How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour,
anger can be power
D'you know how you can use it?
—The Clash, “Clampdown”
…On the seventh day we began to read the speeches. In a room crowded with lunch boxes, chairs askew, notebooks piled on top of the table, dust-motes floating in the afternoon sunlight, flies buzzing over us, I told the kids that under anger is usually fear, and under fear is usually something beautiful. Under the stories in their speeches was the golden honey.
I am trying to teach the ways we can use the experiences and feelings that we already possess. But not only anger. All of us, even those aged twelve, have seen, felt, known, heard much. We have lived in a thousand places and states of mind. We each have a unique set of powers, born from what we know, that carry us through our days, and it is the best of these powers that our speeches try to summon, define, unleash, and use as guides to how we should live. If we can find the vein of feeling, the right feeling, then it only becomes a question of learning how we can use it.
It is easy enough to dwell on our failures, shortcomings, and deficiencies. And there is something to be gained by knowing where we have room to grow or how we might have done things differently when we didn’t do right. Indeed, much to the substance of the kids’ speeches revolves around taking a deep, momentary look at those times when what they did wasn’t enough, when they felt they weren’t enough, when they looked in themselves and felt something missing.
Like any class of kids, these adolescents (and grown-ups, for that matter) walk though the days feeling, on some level, at one time or another, any number of kinds of “samsara”: “I’m too short. I’m no good at math; I’m afraid to speak in class; I’m boring; I'm afraid to tell people when I feel put down; I’m too fat, too pale, too thin. My nose is funny; I’m mean; I don’t listen well; I’m not organized; I don’t understand abstract concepts; physics makes no sense to me; I’m not cool; my clothes make me look like a dork; people don’t understand what I like; I’m too easily distracted; I’m obsessed with things that drive others crazy; I don’t understand what others like; I only show a part of myself; I’m judgmental; I’m weak, frail, afraid. I’m terrible at soccer; I can’t keep up; I’m slow, I cry easily; I can’t cry; I anger easily; I don’t have a good vocabulary; I’m a slow reader; I worry about everyone else; I don’t get it. I’m a bad friend. A bad student. A bad classmate. A bad daughter or son.”
These thoughts swirl in us, constantly. And sometimes these things are true. But when we read the speeches, something else becomes clear to all of us. We are far more powerful, more creative, funny, wise, tender, loving, aware, cognizant, compassionate, and inspiring than we give ourselves credit for. It is from these truths that we extract the treasure: the flip side of the fears, the anxiety, the worry, the feelings of deficiency—is that treasure.
So when I ask, “What do I need to know, feel, understand, or do to live a good life” what we say we need is related to what we already feel. The miracle I have found, which I find over and over, like the sun born over and over, is the kids always know what they need to do. They already have the answers inside them. It is only a matter of helping them see that the great powers which they possess have been waiting, have been wanting, to be used.
In the end the speeches, rooted in the real feelings of adolescents, aspire to the highest dreams of humankind. The speeches call us to trust, hope, and love; they call us to the pain of others; they call us to see the best of what lives inside us.
Invariably, the speeches make us laugh, or look at each other across the table and all understand, together, in a split moment, the same bit of knowledge; we look across the table at each other and we raise our eyebrows at each other, because we hear something in ourselves through the words of another. The speeches call us to ourselves, to the capacity for change, growth, and deepening. One boy, reflecting upon his words and actions in seventh grade, wrote about his own mental enlightenment:
After that conversation I knew I really had to change, for the ladies and for me. The truth was, I was not just being dumb but I was disrespecting all the girls in the school and, for that matter, all women and men across the universe. Even though not every man and woman heard me, I was still saying things about mankind, so I guess I was really disrespecting mankind, and I am a part of mankind, so I was disrespecting myself….
That’s a huge leap, from the basement of a scruffy school in the mountains of Vermont, to begin to include in his thoughts the entire human race. An awareness, too, of his ability to effect the world beyond him.
At any rate, what I mean to say is when we hear the speeches, it becomes clear that the kids carry in them seeds of a super-humanity, some strands of compassion/ wisdom and wild, rambunctious, zygotian idealism that, unless pried out into the open, remains mostly latent, almost hidden, in the shadows, undefined, molten or tentative and, I believe, desperately waiting to be called forth.
“How should we live?” This question calls us forth and we find freshets of power in them. There is so much, once the vein is tapped, that they are swimming in it and we are all lifted by what they find. One boy, who had been in a morose funk since the start of this year and dwelling upon his perceived weaknesses as a student, was told by me to dwell in the feelings of dumbness that he felt. We defined that feeling, to establish its boundaries and its relative depth.
“So you say you’re dumb and you’re not so hot at solving an math equation. You say, ‘Forget about friction, let’s be dumb together.’ Why do you say that?”
“Because I’m afraid I’m dumb. If I say forget about friction it makes it easy because I don’t try and then I won’t learn anything and I’ll be dumb.”
“So you feel dumb, and rather than try, you sit there and space out and goof off, because then, if you fail, it isn’t because you’re dumb, it’s because you space out, good off an don’t care. Yes?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Is that a smart way to do school?”
“No, of course not.”
“If someone was afraid they stunk at soccer, would your advice to get better be to tell them to zone out, goof off, and quit. Would that make their feeling of being crappy at soccer go away?”
“No, it would still be there.”
“So was your technique of dealing with feeling dumb a good one?”
“No,” he said, now smiling. “It was pretty dumb.”
“So your ‘escape the feeling of being dumb’ technique failed. Now tell me how you’re smart.”
“Huh?”
“Tell me what you know.”
“Tal, I don’t’ know about anything. I’m dumb compared to all these kids.”
“Oh really.”
“No, I’m stupid. I don’t know big words. I can’t write like the other kids. I have to get help like every two minutes.”
Big words. As if they defined intelligence. What taught him that?
“But you might know something they don’t know. Like, maybe being smart isn’t only about being the first to figure out the math equation.”
“Uh, okay.”
“So tell me what you know.”
“Like…I know about love? For my brother? You mean like that?”
“Yeah, like that. In order for you to be smart and tell us anything, you have to know what you know.”
He proceeded to list a few things he knew about, a few things which are in fact the molten core of his being. Then he wrote this:
Tal asked me, “If I keep thinking I’m a dumb ass, what will happen?” “I don’t know,” I said with a groan. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You’ll be a dumb ass.” Then he kept going to add that I was not yet a dumb ass. He told me I had powers, I had powers and ways how can I use them. “Well,” I asked myself, “what do I have for powers?" Well, I know what pain feels like, I know how hate feels, I know how you can lose a brother or a mother, I know how to love, I know how to be mean and harsh; I have knowledge, feelings, ideas, I know about being rich, being poor, leaving your true home, I know the feeling of desire, of a person’s desire for guitars and sports. I know how to have friends, I know how it feels to not have friends, I now how it feels to get rejected from a girl, and from a family that doesn’t want you. I know how it feels to leave your best friends behind, and I know the feeling of coming back and giving them a warm hug that makes the hot tears flow down your cheeks.
Later, Nathan read his speech first, and I was proud of him and how he did it was great. I commented on it and gave him feedback. I compared his speech to Dante, and the circles of hell, which we learned about last year. Tal asked me then if I was stupid and a dumb ass? I looked at my fellow mates, who sometimes feel like I do, and I said, “HELL, NO."
Which is to say, “Hell, yes I have powers!” We have powers and we are naming the powers, the powers we might use to live a good life. We look at experience, convert into to knowledge, spread the knowledge out to us, for us, to friends. The power to see what is happening. To let the bad into us. To feel it’s contours, then look at it again, to see what it has to teach, say, how a dystopic place can diminish us, and to decide to make something different.
At the end of one of the speeches, a speech about witnessing the hard parts of a friend’s life, we got this from a girl in the class:
So what is a good life? Getting along with your parents. Loving the people around you. Feeling love in your life. Seeing what specific, good, sensual, wonderful things surround us all the time, and how lucky we are just to live the lives that we do. In that case I live a good life, a great life! But there’s more than just that. When you have those things, or feel that love, you feel sadness when you notice the people around you lacking it, even more specifically the people you love, which complicates the circumstances. Is a good life when you and the people you love feel love and give love? Or could a good life be having the ability or the power to give others better lives? As written on Dictionary.com “Love” is a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend. So a good life for me would be if I was able to give my friend the comfort and love that I feel in my life, for her life, in her home with to her mother. To give her a good life, would better my own life.
Can I give my friend a good life? I can be her someone to talk to. I can tell her I love her. I can let her cry when she needs to but make sure she knows I’m there, and that she’s not alone. But only my friend can truly enrich her own life. But after I give her what I can give her, then what can I do for myself?
We need to live with our eyes open, and let in the good things. All of the good things, and we’ve got to see those good things clearly and hold on to them. But a good life isn’t a life excluding anything bad, because how else would we learn? We have to keep our eyes open to the good things and let the bad things in so we can learn from them. The only way to live is to be open, that’s how we learn, that’s how we act, that’s how we cry, and that’s how we have to be in order to get anything out of our lives. Try to avoid Samsara, whether it’s in the form which mine was, or my friend’s, but know when you’re beginning to drift towards it and stop that from happening. I’ve been there, and it is terrible. Not only do you tend to bring down others with you, but if you drift far enough, you may not be strong enough to pull yourself back, not alone, anyway. So today, go home and tell your parents thanks for everything that they do for you, which they do a lot. And think about what you can do for friends who may not be as fortunate as you, could you make their lives better? What could you tell them to give them some kind of enlightenment of how good their lives are? I think about my classmate, whose life is feels like it is breaking apart right now. He feels alone, and scared, but at school he is the happiest person around. He’s always laughing, and encouraging people in whatever they’re doing, and working hard; on the soccer field, in the classroom, wherever he is, and it is completely inspiring! He is living his life with his eyes and his heart wide open, wide open. And I’m telling you, this is the way to live your one wild and precious life.
To decide that the world can be different or better, and to identify an image to fit that vision, to project one’s aspirations into the unknown future—all of that is a disavowal of cynicism and apathy. It is, rather, an invitation, a summons, to those who listen and to the one who speaks, to enlarge the good.
For example, this last section from one of the speeches read this week, about linking a personal vision to our collective aims.
When we are in a place where we feel comfortable to bring out what is inside us, it’s not hard for us to see what is good in another person. I can see that Sophie’s “obsession” with Urban Outfitters, is not all she is, or that Evan cried on the second day of school.
But our good feelings can’t come from facebook. They can’t come from cover-up personalities. They can’t even come from Hollister clothes. They can’t come from music until we put a true, real part of our minds and hearts into it. They can’t come from our writing until we exert that true, real energy into it. These feelings come from the love that we have. This love is Ollie saying he will do a lot to be friends with Calder. It is that Sophie doesn’t want to leave her mom alone, that Rider doesn’t want to be so self centered. It’s these seemingly small things that represent the love we have inside us. Those are the real fires burning and it should be our goal to know that the light that those fires give to us is not shallow and weak, but strong, and lasting.
Our love for each other at this school happens here. This is the Clash City Rockers, except we’ll call it the North Branch City Rockers. When we live our life we should want it to be real. We cannot understand and love each other here at this school until we let ourselves exit our superficial distractions and know that this is the place that we need to turn into a form of utopia for each other and ourselves. This is the real utopia, the utopia that we make. It won’t and should not be perfect but we’ll get as close as we can.
I want every single one of you to know where to find your own happiness. I want to find my happiness in all of you. I want you to tell me what makes you feel good and I will try to give that to you. This is all we have to do be friends. To love each other, to be a family. You don’t need to be at my band rehearsal to know that feeling that I had, because we are going to make it happen here in this room, when we have a morning meeting, a conference, a play practice, a project, or a literature class. This is where we are going to have that controlled chaos and that controlled beauty. It is now only up each of us to say to ourselves and to each other: “I am going to do this. I am going to give myself to this school, to this purpose, to these words, to these feelings, and to these people.”
The story of one of us, or what one of us feels, given to us, makes us look at and see each other. A feeling becomes a link—not a binding, limiting chain, but a chain of connection, one that links us together. Such stories, cast into future time and space, become our bridge. Robert Frost, in his poem “West-Running Brook,” speaks to this idea. A man and his wife walk through these Ripton woods and imagine the brook before them as a symbol of their permanence, the permanence of their love and the possibility that world is hospitable to our deepest feelings.
'We must be something.
We've said we two. Let's change that to we three.
As you and I are married to each other,
We'll both be married to the brook. We'll build
Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be
Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.
Look, look, it's waving to us with a wave
To let us know it hears me.'
We must be something. We want the world to know it hears us. We want the world to answer back, to hold us up, to carry us. We must be something. That can be said as an imperative, as in, it is our responsibility to be something, something great and purposeful. But the words can also be read in the hopeful, inquisitive…as in, “I hope we are something. We are, aren’t we? Aren’t we?” We assert what we want, and yet that assertion comes with hesitance, for the thing we assert we want is also fragile and tender and vulnerable.
We say “we must be something,”—we demand it and, in the right circumstance and the right place, we begin to move toward that something. We sometimes some of us don’t believe it—this idea that we have powers, but we keep scratching, we keep coming back to ourselves. And when we hear each other utter these words, not in isolation but in communion with each other, we find reassurance, strength, and a common path we all share.
This communion leads us to a place, finally, where we can feel the walls between us become porous, and where the goodness of ourselves and others moves between us freely, interpenetrating. When that happens, ideas and knowledge and awareness of what is outside us can move into us. When we are this lucky, learning really happens.
One boy wrote about this feeling between us as he searches in his speech for a way to live less for himself and more for others:
Today Rose talked about Plato the philosopher. She said that he believed that we are all chained in a cave. Facing the wall. With perfection passing behind us. All we can see are the dancing shadows on the wall, created by a raging fire. Plato believed to get to utopia you had to break free of those chains, and turn around, to face the fire and see perfection. That’s what we need to do, here at this school, here in this world. We need to turn around, and see each face lit up by this fire by this light. We want to see each other’s illuminated faces across the flame, and recognize them, and know them, and love them. We need to be able to walk across those coals to save the ones who have fallen into the fire, our bare feet burning on the white flame, not feeling any pain. We have to pick up those people bring the back to the safety, and wash their wounds and heal them. We have to keep this fire going forever. So everyone chained to the wall can be free and see the light and see the perfection.
I as a person will never be perfect. We as a school will never be perfect. And we as a world will certainly never achieve perfection. But we can still try. Through, compassion, selflessness, and love. We can and might be perfect.
Last year we read a book of poems in lit class. For those two months of reading that book I looked forward to going to lit class. I would love writing my lit responses and I loved reading that book. The poems in this were by Mary Oliver. One poem in this book stood out to me. It was “White Flowers.”
As you hear in this poem the woman in the field wakes up and is one with the flowers. Where there is only the faintest line between her and the white flowers. We need to be one with each other. I need to be one with everybody. I want to barely be able to see the line that divides us, we and me. I want to feel like we are all one. We are all around this fire together. Because, remember if one of falls in we will all fall. If one succeeds, we all succeed.
****
The speeches are where we begin in ourselves. In literature, we begin in the “first spinning place” of Dylan Thomas’ poem “Fern Hill.”
We begin our lives, we hope, with the powers of apprehending, perception, and openness to the music around us. As time passes we become aware of ourselves, and of time passing. We begin to be aware of our awareness, conscious of our consciousness, of stories other than our own, of persons beyond us, and of the complexity of the world. This is the state of being for adolescents, who are growing from the power of innocence to the power of experience, caught at various narrow ledges between those two states. The question then becomes: can we live with awareness and knowledge of suffering, death, age, time, the brevity of life with an equal measure of singing power? That is, the song we heard in childhood, the “tunes from the chimneys”—how do we grow older and learn to sing ourselves? To be the singers, not only the listeners?To become a maker, not just the audience. The world is not always going to be utopian tunes from chimneys: so we must learn how to sing, even in difficult circumstances.
Then we listened to Dylan Thomas read the poem; and he does sing in his chains like the sea.
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