#SOL17: Distances

A road in Tuscany, Rob and I walked (2013)

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by  perceiving the relationships in it... Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground

I.

It is nearly a year after Rob's death. It is nearly a year and I struggle to accept how someone who lived so wide awake is no more. His was an animated life--no standing on the sidelines for my husband. He laughed often and told stories continuously--lapsing into any number of voices while doing so and gesturing with his hands.

He was a full-body storyteller who was often the center of a gathering. His was a gregarious life. Rob loved people, and derived energy by being among others. And now all that liveliness is gone.

Gone.


II.

And though I have more memories than minutes, I still feel an absence as if the Law of Conservation of Energy was wrong. I too have read the first law of thermodynamics and understand (somewhat) that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but rather is transformed. Isn't that what Whitman was all about at the end of "Song of Myself?" Look for me under your boot heels, he told us. But that knowledge offers the widow cool comfort.

It is the large, yawning space that has opened this last year between my husband's animated life and his death, that is so hard to cross, so hard to give a name to that sticks.

A million times I have turned to say something to him these last twelve months. A million times I have turned and remembered he is no longer here.

#SOL16: Potential Energy

(M.A. Reilly, 2015)

I.

You would think after the passing of many months, I would not lose hold of the plot. Rob is dead. There I said it. Wrote it down. Put it in print. Sent it out over this field of digital impulse and energy so I can hold what I most want to be untrue. My husband is gone. With such attention, surely I would hold on to this truth. But most days, I do not.

Most days the awareness that Rob has died sneaks up on me. Subtle, like the quick shift from wife to widow. Like yesterday I was driving home from a New York college where I am taking a weeklong course. I had been very occupied for 8 hours making handmade papers and using these and some found papers to craft a series of collages. On the way home I stopped for a red light and the thought of showing Rob the work quickly surfaced followed as quickly the realization that I could not. This sudden truth felt like emotional whiplash. Rob was not waiting at home for me. I would not come in  through the garage as I had done for the last 14 years and find him at his desk downstairs, tinkering in one of the many notebooks he kept.

Even now as I write this, his desk is still covered with the work he was doing last summer. The notes he stuck to a large board remain. His chair sits ready for him, angled just as he left it. Even the fingerless gloves he kept for those days when the cold ached him are by his keyboard. All of this remains. All remains but Rob and the truth of that still stuns me.

Readiness is a farce. No amount of preparation will yield what I most want or soften what I know and feel.

II.

For the last several weeks, I have been dreading the one year anniversary of when we learned Rob had cancer. August 20th. I have been dreading this day because it will make Rob's death more final. Dying is never a singular act for the survivor. Every late afternoon Rob dies. Each morning I resurrect him. I do this without mindful intention. I do this because my mind seems to know what pain my heart can bear.

For now and the next week I can still look back to the year before when we had no knowledge of the awful disease that was wrapping itself around Rob's spine and infiltrating his vital organs. These days were the last days of innocence when we moved through life never expecting that Rob would not see spring.

Tonight I cannot recall any of the words from our last conversation. I cannot even recall when that conversation occurred. Well before Rob's final breath, he had moved into a light coma state. Even during the early morning hours of the day he died, he called out as his lungs filled, panicked by the struggle to breathe and I quickly called the Hospice nurse who talked me through how to clear the mucous from Rob's airway. For the next 14 hours, I would sit beside him, rest my head on his bed, try to inhale him as his body unwound like the spent spring of a clock uncoiling.

I imagine if Rob could have narrated those ending moments he would have talked to me about the transformation of potential energy to kinetic and somehow this offered explanation would have sounded so much more like a story you have always hungered for but never named. My husband adored explaining the ins and outs of science and literature; music and life.  I can imagine if he were here I might ask him to tell me the story of the dark side of the moon. And without any rehearsal, he would launch into a tale about gravitation and angular momentum and somewhere in this tale there would be a line or two he recited from that old Pynchon story, Entropy.

I miss the man who could cull together Meatball Mulligan's lease-breaking party, thermodynamic theory, Henri Lefebvre's production of space and the breakdown of capitalism all the while sipping some tea.  Some days the mystery gets revealed--or at least an outer layer.  Entropy tells us that everything will slow down one day.

Heat & Work

Muscle Memory (M.A. Reilly. Florence, Italy, 2009)

I. Heat and Work

The last few weeks have been filled with work with teachers--teachers we have worked alongside mostly for the last two years. One interesting observation that a colleague of mine made as he observed some work I was doing with fifth grade teachers was that the level of energy in the room increased significantly when teacher shifted to to the role of composer.  We were making our way through a review of the teaching they had done this year and they were determining what they wanted to revise and abandon, as well as what new work they wanted to create.

It was during the composing phase that the energy level increased dramatically:

Multiple voices talking
            at once.
More intensity as they worked
          to capture on screen some of their ideas, language.


The next time I worked with the same group of teachers, I mentioned my colleague's observation and wondered if there might be a parallel between the energy they produced while designing and innovating and how students might work if such spaces of permission were afforded to them as well. We also discussed how tiring it is to actually teach any eExpeditionary Learning ElA units as opposed to working from plans self-authored.

I was reminded as I listened that crafting, composing--be it as teacher or student-- represent active stances made in the context of the present.  Scripted curricula and programs are forever situated in the past. They are dead, epic in construct, untouchable and closed.  And yet, some administrators as well as some teachers, reach for the scripted curriculum as a 'solution' to academic performance challenges. Each time we reach for a scripted program as the solution to perceived academic and teaching 'issues,' we mist remind ourselves that all closed systems lose energy over time.

In an article I wrote, Restoring Points of Potentiality: Sideshadowing in Elementary Classrooms, I captured a moment in conversation between a school superintendent (someone for who I think of as the New Ed Leader who has little actual experience and has been catapulted into the job due to connections) and myself.  We had been discussing scripted programs and professional learning.  He told me matter-of-factly: 

We got standards. We got methods. We got assessment. The teacher’s job is to employ all three and get the job done.

For him, teaching is a simple algorithm and children are receptacles waiting to be filled.  

Line 'em up. Fill 'em up. (Consider the 'em here is likely to be a teacher as it is a student).

As we spoke more and he revealed his interest in scripted literacy programs. He told me: 

I’d rather some of the teachers follow a script. They can’t teach well and at least a script will get the content to the kids.

Sigh.

(An aside: I see more and more of these New Ed Leader-types being promoted into high level leadership roles, especially in poor cities where these new leaders are ushered in as if they were the second coming. Scratch just below that polished veneer and don't be surprised to find appointed superintendents who sport only a bachelor's degree or who have a few years of education experience and even less teaching experience...)

Each time we reach for a scripted program as the solution to perceived academic and teaching 'issues,' we must remind ourselves that all closed systems lose energy over time. 

Being There. (M.A. Reilly, Florida. 2009)

II. Human Doing, Self-Organizing

When I think of teaching and learning, I am reminded of Bakhtin's notion of the architectonic that he defined as “the struggle to effect an whole out of the potential chaos of parts” (Art & Answerability, 1990, xxxiiii).   In Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, Bakhtin defines architectonic as “the intuitionally necessary, nonfortuitous disposition and integration of concrete, unique parts and moments into a consummated whole" (Art & Answerability, 1990, p.209). Yes it is a mouthful.  I like to think of architectonic as timber and stones and the endless array one might make by (re)arranging such materials into whole compositions.  Bakthin's architectonic denotes the cohesion of structure and form composed by humans. Human doing is at the center of the architectonic.  Just as human doing needs to be at the center of classroom life, no scripted program can anticipate the lived utterance (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986).

We must be mindful and acknowledge that it is human doing, not human miming. In thinking about the superintendent's beefs about teaching as a transference act, I wrote in the article:

Delivering the curriculum to students then is a misnomer. In contrast with the school district leader’s presumption, no amount of scripting will get the content to the kids. Bakhtin explained that the speaker’s utterance gains meaning in its audience as it is being uttered: 'Each individual utterance is a link in the chain of speech communion' (p. 93) (p.302).

Teaching is largely about awakening: self and other.


Cited
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). Epic and novel. In M. Bakhtin, The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.; pp. 3–40). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.; V. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1990). Art and Answerability. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Reilly, M.A. (2009). Restoring Points of Potentiality: Sideshadowing in Elementary Classrooms, 298-306. In The Reading Teacher 63 (4).

An Exchange of Energy

Amethyst (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

Sometimes I shoot pictures.  

Sometimes I make images.  

Corn (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

The difference is all about energy. 

Something Like Magic (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

When I make images,
there is a transfer of energy
between the subject and myself. 

Repeating (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

This morning was image-making and I connected with the subject.

A Bird Singing (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

Through the fog, I became the bird singing.