5. This Posting is Ruskin-Free
Here is a story from my life as a teacher at a university with very serious students. Since I've gotten everybody into a churchy mood, I will step into the posting pulpit.
Enthusiasms 5:1-8
And it came to pass in those days that one of my disciples, one of those of the occident, dispatched unto me an email begging dispensation, saying, “I’m, like, chairing the dance marathon? And one of our big sponsors? They can only do lunch today? And I need to leave class early?” And you may ask, was this a request or a demand cast as injunction, for what, truly, was the question? And I spake upon him, “Sure. Just leave the class quietly so you don’t disturb the other students.”
No matter; my sermons fall upon the matriculators of a certain university, who comport themselves in the robes of ambition and of Abercrombie and of Fitch, and they, perhaps, in exceeding unseasonable maturity, do do lunch (verily, I do say do-do). For this maturity I am most grateful, and there is much feasting in celebration.
And it came to pass that ON THAT SAME DAY a second acolyte, this from the orient, bowed unto me and spake, “Will you release me from mine obligations a tad early so that I might attend to my duties regulating the adoption of Chinese orphans, for a major donor from the great city to the south (Chicago, that intertwining serpent that devoured Gog and Magog) has bid take me to see the newborn babes?” And I asked unto him, “Dost thou mean orphan, frequently, or orphan, a child without parent,” and the student, being not of the occident and unfamiliar with the indulgences of Gilbert and of Sullivan, put ear close to his master and asked, most sincerely and without irony, “What?”
And lo, THAT SELFSAME DAY, when the flock suffered to be assembled around their devoted teacher, when she of the occident and he of the orient gathered their quills and the syllabi of edicts, it came to pass that a third student, neither of the occident nor of the orient but of the savage southern lands whose designation is barbaric, for the flag of his city state is crimson and not the Pantone 292 of our cloudless sky and state (and yet I forbade the lefties to mock the Samaritan, since only he had paid his tithe of shekels and camels in full), claimed to all at the table that he, too, was engaged on a mission of great mercy, which involved the fates of every member of the association of students as yet to matriculate into the schools of law, congregating as a society with such shared hopes, and if this red-state disciple did not depart, yea, with the student of the orient and she of the occident, these legal larva might spend the rest of their lives attending to the composition of poetry or dwelling in a similar Cimmerian pit of despair, and did not Aristotle cast the poets from the republicans?
And verily I say unto you, my brow did knit and my tongue did become tied and there were other manifestations of darning with faint praise, until, apace, I recovered, but spake without circumspection,
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I CERTAINLY HOPE THAT YOU’RE TAKING TIME FROM ALL YOUR BUSY SCHEDULES SO THAT YOU CAN DREAM.”
Then came a moment as THE LORD darkened the room with cloud as he had at Golgotha, and a stillness, that is, one that precedes war and other chaos, a silence that is experienced by, perhaps, the thespians Abbott and Costello as they backed into one another in the mansion afflicted by spirits, and of the Mummy and of Dracula and of Frankenstein’s monster and by all the creatures of the disturbed dreaming imagination and did not realize they were backing into one another; verily, the stillness that proceeds a Harlem Globetrotter having thrown a bucket laden not with water but with confetti, or that proceeds the deployment of the whoopee cushion.
This is as exhausting for me to cast in King James Bible prose as it is for you to read it, so I’m going to make my point here, because it needs to be entered into this business of enthusiasm here, after I have introduced the notions of enthusiasm, grotesqueness, and the necessity for play as well as seriousness in our work.
Because what happened after I admonished my overachieving undergrads to dream, something nobody had ever expected them to do, let alone their professor, was that there was the roaring and whooping. I might as well have told them to remove a limb. They didn’t know what to do with it. So, in typical overachieving fashion, they took a picture of me, photoshopped faun horns on my head, with a unicorn and a rainbow and my equally careful/free colleague John Keene at the end of the rainbow, and below all of this pie in the sky, my immortal words “Take Time to Dream!”
I Know a Man
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, — John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
Robert Creeley