‘My education’

This was an exercise set at a workshop which invited participants to read Diane Seuss’s poem, ‘My education’, and compose an essay that responds to the poem. We asked our workshop attendees to think about including some of the following:

1. A description of a place where they routinely do their reading or writing.

2. A quotation or a  line from Seuss that has caught their eye, and what they think or feel about it.

3. An affective scene of joy, sorrow or embarrassment that comes from reading a poem, a novel, a piece of non-fiction.

4. Work with a simile or metaphor that they find suggestive for the activity of reading or writing.

5. Something in ‘My education’ (or elsewhere) that encourages them to be self-conscious about language in their composition, eg. line endings, puns or specific words.

They were invited to treat the above suggestions as springboards for their composition rather than prescriptions for what to write. Here is a selection from that workshop…

‘Jeannie MacLean

How was it to approach the poem this morning and respond creatively? It’s been a muddlesome morning, the struggle to be me in the practical world of a farm. But now a pause, a chance to sink among words for a couple of hours without having to carve out time and say, ‘Now I must write.’

The poem as stimulus A re-visit. A treat. Along its lines pegged like this week’s washing with different
colours of ideas and meanings, waving in the wind of my imagination…

It’s best when the book lies flat on the wooden surface of the kitchen table.
Cleared of plates and people and noise a gap opens between the morning and
the afternoon chores, a gap in which I can read.
This table is seldom clear of books since it accommodates a family of readers,
separate generations who place words on its workworn surface.
I may have subliminally absorbed the line “books strewn on old tables” from
Diane Seuss’ “My Education”; the line which reeled me in was
‘My project, my life.’..

Seuss: ‘Products of lifelong observation
And asymmetric knowledge.’

Me:
                              All I have ever known
                          Tells me otherwise.

Understanding that we can think we see, but the experience we bring, with
our knowledge and other senses, tell us something other, something new.
Building a creative wall, full of cobbled together bits… towards an essay perhaps?

Reading Seuss’s lines, ““I was a poor student, disengaged from the things I didn’t need”” takes me back. Back in a classroom supposedly learning arithmetic. I didn’t need numbers, they danced before my eyes, dizzy from thinking.
I closed my jotter and watched Miss Farquharson putting more numbers on the blackboard, the black space filling fast with meaningless symbols. ‘Four times seventy five’, she spoke as she wrote, 4x75.

Why not write four as I saw it?

I felt as though I might choke on the mixture of numerals and chalk dust. ‘Janet?’ I inquired quietly but loud enough to attract the teacher’s attention. ‘Did someone speak?’ Miss Farquarson asked looking over the rims of her chalk- dusted spectacles.

Silence.

She returned to her arithmetic workings on the board. I tried a little louder, ‘Elizabeth?’
She spun round. ‘Who is talking?’

Silence. And the power of friendship.

‘And forty seven minus twenty six’, she muttered with her back to us.

Last chance. I wanted to strike gold and discover her first name, but it would probably come at a price.
‘Josephine?’ at full volume this time.
‘Jean’ she said, turning on her heel and striding towards me. ‘You will spend the rest of this lesson standing in the corridor. I will speak with you later.’

The escape route. I could allow words to settle in my head again.
I never did find out her name. She simply appeared again in a poem.

Zoe Faloon

As the clock ticked down to the start of the class, I realised, in that slightly manic way of mine, the mess of my bedroom: the mounds of washing still to be put away; the dog spreadeagled and snoring upon my bed; and a cascade of other such assorted nonsense I always tell myself I will sort tomorrow. I rushed to tidy what could be seen on the webcam, and that which could not was shoved unceremoniously out of sight. I sat myself at my desk, essay notes swept off to one side and, like Narcissus, I focused upon the tiny box of myself on screen. 

I had previously thought, as I progressed through the twin worlds of academia and my own life outside and in, that I would be less anxious and be able to emerge with a steady mellifluous voice, ready to share my opinions and intimacies of thought and feeling. But back in my childhood bedroom, with so much hidden from view, I find myself besieged by fear.

*

I am asked to find a metaphor for reading. I chose to imagine reading akin to coming home. As I return to my childhood one, the complexities of home are ones that I have come to reflect on. It can represent the comfort of a warm fire and the wafting aromas of a freshly made meal, but can also be a place of horror… a place you are desperate to leave yet always have to return to—an anchor for the soul and the body, grounding and drowning all at once. Reading does the same for me; reading can bring peace from the day, or the words I read might sit themselves on my chest, waiting and haunting my every thought with all their multitudes.

When I first encountered Dorothy Parker’s short story, ‘Mr Durant’, I found myself once again confronted and consumed by the writing. I found it impossible not to think of the character Rose, all of twenty years old, pregnant and cast aside by the man who had promised her so much. Rose would have stayed silent at the clinic. For her voice would surely tremble and break again. There was nothing left to say. Mr. Durant was right, as always — this was for the best. I saw my own thoughts and experiences of rage and heartache rise from the page, enveloping my own hurt.

I am afraid that I always fall into the trap of believing I am the first to experience an emotion when reading literature, as though I am some intrepid explorer of the human experience, off conquering the vastness of the world. Yet putting these feelings I have out there—publicly outside of me—seems sometimes petrifying. It has always my greatest fear to misspeak, misstep, mistake, to sit and to watch the faces around me fall as they all realised what I had always known… that I did not belong.  

*

In so many aspects of my academic life, even as long ago as I remember being sat on those rigid plastic school chairs, I felt myself scrambling to discover some hidden meaning that everyone else seemed so intimately acquainted with. Found myself searching for the notes from some meeting I must have not been invited to, and that everyone else went to. Sitting in this class now, I see I have scribbled,

In this place again, I find
my breath lost in the flurry of
my hand. The questions snagging themselves
as though on barbed
hooks on my tongue.

Meaning lost beneath the shadowy pall
of impressions and cleverness when
other tongues and hands move with innate
purpose

I have yet to find.

There is comfort, of course, in the idea of funnelling one's pain into art, and as such continuing the cycle of belonging and unbelonging I have often found myself in. But there is also such misery in it. Returning to the hurt and the memory, and letting myself be so very overwhelmed by these feelings that the only way to carry on is to share them with the page.  In ‘My Education’, Diane Seuss’ words, struck a chord. 

[y]ou have to be willing to self-educate
at a moment’s notice, and to be caught 
in your ignorance by people who will
use it against you. You will mispronounce 
words in front of a crowd. It cannot be
avoided.

*

After class and back in my childhood bedroom, with so much hidden from view, I find myself again besieged by anxiety; I belong to both these seemingly divergent worlds, neither one able to house all of me.

After class, I also found myself thinking about change, something that both comforts and destabilises. Change is loss: friends move away, childhood pets die, relationships end, while the rest of the world carries on. But we move on and in the unrolling tapestry of time, each one of these experiences shape these drafts of us,  ‘cobbling’ the mosaic of us together.  There is some comfort in the endlessness of it all, the trying and retrying, the writing and rewriting, knowing that the me of today is only a draft and I need not rush to finish it.

‘My Education’ first put this idea of ‘cobbling’ into my head. Seuss explores how her experiences have been ‘cobbled’ together and made me think about my own fears around the bitty-ness of my own life. The poem spoke to me about the value of these experiences, reframing their ending not as an erasure of what was once there but simply another small addition to the ongoing mosaic. Seuss writes

                                                    [m]y project
was my life. There was no vision or overarching
plan. There was only foraging for supplies,
many of which were full of worms or covered
in dust, like apples on the orchard floor

and so suggests that my divergent worlds can be brought together. Her words have sat themselves upon my chest, allowing me to embrace my multiplicities as a boon not a detriment.

*

Shielded by the soft plush of the armchair into which I sink deep, the lights are now off. Instead, overhead, a vigil of stars or the patter of rain or the honking of migrating geese keep me company. I am calm.

William Hume

Not just what I feel but what I know
and how I know it, my unscholarliness,
my rawness, all rise out of the cobbled
landscape I was born to. 
(‘My Education’, Modern Poetry, Diane Seuss)                                                   

In the garden with its high walls that once bore fires for more tender plants in the colder months, where the only sounds are the buzz of light aircraft in the overhead and the corvids’ caw high up in winter blasted trees, I remember our last conversation. It’s as if the words had been waiting there for my return, nesting in the crevices between ‘fieldstones and mortar’. They were to do with transcendence …how you thought the magnificent oaks and sycamores of this old estate, spreading out from the perimeter of these walls, were themselves transcendent.

Echoes of our pasts gust through, and time feels different here in this tiny universe running with the seasons yet not authored by them.

And I can still enter this space where you visited but once — more often in shared images of what was growing there in the changing seasons. I can enter from anywhere, at any time. I am not bound by the conventional routing along the shoreline and the pathway running uphill from the estuary. In reveries like these, memory musics the movement of the journey, and initiates the impulse to travel…bright mornings that wake and hold me in their light.

I am affected by the music of that light in those mornings listening to Nils Frahm on something like the radio. An electronic wonder wiping out all other sounds… road traffic noises outside my home with buses moving people to where they might begin their day, next door’s dogs on the stairs…all overwritten by more urgent eruptions. Contrapuntal harmonies that begin low, widen, deepen and then pulses. A node, a nucleus of absolute pleasure.

Then stop.

Then nothingness … when I reset to the same amalgam of street noise only now with a different focus.

I prefer to read in those early mornings when my mind is unhindered by the thoughts and feelings of the previous day. Soon after rising and immediately after making coffee is my time for reading…on the sofa in my living room with its dullish view of an old red sandstone church and an adjoining manse that have recently fallen vacant, and whose ocular gaze through its rose window tracks my every move. Today the light from its side windows shine through its diamond chequers offering a harlequinade of colour. I imagine someone, a doppelganger travelling along a different spur of time, observing my mundane actions through a crack, a missing tooth of glass in the lead framing. But what does he catch me doing? What does he see himself doing in this bizarre mirroring? In this interplay between first and second or even third persons; between the ‘I’ of individual experience and the ‘You’ and perhaps ‘he’ of perceived actions. Observing ‘I’ or ‘you’ or ‘he’ drinking coffee and struggling to read the intentions of a modern American poet with a penchant for difference, for asymmetry, for humour in this expanded perspective. Usually, I’ll combine reading with writing as this is when I turn out my best ideas, sometimes borrowing some of the air, the atmosphere, from it. Ofttimes my own thoughts take over and crowd out the words on the page, or I develop a sort of word blindness – eyes turning inward! Not good practice to combine reading and writing in this way, despite their interdependence or co-dependence, is it? If I am writing in a more public place and with no access to pen and paper—rare as I always carry a notebook—then I am forced to be more disciplined and will focus on the published words rather than this inward scroll. I cannot read in bed because I just fall asleep.

All my life I wanted chaos, believing that chaos went hand in hand with creativity, with personal expression despite needing some formal paid work demanding a different sort of practice. Something they said was ethical. For the common good. An ICU nurse and later, fleetingly, a secondary school English teacher… orderly approaches to learning, assessment strategies and shared outcomes. Chaos relegated to footnotes and margins, and days off, weekends away… time spent with friends, untethered. Now that I’m no longer working, order is once again creeping back wraith-like. Now in the suburbs, if I can call living in the corral of the Ayrshire coast the suburbs and having too much time on my hands, living a creative-free minimalism. But what has creativity to do with chaos, really? Is it not merely a preferred state or order? Some artists prefer a palette thick with the pigment from other projects, but not all do. Figurative artist Jenny Saville prefers a glass table that can be wiped clean between activities to keep her colours sharp, un-muddied, keeping her artist’s eye and mind focused on what is happening on canvas.

Reading Diane Seuss’s poem ‘My Education’ from her most recent collection, Modern Poetry (2024), fills me with hope and admiration for a poet who knows chaos and the creative good that can come from it. The action of approaching things obliquely rather than head-on that offers a different viewpoint; a different way of seeing things; a different framing of the truth; an ‘asymmetric knowledge’ that buffets the writer, and reader, here and there among vivid images and aphorisms, ‘yellow perch on a cobalt-blue-platter’, ‘Eavesdrop, as gossip/is sagacity’, ‘a cobbled mind is not fatal’… While this poem is far from being a mirror to my own situation, there is more than a nod of recognition in the values and beliefs that are enshrined in her words and syntax, in those marks on the page that chime with my own.

From her poem, I read… ‘Built on the edge of tradition, they will/ rarely be anthologized […]’, and new ideas form out of old ones… I think where else have I read, or heard, such a phrase? Adrienne Rich’s ‘What Kind Of Times Are These’, perhaps. Where did she catch it from I wonder? The tone certainly fits with ‘My Education’. Anything other than mainstream thinking seldom cuts it, passes muster in a culture built on so-called traditional values. Both poets understand this so well and, in Seuss’s words which could have been written for Rich, ‘camped/ at this outpost my whole life […]’. These words capture the creative act so well like in my garden of memory proffering ideas of transcendence … taking ‘what you know and how you know it’ and how they might be changed, adapted and reach new altitudes…like the trees. Does this suggest freedom, emancipation, liberation from traditional ways of thinking and writing, of making differently styled marks on the paper? Yet this activity of selecting only what you want or need for a ‘cobbled’ life can be a difficult one to follow because of the nature of what it’s resisting.

Seuss is so very accomplished in her poetic stitching together of scenes and vignettes, which may possess the invidious power to regress the imagination and invoke awkwardness. There are so many scenes of embarrassment triggered by reading but none that I can think on today…perhaps ALL are blocked from view…and yet so often I’ve had to suspend my reading because of the associations that words can open up. Being caught in the act of saying the wrong thing or, at least, not phrasing it correctly in front of those for whom language is their business still burns hot years later. Two years ago, I attended a day-long seminar on queer form as opposed to queer content. Puzzled as to the distinctions that were being made between the two categories, both in creative texts and in explorative essays, I in sotto voce asked a notable writer on the Scottish scene, who was seated next to me, what the point of it all was. The response I got was ‘LOVE’ and ‘that as a form it is as valid as any other’. Of course it is valid, I thought, otherwise why was I sitting here seeking enlightenment?! Instead of re-wording what was lost in the gentle crossfire of… ideas, I just smiled. How does this flinching example relate to reading and writing and creating? Well, we all should be able to air our ideas without undue criticism and red faces.

And of poetic language that describes the act of creating itself in Seuss’s poem, ‘Kernals on the cob/haphazardly arranged, not lined up in military/rows’ has me thinking about writing as seldom a neat and orderly process. Instead, it’s one that is filled with unexpected outcomes, some of them funny, many of them damned annoying. Her phrase, ‘Shotgun pellets in the rabbit meat ‘conveys the visceral nature of the act of creating, the taking of life, and remains true to the grit and determination of the poet’s rural theme that can never be ignored, or ‘forsaken’. ’[W]ireworm-filled tunnels in the morels/ at the base of the dead cherry trees’ are as darkly ominous as they are allusive, suggesting living things predating on what is presumed dead. In the world of Seuss’s text, nothing is ever what it seems.

‘Spotty’ like the foxed pages of books –those rust-brown spots that appear on old pages – as well as referring to the spotty complexion of youth and the poet’s incomplete learning is conveyed by ‘What I know of literature, of history, is spotty’. Blind spots, too. And yet spots get such a bad press! Always about missing things; always about omissions. Seldom about hiding what is harmful or even suggestive of a more artful patterning of knowing things…