And We Speak Our Names

...these recent memories of future dream/ these perhaps who have lost their shadows if/ which did not do the losing specters mime/ until out merely not nothing comes/ only one snowflake(and we speak our names

—e.e. cummings

Now is the time when we begin to write our stories. I mean, the longer autobiographical stories, pages and pages, scene upon scenes, some dialogue, some setting, some characters, all set in motion on the page, in the room, in the mind, causing, on many levels, mental transformation, creative stress and energy, sifting, digging, and ordering.

Though this is the dark time of year, and the sky is gray and we go inside, this is also when the connections between us begin to become more dense and numerous. The future dream we uttered in the beginning is far behind us; we try to lose our shadows. Or step out of them to become embodied. Two dimensions begin to rise toward three dimensions. Winter, and first merely flakes of snow? Our story ideas coming out of merely not nothing? This is how we begin to speak our names. We lose our shadows, we gain ourselves.

We do this now because we know ourselves and each other better, and because of that we can begin to write what we know into the forms of our stories. Something falls from a white-gray sky. The first snow-flake. White on white, gray on white, white on gray. Black lines on white pages, white pages piling up. If we are lucky, out of many gray days comes a day of snow and morning sunlight, a radiant story that is the Truth.

On Wednesday Eric took some of the school down into the strata of the OMYA rock quarry where the stone is 190 million years old. We move among those strata and our own. In ourselves, in history, in a pit of the earth. So I ask them: What’s the idea? No, tell me first, what’s the feeling? Where does or did the feeling live. Close your eyes, remember backwards. Go down in the strata, to where thought and actions and circumstance fused together in great heat by time and weight. What was happening there? Where do you seeyourself? On a swing set? Kneeling on the floor with Playmobil and Lego. Staring at a clock at ten minutes before three. Remembering the bones and the stones of an old field. Stacking up pinecones in a fort. A dream of birds eating grain at dusk. Ice clinking in a glass. These are the first places, where we find the seeds of ourselves waiting to be uncovered, resituated, or resurrected and given a little light. There is a lot of talking to ourselves that goes on in this, talking to ourselves and each other, a lot of looking for good answers.

The seventh graders are reading the poems of Wislawa Symborska, in the collection View With a Grain of Sand. The assignment this week was to have a conversation with a rock, mimicking Szymborska’s “Conversation with a Stone.” After class I sent them out to collect their rocks, which they kept with them during the week. The were to talk to the rock, sleep with it, carry it around, and try not to lose it. One of the kids realized the simple idea in such a seemingly silly assignment.

“I was talking to my rock last night and I realized that it was not like a conversation with a person who I can rely on to talk back to me. I realized that I had to give the answer, so it was like having a conversation with myself.”

This is what we are doing. Learning to have the right conversations with ourselves—an ongoing process that takes a lifetime to master. The conversations the seventh graders had with their rocks were filled with innocent and profound questions:

“Rock, what is the meaning of life?”

“Rock, I think we should live loving every little thing, because every little thing is beautiful.”

“Rock, You never make friends if you hide yourself away.”

“Rock, when I have time to think about all the things I hear from my friends everything starts bouncing off each other and I can’t control it. I feel like I need to shout it all and get rid of it.”

“Rock, can you impart any great knowledge to me?”

“Rock: Yes, you can hate. But what do you get out of that? Do you get a good feeling when you have found a new hate? No. But a new love? Yes.”

“You humans can’t memorize a conversation without writing it down. We rocks remember everything.”

When we begin asking questions we don’t know what the answers will be. If we know, what would the point be in asking? So we begin asking, an arduous, strange, vexing process. I don’t know how many times I have heard the words, “I don’t know what to write. What should I write? I don’t know where to go. How should I start?” Though it is difficult for them and for me, we have to try to keep ourselves at this outer edge, just a step beyond what we know, but still moving forward to new knowing. We know what we have to do, and to do it we have to learn to shut out the distractions and the clutter and the static. We have to put ourselves in a state of mental solitude so we can hear. Being willing to go into a state of mental solitude can be the most difficult thing we do, because in that self-imposed quiet we may hear things we don’t want to hear, or that make us uncomfortable, or that confuse, that are strange.

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In the clay studio we made clay orbs, shaped vessels, spheres holding space. We also shoveled sand onto the Labyrinth paths. We made models of the earth and the layers of the earth out of paper and papier mache. All of these hands-on activities mimic what we are trying to do with our stories. Making, holding, containing, digging, turning.

We heard two fantastic projects, the first on Capitalism as a kind of Utopia/Dystopia, the second on “Utopia as Celebrity, Luxury, Advertising, and Consumerist Culture.” We heard about Charlie Chaplin and Adam Smith, Marilyn Monroe and the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis, Suburu ads and the tax rates of socialistcountries. We heard about the flow of capital and the flow of luxury goods, the interconnections of economy and the inter-connections of our own soul-hunger and the ways products are marketed to us. Individualism versus collectivism. What Brad Pitt gives us versus what Rumi or Thoreau gives us; Personal wealth versus healthy communities; luxury value versus sentimental value; “needs” versus needs.

These projects, back to back, gave us an enormous field on which to see our own pursuits, our own inner desires, to compare our own visions of how we should live with images of how we, as a culture, currently live—or how we are encouraged to live by our overwhelming and numerous forms of media and cultural inputs. And following that, or in the middle of all that, trying to grow up in it, we find ourselves writing our stories, which implies a very different set of needs and imperatives, none of which are completed or answered by the material of material culture. Our stories are about the things of the spirit, mind, and psyche. Our stories lead us to a very different place that the one placed before us by executive producers of consumerism. In truth, we find most of what we need in our own unique, strange and single “trufala” trees, which could be said to be our own souls, our most rooted selves, the things that grow up in us that we try to preserve.

Calder volunteered to read a Mary Oliver poem to the class on Wednesday that Sophie had chosen. But Sophie wasn’t at school so she asked Calder to read the poem, called “The Journey.”

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

If we connect Oliver’s poem to our own stories, we may see that sitting down in solitude may be the first good thing that should happen. “But little by little / as you left their voices behind,/ the stars began to burn though sheets of clouds,/ and there was a new voice/ which you slowly/ recognized as your own.” We try to find and recognize our own voices. We try to speak our names. That’s all the stories really are: the boldest, most concrete flourishing of ourselves that we can muster. The stories put us forth into the world. The stories claim territory, assert being, bring shadow into shape.