(A meditation given to the community as part of the Thursday speaker series.)
I come to this lectern already in debt. Others have laid the foundation, others have nailed down a roof, and still others have lardered the pantries. I consider this talk, then, to be the living room of this house the previous speakers have built, the spot where the fire glows, people take their ease over the wine of good thought, and where a largeness of mind can find a local habitation.
Let me title this talk "A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Man" and give you some notion of what education I am now undergoing, what gurus and tutors I have sought out, and what interest, so to speak, I am taking in on the capital of my life.
A major influence on my education in recent months has been Dr. Who. For those of you still benighted enough not to know who or what Dr. Who is, he inhabits the half-hour from 6:30 to 7:00 on PBS Channel 11. Dr. Who is a Time Lord and his mission is to make sure that all cultures in the universe for all time evolve as they are meant to evolve. Pure science fiction hokum, I'll admit. He joins company with such illustrious greats of literature as Doc Savage and Jack Armstrong. But he shouldn't be quite that easily dismissed. There are qualities about Dr. Who that attract me, qualities that present themselves as antidotes to the poisons we spread among ourselves. For one thing, he does not believe in any magic but instead in science, not the science of Frankenstein, which is parody, but of Einstein. Dr. Who sees the exercise of reason as humankind's only salvation from its less controllable parts. He believes that the more a person eradicates superstition and the more a person accepts the humble solvent of his or her ignorance, the greater the chance that people will create a life-sustaining sense of proportion for themselves. For Dr. Who there are no insoluble problems, only bits of information we do not yet know. I find that a bracingly athletic way of looking at life, not only because it denies man the destructive fiction of his own intransigent uniqueness, but also because it forces upon us the imperative that we must take responsibility for ourselves and not foist our obligation for self-understanding off on superstition, god, or the nature of things. Dr. Who anesthetizes despair.
Yet he is not a dour moral Don Quixote. He eats jelly babies, wears a twelve-foot scarf that always, of its own accord, seems to get out of the way, inhabits an overcoat that would have made Harpo Marx jealous, and exercises a wit only slightly less sharp than Zorro's blade. In each of his adventures he solves problems with grace, elegance, and humor. He is Einstein on Rocinante, surgeoning the problems of the universe with his Sherlock Holmesian macropadeic mind, all done with a refreshing sense of the absurd, as if Samuel Johnson had met Groucho Marx. I take heart from Dr. Who because his way is the only way we can follow if we wish to solve and control the forces within and without us: the solution of problems through a science nuanced by good cheer and a sense of delicate proportion, the useful fusion of poetry and the laboratory.
I admire Dr. Who's openness to experience. But I also have a closer and more solid source upon which to lavish that admiration: my nephew Benjamin. Or, as he will tell you if you ask him, Benjamin Abram Moses, as if he were a Trinity within himself. At the age of three he is a demon with language, a parroting computer who chews up language with the most delicious relish. He delights, I think, not only in the power words have for him, but also in the loll of his tongue against his teeth, the tickling of aspiration against his lips, a delight in the pure physical act of living.
You should not lose sight of this lesson. Ben does what pleases him as often as he can within the social constraints his growing-up imposes on him. He is not concerned about living up to social myths or the bogeyman of convention or the edicts of vague populations of they s who live just beyond the fringe of reason. His enjoyment is solely for the satisfaction of his own audience and he takes making himself happy as the serious business of his life. He upholds this mission in a variety of ways, one of which touches me deeply. At times, when he needs a boost, he will simply applaud himself, no matter where he happens to be. His face oxidizes into an enormous "U" of a smile, the hands pump together in a rattle of claps, and he lets out his own version of "Rah, rah, siss boom bah!." Sated, his soul momentarily refreshed, he goes back to whatever frequency he had been on before.
This touches me because of its contrast with my life and the lives of those I see around me. Most of us do not congratulate ourselves; instead, we pass out indictments that allow for little or no plea bargaining. We center our standards of judgment on the gaps and frozen moments in our lives and so end up sounding like a piano with most of its keys dead and most of its strings vandalized. And then, as if that were not enough, we redouble our efforts to cut ourselves in half by bemoaning the lopsided and deflowered music that comes out. We are indentured to our deficiencies, slaves to our imperfections, migrant workers destined always to be harvesting bitter crops.
To protect ourselves we mask this neurosis in the garb of humility and common sense and the price of growing older. And that, to me, is neurotic in itself, a sign of capitulation. Benjamin, not yet infected with the vice of growing-up, his agenda not yet pressured by diminished expectations, is an emetic for my irascible poisons of intellect and mortality. Even if I haven't yet found the joy in living that he finds in himself, I can take vicarious satisfaction from his unfettered and wholly guileless "Yes," and that affirmation is enough to reverse for a time the narcotic of adult purpose and confinement. Like some kinetic fossil he preserves an energy impressed into the marrow of his bones, and it is in the marrow of us all if we would only fight for the time to extract it. He negates Samuel Butler's accurate accusation that every animal on this earth, except man, knows the business of life is to be happy.
Both Dr. Who and Benjamin remind me to retrieve the confidence I sometimes let slip away in the power and beauty of intellect and the cleansing sobriety of simply joy. My third educational sources is, in the words of Maxine Kumin, a retrieval system whereby I can further catch the Who-ness and Benjamin-ness of life. You may think it odd or futile for a man in his twenties to take up a second life as a dancer, but you could only think that if you've never felt yourself dance. Dance is an intersection between mind and matter, where the mind chisels out of the body through strokes of sweat, pulled tendons, bruised muscles and egos, and fickle pirouettes a physical pulsing ideogram of an ephemeral foxfire idea. To me, dance is the art because it conjoins idea and form in a way no other artistic enterprise can. Even though dance is ultimately a humiliating experience because the body will never be able to completely conform to the demanding fluidity of the mind, it is still an affirmation of the glories of physical being, a reminder that our strengths lie in the fact that we are, after all, nothing more than the inhabitants of a planet spinning endlessly, aimlessly, through space and time. Dance reminds us that we house within ourselves the techniques of joy, that those techniques lie nowhere else, and that we are all we have.
If you've listened so far (and if you haven't I hope your thoughts have been pleasant), you will notice that the portrait has been confined to those qualities intractably human and inveterately physical: the grace and power of the scientific intellect, the definition of innocence by the smile of my nephew, the limited corporeal beauty of dance. And this confinement is no accident or omission because it expresses the direction of my own intellectual journey.
The territory of this journey is better illustrated through a story. Alfred Russell Wallace is usually known in the history of biology as the noonday shadow of Charles Darwin, an also-ran who was beaten to the scientific punch on the theory of evolution. But Wallace is interesting for a more enlightening reason than a story about the vagaries of chance. Wallace, if anything, was a more strict constructionist of Darwinism than Darwin himself. He believed that each bit of morphology, each function of an organ, was an adaptation, a product of selection leading to a "better" organism. He and his followers held a deep belief in nature's "rightness," in, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it, "the exquisite fit of all creatures to their environments."
Yet when Wallace eventually came to contemplate the human brain, he abandoned the hypotheses he had spent his life trying to prove and reverted to an explanation of divine causality to account for the complexity of the human psyche. In his words:
The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena [the studies of the human brain], is, that a superior intelligence had guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose.
Wallace continued to assert this all his life. He, like many of his scientific contemporaries, contemplated the eventual destruction of life on earth. And he could not accept it. He could not accept that "all the slow growths of our race struggling towards a higher life...shall absolutely vanish." He opted for a conventional Christian solution, the eternity of spiritual life. As he said, "Beings...possessing latent faculties capable of such noble development, are surely destined for a higher and more permanent existence."
I empathize with Wallace's anguish; at times we all share it. But anguish, no matter how wrenching or heartfelt, is not proof. An invisible force, guiding the directions of the universe, does not exist simply because one wishes it to be so. What Wallace did was commit an epistemological derailment by erecting a picket fence around his own species, allocating to Homo sapiens some dispensation from the laws of nature that seemingly applied well enough to the rest of creation. What he did was not invalid because he had a "loss of nerve," as he was accused. That argument avoids the point. His mistake is that in order for him to conclude that humans had a destiny, and to imply that some force existed that would guide and inform that destiny, he had to deny the methods humans had created for themselves to ascertain truths about existence. And that is how it always is. To posit and believe in a supernatural, infinite, incorporeal force existing outside space and time, one must demean the intelligence and integrity of both human beings and the methods they have created to test the validity of their perceptions about the world.
As a teacher I can not hold a position that denies the worth and power of the intellect that I am committed to help shape and nurture. That is why this portrait of a young man's journey has been a recitative of the glories of the actual world we live in and which lives in us, and has contained no speculation upon an almost-world that may or may not exist beyond the ken of human knowledge. I am not interested in such speculation or in such a world. To me, the world we live in gains meaning and purpose the more we deny it any root in the supernatural. We have stored within us the wit and logic of a Dr. Who, the unbuttoned capacity for joy of a Benjamin, the carnality of movement that incorporates our thoughts into fleshly translations. Purpose comes from an organic collision with the world, an indulgence in all its heavens and hells. It is not a deposit from an outside banker with interest in the system. Meaning takes form only when the person who desires meaning forms himself to find it, not before. As Pasteur said, fortune favors the prepared mind. What else do we really need?
Since I am a teacher I must end with a quote, this time from the French philosopher Henri Amiel: "He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature...is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life." You have an obligation not to deflect your mind away from the world that surrounds and defines you. Lace your science with poetry, and tailor your finite life to the search for joy.