Joyful Study

I live in a tiny room in the back of our pink house.  It looks like an attic room with ceilings that slope down on either side.  I probably have close to one thousand books in this space, one and a half file cabinets, an old computer, an armchair that I can sink into to read and look out at what is left of a once beautiful walnut grove.  Nothing gold can stay—not in Flint anyway.  I also have a single bed, pushed up against the windows.  My husband snores, and I got tired of sleeping on the floor.  On nights I can’t find my way into the dreamwood, I yank the shades down, and they roll up, slowly opening our eyelids on stars.  Recently, a female confidante insinuated (in a tone that was both matter of fact and pitying) that, while my literary life was filled with intensity and passion, I hadn’t been able to participate in real life.  She is wrong.  My room may look like an anchorite’s cell, but it is my mindscape. 

Safe in this tiny space, I study, and when I lose myself in the activity, the room is full of conversations and thoughts and characters.  It is only joyless when I am too aware of the time or get anxious about how the lesson will be received by students or when, let’s face it, I take myself too seriously … and forget that these times alone with books are my music, my play, and my prayer.

There was one day last week when the texts I was preparing to teach—the Faerie Queene, Henry IV, and “The Blossoming of Bongbong”—all seemed to have something to say about the difference between joy and joylessness.  I was happy doing the preparation for class, but it occurred to me that much of the delight I take in these private walks and talks with my characters must be tamed or censored out when I talk about the texts in the classroom because I have to use public language and because I must make an effort to elicit student responses.  But maybe there is value in sharing something of the intimate sounds my mind and voice make when they animate these texts and ideas, even if it is only to persuade others not to be afraid of solitude.  I read in my room--alone, sounding my voice, in search of another.  I meet the intimate when I find a line that opens a new thought.  I meet the intimate when answers come quickly to the questions that have barely had time to form.

What brings people joy?  Is it holiness or wholeness?  Being a saint or being a human being?  Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser, says you must be both simultaneously and that you cannot, in fact, be one and not the other.  The “Legend of Holinesse” follows Red Crosse.  His name is George, but we don’t learn that until we learn his human story which is revealed at the end of the book on Mount Contemplation.  Why does it take Spenser so long to tell us the protagonist’s name.  Is he trying to say that our earthly origins are as mysterious as is our metaphysical destiny?  Red Crosse or RC winds up in fairyland waiting for an adventure, and he gets one:  he may rescue the lady, Una’s parents, the once upon a time king and queen of Eden, from the great dragon Satan, which he can do only if the special suit of armor fits him—the armor of a Christian man.  The suit fits, but the man inside remains an inexperienced rustic youth with all kinds of feelings he does not begin to understand.  

Out of the gate, riding along in complete steel marked with the cross, he did seem “too solemn sad.”  From the beginning, RC is taking himself too seriously, is too worried about failure, winning glory, impressing the ladies, and completing the task to perfection.  When he has dreams of loves and lustful play, he wakes up horrified.  The psychological mechanisms of repression and projection are everywhere in Spenser’s poem.  Because he doesn’t trust his feelings, doesn’t use them to guide him through the wandering wood, he gets utterly lost:  led by a witch to the House of Pride, he fights the knight Sans Joy for nothing more than the trophy of his slain brother’s shield.  So much of modern life is taken up in serious competition for such meaningless prizes.  So many people are popping pills to feel better, to be less anxious, to sleep.  Most people are joyless. 

This is the backdrop to the work I was doing on Tuesday: figuring out how I can teach the story to help us all get out of our deep holes:  depression, despair, self.  Is it possible to recover from major sin and big time failure?  Enter Arthur.  He is the knight in shining armor, but he is also all too human.  After helping the lady (who is carrying around RC’s armor, the relics of his ruin), he defeats a giant phallic symbol, and pulls RC, who looks like a corpse, out of the dungeon.  To him the lady rushes with “hasty joy,” but he cannot respond in kind.  He is “cheerless.”  A way out opens when we hear that Arthur has been through all of the same experiences:  he mocked love and repressed any desires he had, and, like RC, he, too, sat down to rest in the middle of his race.  It was a warm day in the woods, and Arthur was tired of riding so he lay down and dreamed the fairy queen made love to him.  He woke up and she was gone, but he is convinced that she was real because she left a sign—pressed grass in the spot where he dreamed she lay.  Trusting that this dream, this idea, this ideal is part of a larger plan, he set out in search of her.  Arthur is truly joyful.  He lives in the moment, taking opportunities to listen, to help, to love.  Two knights have had similar experiences:  RC has a sex dream, and he runs away from his lady and his feelings.  Arthur has a similar dream, but runs toward the dream queen.  One is depressed and one is joyful. What is Arthur’s secret?

His character says to me:  Accept yourself.  Trust your feelings.  Pursue your ideas and dreams.  Stay in your own story.  Don’t listen to critics.  Don’t get hung up on outcomes.  Dwell in the eros of every moment that gives us new ways of becoming more whole by giving ourselves away.  These are all the things I was thinking as I worked on my lesson for Renaissance Literature.  But I had to put RC aside to get ready for Immigrant Lit, and I was a little terrified of the story I’d planned to teach because the character was very strange, and it wasn’t clear how an oddball with the nickname Bongbong, who rejects the American dream (work, material success, upward mobility), fit in with the themes of the anthology that focuses on the immigrant experience.  As I worked it all came clear.  He comes to America to live a human life but finds himself surrounded by androids.  He rejects linearity to pursue enjoyment:  books, films, friends, visions, music.  Madman or mystic—who can say?  What I concluded was that emigration is a self-scattering experience.  The self splits or doubles as the emigrant takes on new identities, learns new languages, attempts to make a new home.  Instead of panicking and trying to assimilate, making himself over in the image of a young executive, he lives in the moment and feels things.  Artists live like this I think—they tolerate the scattering of themselves into images, characters, ideas; and as their works take shape, they form and reform themselves.  It’s like jazz.  No wonder Bongbong listens to Coltrane’s “Meditations” in which the saxophone reaches for the melody of compassion, love, and serenity out of noise and chaos of the streets.  Saint John Coltrane.  There is a church in San Francisco in which congregants pray by meditating to his music.  

After hours spent wandering through these books, I feel a bit dazed.  I get in my car and drive out to For-Mar which is on the way to my daughter’s school.  It is sunny and the colors are popping orange and red.  The deer come a little too close.  A pheasant beats its feathers in the dust.  I lay down and roll in orange pine needles—and, all at once, I’m home in the Adirondacks of upstate New York even though this place is just an overgrown farm turned arboretum.  I am part of everything.  The characters and the lines of poetry float around my head, but I make it to the little hill on the far side of the park.  I like this hill because as I walk up the mowed path, it looks like I will walk straight on into the sky or up into the oak tree planted just behind it.  At the top of my own Mount Contemplation, I lay down, forgetting how little or how much time I have and soak up the sun like a pumpkin in a field, not thinking, just being.  Down on the level of the homeliest weeds and grass, I see a little thistle plant, browned from nights of cold, trying to release a clump of white fuzzy seeds.  The wind and the warm sunlight work and work to take those seeds, but something in the plant holds on to them still.  Let go.  It’s okay.  Let it all go.  Self-scattering, I think: that is the secret of joy.  To lose yourself, spend yourself, share yourself, knowing that all can never be lost and trusting that undreamt of things will be given along with our daily bread.  I can’t quite tell the students all of this while standing in front of them in a bland classroom when most are still swimming between sleep and waking life.  But maybe after writing my thoughts in this form that wavers between sound and sense, I’ll find ways of injecting the sounds of intimacy into my school marm speech.  Maybe one morning, I’ll walk in at 9:30 and sing, “Morning has broken, like the first morning.  Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.  Praise for the singing.  Praise for the dawning.  Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.”