The rock critic Paul Williams once wrote that, when you come down to it, Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is a song about exhilaration. The narrator has decided that he has nothing to live for, left his home in Georgia, roamed across the country in search of a place where he can do nothing, and now...well, in a way, he's free from all concerns. "What We're Sure Of," my poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is a paradox in a similar way. Everything in the poem deals with some kind of anxiety: the death of grandparents, confusion about the afterlife, the threat of nuclear war, the irreversible march of time, homelessness, hunger, rain. And yet, I didn't feel anxious when I wrote it, and even when I read it now, seven years later, it has a certain lightness on its feet. At heart, it's a poem about not knowing everything. Perhaps a poem about actually knowing everything would be more ponderous fare.
I'm a teacher. Before that, I was a journalist. Before that, I was a student. I know lots of things, and I pass a lot of them on to people who might someday pass them on as well. My entire life, the only thing that I have ever received any money for is telling people things. I don't wield a hammer or a saw, perform surgeries, or build houses. Certainly, I wouldn't make it as an athlete. I live and work each day under the assumption that information is valuable -- Malala Yousafzai risked her life for an education, after all. After 44 years, I know the names of every U.S. president in order (and that Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms, and is thus counted twice). I know that Australia is both a country and a continent, that a banana is technically a berry, that Episode IV of Star Wars was actually the first one made, and that Andy Warhol didn't really say that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. I know how to drive a car (though I am rusty when it comes to changing a tire) and how to fill out an income tax form. The word dachshund is actually German for "badger dog," not "wiener dog." Periods and commas should come before quotation marks. If you heat a hardboiled egg in the microwave, it's best to drizzle a little water on it so that it doesn't get rubbery. The above list may sound like a jumble of random facts. Of course it is. I could fill an infinite series of volumes about the things I don't know, but what I store in my gray matter has kept me alive so far. Obviously, it helped me to graduate from school and get a series of jobs. It would not help me against a tidal wave or hungry bear, but I take precautions to stay away from those. In the confines of my world, I feel like I have the right toolbox to get by. I hope the same thing for my students; every so often, I remind them that the main point of English class is not to pass every vocabulary test or place every semicolon perfectly, but to realize the extraordinariness of life and to develop a certain sense of empathy and perspective. In the 7th grade right now, we're reading Avi's brilliant 1991 novel Nothing but the Truth, in which a high school student does a cruel thing to his teacher that is passed onto a news reporter and then distorted in the media, to the point where the public is in uproar over an incident that never happened and the teacher's career is seemingly ruined. Yes, there will be tests on the reading, and I hope the students pass them. But more than that, I hope that they will learn to be skeptical about gossip, to understand the concept of biased news, to remember that there are two sides to many stories. Perhaps one day, like the title character of Slumdog Millionaire, they will appear on a game show in which Nothing but the Truth is the answer to the final question. However big, however small, something good must come of the fact that we read the novel in class. That's the faith that keeps us teaching. I know, without requiring evidence, that I will never have a student who remembers everything that I told him or her. They will probably all remember some of it, and some of them will pass parts of it on. The information that they learned from me will compete for space in their own gray matter with information that they learned from countless others. That is as it should be. All that matters is that their knowledge will help them, whatever form "help" entails. Perhaps it will give them a ticket to Harvard, or the strategic skills to avoid the next pandemic, or simply an amusing set of trivia to mull over when they have trouble falling asleep. "What We're Sure Of," which appeared in the book Angels in Seven, is a rambling three-section poem that started after I had coffee with a fellow poet who told me that his grandfather (or father -- I may have tweaked the word) had died. The poet was marveling at his (grand)father's intellect and the possibility that it might simply have ceased to exist. "Everything he knew is gone," the poet said, and I incorporated that phrase into section one. Section two is about my office space, the bookshelves filled with memorized passages and the CDs that I played incessantly as a teenager, both for the music and the history behind them. The homeless woman who appears at the end of the section serves as a reminder of the limits of book knowledge -- "our luck determines what we learn from rain." We're lucky if our survival depends on Shakespeare rather than how to scrounge for water. As I said above, it's not entirely a melancholy poem. Section three is where it turns brighter. That part is based on a real experience that I had years ago tutoring a Chinese girl; Cindy was her name, or at least the anglicized one that she picked as an exchange student. She was bright, inquisitive, and doing her best to comprehend Mark Twain's dialect in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, not the easiest book for an English-learner. She was determined, though, and one day, we stopped on a word in the text that reminded her of another. As the poem states: She pauses at sever, the cousin of severe, and I sketch a flailing hand cleaved from the arm where it once belonged. If you sever a hand, I say, you have a severe injury. She smiles, tugs a sleeve over her fingers. Severe, like serious? All of that actually happened. I only tutored Cindy for another couple of weeks, so I can only speculate what she did with the knowledge I gave her. Hopefully, she ended up passing all the assessments about Huckleberry Finn. Presumably, she went back to China with plenty of stories about Americans. Perhaps she even encountered a situation where the word "sever" or "severe" came in handy. Or she may just remember them now as amusingly similar words, another quirk of the English language. Maybe that's why Otis Redding's vision is appealing to some of us. On the dock of the bay, watching the tide, we have nothing but time to think.
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
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