I am surprised sometimes by the suddenness of November: beauty abruptly shed to a common nakedness— grasses deadened by hoarfrost, persistent memories of people I’ve lost.
It is left to those of us dressed in the hard barky skin of experience to insist on a decorum that rises to the greatness of a true Thanksgiving.
This is not a game, against a badly scheduled team, an uneven match on an uneven pitch.
This is Life. This is Life. This is Life.
Not politely mumbled phrases, murmured with a practiced and meticulous earnestness.
Thanksgiving was born a breech-birth, a screaming appreciation for being alive— for not being one of the many who didn’t make it— who couldn’t moil through another hardscrabble year on tubers and scarce fowl.
Thanksgiving is for being you. There are no thanks without you.
You are the power of hopeful promise; you are the balky soil turning upon itself; you are bursting forth in your experience.
You are not the person next to you— not an image or an expectation. You are the infinite and eternal you— blessed, and loved, and consoled by the utter commonness and community of our souls.
We cry and we’re held. We love and we hold.
We are the harvest of God, constantly renewed, constantly awakened, to a new Thanksgiving.
~Fitz
Have a great break. Thanks for all of your good work this semester. No homework until you return!
Take your foot off the brakes, but keep your eyes on the road
~Fitz
Once, back in my days as a logger, I cut through a big white oak. I didn’t realize that the trunk was mostly rotten and hollow until my chain saw was most of the way through the monstrous tree. After the mad crush of the tree to the ground I noticed blood on my saw and on my legs. In cutting the tree down, I inadvertently massacred a whole raccoon family: a mom and seven incredibly small babies. I was pretty bummed about it all, but while moving the family out of the stump, I noticed the smallest ball of fur hobbling way on three legs.
One had survived. I picked him up and named him Rocky (after the main character in The Beatles big hit “Rocky Raccoon.” He fit into my shirt pocket with plenty of room to spare.
When I got home, I put him on the table in a cake dish filled with straw. I wasn’t even sure how to feed it. Its eyes were still closed. I heated up some milk in a pan on the stove and sucked some warm milk into an eye-dropper, and as luck would have it, Rocky slurped it up.
For the first few weeks warm milk was all Rocky could eat, but as time went on he grew into a fun little terror who would eat almost anything. He even learned to open the refrigerator door himself. He laid on his back in the mornings when I was milking my goats begging for me to squeeze the teats milk all over his face. He would steal the chickens’ eggs as if it were his birthright.
I felt like a young dad doing everything a dad needed to do. I wanted to raise a raccoon that could live in both worlds: the wild world and my world. After about six months Rocky was a pretty stout and healthy three-legged raccoon. I felt more and more confident that he could now live in both a feral and a wild world.
So I let Rocky outside on his own.
Later I saw a hawk circling overhead the hay field. I saw a coydog skulking in the tangle of brush beside the woods. I heard the awful cry of a fisher cat somewhere deep in the swamp.
Maybe I let Rocky go too soon. Maybe I should have given him a better rubric for life.
So What’s Your Point? The Uses and Abuses of Rhetoric
Knowing that you do not understand is a virtue; Not knowing that you do not understand is a defect.
—Lao Tzu
Nobody likes to be wrong, and for that matter, most of us “like” to be right. Few of us walk around writing, saying or thinking, “Boy, my opinions and views are certainly shallow, uninformed, and alarmingly trivial—but here is what I think….” We like to be assured that what we know and feel is valid and real and informed, for there is a serenity in knowing that we know—or that we have thoughtfully reached a level of knowingness that is somewhere near to certainty. I admit that a certain jealousy sweeps over me when I hear or read someone say exactly what I already think and feel (and though I knew) but I just never found the words or the way to say it with that much eloquence and clarity. Or I am at a party and two prodigious minds are arguing a topic, and I find myself swinging dizzily from one side to the other: “He’s right. No, she’s right. But he made a good point. Now her’s is better.” Worse is when I decide to butt in to the conversation with my limited skills and sketchy half-ass information, and I am forced to slink away with my tail between my legs like a proud, yet sheepish, cur. In each instance I have been victimized by a majestic and compelling use of rhetorical language—which is simply effective and persuasive speaking or writing. But don’t fear. Becoming a more adept rhetorical speaker and writer is a skill that can be learned and practiced in every facet of our academic, social, and intellectual interactions.
The first skill is to stop. Think. Think some more. Then speak. Lao Tzu had it right almost three thousand years ago when he wrote the short poem posted above this essay. He was no doubt annoyed by people who were obsessed with being right, but who were not equally obsessed with knowing what they needed to know before opening their big mouths or wetting ink to papyrus! The wisest and most enduring advice then is to stay the heck out of conversations you have no right or aptitude to be in. Sadly, Lao Tzu’s wisdom is lost on most people, for our lives are full of moments where we are carried away by the ephemeral sound of our own voices and not by the content and wisdom of our arguments. We only need to read or hear the endless screed of Facebook postings, political rantings, and absurd comments that so fill our everyday lives to know that we live in opinion-full, yet shallow, times. I am just as guilty as any of you. Regrettably, it is often impossible to undo what we say or write or post. The only practical (and wise) thing we can do is to start fresh and choose our arguments more carefully, think more deeply, and know when, where, and how to say or write what we want to say or write. Only then will our rhetoric rise to the level of the sublime. Hopefully, this set of criteria for speech giving will not banish us collectively to a vow of silence, for there is much each of us do know, perhaps more than any other person on the planet!
The second skill is to know that a gaggle of thoughts and opinions cannot be simply dumped on the page or on the person like an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. We need to complete the picture for our listeners and readers; moreover, we need to let our listeners and readers feel like a part of the building process for without a sympathetic audience our words are but emptiness in a vacuum, and our rhetoric will be a self-aggrandizing show-boating of our superior and subtle thoughts, and we will not convince anybody of anything. A good rhetorician understands his or her audience as fully as the subject matter, and they are willing and happy to meet that audience on a common field of play with a common set of rules for the game at hand. I worked for many years as a boatbuilding wood-shop teacher, and my mantra for building a simple boat has always been the old maxim that “form follows function.” It is much the same with rhetoric: the ways in which we build our arguments and state our cases need to be crafted with the same adherence to sound and effective principles of construction as a craftsman building his or her boat. No doubt there are new and radical boats launched every day, but every one of them must float, and they must move through the water in some semblance of the way the builder hopes they do, or else it is essentially a failure. Interesting, perhaps—but still a failure. Some people have mastered the art and craft of rhetoric through experience, reading, practice, common sense and an uncommon intuition; most of the rest of us are best served by listening, watching, reading, parsing, and perfecting the time-worn and time-tested formulas and spontaneous performances of whomever we feel is simply awesome at drawing sap from a telephone pole, a meal from a loaf of bread, or, simply, sense from sound.
The final skill (which I need to practice right now) is discerning the limits of what you know well enough to speak or write sensibly about, so this is where I leave you off because I am pretty sure that I have reached the limit of my erudition on rhetoric—though not my interest in the subject. I need to be content at this point to be, as Buddha once said, the finger pointing at the moon. If you really want to master the art of rhetoric—if truth is mightier than the sword of your opinions—you’ll figure it out. The obvious starting point is to read Aristotle’s seminal work, Rhetoric, or even just the history of the discussions surrounding rhetoric and its uses and abuses in ancient Greece to the present times. There are reams of discussions and treatises on rhetoric in print and widely available on the internet. Reading Aristotle, who is way more wordy than Lao Tzu, is a sensible place to begin; but, at the very least (and before your next argument) remember what Mark Twain said: “If you don’t lie, you’ll never have to remember anything.”
My entire adult life has been spent writing personal essays. I fact, whenever I write anything else—a song, a poem, or a story—I can trace its birth to some essay I have previously written. Personal essays are how I figure out who I am and what I live for and what I aspire to be or become. In short, my essays are me. I write from my head and heart using as many time-tested tips, tricks, and techniques of the writers craft to say what I want to say as clearly and powerfully as I possibly can.
I want and need you to do the same. You are a perfect and poignant person, and your voice is as valid and real as any other voice in the universe, so everything you don’t write or try to say is deducted from the potential beauty of the universe. You don’t feel, think or believe any less than me or any other person. What you might not believe or realize is that essay writing, aside from getting a good grade or getting into some ritzy school, is all that important.
All I can do is give you the tools to build an essay. You, however, are the materials you use to build the essay, but I can’t make you swing the hammer, cut the boards and build the house of your dreams. That is up to you. If you are not willing, then you are resigned to mediocrity. This class is useless to you.
But if you are willing; if you blow the sparks of your life into flame, then the fire of possibility will be lit and your life will shine like a beacon in the night. You will inspire, comfort and console the lives lucky enough to read and hear your words.
The four main pillars of this class are Read. Write. Create. Share. The first three are the hardest because they require real work, effort, and often drudgery in the midst of your taxing and often stressful life. But to share… To share is as simple and hard as finding the courage to press a button and release your words to a wider world and “let the chips fall where they will.”
In the simple song of Guy Clark, he is not implying he merely wants to build a boat—he is “tired of the same old same;” he is tired of the “same old songs with the same old lines/ the same old words with the same old lines.” Clark wants his words to take him to new places in a brave and enduring way. It is time for all of us—and yes, me too—to “sail into a brand new day.”
Does this video really have anything to do with English? It was posted by a friend–who is easily the most talented musician I know–so I watched, more out of a shop teacher’s curiosity of “how things are made.” What strikes me most is not the skill of the violin maker, known as a “luthier,” but the un-noted history that brought him to the point in this video where he can construct a violin with a set of hand tools. It had to be some equation of life measured in time, passion, and curiosity–not some innate and crazy skill. Nothing he does here–from a woodworker’s perspective–is all that special, but the end result is.
You are all at a point in your life where everything matters: if you work out and get strong, you will probably stay strong for the better portion of your lives. If you study hard and do your work in and out of school, you will have a lot of options in the future. If you practice kindness, generosity and acceptance, you will never be without a friend or without respect.
If you do not dream, you are already dead. If you waste time today to rest for tomorrow then the violin of your life will never get built.
Recent Comments