VII. COURSE OUTLINE
If I’m forced to leave the teaching profession, I’ll perhaps try my hand at becoming a jazzman. I’ll need to develop some sort of musical ability, but I have the improvisational aspect down cold. I’m required by the staid, unimaginative powers-that-be of this university to provide you with an extensive week-by-week breakdown of what we will do in class and of the assignments and such I expect from you. What an absurdity! Is this what education has come to? Where is the creativity? The joie de vivre? The joie de enseignement? The turns of the moment? The excitement of making something new and unpredictable every day? Course outline? I ain’t doing that shit. I will ask of you this, though: by the second week, please read Roland Hudson’s The Firewater of Love. Next Wednesday, my colleague, poetry professor Kin Samson, will guest-lecture on the book. Beyond that, I become Miles, brewin’ this bitch fresh as things move forward.
4.
Perhaps you’ll agree, Reginald Chambers’s syllabus was a remarkable document. Everything was there: the flaunting of his considerable intellect; the contempt for his superiors at the university; disastrous and highly experimental teaching methods. Chambers was ready.
Up until the first day of classes I still had not heard from him, aside from the syllabus. Unbeknownst to me I set up in a classroom right next to his. I found myself facing a full room of bright-eyed students. I cared not what they called themselves, I called them all Bright Eyes. They had heard of me. They too were ready. In a low voice, a dramatic growl, I told from memory the story of Jardin the Axe-Wielder. I closed my eyes near the end of the story and opened them only when Jardin began reciting his abecedarian of violence. To my delight, I saw Dr. Chambers standing in the doorway, his face drawn in childlike wonder. He mostly wore one of two sports coats—a tan or a gray-blue. They were fuzzy from time and repeated dry cleanings, and strings hung from the seams. He was the perfect stereotype of a professor. If those two jackets were at the cleaner’s he wore a navy blue that was an older style, slightly too big for him; when he wore that one he looked more like a child than usual; it was as if his father had gifted him a blazer he once wore in the nineties. The sports coats served to remind me that Chambers was my prey and I was on a continuous hunt and like all unwitting beasts unaware of their armed stalkers, he deserved a sporting chance. This day, he wore the tan one with the stained sleeves.
Chambers slow-clapped for me as the students filed out. Reece, he said. That takes on so much more power the way you speak it into existence.
I reached out for a handshake and a brotherly half hug. Yeah, I said. Gets the students excited about the work. What about you? The loneliness class, huh?
Yep, I went for it. Don’t say that too loudly, though. What’d you think of the syllabus?
Thing of beauty. What about the essay? You’re still working on it, right? Should be submitting it right about now, right?
I gritted my teeth awaiting his answer.
Eh, I don’t know about that one. Less in love with it than when I sent it to you. We can talk about that. I got class, though. It’ll be a fun semester, for sure.
I nodded like a fool, believing what he said to be true, believing that we’d have time to talk more, but I mostly saw only the back of Dr. Chambers’s head in the weeks that followed. I’d see him off in the distance. He’d reply to my long emails with a sentence or two. He moved his classes from next to mine, a technology issue with the glowing screen where he showed his presentations on loneliness and solitude, he said. I never overheard his lectures anymore and I ate alone most days, or infrequently I ate with the dimwit.
Revolutions begin before the overthrow and last long after the skirmishes are finished. Great Insurrections give way to greater insurrections. My heart told me to go slow, but my mind despaired for the plan.
Meanwhile, Chambers taught his class.
5.
LONELINESS VS. SOLITUDE
A presentation by Dr. Reginald Chambers
Freedman’s University • English 101Department of English and Cultural Studies
You are a Superman . . .
. . . in your Arctic fortress, away from the world’s crying out, the world grabbing at you, asking you to solve whatever’s gone wrong.
Just you and stillness.
Just you and quietude.
Strengthening yourself to again make bullets bounce from your flesh.
This is solitude.
To someone else you are a god,
and it’s too much to take.
I never feel more alone than when I’m in Christine’s presence.
When I look into her eyes, I see reflected all the dreams of a ten-year-old girl watching her family wrench itself apart
Every minute of every day she transforms into a baby in a barrel
Plunging through the rapids over the Cliffs.
And I become a Superman defying gravity to rescue her.
I have no Arctic fortress to return to. No break from the labors. There is nothing to me, but rescue.
I can’t even tell you how it started, when the deterioration began, but the quiet swept in like a northern breeze on a January morning and . . .
eventually, even the silences between our silences kept their own silences.
This, students, is loneliness.
End of Slideshow, click to exit.
6.
To: Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Assistant Professor—Department of English and Cultural Studies
Sent: February 2, 2018, 3:54 a.m.
From: Rebecca Montana
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Firewater
Hey Mr. Chambers,
I am a student in your noon English 101 (I was the one in front with the lakers hat). I’m writing because I started reading Hudsons book. I didn’t have to read much poetry in high school, but I see why u chose this text for this class. I feel Hudson’s loneliness, madness, and confusion on every page. Its creepy. Makes me shiver. He’s been dead since even before my grandmother was born and the only thing that remains from him is his despair and his loneliness. It’s like he left a ghost and it haunts us everytime we open his book. I guess that’s why I was the only one who admitted to reading when u wanted to discuss it in class today. I bet some people started and couldn’t go any further. No one wants to feel all that emotion. Who wants to be haunted? I mean, its fine for me cuz I watch a lot of horror movies. Being haunted seems like fun if youre willing to listen to whatever the ghost has to say.
I wanted to expand on my question from class. When you were explaining solitude versus loneliness. In Hudson’s book, he talks about the rough part of the Cross River and being pulled there in the rain, the winter, in the summer while being swarmed and devoured by the mosquitoes of blood-sucking love (remember when u conceded after my comment that he may have been talking about literal mosquitoes as well as metaphorical ones). I think I found the spot he wrote about all those years ago and I’ve been going there as if called for a few days. I’m there now as I type this. It’s real peaceful here. Nice place to meditate. I hear my name echoing. I bet there are a lot of mosquitoes in the summertime. I must say I’m new to Cross River. I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as this river. We don’t have a river as gorgeous as that where I’m from. I just can sit here for hours. I’m afraid I’m turning into Roland Hudson. LOL. My question is this: that retreat Hudson talks about, that spot where he’s feeling peaceful but also tormented by the water & the spirits beneath the water, is that feeling solitude or loneliness? I’m not sure where it fits on that line between you & “Christine.” It seems like solitude, but if he had friends who understood his madness he probably would not have spent anytime sitting there by the Cross River. But then what does that make me sitting here cross-legged by the Cross River, huh?
Rebecca
• • •
To: Rebecca Montana
Sent: Februa
ry 2, 2018, 6:00 a.m.
From: Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Assistant Professor—Department of English and Cultural Studies
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: Firewater
Dear Rebecca,
I remember who you are. I never forget a student who engages with the text. Thank you for your incisive questions and commentary in class. It appears that you are the only student in any of my six sections of 101 who did the reading so far.
I think you are on to something re: Hudson and solitude. The reason I chose Firewater is because Hudson complicates and problematizes the concepts of loneliness and solitude by blending them together. We often talk about them as discreet but related concepts. Our formulation goes something like this: loneliness bad; solitude good. I’m guilty of that too. I’m forced to do a bit of simplifying in class when introducing new concepts. But Hudson isn’t restrained by any such convention. Hudson quests into solitude to relieve himself of his loneliness and there he finds comfort, but also torment and more loneliness. We all do a little of this, though most of us are not as dramatic about it as Roland Hudson (lol). I think of the silences I seek to do my life’s work and how it conflicts with Christine’s life’s work of building a sustainable relationship and family. Perhaps you can think of how this works in your own life and in your dealings with friends and loved ones. The conflict is where we find our personal torments. I encourage you to explore these thoughts further in your journal assignments. I will be posting the prompt for that by the end of today.
I am happy you decided to take my suggestion to visit the Cross River. It is indeed a wonder and a beauty.
Sincerely,
Dr. Reginald S. Chambers, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Cultural Studies
Freedman’s University
x3725
Sometimes I wonder if I can love forever
Like an angel unbound by time
Then I glimpse Lucinda’s neck
Long and black like my favorite bend in the Cross River
And I know then that I’ve lived forever
And as long as I’ve lived I’ve loved
—Roland Hudson “Lucinda by Riverlight,” from The River Is a Gray Black Snake by Day, a Silver Snake by Moonlight
7.
Dr. Reginald Chambers
Freedman’s University
English 101
Special Topics: Loneliness
JOURNALS: YOUR LOCUS OF PRACTICE
The problem for many of us is not that we are scatterbrained or foolish, it is that we’ve lost the ability to sit still, to luxuriate in the meditative trance that serious thinking and writing require. We have been raised on the quick cuts of music videos, the frequent breaks of network television, the sitcom pacing that demands a laugh break every two minutes or so. Real life does not condition us this way. It does not guide us toward the emotion we are supposed to feel. It just is. It’s gotten much worse now that we’ve entered the age of the smartphone. We check and recheck and rerecheck every few minutes for little text missives, to see how that other world, cyberspace, is faring, how it is perceiving us. We condition and recondition ourselves to reject the stillness we need to grow. Since your conditioned mind simply can’t accept stillness, when faced with quietude it becomes nearly a dead fish flopping about at the assault of fresh air, of freedom. We are not fish, oxygen is nourishing, but we hardly ever experience it (it, or the oxygen of this extended metaphor, being stillness), so how would we ever know its nourishing properties?
This brings us to your journals, the meditative trance that you will induce in yourselves (with my aid!). For each journal you will be assigned a short prompt. Here’s what you do: Set aside ten minutes and vow not to be disturbed. Don’t ruminate on the prompt, just write. For ten whole minutes stare at your screen and type whatever comes to mind and when that time is up, you stop. Don’t worry so much about grammar and spelling and the like (you will worry about these very much in your final paper, which will utilize the insights you’ve gleaned from your journals), just worry about getting your thoughts out. No more than ten minutes. Trust me, dear students. Do this enough and you will have taken your mind back.
In the interest of taking my mind back, I will be doing this assignment alongside you. Each prompt will come with my take on the topic to give you an idea of what sort of writing I expect.
Dr. Reginald Chambers
Freedman’s University
English 101
Special Topics: Loneliness
Journal #1
PROMPT: Write about the loneliest place you have ever been. To Roland Hudson, sometimes the Cross River was the loneliest place he had ever been. But then again, Hudson himself claims that the presence of his love, Gertrude (whom he came to believe was a mythical water-nymph/siren/water-woman), was the loneliest place he had ever been. You may take an expansive view of the word place. It does not have to be a physical location. Perhaps your place is a time in your life. Perhaps your place is in another’s presence.
Dr. Chambers Journal #1:
Christine sits across from me as I type this. The days that I’m writing about, she was both there and not there, like an impression, or a wisp, or a ghost. She resided in Los Angeles and I in a kind of cold hell. Upstate New York. Binghamton. The Bing. There I worked as a newspaper reporter. Most days in Binghamton were lonely and gray and cloudy. Pick a day. Winter or summer. Spring or fall. According to the National Weather Service, Binghamton is cloudier than Seattle and windier than Chicago. This fact often made a hazy wave of black pass over my mind. Seattle and Chicago are, respectively, known for the miseries of gray clouds and sharp winds. By themselves, such atmospheric dreariness can be passed off as charming minuses in landscapes of cultural pluses. Binghamton is a place that bills itself as the Carousel Capital of the World; a place that touts being about three hours from vibrant culture and life, as if where people want to live is really away from everything. While I was there, the city had also been named one of the country’s unhappiest places to live by some magazine.
The world then was a black-and-white picture taken just out of focus. I rambled back then when it was warm enough to walk and sometimes when it wasn’t, the death-cold of zero and below. The cold that could and often would freeze and then cleave my soul from me. I would often walk from the edge of the city of Binghamton—on Main Street where a stone arch tells drivers they are entering Johnson City—to the downtown area, where Main Street becomes Court Street. On these walks, I sought clarity, but never found any. My grandmother who was back in Cross River often used to say, It’s always time for a change, but change comes with time. It’s one of those clichés that, on balance, proves true. Time had a different meaning to her because she’d always been old—at least as long as I’d known her—and I’d always been young. Plus, she’d never lived in Binghamton. Time moved more slowly there. I aged ten years in the three that I lived there. I rarely ever saw people my own age, not to mention people of my own hue. Mostly it was middle-aged white folks who looked very old and the very old who looked nearly dead—and boy did those old white folks watch me suspiciously. Even at work I was a lone black drop of paint in a bucket of white primer. And every time someone interviewed a person darker than a sunburn, the editor would tout it in the daily newsletter: Reginald Chambers interviewed Johnson Smith, an African-American!
When I looked out onto the world, all I could see was an ocean of heads as gray as a Binghamton sky. It reminded me of my mortality. I spoke to no one. Well, almost no one, and when I did speak I’d wished I hadn’t, work talk and such, small talk and such, speech with so little consequence it was like anti-speech, speech that communicated nothing but the dubious idea that any word-sound is preferable to silence; it often felt as if my misuse of the ability to form words had erased real words from my vocabulary. The words formed in my brain, but never made it to my mouth; they committed suicide rather than be w
ith me. I shook from the center of my chest, that’s what this imposed solitude did for me, it quaked my very soul. It was time for a change, but change comes with time.
Look, I’ve said all this and I’ve actually said very little. Very little that is true. Yes, I was alone. Quite literally walking against the wind in a windswept wasteland. Yes, it was a wretched experience and I felt my humanity leaking from me. And yes, I cried out for Christine and we’d visit each other every couple months and lie in the warmth of each other’s arms and promise to share a soul between us to make up for the soulage that we both lost living alone and away from one another. And I didn’t realize it then, but the truth is that any warm being (a cat, a half-dead junkie, a swarm of fruit flies) could have stilled my emptiness with their temporary presence. But I felt something much different later; what I’m talking about was after I left that cold hell to return to Cross River and Christine left Los Angeles for Cross River and she became a permanent presence, always around, I had to learn to live with the pressure of her standing on my soul; what I’m trying to say is this: I love Christine, I really, really, really and truly love her, but what I came to learn is that I felt one kind of alone in Binghamton and a whole ’nother sort of alone with Christine. Who knew that loneliness came in so many varieties?
The World Doesn't Require You Page 24