The notes I made - first ideas, pleasingly compact, promisingly polyvalent - the notes for this very thing I am now setting out to write, are gone. Not lost, really, but dispersed in the way that ashes are scattered. It happened in this way: first, a computer file; then, user error (intemperate cutting/pasting/saving.) Less regrettable than losing handwritten notes with the attendant painful musing: “Perhaps if I look here? Oh, maybe it is…? Could it be [preposition] this?” The thought of what is lost clings gently as though regret were wet. Making an error is a positive action (I created a mistake) with clear borders of finality. Though admittedly no reason to celebrate, erring is more tolerable than losing (something). “What if I hadn’t? How could I have?”
I woke early on Sunday, for my birthday, then lay narrowly on my wide bed trying work out the puzzle of how to feel glad and expansive. Let us say that this year is, for me, about my power in the world. I ask myself to be direct and less effortful, clear and unconfused, at peace and not resentful should the need arise to yield. I have been thinking, intermittently, about the third chakra (at the solar plexus) called Manipura: Jeweled City. City of Jewels. As I understand it, this is our fire element place, where identity and striving for accomplishment arise. I feel weak here: I set stones together with effort, hoping to house myself. Down they come again, though, these stones badly laid by me or sent scattering by forces I cannot control. My power in the world emerges as resentment. I resent what I have lost, even, as it shrouds me, a transparent palpable mantle.
Manipura. On a small piece of paper I drew a city, a city schema. Along three faces of a hexagonal wall, three tall doors. Within the walls three trees and three narrow towers, many-windowed triangular prisms. Symbolic representation - can it bring forth what is not? Young children, and I, along with them, are nourished by the belief that YES, in a way, our pretending and imaginging and artful doing DOES nourish and bring something forth. One night I traveled by subway with a kit of candles, matches, incense. Arriving at the empty home of a friend I entered with the key that was given me, climbed stairs, next a ladder, then through a hatch above me, straight out onto the roof. Then, crouching and struggling with matches and strong air currents I lit and burnt my drawing under a new moon against whose face our planet's shadow was a great, dimming vesica: tender, contingent, a transparent and palpable mantle not of loss but of presence. All shadows speak of presence, after all. The moon sank, down into the glowing, humming evening of the city we share here, away from steady Venus. The drawing burned, a sheaf of flame flowing backwards towards my hand but not harming me. The drawing flared, blackened and contracted then grew soft and pale again. When the fire had gained from the paper what it most wanted, there remained an inch-square scrap. On that scrap was spared one tiny door, drawn by me and skirted by the fire. I cannot say why burning the drawing of this notional city has rendered it more powerful or real for me, extending its presence far into three and four dimensions. But I feel it has - and I have one small doorway in.
For this past month it seemed that I was a scarce and precious commodity for my children. Taking on the status, nearly, of our two classroom cats: much abused stuffed animals with well wrung necks and drooping whiskers, one gray (and large and quite ugly), one black (and smaller, velvety and quite comforting.) The cats are much in demand at rest time. Aisha was the first to confer upon them their status as objects of desire. Because she wanted and needed the gray cat at rest time, observant, competitive children (Olenka and Lesley at first) could produce emotional pyrotechnics by slipping the gray cat from the basket before Aisha had the chance to retrieve it for herself. Sometime mid-March we began a running list of “Who Gets The Cat/s At Rest Time.” Children begin asking about this list about one hour before rest time begins. As the months go by, the number of children requesting a spot on the list grows. Early adopters, late adopters, no one really loves the cats, I think. They covet the status of ownership. Maybe Aisha was the only one who ever loved the cats – that ugly gray cat, at least.
Particularly aggressive children generate novel terrain for competition out of thin, thin air, without the aid of props. [NOTE: no urine was actually released during the game described herein.] Olenka and Lesley call to me from the rusty iron platform of the tall climber. Both are angry and close to tears. Their shins are at my eye level and I look up at them. “Lesley hit me,” Olenka pouts. “What happened, Lesley…Olenka? What happened first?” “She peed before me,” Lesley whines. “What, what did you say?” “She peed.” I look at Olenka, who is now smiling in spite of herself. “We were playing a peeing game. A standing up peeing game. I peed first.” She pretended to pee…pssshh. “And then you got mad, Lesley?” “Yeah,” he admits. “And you hit Olenka?” “Yah,” he drawls, recollecting this with satisfaction. “Is it ok to hit…when you’re really mad?” I ask. “No,” they both answer. “What else could you do, Lesley, if you’re so MAD at Olenka because she PEED, before you, when you were playing a PEEING game?” “I could tell her I don’t like that.” They grin at one another. They like everything, for now.
But of course liking everything will never do. Selected things within the classroom enjoy brief periods of popularity and then fade back into the noisy abundance. Months ago the three blue wooden people in the block area were fiercely contested. Then it was the fashion to have one red and one blue guy. Injuries were narrowly avoided during the red/blue fad skirmishes. Leopards were less popular than tigers but are now seen as having slightly more cachet. Rhinoceroses are NEVER in style. Panda bears (we haven’t got any, but I used to in another classroom and school) can elevate levels of aggression with impressive rapidity – but even they, at some point, lose their painfully urgent charms. It is easy to restore their appeal, of course, or the appeal of any reasonably attractive material: remove it from circulation for some time and then reintroduce it with even a modest flourish.
And that is precisely what I have done with myself. Inadvertently, unavoidably. I leave my classroom for my office at 12:30 and return at 2:40 or so to a chorus of greetings – and my substitute teacher so often looking somewhat haunted and fatigued. We gather on the rug and I demonstrate how little time I am away from them. I set a large unit block down to represent our classroom, and a small unit block nearby to represent my office. I use a small toy garbage truck to represent me (it was handy.) “Here’s me, coming to work in the morning. I go right to the classroom and here’s what we do,” I begin laying down the schedule cards to show the parts of the day I share with the class, “Good Morning, Breakfast, Free Play, Clean Up, Meeting, Bathroom, Outside Play, Small Groups, Story, Lunch…” I pause. “Then I go to my office for a little while…” I drive the truck to the small block, “while you Brush Teeth, Rest, and have Snack.” I lay the cards down crisply. “Then,” I drive the truck BACK to the big block, “I come back, we play and talk, and we say…Goodbye.” I lay the last schedule card down emphatically it makes a little ‘toc’ as I place it. “Look,” I say, “I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ELEVEN, parts of our day that I spend with you. There are only THREE parts I don’t spend with you.” I am pleased that everyone seems satisfied with this demonstration. I put the truck away and the cards and the blocks.
It occurs to me, quite recently, that I have only the appearance of being a commodity in demand. I am in fact the consumer driving up the value of my students. I miss and need them, I long for their company and for the longueurs and rhythms of my whole classroom day. I want to go on and on discovering the same things about these children over and over again – because it takes me so long to learn. They make intricate bids for my attention, present me with drawings, have troubles and seek my help, command me ‘sit here, sit here’ for lunch, call my name scores of times each day. They are my adornment. Perhaps even the jewels of the city of my self, or even the very door. “What if I had not? How will I now?”
