Report from the Schoolyard: Joy to the World the Teacher's Dead

The Hidden Banter of the Schoolyard
    Inside the inner circle of school-talk lies an entire world closed off – for the most part – to the outside, adult world. In elementary school, we used to say that if we could find the person who invented school, “we’d kill ‘em.” At recess, huddled in our peer circles, after gossiping, the banter became indictment of school in all of its ugly designs. That’s what we thought. Partly because that is the way school children are supposed to think about school, at least amongst themselves. Adults were horrified when they caught us singing the maladaptation of the Christmas carol "Joy to the World."

Joy to the world!
The teacher's dead!
We bar-b-que'd her head.
What happened to her body?
We flushed it down the potty!
Heaven and nature sing!
Heaven and nature sing!

Magistricide Horrors
    Adults were horrified that we would fantasize about magistricide.

    Now that I am a teacher myself I understand the latent aggression towards teachers (and how it sometimes flare up and becomes less than latent).

    Students respond to their teachers as figures of authorities. As a student there is a low level of power; at every level there is someone in a higher position, a pecking order. Teachers represent the upper echelon of the order (even though we don't get paid much).

To fantasize about killing your teacher is a fantasy about control.    We sang the song because we wanted to hold onto some sense of control. In middle school, a child is at the mercy of bigger kids, janitors with mops, nasty lunch ladies, assistant principals, bullies, school food, bus drivers: there is seldom a moment of absolute freedom from authority.

    Except at recess. And that is where we sang our lilting dirge.

Joy to the world the teacher's dead.
    I don't think we meant that literally. If our teacher did, in fact die, I am sure we would have felt guilty. Just like the little kid who wishes privately his parents were dead — and they do in fact die — has to go through a lot of therapy afterward.

    Perhaps what underlies all of this is the education of power. Is growing up the education of using and balancing power?

    Even as middle-schoolers we understood power structures even though we had never picked up Michel Foucault's book Discipline and Punish.

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Prose Poem: "Cloister"

image credit: Greig Roselli

In the cloister, there is often a sign on the porter’s door that reads, behind this door no one is allowed.  But, sometimes, after time has passed, the sign is worn by fingerprints and folks pass over the threshold unbeknownst to the lawgivers. And, as usually happens when laws are broken, a tension arises there – in the navel, in the cloister, and then, as it ineluctably does – community begins again.

"Cloister" is a prose poem by Greig Roselli.

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On the Wizard Merlin and Celibacy in Mary Stewart's Novel The Crystal Cave

Merlin, celibacy, and power in Mary Stewart’s novel The Crystal Cave is a topic I wrote about back in 2007, and I found it whilst cleaning files on my laptop. Enjoy! It was written for a class on Arthurian Legend. The text starts here: 

    What I mean by power is a tension in society between those who have privileged knowledge and those who don’t.  Power is not a stable constant.  It is contingent upon shifts in knowledge within society itself.  The avenues by which celibate roles gain an upper hand, depends in part where the non-celibates have control and vice-versa.  These roles cross over and get distributed.  There are significant shifts in the power knowledge divide, which Foucault calls “epistemic shifts.”  This is the basic struggle or tension between power and knowledge that can be traced out through history through an archaeology — a search for origins.  To see how celibacy has held sway in history, especially among those like Merlin, who represent powerful celibate men, is to dig out the origins of this power and name the origins.  

Why I Write Better When I am Homeless

Writing is probably good for you.
Even with a due date.

When homeless I am uprooted. But I have money in my pocket.
Why do I write better? Because it is something to do to fill in the emptiness. When Maslow's needs are met I think we are less prone to be creative. It is the pang of hunger and thirst that spurs us on to aesthetic heights.

The hungry artist is the short-lived artist but his art is intense. I think Arthur Rimbaud was such an artist. He wrote until he exhausted himself. He wrote first then ate later. Even then it was not so much as a need but visceral. A part of creativity. His eating became his aesthetic.

I cannot be an Arthur Rimbaud. I enjoy creature comforts. Take-out. Lunch on a subway bench. A gin and tonic after work.
They do not make me more creative. I could say something pretentious like the life of the middle class intellectual deadens my creative sense. But that sounds wrong. I am a creator because I am a middle class intellectual. And I am not even sure if that label fits me. A lost boy is perhaps a better descriptor. A stranger in a strange land. A man who happens to have a degree who happens to teach Plato, Aristotle, Virginia Woolf and Camus to community college students in Brooklyn, New York.

I am a man who loves the color of apples. But I like stiletto heels as well. I like the religious ritual of going to the movie theater on a Thursday evening after work. I eat lightly buttered popcorn with the same laconic motivation of receiving the holy eucharist on my tongue. The darkened theater and the womb-like cavity of stadium seating — where there is always less people and more space feels like an experience of daily Mass.

Aesthetic Thursday: Max Beckmann, Beginning

"Beginning" Max Beckmann, 1949, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Triptychs
The piece "Beginning" is a triptych which means it is a single work composed of three panels. Triptychs were originally intended for religious art. Since the work is composed of three separate panels, once installed in a church or home, the priest could open or close the panel depending on the day of observance. Beckmann chooses the traditional triptych style, not for religious purposes but to depict pivotal events in a boy's adolescent development.

The Central Panel
The central panel depicts a boy on a white horse, a woman wearing blue stockings lying on a divan (smoking a hookah?), a cat hangs on the ceiling (reminds me of Puss in Boots).

Left Panel
An organ grinder, an angel, a boy with a crown.

Right Panel
Boys with laconic gazes, a teacher disciplines a pupil, a boy displays his pornographic magazine to other students.

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Poem: A Monk Reads at Table

image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

at table reading,
our minds most likely a cacophony
of invective, misery, and lower back pain.

There is silence. — 
Usually amid the drone of listless
hagiographies,
— put an asparagus spear in your
mouth —

the tables are urchin gray; the reader enjoys
whispering
for
eating in silence is all we can ever do

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Repost: The Relationship of Truth and Relativism by Marian Larman, O.S.B.

I came across this essay in my personal files. It is written by Marian Larman, a Benedictine priest who taught philosophy. This essay has a personal import for me. Larman wrote it during the last year of his life. He had retired as pastor of a small church in Saint Benedict, Louisiana. Because of declining health, he moved into the infirmary at the monastery where I was a monk. On some mornings I would visit the infirmary. Two parakeets inhabited a birdcage in the solarium, a rectangular room that allowed in plenty of sunlight. Father Marian would sit in the solarium reading a newspaper or a newly acquired book on Saint Thomas Aquinas. While an ardent Thomist, he did not hold to the belief that there we through faith we have access to an overarching truth. There may be an absolute truth but finite beings are limited to what we can know. We would have quiet conversations sometimes. I mainly listened as he told me about his ideas. Father Augustine, who took care of the infirmary allowed Father Marian to write in the infirmary. He acquired a small manual typewriter on which he wrote the following essay. While he equates truth to adequation in the following piece, a position I find difficult to swallow, since I have difficulty with the concept of absolute truth (especially in regards to theology), the following essay is a fine example of a Thomist attempting to square his views with relativism and the charge that all is merely subjective and everyone has their own version of truth (or, the verso, all is objective and all there is absolute truth). I have simply typed his essay as it appeared in the typewritten manuscript.