18th Century Gulliver

[It has been a pleasure blogging for Linebreak; the journal is excellent, and I thank the editors for the opportunity.

I'm closing my week as guest blogger with a piece I recently wrote for my own blog, Mindbook (www.mindbook1.blogspot.com); I reproduce it here because it is not only the necessary but the only possible ending for this sequence on my strange education.]

I had been before to Warehouse 9. Situated on a cul-de-sac near the margin of the Army Corps of Engineers facility where I was then working, it was a large but unprepossessing building: sheet metal quonset-hut style, like an airplane hanger–probably it was in fact a recycled or otherwise diverted airplane hanger–large enough to contain, perhaps, a football field.

When I had looked inside Warehouse 9 before, it was empty except for a large expanse of dust-filtered sun angling down from skylights. This day, therefore, I walked up a short flight of wooden stairs onto a loading dock and opened a door, expecting nothing. What I saw instead was an ocean.

To be more precise, what I saw was a model ocean, a working replica of an ocean. But when I opened the door, I did not yet know that. All I knew was that the place was full of water, to a depth just below the level of the loading dock where I was standing, a sheet of water that extended virtually the length and breadth of the building. I stood for a moment bewildered; there was something here, I had been told, that I was supposed to see, but beyond the water, it was hard to tell what that might be or what I was to do.

As my eyes adjusted to the light, I noticed a narrow platform in front of me, that led to a narrow walkway built of planks that led to the wall and then down the length of the building. I followed it, not knowing what else to do, and then saw that at the far end of the warehouse there was — what? something, and a couple of people moving in the dusky light.

*

It was many years ago, in a universe far away. I had a job.

1972, a year when people were still considering dropping out as a viable lifestyle: always behind the curve, I was dropping in. I was 22. I had completed a Masters degree in literature and creative writing all except the thesis; struggling to finish the thesis, I convinced myself that the whole academic enterprise was a mistake for me. (more…)

Nathan Simpson

Begin with a human figure—a silhouette of a human figure, for the moment, backlit by sunset—a human figure walking down a road. The road is a dirt road, hard-packed reddish-beige earth. Down its center a pair of bare ruts run, where passing cars and trucks and tractors have flattened, hardened, and buffed it to a kind of ceramic sheen. The person in view, however, does not walk in the rutted center of the road, but in the gravel on its narrow shoulder. One’s first interpretation of this fact might be that he—for let us now deploy the masculine pronoun—walks as he does for safety’s sake; but any traffic in a place as remote as this would be obvious even from a great distance, and if he so chose, he could walk the center of the road without danger either to himself or to the animal he leads on a length of hemp rope. It is more likely that his position is a concession to the animal than to any merely human consideration. The old brown mule follows the man at a distance of about six feet, walking entirely off the road, from where it stops often to snatch a mouthful; when the mule stops, the man stops, in a sort of enforced symbiosis of which the mule most often appears the dominant component. Still, the rope is long enough that the man could, if he chose, walk the center, and let the mule still graze the shoulder. Surely it would be easier to walk along one of the ruts, flat and hard as a sidewalk, than in the gravel along the road’s edge; yet surely walking as he does is a choice—dictated perhaps by a deference that precludes his seizing the center.

Though more than fifty years have passed since the time of which I write, if you stood today in the place where I locate the lens of my memory, the scene would be remarkably similar. Both man and mule are decades dead, the road remains still unpaved and fundamentally unaltered though likely now it is in worse repair than it was then.

About the length of hemp rope, who knows?

*

There are questions about everything I have described here. About the road, for instance, it is worth wondering when it came to be here, and how, and especially why. It is a rural road maintained—however intermittently and poorly—by the county board of supervisors, and yet is serves, almost entirely, a single farm. The road is an ovoid loop appended to a slightly wider main road that runs several miles before terminating in a blacktop road that extends another fifteen miles to the nearest (tiny) town. The loop was a three-mile detour, so to speak, through the farm, and was used by almost no one other than those who lived there—all members of one extended family plus their employees. Is it usual for county governments to build and maintain roads for such constituencies and narrow purposes? (more…)

Certain kinds of introspection are less like meditative journeys and more like putting one’s hand into an ant colony. For me, thinking about my early experiences with the official educational process is an exercise in ant excavation: painful, revelatory of ugly inhuman things, and generally uncanny. To revisit there, for me, is to reenter a narrative that has the dark numinousity of a primal scene, simultaneously repellant and fascinating.

It’s impossible for me to know how I would be different had I grown up in another place (for present purposes I leave out of account the possibilities in growing up in other times)—or whether I would be different, in any fundamental way, at all. I have grown, over subsequent decades, into a selfhood that I experience less as a unitary thing (like a potato or a stone) than as a semi-random composite, like a coral reef. This composite has turned out to be a reasonably fertile medium for poetry and other kinds of writing. To what extent poetry is its necessary product I can’t say; whether I would be a poet had I not undergone the education that was given me I can’t know. All I know is how it was and how it is. For other writers, the “education of the poet” as a subject has been mostly either prescriptive or descriptive; in my own case, it takes the form of a cautionary tale, and the majority of the caution is directed at me and me alone.

*

I have written elsewhere, at some length, in poems as well as prose, about the place that was my jumping-off point from nonbeing: eastern Mississippi, a farming community, from 1950 onward. My family was sufficiently typical there to be virtually invisible by reason of protective coloring—literally coloring, given the state of race relations in that place and in those days. Basic facts: 1. we were white folk; 2. white people owned, and controlled, just about everything there was in that place; 3. white people were a distinct minority of the population, which was approximately 70-30 black to white. These three simple facts give rise to wide-reaching and, to say the least, unpleasant social dynamics.

For present purposes it is not necessary to rehearse the whole history of race relations in America. Suffice it to say that I lived through a vital transition point in our history—the Civil Rights Movement—beginning on the wrong side of it, and I lived through it first in my nerves and muscles and belly and bowels more than in my mind. Institutional education, never completely disinterested or impersonal in the good sense, never “objective,” was complicit in the maintenance of the status quo. This too I have written about elsewhere, limning out the basic principle of education in the context of institutional racism from the side of the racists: that the process centers on mentally blinding one’s children. If African Americans were, in that particular version of the weird old America, invisible, they were only so by reason of the blindness of white people. Therefore it was the “God-given duty,” as it was perceived in that place, to pluck out one’s children’s eyes.

(more…)