The Teeming Brain

Why is it that whenever I have a day off work, I’m less likely to make a blog post on time than when I’m stuck in my classroom? I dunno. I had the day off yesterday in recognition of Easter (the school where I work actually called it “Easter Break” on the district calendar instead of something generic like “Spring Holiday”), and no blogging happened. Oh, well.

This week’s entry is a transcription from my private journal. It’s been awhile since I made a post like this. In fact, I think I’ve only shared a single journal excerpt previously here at The Teeming Brain, in a post last October titled “The irreducible daimonic element on authentic education.” So it’s about time I continued this minor tangent.

In recent months and years my journaling has been sporadic. Whereas all throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s my journal was an ongoing obsession, now it’s died down to an occasional eruption. In 2003 I culled a book-length collection of excerpts from my scattered notebooks and titled it There Is No Grand Scheme. It’s currently unpublished, but you can read excerpts in a book titled In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, which was published in May 2006 by Impassio Press.

If you do read those excerpts, or if There Is No Grand Scheme is ever published, you won’t find the following entry in it, since I wrote the entry after culling and editing the book. It explores a fundamental and frequent cast of mood and thought that often overtakes me, especially when I’ve been reading the words of other authors who share a sensibility similar to my own.

It also shows me pursuing a spontaneous line of thought without concern for whether it adds up to a coherent point with a fleshed-out conclusion.

* * * * *

04/30/04, Friday, 7:15 a.m.

Currently reading Amiel and feeling a deep & powerful fascination with his struggles to come to terms with the conflicting drives & thoughts & doubts within him.

For many years I have keenly perceived two possible ways with spiritual or religious longings, two contrasting understandings of the ultimate spiritual goal, as well as two distinct methods of approaching it. One way is to regard the self’s deep longings as something that can be met and fulfilled by attaining their object, by achieving what the longings point toward. The other way is to regard that longed-for object as illusory and the longings themselves as misguided; to regard the longings as evidence not of the existence and possible achievement of their object (as in the theology of C.S. Lewis), but as evidence of a defect or disruption in the self that longs, and thus as something to “see through” and transcend. The first view holds that the soul’s longing can be positively fulfilled, while the second holds that the soul’s longing is fulfilled by being recognized as delusory.

Chesterton brushed up against this issue in his Orthodoxy when he contrasted the characteristically Christian statue of a saint (eyes wide open and staring, looking eagerly toward the divine goal to be obtained) with the typical Buddhist statue (the Buddha smiling with eyes closed, gazing inward in silent, peaceful detachment). Others have noted the division as well, such as Alan Watts, who in Psychotherapy East and West invoked almost exactly the same contrasting image of religious iconography that Chesterton did but used it to make an almost diametrically opposite point.

Amiel does much the same thing when he contrasts Christianity with Buddhism, and although his understanding of Buddhism is colored by the 19th century Schopenhauerian misunderstanding of it as pure “annihilationism,” still his recognition of the fundamental character of, and differences between, the two views is acute and poignantly affecting.

I’ve just been reading his entry from August 31, 1869, wherein he virtually cries out in agony over his inability to know which of the two positions to settle upon, and also his inability to believe wholeheartedly in or commit fully to either of them.

Here as elsewhere, I see myself reflected in Amiel, and he in me, to an astonishing degree. These two ways with the self’s longings have been with me for so long that I have almost made an identity out of my suspension between them. Something, however, seems to have definitively tipped within me during these past two years or so, because I have not been as susceptible lately to those wholesale uprushings of Christian longing that used to burst within me at regular intervals.

Of course it has not been lost on me that this has coincided with the onset of my inability to write a story, although I have been unable to arrive at any clear understanding here.

My first viewing of the film Chariots of Fire in the late 1990s fixed for me an iconic image of the soul achieving its longing in positive, Christian fashion. When Ben Cross’s Abraham sits in the audience seats beside the track after having lost his first race and replays helplessly, in agony, the mental image of Eric Liddell bursting across the finish line — that image stabs right through my heart. With eyes closed Abraham/Cross purses his brow in pain, and we see what he’s seeing in his mind’s eye: the image of Liddell running like a virtual elemental force, arms flailing in their characteristic undisciplined display, head thrown back in a kind of primal rapture, mouth open and lips drawn back in a kind of leonine gasping-fierce grimace of ecstasy. Liddell breaks the tape with his chest as the rushing, roaring sound of the crowd swells. Abraham cannot stop replaying the memory with deepest agony.

Later, when Abraham wins his Olympic gold medal, there is no sense of victory but just a hollow feeling of loss while Vangelis’ unbearably melancholy music underpins the scene, subduing all ambient noise. Abraham is locked in his own private world of unfulfillable grief.

Back when I first created this blog in June, I thought I might occasionally post excerpts from the journal I’ve kept for nigh on 16 years now. This is the same journal that went into the creation of my currently unpublished manuscript There Is No Grand Scheme, which I culled from entries ranging over a nine-year span ending in 2003, and portions of which were published earlier this year in a book titled In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, from the very worthy Impassio Press. I even claimed up front, in my inaugural post, that I would probably share excerpts from this journal, which has served more than any other forum as the place where I have honed my thought processes and writer’s voice. Right now I’m about to make good on that claim.

I’ve always used plain old spiral notebooks for keeping my journal. Sometimes I find it fascinating to open one of these and flip randomly to an entry, since I’m often surprised to see what I was thinking and feeling at a given point in my past. Many times when I go back to reread previous entries, it’s like rediscovering a forgotten portion of my inner life, since I have no recollection of having written those particular words.

That’s what happened this morning when I randomly opened one of these notebooks and was presented with an entry dated Thursday, February 19, 2004, at 12:40 p.m. The subject of the entry was education, which seemed eerily appropriate to present itself this very morning since I was about to leave the house to attend an all-day professional development seminar where teachers from public schools in my regional conference were slated to convene and share their personal strategies for improving student performance on the MAP test. MAP is the acronym for the Missouri Assessment Program, which is Missouri’s official academic tool for measuring student academic achievement in public schools. I hate it. So does every other teacher in the state, as far as I can tell. As with all top-down, government-mandated tests, the MAP, far from being an objective measurement of academic achievement, is instead an intrusive animal that has little or nothing to do with authentic education and everything to do with bureaucracy, red tape, political pressures, and the quantified, socially engineered approach to teaching that’s based on a muddled mingling of behaviorism, “outcome-based education,” and the economic commodification of every aspect of life. As such, it’ an academic avatar of the contemporary American zeitgeist — a dreadful, deadening academic tool that is fully in harmony with the tenor of the times.

But I digress. Below is the journal entry I flipped to this morning. I wrote it nearly three years ago as I was nearing the end of my third year of teaching. I don’t remember writing it, nor do I remember what event or events motivated me to do so. But I can tell you that my thoughts haven’t changed at all in the intervening two and a half years:

“Nobody will ever succeed in quantifying nobility of mind and character. The approach to education that prevails in the U.S. right now is based on a crude cause-and-effect model. It holds that you, as a teacher, should teach your subject in a certain manner, using certain carefully defined methods and curriculum materials, the selection of which is based on all of the latest, most up-to-date theories and data obtained by educational researchers. The result of your efforts — according to this model — will be determined by the soundness of your methods and materials. If these are good, then your teaching will result in the formation of truly educated individuals: knowledgeable, noble-minded, and possessed of high intellectual and moral character. If, on the other hand, your methods and materials are bad, then your teaching will result in the formation of poorly educated or even uneducated individuals: obtuse, benighted, and marred by mangled souls and barbaric tendencies.

“This is so wrong-headed that it staggers the imagination. What the above-described model fails to take into account is the fact of individual inclination and drive. Some people possess an innate predisposition toward the things a true education requires and provides. Others are predisposed against the very same things. It is this predisposition, more than any other factor, which will produce a given result in a person’s life. And this predisposition is inherently elusive. Its rhyme and reason categorically defy capture and quantification by the educational theorists.

“True education depends on the presence of a factor in a person’s spirit or soul that cannot be manipulated or instilled — or removed, for that matter — by any external force or influence. This factor is, or is related to, the Unquantifiable itself, the Transcendent, one might even say the Perverse, which dwells in the depths of the human self and reality at large, and makes its presence known as an unaccountable, undeniable daimonic directive.

“Thus, the only kind of education that counts is the kind one achieves for oneself, under one’s own propulsion, even as one is sometimes duped into projecting or displacing the locus of the motivating force onto something external — which may occasionally and temporarily be a useful psychological gambit. “

* * * * *

So that’s how I sound when I talk to myself. Sometimes my sentences curl in on themselves until they’re almost unintelligible even to me when I return to read them later. (I must admit that I cleaned up a few of them in the above transcription.) Regarding the content of this particular entry, I find it interesting that I didn’t think to mention, even in passing, the important role of daimonic passion on the part of the teacher. Oh, well. Surely the reason lies somewhere within the long-forgotten impetus that led me to write those paragraphs in the first place. And in any case, I’ll probably share a few more journal entries about other topics in the future.

On another note entirely, I received my contributor’s copy of Dark Arts a few days ago and am very pleased with it. The production values are high and the interior is beautifully laid out. I’m also pleased to report that when I went and reread Mark McLaughlin’s and my story, it satisfied me as much as I had remembered. I had intentionally held off on rereading it for the past five years, and a part of me had begun to worry that I might be disappointed when the anthology was finally published and I took a second look at our story. But no, “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic” still ranks as one of the two or three stories that I’m most satisfied with. Mark and I were truly in the zone when we wrote that one. It deals successfully (in my opinion, anyway) with a plethora of themes that are very dear to both of us, including the nature of creative inspiration, its association with madness and despair, the subjective layers of human selfhood, and the horror of the infinite. If you happen to procure a copy of the anthology, I do hope you enjoy the story.

Of course, I feel unwontedly comfortable bragging about this one because I didn’t write it alone. Hats off to Mark!