I did not have a telephone, and used to walk to the grocery store to use the pay phone outside. I remember an evening in early September, dark gray sky growing darker by the moment, bats swooping circles around the lights overhanging the parking lot, finding their meals of daily bugs. I was on the phone to an old friend. He lived in California, and we'd not talked for a couple of years. Craig said, "I'm worried about you, buddy. I always thought you'd do something, go somewhere."
"I'm here."
"Where the hell's that? The back side of Idaho, living in a dinky apartment doing nothing? You have gifts, man, and with any gift comes responsibility. You can't just walk away. If you don't give back to the universe what the universe gives you, then you really aren't worth shit. I hate to say it, but I hate even more to see you like you are."
I didn't say anything. What could I say?
"I'm not saying you have to get some fucking job at PayLess, not at all. What I'm saying is that if you are ever going to succeed at anything, it has to become the most important thing in your life. What do you value, Derrick? Where do you live? Can you answer that?"
Had he said these things a year, or maybe even a day, before, they would have hurt and upset me. But because the time was right, they helped. Later that night, hours after we'd hung up, and hours after I'd taken a walk to Spirit Lake and sat quietly by the shore, I began to realize that I'd long since answered Craig's questions. I'd begun answering them by refusing to follow the path blazed for me by my father, and by his father before him, and his before him, and later by refusing to remain in the wage economy, and later by doing nothing at all, and by taking the time to begin my own life. Now it was time to get on with it.
That American settler was right when he wrote, "As long as we keep ourselves busy tilling the earth, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild." So long as we keep ourselves busy removing spindles from our kingdom and building dams to block rivers, taking notes in boring classes and counting hours in tedious workdays, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild. Nor, and this is much the same thing, is there any fear of us becoming who we are.
I began again with bees. I spread the hives around the Hoodoo Valley in north Idaho, and driving to drop sites I often saw the abandoned ruin of a partially constructed church. The builders were wise, I thought, in discontinuing their project: what could be more ludicrous than building a house for God amongst all these trees and hills and meadows full of grasses? The wood frame would serve only to separate those inside from those out. But I guess that's been the point all along.
My last summer in Idaho I lost a stand of hives to bears. I arrived at the site to see boxes scattered and honeycombs torn and tossed, as though the bears had sampled their way through colony after colony, selecting only the most delectable foods from this buffet. Frightened bees clustered in clumps down among the deep clover.
Contrary to what we were taught by A.A. Milne in Winnie The Pooh, when bears rip apart a beehive, they aren't so much interested in honey as they are in baby bees. I'd heard old-timers (beekeepers, not bears) say the grubs are sweet, which only made sense, considering their food. After I cleaned up what hives I could and put what bees I could find back into their homes, I had several honeycombs full of brood left over. I knew the babies chill quickly, and that the bears had been to this site at least a day before, so the babies were either dead or dying. What's good enough for bears, I thought, is good enough for me, so I started munching on bee grubs. I'm not sure why the bears bothered; while succulent, the grubs were disappointingly pasty and not so very sweet at all.
I moved to Spokane, to go back to graduate school, this time to study writing, and I brought the bees with me. I placed the hives in fields of alfalfa around eastern Washington, and kept some at the house just to watch. I remember once I saw a hive throw a swarm: tens of thousands of bees swirling in a cloud three times the size of a house. I couldn't follow the flight of any individual bee—they were too many, flying too chaotically— but after a time I noticed the cloud's center of mass begin to shift, at first subtly and then substantially, toward a tall pine. The tree shimmered with bees. It was alive with humming. Slowly the seething mass coalesced on a limb—high up, of course, later necessitating a hard climb—shrinking, shrinking until they formed a tight bundle the size of a basketball.
One summer I noticed that each night a long line of ants ran single file back and forth thirty yards from the barn to the nearest of the beehives. I'd seen ants kill hives before, overwhelming the guards by numbers, standing six to a bee and clasping fur or legs in mandibles while she furiously maneuvered her stinger to jab at them again and again, then more ants, and more, until the bee is covered. Having overrun the colony, the ants carry honey and grubs back to their nest. So I presumed these ants were up to no good.
Having grown up in a coercive culture I find it sometimes hard to rid myself of all vestiges of the desire to control (Vestiges? Who am I kidding? It's hard to rid myself of vast unbroken stretches of that territory). I tried to sweep the ants away with a broom. After that I stepped on some. I placed blocks of wood in their way as barriers. Finally it occurred to me to simply watch them. They weren't hurting the hives at all. The ants, like the grasshoppers so many years before, were simply carrying away the bees' trash. I looked more closely, and more closely still, and saw that though the hive was full and healthy, the guards merely checked the ants as they walked in and out, then waved them through to continue about their business.
When I returned to school in 1989 I began to teach. Or rather not to teach but to participate in classes. I knew from my own experiences in school that I wanted the classes to be different than what I had been put through. I knew that the most important words any instructor had ever said to me were, "Never believe anything you read, and rarely believe anything you think." I knew that the best teacher I ever had was that excitable cocker spaniel. I knew I was somehow supposed to be helping students become better writers, but I knew also that the best writing springs from passion, love, hate, fear, hope. So by definition the class had to be as much a class in life—in passion, love, fear, experience, relation—as in writing. I knew also that we teach best what we most need to learn, so thinking of the lessons of Crohn's disease I knew I'd have to strive my hardest to get members of the class, including myself, to begin to feel, and to express that feeling through writing, and perhaps even our lives. And finally, the night before I was first to enter a class, I encountered words by Carl Rogers, in his book On Becoming a Person, that seemed to speak to my experience as a learning human being: "It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior. ... I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As soon as the individual tries to communicate such experience directly, often with a quite natural enthusiasm, it becomes teaching, and its results are inconsequential. . . . When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seem a little more than consequential, because sometimes the teaching seems to succeed. When this happens I find that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his [or her] own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful. When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same—either damage was done, or nothing significant occurred. ... As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior. ... I find that one of the best, but most difficult ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which [another's] experience seems and feels to the other person. I find that another way of learnin
g is for me to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have. ... It seems to mean letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience." Of course I did not accept Rogers's words merely because he said them, but I fit them to my own experience of learning, and soon, of "teaching." I walked in that first day of that first class, and the first thing I did was to change the name from "Principles of Thinking and Writing," to "Intellectual, Philosophical, and Spiritual Liberation and Exploration for the Fine, Very Fine, and Extremely Fine Human Being." Many of the students reached for their class lists to make sure they were in the right room. As I took role, I asked each person what he or she loved. At first suspicious, they began to open up within minutes.
I soon realized I could not give grades: it would be immoral to ask someone to write from the heart, then give the writing a C. This created a problem, since the department required I assign grades. I suggested assigning grades randomly, but neither the students nor the department liked that idea. So I suggested giving everyone a 4.0. This was fine with the students, but not the administration. My next plan was to give everyone a grade of 3.14159, or π. Math majors in the class thought this was a hoot, but the administrators didn't get the joke.
Eventually here's what we (the students and I) devised. Because the way to learn to think is by thinking, we would spend most class time on open discussions of important issues: What is love? What is the difference (if any) between emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical intimacy? Is there such a thing as a universal good? What do you want out of life? If you had only a limited time to live (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time? Is the universe a friendly place or not? (This last question, by the way, Einstein thought to be the most important a person can ask.) Irish students took it upon themselves to teach us about the Irish Republican Army, and African-American students taught us about their own experience of racism. A Samoan man told us of his earlier life in a gang. The sons and daughters of farmers told us what it was like to grow up on a farm. Volleyball players told us of volleyball, and football players of football.
Similarly, the way to learn how to write is by doing plenty of it, so my main job in the classroom would be to cheerlead them into writing more. The students could, of course, write anything they wanted about anything they wanted. I would not judge any papers, but merely give the writers positive feedback, and I would try to guide them wherever they wished to go in their explorations. I asked (not told, but asked) students to write about the thing they'd done in their lives they were most proud of, and asked them to write about that which caused them the most shame. We took the latter papers (mostly unread) into the hall and burned them, causing police to show up one quarter to question us about vandalism. One student, getting married the next summer, wrote her wedding vows as well as a letter to her fiancé to be delivered moments before he walked down the aisle. Another, a wine salesman by trade, spent the quarter writing sales pitches. Many people explored their own abuse, some wrote fiction. For each piece of writing a person did, he or she received a check mark (longer pieces received more). The final grade corresponded to the number of check marks. If a person had thirty-four check marks by the end of the quarter, for example, the grade was 3.4. Simple enough. The people in the class wrote about five times as much as people in other sections, but loved the work because it pertained to their own lives. When people wrote pieces they particularly loved, we scheduled private conferences to go over these pieces again and again until every word was magic. In the context of sharing an important piece of themselves, suddenly even grammar became crucial: the bride, for example, didn't want the pastor stumbling over her sentences or her groom wondering what the hell she was trying to say. Given the opportunity to express themselves, these people wanted to learn how to do that.
I asked each student to hand in a couple of pieces composed in different forms of expression besides writing. Many brought in food, some paintings, a few tape-recordings of their own music. A chef from Kuwait cooked us a seven-course meal and showed us pictures of his country. Another student brought a videotape of himself doing technical rock climbing.
It took us a couple of quarters to realize something was still missing. Experience. It's madness to think all learning comes from putting pen to paper. What about life itself? We decided that people would get check marks every time they did something they'd never done before. People went to symphonies, rock concerts, Vietnamese restaurants. They watched foreign films ("That Akira Kurosawa guy can be pretty funny"). They got in car wrecks (not for the check mark, but it having happened, they may as well get credit). They got counseling (I hope not as a result of the class). One fellow told his father for the first time that he loved him (a big baseball fan, he watched the movie Field of Dreams over and over that day to psyche himself up).
Something else was missing. I still had too much control of the class. How to let go more? I didn't know. Finally it occurred to me to break them into groups, and ask each group to run the class for one two-hour period (we generally met two evenings per week). They could do whatever they wanted. One group wanted to play Capture the Flag. I thought, "What does this have to do with writing?" But we did it, then wrote about it, and I felt closer to that class after our group's physical activity than I had even after intense emotional discussions (besides, my team won).
Next class period we talked about the relationship between shared physical activities and feelings of intimacy. Another group had us eat popsicles and watch cartoons, then draw pictures from our childhood with our opposite hands (it broke my heart when one fellow shared his picture with the class: "This is my father taking me out in the woods to smoke my first vial of crack"). In the same group we played Duck Duck Goose and Hide and Go Seek in the basement of the near-empty building. Many of the people were continuing students, and thus were older. Looking back, I don't know how anyone could possibly say that he or she has successfully run a writing class without having played Hide and Go Seek with overweight old men, twenty year olds, middle-aged mothers of five, and a half-dozen men and women whose native language is not English, all of them dead serious about finding or not being found. One group taught us how to do the Country and Western dance, the Tush Push. This was especially difficult for me, a confirmed nondancer. Because the room was too small, we did this in the building's central courtyard. Midway through one of our times pushing our respective tushes, a couple of the department's most humorless administrators walked by, evidently having worked into the evening. I smiled and waved. Even this class taught me much. I had been working on letting go in my writing for years by this point, and I sometimes became frustrated at the baby steps many students were taking toward manifesting their passion in words. But when it came to me attempting to let go in dancing, I suddenly comprehended their inhibitions: I would push my tush only three or four inches, while many who were too shy to open up in words were wildly swinging their hips (including a fifty-year-old sheriff's deputy I never would have pegged for a tush-pusher). In another class we made marshmallow figures representing our hopes and dreams. One fellow, a bow hunter, made a big marshmallow buck with toothpick antlers, and a huge toothpick arrow jutting from its chest; mine was a broken marshmallow dam with marshmallow salmon swimming in a river of marshmallow (surprise, surprise). We played blindfolded soccer in the classroom, with four people at a time blindfolded, being told where to move by sighted partners ("Left, left," my partner shouted as I ran into the wall. "Oh, sorry, wrong way"). We broke into groups, each group picking out of a hat the rough plot for a screenplay (our group was to come down from a mountain to find that everyone else in the world had disappeared), and then each person in the group picked from a different hat a character to be played in the drama (I was to play the actress Sharon Stone), after which we had an hour to write
our scripts, to be performed and videotaped in what we later dubbed "An Exercise in Embarrassment." For Halloween, we plopped sleeping bags on the floor, sat around a flashlight surrounded by small pieces of wood (simulating a campfire), ate s'mores, and told ghost stories. For Valentines Day, we wrote stories about first loves, and memories of hearts broken or overflowing. Mainly we had fun.
I did assign one topic each quarter that the people in the class had to write on. It was the final paper. The assignment was for each of them to walk on water, and then write about it. They had to decide to do something impossible, do it, and then describe what it was like. A few people filled their bathtubs with a quarter-inch of water, walked across that, and considered themselves done. Others walked across frozen lakes. But one quit smoking, another ended an abusive relationship, a very shy woman asked a man out (he said yes), another woman for the first time admitted her bulimia and sought help, one man told his parents he did not want to be an accountant but instead an artist.
The people in my classes, including me, did not need to be controlled, managed, nor even taught. What we needed was to be encouraged, accepted, and loved just for who we were. We needed not to be governed by a set of rules that would tell us what we needed to learn and what we needed to express, but to be given time in a supportive space to explore who we were and what we wanted, with the assistance of others who had our best interests at heart. I believe that is true not only for my students, but for all of us, human and nonhuman alike. All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?
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