Irony of dreaming

sometimes I think I should return to the intention of writing the dreams.  They are vivid and more active than my awake life. My awake life is full of distraction and longings and frustrations and disappointments and stress with a little pleasure thrown in with hanging out with friends or going to see a movie or finding an engaging moment on tv. My identity in my art has all but disappeared. I’m not writing, I’m not playing music. I’m too exhausted, too spent, running ragged at school in part because of trying to teach students who are eager but not always ready to learn more difficult skills. We have fabulous “extra” things going on at school and I bite off more than we can chew. I love the actual time in the classroom engaging with students and it feels like they are engaged and enjoying it and then the assessments are low performing for the majority as they revert back to old habits badly learned in middle school “to begin” and “to continue” as if these were transitions and it doesn’t matter how many times I beg them to think about what they write, they resort to these horrible habits of hollow writing.  Alliteration intended.  I even sat there yesterday and took a break and asked them to stand and stretch and write out some memory notes about forbidden words (and so forth) and then let them back into their essays for 20 minutes to clean up and edit.  And the horrible habits of hollow writing remained. (Just one of many prevailing, distressing examples currently—refraining from mentioning those who have had me for a year and are stuck on not knowing what to do with a simple appeal to them so we are all struggling to figure it out—me how to instruct and show; them how to just go for it and see what happens.)

But my dreams are amazing and active and energetic and creative and often solve mysteries and problems and there are always many people and often there are people from my past who are present and we are working or playing together as if no time had passed and the believability is unbelievable when I awaken to sadly only partial memory. Last night involved many colored pencils and swapping out ideas and colors for a project I can’t remember (the one at school is the Happy Thanksgiving banner for families receiving Elev8hope baskets—which I am part of but won’t be coloring or drawing...) And all of this was exchanged with a “best” friend in high school and college with whom we had a bit of a painful and misunderstanding-laden separation in our 20s. But no memory or trace of that was in the dream, we were simply the selves we have always been with me wanting to create and she needing to go out and be medical help for others, though she always had the cool stuff to create with.

The dream included a funky place on the beach with several stair cases and secret entrances and that old wood worn by wind and rain and yet not rotting and paint peeling patiently and rustically and at one point suddenly all we who were living and working there and in and out all the time came up to the door and it was locked! So was the second door!  We each had been given a key but these keys were hidden safely in our luggage because we also heard the scuttlebutt that people were always in and out and so much going on there was no need for a key or to lock the door but suddenly we were locked out. I remembered an entrance slightly beyond and above a second entrance and it was something like an attic entrance so I climbed those stairs that narrowed and found the little door and it was bowed just a little bit and there was barely any light, just that which trickled up with me from the landing twisted below and I could pull up the corner of the door just enough to see a little paper bag with its sides rolled down and brass keys brightly shining in a pile like the treasures of old caves that possessed their own light and shone out even from the darkest caves and smiling I took one and came down stairs and handed it to the thin and scruffy guy who was the first to discover the locked entry door; he tried it and it opened and I was a hero glimmering in his smiling eyes. We all cheered and went in and I secretly took the key back to its little hidden bag. 

Other scenes in this same dream included sitting on the beach near the pier and bones instead or along with shells were lying on the beach not fully recognizable until I realized these were not all shells. We generally see what we expect to see unless our eyes are given a chance to linger and see what is there. These were not scary bones or horrific or signs of murder more like intriguing treasures and remnants of another world and another life. Something about a map that endured the ocean and sand and weather and was something like cloth and something like plastic. I have no recollection what it was of, just that it helped explain some of the things that had washed up to shore. It would make sense if all this were metaphorically part of a parallel life or things lost along the way now unusable and unsalvageable. (Perhaps the map represents my dreams and all that sits around me represents all that I struggle with in my waking world....)  It was fascinating and again someone was there with whom we wondered back and forth in simple suggestions and what ifs and look at thats and ideas in quiet reflection and easy exchange and the waters lapping as the only rhythm that could be called the passing of time as time seemed more open than passing and it was a wonderful, casual, restful day.

I can tell in the waking that I have an egregious lack of decompressing creativity in my life right now because of the extent of my frustration and overreaction when kids are more like stones and I no longer have the strength to move them and seemingly the simplest of assignments and means to get them to understand while also enabling them to achieve better grades seem always to go awry and cause more trouble than success.  This is my waking life that is consuming me and burning me out.  I’m sure you hear easy answers and encouragements for shifting more of the dreaming into the waking and indeed I know that too but just like the students who hear it all but cannot seem to do any of it, I feel a bit like most of me is hidden away in a tiny paper bag up the abandoned and twisted stair behind a bowed but locked and unseen door.

freewriting on the conflict of writing and teaching

Flannery O’Connor warned me today—she grabbed me by the shoulders and with those piercing green eyes she said with fierce passion: do not abandon the story; do not abandon the mystery.

I love story.  I believe with all my heart the story will save you. Will save the world. I believe that the source of power in story is its ability to engender empathy.  It is empathy that connects us, protects us, enables us to love and accept those who are unlike us but with whom we can identify at the most basic level—our need to be loved, fed, protected.  Our desire to love, nurture, protect.  This is also the ultimate mystery—who we are and why we do what we do.  This is character and plot, pure and simple.

I also love kids.  Now THAT is a mystery.  I like the power of discovery, the openness most kids have in exploring the world...  But the harsh irony is that I spend all day banging my head against the walls of formal education where it is my duty to teach the tools of analysis.  “We murder to dissect” has rung in my ears since I was in high school myself and wondered why the teacher was teaching a great poet like Wordsworth who basically undermined everything she was teaching.  Now I do the same.

Because I have to teach the minutia of analysis and how to speak authoritatively of the author’s purpose, the structure of the story, the intent of meaning through an element, the textual properties and means of explication, I feel I have pounded the flavor out of the meat of mystery and pleasure and joy and true power of a novel—to alter and change us, sometimes without our conscious collusion.

Most of the year I languish under the desire and critical need to write, to create story, and summarily fail.  Most summers I dig and dig, struggle against the solid, stony ground of my imagination until once again I strike gold...or oil...or clear flowing waters of story...  But I seem to lose ground every year, find I am farther and farther away from finishing worthy stories, worthy novels, A worthy novel, to hand to a stranger and be read. 

I don’t know why.  It is a puzzling mystery.  But I want to write.  I want to learn how to tell a story.  A story with meaning.  I want to give to “someone” what I have loved in receiving great novels, great film, great short stories, great poetry. 

I tend to blame my job for being stifled and barren.  Oddly, pathetically, I feel I have made a sort of secret deal with my ancestors...I have not borne children, therefore (or because) I will bear stories.  And yet I have not done so.  Not really.  Not right now.  Not for a long time.

Even this...this...emotional dribble...is a violation of all that is story.  I am emoting and telling...not creating a story with pathos or empathy.  I am merely emoting.

I walked very fast today my 40 minute walk around the circle and I took Flannery O’Connor’s collection of essays with me and I read as I walked.  The humidity is so heavy and there were few walkers which I never realized before how much I prefer not having to pass others on the walk.  Sad isn’t it?  Anyway, got back and showered.  As I washed my face I was suddenly overcome with sadness thinking (didn’t even realize it—surprised me) about a particular student who is so very, very intelligent and is in so much trouble.  He has two more weeks of probation...he has four felonies.  He’s 16 years old.  His record will be expunged when he is 24.  Yet he has already established a habit of breaking the law.  It truly blows my mind that he is living that life.  I love this kid—he is bright and deeply insightful.  He picks up on subtleties in literature and poetry that even the majority of my IB students miss.  I know that this kind of sensitivity and high intelligence often gravitates toward the flames of self destruction but I don’t understand exactly why and I certainly don’t know how to stop it—only he can stop it.  But how can I help?

And I cried at all of this thought that didn’t have words until now.  This kid who is the youngest of three boys, three years apart.  His oldest brother is the scholar and the favored one whom his father loves—this boy feels that so keenly, I can see it ooze from every pore as he smiles calmly in the telling of it.  His brother, the one in the middle, 19 years old, he whispers, is transgender, doesn’t feel like he’s in the right body.  This draws a lot of pain and confusion from his father.  He is a great disappointment.  Of himself he says that he is the greatest disappointment of his father.  Whatever crimes he has committed...time he has done in jail...whatever it is, he feels he has deeply hurt and alienated his father.

Whenever I grow despondent about the writer’s block, the energy drain, the distance my stories keep from me, a friend of mine tells me that I am doing far more important work teaching and engaging with these kids.  But...I feel that I have betrayed a gift...a particular trust...I am not living up to my potential, not fulfilling my calling to write.  I am failing at the purpose of my life—this is how I feel, this is a deep and passionate conviction.  No excuses.  I am a story teller.  I must tell the story.  But every day I fail.

I don’t know how to fight this dragon.  I don’t even know which thing is the dragon...  Is the dragon the failure to write, or is the dragon the feeling that I am failing.

Underneath all of this and perpetually is the haunting of my Japanese American friend.  Twenty years ago, this friend who spent his childhood in the Japanese internment camps in California, mentioned his gift and love of writing.  I asked him why he wasn’t writing, except within the context of his ministry.  He said he had to make a choice and because of his experience in the camp he chose to follow the calling of Christ to minister to those who are victims of a system that beats them down and keeps them down.  He felt it was more honorable to give his life to others rather than to his writing talent which he considered to be a selfish indulgence.

I disagreed.  And I told him so.  I’m sure he smiled at my impertinent youth and delusion. 

The reality is I must work, earn a living, where I have a reciprocated feeding of the soul—I find this in teaching. Writing (as a career) is too unpredictable, too precarious, too insecure, too risky....  So I cannot give up a stable income on the way way off chance that my God-given gift and talent, the promise I made to my ancestors, might fail...might become cursed in the face of the more noble and higher calling of teaching.  Ironically it already feels it is cursed, as if in teaching I am squandering my opportunity, desire, need, gift.

It’s not that I want to give up teaching; it’s that I want also to devote my life to the craft of writing.  To find a way to truly inspire the love and joy in the mystery of the story...I want to cultivate that curiosity and I want to nurture my own muse and engender in me that ability to write the story even as I teach others how to find meaning in other people’s stories. 

But deep down I fear it is a serving of two masters...unless I can find a way of recognizing it is simply a single coin with two sides...