Breaking the Fourth Wall

...I'm gonna put white hands

And black hands and brown and yellow hands

And red clay earth hands in it

Touching everybody with kind fingers

And touching each other natural as dew...

—Langston Hughes, "Day Break in Alabama"

We discussed the famous artist Allan Kaprow’s notion of “breaking the fourth wall.” Kaprow believed that the “wall” between a person looking at or “reading” a work of art and the work of art itself could be broken by involving the viewer in the work. We discussed this notion as getting to that place of writing where the feelings are so direct and true that the wall between the maker and his story dissolves. We go inside, break through the screen between how we read our thoughts, our past experiences, our fears. We go into the feeling, the time, the place the memory, the thought, and become it again, sit with it, touch it hold it, replay it. And when that happens, and the story is read, the wall between the maker and the listener also dissolves, and we (the listener) can feel ourselves living in the story ourselves. We want our work to be so full and involving that we begin to forget about artifice and separation between what we know and feel and what another knows and feels. The story, written by someone who has embodied his own feelings and thoughts, brings us into the same feelings and thoughts. We can touch their knowledge.

This happens at various points in a story. We called it the “cave of love," the sixth gear, the fifth dimension, cloud ten, and the soul groove. We hear it and feel awe it when it happens. We feel transported. We feel new knowledge opening inside us.

We discussed what should happen in a class, during, say, a project, or a discussion, or a story.

1) Lower order thinking: our base, animal needs. For the time of our learning we must forget about food, cold, comfort, territory. In order to be involved here on a daily basis, we have to learn how to put these aside.

2) Civilized Functional Thinking: to use our well-developed brains to listen, perceive, talk, write back, take notes, put things in order on paper, to ask questions, record and remember data, dates, make observations, work out problems, respond to questions.

3) Higher Order Thinking/ Meta-cognition: thinking about the data we take in. Thinking about our thinking. Reflecting on it, sifting, wondering about it, asking questions about it, extending it beyond the sphere of the classroom and into ourselves; or connecting our own thoughts with the great flow of human thought.

When kids come to NBS, we assume that they can set aside, or not focus strictly on their base needs; or, at the very least, they know how to function and take care of those base needs.

Then, the expectation in class will be that they can all do, to varying degrees, civilized functional thinking. That in class they will do the things that make them be following and listening and being activated by what happens. If a student does this, they they are “doing their work.”—getting along, fulfulling the deal, getting some skin into the game.

The higher goal, with varying ranges of intensity, is to get to the point of being able to think noble thoughts, make deep connections, attach the new information that is encountered to things beyond the matter at hand; to make larger generalizations about ourselves, humanity, or history, based on specific info encountered in class. When this happens, the learning should not stop when class stops, but should be continuing at every waking moment. One’s thought flow carries on continually, while driving in a car, while playing a game, while discussing something at dinner. When this happens the learning is growing and multiplying in a sort of individual Petri dish of thoughts, where all things keep getting reconsidered, re-combined, and new thought combinations keep emerging like a rapidly reproducing virus (a GOOD virus).

Poem read by Isabel

"Advice to a Pregnant Daughter-in-Law"

by Charles Darling

Avoid sharp things like corners, scissor points,

words and blades and cheddar cheese. Eschew

whatever's heavy, fast, and cumbersome:

meteorites, rumbly truck and stinky bus,

hockey players, falling vaults, and buffalo.

Steer clear of headlines, bank advices,

legal language, papal bulls, and grocery ads.

Every morning, listen to baroque divertimenti,

romantic operas, Hildegarde von Bingen hymns.

Evenings, read some lines from Shakespeare's comedies;

do a page of algebra; study shapes of clouds

and alchemy; make fun of your husbands feet.

Practice listening like a doe at the edge

of the earth's deep woods, but learn to disregard

most everything you hear (especially your father

and father-in-law). Learn some Indian lullabies;

speak with magic stones beneath your tongue.

Finally, I wish, avoid all tears—except

that the world and time will have their way

and weep we must. Perhaps enough is said

of grief and happiness to realize

that any child of yours will live a lifetime

utterly beguiled (as my child is)

by your bright smile, your wild and Irish laugh.

We decided that this was a great poem for us: but that the poem was wrong on one count: hockey players should NOT be avoided. We like hockey players.

WE heard a great project on the Great Migration of African American—the two main movements from 1910-1940, and then again from 1940-1970. As a set up Yared also told us about the “grandmother migration,” Harriet Tubman leading slaves to Freedom and the promised land. We learned about this later “Negro Exodus”, the movement of a people set on finding a better life, the movement away from a dystopian situation, the human need to find what is good and right, and the efforts and risk involved in looking for that. From Yared we learned about Mississippi floods, the boll-weevil, the crash of cotton industry, racism, lynchings, Muddy Waters, “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Mannish Boy,” “Sad Letter Home Blues,” unemployment, and how a huge segment of the population went looking for jobs, a better life, education, opportunity, and who also encountered difficult living situations, cramped urban tenements, whites resisting the loss of job security, and race riots.

In addition, we learned about the GREAT things that were born from this migration, such as Jazz, the blues, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the art of Jacob Lawrence, and the Harlem Rennaisance in general. Yared let us read two Langston Hughes poems, the first a very famous one, the second one not as famous.

“A Dream Deferred”

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

“Daybreak in Alabama”

When I get to be a composer

I'm gonna write me some music about

Daybreak in Alabama

And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it

Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist

And falling out of heaven like soft dew.

I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it

And the scent of pine needles

And the smell of red clay after rain

And long red necks

And poppy colored faces

And big brown arms

And the field daisy eyes

Of black and white black white black people

And I'm gonna put white hands

And black hands and brown and yellow hands

And red clay earth hands in it

Touching everybody with kind fingers

And touching each other natural as dew

In that dawn of music when I

Get to be a composer

And write about daybreak

In Alabama.

This poem expresses an exquisitely beautiful vision of a world of harmony and equality. It is about the remaking of the world in the form that a just god would wish: in that dawn of music where all hands touch with kind fingers and no thing is excluded.

In addition, we discussed Education policy in the United States, No Child Left Behind, “the Race to the Top” (the current political administration educational policy); Tal’s view of it all—“No Administrator Left Standing;” the spirit of man in 1984 and Winston’s noble fight; we began writing and plotting our own play, in which we hope to figure out what the spirit of man is; Wislawa’ Szymborksa’s poem “No Title Required,” in which she asks us if we can tell what is important from what is not; and her poem, “The Joy of Writing”, in which she describes writing as “the power to preserve, the revenge of the mortal hand."

And finally, Reed read Pablo Neruda’s “Falling”, which includes these lines.

I am a naked pilgrim

traveling to the church of the sea:

I crossed the salt-encrusted stones,

I followed the discourse of rivers,

And I have felt myself joined to the bonfire

Not knowing what my destiny would be.

We don’t know yet what our destiny will be, but we are going to come close to finding out and we will do it by exercising our power to preserve with our mortal hands.