Wild Men Who Sing the Sun in Flight

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."

—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

When we watched “Amadeus” on Friday everyone, it seemed, was open to receiving the meaning of the story, or if not the meaning, then at least the pleasure of an exciting story well-told. In the movie we see a wild genius who appears, to Salieri at least, to have been chosen to be the voice of God. Mozart’s genius is multi-dimensional: it is bawdy, profane, tender, bold, unpredictable, relentless, disciplined, and original. His vision is open to everything. But it has at its core neither logic nor reason, but something wild and untamed and infinite, which is embedded in his own true words: “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”

His character is, without a doubt, that of a wild man. Earlier in the day Yared had read Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Thomas speaks of another Wildman, the “Wildman who caught and sang the sun in flight.” The poem is an exhortation to live possessed of wildness and “blazing eyes.” In “Amadeus” Mozart lives with blazing eyes. Winston lives with blazing eyes, and they both live to know what it means to be human.

At our best, we live with blazing eyes, too, and when we do, we rise up from mediocrity to greatness. In the classroom it comes in little flashes of word or deed, moments of greatness, of profundity, as when a student can see what a fellow mate is saying: or when a fellow mate can say what another student is seeing. When we see that we build protective shells around the best things in us because we want to protect those things. When we realize that the shell is a barrier which keeps us from living and feeling. When one of us asks the question that breaks the shell another of us has built. When we break the shell ourselves and find ourselves living more fully, more able to apprehend the sights and sounds around us. When we are able to apprehend the nature of the world we live in, the corresponding rise in our feelings of love for the world.

These moments happen in the course of a morning, when the lights are still off, before the dust has risen. Or while discussing the sound of the thrush in 1984. Or creating a metaphor to describe Annie John’s metaphor of the black ball covered in cobwebs deep in her center. Or when Yared leaps from his chair to get a poem he has been carrying around for six weeks. Or when Rider tells Luke that he is proud of Luke. When Rio’s football logo comes in finally and it is an image of a sitting Buddha under a strange tree in the light of the moon; or when Aylee draws an image of the Proles fighting over a sauce-pan; or the symmetrical, wild beauty of Anneke’s mandala. Or Henry prodding his mates to work harder, commit more, and his mates rising the challenge. When Rider pushes himself to consider how much love he does has to give, and brings forth the question: is the love in me infinite; when Nathan uses the old intergoogle device to debate and write a definition of the word “love” which he shares with the class. When Cassie responds to a beautiful character sketch of her by Reed Me., with seven “points” of response; when Henry’s character sketch of Cassie, in which he says he wants to get to know more of her, is answered by Cassie’s in which she says she wants to give more of herself. When Lydia, Hannah, Bryn, and Cassie take on the challenge to be the Ninety Girl Bakers and make the school three purple cakes from scratch, with “NBS” messily written in icing patted on with the end of a plastic fork; Jesse saying that she wants to have close friendship, and she wants that others to have the same; when Luke writes a sketch about a girl whose beauty he admires; when Bryn works steadily for hours on a watercolor mandala and then decides it’s not right and starts again; when Reed Ma. uses her hands to describe the layers of thoughts and feelings inside Sophie, showing Sophie where her best thoughts lie, and Sophie can see it too, finally; when, in Anneke’s character sketch, Anna’s face lights up with understanding—at either math problem or the interactions of her classmates, or both at once; when Miles runs to help Tal set up the digital projector; When Ollie penetrates to the core of a conversation with insight that is at once wise and original; When Isabel condenses a four page sketch to one page, leaving only the feeling, reduced but clarified into intensity; when Claire knows that her feeling is not resolved so she keeps pushing late after school to get it clarified, and later her sculpture by the North Branch River is made by laying up thin panes of clear ice in front of the cave made by a large boulder; when Calder says he does not want to be friends only with one person, but with every one; when Evan remembers being able to be friends with a girl and it wasn’t strangely awkward; when Edgar sees that Tal is worn down and despairing at his task, so Edgar mimes everything he can think of to make Tal laugh; when Kiley offers Tal a mint because he is tired; when Sarah, in a fit of feverish hallucinations, pushes herself to finish reading Walden, and comes into school bubbling with ecstatic excitement because she did; or when Rose talks about Utopia, that it comes when we are able to act out our highest ideals, or, conversely, dystopia, which comes when we act without awareness of our highest ideals—and then she has everyone make Peanut-butter clay football teams. When Eric pushes and urges and gives us the time to make our greatest physical sculpture—the clubhouse of fire, earth, and wood—the bread-oven; or when Tal realizes that he only has time in his life to read 480 more books, give or take a few, and this numerical fact impels him to read more deeply, to mine with greater intensity, to savor every word. When we are all thinking that what we leave behind can be a trail of slime or of gold.

These moments all occurred in one week; this all happens in one day. All of this is what is in us, is what we are tying to bring out. It comes out in the way we arrange rocks into sculptures, or make nests out of dead ferns, in a collective sculpture down by the river; or in the way we try to hold ourselves together when 1/3 of the class is sick; or in Simon’s project on Emmett Till, where we have to learn how to look at difficult event in order to understand how the course of history changes for the good; of the hyper-delight in making 35 fantasy football teams which are really assertions of 35 personalities, organized into 5 haphazard divisions: Food, Social Tribes, Animals, Misfits, and Music (which could sort of describe our collective essential being). It happens when we realize that we do have moments where, like Winston Smith, we live in a clear glass sphere and we are touching the red coral of love; It happens when we hear a poem, understand a theorem, understand the way that heat is generated beneath the crust of the earth, and we realize that what we are doing here is a way of creating a human heat which is slowly changing us, transforming us under the surface of our days. It happens when we realize that we are making our own Golden Country, right here. It happens when we try to speak words that have the power to fork lightning, when we cry fierce tears and rave at the close of a day, or see the brightness of our deeds dancing in a barren wood. It happens when we hear our writings about each other, when we hear that John Adams, no more or less than any of us, simply wishes to do a little good.