Houses That Are Sure

Easter (M.A. Reilly, 2019)

Auden in Sonnet XVIII wrote, “We envy streams and houses that are sure...” I read the sonnet, in the Shoshanna Zuboff’s (2019) book, The Age of Survelliance Capitalism . The Auden line and Zuboff’s opening chapter have remained on my mind the last few weeks.

We envy that which is sure.

After Rob’s death, I tried to understand the meaning of that loss as if that meaning could be singular. It was not. It is not. I wondered, who was I without my husband, my best friend, my lover, business partner, fellow writer, and co-parent?

I have been waiting for the loss to leave, pack a bag and move on, far away from my heart. Tonight, I understood that the loss doesn’t leave. Rather, I have learned to live with it. And living with it reveals me as imperfect—showing those hard places that formed me most.

I wrote earlier how marriage allowed me to compose better versions of myself. Living with grief has shown me that those better versions were each imperfect.

Love never was a barter for perfection. Rather it was a house,
                     a stream that wound on
                     well after certainty
                                                          fled.

#SOL16: Certainty

Winter (M. A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

On my way to see Rob the unusual happens. I am walking down a hospital corridor, heading towards the palliative care center where Rob is waiting. It is very early in the morning. No one seems to be around when my right eye begins to blur and a vision blooms full. I see the cancer cells that riddle Rob's thoracic area: lungs, spine, ribs, and sternum, along with his liver and spleen light like gold nuggets. And I watch as the cancer is drawn from his body, as more and more cells are swept into a black hole held in an outstretched hand. I see the gold bits of matter disappear into the blackness, like a giant mouth swallowing the cancer. All of this happens as I'm standing still in the hallway, the early morning sun falling through a window to my right.

Later, Rob will tell me that he visualizes the cancer in his body as long dark tunnels that are oddly empty.

I I.

A few days ago I received an email from my son's friend's mom. She asked me to read, Radical Remissions:Surviving Cancer at All Costs.  The premise of the text which grew out of the author's dissertation is "Although unexpected remissions are rare, thousands of people have experienced them." As I read the book I was filled with both hope and an odd embarrassment that dogged the belief that Rob could live. There's an inner voice that says such hope is foolish; that hanging on to nonmedical 'cures' is dangerous, wrong.

For the last six months, interactions with doctors and residents, technicians and interns have caused me to follow blindly. Of the hundreds of tests Rob has been subject to, less than 1 percent have been reported to us. Only our family doctor, two oncologists, and two surgeons shared results with us.  The majority of medical doctors who ordered test after test: daily blood cultures, X-rays, cat scans, MRIs, body scans, blood tests and on and on and on during these last six months failed to discuss the results with us. In many ways we were and certainly felt inconsequential.

III.

It's so easy to lose yourself, to surrender your will, to doubt what you know. Certainty is a foolish desire.

Ambiguity and Grace (#SOL15, Day 11)

Birds in Tree in Winter (M.A. Reilly, Ringwood, NJ, 2015)

I. 

I've been thinking about the problematic use of close reading as the de facto method for interpreting texts in grades K-12 and how the PARCC and other high stakes tests are designed to discern how well children closely attend to the minutia and substance of a text--as if each was worthy of our attention--as if each remained stable. We situate these results as prized namings of children's talents and needs as if truth might be gotten from a 3-day test.  

Could we be more foolish?

I was thinking about the problem with close reading and how we measure it this morning while rereading William Carlos William's "January Morning"--a poem that reminds me how being curious is its own reward. After more than two decades of reading this poem, I still cannot quite understand it and think, perhaps, that I'm the better for such lacking.  

There's little room for lacking at school these days.

The poem is divided into 15 sections and Williams provides a series of quick and quirky visual snapshots of the comings and goings that his speaker sees as he makes his way through Weehawken, NJ on a January morning. It is a mad celebration of the ordinary as different noticings are mentioned briefly and then abandoned. Oh, our good doctor, our fine poet surveys that world with certain exuberance and I find I cannot help but carry his sense of whimsy and joy into this feel good morning of my own. 

This is what it means to embody a work.

II.

Williams was a young man at the time of this writing (1917) and I wonder if at the end of the poem, the old woman he addresses is his mother. Or perhaps, the old woman is more muse than mother. Maybe mother and muse are one.  Let's take a look.

XV.

All this --

                was for you, old woman.

I wanted to write a poem 

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me

if you can't understand it?

                But you got to try hard --

But --

Well, you know how

the young girls run giggling

on Park Avenue after dark

when they ought to be home in bed?

Well,

that's the way it is with me somehow.

I take a deep breath at the end and wonder more about the way it is somehow and what exactly does Williams mean by that?  Some mornings I think I can gather that ambiguity and hold it in my hand like cool water that is a balm.

Let it settle there. Soothe me.

                 Only to feel it slip 
                                                     free, again and again and again. 

See, it is the instability, the not knowing that I most want to emphasize here. Meaning is never stable. Never. Why, even Williams's speaker is contrary. 


III.

Reading is a full body experience and we ought to broaden how learners come to (re)name the texts they read. It's foolishness to believe in the singularity of close reading in schools as if the New Critics knew the only way to read a text. 

I hope on this March morning that you want more for yourself, more for your child.

What we privilege and fail to privilege at school matters; deserves our attention.  It is the uncertainty of meaning making that we most need to make room for at school. For is it not important for learners to be able to recognize when a more accurate understanding of a text is attainable and when the complexity of a work eclipses that felt need?  

To become easy with ambiguity is to touch grace. 

I'm not sure what Williams intended or if even his intentions can be named. The possibilities are of interest more so than the certainties. 

This is the way it is somehow. We are never standing still.

A Passion for Possibility

Want (M.A Reilly, 2009)

“A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it does not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us new aspects and new semantic depths” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7).

Tonight I was listening to Beethoven's 9th. It is such an expansive and emotional work.  One that never fails to move me--largely because it opens me to possibility.  There's something untamed about listening to the 9th.  

When I think about listening I wonder about about learning--how learning ought to open us--ought to be largely a matter of possibility, not certainty.  And yet, the desire to be certain when confronting an unknown and have it named often determines us and what we value--be it in our homes, our hearts, or our schools.  Consider Maxine Greene who tells us:

We are not the first to feel a slippage under our feet, to grope for a “point d’appui,” something to stand on, a platform, a ground. Like so many of our predecessors, many of us grope wildly for security. We seek a certainty of protection, of salvation.  (from here)

But what is the price we pay for security?  I can't help but think of the cool comfort standards and high stakes testing have offered--twin methods we have been embracing since we were told we were a nation at risk.  Frightened of our limitations, we wondered who might we trust? And in the ensuing years we have learned most not to trust ourselves, our very eyes and ears. We substitute certainty and completeness that wrap itself around national standards and national tests for the slippages we feel when we stand on our own feet atop a world that is always in motion. 

When I think about the CCSS and other educational certainties it is the sameness--the way the language parses itself so neatly, so predictably that most confounds me as it concerns me. Consider how likely it is that David Coleman and company, could name for millions of children (at least those enrolled in public US schools) what they most need to learn and when. Standards are a closed system. And yet, if meaning is most revealed as Bakhtin says when it comes in contact with other, then what might we make of this rather closed movement of educational standards--self-referential, monologic?  Hegemonic?

Again, Greene offers us a way of framing this conundrum when she writes:

As John Dewey reminded us, facts are mean and repellent things until we use imagination to open intellectual possibilities. Imagination may be viewed as a passion for possibility...this is where the effort to achieve freedom begins—freedom as the opening of spaces in which choices can be made and action undertaken. Thoughtfulness, imagination, encounters with the arts and sciences from the grounds of lived life: this is the beginning and the opening to what might be.

It is from the grounds of lived life, where we most need to dwell--the spaces that open and close causing gaps to appear. Nothing living is ever finished.  It is in the lived life where we can best "anticipate and accept incompleteness" (Greene again).   And perhaps that--incompleteness--is what we might value most at school.