A Balancing Act

I began a course for new teachers this week at the university, and on the first day our instructor showed us this clip, of the very talented Miyoko Shida. She asked us to think about the meaning it had for us, as teachers.
The responses were varied, but centered upon ourselves as "juggler" - we put ourselves in the place of the performer and contended with that - one bedraggled young man fought with the concept, saying he refused to be a "one man show" while others embraced the concept. The students were compared to the branches, the audience, the judges.
Later I thought, how funny that none of us had thought to put the students there, on that stage. How we had forgotten the precariousness of existence at their ages, when one must perform incredible and unexplained feats of unlimited poise and concentration before the judges, the adults - parents, teachers, family. How terrible is the audience of the peers, before whom one hopes to leave a lasting impression, the fear that the whole odd and unstable structure will collapse and leave one shamefaced. Everyone is always watching you at that age, a thousand eyes ogle one and await inevitable failure.
And the whole of one's reputation, as it stands before the audience, the judges, the world tuned in, rests on shoulders as fragile, shaky, transient as a feather.

Hecht's Heroes

Mass public education can be a tricky thing. Take "What Would You Do", an Israeli TV show dedicated to rewarding the nation's most tenacious busybodies, which made of Yehud its most recent soapbox. The town being my new venue of employment, I happened to overhear one of the teachers praising two girls who appeared on the show (unwittingly, of course - its 'big brother'-type format meaning the show relies on hidden cameras). The girls, now about to graduate from high school, were students at the middle school and some of those present in the teachers' lounge remembered them.
Intrigued, I watched the episode online. Its somewhat dubious scenario went thusly: Three young men walk into a coffee shop in the center of town, instructed by the righteous Haim Hecht, who speaks before the camera with such conviction that it seems entirely possible he missed his calling as a Harlem preacher. Hecht, who mercilessly places the two innocent girls randomly in the crosshairs of his little social experiment, tells the actors to be seated at the next table. They sit, and immediately begin to talk about taking turns raping a poor innocent 15-year old not yet arrived on the scene. ("We'll get her drunk, I'll take her first, and then you, let's see how much of a man you are!") Their tones and diction resemble that of a Shakespearian Hamlet reciting his "To be or not to be" speech.
At first the two girls giggle, a response not entirely uncalled for, in my opinion. "Is this for real?" one asks the other.
No, my dear, it is not. You have been made a guinea pig without your awareness. Just sit there and attempt not to get arugula caught between your teeth, because you are, also unwittingly, being filmed for a national audience.
Soon the young men's prey arrives, and the girls bear witness to a whispered conversation between her and her 'boyfriend', who tells her not to be a child and come with them, despite the fact that she wants to be 'alone' with him.
The girls giggle again at the outlandish dialogue, which has been fine-tuned to form such a perfect example of good and evil that it would put Harry Potter to shame. Cut to Hecht, who laments that perhaps the girls do not understand the gravity of the situation.
"Let's give them another chance," he says magnanimously to the camera. "Perhaps they are afraid to make a move when the guys are there. Guys, step out so we can see what they do."
Inexplicably, the actors rise and leave their victim alone, muttering something about having to make a purchase at the corner shop. The other maintains she must make a telephone call, and when she is left alone the two lab rats take action.
"Listen, you shouldn't go with them," they advise her. "We overheard them talking about getting you drunk and raping you."
"Really?" the actress says with mock incredulity, then goes on to explain that she has to go, she loves him, bla bla bla.
Her 'boyfriend' returns, at Hecht's behest; he has hooked two fish, now he wants to see if he can reel them in . In other words, will they let her go with the 'rapists' or continue to attempt to "save her"? I have no idea what Hecht had in mind here... Perhaps the girls - whose width when placed side by side is just about equal to half that of the studly 'boyfriend' in question - were meant to beat up the actors and depart on a white horse, slut in tow?
In any case, our admirable host is in for a disappointment - the girls let her leave, though not without a strict warning, and are gently chastised by Hecht the moment they exit the cafe.
"This evening, Sapir (the 15-year old) will get raped. Did you do enough to save her?" he exhorts, as the two girls hang their heads in shame.
"Next time I won't let it go this way. I'll do everything in my power... It's just that nothing like this has ever happened to me before," says one of them, defensively.
Next time, indeed. Leaving aside, for a moment, the almost laughable unlikeliness that anyone will ever overhear three young men plainly discussing a rape plot in the middle of a coffee shop, in tones meant for a studio audience, and suspend our disbelief, for Haim Hecht's sake. But even with this in mind, the show propagates a number of dangerous beliefs and behaviors, precisely the type of beliefs and behaviors that brought us the death of Trayvon Martin so recently. Preaching of Hecht's kind creates civilian 'heroes' for whom the street is nothing less than a Hollywood set, of which they are the star. Indeed, there is genuine call for this view, for Hecht's set is the street, his scenarios, unlikely as they appear to anyone mature enough to know that life is not entirely black and white, bring to life the 'damsel in distress' fantasy that is the stuff of our most potent dreams, and quite a large number of silly American movies.
To think that by chasing her (or her future attackers) down the girls could "save" little Sapir is a perilous misconception. I have worked with teenagers long enough, both in public schools and in a program designed for teenage prostitutes, to know that all of the instruments of the welfare state put together cannot "save" her. Young girls who enter willingly into such situations require lengthy psychological treatment delving into the episode, or multiple episodes, in their youth in which an uncle offered them candy to sit on his knee, or a neighbor touched them inappropriately while helping them off the swing. To pass off to the public that what ails such young women can be immediately remedied by anyone on the street is to plant dangerous and narcissistic notions in the heads of many naive people. Also, it completely ignores the real issues that put those girls in such situations to begin with. For them, the real rape has already taken place, is taking place in far too many homes across the nation. To "save" them in the manner Hecht proposes is to spit rather indecorously in their faces.
Me, I find myself wishing that instead of focusing on preposterous situations with the statistical likeliness of lightning striking one's head, Hecht would use his noxious notoriety to perform some far more necessary and edifying experiments.
A few lessons in politeness, for example, are something I find lacking in my home country. Rather than increase the average Israeli's already obsessive need to stick his or her nose in other people's business, why not teach the advantages of improving oneself first?
Picture a line at the bank, or the post office, in which people wait agitatedly for one snooty clerk, who is of course occupied more avidly by her nails than the large population currently depending on her efficiency.
Then picture Hecht, in his mobile editing van, asking the camera, "What would you do? Could you wait patiently for your turn to arrive, or would you surrender to the rude impulses of the masses?"
Cut in line, and Hecht pulls you out of the bank with a wagging of his obnoxious finger. Sir, you failed the test, he tells you before the camera and the world. Yell at the clerk and you are chastised on national television, all while realizing that the entire country just caught you surreptitiously picking your nose on hidden camera.
Or take another scenario, a business meeting, for example. Can you wait until your coworker finishes speaking before cutting her off like a chauvinist asshole? No? You get a good verbal spanking by the omniscient Hecht. On the other hand, offer to get the secretary a cup of coffee for once ("You deserve it too, every once in a while," you say to her incredulity) and the entire nation suddenly thinks very highly of you. Perhaps you even get stopped and congratulated on the street.
As an educator, these are the things for which I tend to reward my students. Simple, daily acts of kindness.
Perhaps Hecht would find such a show boring, but I have a feeling he would be the first on the show to get a good wag of my finger.

Ode to E

This week E, the student who terrorized the lesson I wrote about last week, was removed from my class. I asked the principal to come in at the beginning of the next lesson to reinstate the values of the classroom (You are all here to learn, no one can disrupt another student's right to learn, etc), and when she reached the end of her little motivational speech, the students seemed, for the most part, to agree with her. It was therefore surprising that when she asked if anyone felt he could not take on the responsibility of learning, E spoke up. "I do not accept what was stated here," he chirped.

One has to feel sorry for E. Last year, I have heard since becoming interested in his case, he was visibly depressed. He spoke constantly of suicide, when he spoke at all, and his lack of place in the world and the school. He was silent, thin and pale. Puberty, it seemed, had taken a rather wringing toll on him.

But what was depression last year has become elation since the beginning of this one. Life says white, E boldly, boisterously and persistently says black. He rebels against anyone older than age 17. His wits have turned him from class mute to class clown, and he is drunk with newfound power. Perhaps for this reason E has feelings of persecution, as he told the guidance counselor, (though she found these feelings to emanate solely from the two teachers who are new in his life - myself and his homeroom teacher). E has overshot his mark, it seems, and once again finds himself displaced, like an Amish man who has joined the party scene only to become an alcoholic.

I find myself distinctly penitent over the battle I allowed E to wage against me. Things may be very different now if I had just taken him aside that very first day, asked him to tell me what was wrong and why he felt I could not teach him. Now, granted, this dialogue might not have worked at all, or made me appear pathetic in his eyes, but at least I would have known I had exhausted all options. As it is, I am left with the knowledge that I beat a 14-year old boy in a battle of wits - not at all a proud achievement. 

What is tricky about this age, I find, is that students appear to be adults - in speech, behavior, and often physical traits (some of my students are taller than me) - and this makes it exceedingly difficult to remember that, in their hearts and minds, they are little more than children. Engaging in battles of wit with them just a little less reprehensible than doing so with a 5-year old. Indeed, a middle school student walks a thin and perilous line between childhood and adulthood, and it is an educator's job to transport him safely, and with as little trauma as possible, along this ragged path. It is a trying and exhausting ordeal, but oh, how rewarding can it be!

I say this because today I visited my old school, the one that so ruthlessly divested me of any and all innocence and naivete I may have had last year. I was told that V, my shyest and quietest homeroom student, whom I probed and prodded and encouraged to speak all year, is now volunteering to speak in class. What's more, V, who had very few friends and whose name almost none of the students knew, made a video clip with two of the most popular boys in his grade for their first school project, which won the competition. 

Without too much boasting or tooting of personal horns, I would like to give myself just a little credit for V's achievement. Of course it wasn't just me who caused this change, but I doubt it is very wrong to feel a little, tiny bit good about myself. 

I began this year with a very harsh stance towards the students. Scared, perhaps, that they would not take me seriously. That they would walk all over me if given the chance. But this approach, too, exists on a very thin, membranous line between laxness and Machiavellian zeal. What I've realized, thanks to E, is that I'd much rather be a teacher who is taken advantage of than a teacher who traumatizes.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

If I am coming home in a state of nervous breakdown, my throat a forlorn and arid desert watered only by the tears that strain through its surface like an underground wellspring, my head neglecting to recall a time when it was free of the fist pounding at it from within, like a madwoman straining at the door of the attic, well, then, it must be the new school year.
Don't get me wrong, there are things I have learned. I would like to list them here, if only to make myself feel as though I did, at least, emerge from the previous year's romp in the lions' cage with, if not intact wits, then at least a few fortified memory cells.
1. Don't let them get to you:
As exemplified when, on Tuesday, a boy I will call E began a paper ball fight that ended with the class in chaos and my nerved frayed as the jettisons of a paper shredder. My relationship with E began on rocky terms when, going round the room for introductions, he told me to consider him a seat-warmer, a potted plant, and no more. I was immediately put on my guard by this, and when later he made conversation with a classmate while I was talking, I reminded him that potted plants do not make noise.
This little witticism, which I imagined gave me a droll and scintillating air, was to be my downfall. The laughter of the class was a momentary victory over E, but any good teacher will tell you never, under any circumstances, to enter into battle with a student at all. I therefore recognize that E's misbehavior was my doing (as well as my undoing, for I lost control of the class on just the third lesson), and blame only myself. Luckily, the principal was there to back me up, which brings me to my second reflection.
2. When in doubt, choose the school for its principal:
A good principal is a principal who gets things done. In this case, E finished his day with a letter of apology, the threat of suspension hanging over his head. Of course, things would have been far better if I had been able to sustain a proper learning environment without the involvement of a deus ex machina, but this brings me to a third moral.
3. Sometimes, the odds are stacked against you:
Such is the case with E's class. Largely an amalgam of inferiority complexes, enraged impotence, rebellious tendencies and, not to mention, a gushing and uncontrollable tidal wave of ADHD - which, of course, garners extra force from a trembling earthquake of hormones - the stage has already been set for drama and tragedy, the script now subject only to those tiny amendments made spontaneously by the deftest of actors. Sometimes, if only to feel a little bit better about herself, the teacher must recognize that in some cases she regrettably has little to no influence over the occurrences in her classroom. On Tuesday, the second and third hours of the day ripped apart like an old patchwork quilt and I was shoved, shoulders quivering with oppressed rage and resentment, into a scene I recognized all too well. But I took a deep breath, my throat a dam holding back a whole sea, an entire ocean ready to burst out, and turned my back to the audience. I went directly to the principal's office. I told my tale shakily, and when I left to teach a class directly after I was perceivably NOT a bundle of frayed nerves, on the verge of meltdown. In that office there was no shrugging of the shoulders, no damsel-in-distress sigh, no raising of the hands in abject helplessness - I mean from either of us - which goes to show some understanding I have gained regarding what I am and am not in control of. What I saw in myself that day was an understanding that what depends on me is not what happens, but rather how I react to it. The stagehands may drop lights on my head, the mise-en-scene may fall apart and roll round the stage, and the audience may throw rotten tomatoes at my head, but I must keep my cool and play my part until it's done.
4. The parents are to blame, but that doesn't mean you have to blame them:
Speaking of acting, a certain amount of diplomacy is required when handling telephone calls in which one's first instinct is to say, "I'd like to speak to Satan please, regarding its spawn."
Exercising Obama-esque cool I called a parent, congratulated her on finally purchasing the required course book (biting my teeth on the knowledge that what-the-fuck-is-so-hard-about-buying-a-fucking-book-and-why-the-fuck-should-I-have-to-practically-blow-someone-to-get-them-to-do-it) and asking if, on an off chance, her adorable and intelligent offspring may have forgotten to imbibe her daily dose of Ritalin?
The thing is, it works. With the parents on my side I at least feel as though someone is commiserating (though said commiseration takes place in a minefield of political-correctness, expressed through enthusiastic exclamations on the child's rampant acuity and utter brilliance on all things). And the child avoids the schizophrenic confusion caused by two separate disciplining voices running its life. Everyone's a winner.
Who knew, that being a teacher would actually teach me some patience?

Reliving Those Magic Moments

I highly recommend to all homeroom teachers out there, to film a video of some sort with their class.
I did so myself in an effort to foster teamwork in my homeroom. In a glorious burst of what I now know to be asinine misunderstanding of seventh-grade social norms, I decided (spur of the moment, while allowing them to watch music videos on YouTube) that I would try to bridge the canyon-like rift between the sexes by forcing them to work together on a common project in which all had a stake of some sort.
I thought it would be fun.
Yes, my initial goal may have been incredibly misguided (what ended up happening was a deepening of the initial rift due to the various melodramas that occur when insecurity rears its ugly, 13-year-old head) and I was glad when other end-of-year projects relieved it from its spotlight in the classroom. Not only this, but towards the end I had no choice but to acknowledge that the few workable scenes in the footage I did manage to film were no doubt lost beneath such an avalanche of shouting-arguments, mid-scene interruptions, and general horseplay, that I would never finish editing the damned thing before the end of the year. Thus, during my final homeroom meeting I was forced to declare the endeavor a failure before the eyes of God and the Israeli school system.
'I will try to edit it over the summer, but I can't promise we have enough good footage,' I told their skeptical faces. Many of them said 'good riddance', having themselves become aware - due not only to their insecurity upon facing the camera lens but also to my, often exasperated, tone - that the video would certainly win no distinctions, and may even come out objectively 'bad'.
This, of course, was my failure far more than it was theirs. But I had already given them so much of myself over the course of the year, that I felt unequipped to waste any more life-energy on regret over this particular enterprise, chalking it up to an unsuccessful project to be archived among its counterparts in a mental folder called 'Never Again'.
And now that I have no doubt caused all teachers heretofore considering taking up my recommendation to regard it with adequate suspicion, I will tell you why it is that I still recommend it (though not to the faint of heart, or, for that matter, those with actual lives).
You see, the fell swoop of summer, which descends upon one with the swiftness of the guillotine, alters the life of a teacher with the speed in which newly released students race headily through the school gates to freedom. One is used to waking every day with the weight of eighty-some children on one's shoulders. Atlas-type responsibilities - to them, to their parents, to other teachers, to the school system as a whole - trouble the mind at every waking moment, and often continue to do so in sleep. Then, in the split second it takes to uncuff a prisoner, all of this is gone.
And although there is, of course, an overwhelming sense of liberty infusing both mind and body, the immediacy with which it occurs is somewhat unsettling. One must have some sense of continuity in order to narrate one's past, otherwise it slips away as does a nightmare upon waking.
The editing of the video has provided me with this necessary sense of continuity. Not only do I now chuckle at all of the hijinks that so aggravated me at the time of their performance ('Look how cute they are,' I gushed as two students performed a cat-and-mouse chase through the scene I was filming, causing the participants to bellow curses and halting filming for a full ten minutes) but I also, thanks to the fact that I was the only one filming, get to glimpse the POV of a frustrated but still hopeful first-year teacher trying relentlessly to tack a positive ending onto a very trying year. That the viewpoint is my own is at times vindicating and at times edifying (though it's true that hindsight is always 20/20, we can still attempt to learn from our mistakes), but what I found most exhilarating was simply to watch without passing judgement, to laugh at what is funny only in retrospect (like the fact that every 5-second scene took at least twenty minutes to film), and to appreciate the incredible talents of the skater to whom I dedicated endless hours of tutoring and mentoring, the rollerblader who talked and sang ceaselessly in class, the dancing ability of a girl whose mouth I would have paid grand sums to clamp shut, and the choreography skills of two girls whose sense of maturity and responsibility well surpasses their years.
I realize that these are some very rosy glasses I have donned, but I also think the activity I rather naively selected is precisely what allows me to do so. In editing a film we choose only the best shots, the ones in which the camera captures utter perfection, that which adheres to the script. The shots in which the actors have been filmed at their very best angle, these are the only ones that participate in the final product. All the rest are disregarded, wiped clean from the public eye and therefore forgotten.
It may not be the best take on life, but it certainly makes a teacher feel that it was not all for naught.

'Thrift Shop' is the song my students chose for their video

Let's Talk about Sex

Vacation is like a dream. A time for the mind to sift through the tangled and complex experiences it had stored away due to its inability, at the time, to fully acknowledge them. Like a housewife cleaning out her attic, it roots through its storage bins, torn t-shirts and ancient magazines contemplated then rejected, great-grandmotherly heirlooms and old photographs scrutinized and placed in piles - this to keep, that to throw out.
For Freud, dreams were a soapbox of sorts for the return of the repressed, but Freud lived in a time of repression.
We, on the other hand, live in a time of expression, a time in which not a single thought is cherished in the privacy of one's own head, but rather ejaculated thickly onto self-aggrandizing monuments to the wonder that is me - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, what have you - where it (the thought - now a status, tweet, comment - whatever) writhes unattractively in that worldwide slush-bucket that is the Web, like a hooked worm in water too muddy to entice any fish.
What a hypocrite I am, for writing this in a blog.
But to the return of my repressed, now to become the expressed, and how fitting that it be sexual:
My memory is of a class in which one particular young man of the most utterly "dorky" classification - small puckered eyes framed by giant spectacles, downturned and perpetually spit-oiled lips overlooked by dark fluff reminiscent of a dead caterpillar more than it is of a mustache - stood up as I was in mid-sentence and revealed, from between an oversized old t-shirt and ugly, stained sweatpants, a rather statuesque and impressively large 'boner'.
The split-second it took him to notice the mishap and tug the t-shirt over to hide it was enough to cause me to falter, mid-sentence, and completely lose track of whatever it was I was saying. Like an impassive boulder, it derailed the train of my words for a good thirty seconds, during which I was left stuttering in the manner of that Looney Tunes character Porky Pig (Bdee bdee, bdee bdee, That's All Folks!)
What is most confusing now, and what I feel sure must have caused my mind to delay homing in on that moment for analysis - due to the complex conclusion I feel now this analysis must inevitably come down to - is that this stuttering was not merely the effect of embarrassment. Language, as Lacan explains in his theory, had become inaccessible due to my approach of its core, a thing he called 'trauma'.
I mean to say that at that, yes, extremely embarrassing and utterly confounding moment, I must have - as I see it now - connected somehow to that boy. On a sexual wavelength one usually reserves for other adults, or, in the case of a married woman such as myself, one other adult (although I would have found it far less 'repressible' to relate in such a manner to any other man of adult age, probably just sweeping the matter aside as a slight mental indiscretion, of which my husband is probably guilty at least four or five times a week).
I would like to state that I was, by absolutely no means, attracted to the boy, who is, as I have described, objectively ugly and in all probability highly unattractive, at this point in his life, at least, to anyone of the opposite sex. As a matter of fact, if I thought I could - in any way, shape, or form - be attracted to 13-year old boys, I would immediately quit my job and seek professional help.
The problem is that the feeling was visceral, vehemently so, and totally apart from any logical understanding of the person to whom this thing belonged. The 'boner' was so completely out of context, to my mind, from the framework of the classroom that it was like coming face to face with Zeus in a parking lot. I was drawn to it, awestruck, it was magnetic, but totally detached from the boy himself. It belonged at once to all men, it was my husband's and it was my father's, and my response was attraction and repulsion in equal parts. It was the phallus, not the penis, as Freud would have it. The phallus being the locus of Lacanian trauma, making language impossible.
It does not seem to matter, then, that I tend to view myself as a sexually open and uninhibited woman in general (placing aside, for a moment, the fact of one's being a thoroughly unreliable witness as to oneself). I think my response overrides both inhibition and any lack thereof. This was an experience of archetypal female responding to archetypal male in whatever cave they were first engendered, first broken apart into two different sexes. Embarrassment does not enter into this equation, nor does attraction.
Of course, to try to signify this event with words is somewhat of a moot point, when I have already defined its essence as the "Real which denies signification". Perhaps the trauma seems more approachable when it is entombed in flowery language and thus seemingly laid to rest. However, upon its publication here, this particular trauma has been preserved in a transparent mausoleum, through which all the world may peruse it. I leave my analysis of the reasoning for this (or lack thereof) for a later time, at which I hope the unwinding summer will have gifted me with greater clarity.

The Return of Moby Dick

This post was written on May 25, 2013

Calling up references between different phases of my life is one of my favorite little pastimes. Perhaps it is the result of my lengthy training as a literature student, which began precisely at age one and a half, when I had memorized Peter and the Wolf and could recite it at whim (even turning the pages at the correct moment, to render complete the unsettling effect of an infant reading a book). It was therefore with great (if somewhat self-consciously geeky) glee that I smiled to myself yesterday morning during my regular bike ride home through the traffic-River Ayalon, an activity I had previously conflated with the Moby Dick chapter entitled "The Mast Head". In this chapter Ishmael warns the philosophically preoccupied youths, who often function as lookouts atop the mast, against the dangers of losing themselves in contemplation of the watery depths below. This imprudent plunge into the profundity of one's own psyche could very easily, Ishmael warns, lead to a physical plunge into the sea. The passage describes a sort of drowning in one's own mental soup, ironic because Ishmael himself is more often than not given to philosophical contemplation over every happenstance in the novel, no matter how seemingly insignificant.
In this he is a noble character, but also rather cocksure in the academic sense. Riding my bike that hazy afternoon I was reminded of his reasons for embarking on a whaling excursion, as a reference for my own justification in taking a thankless, low-paying job in which I am thrown hither and tither among the chaotic seas of the school. One of the many, (many!) things the white whale comes to represent in the novel is that which is unknowable in one's own mind, and Ishmael devotes entire chapters to research on the whale, tall tales and folklore describing his comings and goings, and musings of his own on just what, if at all, this monster of the hoary deep might be thinking.
He undertakes a position on a whaling ship with the goal of understanding "the overwhelming idea of the great whale. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused my curiosity." No less arousing is the notion of "the wild and distant seas". "I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it... since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in."
Did the barbarous coasts lead the reader to my meaning? For they, as well as the white whale, certainly hold sway within our student body.
Moby Dick is that element of chaos contained in the sleepy morning when the plate-glass sea is yet calm, and which unleashes itself inevitably as the clock ticks, a time bomb, towards the day's disintegration into madness. It is not so much that a white whale flicks its tail within each and every single one of them, but rather more as though a school of tiny fish were arranging itself into a final portrait of the whole massive monster. Throughout the day the elements are attracted, magnetically pulled to their precise location beside and betwixt others, which exert an uncontrollable pull. Finally the leviathan reveals itself, an unstoppable force of nature in which each tiny fish can be seen to smile cruelly, yet to extract this one or the other for leading the entire mass of them proves impossible. Thus we stand, daily, contemplating the monster that weaves itself into being, and entirely incapable of containing its gruesome potency.
Each day I am caught, like the damned Pequod, within those "concentric circles" that the monster swirls around me. Impotently I clutch the rough wood of a coffin floating in the midst of the vortex, and as the last of them rushes through the door to freedom, I float on a "dirge-like main" of silence. It is the silence that follows the great rush of storm at sea.
But more disturbing, even, than my penchant for reliving Ishmael's final trial every single day is the change that takes place throughout the day and, by correlation, throughout the year.
Ishmael's motives, upon setting out to sea, are scientific. He desires to know the whale (never mind that knowing it is killing it, for we murder to dissect, as Wordsworth so plainly stated). Throughout the book he discusses its origins, its skeletal and organic build, and there is even an entire sequence devoted merely to its forehead. He contemplates legends structured around the mythical creature, the lifespan of its species (which he concludes must eventually go extinct from hunting, even as he continues the hunt), and the significance of its sperm. No question is too big or too small for him to ponder in relation to the great sea-monster, and as he does so he elicits for himself and his readers an enlightening and educational experience.
Then there is Ahab. His desire is quite plainly to kill the whale, and he will stop at nothing to do so. He is singleminded, he is determination given human form. Aside from this, it is his vengeful task which leads the plot ever onward. Not content, as Ishmael might have been, to float upon the serene waters and contemplate the mysteries of the universe, among them the great leviathan, Ahab is the motor behind the tale. He will not even stop to help the weeping captain of the Rachel, whose children have been tugged to oblivion by Moby Dick himself. He insists upon his battle with the white whale, though his mate attempts to make him see that a mindless creature may remember no battles nor have no enemies. Ahab's war is quite like Bush's War on Terror, and quite as ill-conceived. For one cannot do battle with an abstract element of chaos, unless one expects thoroughly to fail.
I began the year as I attempt to begin each day - with the task of an Ishmael. But to study the students, to know what makes them tick, often proves an unfeasible task, for they are in constant flux! This day cannot lend me any insight on the next, and I am often lost among those explanations contrived by my own mind: This student found that task too difficult, the other was lazy, still another was too caught up in his social worries to be of much use, and his friend was too tired from sleeping poorly the past night.
Who can know what goes on behind those foreheads?
Every day I discover that the academic task of Ishmael is ill-suited to my needs. For the ship is steered by Ahab, and it is his attitude that allows his counterpart's peaceful one to exist. Ishmael becomes a passive observer - never truly knowing the whale - whereas Ahab binds himself inextricably to the awesome creature in one final thrust of the harpoon. Down he goes to those murky depths, and though he drowns he accomplishes what Ishmael could never do. To be one with the whale, to truly know him, is to dive headfirst into frothy beast-churned waves.
So which will triumph in me, the scientist or the warrior? Aloof intellect or violent intimacy?