Mariolatry redux

Looking for something else, I found this old and incomplete poem from the time of one Mary phase (some months before the shrine visit.) Strangely resonant (but just a little...Mary plus subway.)


The Mary nearest Nassau,
by a wet and stagnant fountain shadowed,
open handed, parts
her cast-stone cloak. Saying:
holding nothing I divide,
as if a sea,
the material all of matter. Saying:
let no obscurant tear
your soul from heaven.

Yes. Very near the ham-hazed coffee shop,
where starlings nest in vinyl
siding seams, (some fledglings end
pop-eyed, yellow beaked and
dead on hard ground) is Mary
in her downward gaze, her lap
of rock by mounded palms is framed.
The thenar eminence, a Venus
mount, muscling the thumb,
stirs the radius around, opens arms.

We’re pressed against the cold
walls of our train car, my daughter
tracks our black racketing passage.
Today we spill out backwards like wet litter mates,
quickly steadied by invisible and air.

Heaven and Earth in Little Space

Last night on the F train I rode with my back to the places we rushed towards. At 10:15 the car was neither full nor empty, couples mostly. We were scattered, parallel and perpendicular as is the way with the F train seats. We came into stations and left them; I read, using the door-closing chimes as my cue to check our progress. The chimes sounded, the doors closed. Behind me, unseen, a voice opened in song, Schubert’s Ave Maria. A young woman in jeans and a jacket, walked slowly through the car, a wool cap puddled in her left hand, her studded handbag in the crook of the bent arm. I pulled my heavy wallet from its place in my pocket, and a dollar bill from its place among receipts and stubs. I folded the bill in lengthwise halves. Turning my shoulders toward her, extending my hand slightly, looking towards her face – physical cues a wordless baby might use to signal her mother - I held my offering up like a small candle. My face was full of thanks, more full than a dollar bill can be. She stayed on our car past the next stop, to finish the song. My tears rose up, I kept them close, closed my eyes and pressed the spilling drops, with finger tips, back along the seams. The song was done, the singer stood, fading from our notice, face to the door through the panes of which the black tunnel shone by.

Early in my life as a teacher, early one winter, as Christmas approached, I was seized by the idea of Mary. Seized again, I should say. My deep, intermittent, thoroughly idiosyncratic love of Mary began many, many years before. But one winter, that year, surrounded by the illuminated plastic crèches of our old neighborhood, and passing every morning a flower-decked shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, my thoughts circled Mary. Mary full of grace, her face a downward blossomed lily, gazing at the earth. Mother of God, her child both vulnerable and transcendent, as are our children, after all. We are the subject, really, of the story of Jesus’ birth: the acknowledgment of divine presence in human being. I wanted to beg Mary’s help to remember that, to embody it. I knelt at the shrine briefly, two evenings at the end of Advent, in the snow, scared, a trespasser. The church stood by me, a night sky of stone; I touched my heart to my hands, not knowing how my knees should go (on the ledge, on the ground.) Parishioners passed to my right, bitten by cold, greeted by warmth as they entered doors to some basement place. I didn’t know how long to stay there and felt like a child risking a great deal pretending or intending something very ardently. I asked for discernment, for a way towards seeing and speaking to the lively divine spark in my child and the children I care for. I asked to be a good mother and to discern who I should be as a teacher. What should the ratio be, how many parts tender mother to how many parts engaged stranger. Every day, still, I need to work out how much a yielding and how much a hard place to be. This question entices, moves, and troubles me: how much heaven, how much earth.

With Apologies To Eero Saarinen

Last week, in a cold rain, I traveled up to the Museum of the City of New York to see the Eero Saarinen show. I expected to feel glad there, and moved by Saarinen’s work. I began my undergraduate studies at a university where I had, as a nine-year-old, visited a Saarinen dorm. It had seemed like a great basin of light and I wanted to live in such a place. While I am glad for my time there, I never did find a good way to fit myself into the culture of that university. Similarly, I felt myself strongly affected by, but not enjoying, the Saarinen show. As I considered the succession of corporate campus projects – so many windowless offices (described, not shown) set down in vast clearings – my heart contracted, perhaps because I enjoy and rely upon contact with the world around me, in all its random and changeable aspects. Saarinen said of his pedestal furniture, designed for Knoll: “The underside of typical chairs and tables makes a confusing, unrestful world…I wanted to clear up the slum of legs.” The slum of legs has, of course, long been a favorite place for children who find within it the enclosing, inviting space that intensifies the pleasure of play. It is the slum that shelters children from the unrestful world of not-play and not-imagining (for any child, at some point the classroom sometimes represents just such a difficult place, and the escape route is located right under a table.)

My favorite image from the Saarinen exhibition shows a child in the just-opened TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. A boy, perhaps six years old, in a suit with short pants, is climbing up the low escarpment of a curving (snow-cave/middle ear) wall. His back is to us; two adults in the foreground ignore him. The picture reminds me of a thought I have had from time to time (when passing a huge snow bank, a heap of wood chips, a small stone outcrop): it takes a great deal of acculturation to suppress one’s inclination to climb up a nice ramp or fit oneself into a likely niche. At least when young, we like to get higher, we like to tunnel under, we like to establish our redoubt. How we define the “confusing, unrestful world” from which we seek relief, that is what we are so unlikely to agree upon. In the classroom I am the voice of acculturation, the denier of the urge to be under tables or on top of shelves. I try to help my students fit themselves together in a community, and fit themselves into the world through language and representation. All the while I often refuse them opportunities for another sort of representation and communication as they seek to fit their bodies into the world, physically, in novel (disruptive, potentially dangerous) ways. Sometimes I become, my body becomes, a space for them to use in play. They climb under and over me, seek out or escape the embrace of my arms. I am part of our classroom, part of the physical structure of the school. I hope I may seem, in later years, in my students' wordless, distant, impression of our time together, like a space that opened onto, out into the world. More often than not.

Image: orphanage from a community laid out on the classroom rug, after hours, by Hanauta.

Everything That Begins

My daughter’s pet mouse died. Shall I give that little creature a posthumous pseudonym? Yes: Aster, like the wild asters that persist, slightly shriveled but still vivid along the margins of tree wells and fences even in December. Aster was not impressed by humans, I don’t think, but she was lovely, with violet-petal ears, and she allowed us to gently stroke, with cautious fingertip, her tremulous flank. The sensation of her stance upon my hand was barely tactile, as though I were cupping not a living body but an audible vibration, a delicate sound. But, as I said, we barely seemed to register in her consciousness except as a place to poop or pee, occasionally. Neither Hanauta nor I paid her much mind, alas. Days would go by without our having looked in on her and each time we did she was invariably huddled inside her pink translucent igloo. Days did go by, we don’t know how many, between the time of her death and Hanauta’s discovery of her body. Several days, surely, at the end of which came H’s wail of regret, and her tears. I lifted Aster’s still, small body and gently shook away the clinging clods of bedding. She weighed nothing and seemed neither stiff nor pliant, though her body had taken on the pent, smooth angle of her cage’s corner where she had lain to die. Dark patches shown through her fur, blackened circles that alarmed me, and beneath its scales her naked tail (pink and seemingly four-sided like the stem of mints) bore regular stains of purple. Hanauta retreated to her reading chair but I invited her to make a ritual farewell for this lonely creature. I made an incense offering (to all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas throughout space and time) and we chanted Loka Samasta Sukhino Bhavantu (may all beings everywhere be happy and free.) Then I placed Aster in a re-sealable plastic sandwich bag and set her atop a box of ‘home style mini waffles’ in the freezer. She is awaiting burial, or I am awaiting her burial in a Brooklyn planter box (Hanauta’s dad has a roof garden.) That was that, ritual enough.

The morning after Aster’s funerary rites I found on my classroom rug a brown mouse lying dead. He was plump and sleek having grown fat on the scattered aftermath of our messy lunches. He had been on his way some where, his limbs arrested in a graceful trotting posture. I do think he was male, on his belly I saw no nipples (he looked so full I thought at first I’d found a pregnant female.) I didn’t pick him up, I don’t know why I felt such caution in the stillness of the morning classroom. I called my boss who pinched him up in a paper towel announcing, “It’s still warm” before depositing him without sentiment or ceremony in a trash can.

Other deaths have occurred in the classroom. Many snails have died while in my care but snails are mysterious and have methods of absence that fall short of actually dying. First, they can simply hole up in their shells and refuse to flow out no matter the enticements of tender lettuces and water droplets and the loud entreaties of impassioned three year olds. Second, snails are able to disappear in a small amount of soil for months on end. When I say disappear I mean these snails elude detection no matter how many times I rake my fingers through the snail tank soil. They re-appear, prompted by I know not what change in the environment, visible, viable, ready to live again. Third, snails also aestivate, seal themselves up under a thin cover of dried mucus – a real necessity when I am in charge of their habitat and routinely fail to give them adequate spritzing and/or fresh flora. But snails do truly die, of course. Sometimes I have found them still in the throes of decay, their lovely subtle foot reduced to foul, green muck. Sometimes nothing at all remains of the soft tissue. Invariably I sniff at these emptied shell and find they smell of nothing, soil, and sweetness. If a child asks about whether a snail has perished I say: “Well, no (or well, yes) but everything that begins will end sometime. Everything that starts will finish.” As for rituals of farewell, I just lob dead snails and empty shells into the garden or trash can without comment.

What more can one say to three year olds about death? Margaret Wise Brown wrote The Dead Bird which is a lovely but impossible book. Impossible because the children pick up, caress, and (in Remy Charlip’s sweet illustration if not in the text) kiss the (dead) bird. To which I say: feather-borne parasites, federal laws against possessing any dead birds or parts of birds, avian flu. But The Dead Bird sometimes appears on lists of resources for ‘talking to young children about death.’ A book I really do like on this topic is Judith Viorst’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. A dead snail doesn’t necessarily merit this degree of study and reflection, not unless a child seems concerned or interested. I am thinking about death, though, as I anticipate the entry into my class of a child whose father died a year ago. My students have not quite gotten around to the perennially favorite game of playing dead. The chief feature of death in these games is its impermanence, its reversibility. To play you must lie still and wait for someone to approach and wake you; this game is only played by children who are confident that one or more friends will come to rouse them. Children in our class will play dead, though, and we will certainly talk about daddies and we may find ourselves in a conversation that spirals gently around (like the snail’s shell) from these broad topics to the particular fact of one Daddy’s death. I don’t know, yet, what we will say, the children and I, but not “everything that begins will end.” When it comes to the people we love that is, I think, too large and cool a truth for threes to bear.

Monsters

My daughter is ten and in these writings I will call her Hanauta (ha na oo ta - meaning humming in Japanese.) I think she is pleased with this arrangement, I have, it seems, transmitted to her my own attraction to pseudonyms through which we can be a secret both hidden and revealed. We were walking uphill, Friday evening, glad for the end of the week, and talking, for reasons I can’t quite reconstruct, about games that boys play in yards and parks. Hanauta surprised me, saying that 5th grade boys play cops and robbers. “Really! They still do?” I wasn’t sure whether I meant: ‘they still do at age 10?’ or ‘they still do in 2010?’ “You know what is funny?” she said, “they have cops, they have robbers, but they never have victims.” Dazzled as I was by this observation, it could hardly be otherwise. Games are neither theater nor reality, but another thing, always somewhat alien to me though I know it to be central to childhood (and humanity, by extension?) From time to time I take up the project of researching ideas about play and games. Then there are things to do (taxes, heartache, new jobs, and other consuming disruptions.) I leave off and forget, completely, everything I read and thought about the study of play. Yet my interest, both deep and dissociated, remains.

Among my students, both boys and girls, Monster is a favorite game combining running and being wanted. There are elements of hiding and narrowly escaping from a corner but the principal action of the game is the flight of the many from the one (monster.) The narrative, such as it is, can be conveyed with “I’m gonna get you” or a roar, or even just two upraised, menacing paws. Some children are dedicated to only one of the two possible roles (scary/scared) but most will switch hit. At the outset the game can be competitive, a snarl of potential monsters, baring teeth and heaving with the effort of their roars, each one with head a-tilt as though angling to clamp teeth on vulnerable tracheae. Eventually the real monster is established and the game can begin in earnest. While girls and boys are united in their love of monster, they can have different patterns of play. Boys often stay immersed for longer stretches, making many monotonous, gleeful circuits of the space. It seems that girls soon find other thoughts emerging; they do not hold for quite as long to the boundaries containing that binary world of pursuer and pursued, but branch out with talk of cats, sisters, princesses, babies. So they separate out the parts, boys and girls, cleaving the running from the being wanted. But because no one is ever really caught, really ever “gotten” there can be no victims. With monsters in the yard it is a good world.

Tissues

At the center of our classroom is a tissue box. Not dead center, though, and its position is not absolute. It shifts to a high shelf, settles on a lower shelf, withdraws under a stack of books: I Love You A Bushel and Peck, Everyone Poops, Nicky and the Big Bad Wolves, and the loose-spined, much-mended, tall, red juggernaut: Busy, Busy Town.) Of course it is not a tissue box but a succession of boxes, of varying colors, always low in profile (slim line) and holding a modest number of softly massed, gently interleaved tissues. The flimsy membrane covering the mouth of the box, slit to yield but one tissue at a time, serves a second purpose in our classroom where children stuff their used tissues back in the box, tucking them comfortably under the filmy, transparent shield until it bulges (and catches my eye.) I don’t know who does this, but dimly understand why they do. I pull out the rounded nearly weightless wads. They are crumpled but not sodden, only vaguely snotty because in nose-blowing, as in much else that we value, three year olds are only nominally effective. I pull them out and toss them in the trash, wondering whether they represent some child’s early, magical notions of what will eventually be a firm grasp of reversibility.

But back to the tissue box. It was borrowed by someone, on Wednesday afternoon, and returned to us promptly. Today, all day, I found, pressing up against the plastic shield, a little clutch of googly eyes. Which I call google eyes no matter how often I may be corrected. Large eyes, and small, several at a time, they kept appearing as tissues were pulled from the box. I scooped them up and scooped them up and thought I had skimmed off the last of them. Late this afternoon, returning to my own classroom after full-day outdoor time, I found still another eye. A large, albino eye, glassy, the iris a matte pink disk. It was the coda of a poem, rhyming with Man Ray’s un-absorbable glass tears (and maybe Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, but no!) Thinking of Man Ray’s image (look at her empty nostrils, the real proof of artifice) I wondered why weeping brings snot when snot does not give rise to tears. Generally speaking. In our classroom snot gives rise to words, a gently merciless narrative of encouragement and admonition from teachers: “Get a tissue, go get a tissue, blow your nose. Really blow, blow out, push air through your nose. Now you have to PINCH. That’s wiping, that is wiping, PINCH! Oh, YUCKY! I’ll get another tissue for you. Blow! Blow! Blow! Blow the balloon! PINCH! Like this. Ok, here. Throw it away, in the trash can. You throw it, here. Here is the trash can, see the trash can, by the bathroom door? And now you are done! You threw it away! Go wash hands, please. With soap. With soapy bubbles.” Bubbles, though, like reversibility, and tears, and snot, are topics for another day.

I did not set out to be a teacher at all, and more than that, even as a child, I planned to never, ever spend time with young children. And yet it happens that, having been vigorously kneaded, folded, and stretched by life’s vagaries, I AM a teacher and I spend so much time with and thinking about young children.

Teacher is an inaccurate (or over-sufficient) term, I think, for what I do. I am an engaged observer, a student of my students and of the masterful teachers whom I encounter in person or in print. I call my students ‘my children’ and their parents I call ‘my parents.’ This work has given me a large, diffuse, transitory, and sometimes discordant family. And, like a family, this work has provided me with a reasonably intelligible, defining space from which I can interact with and represent my ideas about the world. Everything that I am: mother, child, sister, breather, mover, writer, singer, maker of images, thinker, feeler, perceiver, intuiter, can fit – at least a little, almost enough – within my role as teacher. What doesn’t fit may find a place here.