat bank and his million dollar view, he has a unique kind of wealth.

I sent him in return a poem by Seamus Heaney called “Digging” in which Heaney compares the work of his grandfather digging peat and his own work as a poet digging for the good earth with his pen. 

Heaney writes about the way we find meaning in our lives. His father, like his grandfather, dug ‘Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods /Over his shoulder, going down and down/ For the good turf. Digging.’ What I read in the poem is a celebration of the way we can find purpose in our lives and a humble respect from a nobel laureate for his labouring forefathers. 

Meaning emerges in this poem through the juxtaposition of shovel and pen. Nowhere does Heaney write explicitly about the way meaning and purpose can come through digging deeply into the rich earth of our cultural world, but the understandings emerge as carefully shaped as the peat sods his grandfather dug from Toner’s Bog.

I’m far from the poet Heaney is, but my most successful writing has these same characteristics. Meaning emerges through the cracks opened by a metaphor and, like Ted Hughes’ “Thought-fox”, wearily tests its vitality as it enters the space between my mind and yours. It seems to happen almost by accident; an emergent phenomenon as improbable as any other miraculous birth.

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Words seem to me anything but ordinary. The very possibility of words producing meaning - let-alone creative meaning - seems so unlikely that it’s necessary to stop from time to time to marvel. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote somewhere that imagination is “like snow upon a river, a moment there then gone forever”. In a recent email to a friend I described the creative process as oddly woolly - like herding sheep with little sense of cohesion until suddenly and miraculously they’re all there neatly penned and staring back at you. 

This reflection was based on the experience I had while writing a poem. While I was riding to school I though of a metaphor: "a camera photographing itself in a mirror." I’d written the first half of this post and the ideas were still sloshing about in my head.

What’s interesting is the way the poem emerged. The metaphor was the heart of it. As my journey progressed, the second part of the poem - the idea of the complexity of the mechanisms that capture an image - began to form and when I arrived I sat in my classroom and wrote it down.

Here’s the interesting bit: only when I read what I’d written did much of the potential meaning come to light. The lovely paraphrase of Shakespeare’s line “signifying nothing” - echoing Macbeth’s soliloquy at the death of Lady Macbeth - was unconscious but powerfully apposite. I know the soliloquy, but I had not remembered its use of the metaphor of the “player”; the performer as mimesis, the signifier of a world who’s meaning is futile at best, and incomprehensible at worst. Shakespeare, the greatest interpreter of our world who reminds us at every turn of the futility of

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interpretation. 

The form of the poem as a mirror was deliberate because I wanted the two ends of the poem to reflect endlessly back to one another. Structurally, the poem is a deliberate nod to the philosophic idea of the hermeneutic circle. What emerged from this structural device was the word “beyond” which becomes a fulcrum for the poem. It was the power of this word and of it’s mediation through “nothing/ beyond/ perhaps” that struck me afterwards as powerful. I didn’t write this. These words and the meaning I find in them assembled themselves. 

And as always I am in awe of the power of our minds to dance with the world. From the blade of my uncle's shovel through the echoes of a Shakespearian soliloquy, the terrible beauty of our world assembles.

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

Community = Communication

I’ve been reading a lot about the good and the bad of blogging this week.

Jeff Plaman shared these two articles from The Atlantic: Why American students can’t write and How Self-Expression Damaged my Students. Both articles present a general position about the dangers of a learning environment in which there is too much freedom for students and too little direct instruction from teachers.

These articles are in contrast with Jeff’s own writing about our digital identity and that of my colleagues Paula Guinto and Jabiz Raisdana. If I can grossly simplify the collective position of Jeff, Paula and Jabiz, I think it is that blogs provide a space for students to explore and develop their sense of themselves as writers and that a certain amount of “freedom” is absolutely necessary for this to occur.

Central to this discussion is the concept of “freedom”. For Peg Tyre and Robert Pondiscio, the two writers from The Atlantic, freedom seems to represent an abdication of responsibility by teachers. Pondiacio argues that giving students freedom to explore their identity as writers through the “Writers Workshop” model is to ignore a more important responsibility we have as teachers: direct instruction.

…at too many schools, it's more important for a child to unburden her 10-year-old soul writing personal essays about the day she went to the hospital, dropped an ice cream cone on a sidewalk, or shopped for new sneakers. It's more important to write a "personal response" to literature than engage with the content. This is supposed to be "authentic" writing. There is nothing inherently inauthentic about research papers and English essays.

[…]

…at present, we expend too much effort trying to get children to "live the writerly life" and "develop a lifelong love of reading."

You're not going to get to any of those laudable goals without knowledge, skills, and competence. For every kid who has had his creative spark dimmed by "paint-by-numbers" writing instruction, there are almost certainly 10 more who never developed that creative spark because they grew up believing they can't write and never learned to adequately express themselves.

Whether Pondiacio’s depiction of the “Writer’s Workshop” method is accurate or not (and my own recent training in Writers Workshop would suggest not), he nonetheless represents a concern about the failure to teach “basics” which rings many chords. It takes little time surfing the net to discover waves of disgruntled writers concerned about the loss of basic skills in the education system.

As I’ve written elsewhere, this concern seems to reflect something much more pervasive than just the teaching of writing. A general concern about a lack of disciplined teaching in schools is pervasive in the popular press despite a lack of evidence to this effect. In western countries, the massive increase in participation in post-primary education over the last 50 years has lead to a concomitant increase in literacy. The population of today is without doubt more literate than that of yesterday. What this has also meant is that instead of a small group of the educated elite defining the lingua franca, there are increasingly diverse groups contributing their ideas and their voices to the discourses of power.

It seems important to me to remember that the whole project to fix language into one definable form is not only political but also very recent. The project to “fix the English language” which Samuel Johnson began 250 years ago in the writing of his dictionary, reached its apotheosis in the creation of The Oxford English Dictionary in the mid-19^th Century, a project which was not finished until early in the 20^th Century. We think of English language and grammar as being largely fixed and unchanging but they never have been and the idea that they might be fixed is essentially a modern one. Shakespeare did not have a standard spelling, grammar or lexicon and, arguably, could not have written Hamlet if he did. A freedom to play with language is at the heart of most great writing and particularly poetry.

My argument is not that I think language should be loose or that any form of communication should be fine, but rather that it is important to understand that all decisions about which words, grammar and spelling are “right” are conventions and that these conventions should and must evolve. We do need to understand the conventions of our day, but we also need to stop and ask ourselves why we want to communicate and it is this question that I think is missing from the “back to basics” agenda.

We communicate to create communities.

Language is, at its most basic level, communicative and our identities are the consequence of this communication. What I find unsettling about articles such as the two which began this post is that they almost see writing as combative; the desired outcome is to conquer, not to communicate and successful writing is that which is “better” than others. The idea of a polished prose based in a view of potential perfection is anathema to communication because communication is a negotiated medium in which meaning cannot be static.

One’s prose is important, but far more important is the connection between interlocutors and the possibility of building and evolving a better understanding of self and others. Respectful communication is first and foremost concerned with forming connections to the interlocutor – not with evaluating the status of their prose.

Which brings me back to what I think is a good blog. First and foremost it is one which communicates. Language can facilitate communication in a range of guises. At times it works best when it is well-dressed in black tie or ball gown; at other times board-shorts and “T” shirt fit better. It is absolutely the responsibility of the teacher to bring students to an understanding of what clothing will gain them easiest entrée to which venue but a far more pressing need in any society is to teach them to look for the person beneath the veneer and to truly communicate.

What I find truly inspiring in the work of my colleagues is that they are giving students the space to find themselves and each other in their writing. Part of the mission of our school is to “make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future”. Such an important task must begin with communication.

What’s so good about reality?

There’s nothing “real” about language. You can’t eat it or wear it; you can’t pick it up and use it to keep off the rain.  There are no stories to be found out there in the “real” world. You can’t hunt poems in the forest or look at essays in the zoo.

Beyond the vibration of vocal chords, language, the most human of humanity's capacities, has no “reality” to it at all. Animals exist in the real world; humans, to the extent that we are more than animals, live in a reasoned world of language where the building blocks are metaphors and the mortar is narrative. Beauty, values and moral judgements are all human abstractions based in the real world but not to be found there. In an existential moment, Shakespeare made this same point: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I make these observations because I have been thinking about the issues raised by a number of my colleagues as they address the popular perception of a dichotomy between the “real” world and the digital world. So the argument goes: too much time on computers is taking people away from what is real. Computers, the latest manifestation of an evolving information technology which we might trace back through TV to telephone, novel through newspaper and all the way back to fire-side stories and cave paintings, are placed in opposition to a real world of face-to-face interactions.

My argument is that there is nothing inherently more real about a face-to-face chat than there is about a twitter feed. Both exist in the abstracted world of language where meaning must be negotiated and reason evolved. What these two communication forms share is inherently more significant than what separates them.

I value conversations - in whatever form – for their capacity to expand my humanity and to build a just and reasoned world. There is plenty on Twitter that is inane and pointless but I have had my share of face-to-face conversations of this kind, too. What is important is not the form of the conversation but its content.

It's important to add that I value reality. Some of the most precious moments of my life have been whilst sitting quietly on a mountain or in a semi-meditative state sailing in rough weather. But I also value my humanity and, for me, being truly human is bound to my sense of myself in language as I make meaning from the world and build a reasoned response to the complexities of my cultural environment.

As Jürgen Habermas’ theory of “Communicative Action” suggests, becoming a reasonable person happens in all kinds of ways in all kinds of interactions; digital interactions like this one that I am having with you being no more or less valid than any other.

Ambiguity

Way back when I went to school we read novels. Big lumps of processed tree sandwiched around black dye and filled with moral goodness. We opened them and we read them and we didn’t stop until they were all gone: chewed, digested and circulating through our veins.

This was the wholesome diet that helped us face the world and our examiners. We trusted that the right ratios of Shakespeare and Dickens would give us the strength to face down the ambiguities of the world.

It didn’t work, of course. Or it didn’t work for long. Maybe at school we were prepared to kid ourselves that Shakespeare and Dickens provided some kind of certainty that might shelter us from the rain. At University it quickly became evident that there are no certainties to be found in any writer who is worth reading. Ambiguity is the essence of great writing and the masters revel in it.

Ambiguity isn’t easy to examine, however, and the mass education projects of the mid 20^th century struggled to know how to deal with Shakespeare. At school I remember being asked to memorise Polonius’s speech from Hamlet in which he advises Laertes on how to live a virtuous life. It strikes me now as a little sad that we sat in class holding tight to this one small, shaky reed of certainty while all around us raged a river of existential angst. While we read, “neither a borrower nor a lender be”, Hamlet grappled with the enormities of life and being right beside us and we never really noticed.

It’s the hardest of things to confront ambiguity in a classroom. You can’t really mark it; you can’t easily define it; it’s very difficult to push it into shape for a lesson plan.  “Language” as the poet Gwen Harwood reminds us “is not a perfect game/ and if it was, how could we play?” At the heart of what makes us human is an enigma and I’d like to think this enigma finds its way into my classroom from time to time as well.