Author: Loren

Change is Inevitable

Although I was unwilling to change to fit my ex-students’ way of seeing and dealing with the world, like it or not, I have begun to change the way I see the world because of my recent throat cancer surgery. Although some of these changes are relatively minor, others seem far-reaching.

Unable to eat for over a month and being forced to rely on cases of Hershey’s ProBalance, fondly referred to as "yellow sludge," I may never again eat a Hershey’s candy bar. I did, however, gain a new respect for Round Table pizza, for me the ultimate measure of recovery. I will celebrate my victory in the hard-fought battle to re-learn to eat with a feast at my local pizza parlor.

Constantly fighting for breath and trying to clear my tracheotomy gave me a new appreciation of the problems my brother, and others, went through fighting asthma. It is truly terrifying when you can’t breathe, even if you know that you will be able to breathe in a few moments if you do what you need to do.

Not sleeping a whole night through for over two months gave me more empathy for a friend who suffers from intermittent sleep problems. It’s hard to take much of anything seriously when you’re always tired.

Being unable to speak for over a month and only being able to communicate through writing, I realized how frustrating and alienating such a disability can be. Unless people really reach out to you, it just seems easier to withdraw into yourself and forget about trying to communicate with others. The longer you go without communicating with others, the greater the temptation to withdraw further into yourself. Such alienation can be confusing and frightening, even when you know, as I did, that it is only temporary.

On a more positive note, such a withdrawal is almost like entering a monastic retreat where you can look deeper into yourself, because there are no outside distractions. That’s what I chose to do. When you spend a month doing little besides examining yourself, you’re bound to gain new insights, for better or for worse.

The greatest realization is one that should have always been obvious, but wasn’t. Life is finite. While recovering from this surgery, for the first time in my life I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, wasn’t sure I wanted to endure this kind of pain. I never once had that feeling in all my fire-fights in Vietnam. I never had that feeling with my first encounter with cancer twenty-three years ago.

The only time I have ever vaguely felt that way was when my father died after several ravaging heart attacks and when my mother died after suffering from Alzheimer’s. My time, like there’s, is limited. And I have never lived my life as if that was true.

Some people live their life in the past like “Richard Cory” or “Glory Days,” but that’s never appealed to me. Figuring there’s little I can do about the past, I have few regrets in my life. Why regret what you can’t change? My daughter once accused me of being the “least sentimental” person she ever knew. In a sense, she may be right. I love where I am now; so, why should I spend time looking back?

I have, unfortunately, lived much of my life in the future. “When I retire, I’m going to:” Read all the books I started buying when I was in college. Learn electronics. Take advantage of all those neat woodworking tools I haven’t had time to use. Finish the yard. Change my life. Attain enlightenment

Now, however, it seems that trying to live in the future is just as destructive as trying to live in the past. Both deny the moment its due.

Perhaps I’ve sensed this for a while now. Maybe my increasing interest in Zen was the result of realizing that I’ve tended to live beyond the moment rather than in the moment, and that in doing so I wasn’t really living at all.

Be that as it may, I have resolved to change my ways: to start reading the books I’ve stored up for the future (I hope I still find them interesting) instead of buying new ones, to use the tools I have now rather than looking for new ones to buy (unless, of course, I absolutely need it to finish an old project), to master and apply old skills rather than trying to learn new ones, and to finish old projects rather than planning new ones.

I’m going to try to live my life as if there is no tomorrow, not in the hedonistic sense of “eat, drink and be merry,” though there’s certainly nothing too bad about that, but in the sense of trying to make the most of every day and finishing what I’ve started rather than leaving loose ends around for someone else to have to pick up.

The Last Reincarnation

Reinventing yourself at my age is no easy task. One of the reasons I left teaching was because I was beginning to feel like a dinosaur and didn’t want to change my values to fit those of another generation.

Now, one of the things I always liked about teaching was that I felt it kept me young. Constantly being around teenagers affects the way you see the world. If you’re lucky, it keeps you plugged in to the positive changes going on in the world. If you’re unlucky, it makes you view the world more and more pessimistically.

Fortunately, I liked most of the kids I taught over the years and sympathized with their viewpoint. Most of them seemed more positive and optimistic than the adults I knew. I enjoyed working with them, and they gave me hope that the world was becoming a better place.

Unfortunately, I began to lose that feeling the last few years I taught. It’s not that I didn’t like the kids just as much, I did. I even liked some of the kids whose attitudes I was no longer willing to adjust to and put up with.

More and more, students came to class with an “attitude.” They came with every intention of getting in the teacher’s face. Don’t misunderstand me, though, I’m all for “attitude.” I have “attitude” and always have had. Having "attitude" helps you to stand up for what you believe in a world that often doesn’t give a damn what you believe and would gladly steamroll you into some mindless conformity. But having an attitude doesn’t mean you have to show it all the time.

I spent most of my grade school years fighting because I had an attitude. When I get angry, and thank God that doesn’t happen very often, I have way more “attitude” than any sane man would want. I think I inherited it from my father who became an All-City tackle in Seattle by “getting mad” in games. It’s probably not entirely irrelevant that my favorite comic character is Donald Duck who’s famous for his outbursts.

As a teacher I enjoyed teasing kids and having them tease me back. It was often an easy way to defuse an emerging problem, and most kids thought it was fun to tease the teacher. Personally, I always thought school, and life in general, should have been a hell of a lot more fun than it was. After all, this was learning, not torture, and learning is what life is about. Isn’t it? So, why shouldn’t learning be fun?

But the last generation of kids I taught was different. They came in sounding like rappers, WWF clones, or spoiled athletes who think it’s cool to taunt their opponent. The simplest request was often met with belligerence, no matter how reasonable the request. Boy or girl, made no difference.

Sadly enough, I felt too old to adapt to this new style. I wasn’t willing to put up with it, no matter how much I liked a kid. I knew that it was just a fad, part of the current culture, but I wasn’t willing, or able, to adapt to the style, understand it or not.

Simply put, at some age it gets harder and harder to change your values and your ways of seeing the world. I’m afraid I’ve reached that age.

In a Dark Time

Here’s the poem this journal takes its title from:

IN A DARK TIME
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks-is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened. summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke’s “In a Dark Time” seems even more powerful today than when I first read it in 1965. It stands as a masterpiece in itself but takes on added depth when read within the context of Roethke’s entire body of works. When one understands the dark nature of many of Roethke’s earlier poems, poems like “Epidermal Macabre,” “Weed Puller, or longer poems like “The Lost Son,” the transcendence suggested in the phrase “and one is One” is amazing. In another sense, though, it is a “typical” Roethke poem because many of his poems attempt to move from despair to hope.

The first line of the poem suggests the essence of the poem, the idea that in a dark time, a time of despair, one begins to find oneself. Too often we lose ourselves in our despair and give up all hope, but the loss of the most important things in life can also help us gain insights that enrich our future life. Indeed, perhaps it is only in such moments of despair that we can find our true selves because they test who we are and what we truly believe.

When the poet sees his “shadow” he sees his alter ego, perhaps even the dark side of his soul, in this increasing darkness. The “echo,” though it may seem merely to reflect the idea of the shadow, instead seems to indicate a different idea, the idea that he finds himself reflected in nature, which is usually a source of insight and power in Roethke’s poetry. This idea of highs and lows is mirrored in the closing lines where he uses images of “the wren,” high, and, “serpents of the den.” low.

The line “What’s madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstance” seems particularly poignant considering the number of times Roethke was committed to a mental institution for treatment. Certainly if anyone could understand the “purity of despair” he could. “That place among the rocks-is it a cave,/Or winding path?” forces us to wonder how many times in the midst of this tormenting “fire” he felt he saw a way out, like Yeats’ spiral path, only to discover that was a source of greater despair, the cave of the “serpents of the den.” In these moments of despair, he seems to be constantly walking on the edge of the abyss.

In this “dark night of the soul” he receives many “messages,” literal or symbolic. It is a night when the birds, often used to represent the soul, fly away, as if suddenly disturbed by some force or as if leaving the body behind. The complex symbol of the “ragged moon” suggests “lunacy” or loss of imagination, while the eclipse suggests that the dark side is prevailing and that all hope is lost. The “unnatural light” reinforces the idea that the forces of darkness are at work here. Worst of all, there are no tears, as if no one really cares what is happening, even the poet himself.

The poet, a “heat-maddened” fly desperately buzzing at death’s door, simply wants to die. And miraculously, at this very moment of the “death of the self,” the poet finds himself and God, becoming one with One, and he is suddenly “free in the tearing wind,” free in spirit, no longer held by the flesh. It’s almost Zen-like, or perhaps the kind of merging with God that Christian Saints felt in mystical moments.

This final transcendence seems more convincing because of the powerful images of despair that precede it. This is no easy victory, no easy transformation promised in a book. This is the record of a hard-won victory by this man at this moment.

And, if Roethke can win his victory over the forces of darkness and despair, there is hope that I can too.

Here’s a number of Roethke resources on the web.

A Scott Ruescher essay on Roethke’s collected poems.

A Roethke page at the Academy of American Poets

This site is a touching dedication to Roethke

Eleven of Roethke’s poems are included here if you want some background. “The Far Field” and a “Journey to the Interior” might shine the most light on “In a Dark Time.”

A Blog’s Limitations?

Speaking of form and the limitations necessary for art, writing about May’s book has made me very conscious of the limitations of a blog. In fact for a moment I almost, but not quite, missed the classroom where I could have a dialogue with students about a book rather than just “lecturing” to myself.

Having written the summary of the first two chapters of The Courage to Create, I resisted writing more summaries (as you could probably tell if you came back for several days in a row). Although I admire Philosophical Investigations’ attempts to discuss Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations online, I personally find it very difficult to discuss a long work in my blog. The first time I tried to discuss a philosophical book, I posted an entry but then later deleted because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it online.

I find that quite frustrating because novels, and other full-length works, have been just as influential in shaping who I am as poets or musical artists have been, and I would like to deal with them in this blog. Although they aren’t as easy to deal with as a poem or a song, they have sometimes been more influential in my life. Books like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure have been pivotal in shaping my “world,” to use Rollo May’s term.

I’m convinced that the philosophy that has emerged from my interaction with the “real” world and the world of ideas that I encountered in literature have allowed me to cope with my experiences as effectively as possible and to avoid, though neither unscathed nor unchanged, the life-crippling despair and bitterness that many of my friends have experienced when they experienced similar situations.

One of many reasons I became a teacher after my experiences in Vietnam was the belief that the young soldiers I served with in Vietnam has not been prepared for the “world” they met in Vietnam. To the contrary, they came to the war with an idealistic view of America’s role in the world that was belied by most of our actions in Vietnam. These recruits came expecting to gloriously rescue the “good” South Vietnamese from the “evil” North Vietnamese. Instead, they encountered a peasantry that, at best, was indifferent to the Americans, and, at worst, was fighting at night to defeat us.

Many of these young soldiers reacted very differently to the war than I did, and I’m convinced that in many cases it was because I had a different background than they did. After four years of reading modern literature in college, I was more skeptical of America’s war aims. Books like Camus’ The Stranger and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead gave me a different expectation of war than the patriotic, distorted high-school history classes these young men had taken. They had been told about all the great ideas America stood for and about our noble deeds in the past. Unfortunately, the media and their teachers had ignored all the bad things we had also done, like our treatment of the American Indians or America’s questionable practices in South America

As ill-prepared as they were psychologically, little surprise many of them simply couldn’t come to terms with the reality of what was going on in Vietnam. They couldn’t reconcile their “world” with the “real world” of Vietnam.

I, on the other hand, suddenly understood Camus’ The Stranger, a novel that seemed incomprehensible when I encountered it in college five years earlier. Existentialism itself became clear. Kiekergard’s despair became my despair, but at least it didn’t come completely unexpectedly. I must admit, though, that sometimes even I was shocked to realize that just a few years earlier I had been sitting on a college campus reading poetry and watching all the beautiful young ladies walk by.

When I came back from Vietnam, I couldn’t believe the changes I had undergone. I was even half-thankful that I had gotten a “Dear Loren” letter before I left because I didn’t think the girl could possibly recognize me as the same person I was when I left, for I hardly recognized myself.

The point is that books have played an integral part in developing my philosophy. If I’m going to continue to blog and explore who I am online, I need to find a satisfactory way of dealing with long works so that I don’t bore the hell out of myself and anyone else who just might drop in to see what I have to say on a particular day.

If you have an opinion, drop me an email.