Some Notes on Teaching: Probably Spoken

     A woman invented fire and called it

                                                  the wheel

     Was is because the sun is round

                    I saw the round sun bleeding to sky

     And fire rolls across the field

                    from forest to treetop

     It leaps like a bike with a wild boy riding it

     Oh   she said

                         see the orange wheel of heat

     light   that turned me from the

                    window of my mother’s home

     to home in the evening

Here are about fifteen things I might say in the course of a term. To freshmen or seniors. To two people or a class of twenty. Every year the order is a little different, because the students’ work is different and I am in another part of my life. I do not elaborate on plans or reasons, because I need to stay as ignorant in the art of teaching as I want them to remain in the art of literature. The assignments I give are usually assignments I’ve given myself, problems that have defeated me, investigations I’m still pursuing.

1. Literature has something to do with language. There’s probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what’s on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you’ll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren’t a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of schoolteachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage.

2. A first assignment: to be repeated whenever necessary, by me or the class. Write a story, a first-person narrative in the voice of someone with whom you’re in conflict. Someone who disturbs you, worries you, someone you don’t understand. Use a situation you don’t understand.

3. No personal journals, please, for about a year. Why? Boring to me. When you find only yourself interesting, you’re boring. When I find only myself interesting, I’m a conceited bore. When I’m interested in you, I’m interesting.

4. This year, I want to tell stories. I ask my father, now that he’s old and not so busy, to tell me stories, so I can learn how. I try to remember my grandmother’s stories, the faces of her dead children. A first assignment for this year: Tell a story in class, something that your grandmother told you about a life that preceded yours. That will remind us of our home language. Another story: At Christmas time or Passover supper, extract a story from the oldest persons told them by the oldest person they remember. That will remind us of history. Also—because of time shortage and advanced age, neither your father nor your grandmother will bother to tell unimportant stories.

5. It’s possible to write about anything in the world, but the slightest story ought to contain the facts of money and blood in order to be interesting to adults. That is, everybody continues on this earth by courtesy of certain economic arrangements; people are rich or poor, make a living or don’t have to, are useful to systems or superfluous. And blood—the way people live as families or outside families or in the creation of family, sisters, sons, fathers, the bloody ties. Trivial work ignores these two FACTS and is never comic or tragic.

May you do trivial work?

WELL

6. You don’t even have to be a writer. Read the poem “With Argus” by Paul Goodman. It’ll save you a lot of time. It ends:

     The shipwright looked at me

     with mild eyes.

     “What’s the matter friend?

     You need a New Ship

     from the ground up, with art,

     a lot of work,

     and using the experience you

     have—”

     “I’m tired!” I told him in

     exasperation,

     “I can’t afford it!”

                    “No one asks you, either,”

     he patiently replied, “to venture

     forth.

     Whither? why? maybe just forget it.”

     And he turned on his heel and left

     me—here.

7. Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious. Luckily for artists, they don’t require art to do a good day’s work. But critics and teachers do. A book, a story, should be smarter than its author. It is the critic or the teacher in you or me who cleverly outwits the characters with the power of prior knowledge of meetings and ends.

Stay open and ignorant.

(For me, the problem: how to keep a class of smart kids—who are on top of Medieval German and Phenomenology—dumb? Probably too late and impossible.)

Something to read: Cocteau’s journals.

8. Sometimes I begin the year by saying: this is a definition of fiction. Stesichorus was blinded for mentioning that Helen had gone off to Troy with Paris. He wrote the following poem and his sight was restored:

     Helen, that story is not true

     You never sailed in the benched ships

     You never went to the city of Troy.

9. Two good books to read:

     A Life Full of Holes, Charhadi

     I Work Like a Gardener, Joan Miró

10. What is the difference between a short story and a novel? The amount of space and time any decade can allow a subject and a group of characters. All this clear only in retrospect.

Therefore: Be risky.

11. A student says, Why do you keep saying a work of art? You’re right. It’s a bad habit. I mean to say a work of truth.

12. What does it mean To Tell the Truth?

It means—for me—to remove all lies. A Life Full of Holes was said truthfully at once from the beginning.1 Therefore, we know it can be done. But I am, like most of you, a middle-class person of articulate origins. Like you I was considered verbal and talented, and then improved upon by interested persons. These are some of the lies that have to be removed:

a. The lie of injustice to characters.

b. The lie of writing to an editor’s taste, or a teacher’s.

c. The lie of writing to your best friend’s taste.

d. The lie of the approximate word.

e. The lie of unnecessary adjectives.

f. The lie of the brilliant sentences you love the most.

13. Don’t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman

      Prince Kropotkin

         Malcolm X

14. Two peculiar and successful assignments. Invent a person—that is, name the characteristics and we will write about him or her. Last year it was a forty-year-old divorced policeman with two children.

An assignment called the List Assignment. Because inside the natural form of day beginning and ending, supper with the family, an evening at the draft board, there are the facts of noise, conflict, echo. In other years, the most imaginative, inventive work has happened in these factual accounts.

For me too.

15. The stories of Isaac Babel and the conversation with him reported by Konstantin Paustovsky in Years of Hope. Also, Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life, a collection of stories incorrectly called autobiography.

Read the poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” by William Butler Yeats.

*   *   *

Students are missing from these notes. They do most of the talking in class. They read their own work aloud in their own voices and discuss and disagree with one another. I do interrupt, interject any one of the preceding remarks or one of a dozen others, simply bossing my way into the discussion from time to time, because, after all, it’s my shop. To enlarge on these, I would need to keep a journal of conversations and events. This would be against my literary principles and pedagogical habits—all of which are subject to change.

Therefore: I can only describe the fifteen points I’ve made by telling you that they are really notes for beginners, or for people like myself who must begin again and again in order to get anywhere at all.

(1970)