An Abstract Sense of Being

About ten years ago, I supervised an independent study for a senior I’d had in one of my first-year writing courses. He was an Environmental Studies major with a Creative Writing minor and wrote mostly non-fiction about Maine, where he’d grown up, and places he’d travelled on a gap year and when he studied abroad.

He was good, with a clear eye and a willingness to implicate himself. He came, like me, from a specific kind of privilege: a higher social than economic class, which usually looks something like your people are educated (in an academic way), but the money, having been generated by devotion to a capitalism repudiated by more recent generations, ran out a while back. Both of our fathers were Episcopal priests, as it happens.

He would come through my office door and throw himself into the overstuffed wingback chair I’d inherited from the office’s previous owner (who’d died within a year of retirement, having given his life to the lives of his students’ minds). I’d just let him sit there for a moment, amused at his frustrations, knowing he’d be okay. He, like me, like many writers, lived in more than one world at a time but didn't feel a complete sense of belonging to any of them, a condition that is both a choice and a burden.

He was adjacent, because of where he lived and who he hung around with, to a working class Maine he admired but could never be a part of, but nor did he want to be, with its conservative politics and hard living. Nor did he want to be a part of the other Maine he was adjacent to, that of the coastal moneyed, a life closer to leisure than lobstering. He admired his dad and the middle way he had forged (his dad who worked with his hands and eked out a living on the waterfront and then went to seminary, taking positions like the chaplaincy at an elite private school attended by children of some of the world’s wealthiest people) but like any son since the beginning of time, wanted some way that was his own.

He wrote essays about his girlfriend’s father, a Mainer who could build or fix anything, paid cash, and spoke only when necessary. He wrote about helping slaughter a sheep for dinner in Patagonia, about slicing its throat and letting it bleed out, saying that if he was going to eat the meat he felt like he had to participate in the animal’s death, but that it was hard. He wrote as if he were on the outside of every situation: he wasn't a true Mainer, but he wasn’t from away. He was a college student, but he could build things and support himself that way. He was an American guest at the ranch where they slaughtered the sheep, but stood with the shepherds while the sheep bucked and died. He wrote about all the ways he fucked things up and fell short until I said “enough,” that he had no more penance to perform, that he could never apologize enough for what he was because he was the result of the sins of all his fathers and it was time now to go on and live his own life.

Maybe I didn’t say it just like that, but we seemed to understand each other, and that I was saying these things to the both of us.

A lot has been said about the relationship between teacher and student and how at its best it is hard, impossible even, to determine from the inside which is which. It’s a strange existence, teaching, one of ostensible authority but the more seasoned you become, the more aware you are of both how rich the vein of knowledge is and that it’s a product of the relationship you have with your students, not with yourself and your own mind. You’re only as good as the extent to which you’re willing to show up with your expertise as ballast rather than armor. Let them test themselves on you. Over time, help them understand that you don’t have all the answers, and that they won’t ever need to, either.

I’ve had some strange experiences when I perceived people’s perceptions of me and was startled, but couldn’t deny them the truth of their experience. Mediating those perceptions has been tricky, though; I felt like I didn’t have access to myself for a long while, that I’d gone to ground when I got hurt by the world. I studied people for information about who I was because I didn’t trust my own instincts, but neither did I know how to interpret the data.

I have been sort of stunned and amazed, in these two years away from teaching, to discover that my students have been the most reliable source of this kind of information this whole time; over the thirty years of my teaching career, I have apparently been consistently who I really am with them, in the classroom and afterwards, with those who have chosen to remain in touch. This revelation came about because for the first time in thirty years, I have had to be whoever it is that I am outside a classroom, outside the role I was so comfortable inhabiting that I didn’t realize who I had become in it, which is to say: I had become myself.

I can only speculate that this becoming happened the way it did because I didn’t need to hide from my students. I needed them to help me tap into whatever it is that makes classroom learning happen; what we were trying to do would only work if I showed up without pretense, not caring about what they thought of me, caring only for what we could accomplish in the short time we had together. I was asking them to be vulnerable, as writers, so how could I be any less with them? But it wasn’t conscious; it just was. If I had been anything less than authentic, nothing would have worked the way it did.

When that senior, the not-Mainer, the not-from-away college student carpenter, read his work in front of an audience before he graduated, he recounted that I’d told him that memoir was hard because you have to believe that you’ve lived, and are living, a life worth writing about. He said he wished I’d told him that ahead of time, but you can’t warn a writer not to be a writer because that would be like deciding for yourself that you’re going to have brown eyes instead of blue ones.

What you let yourself see with those eyes, though, what you decide to do with the words that fill your head…that’s where we’re at our own mercy. Writers, determined outlaws, misfits, loners, we think, outsmart ourselves in this way: the feeling of not belonging anywhere becomes itself a place of belonging. Our stubborn insistence on a life at the edge of things, on being always on the outside looking in, becomes substantial in itself; we create a shadow we can’t outrun. We’re less special than we want to be, less special than we think we are, but we have to keep thinking that we have things worth saying, because we don’t know who we’d be if we stopped trying to understand, if we stopped trying to make sense of this world, of this life that is so confounding and beautiful and heartbreaking and full.

The same is true with teaching, in my experience. I could have tried to hold myself apart, tried to be either invisible or the locus of truth at the front of the classroom, but that would have undermined the whole reason we were there.

When I left Maine, I didn’t know if I’d be returning. I didn’t know if I’d ever teach again. I hadn’t yet been able to metabolize the lessons my students had taught me all those years. All I had when I left was the lingering sense that I wasn’t done yet, that I had more to give, but I wasn’t sure what form it would take, and I was so tired, not from teaching, never from teaching, but from all the ways life can be hard. These two years away have given me the perspective to understand why I needed to walk away when I did, and what I needed to understand in order to return.

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