The Future is Unwritten

“Tell your maw, tell your paw, I’m gonna take you back to Arkansaw”

—Ray Charles

We started with Wislawa Szymborska’s question: “How should we live?’ In her poem “The Century’s Decline,” she gazes upon the wreckage of the 20^th century, when we were supposed to have the means to end war, poverty, hunger and disease, but instead created the worst wars and most mass-human suffering in history.

A little bleak, maybe, but to ask the question here and now, with liberating naïveté and hope and faith, is to take a step towards something else, an alternative, a different way to walk into the future. To quote Joe Strummer: “The future is unwritten.” So we begin our quest in the attempt to begin to write that future, to erect a Eutopian scaffolding—though our own seeking and questioning and our innate powers and creativity.

My question: What do we need to know, see, feel, do, realize, or discover, to live a good life? Who is this “we”? Humanity? Our school? Our individual selves?

How do we carry ourselves with purpose, even as we admit that we have so much more to find? How does our knowledge and experience as an “I” relate to the collective “we?” How is the experience of one of us connected and relevant to all of us? What is a good life? What is “life?” What, even, is “good”—do we mean a good life in a mansion and a heated pool and some sweet technological gadgets and a new Gibson Sunburst Les Paul? Or do we mean good as in “moral”—authentic, true, pure, striving? Are we talking about the guitar—shining but inanimate—or are we talking about what we do with the guitar, whether we can awaken in it something that is really ourselves, something that flows from us, played over the strings with soul and a wild hunger to shake the world.

Tal told the story of Mozart’s antagonist, Salieri, from the film “Amadeus.” Do we want to fill all of our actions with love and fury in the quest to make something great, or will we be satisfied to play safe, hum-drum ditties that can barely reach the walls of the emperor’s court? Do we really want to be the Patron Saints of Mediocrity so long as we get what we think we want? Do we really want to be slugs, a low species of Teen, whose only by-product is a thin silvery stream of evaporating slime? Or, do we want to evolve into giants of the best that is in us?

Tal told another story:

“A student here once climbed the forty-six 4000 foot mountains in the Adirondacks. A great act of endurance and commitment. She excitedly told us about the upcoming day when she would climb the final one. ‘So what?’ said another student? ‘Why would you want to do that? What’s the point?’”

Tal continued: “She was so apoplectic that she could not answer. She sputtered and fumed and raged. ‘What kind of imbecile would ask such a moronic question?’ she bellowed.”

The question was not “Why would you do that?” The question was: “Why would you NOT climb the 46 mountains? Why would you ground yourself in some dark hollow with your eyes nailed to the tops of your shoes, rooted there in decay and short-sight. See, she was mad to live, and she was mad that her classmate seemed NOT mad to live, or at least, she was mad that he could not see in her the ferocity of someone who WAS mad to live.

We have found that this madness to live, to be close to life, to see what it has to teach, is infectious. It can be a kind of glorious unsettling chaos-inducing illness. A Dis-ease. And how should that dis-ease spread? How should we become dis-eased with never standing still? Or dis-eased with the knowledge that there is a time to stand still and a time to rise up? How, as peers and teachers, can we make a place where we shake things up a bit to become dis-eased into to wanting to seek more? To become artists of ourselves, as Stanley Kunitz wrote: “The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.”

Other Stories: Samson, who would not stand there being mocked, but was willing to bring the whole temple down—to exercise his power, to strike back at his antagonists and oppressors, to even die doing it. We looked at this story as some thing noble and beautiful, perhaps a bit scary—that to become one’s true self, to demonstrate one’s faith in the highest good and the absolute expression of one’s soul—one must be willing to destroy, to become unsafe, to feel the weight of things crashing down.

In order to discover all of this, in order to begin writing the future, I asked them to work backwards, often through tears that ran down their faces this very first week of school: “What in your past has instructed you to these ideas you hold now?” Yes, you want a safe place, emotionally and physically, and you need that to live a good life, but what in your experience, in your life’s history, makes you chose that here and now as the expression of a “good life?”

Then I remembered how that very morning, as I was leaving to come to school and start another year, our durn family cat Garfield got out. The rascal thinks the good life is outside—due to dangerous and blissful ignorance he doesn’t know about the Foxes and Fishercats.

“This morning my cat got out and went under the deck,” I told the students. “I couldn’t get him out. I am worried when our cat gets out. He might get eaten.” I looked at the expressions of my students as I told this story: no one seemed to care. They just stared at me, waiting for meaning. They were not moved, their hearts untouched.

So I re-told the story, the way it happened. “My cat got out, like I said. But here is what I didn’t tell you the first time. We have had two cats in the past who died in September when they got out. This morning Garfield was sitting under the deck where we couldn’t get him and we had to leave for school. He was looking for mice. As I called him through the lattice and tried to get him to come to me, I looked in the shadows behind him. There, in those shadows, I saw a cat skeleton with a patch of matted orange hair, the bones scattered in damp dirt and the body draped over a wire cable. It was our old cat, Elgin. He had gotten lost in a storm a few years earlier, and that was him, and he had come back to the house to die alone, under the deck, with his body splayed over a loose wire. That skeleton was resting there behind Garfield, who was only intent on finding mouse to bat around.”

I looked at them.

“How do you feel about my story now?” Their mouths were open. Some of the kids seemed to have been transported to a place of authentic pain.

The students were unanimous in their feeling that the second version was a better.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of the skeleton. We could feel that. That was the reason you were scared. You were scared of Garfield becoming a skeleton. The skeleton made you and us feel what you felt.”

“It was right behind him. The living form and the dead form. But the dead form had a bigger kind of power. So what are we saying?”

“The skeleton has to be shown. In the shadows. The past history.”

“Yes, the bones, the guts. The reasons behind. The story that preceded the present.”

Then we came to their stories: Can we make chaos fly from our fingers? Should we control chaos? IS there beauty in chaos? Is there too much control? Can distortion, feedback, and dissonance be heard as or made into something beautiful? How do we hold onto the past AND move into the future simultaneously Why should we want to live closer to life? How do we get closer to life? What has taught me that I should need to mend my ways? How do we fill the space, or are we even responsible to fill the space, when somebody leaves? Do we talk to our parents? Why is it important? A good life must include being loved, having a safe place—physically and emotionally—and have someone we can call or go home to. What happens if we are happy but people we love are not? What if we expend too much energy on worrying about others but we feel a nagging sense of incompletion in ourselves? How can we be happy and thoughtful of others at the same time? How can we be selfish and selfless at the same time? How important is having a place to make huge mistakes? What is the importance to learning in being forgiven for our mistakes, and understanding why we made them in the first place? What do we want from our peers or parents when we make mistakes? When we are confused and upset, but do not have the power or means to change our state, how should we live? How can we live or function in a state of confusion and doubt? Can we tell those who are important to us that we love them, appreciate them, understand them? Do we have the courage to call down our antagonists? And when we do, do we have the capaciousness of heart to understand and seek a solution to the reasons for why the antagonist antagonizes? If we are jealous, what drives the jealousy, what’s missing in ourselves? What happens when we project our fear or insecurity ahead of us instead of what is most tender and proud inside of us? Do we play small ball or long ball? What, even, does the life and death of a baby, sightless mouse—so briefly loved by one of my students—have to do with living a good life?

Can we go inside the whale and come out, or do we cower there? Who is responsible for bringing us out? Ourselves? Each other? Or God? Or luck? Are we passive or engaged? If we are passive, why? When we are engaged, and spitting out our lines with passionate intensity, what feelings do we create in ourselves? What controls us? How do we lift the chains? Are we saying the meaningful things we need to say to the ones who mean something to us? And always, are me making the most of time?

****

At Lake Pleiad we enacted a nine year-old ritual, the making of fairy houses and sculptures in the woods in the first Friday. As math teacher Rose so aptly noted, we went up to the woods together, along the narrow channel of Rout 125. That, she observed, was like the trunk of the tree, having been rooted in and sprouting from our three and ½ days in our brown schoolhouse. Now the trunk was rising up, going up and into the wood, the nearest height, and once to that height, we all spread out, like single limbs, each of us walking into a solitary space to make a new thing. Yes, we were within proximity of each other, but we could only see movements out of our peripheral vision and hear the sound of twigs snapping and the breeze blowing though the trees. In one hour thirty original sculptures erected under tree trunks and limbs, in the crooks of saplings and on the flat pine-needly floor. Mosses heaped into altars; imperfect, knobby sticks arranged into geometric perfections. Docks and landing jutting into the future, someone calling out the words of a song: “Wishful Thinking:” -- “Fill up your mind with all it can know.” A Eutopian soccer field. A hiding place. A chamber to protect what is holy. A monster with two mushrooms for eyes. A pyramidal tower. Writing in charcoal on the sun-heated granite. Colors of leaves spiraling in or out and a peace sign spread out like a great, fleeting mandala laying before us on our path—all of these our collective wishful thinking that we write as we go, as we write ourselves into our very own future.