Gathering

Above, behind windows
I bear witness to their daily walk
Prisoner’s march with fingerprint gait
Through tingling raindrop seeds, their fists stretching pockets
Eyes downcast
Snubbing the sidewalk to gaze into flames of worry
Which of us
If a student asks for a bucket of water
Will give him a flashlight instead?

The near sidewalk lies directly beneath my window
Invisible until I rise from my chair, which I seldom do
Unless a familiar laugh or raised voice tumbles up
And in the classroom it’s easiest to see the back row
Because I’m a bit farsighted and they’re in my field of vision
But you who are nearest me are invisible
Unless I fold my neck in half and squint

So, on the sidewalk they advance and retreat
But only one out of dozens is bound for my office
In the classroom they come and go
Talking of g______ Loren Crow
But only a handful of you draw near enough to make contact
And then I fumble and hem and haw and flounder
And you are the hardest ones to see
They, who keep their distance
And fit my field of vision
And fit my expectations
And my stereotypes
And my stencils
And my habits,
Are vivid
Detailed
Defined
Sharp
There

My mentors all agreed,
The best teachers keep a healthy separation.
And the fox walked away with his nose in the air, saying
I am sure they are sour.

Paired and in packs, footfalls synchronized
They circulate woes, treasures
Burning through a meager cache of sleep-heaped energy
To peel one layer off the universe
While daylight spills between their gripping fingers
A breeze swirling against an avalanche

I own no square inch of land
Still, the Oregon countryside takes my breath away
I must not touch artwork on a gallery wall
Still, open doors usher me in
I may approach this near, but no nearer
And understand this much, but no more
And offer, but suffer frequent rejection
Still, I witness their daily walk
Through the window
Across Alder
And bathe my heart in a glorious, excruciating joy

Now monkey-walking through bicycle racks to exhume a buried smile
Now swinging keys on a lanyard for the soothing propeller motion
Now shouldering a backpack strap to a more comfortable spot
Now text-walking in front of an oncoming bus
As the Angel of Death moistens her icy white lips
Now halting mid-step, remembering they must be two places at once
Or two people
Now exploding into full sprint to escape the slugs

Each passage drips into my memory
Deposited in a half full cavern of stalagmites
Downy freshmen who grew a lustrous coat
One day finally exiting the MEC, robed and capped
And setting off for other sidewalks

Gesture

The literature on nonverbal communication is stuffed full of research into the link between gestures and speech. And lately I've noticed that my favorite fidgets and my favorite ideas all have to do with finding unstable balance points.

My students must get sick to death of hearing about dialectical tensions, but most of the academic notions that fascinate me the most are some sort of variation on that. Between kindness and cruelty, which is the good one and which one do we want to minimize? Easy: kindness is good, and we should minimize cruelty. But between, say, sleep and being awake, which is the good one and which one do we want to minimize? They're both good, but each one is the negation of the other, so we have to figure out what balance to strike between them. And we can't do it once and for all, because our need for each changes with circumstance. That's a short run through the idea of dialectical tension. It's a big idea in relational communication: relational partners want both time together and separation, both familiarity and spontaneity, both openness and secrecy. And the balance of each has to be continually renegotiated, and it's the renegotiation that is the lifeblood of the relationship. The idea pops up in a number of other places, and every time it does, it tickles my curiosity just perfectly. I often woolgather about it when I'm out walking.

The other thing I do aimlessly is fidget, and it struck me this morning that most of my commonest fidgets are about balance. I balance on one foot and swing the other one around. I balance books on my third finger and spin them, just like a basketball player with a basketball. I twirl pens through my fingers and around my thumb, which works best with pens that balance easily, and might not work at all with poorly balanced ones.

There's no end of aphorisms about the importance of balance, and most of it just makes me impatient. I'm not at all drawn to the abstraction in those sayings. It's the experience of hitting a tricky balance just right that pleases me. It feels like mastering the arrangement that truly makes a difference in the world. Far more than marshaling brute strength, I think that grasping the multiple interacting forces and learning to maintain balance between them, even as they change, is what it takes to be the source of influence more than the target.

Gauging

They did it again, this week. Twice. They notified a room full of people, "I am intimidating."

Generally, it's a pretty dicey undertaking to make bold, public declarations about other people's perceptions of oneself. The risk of being made absurd is unnecessarily high. And I think a lot of the students I teach are treading close to that line. I've noticed it over the past year or two: more and more college students drop into conversation, or an assigned speech, their assertion that "I intimidate the people around me." And I have no idea where it comes from. We're not talking huge, hulking bruisers, or decorated sharpshooters; not a Nobel prize winner among them. They're just ordinary eighteen, nineteen year old college kids, who are convinced that they make other people's knees shake and stomachs turn to ice water.

My first diagnosis was plain old narcissism. These are kids whose parents, all four or five of them, and grandparents, all twenty-three of them, repeated hundreds of times a day how special they were, how talented, how beautiful, how much better than other children. Now, if they find the people around them unresponsive, it can only be because they are so formidable, so wonderful, that they shock everyone into silence. That must be it.

But it's also been showing up on my course evaluations, too: they tell me that I'm intimidating, that they feel afraid to approach me. And if they're intimidated by a pasty, middle-aged academic dressed in Wal-Mart clearance, they're bound to find the world outside pretty daunting. Somewhere along the way, the benchmark has moved: a fairly large segment of the generation currently coming of age is primed to find people intimidating on the weakest of cues.

The students who claim the label for themselves do have in common a tendency to be assertive. They don't apologize, they don't talk around things, they simply say what they mean. As far as I'm concerned, that's a positive and healthy thing, and I've been known to frame my remarks that way as well. But is it really the case that if we aren't radiating uncertainty, if we aren't indirect in all our remarks, that we project an uninviting hardness that repels people? Are we drifting in the direction of our neighbors across the Pacific, sliding culturally into the high-context obliqueness that makes conversation a mix of ceremony and detective work? I don't suppose it's a catastrophe: cultures do change, and if that's what we have in store, then I suppose it'll be interesting to watch it happen. But it does make me curious what forces are driving us that way.

And I think it has a good deal to do with the particular brand of alienation that's taken over this country's culture. It's the same phenomenon that makes the typical American so conflict-averse, so certain that having an argument must mean ending a relationship. My sense is that we've built on top of being over-medicated, and now our everyday conversations are over-choreographed. Probably some of the blame for that falls at the feet of my field, but as with any helpful advances that pare down the messiness and danger in life, it's tricky getting the balance right.

Governmentality

One of my more cynical, but firmly and confidently held, beliefs about politics is that each party quietly keeps alive the issue that is its greatest source of public outrage, because it needs the outrage for fuel, for dollars, for attention. Republicans don't really want to stop abortion. If they had to, they'd quietly supply the funds to keep the abortion clinics in business. If abortion went away, how far would they have to travel to find another hot button that works so reliably? Democrats don't really want good race relations for the exact same reason.

To that list, I have to add two more very convenient outrages in the Republican column: terrorism and budget deficits. I've spent nearly a decade scratching my bald head over the utter irrationality of the Republican position on terrorism, and how it flies in the face of very recent, very powerful historical evidence: the British and the IRA. How did the British treat IRA terrorists? They refused to militarize the conflict, refused to treat arrested IRA members as prisoners of war despite demands from the prisoners that they do so. Instead, they proceeded as though the bombers were common criminals, and the symbolism and imagery were powerful. And where is the IRA now? Where we would like al-Qaeda to be: on the trash-heap of history. So why should we militarize our confrontation with al-Qaeda? What sane person could think it's a solution? What does it do other than let us flex our muscles and congratulate ourselves on what mighty warriors we are? It reminds me of kicking the computer to try to make it work. It's certainly tempting to do so, but anyone who thinks a kick genuinely will make a computer work better is an imbecile. So why do Republicans cling so stubbornly to militarizing the al-Qaeda conflict? Because they don't really want it solved. Why would they? If it goes away, they lose a key leverage point.

Same thing, by the way, goes for deficit spending. Anyone who can still say "tax and spend Democrat" without being washed away by a tidal wave of absurdity is living in Oz. The Bush deficit is the crust, mantle, and outer core of the "Obama debt." Clinton gave us a surplus, Bush poured it down the drain, and Obama is foundering under a wave of rage over how large the debt is. It's insanity, but it's outdated fidelity to the hoary old symbols of American politics: Republicans cut the budget and Democrats bust it. Yes, and once upon a time we thought all Jewish people were nebbishy and incapable of fighting, before the IDF came along and re-defined "tough." But to be Republican right now is to sound the alarm about the deficit, all the while never allowing oneself to be pinned down to what program one would actually cut. Republicans panned Obama's State of the Union for not being adequately serious about budget cuts, but then also complained when he canceled NASA's efforts to return to the moon. Which is it? What do they want cut? Answer: nothing. They want the deficit nice and high. While it's high, they have an easy leverage point.

Please understand: I've written a lot about Republicans in this post, and, in fact, I think what passes for Republican thinking and Republican leadership is, at this precise moment in history, unbelievably toxic to our country's well-being. But that's not at all to say that the Democrats don't have their own convenient problems that they don't, at all costs, want solved. I mentioned race above, and there are others. It's just that Republicans, having decided winning back a majority trumps all other objectives, have theirs very prominently on display at the moment.

That's one of the sad but true qualities of elected officials: you must pretend to grasp the seriousness of a problem and be committed to solving it, as long as anyone is listening. But in your heart, you know how badly you depend on the problem's continued existence. How they straddle that hypocritical chasm without falling in, I couldn't tell you. I'm glad I've got the job I have, and not theirs. It must just suck the soul right out of you.

Gandalf

Last night, the library held its second annual Mystery Party, set up as a big, live action game of Clue. Last year, we had fairly straightforward character names taken from the game, and we were left to our own devices to think up details. This year, they chose "books made into movies" as the theme. Students dressed up as the Wizard of Oz characters; Harry, Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter; Max and the Wild Thing from Where the Wild Things Are; Sam-I-Am from Green Eggs and Ham; Dustfinger from the Inkheart trilogy; and Jadis the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My colleague Loren Crow, our Bible professor, dressed up as Darth Vader, and I was Gandalf.

The murder victim was a screenwriter, Mr. Write. The game began with Steve Silver, the detective, introducing each of us, and we had a minute or two to give an opening rap. He told us in advance that he would ask two questions:

1. Where were you on the night of the murder?
2. What happened?

Last year, I used this blog to compose mine, and I wound up pleased that I'd recorded it here for memory's sake. This year I didn't compose it here, but I'm nevertheless going to set it down so I can look back on it later. It's pretty clearly a step down from last year's, but a few of the bits went over well.

"A wizard is never late. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he intended to.

Where were you on the night of the murder?

"On my way to Hogwarts. They've hired me as an adjunct; I teach spelling. But I soon realized that there was a stowaway on my eagle: Gollum had climbed aboard, smuggling explosives in his underpants. We took an emergency detour to the Cracks of Doom to drop him in. Again. After that, my eagle needed refueling, so we cut across to Oregon and I sent him out to fish for salmon, while I swung by this library to check out some rare books. I dig rare books.

What happened?

"Knock knock.

Audience: Who's there?

"J. R. R.

J. R. R. who?

"That's what the screenwriter said! I mean, no Tom Bombadil? Merry and Pippin turned into something out of Dumb and Dumber? Frodo reduced to a whiner with one facial expression? Saruman vanishes from the story right in the middle with absolutely no explanation? I'm telling you, at one point the screenwriter wanted the trees to do a song and dance number to 'Let Me Ent-ertain you!' I decided to kill -- to kill -- to -- (violent fit of coughing)

"Sorry, too many centuries of smoking pipe-weed. I've been trying to kick the hobbit.

"Anyway, I decided to sneak up on him, make blinding light come out of my staff, and give him a good grilling! Unfortunately, I mispronounced one word in the spell, and made fire instead of light. And as for the grilling, weeeell ...

"That's what happens when you don't spell-check."