A Language Older Than Words (46 page)

I soon realized I could not give grades: it would be immoral to ask someone to write from the heart, then give the writing a C. This created a problem, since the department required I assign grades. I suggested assigning grades randomly, but neither the students nor the department liked that idea. So I suggested giving everyone a 4.0. This was fine with the students, but not the administration. My next plan was to give everyone a grade of 3.14159, or π. Math majors in the class thought this was a hoot, but the administrators didn't get the joke.

Eventually here's what we (the students and I) devised. Because the way to learn to think is by thinking, we would spend most class time on open discussions of important issues: What is love? What is the difference (if any) between emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical intimacy? Is there such a thing as a universal good? What do you want out of life? If you had only a limited time to live (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time? Is the universe a friendly place or not? (This last question, by the way, Einstein thought to be the most important a person can ask.) Irish students took it upon themselves to teach us about the Irish Republican Army, and African-American students taught us about their own experience of racism. A Samoan man told us of his earlier life in a gang. The sons and daughters of farmers told us what it was like to grow up on a farm. Volleyball players told us of volleyball, and football players of football.

Similarly, the way to learn how to write is by doing plenty of it, so my main job in the classroom would be to cheerlead them into writing more. The students could, of course, write anything they wanted about anything they wanted. I would not judge any papers, but merely give the writers positive feedback, and I would try to guide them wherever they wished to go in their explorations. I asked (not told, but asked) students to write about the thing they'd done in their lives they were most proud of, and asked them to write about that which caused them the most shame. We took the latter papers (mostly unread) into the hall and burned them, causing police to show up one quarter to question us about vandalism. One student, getting married the next summer, wrote her wedding vows as well as a letter to her fiancé to be delivered moments before he walked down the aisle. Another, a wine salesman by trade, spent the quarter writing sales pitches. Many people explored their own abuse, some wrote fiction. For each piece of writing a person did, he or she received a check mark (longer pieces received more). The final grade corresponded to the number of check marks. If a person had thirty-four check marks by the end of the quarter, for example, the grade was 3.4. Simple enough. The people in the class wrote about five times as much as people in other sections, but loved the work because it pertained to their own lives. When people wrote pieces they particularly loved, we scheduled private conferences to go over these pieces again and again until every word was magic. In the context of sharing an important piece of themselves, suddenly even grammar became crucial: the bride, for example, didn't want the pastor stumbling over her sentences or her groom wondering what the hell she was trying to say. Given the opportunity to express themselves, these people wanted to learn how to do that.

I asked each student to hand in a couple of pieces composed in different forms of expression besides writing. Many brought in food, some paintings, a few tape-recordings of their own music. A chef from Kuwait cooked us a seven-course meal and showed us pictures of his country. Another student brought a videotape of himself doing technical rock climbing.

It took us a couple of quarters to realize something was still missing. Experience. It's madness to think all learning comes from putting pen to paper. What about life itself? We decided that people would get check marks every time they did something they'd never done before. People went to symphonies, rock concerts, Vietnamese restaurants. They watched foreign films ("That Akira Kurosawa guy can be pretty funny"). They got in car wrecks (not for the check mark, but it having happened, they may as well get credit). They got counseling (I hope not as a result of the class). One fellow told his father for the first time that he loved him (a big baseball fan, he watched the movie
Field of Dreams
over and over that day to psyche himself up).

Something else was missing. I still had too much control of the class. How to let go more? I didn't know. Finally it occurred to me to break them into groups, and ask each group to run the class for one two-hour period (we generally met two evenings per week). They could do whatever they wanted. One group wanted to play Capture the Flag. I thought, "What does
this
have to do with writing?" But we did it, then wrote about it, and I felt closer to that class after our group's physical activity than I had even after intense emotional discussions (besides, my team won).

Next class period we talked about the relationship between shared physical activities and feelings of intimacy. Another group had us eat popsicles and watch cartoons, then draw pictures from our childhood with our opposite hands (it broke my heart when one fellow shared his picture with the class: "This is my father taking me out in the woods to smoke my first vial of crack"). In the same group we played Duck Duck Goose and Hide and Go Seek in the basement of the near-empty building. Many of the people were continuing students, and thus were older. Looking back, I don't know how anyone could possibly say that he or she has successfully run a writing class without having played Hide and Go Seek with overweight old men, twenty year olds, middle-aged mothers of five, and a half-dozen men and women whose native language is not English, all of them dead serious about finding or not being found. One group taught us how to do the Country and Western dance, the Tush Push. This was especially difficult for me, a confirmed nondancer. Because the room was too small, we did this in the building's central courtyard. Midway through one of our times pushing our respective tushes, a couple of the department's most humorless administrators walked by, evidently having worked into the evening. I smiled and waved. Even this class taught me much. I had been working on letting go in my writing for years by this point, and I sometimes became frustrated at the baby steps many students were taking toward manifesting their passion in words. But when it came to me attempting to let go in dancing, I suddenly comprehended their inhibitions: I would push my tush only three or four inches, while many who were too shy to open up in words were wildly swinging their hips (including a fifty-year-old sheriff's deputy I never would have pegged for a tush-pusher). In another class we made marshmallow figures representing our hopes and dreams. One fellow, a bow hunter, made a big marshmallow buck with toothpick antlers, and a huge toothpick arrow jutting from its chest; mine was a broken marshmallow dam with marshmallow salmon swimming in a river of marshmallow (surprise, surprise). We played blindfolded soccer in the classroom, with four people at a time blindfolded, being told where to move by sighted partners ("Left, left," my partner shouted as I ran into the wall. "Oh, sorry, wrong way"). We broke into groups, each group picking out of a hat the rough plot for a screenplay (our group was to come down from a mountain to find that everyone else in the world had disappeared), and then each person in the group picked from a different hat a character to be played in the
drama (I was to play the actress Sharon Stone), after which we had an hour to write our scripts, to be performed and videotaped in what we later dubbed "An Exercise in Embarrassment." For Halloween, we plopped sleeping bags on the floor, sat around a flashlight surrounded by small pieces of wood (simulating a campfire), ate s'mores, and told ghost stories. For Valentines Day, we wrote stories about first loves, and memories of hearts broken or overflowing. Mainly we had fun.

I did assign one topic each quarter that the people in the class had to write on. It was the final paper. The assignment was for each of them to walk on water, and then write about it. They had to decide to do something impossible, do it, and then describe what it was like. A few people filled their bathtubs with a quarter-
inch of water, walked across that, and considered themselves done.
Others walked across frozen lakes. But one quit smoking, another ended an abusive relationship, a very shy woman asked a man out (he said
yes),
another woman for the first time admitted her bulimia and sought help, one man told his parents he did not want to be an accountant but instead an artist.

The people in my classes, including me, did not need to be controlled, managed, nor even taught. What we needed was to be encouraged, accepted, and loved just for who we were. We needed not to be governed by a set of rules that would tell us what we needed to learn and what we needed to express, but to be given time in a supportive space to explore who we were and what we wanted, with the assistance of others who had our best interests at heart. I believe that is true not only for my students, but for all of us, human and nonhuman alike. All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?

Out of Mourning,
P l a y

"The Great Way has no gate;
There are a thousand paths to it.
If you pass through the barrier, you walk the universe alone."
Wu-Men

THE PAST FEW YEARS I've begun to burn my beekeeping equipment. Frames and boxes, varnished with beeswax from years of use, keep the house warm. Other equipment I've stored in the barn. Chickens roost on the lip of the extractor, and last year a hen started setting in a settling tank.

I'd love to start with bees again. I look at empty hives still standing in my yard and feel the urge to hear again the hum of thousands of bees flying in all directions, but I'm scared.

The fear began for me in 1992. The year started wonderfully, a hot, wet spring that produced a waist-deep carpet of blue and purple wildflowers. Hives bubbled with bees, and each colony filled boxes with seventy pounds of honey as fast as I put them on. The bees were happy, and so was I.

Then bees started dying. At first I blamed the weather—it was dry from mid-June to early September. Then I blamed pesticides. Then urban sprawl. But most of all I blamed myself. I didn't know what I was doing wrong, but it had to be something.

It was strange solace to learn that bees were dying everywhere: solace because this meant I hadn't caused the deaths; strange because I had to ask what sort of solace it was to be discovered in such loss. A 1996 American Beekeeping Federation survey of the previous winters kill reads like the casualty count of a horrific battle: "Maine, 80 percent loss . . . Massachusetts, 55-75 percent . . . Michigan, 60 percent. ..."

Why? Varroa mites. They cause deformities and paralysis, introduce viruses, and ultimately kill entire colonies. The best guess on how these mites got here is that in the 1980s a beekeeper smuggled honeybee queens from South America or Europe, hoping their offspring would pollinate more effectively and give more honey than American honeybees. But along with queens the beekeeper accidentally brought varroa mites. Because bees groom each other constantly, mites spread throughout hives into which the queens were introduced, then clung to bees as they entered other colonies, quickly invading hive after hive. Since commercial beekeepers often follow blooms across the country, mites soon overspread the continent.

It would be pointless to blame the die-off on the smuggling beekeeper. The collapse was inevitable anyway.

The strengths that have made modern beekeeping the foundation upon which the agricultural infrastructure rests are precisely the weaknesses that have made beekeeping, and modern agribusiness, vulnerable to something tiny as the mite. These are the intertwined attributes of standardization (the use of one pollinator across many crops), density (the annual gathering of a half-million hives to pollinate almonds, for example), and mobility (the transport of bees, and consequently mites, to and from all parts of the country).

Years ago, working with bees provided me a somatic understanding of cooperation. More recently they taught me about loss. Now, as I watch modern beekeeping collapse under the weight of its own strengths, they're teaching me once again that the modern industrial economy—based as it is upon these same traits of standardization (the conversion of forests to tree farms, grasslands to cornfields, diverse cultures to capitalism), the short-term maximization of resource usage, and the absolute mobility of resources—faces the same vulnerabilities as beekeeping.

Despite the high losses, it's not the end of beekeeping. Each year, new people discover the richness of this craft, and for them high losses and an ever-widening spiral of chemicals may simply be part of the bargain.

As for me, this year I watched a pair of nuthatches try to squeeze into an empty beehive. No matter how they tried, they couldn't make it. With saw and file, I made them a home. They raised babies there, and seemed to like it. So did I.

Even though I often have nightmares, I have never felt unsafe with the Dreamgiver. The horrifying dreams, I feel, have never been without purpose (Yeah, I know my father never beat anyone without good reason, but this
feels
different). They remind me often of things my conscious mind wants to ignore. It is such with the symbolic underpinnings of our actions of the day—as when my father beat his children attempting to retell the buried story of beatings he'd received, and when we collectively destroy the planet because we so wish to end our way of being—and it is such with the symbolic underpinnings of our actions of the night.