Yet Let us Enjoy the Cloven Flame Whilst It Glows

I got to stand up and take a step/You and I have been asleep for hours

I got to stand up/ The wire is stretched in between our two towers

Stand up in this dizzy world

—U2, “Stand-Up Comedy”

On Monday, since it was the start of Rosh Hashanah (the New Year), I brought in the Shofar, the sanctified Ram’s horn, which is blown at the end of the High Holy days in Judaism. We tend to blow it when the spirit moves us. “The liturgy of Rosh Hashanah is designed to get you to wake up and pay attention not only to who you are but who you have been and who you mean to be…Rosh Hashanah is about reverence and gratitude for life, the mother-lode of all religious insight. Yom Kippur is about telling the worst truth about yourself, and getting new life from that” (From Living a Jewish Life).

So we bellowed into the Ram’s Horn and made it toot and squawk. We try to think about who we are, who have been and who we aim to be. That is the essence of the speeches, which we have continued to read. The speeches, at the core, make claims for what is necessary for good life. The kids, through the speeches, claim their gratitude for what they have; they map out paths for us to consider, and solift what is meaningful up from what is not so we can see the good more clearly.

We do this by talking around the table. Many people ask me why we have only twenty-seven students. Why not add a high school? Why not make the school bigger? We once thought we would do this, and so expand the imprint of the school. But the reason we stuck ourselves at twenty-seven is so that we can all remain seated around the table and have a single discussion. So we can all talk to and hear each other. Twenty-seven is big enough for variety, tension, and wonderful human collisions, but small enough to all be able to look each other in the eyes, answer back, and learn what each other has to teach. We can have a conversation, and each kid will have a part to play and can be heard or noticed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay “Circles”:

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs are supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, --knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday, -- property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and the like, have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations, and dance before our eyes. And yet here again see the swift circumspection! Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

Let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls! This is why I always say, in answer to the question, which year of teaching was the best, “THIS year is the best!” I answer, with not a single doubt. THIS is the year that is happening, this is when our tongues are on fire! We do not cast back for a memory of the flame, but we sit before a new flame in present light, and we are enjoying, in this moment, the glow of it upon our walls. And so it is this conversation, a continuation of years of conversations, that awakens us, perturbs, agitates, and moves us. Everything else is statues and memories and specters. Now is the time, now should be the time, when we are “fiery men” and everything inanimate “dances before our eyes.”

So in the conversation this week. Among all the other things: trying to learn how to function as a group while making Utopian Villages; using the democratic process to elect clean-up checkers and chose a name for the Utopian Village area (“The Round Bale”—as in its shape and how it contains a bundle of all of the kids’ ideas and ideals, all the result of work and mental harvest); wiffleball continuation; parents and guardians meeting and conversating; two soccer games (two shut-out victories for Prunes FC); heroic exploits on the field and in the room; changing the daily schedule to make it work better; making clay triptychs which contain symbols for “how we should live”; baking cookies with maple butter cream frosting, which also included reducing fractions in order to get smaller batches of cookie dough; writing first place descriptions, trying to get as many speeches read and responded to as possible, trying to chose project topics; AND getting deeper into The Red Pony.

We read “Fern Hill” and discussed Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden first, before we started The Red Pony. These are the first shining moments, and they are brief. Such poems and stories—concerning the brevity of time—are analogues to these “middle years” between childhood and adulthood. It is Adam and maiden but for a few moments. Adam and Eve appear on page three of Genesis and are sent away east of Eden on, you guessed it, page three. Such perfection, such a flower, such moments are miraculous but fleeting. As Dylan Thomas writes: “So few and such morning songs, before the children green and golden follow him out of grace.” We see and apprehend these songs but they cannot last. Beautiful but ephemeral, they are as brief as the sunlight glinting off the water of a pond.

So it is with Jody and his pony. We find him in the beginning of the book, in stasis. He is held between two worlds, with no goal or purpose, nothing to aim at, his only responsibility to stack wood in the wood box and scatter feed for chickens, his vision fenced in. Childhood is behind, the future is up ahead. But how to get there?! It is not enough to mope around the farmyard, even if the farmyard is a “utopian” kind of child’s paradise. It is not enough to smash muskmelons, throw rocks at birds, do a few chores haphazardly, to simply be waiting, in an unquestioning routine. While nothing bad is happening, nothing is happening; and so something, even as dark as black birds, must happen.

The beautiful, soaring hawk harassed by black birds. The gate, once secure, left unlocked and swinging in a dark storm. The warm, enclosed barn, filled with the warm bodies of beasts, now blown through with cold, wet winds. Without these turns, the story would not be compelling. Lessons could not be learned, there would be nothing to left to touch us.

When Jody sees his horse, it is shining, a deep red, it “was Adam and Maiden.” We see him, then, with the equivalent of the highest good. But is he spiritually lifted? Does the horse, in itself, give him spiritual power? No, it has been gifted to him, but not yet earned. The pony has not delivered the ultimate gift. Or, we should say, the highest gift is not yet been made incarnate.

The Pony was a shining gift, yes, a gift he willingly received, but there is more than he can yet imagine. The pony, in its new-born perfection, is not life complete; with it, with life, with growing up—comes loss, suffering, pain, grotesquery, longing, unquenched desire, and inchoate rage. Spiritual power will come from living through and understanding those deeper currents. If we say The Red Pony is about learning, we say it is about learning what life is, about what must happen in time, the way how, through time and loss, we must stand up, grow up, in order to gain the spiritual power to sing in our chains.

In our own conversations here at school we look at moments such as these, when what was given or done shifts and becomes more than we imagined it ever would. We train ourselves to look at these moments, to hold them and to wring out of them whatever might be good.

Say a girl, young and tender-hearted, spends the morning with her aged grandmother, a morning remembered as though the two of them were the only people in the world. She lay in the bed with her grandmother listening to the songs of birds, and her grandmother told her the names of birds. They rise, and the young girl helps her grandmother slip her bony feet into her slippers and holds her as she stands on her thin legs. They walk into the kitchen together, where the young girl helps her grandmother, with Real Lemon in the tea and honey on the toast. The grandmother feeds her old dog toast under the table, against the rules, but, her granddaughter understands, she must feel something extra for the old hound. The young girl wanders off, to watch her show, a silly TV show, but she wants to watch it. She has forgotten her grandmother, and leaves her grandmother, momentarily, to do a childish thing. After all, she is still a child.

The grandmother follows, and finds her and says, “I didn’t know where you went. I was looking for you.”

And so the young feels something rise up in her, the feeling that she left and abandoned her grandmother. Left her alone and bewildered. The young girls feels like she has done a great wrong—has committed some treacherous betrayal. And when, sometime later, her grandmother dies, the young girl can only think about how she left her grandmother to go watch Hannah Montana. Why did I do that, why did I do that, she asks. She is asking herself, and now she is asking us.

“So did she do a bad thing?” I asked. “Is the feeling she felt, that she did a bad thing, the right feeling? The feeling of guilt that she carries for not having stayed by her grandmother’s side?”

“How could it be a bad thing? There was no way for her to know what it all meant. She was a child. She had to do the things a child does,” says one.

“What is the feeling of guilt, then?” I asked.

“It means she loved her,” someone offers. “She feels guilt because she feels responsibility. She feels responsibility because she loved.”

“Or, she loved her, but feels bad about the time when she feels like she didn’t love her.”

“But that still means she loved her, no matter what she did.”

“You got it,” I say. “She loved her grandmother as deeply as a kid can love something. So how can she move the guilty feeling of the time she watched Hannah Montana out of the way and see that she only ever loved her grandmother?”

“She has to remember what she felt when she was listening to the birds,” someone offers.

“Yeah, I mean, she’s a kid. She has to be a kid, too. But she was also being loving when she was a kid.”

“You’re telling her she has to forgive herself for being a kid, and also think about the ways she loved her grandmother?”

“Yes.”

“So, hold both feelings, simultaneously? The acceptance that she had the impulse to be a kid, the deeper impulse to be good and loving. Can both feelings live in her simultaneously?”

“Yes, it means she is more aware. She felt the feeling of leaving her grandmother then. She feels it now. So she loves her grandmother. She has to remember that.”

The conversation arrives at this point. The girl, who has written this speech for us, has told us something about who we are and might be. What it means to be alone. To leave someone alone. The power of our actions, or inactions. The depth of feeling we might live with. The weight of feelings, and how we carry them, and how they might instruct how we live. But there is more.

“It makes me think of my grandparents. I don’t have much of a relationship with them,” someone says.

“What she had I wish I had,” says another.

And in the space that follows, in the short silence between the end of that sentence and the next, a door has opened up, the boundaries of the common are expanded. “The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday, -- property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and the like, have strangely changed their proportions,” writes Emerson. The forms before us change. For the young girl, to see that her love of her grandmother and the time spent with her was a rare morning song, something not to weigh her down, but for her to treasure. For us, to see the largeness and beauty of those forms, and perhaps, to see ourselves anew.