being academic

“The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.” G. K. Chesterton, Manalive

There is plenty of light abroad today, shining on the blue-grey cedar berries and the brown-grey cedar trunk, shining on the white library steps and the red brick courtyard.  Yet perhaps my mind is not very academic, for it will not be still upon any subject, but disports itself like a giddy child, running hither and thither amongst so many things. Snatches of songs contend with the whistling wind for my attention, and characters in and out of books vie for precedence in my regard.

If I do not manage to reflect infinity, I reflect upon infinity, and upon the way it has been set in my heart if not in my mind, “yet so that [I] will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end” (Ec. 3:11, NASB).

And though the time of everything’s beautification has not yet arrived, many things have been made beautiful already.  I am content to differ from Chesterton’s academic.

on things found

The invitation came as a surprise, an answer to a question I was only beginning to ask, grace before I knew I needed it, and a reminder, even when it was only an invitation, that all the disparate threads really are bound up together, that yesterday is not — as it sometimes seems — irrevocably lost in tomorrow.  We never know what sorts of roads we are weaving, all unsuspecting: I didn’t know years ago, when I let the girl who’d been laughing so hard she’d cried use my dorm room mirror to wipe the mascara off her cheeks.

So I went to the house of the girl who is a visual artist – disconcerting thing, because asking questions means admitting you don’t know, and there is no dictionary of her vocabulary to allow for clandestine self-education. But sitting across the table from her in her cozy living-dining-art-studio room, I found I didn’t need a dictionary, because there wasn’t any language barrier. I found that I with my words and she without them both speak of the same things.  And I found myself tremendously encouraged.

I came away with a splinter of wood in my pocket, a fragment rescued from the refuse of art-making to be made art. It has two sharp ends and is painted gold.  It signifies the sufferings of which we are privileged to partake, the preciousness of the wounds which make us beautiful, the purpose of even the fragments we sweep into corners.

And, as meaning inevitably layers on meaning in this world where we never can mean all that we will mean, it now carries other connotations: fragrant food and lamplight and the girl with the warm smile across the table from me encouraging me to be bold, to chase after the things that matter, to take hold of abundant life, even when it looks as though it is all splinters in my hands.

And so, for you who read this: I pray that you, also, will see that the splinters may be golden, that the discarded bits may become beautiful, that the loose ends will not be loose forever.

Dear January

I don’t suppose I ought to be surprised to find you at once so brief and so long, but, all questions of “ought” aside, I am surprised.  Does anyone get used to time, I wonder, or are we always to be baffled by it, creatures designed for Timeless, caught in today and today and today?

There is reason, though, to be surprised at your balminess: tricking the daffodils to blossom before their time, teasing open windows which we thought to have kept demurely shut, mocking us for the affectation of winter coats and scarves, you overturn any notions of your solemnity. Perhaps in this, like Mr. Frank Churchill, you have “used every body ill,” but your mischievous face is so charming that I, for one, am “delighted to forgive” you.

Besides, you bring gifts to soothe my unsettled expectations:

*The satisfaction of matching nearly all their names to their faces in the classroom before they raised their hands.

*Personalities emerging from behind typed paragraphs.

*An owl on a fence-post, meeting our delighted gaze with perfect equanimity before flying away into the night.

*People who remember me — grace.

*The aforementioned daffodils; also pink camelias.

*The threat of tornadoes never materializing, so that though I woke and heard wind in the night, in the morning nothing was broken or lost.

*New piano music to draw me from the one keyboard to the other.

And so you hasten, January, to the place of your setting, and I hasten from today to today to today, with tomorrow always shining with some new thought, and Timeless promised, an end of bafflement.  But while you’re still here, and while I’m with you, and while the clouds blush in the blue sky and the naked trees and brown field look softer than I’ve seen them in other Januaries, I thought I’d like to tell you that I consider you to be passing in what might be called — though I mightn’t exactly recommend it if you were writing an academic essay – “a very well manner.”

being reminded

It may seem strange, but sometimes I forget it: the white badge of scandalous love I wear on my face. I walk out into the world supposing my face is as much like any other as any face is like other faces.  And so, sometimes, I am confused.  Today’s new student’s gaze was so persistent, so full of questions, disconcerting to the teacher who tried so hard to make everything clear, who kept looking up to find him still staring. (Most people have been taught, by his age, that staring is impolite.)  Finally, though, I realized it as he finally began with the familiar preamble, “It might be rude to ask, but …” and raised his hand in the familiar gesture to his own left brow. Such a relief it was to know the meaning of his looking, I think I beamed at him as I gave the familiar, simple explanation: how it changed when I was eight, how it doesn’t hurt, how I was glad he’d asked.

And I was glad. Those questions don’t always gladden me.  There are the days when I wax angry at the impertinence of people who deem the pigmentation of my lashes to be their concern as well as mine, days when I want nothing more than anonymity, days when I wish I did not inspire the cashier to call her niece in Louisiana to tell said niece about me. But today I was glad.

I rarely tell people the whole story; I didn’t today: how I look upon it as a mark of love, how it reverberates with echoes of other stories for me now, stories of wounds being made beautiful, how to smile when I am asked is somehow, for me, to answer for the hope that is in me. How sometimes I forget that hope, the scandal of that love, how their questions remind me. How He tells me:

You are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.*

Oh, yes; today I am glad you asked.

*Isaiah 43:4

down to the sea in ships

I have spent a long, quiet day travelling from the first page of Silas Crockett to the three-hundred and thirty-seventh — only about sixty left to the end.  I’ve sailed round the world from Maine in the Southern Seas and the Solace Winthrop, and puffed up and down the New England coast in the steamer Searsport. I have seen generations of sea-faring men born and die, waited and watched with their waiting, watching women. Seen styles change and travel transform, and yet been rooted to one family name, one graciously aging house in an imagined village on the Maine coast.

Now, with those many days packed into my one — and yet they fit without crowding, like Narnian days — I am swathed in quietness, remembering a girl in her early teens who spent days and days wrapped in other worlds, so that days like today were not novelties then.  And I wonder if that is why she said so little, and if the habit of watching other lives in books trained her to watch people outside of books.

The day with the book somehow puts a distance between me and all worlds, so that the events of the past week in my piece of Mississippi seem as distant and dream-like as the luminous Maine coast one hundred and fifty years ago. And yet tomorrow a new week opens, with all the bits of this past week crowding back, important and necessary.

The forty-nine students, whose faces and names I keep taking up in my mind, working to stick them together with the bits of their stories which I’ve learned and the other bits which I’ve imagined: hometowns and pieces of educational history and the way they chose to format their first essays combining with ideas derived from style of dress and style of speech and willingness or unwillingness to answer my smile with one of their own. Certain vague ideas in my music-teacher world, too, to be definitely settled with decisions and music copied and inserted into fifteen black folders. Appointments made, appointments kept, and my green Honda needing gasoline next time I go to town.

Sailing vessels which carried ice from Boston to the West Indies in 1850 really have no place in all of it, have they? Yet I am not sorry to have spent my day with them. Not sorry to wonder, having read of “the long dependence of the present upon the past,”* what presents may come, leaning on the arm of today. And, though often those wonderings worry me, tonight, swathed in my quiet, I don’t mind.

*Mary Ellen Chase, Silas Crockett

*A rainbow in my yard this afternoon, spanning from driveway to field: a covenant of which I am beneficiary, but which will be kept, even in spite of me.

*Rain on my roof tonight.

*Books for months-on-end, courtesy of kind librarians.

*A visit from a rather wonderful cousin.

*A letter written on the back of a red-checked paper napkin.

*Forty-five new students next week to prevent my pining for last fall’s nineteen (though I will miss them).

*The way I always arrive at the next thing in spite of my dug-in-heels and declarations of unreadiness.  The way that, in spite of those, there is always grace enough, though it is not my grace.  The way I can rest in that, if I will, when a list is the only thing I seem able to write.

frivolity

In honor of the New Year, and because I’ve recently rediscovered this project and found it much more engrossing than my Master’s thesis, I am pleased to present to you the fourth chapter of the unfinished Tales from an Impetuous Landscape:

The Grief of Spoons

It is here appropriate to narrate to you the reason why the grief of Spoons is in the air of the Impetuous Landscape.  It is no longer an active grief, for it stems from events far, far back in the Landscape’s history.  Still, the Spoons remember and sigh, sometimes, to think of how it came about.

Two of the oldest families among the servants and subjects of the royalty in the Landscape are the Dishes and the Spoons.  The Dishes have always tended to be of flat disposition, not inclined to adventures of any sort.  They are steadfastly useful, and can be depended upon to be where they are expected when they are expected.  The Spoons are a family more inclined to get into scrapes.  It is rather common for one or another of their numerous family to be missing for weeks at a time, but they mean no harm.  They are more nimble than the Dishes, and, with their broad, round, shining faces, are very well liked.

In the early days of the Landscape, there was a young man in the Spoon clan named Runcible, who was missing more often than all of the other Spoons put together.  He developed quite a reputation for it, and his fame was increased by the fact that, while most of the Spoons combed their hair smoothly down on their foreheads, he wore his in three spikes at the top of his head.  People tended to mistrust him, but, because of his good family, they could not, in good conscience, shun him.

Now it happened that he struck up a friendship with a young lad of the Dish family.  Albert was not a large Dish, nor was he very bright, but he found the glamour and adventure of Runcible’s life to be quite attractive and he wished very much that his limp hair could be persuaded into spikes.  It became quite common to see Albert and Runcible going out for an evening walk or stopping for a drink at a wayside inn.  Their friendship did not keep them from accomplishing their work, and, as Albert showed no signs of going missing, his parents allowed him to walk about with Runcible.  But then it happened.

It was during the Festival of the Talents, when trained animals competed in various skills.  There were high-jumping cows and musical cats; mop-swallowing dogs performed on street corners, and everyone turned out for a week-long holiday.  (The animals have lost much of their skill since those days; more’s the pity.)  That was the year that a cow named Bossie broke all previous records by jumping absolutely over the moon.  Her antagonists accused her of fraud, and there was a drawn-out investigation of the matter with many accusations and denials and everyone in the Landscape loudly expressing his or her own opinion of the case.  In the end, Bossie was cleared of all charges, and her record stands to this day, a memorial to the fact that cows, at least, have not developed according to Darwin’s theories.

Runcible Spoon never had enjoyed the Festival of Talents; he’d never had the patience to train any creature to perform, unless indeed he could be credited with having trained Albert to listen to him.  In any case, he grew impatient with the conflict over the cow, and finally decided to leave the Landscape once and for all.  He told Albert he was going to go live the life of a vagabond in the mountains, and Albert, full of the glamour of the idea and unable to bear the thought of being parted from his hero determined to go with him.  Runcible hemmed and hawed and said it would not be fitting to take Albert from his home, however much he would like to have Albert’s company and aid in the mountains, etc, etc., and the end of it was that Albert absolutely would not let Runcible go without him, which was exactly what Runcible had wanted.

When Bossie had finally been cleared of charges, it was discovered that Runcible Spoon and Albert Dish had run away together.  An expedition was sent in pursuit of them – Albert, being not really skilled in secrets, had left a letter detailing their intended route – and the pair were brought back without any difficulty.

Albert was cleared of all blame in the matter.  He had been very young and very impressionable.  He grew up to be a useful and pleasant citizen of the Landscape, though he and his descendents after him have ever been known in common parlance as “Dessert Plates.”

However, Runcible, apart from whose insidious influence Albert would never have run away, was banished from the Impetuous Landscape and sent to live in the Land Where the Bong Tree Grows.  There he quickly gained a position of prestige – you will recall that he was present at the wedding-supper of the Owl and the Pussycat – and there he became the patriarch of a large and industrious family.

While Runcible was enjoying himself in the Land Where the Bong Tree Grows, his relatives in the Landscape were deeply wounded by his desertion and banishment.  They felt that their once-spotless reputation had been tarnished by such an association.  Ah, yes, though they have prospered and been trusted throughout all of their generations, it is still customary for their mouths to droop a bit at the corners, and still the Landscape has their old grief in its air.

©2012 Stacy Nott