—John Wooden

Most of us think of face as an eastern idea. The clichéd understanding is that face is an inscrutable, stiff-expressioned honor unrecoverable once compromised. In movies, losing face precedes resignation and/or seppuku, ritual suicide. On that scale, few of us have ever lost face.

Of course, it’s more complicated. Stella Ting-Toomey, a leading researcher on face theories, defines it more broadly as the image one projects of oneself. Saving face is the attempt to negotiate the way others perceive us, to bring their impressions more in line with our wishes.  Doing so is much harder than it seems.

The trouble with face, especially in the US, is that you can’t give it to yourself. It is conferred, granted by a community on the basis of experience and esteem. When you are new to a place, for instance, you can have little more than institutional stature—your title and being hired to fill that title. The respect you garner by doing your job well takes time, maybe years, but all the time in world won’t replace the consent of the community. When you lose that job, you lose the community and nearly all your stature.

Ting-Toomey regards the U. S. and other pioneer cultures as “low context societies,” because they honor autonomy more than face. Individual rights are more important when a high value is placed on self-reliance and self-preservation. Individual rights supplant loyalty to a nation, institution, or even family. Low context societies believe in direct communication—saying what you want and why you want it, fighting for it—and they accept conflicts where competing desires result in one individual or group losing.

According to Ting-Toomey, in the “high context societies” of the east, inclusion has a much higher value. Group harmony is a crucial attribute and some nonverbal signaling, indirection, or pretense in communication occurs because it preserves a pleasant and agreeable atmosphere where all have a value. Put simply, institutions absorb individuals. Individuals accept knowing less about colleagues because they perceive it as essential to avoiding conflict and preserving unity. Thus, in a high context society, losing face is the ultimate insult—it is losing a place in a world designed to keep places. Without face, you have little value. Acknowledging the importance of the community encourages institutions to retain their members.

In a low-context environment, even extensive explanation leaves people free to form what conclusions they can. They have autonomy and invest absolutely nothing in believing official versions, and, though an individual might try to save face by revealing a more complete picture, face is conferred and not claimed. Placing emphasis on individual perceptions also makes people quick to judge and might lead them to regard any explanation as rationalization. When people invest in their own beliefs before and above others’, they’re unlikely to buy any attempt to save face.

In other words, you’re on your own. Americans don’t give face. Yet face is real—even in the US individuals have stature arising from institutional affirmation. You cannot be important simply by saying you are. Institutions still make us.

Ting-Toomey says that in low context societies, a personal feeling of guilt serves as a moral corrective. Face issues aren’t nearly as significant as they are in high context societies because Americans are free to apologize, be forgiven, and resume their station. In theory, society will not prevent and may even encourage redemption. We love comebacks and makeovers. In theory, you can never be entirely lost when you control your destiny.

But what if confession or apology don’t seem the proper correctives? What if you really don’t have much to apologize for? What can you do to regain face, when you can’t really insist upon it and it must be given?

Very little, which is why losing your job is so devastating… and why corporations’ delusions about employees easily finding other work is either naive or self-serving. We Americans like to believe ourselves masters of our own destinies but are instead masters of another sort of hubris, believing in the self-made man or woman when really it’s so much more complicated than that.

http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/face
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~jk192699/fn.htm

I was amazed at what I’ve forgotten.

Graduate degrees ought to come with expiration dates. Some must remain relevant—maybe the ones where learning is practical and essential—but everything unused fades quickly. And the thesis sitting in your attic or the spirals of class notes from college are more mementos than records. I’m not sure why I kept mine.

Here’s something I found on page 78 on my second semester book, my notes on Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions:

Completed only months before Neruda’s death in 1973, he revisits, “that vast well of perpetuity”: the imagination of regeneration and vision. These poems express dedication to what Hayden Carruth calls “structure of feeling” underlying experience. Neruda’s “passion lay in finding and improvising upon basic rhythms of perception to reveal unspoken and unspeakable traits.”  These poems, “integrate the wonder of a child with the experience of an adult. The adult usually grapples with the child’s ‘irrational’ question solely with the resources of the rational mind.” These questions do not produce, and aren’t intended to produce, any rational answers.

These notes must come from Hayden Carruth’s introduction, an explanation I hardly understand for a book I don’t remember. At the time, in 2000, the notes aimed to enhance a poet’s education, but “the vast well of perpetuity” swallowed them, and this rational mind wonders how, even if it understood them entirely, how it might apply what it found.

As Neruda’s book still sits on my shelf, I’m not sure why I wrote my favorite questions on the opposite page. I’ve carefully copied, “At whom does rice smile / with infinitely many teeth?” and “Where can a blind man live / who is pursued by bees?” along with “Will my sorrowful poetry / watch with my own eyes?” and two more pages.

Was the idea to write as Neruda did? I couldn’t have been so naïve… because he is Neruda and I’m not… and at the bottom of all my careful scrivening appears a rushed note to myself, “The fact is we don’t know what’s going on and why do we place such emphasis on saying we do?”

Perhaps my books of purple calligraphy would have a different meaning if they described the structure of the heart or equations to determine the weight distribution of a suspension bridge. Perhaps only an arts education is so perishable. And maybe these notes were meant for a paper I’ve forgotten, or they hoped, in examining what exactly made Neruda’s best questions, to gather something I might use in my own poetry.

But another conclusion occurs to me—maybe only aspiration matters. As foolish as hoping to remember might be, something of those notes must persist, some determination laid down like substructure, pipes, wires, and conduit. If your aims are sincere and their effect real, the result isn’t in notes but in the influence of reading and writing intently, actions designed to copy learning somewhere unconscious and untraceable.

I could be rationalizing endless hours spent scribbling—they have to count—but the “structure of feeling” they communicate must be real. Most patterns we create without noticing. They assemble themselves like currents aligned to regular movement. Like Neruda’s questions, those “basic rhythms of perception” that “reveal unspoken and unspeakable traits,” arise, at least in part, from us and what we want enough to labor for.

At the end of each of these books are a few pages I never reached. The semester ended and I picked up a new book. Those empty pages speak as vividly as some of the full ones now. I’m not sure whether I know what these notes do anymore, but they tell me I wanted to know. I don’t mind witnessing their desire anew.

Maybe I will find something for their empty pages yet.

Soon, one of my classes will wander into meta-territory, the domain where you are no longer talking about this book and begin talking about writing, reading, thinking.

Next week they will reach the twenty-second and twenty-third chapters of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. If you’ve read the book you would remember these chapters—one is stream of consciousness coming from the eponymous Beloved, a murdered two-year-old come back from the dead to occupy a young woman’s body. The next chapter was her consciousness layered with her mother’s and sister’s.

Two-year-olds make complete sense only to themselves, and seem biologically incapable of the linear, sequential thought that streams through prose. Morrison must have done something right because chapter twenty-two is particularly incomprehensible:

I cannot find my man the one whose teeth I have loved a hot thing the men without skin push them through with poles the woman is there with the face I want the face that is mine they fall into the sea which is the color of bread she has nothing in her ears if I had the teeth of the man who died on my face I would bite the circle around her neck bite it away I know she does not like it now there is room to crouch and to watch the crouching others it is the crouching that is now always now inside the woman with my face is in the sea a hot thing.

We will spend some time trying to decode this passage and others like it by examining what are clearly repetitive and important elements: faces, teeth, the sea, and, of course, “a hot thing.”

During discussion, the last item can become comic punctuation—“I think water might represent birth or transformation between life and death and back again…a hot thing.”

In such moments, I’m especially appreciative of what good sports I teach. I give them a task—make sense of a pointedly and relentlessly recondite passage—and they sum their considerable intelligence to gain a foothold. But I’m not naïve, some only pretend to like it. Midway through the period, someone will wander into meta-territory by asking why this book has to be so challenging, why authors don’t try harder to be understood.

If I turn the question back on them, they have a ready generic response—authors want us to participate in assembling meaning instead of absorbing it. Half the fun, a dutiful student will say, is solving the puzzle. Authors know: show, don’t tell.

Okay, of course that’s right, but something in me goes cold when I hear it. Maybe I’m tired and skeptical of right answers that are too easy, but a better response might be that, if consciousness is mercurial, prose should be too. As Morrison channeled her character, the diction and syntax probably formed like new track in front of her, but some students seem to see it the other way around. Morrison laid the tracks with switchbacks and impossible grades…then tried to drive it, reader-passengers be damned. Perhaps it’s both—she wanted to be true to Beloved’s elusiveness in an aesthetically sophisticated way—but I’m sure her subject came before her reader. Her aim was authenticity, not ostentation. She wasn’t trying to pander to a bunch of brains looking for something to do. She was doing her best to be Beloved.

My students accept the explanation that Morrison wanted to present Beloved as she would be—difficult to understand—but they have much more difficulty with my other answer: perhaps the trouble is our expectation of sense, not the book’s reluctance to offer it. Language isn’t all about rational communication—some shifting percentage (but always majority) of communication is non-verbal, or so I’m always told. So why can’t language have an effect that eludes rational explanation the same way music can? Why can’t Morrison’s chapters be music not intended to further the plot or offer clues to character?

Which is a tough sell because Morrison has to be after something. School teaches us to analyze and look for meaning in the text, and advertising teaches us to look for hidden agendas. In school, we expect information rather than tone or emotion. When we watch TV, advertisers send us searching for extra-textual motives in art. The author means for us to do this or that (or the other) the same way Maxwell House means to sell us coffee by telling a story of new neighbors sharing a cup.

Some people resent speakers with advanced vocabulary because they believe the speakers are showing off or want to create a particular image. The speakers, these people believe, are advertising their intelligence. The words, they believe, have an extra-textual intent. But it’s possible those speakers might use the words because they are looking for just the right words or because they enjoy the diversity and range of language or just the sound of words like “recondite.” They may have been looking for any excuse to use the word “eponymous.” Yet, for some people, those words distract instead of add. They’re pretension, not communication.

However, the more literature I read the less I believe great writers calculate their image. Pick up a New York Times Book Review, look at the ads, and it appears every book is about its attractive author, but that’s about selling the book, not about appreciating it…and certainly not about writing it. I like to believe writers are difficult or easy because it’s what their subject demands.

And, as for the photographs, it’s just a fact of life writers are good-looking.

After too many minutes talking about difficulty in fiction, my class will inch closer to understanding what “a hot thing” is and—as I’m not at all sure myself —I’ll be grateful for the diversion and for the re-education, any chance to redirect students’ attention and reclaim them from advertisers…and maybe even school itself.

Or so I have always struggled to believe. Recent stomach troubles have me feeling middle-aged. At 53, I expect some indignities like bruises that come more easily and stay longer or joints that stiffen with inactivity. But I’ve kept myself up. I never have trouble identifying with the youth culture foist on me every day. Being older seldom limits what I might do.

But then my stomach began to complain if I ate spicy food or if I ate too much or if I ate something too rich or if I ate at the wrong time. My sister, a doctor, told me I would feel much better if I avoided three things: alcohol, coffee, and chocolate. Perhaps you can imagine how disconsolate I was. Suddenly I saw aging stretching out ahead of me as a long road of sacrifices where, one by one, I’d drop all my youthful pleasures.

Having made the changes my stomach made necessary, I’m surprised to discover I was wrong.

In The NY Times Book Review this week Laura Shapiro writes about In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age by Patricia Cohen, a reporter for the NYTimes. In her review, Shapiro discusses Cohen’s thoughts on the origin of middle age, describes one of the more colorful historical responses to aging described in the book—men seeking to replace their own testicles with monkey testicles in hopes of regaining their lost energy—and presents Cohen’s thesis, that aging has unjustly been made into a disease.

Cohen, apparently, is optimistic. She presents a middle-aged generation that is more productive, attractive, and mentally acute than ever. Cohen believes people in their 50s and 60s are, “Rewrite[ing] a cultural script that’s been more than 150 years in the making.”

Yet, I wonder what this redefinition means. I haven’t read the book, but if she is saying older people can do just what young people do, is she redefining middle age or pushing its frontier back? A new definition, it seems to me, should give middle age its own identity, and Shapiro suggests Cohen sees it as every generation has, in terms of how favorably it compares to youth. What is middle age itself? What attributes—pleasures and perks—are distinct to it?

I saw a picture of Sylvester Stallone’s abs recently and was equally awed and disgusted. Impressive, yes, but there’s something pathetic in our desperate efforts to see how long we can pretend to be young.

Caffeine has been my drug of choice for over 30 years, so long that I knew nothing about life without it. When I gave it up three weeks ago, I suffered headaches for a few days and then, for the next two weeks, felt lethargic and dull. I’m beginning to come around, however, and I like my life without it so much that I won’t return to it even when my stomach improves.  And it hasn’t hurt me to eat fewer sweets or drink less either. I want to convince myself I’ve awakened to a different sort of life, not a lesser one.

Perhaps I’m making a virtue of a necessity, but I’d like to find something to define this age that doesn’t derive from deprivation or decline. I’d like to feel the age I am, whatever that is, and transcend eagerness to escape it. Something must be good about 53, and, if I have sacrifices to make, perhaps they will lead me into new pleasures, new perspectives, new territory.

The opening of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938) describes ways biologists account for animal and human play: it’s training for life’s serious business, it’s an initiation by elders, it’s a release of a youth’s superabundant energy, it’s an exercise in controlling and channeling impulses. However, Huizinga rejects all of these explanations because they assume, “Play must serve something that isn’t play.” He asserts play has it’s own compulsion. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be fun.

We can’t, in other words, not play—it’s instinctual, fundamental. At the same time, we can, Huizinga says, recognize play as less than serious. In his view play centers on experimentation only possible when actions have no consequence outside the game. It begins with pretense, he says, and all play, “Betrays a consciousness of the inferiority of play compared to seriousness.” The absorption and intensity of participants can exist within a game while remaining make-believe. Play is cathartic, rapturous without being consequential. The game ends, and we return to life.

His views seem naïve now. Even if the NFL playoffs weren’t beginning this weekend, the multiple sports networks and hour-to-hour wall-to-wall broadcast of games suggest how seriously we take sports and how central it is to American culture. Revenue from professional sports contributes significantly to the overall economy—it’s big business, we’re told over and over—and anyone who’s met someone in a weeklong snit over a ref’s botched call or watched a fallen baseball star testify in Congress or seen footage of overturned cars burning during victory celebrations knows how sports bleed into real life. Athletes are demigods, their stature in society assured by skills confined to quarters, innings, fields and courts.

Huizinga seems to have overestimated our capacity to separate play and real life. American culture elevates even the most trivial pursuit to high seriousness and treats our most grave pursuits like melodramas. We take our mock seriousness very seriously and fill airtime with tweets, verbal slips, and wardrobe malfunctions. Our political news follows politicians like soap opera actors, and we attend to their antics without knowing much about their positions or actions. The issues at stake are too complicated, so we revel in partisan disputes as we might boxing, unaware exactly what’s being disputed, aware only that it’s fun to watch. The discontented gather in parks, and we absorb them like a made-for-television circus. We struggle to distinguish the serious from the not-so and, even worse, stop struggling to make much of a distinction at all.

Of course, some people still study their daily newspapers and can differentiate the policies of every Republican presidential candidate, but they are a shrinking minority and subject to jokey ridicule from many of us. Scholars still pore over the great thoughts of authors, philosophers, religious figures, and historians, but they aren’t funny enough to hold anyone’s attention for long.

Voltaire once called God “A comic actor playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.” We’re not sure who God is anymore and are afraid not to laugh. Raise a cry about our self-absorbed and trivial culture, and someone will ask, “Why so serious?” and then return to the private amusements of their iPhone, videogame, laptop, television, and iPod.

Teaching poetry should be easy and is perhaps the hardest teaching I do.

I don’t blame poetry—from my perspective, what could be more alluring to students than reading assignments that are crazily creative, organically mysterious, and nearly always short? Yet anyone who has seen Dead Poets Society knows teachers are not playing on a level playing field. Few students are neutral about poetry.

If you’ve seen the movie, you probably remember the episode I’m talking about. Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) asks a student to read the introduction to a poetry anthology in which J. Evans Pritchard encourages readers to plot the technical expertise of poetry against its importance, yielding an area equal to the poem’s “greatness.” Then Keating calls the method “excrement” and encourages the class to rip the pages out of their books.

Keating’s conclusion:

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute, we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion…This is a battle, a war, and the causalities could be your hearts and souls. Armies of academics going forward measuring poetry—no, we’ll not have that here! No more J. Evans Pritchard!

While this iconoclastic moment makes good cinema and though Mr. Keating’s clarion call seems to reclaim poetry from dusty libraries, his perspective actually makes my job tougher. It isn’t just the crazy notion that, if you have teens in trouble, the best solution is to prescribe poetry…though I am sick of that cliché. It’s that, by elevating poetry’s importance, Keating puts poetry on a pedestal many students love to topple. And in rejecting Pritchard—execrable as his introduction makes him seem—Keating calls into question all analysis of poetry, which makes teaching poetry blasphemy. The combination is devastating.

It’s occurred to me maybe teaching poetry is impossible, maybe we are not supposed to analyze poetry and, as my students often tell me, maybe poems mean whatever you think they mean and thus any collective attention to them is a waste of time. Maybe it’s true we “murder to dissect.” Many days, I’ve been perfectly willing to give up.

However, I’ve stuffed my files with failed lessons I return to over and over hoping this time they work. I can’t give up. Teaching poetry brings out the quixotic in me. What could be the harm in helping students read more thoughtfully and carefully? In the movie The History Boys, the teacher Hector (Richard Griffith) describes literature as reaching out of the page and taking your hand. If you can make that happen one time for each student each year, isn’t it worth the risk?

In Billy Collins’ introduction to 180, an anthology of easily accessible and clever poems, he says “High School is where poetry goes to die,” and tells the story of a student who writes in the school paper, “Whenever I read a modern poem, it’s like my brother has his foot on the back of my neck in the swimming pool.”

I understand the metaphor—many students see poetry—being lofty—as something someone is supposed to “get,” revelatory and rapturous. The clouds are supposed to drift asunder. A ray of heavenly light is supposed to illuminate, laser like, one square of significant something. Not getting that epiphany makes them feel stupid, as if they’ve missed something the rest of the world has seen.

And here’s the catch 22. Trying to help them see what they might be missing is fraught with trouble too because, well, poetry isn’t meant to be analyzed.

Where’s a teacher to stand?

Good education is serious play, a willing struggle to understand, an attempt to move a heavy object without handles from here to there. It’s another try at a seemingly inaccessible but possible goal or a ballet that might just come off perfectly this time around. Certainly, learning is important, but it should also be fun. And, unfortunately, students don’t always associate “fun” with poetry.

Collins sees poetry as fun. He starts 180 with his own poem, “Introduction to Poetry,” and employs a series of metaphors representing what he’d like students to do with poetry, namely drop a mouse into the poem-maze and watch it run, hold it up to sun like a color slide, feel along its walls for a light switch, or waterski across it waving at the author. Still, all his students want to do is

tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

To me, Collins’ poem looks like an indictment of students who have trouble balancing appreciation and analysis, who have trouble simply playing and expect more of an answer than poems can (or should) present. Yet, even exploring the metaphors of this poem sometimes sets students’ eyes rolling. For some, even asking what Collins means by the metaphors is murder enough.

So teaching poetry often becomes an exercise in un-brainwashing:

No, poetry isn’t special, except that it is a form of writing with distinctive and interesting conventions and challenges.

No, we aren’t looking for specific answers in poems as if each were a life or death riddle.

No, you aren’t stupid if the poem doesn’t resonate with you. Maybe the next one will.

No, it is possible to read a poem closely and attentively and still appreciate it (and maybe even enjoy it).

No, poetry isn’t always boring, arcane, or snooty.

No, I won’t give up or leave you alone if you play nice during this “poetry unit.”

Memory works its own sort of magic. I’m not sure why I remember that bag’s weight, the way light penetrated its walls when I peeked inside, the shadows when I looked in later. Perhaps I’m inventing. I’ve opened many more bags, but the moment seems true and fresh.

The bag sat on my bureau all week long. I still see it. Maybe it survives in memory because the apprehension I felt is now so familiar. I needed to make something wonderful from its contents. I needed to stand out.

And win. The den mother would decide who used the pieces most imaginatively, and I thought that should be me. Every other boy may have felt the same, but it mattered more to me. They would solve the challenge, and I would transcend it. I was supposed to be talented at things like that.

Memory doesn’t disappear so much as erode, soil leaving to reveal outbreaks of shelved strata. Particulars vanish to expose what’s beneath and behind them.  What I am is in the nine year-old, waiting to be seen.

I was so apprehensive that, after a week, I’d spent more time dreaming of winning than doing anything to win. The pendulum paused and swung back—I began to wonder if I could make anything at all.

My mother reminded me of my task as though I’d forgotten it, and when I told her I had no plan and no idea how to begin, she told me let my creation take its own shape. “It’s supposed to be fun,” she said.

Dreams and memory overlap. The hard edges of experience soften and fuzz from what they were, but, in their place, events become more essentially themselves. To others they may bear no resemblance to reality—two people never remember a common experience exactly the same way—but they communicate deeper accuracy.

My father finally made my project for me. My mother must have voiced frustration, and, complimenting his artistic nature, compelled him to compel me. Dad and I sat on my bed, the bag’s emptied contents between us, and he asked about my ideas. I said “Circus” and that’s what my materials became. In a hour’s time, two sponges topped two rods with yarn strung between them, the pipe cleaner tightrope walker stepping from one sponge platform, a rod in his hands to keep him balanced, yarn netting beneath him, a pipe cleaner ringmaster beneath that, and a circus menagerie waiting on the periphery.

A parent hijacking a project is cliché—the child participates, observes, then leaves the room to make a sandwich and watch TV. I’ve seen and read it one hundred times. Yet in the play titled “Memories of My Dad,” this moment is a key scene, one of few starring just my father and me.

Somehow memory convinces us. Recollection becomes reality, as delusion aligns details along a bias that points every image the same direction.

The most vivid part of my memory was my disappointment when my circus did not win. I’m not sure how it became my circus, but it was miles ahead of my den-mates’ sloppy and incoherent constructions. When she announced the winner, I sunk. For the first time I understood hope and disappointment are directly proportional. Maybe the den mother saw the project wasn’t actually mine, but, though my father really lost, I lost.

In fables, outcomes save you from reiteration. You learn. In life, moments can seem to bleed into what’s next, a pattern set for the first time. But what if that’s exactly wrong? What if memory is the opposite of reality, making the past fit what has happened since, an erosion more purposeful than we can believe?

Maybe the past is inescapable because what we believe happened, did.

When I was young, I dreamt of inventing an expression that would gain popularity and then—like an oddly marked bill—return to me from a stranger. I was naïve enough to believe that I could come up with something new and naïve enough to imagine saying, “Hey, I invented that” and have someone believe me.

So, for a couple of weeks, I started telling friends I felt “rossy” when I was tired or called money “smackaruvian smackers.” Some of my tries were attached to popular culture, so “to be gilliganed” was to be ostracized or left out, “to be kimbled” was to be unjustly accused, and being “warholly” meant you sought momentary attention.

If these expressions circled back—I wonder if I would trust they were mine?

I still think about how one person may have come up with the phrases we use. Some statements seem so strange someone must be the author. About the time I was experimenting with new language, I heard a character in a cartoon say “23 skidoo!” The meaning is clear enough—“scram” or “let’s get on with it”—but I couldn’t help thinking, why “skidoo” and, particularly, why the number 23, instead of, say, 16 or 3,897.

Then, reading a guidebook about New York a few years ago, I ran into the answer. The Manhattan Flatiron building on 23rd street diverted winds so dramatically it blew women’s skirts up. Gawkers gathered to see it happen, and a beat cop stationed there moved them along, saying…well, you know what he said.

Granted, “23 skidoo” isn’t “It’s raining cats and dogs,” but will do as a demonstration that one person, like that butterfly wing in Tokyo—who came up with that?—can release an eddy that makes a tornado and more.

Once you understand the disproportionate effect of a single act of creativity, invention becomes something nearly mystical, an unmoved mover close to divinity. Sometimes I walk to work, can smell a cigarette, and see no one smoking. I think diffusion of creation must work the same way—we know the effect, seldom the cause. The cause can seem to come from a sort of spirit world entirely invisible to us. Even if we find the exact source, other unseen sources are behind it. Perhaps “skidoo” wasn’t the beat cop’s at all. Maybe the double-o suffix came from a grandmother in London. Maybe the wind gets all the credit.

As philosophers have asked since Aristotle, what causes itself?

The internet is the ultimate diffusion experiment. I wonder what use people make of what they find, where it travels next and whether it will travel far enough to be untraceable. Over a thousand people might visit a single image. How long does it take before those images drift out there carrying no name or another name?

Teaching history demonstrates how hard it is to reach back. No one’s arm seems long enough. We would like to be able to name the first time someone suggested a solution or to see the moment a new idea came to whose mind. We like to know what we can’t.

In a similar sense, you understand why people want ownership of art, not in the egotistical way I wanted to be warholly, not for credit, but for rectitude, to anchor an image or words, to keep them in this solid and real world. We want to freeze our creations when, really, not a molecule will ever be entirely still or still in the same place, moment to moment.

How can we even know if what we say is ours or the transmutation of something before, another leg on a relay that never really started? Can we know what we’ve truly invented when every moment is another creation, when every breath starts another eddy? What does it mean to be original if originality itself was an impulse someone indulged for the first time long ago, the first word of the last ape?

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.

Breaks from work remind me of a giant hole in my education—I don’t know how to rest.

I know how to spend time off, but that is not at all the same thing. My Netflix account reveals hours of instantly viewed television and silly movie watching, but every minute is flight, diversion to elude thinking or worrying or work. In the end, that sort of effort isn’t restful.

And, though I can feel a little better about reading, I wonder if the same impulse fuels it. I push time forward and call it productive. Cooking meals and cleaning closets and filing papers and organizing a long-disorganized desk are similarly useful, but not restful. Each has the object of occupying time with some redemptive activity and giving time off a purpose.

Or so it seems. Maybe rest is a matter of perspective. Instinct determines physiological rest, and the division between waking and sleeping is clear and inexorable. But psychological rest is more complicated, confusing, and contradictory. How do you relax within your life instead of looking to elude it? Physiological rest is inactivity. No one really knows what psychological rest is. When all the chores of my professional life drop away, precious little remains. Leisure requires redefinition, arduous redefinition. It sounds like a petty complaint, but it’s tough finding a new way to be.

So time off becomes an experiment to determine what life requires, what’s essential that will allow me to return to work ready with new priorities. Getting rest right is learning how to avoid the whirlwinds of wasted effort that will quickly sweep me up.

But I haven’t gotten it right. How much alone time do I need, how much together time? How much at home and how much away? How much of my time needs to be creative and generative and how much should be passive and restorative? How thoroughly do I plan, or be spontaneous, or plan to be spontaneous? The answers shift about like the phantoms of a long-exposure photograph, too variable to resolve.

Hardest to control are my expectations. The last day of any break sees me returning to the first and the high hopes I felt in the first hours of freedom. I lament the time I squandered on Netflix or the closets I never got to. I mourn the passing of “me time” and the onslaught of routine. I should be asking what I’ve learned about living with myself, what’s restorative and sustainable and reliable, what’s relaxing. I should be resolving to bring some new knowledge to my regular life.

When people ask, “How was your break?” I sometimes grunt or give the pro forma response, “Too short.” Maybe instead I should answer, “We’ll see.”

Toward the end of his life, just before that ugly cheek tweeking incident in New Orleans, noted literary critic, Michel Fausault* established the standard by which all “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” criticism will forever be judged. I remember the scene well, it was early October and the Christmas season had just begun. Michel cried “Ach!” his head pitched forward, his brow bunched in deep thought. “Rudolph,” he roared suddenly, as from a revelation, “Has never really been understood. It is only superficially a child’s Christmas song. It is actually a poem about . . .” and here he belched and scratched his belly, “about … scapegoating.”

Then we went back to our Parcheesi game. Fausault did not remember the remark later, but the damage was done. No one could ever sing “Rudolph” joyfully again, for he had exposed the song for what it was, the story of a reindeer misunderstood, undervalued, and manipulated by the bankrupt aesthetics of the petty bourgeois. Since the birth of Rudolph studies, scholars have been troubled by the fuzzy depiction of the mysterious central character. Rudolph’s original description in the first line as “the red-nosed reindeer” (emphasis mine) is clear enough, but it is not so much a description as a degrading label (emphasis mine). Rudolph is the only red-nosed reindeer (still mine), and while it appears later in the poem that his red-nose is his distinction (no reason for that one), it is actually his badge of shame, the attribute that marks him as different and inferior to the other reindeer.

And what about that nose? Noted Rudolphian Vlad Brown has noted that there is a noted confusion regarding that nose. It is articulated variously as “red,” “shiny,” glowing, and “bright.” Yet can any one object be red, shiny and bright and also glow? After all, anything that glows, because of the illumination inherent within the object, cannot also be shiny, which is a surface quality caused by greater illumination outside said object. Brown has suggested that this confusion is deliberate, and I agree. I would add to Brown, however, that this confusion is a shrewdly hinted attempt to universalize the reindeer, to make it into an “everydeer” of sorts, a model for all of the scapegoats victimized by society because they are different. What’s more, I believe that Fausault—had he not died in that bizarre knitting accident—would agree with me.

Now many readers are fooled by the apparent reintegration of Rudolph at the end of the poem. The poem states directly, “Then how the reindeer loved him.” But let’s examine the quality and implications of that love. It comes only after the significant psychological pain of being laughed at, called names, and not being allowed to participate in games, which, Strauss-Levi has pointed out, are the most important emblems of solidarity in modern, post-industrialized cultures. Can Rudolph be expected to recover from these slights? In such an interpretation, we would have to believe that Rudolph has the emotional depth of plum pudding, that his pain is not real pain and is instead the product of some sort of harmless snub that he can laugh-off and forget. But this point of view only cooperates with the cruelty depicted in the work itself. No one likes being laughed at—I remember softball in seventh grade gym. And who can forget Fausaut’s unfortunate encounter with Cher?

Prominent Rudolphianists have also suggested that Santa’s decision to have Rudolph lead the sleigh compensates for the alienation he faces earlier in the work. To that, I say “poppycock!” Were Fausault here, he’d say something clever in French, but that’s the best I can do. Look at the text, Reader! The word used is not “lead,” but “guide,” which clearly indicates the red-suited fat man’s reluctance to give up his position as the true driver in this sleigh. Santa only turns to Rudolph because, happily, the reindeer possesses a quality that the red-suited oppressor—and known slave-wager, labor-law violator—finds temporarily useful.

Returning to how the other reindeer “love him,” I think it’s easy to see that their “shouting out with glee” rings pretty hollow. Once Rudolph’s talent has been exploited, what’s left for him in Santa-land? He will be sent to the glue farm, to be sure. Furthermore, his new comrades, the other reindeer, are not really comrades at all. It is no accident that they say he will go “down in his-tor-y.” The adverb “down” suggests decline, decay, reduction, descent, weakening, attenuation, disappearance, and seven other nouns. Some will accuse me of over-analyzing this blatant reference to pigs like Santa who, in writing history, always denigrate or erase the accomplishments of the underclass, but they are part of the oppressor culture, and, after last Tuesday, I’ve learned to expect it of them. And I know Fausault, were he not in Davey Jones’ locker, would grunt his approval in that charming way of his.

What all this adds up to is a travesty perpetrated on an entirely different class of the tyrannized, the children of the world. It’s well known Fausault didn’t like children—though this is as good a time as any to remind you that he was never convicted. That doesn’t make the song any better, however. For years, the little shining faces of the children have sung this popular carol, unconscious of the subjugation perpetuated in those words. “Rudolph,” they sing, “With your nose so bright.” But they might just as well be singing, “Rudolph with your chains so tight, how’s it feel to be wronged tonight? Old Santa wants a headlight, now you are his easy prey, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, blighted by a cap’list sleigh.”

*Any resemblance to real or imagined noted French literary critics and philosophers is real or imagined.