Typecast: a Sunday check-in

Some thoughts about race

Some of my best friends were black – and some of my worst enemies too. And it took me a long time to wake up to my complicity in racism. I went to school in affluent middle class suburban environments in Minnesota. I don't remember any black students in my elementary school, but I do remember learning about slavery and racism while I was still young, and being horrified. I also remember before going on a family trip to Chicago to visit my brother in school, a friend told me “be careful if you go to south Chicago. There are a lot of black people there.” -Well, so what? I asked, incensed at his insinuation. Though the only black people I met personally in my childhood were those in Chicago – or in Columbia, Missouri, where my other brother was in school – I did watch movies with black characters, like Ghostbusters, and I watched the Cosby Show, and I thought that black people were cool. How could anyone hate them, I wondered, when they were so cool?

[Someone needs to make a meme with Danny Glover's character in Silverado saying "Son, you've got a lot to learn about people."]

In eighth grade I became friends with the only black student in my junior high school except for a girl from Africa. He was an amateur rapper with the stage name “MC Carpet,” adopted in reference to his flat-topped hairdo in the style of the time (this was in 1990). Being one of two black kids in a white school where the cool kids listened to gangster rap and everyone listened to MC Hammer, I think he felt like he had to emphasize his racial traits to make him stand out from his white classmates who idolized Eazy-E. My friend wasn't into gangster rap, but he had a bombastic persona and some of his lyrics were quite sexual. All this shielded an awkward and sensitive character that made him as much a social outcast as me. To make matters worse, he wore some kind of orthopedic brace, which in junior high never helps. I still remember him in the locker room after those humiliating gym classes, in his metal and plastic frame, cold and white against his bare brown buttocks – fragile flesh in that concrete cave. “Watch out for the black moon, y'all!” he would shout before disrobing.

Being the only black guy in school, you'd think all the white kids who listened to rap would look up to him as the real deal, but I repeat: he was one of the outcasts like me. His posturing was dismissed by those of the higher strata. He was not strong: I once saw him get beat up by our lunch table (none of the rest of us dared to intervene). Once he shaved “WORD UP” into the hair on the back of his head and it backfired about as spectacularly as my covering my jean jacket with buttons, i.e. it drew nothing but gleeful derision. But I wasn't aware of that derision having a racial aspect: I thought he was picked on for being a nerd and a wimp, not for being black. Maybe his loud flaunting of his blackness helped shield him from overt racial malice? At the time, Steve Urkel was making us all laugh on TV and getting white audiences used to the idea of black nerds. Or maybe I just failed to see a powerful racial undercurrent. Maybe everybody had to pick on the only black kid in the school, to prove that they wouldn't discriminate in their cruelty. There was plenty of cruelty to spare, so maybe they felt that it would be reverse discrimination (which as every good white person knows is twice as bad, right?) to spare a target because of his color.

I lost touch with my junior high friends when we moved to the Cities, and I started 9^th grade in a huge but affluent school with many more black students. Many more in absolute numbers, but relatively they were still a small number. It's true that a lot of them sat together at lunch, and of course some of us white students sometimes commented on that, but the classrooms were inescapably integrated. The black guys in choir made me laugh and left me alone. I got along pretty well with the studious and religious guys who put Bible quotes in their lockers: with one of them by my side I actually had the nerve to debate theology with an agnostic in one of my classes. But there was also a big bully in Social Studies, who provoked me to one of my immature attempts at violence and then had the nerve to ask me if I was racist. “I'm not!” I sobbed. “The last thing I am is racist!” In American Government I got along just fine with one black girl, but another one teamed up with her blonde friend to make my life miserable.

It didn't help that I was one of those adolescent boys that teachers like to complain about: I mean I was still lax in my personal hygiene. I figured that since I wasn't growing yet, I still hadn't hit puberty yet, so why should I waste time on deodorant? Especially since I was already missing too much sleep by having to get up early for the weekday religious instruction that we Mormons get as teenagers.

My classmate and her friend were not shy about expressing their disgust at my smell, or how long I went between washing my clothes. Once she grabbed a ball-point pen and wrote on my knee with it: “there! I'm writing 'Friday' on your jeans, so you can wash them over the weekend, and if you don't I'll know it the next time you wear them because this will still be here.”

It may have occurred to me to protest this invasion of my personal space, but I didn't stop her. It could have been resignation to the fact that I just didn't have what it took to resist what everybody dished out without making a big scene, or it could have been some kind of masochistic pleasure at getting this kind of intimate attention from a girl. I think it was more the latter.

I didn't like these girls. Besides being mean to me, they were raunchy and obnoxious. But I wanted to like them and for them to like me, and if I couldn't have that, then at least I was getting attention from them. I wasn't aware enough of my feelings or feelings in general to recognize that sadomasochistic attachment lurking under the surface of our interactions, and there was no encouragement or time to develop a conscious understanding of it, what with classes, homework and report card angst demanding so much of my time and attention. Role-playing scenarios in Social Studies only scratched the surface, and an awkward boy who got a C in the class didn't look likely to have interest or aptitude for psychology. Even our kind-hearted teacher could not have taken the kind of time and attention with me that might have called out my interest and native empathy to develop beyond the immature behavior that marked me as a prime target for harassment. Teachers in a school of 2000 students simply cannot afford to give that much attention, even if it is a “school of excellence.” In fact, the school's excellence accentuated my poor performance, casting it all the clearer as sinful rebellion against a benevolent authority that “really wants to see you succeed.”

I was better served by Neil Peart, who deserves some kind of honorary education degree for all the learning he has fostered in nerdy Anglophone teenagers fed up with school over the last 38 years. As I sat glued to the radio one night in 1993 for a special program in honor of the release of Counterparts, I heard him mention Carl Jung and Camille Paglia. While it took me almost 20 years to follow up with my own investigation into these visionary voices, the song they inspired, “Animate,” became one of my all-time Rush favorites and remains for me one of the best songs in an album that suffers at times from a heavy-handed didactic tone.

One of those socially virtuous songs, “Alien Shore,” resonated with my experiences at the time: “You and me, we are thrust into these solitudes: color and culture, language and Race. Just variations on a theme, islands in a much larger stream . . . for you and me race is not a definition.” Race was not a definition for my black classmates in high school from my viewpoint, and I didn't think it should be. Our shared social class was a commonality that made comfortable inter-racial mingling the order of the day – at least that was how I saw it. So when the students at my school put on a cultural awareness program my sophomore year I saw it as divisive, making a big deal out of differences I felt that I had accepted and learned to ignore. It happened during my sophomore year, when I was at my most reactionary. That was also the year that I had a black study hall supervisor. He professed a reverence for Truman Capote, but I don't think he would have known what to do with a student like him. Catherine Woods he was not. Confronting me once about something I didn't do, he refused to allow me a word in edgewise and seemed compelled to remind me who was boss: “if you give me any more nonsense, I'll come down on you like a ton of bricks.” In a silent bout of l'esprit d'escalier which I would never have dared to voice, I imagined asking him “Is this because I'm white?” I remain grateful that in that case my fear saved me from saying something so stupid.

Of course I not only had something to prove, but a limited frame of reference to work with. I could have benefited from some sustained, well-informed and calm discussion of not only race but economic class, and their interrelationship. What if the cultural awareness presentation had dealt squarely with economic class as well as race and ethnicity?

I keep wondering: what might have my experience been in a mostly working-class, or inner-city high school? I had some working-class friends, thank God, even in my privileged upbringing; but they were all white. There may have been apartment complexes in my school's area, maybe even trailer parks, but no black ghetto. Students of all colors wore skewed baseball caps and saggy baggy pants as well as neat sweaters. “Cross colors” was a hot new clothing brand that did just that.

Some of the things I remember from that cultural awareness presentation: “why do black people change songs so much when they sing them?” A blonde cheerleader dancing enthusiastically to hip-hop and then saying “I'm glad they brought over your ancestors as slaves!” A monologue portraying the life of one of the first successful black women entrepreneurs.

Aha! Being a dutifully aspiring young Republican I worshiped entrepreneurs, and so I came out of my defensive conservative shell to rejoice at this shining light of good example (I remember also admiring how the presenter kept her poise when confronted by mild heckling). See, I wanted to say, this is what I'm talking about!

Looking back, I don't recall any discussion of systemic racism in relation to politics and economics: the students' grievances centered around “the way they are treated because of their differences.” Because I felt that I didn't treat them any differently (I, who didn't have many friends anyway), I didn't think anyone else did either, and so these provocateurs weren't acknowledging my generosity. How dare they be so ungrateful!

Year later, in Pittsburgh, I worked with a black woman, an attorney who had two sons named Thurgood and Langston. It taxed her patience to talk to people on the phone who “can't speak the king's English,” and she often disparagingly talked about the attitude that “The Man is keeping you down” as “complete bullshit.” I have wondered what she would have thought of that presentation if she could have gone back in time and visited my school. Would she have told them to quit whining about The Man keeping them down and just get on with it? Would she have thought they had a better deal in the suburbs of Minneapolis than in Pittsburgh? I really have no idea. I don't know what her experiences were like living in Pittsburgh, which, though it has its problems with racism, also has a much, much higher black population than Minneapolis. It may be full of bigots, but the objects of their bigotry aren't as exotic as they were where I grew up. Still problems, but different kinds.

The part of the presentation that got me the most steamed was where the white students were saying how grateful they felt thinking about all the settlers who came over on the Mayflower and so on, and then the black students started bursting their bubbles: “People! Open your eyes! Not everyone came over on the Mayflower! Our ancestors were packed into the hull like sardines!” And the white students covered their ears, so the black students had to come closer and speak louder.

On a human level of course I couldn't help but recoil at the horror of the slave trade, so why did it get me so angry that the descendents of slaves were expressing their own horror at it? The guilty take the truth to be hard, and that reminder of the historical injustice underpinning my privileges cut me to the quick. You see it every day: people try to excuse themselves by taking offense. So few have learned how to debate responsibly that it works too often: the moment someone takes offense at what you say, you have to give up the moral high ground? (Seems to me a dark-skinned prophet had something to say on that subject on a city wall a few hundred years ago.) I thought there must be some malice in their bringing this up to manipulate our emotions and make us uncomfortable. I had been taught to believe that whenever black people brought up the past in that way that there was some Hidden Agenda at work, or at least rudeness: couldn't they see that it wasn't nice to make us polite white folks uncomfortable? Didn't they want to put the past behind them and be friends?

There must have been some mention of Columbus in the presentation too, because I wrote in my yearbook, and I quote: “if 1 more fyag bashes Columbus I will drop out of school & egg their house!”

I can't pinpoint the exact moment when I woke up about this, but it was really always there, the human recognition of injustice. I didn't want to admit it because it went against the doctrine I had submitted my mind to at the time. Despite learning of the evils of mass conformity in my Great Wars class and reading A Raisin in the Sun in English, I didn't yet have the nerve or the strength to apply the lesson with consistency. The anger with which I smothered my conscience speaks to the same stunted psychic growth that locked me in sadomasochistic relationships – and which does the same for too many people. After all, that's what school really teaches.

It also has taught the descendants of 19th-century Scandinavian, German, Italian, Irish, Slavic, etc. immigrants to ignore their own family histories in favor of Mayflower mythology, which is another problem. Some southeast Asian immigrants took part in that awareness presentation 20 years ago, and I imagine that if they're still doing them, that recent ones will include Latin American immigrants as well. Those two groups come of their own free will, but aren't able to blend in just by learning the language either, as most Europeans could.  An education which truly encouraged, or at least allowed each young person to own and explore their individual ancestry and its culture (partly by not crowding their time with schedules, assignments and tests) would give a better environment for the kind of empathy; or patient, respectful admission of its limits; that these students were right to wish for in their peers – that every citizen is right to demand in a society with any kind of pretensions or aspirations to freedom.

Typecast: Spiritual struggle

If you know any teenagers I highly recommend The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn.  There used to be an easily accessible PDF online, but I think it got taken down.

Typecast: an open letter to teenagers

Dream, Dare, Do

The morning of September 9, 2013 I saw a stream of sixth graders walking in front of the building in the lovely cool morning – first hint of autumn, magic magic magic. Even walking past the school building later that afternoon and not forgetting the terror and captivity, I felt magic from the red bricks, from the cool air, from the memory of pencils. Shouldn't there be a place for the honor of that, as part of autumn's enchantment in childhood?

But I was thinking about the morning first. Those sixth-graders filed past the door in tune with the morning's loveliness. Then I heard an adult voice bark “single file straight line!” as if they were a bunch of jailbirds – reminding me that, in fact, they are.

When I called the sixth-grade school they said that these students had attended an assembly at the middle school, some anti-bullying thing. Very much on everyone's mind these days. I called the middle school and found out they contract with some outfit to come and give them this presentation every year.

Apparently it's a big deal: they set up three big screens in the gym and have a powerful sound system. They're very proud of it, saying it “will encourage students to clarify dreams, look clearly at obstacles, and through hard work and determination, turn their dreams into a reality. Students will learn positive methods for dealing with the pressure, stress and fear they feel inside, and they'll understand the importance of setting short-term goals for their lives.” And of course there's the personal responsibility that adults never tire of invoking when it comes to making younger people do things: this show “will help students realize that it's time to stop passing the blame to someone else and start taking responsibility for their futures.”

Their website offers a shrunk-down version of the presentation, which I watched. They certainly do try to make an overwhelming show of sight and sound. The shrunken preview can't match the experience of the real thing, they say, and I believe them.

A powerful, high-impact character lesson, they say. What it is is loud and vapid, the art of saying nothing over forty minutes refined near to perfection. I can imagine sitting in the bleachers in the gym with those sights spread out over huge screens and the sound blasted into your head – no escape. I imagine all the adults, having their ears pressed flat to their skulls by the angry-sounding pop metal music in the thing, maybe not enjoying it at all but thinking that these guys who made it sure must be legit cuz they've got all this badass-sounding music that the teenagers like.

I sat through plenty of clumsy agitprop while I was in school, and of course we saw through the grown-ups' feeble attempts to appropriate our vernacular and poured derision thereon when they were safely out of earshot. I'm 36 and have only the vaguest idea what kids are listening to these days, but watching this it looks like (alas) the propaganda engineers have gotten much better at what they do over the past quarter century. The music in this presentation sure didn't sound like the cheesy stuff that tried to inspire my generation to love school. This stuff was like a hammer to your brain, along with the rapid editing of shots (including plenty from action movies) smashing away at any attempt by a viewer to formulate and consider any thoughts of substance or consequence.

-Which served its purpose, since what would happen if too many people really started asking questions like: what if my hopes and dreams are in fact blocked by having to go to school every day? Just how exactly do my good grades in each subject prepare me to reach my dream? How do the standardized programs of learning even help me to find what my true dream is? Are the grotesquely-amplified examples of athletes and singers really relevant to my life? How would the authorities over me react if I dreamed of a life outside of this system and dared to do what I had to in order to bring that about?

How much can the school environment even bear the concept of an individual life's calling?

And on and on. I haven't the energy to write much more about it; I don't know if it even deserves the dignity of a detailed consideration or rebuttal – there's not really much to argue against, because it's damn near impossible to argue against emotion.

 Of course this thing doesn't show any sex or tantalizing views of certain body parts, but it's as pornographic as anything, stroking the feelings of your lower chakras in a calculated move to make a flood of feelings that will drown ideas. People pay for this kind of opiate in theaters or in their own homes to escape the meaninglessness of their over-regimented lives, or in the case of music, the powerless band together in communities around angry protest songs: punk, heavy metal, rap. I don't know if this production company really pulls off a convincing appropriation of that protest in the perception of its young captives. Despite the in-your-face, no-escape presentation method, I hope that the young people saw through it.

Maybe it's vain to hope too much: we constantly hear complaints about today's youth: about their apathy, their addiction to screens, their susceptibility to the persuasion of violent and titillating images on those screens – this presentation was tailored exactly to such, and depends on non-thinking recipients for its success. But I still hope. I hope there were a lot of closed eyes, and mouths in cupped hands pressed to ears, during the onslaught: respectful human touch is the best antidote to pornography.

In which I quote obscure songs and philosophize (also not a typecast, sorry)

You run to the gate but you'll be marked late.

It's for your own good. It's for your own good.

You're likely to make the grandest mistakes.

You suffer alone in the skin and the bone.

Let's sharpen those new sets of arrows

for the next generation of playground martyrs,

and join in the game of intolerable shame,

'cos everyone shares in the sins of their fathers.

School bell rings. Single file in.

Trade you my unhappily everafters.

So bring out those things to hammer out the wings

of the next generation of playground martyrs.

-David Sylvian, “Playground Martyrs” (Steve Jansen, Slope)

I'm an art-school witness, witness this device.

I always feel so helpless lost in this episode twice.

-Justin McBride, “The West in Despair” (Finngerhutt, The Secret Life of Bookworms)

We are all of us, who have been wounded by the device of school, witness to it, though some of us have suffered more for our testimony than others. Some of us might not even be aware that we are martyrs: what we went through doesn't mean anything now that we're “grown up.” Or whatever it might mean is just that we went through an unavoidable part of life, an institution, a part of the set-up taken for granted.

In the aggregate we are an archive, a fonds, a record group, a body of evidence witness to the device that has shaped life in the US and in the industrialized world for so long that nobody remembers a time when it did not.

I always did feel so helpless, in those classrooms, on those playgrounds, lost in the episode countless times. I remember playing some sport in the gym, in fifth or sixth grade, and imagining I was in a TV show. My life went on in my mind and body as independently as was possible from the world around me and the experiences of those in it, but they had to coexist to some extent. I had to do dramatic poses and facial expressions in a freeze-frame every time the ball went by me: it was the only way I could make my life into something meaningful, the only way I could redeem it. By acting in my own private little TV show in gym class, I was the star of something. I drew a magic circle around myself, and for a time the derision of the others was an acceptable price to pay for the little bit of mastery that I owned in pulling off those poses. At first I paid the price but I did not count the cost (Neil Peart), but then after a while as it became more clear to me how ridiculous the others found my actions, and how completely they failed to understand why I did them, I think the pain of that overrode the benefit of doing it.

Magic circle, but in some way I had expected my peers to understand what I was doing, because I often assumed that the contents of my private fantasies were openly apparent to others. For a time this made it very difficult to bathe or use the toilet, because I was convinced that acquaintances could magically see through my eyes and would therefore see my private parts if I looked at them. I still have not come to any sort of workable hypothesis of how this kind of thing could have been treated. But what I am satisfied in hypothesizing is that this kind of fantasizing is rampant among children, especially introverted ones, and most especially among introverts who feel insecure packed in a classroom with other children their age and kept there by force, feeling the effects of the authority-imposed pecking order, all the more terrifying and rigid for being imposed by an authority unconscious of its actions, or whose spokespersons sometimes vocally deny the authority's unconscious unspoken actions, try so hard to go against them. Teachers often try so hard to protect children from the effects of the system they serve that it is tragic to see.

Benevolent mothers smother the child, the benefactors are in denial.

-David Sylvian, “The Banality of Evil” (Nine Horses, Snow Borne Sorrow)

Their words and wishes show themselves as powerless.

Powerless I stand before the ocean.

-Craig Bench (Pilot – Provo, 1998-2000, unfinished LP)

I want to get some students together in a safe place, sit down with them and tell them: I know of this. I understand that some of you carry within yourselves these fantasies, these private worlds, things that you cannot share with anyone, that if your parents see a hint of it they immediately judge, they may panic. If your peers see them they attack. If your teachers see they “intervene” and generally make it worse. Let me offer sanctuary. I won't even ask that you share secrets with me. Let me offer a way that you can face them, own them, manage them. I hope that in doing so you can give a space and a time for what drives them to let off steam, to vent, to find an expression that will ease the pressure on your soul and allow you to live a more purposeful, directed, awake and confident conscious life.

Writing in journals? That would be one way. Sitting still with eyes closed, daydreaming, maybe even Active Imagination? Is that appropriate for adolescents?

Dear old Mrs. Harmer in my 7^th grade art class had all of us sit in a group and put our palms over our eyes to meditate – even the inveterate offender who muttered “bitch” at her back. You just can't make that kind of thing work if any of the children feel unsafe, and they will as long as there is that dynamic of unequal power relations in a room. And you can't expect to find out those dynamics with clumsy adult attempts to get children to talk as if there were nothing under the surface, however good your intentions.

Maybe that was why I was so interested in the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot as a 7^th-grader, because I knew for absolute truth that we stand powerless before the dark water which holds mysterious beings, monsters that don't heed our wishes and which we cannot measure, no matter how many times we look, no matter how sophisticated our equipment is. That monster is there but the deadened eyes of a materialist-minded man cannot hope to see or discover it. It refuses to reveal itself to his arrogant probes.

So what is the kind of humble probe that can reveal it? School personnel just want to know how they can diagnose and treat. That's part of the problem, because the reason they want to do that is in order to get things going efficiently again, move in the direction of a program that would keep everyone safely and neatly on the road to a “success” that they can't really define. Their blind pursuit of progress and uniform success is dumping all sorts of mutogenic ooze into the water to create even more monsters.

What is the monster? I thought of Nessie as benevolent, a sort of guardian. Like Napoleon Dynamite, I thought of her as an underwater ally against the monstrous depredations of my classmates whose souls had been driven into an animal unconsciousness by the larger leviathan of the school.

Let's not insist on a coherently logical structure of metaphor here. I don't know how much I thought of Nessie as benevolent, but being so far away she couldn't get at me even if she had a mind to chomp people. Maybe it was that I felt I could hold onto something mysterious: that there were these mysterious things: monsters, aliens that I felt I could know or at least know something about. And by reading those books about monsters and aliens I felt that I had a way of managing them. At the least it was empowering to feel that I had a knowledge of things that were mysterious, maybe. Or it was a way of affirming the truth of how much that shapes life is unconscious.

Mystic rhythms, under northern lights or the African sun.

Primitive things stir the hearts of everyone. . . .

Mystic rhythms under city lights or a canopy of stars.

We feel the powers and we wonder what they are. . . .

We feel the push and pull of restless rhythms from afar.

-Neil Peart, “Mystic Rhythms” (Rush, Power Windows)

Few of my peers accepted the stories of literal monsters below the surface of factual lakes. Looking back, does it just show how little they thought of the reality of things shaping our lives that went on unspoken, impossible to challenge because they were impossible to articulate, unless in ways that could be dismissed as childish? Were my peers more interested in finding a place in the order where they could have comfort, find a place at the table, gain the favor of the king, a seat on the bench in the mead hall? Some of them were obviously going somewhere with their lives in a way that I wasn't. Some seem to have set themselves up pretty comfortably after having passed all the requirements set by that unconscious beast.

Ich bin das letzte Biest am Himmel.

-Blixa Bargeld, “Letztes Biest (am Himmel)” (Einstürzende Neubauten, Halber Mensch)

The school leviathan swirls over us like the clouds – not out of a death-eater skull, because that would show too plainly what it was up to. Some sort of imperial Chinese dragon. A superior force hovering over like a facile god: above=greater, superior in every literal sense, self-evidently our ruler. The heavens where the invisible being dwells in a place no scientific probing can ever hope to discover (another reason why I was susceptible to cryptozoology? And the shame at seeing the extents of credulity to which faith might lead was keener for my friends than for me?), and whose dictates are to be obeyed without question.

The waters above the firmament as well as those below: those unconscious processes, the mystic rhythms or the sinister forces that drove us, were not just subterranean. Subterranean were the forces that set my peers against me, that drove our conflicts with each other, that tried to find expression in what the ready guide in the celestial voice (Peart) made permissible and possible. There were unconscious forces above us that ruled over those below, and made the vessel in which the lower forces cycled and fermented.

Ancient idolatries born of natural psyche are wholesome and benevolent compared to the modern ones born of the machine which made bold to exist in the spirit instead of obeying (Rainer Maria Rilke). And it is one of the saddest ironies to me that those who shave their faces and straighten their ties should ally themselves so fully with the modern idolatries in denouncing the ancient ones as wicked, should assert that the God who brought the human psyche into being is identical with that leviathan which swirls invisibly in the skies above the school building and the skyscraper, the one that cooks children in its vessel that I don't want to call hermetic. A celestial dragon that wears smiling masks but puts the lid on us in the pot, fires below, heating the waters of our psyche in an industrial recipe. Some of the dragon's acolytes have written cookbooks and now their heirs are following those recipes, without question, because this dragon is a god to be obeyed without question. We leave the judgment to the experts, we defer to something above us, also unknowable.

This is hard, because certainly the true God is also unknowable at the core, but I hold to a segment of Rod that Nephi wrote: he doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world. I also think of Alma's seed metaphor: something is true because it is light, is discernible. It leads you along but in a way that you see plainly, even if it is only one step at a time. A kindly light leading through a dark night, instead of a prideful, garish day (John Henry Newman) – I have always found that image of the garish day to be very interesting in light of our habitual symbolism of day and light. Spiritual metaphors are like language: if one talks about above=good, below=bad, light=good, dark=bad, that's a discreet system. Within its own boundaries, those signs are valid, but it's not a universal truth, like a map might show Minnesota as purple and it works within the map, but the land isn't really that color.

The Earth's core is a second sun underground, the cthonic sun? The invisible sun?

There has to be an invisible sun. It gives its heat to everyone.

There has to be an invisible sun that gives us hope when the whole day's done.

-Sting, “Invisible Sun” (The Police, Ghost in the Machine)

Like Robert Ingersoll I want to stand on a rock of surety in this: there is a plainness like Nephi says, a basic benevolence or rightness that is discernible to everyone, the capacity to spot a naked emperor; and that this doesn't ever truly die even if we ignore it. I want to believe that no matter how deep we might try to bury this, it will keep speaking to us, and I accept that its voice speaking like familiar spirits out of the dust (Isaiah), coming out of those deep layers might sound so spooky that we will be even more likely to fear it, shun it. We could trivialize it (like using Tibetan monks' chants for Hallowe'en sound effects), or we could condemn it as evil in the same hasty judgment that one of my youth leaders showed in saying Queensrÿche's Batman-like logo looked Satanic. Or my fear that King Crimson's “Thrak” and “VROOM VROOM: Coda” were Satanic when I first heard them – and my roommate said as much: “this is Satan music!”

It certainly was eye-opening music that King Crimson gave me: they beguiled me, and I did eat. (And then learned about Thrace, which has Turkish-influenced folk music in asymmetrical meters. Robert Fripp referenced Bulgarian music as part of his European musical heritage. Like I wrote before: orcs-Turks.) Here was something that gave eloquent voice to those immeasurable monsters in the deep. And over time, I have learned that some of them indeed are our allies.

An open letter to the teachers of the USA (not a typecast this time)

This is a piece I've been working on for over a month now.  I'm planning on sharing a condensed version with the staff of the school district where I work.

Recently I found some of my old report cards, along with a few happy notes from my third grade teacher, festooned with cartoons: “Charles has done great work today!” and so on. Looking at them you might conclude that I did well in third grade. On the report card that year my teacher wrote “Charles has been very special to me.” Maybe I was: after all, it was my cackling laughter she recorded for use as a Hallowe'en sound effect. But what I remember is trouble. Those cute congratulations for doing my work were few and far between, because third grade was when the battles really began about my stubborn refusal to do assigned work.

It had started in first grade, as my joy in learning had been invaded more and more by worksheets and other demands from teachers that I saw as pointless and disruptive, and so I skipped out on them as much as I could get away with. (For the purposes of this piece I'll pass lightly over the problems I had with other children, which were formidable in their own right.)

The lesson that stuck the deepest and longest from third grade came after I had crafted a paper mouse in loving detail. When I showed it to my teacher she told her special student – quite gently, I emphasize – that I should have taken care of my backlog of unfinished assignments first. You see, this art project was only for those who had done their serious work: a positive reinforcement, like those cartoon notes. The logic that meted out such favors on such conditions could not tolerate my transgression, so my teacher was obliged to turn my pride of accomplishment to shame. I repeat: she broke it to me as gently as she could, but shame me she did. I have often wondered what went through her mind in carrying out this subtle behaviorist violence. Where did she learn it, who told her that it was effective, or good for children? Did she follow in full faith that it would shape me to be a good worker, a good learner? How long had she been carrying out this technique? Had she seen it break the resistance of children before me?

Whatever fairness she may have told herself she was enforcing, that lesson destroyed my trust in her – and in teachers generally. For this made clear how insignificant my “special” gifts or even my conscience really were in her eyes. Yes, at its root my refusal to do homework was a matter of conscience, but who takes seriously the conscience of an eight-year-old? She could override my sense of right and wrong with diagnoses of laziness or failure to cooperate, but what she was really enforcing was her power over me. Something in me, something in every child, sees right through that, which is why adults try so hard to crush it.

My first grade teacher had been gracious enough to concede when I began a sentence correctly with “because,” but this was different. I was two years older, and instead of disagreeing in a matter that could be empirically demonstrated, I was guilty of a violation of class ethics, and the teacher had the power to enforce them, while I had none to defend or even assert mine. That was what I really learned in third grade.

How many teachers are so occupied with trying to acquire and follow the most respected theories about how to teach that they have no time to develop their natural human empathy? It is this empathy, more than theory or method, which could have given a well-meaning older woman the insight she needed into how a boy served his own gifts, and made her theatrical flourishes in the classroom (which could fill another six pages) more than simply shocking or comic effects. But really, being an avid learner not only counted for nothing if it got in the way of worksheets, but of course it attracted the ire and scorn of peers as well.

My constant daydreams were an added frustration to the program, but the scorn they bred in teachers (“Earth to Charles!”) only made them more precious as an escape. I daydreamed with a complexity, concreteness and focus that I no longer seem capable of. So when, in fifth grade, we were given several story prompts to write about, it was a revelation of joy beyond my ability to describe.

I had found a new dream: to be a writer! And I could have pursued it for hours. But when a bell rang or a clock hand moved, then it was my job to set those frivolities aside for the more important things. Teachers' efforts to entreat, cajole and finally threaten me into doing “my” work failed to convince me fully of the necessity of busywork, but over time they would succeed in convincing me that I was a lazy boy who was bad at finishing what I started – all the more reason not to trust me to choose my own tasks. A neat way of absolving authority from the troublesome burden of cultivating empathy.

My parents saw that I was struggling and, searching for alternatives, arranged (without my knowing) for me to be tested by ISD #77's Gifted and Talented program. I had seen their director interact with my family. I didn't know what his job was but he seemed nice, until he aimed his psychological wiles at me to coerce me into making contracts to do my homework. They meant nothing to me and I broke them one after another, wishing that he would just go away. After several fruitless weeks he finally did leave me alone. I had no idea at the time that Mr. Contract's intervention came from my parents' wish to improve my school experience, but I did know that his game was absurd and manipulative: oh dear, now not only was I lazy, but had sullied my honor too. He never showed interest in what I was learning, though who knows, maybe he really meant to help me pursue my dreams, if only I would keep my word and do my homework?

He failed, and I don't regret my actions. They could keep their GT program, along with their definition of honor.

Fifth grade still gave some opportunities to write freely though, and I seized on those meager chances, inspired by long hours of looking through books and National Geographic articles instead of doing my homework. A student teacher honored one of my stories by reading it out loud in front of the class. (Did that impress the bullies? soften their hearts to leave me alone? Let's not be ridiculous.)

Writing became more urgent to me in sixth grade, spurred on by my voracious reading (which soon developed a fertile symbiosis with the video games I played). I still have the records of three summer reading programs from my fourth, fifth and seventh grade years.

I failed to complete any of them.

So I won no prizes for what I read, even if I was slogging through The Red Badge of Courage or learning how recording studios worked, or taking six months to patiently digest 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in its unabridged entirety (but that wasn't in the summer so it didn't count).

My eyes, opened in third grade, could not be closed, and in fact I was constantly reminded: reading, aye, learning, like unauthorized art work, was rebellion if it went against the programmed activities or assignments. If I hadn't slacked off from so much class work I never would have tasted the richness of story that some of our textbooks concealed, of which the teachers doled out such a paltry portion. Nor would I have had time for Verne, Wells, Malory, and others that weren't on my teachers' radar.

In junior high I hung on every word my Social Studies and Life Science teachers said, reveling in the glories of new knowledge, but still resisted homework. I stole a lot of time to educate myself beyond the curriculum and in defiance of the expected workload, sneaking paperbacks in classrooms like contraband. The library became my refuge not only from students, but also some of the teachers and especially the principal. It was shared with the high school and therefore had plenty of books written for grown-up readers.

So with all the reading I did on my own, and with Rebecca Wall sitting next to me, I could well afford to flourish in Mrs. Boyce's English class, and I remain grateful for it. Acting in a school play (a privilege previously denied in consequence of not doing homework) was another lifeline, as was Math League. How Mrs. Heinitz managed to cure me of my raging hatred for math I do not know. But she did – temporarily. I think it might have had to do with her unflappable calm, a trait that the principal did not possess.

It is sad that I remember that principal – a human being who was probably loved and respected by many – as a face contorted in rage, screaming at me in the cafeteria. And an iron hand on my arm, pulling me through the hallway while her shrill voice berated me for having the nerve to sign up for Students Against Doing Drugs in my free hour when I had so many overdue assignments! I look at her smile in my yearbook and can't believe she ever wished to be such a terror to the young. But what and who she was in her personal life had no bearing on mine when she put her faith in the same behaviorist doctrine that had compelled my third grade teacher to trash my triumph. Once again, my behavior constituted a transgressive threat against an ideology that had the practical force of religion, and its priesthood felt duty-bound to punish. I would have done better under the secular humanists whom I hear spoken of with such great fear, but have yet to see wielding the real power in a school.

I pity my junior high principal, but never have I wasted a shred of gratitude on her attempts to correct me. I owe none of my life's successes to her, nor to the faith that claimed her allegiance.

In those bad years I had to keep writing: escapist fantasies to purge the horrors of junior high, and more serious attempts to assimilate tropes and techniques that impressed me from my extra-curricular reading. Poetry too, inspired by Neil Peart, one of my most important teachers who I never met and never expect to in this life. But official allowance for this was fast drying up in the sharpening scrutiny from the guards. My grades worsened, culminating in the shame of a D+ in English my freshman year.

At home I got the riot act, of course. Ds in junior high were one thing (and I had gotten several), but this was serious now. I had college to think of. By that time there was little to prevent my bad grades from taking a devastating toll on my confidence and self-image: after all, isn't that what they're for? Maybe if I had been one of the bad boys, I could have better articulated defiance towards the constant attempts to manipulate my behavior. But my socioeconomic class would not forgive that, and I wasn't tough enough to defy it along with school. The bad boys terrified me with their worldly ways and adult confidence, and several of them were clearly marked for prison.

My socioeconomic class saved me from being marked for prison, but that only sharpened the shame of bad grades. Although I was smart, they said, I was wasting my potential by my naughtiness: reading, writing and drawing according to my own curiosity (and conscience? That was getting harder to hold onto) instead of doing the work they gave. Any protestations by teachers that they really cared could not change that, nor could they mask the foundation of our relationship on an enforced inequality of power.

For the most part, the personal concern for my success and even the compassion my teachers expressed as they gave me those low grades only reinforced the message that I had serious character defects in their view – or that they didn't see me, they saw a subject, who was headed for trouble if he didn't adjust his behavior. If I ever thought that a teacher really cared about me as a person, it only made me wish more fervently that I didn't have to spend my days in a setting where self-worth was predicated on submission to authority.

Things changed for the better the next tri, when Mrs. Seelicke let me count a scene from my novel for class credit. She liked it so much that she surprised me by reading it out loud in front of the class without telling anyone it was mine. I still remember the gasp of admiration at the end from Anna Sandberg, whom I admired desperately from afar. I never remember exchanging a single word with her, but to hear that my writing impressed her . . . how do you think I felt?

Panicked. I was in ninth grade, remember, and dealing with not only the fallout from bad report cards, but a host of problems I needn't belabor. The souls entrusted to your care are beset by similar and different, by stresses and turmoils that your efforts to create a safe place might never fully assuage.

So when Mrs. Seelicke approached me to talk about some kind of mentor program to encourage my writing talent, I really freaked out. By all rights I should have thrown my arms around her, wept for joy and begun a rewarding relationship with someone – finally – who believed in my dreams (reminder: I'm talking about the teacher, not the pretty girl). But I didn't. I shut down. In trying to coax a pile of tinder into flame you may snuff it out with too forceful a breath. Maybe if she had persisted in talking about it, if she had, say, asked me to write more of my novel for class credit, or offered repeatedly to talk to me about where it was going and give advice (since I was suffering from writer's block at that point), it is likely that I would have finally opened up to the strange and unnerving experience of fully trusting a teacher.

Could we have been successful in setting aside that enforced power inequality? After nine years of it, such a prospect was really quite frightening – too human! So I did not take her up on her offer. And of course, there was nobody to blame but me. Should you be held responsible if an immature kid ungratefully runs away from your attempt to reach out to him?

I got an A in her class though, for all the good it did me. And the next tri in Mr. Mandli's class, when we read Romeo and Juliet I felt haughtily superior to my classmates. Having heard Early Modern English read out loud regularly for years (without any graded tests to ruin it), I understood it. My ego was stoked by dominating a competition of Shakespearean vocabulary mastery – payback time for all those taunts about reading the dictionary! A regrettable and damaging distraction, but Mr. Mandli was a wonderful English teacher. Genuinely empathic, he was willing to question the justice of our power relationship. He strongly reminded me of Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society. The next year I was mesmerized by Mr. McCreedy, who commanded respect without demanding deference (do you teach your students to know the difference?). But there was no room for writing my stories. The study hall supervisor loved Truman Capote's writing but would have sent him to detention had he been his student.

My geek friends wrote copiously in their spare time (and probably when they should have been doing homework): epics of magical adventures and daring battles. I joined in the game with gusto, but I never showed them my stories, the ones that I really believed in. Looking back now, I see that even these were derivative and shallow, but there was no safe place for someone to show me this, and to guide me beyond. Anyway, they afforded me the chance to work on the mechanics that are vital to good writing. I was able to sharpen them against the models I found in what I read, but rarely did I get the chance to enlist a reader for honest critique (for which effusive praise is no substitute).

In eleventh grade it almost happened: I took a Science Fiction class that let me write whatever I wanted. My teacher liked what I wrote but also gave useful criticism. He was a new teacher who wasn't determined to assert his power over us. He did once threaten to leave the room in high dudgeon after a clash of wills, and a student called him out for it. Mr. Voss stayed to argue with the student and between them they quickly resolved the matter. I'll never forget it. I had witnessed a rare thing: a disagreement resolved between two equals who were finally willing to lay down their pride.

I repeat: between equals. I saw precious few models of this, so it was one of the most important lessons I ever learned in high school – in a class devoted to something that people dismiss as fluff. This was not on the lesson plan. There were no quizzes. There was just this example of two equals, and I loved Mr. Voss all the more for it. I loved Mr. Helgeson too, who took us through ancient literature with the unquenchable curiosity and joy in learning that are an integral part of the human spirit. Nor did he shrink from poking holes in my arguments when I was guilty of absurdity or lazy logic. His example validated and amplified my own innate curiosity. Like a Gnostic Christ, he didn't so much teach me as tend the bubbling spring whence I drank and got gloriously drunk to this day. The B+ I got from his class was laughably irrelevant.

But the trimester following that, when I finally got to take a class dedicated to creative writing, it was a disaster. My teacher had a whimsical streak not unlike my beloved Mr. Mandli, but his class gave no place for stories trapped in individual minds clamoring to be let out. He led us through exercises that were useful, but disjointed. Reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels in class brought reprimands for not doing makeup work (maybe he thought science fiction was fluff?). And then, after all this, he blithely bid us write poems that were “philosophical and totally cool.” Budding poet, I? was so turned off that I cheated by enlisting classmates to ghost-write them for me. They were despicable doggerel, but I didn't care, I was so glad to escape that stupid class with no worse than a C. I'm sure my teacher saw right through the deception, but was too tired of me to contest it. He probably saw me as either a waster of talent, as so many others did, or as a poser who didn't have much talent to begin with. If I wasn't going to discipline myself, how could I ever presume to be a writer? I had wasted my chance – my second chance! And so creative writing continued to be a hobby – pat on the head – only tolerable if it didn't detract from my work, and because it wasn't as childish as drawing.

In my senior year I improved my grades so that I could go to college, so that I could go to graduate school, so that I could get a job that would pay (barely) enough to pay off my student loan debt. Then I realized that all along I was also supposed to get good grades so that I could go to college and graduate school and then get a job of prestige and privilege, above those who had gotten bad grades. That was why my bad performance scared my parents, saddened the teachers who formed attachments to me, and gave the guards license to mistreat me. That my own curiosity and creative drives might serve as the most reliable guide to my own life, or that they might at least enrich it and valorize a variety of work – such a notion wasn't on the program beyond the occasional ritual lip service, which only emphasized their practical contempt for the dreams of real children.

My experience in excellent and amply-funded schools left my gifts in a state of atrophy, but it didn't take them completely away. I won't tell you here how I revived some of them, but I take some satisfaction in noting that much of my living over the past ten years has come through what I write, even though I have not risen to positions of power (and I walked away from one of questionable privilege to come here). I have other gifts besides writing, for which grades and test scores were even more irrelevant, and to which curriculum was always coldly indifferent. You have them too, and so do your students. Are you using them? Are they? They need to serve their own gifts as the gifts know best, a dizzying diversity that confounds tests. Are you helping them to believe in those gifts, or are you too busy learning the latest technique for keeping them in their places?

The mechanisms you administer cannot measure their real talents or abilities, let alone give you true insight into their dreams and desires, or any part of their truest selves. In fact your most earnest efforts may inflict psychic wounds that take years to heal, if you allow procedure, protocol and doctrine to overpower your human empathy.

I hope your intent is to encourage them not to accept their allotted place in the world, but to make one, indeed to help re-shape the world to better fit their idealism (which they may well keep hidden from authority figures such as yourself: what reason have you given them to trust you?). At the very least, I hope you do your best to guard these young people from the lie that test scores or grades can reliably measure their intelligence, virtue or worth.

Typecast: Mankato Waters

Typecast: beer and wine to a first-grader

Typecast: office radios, soon digressing

Typecast: rambling about public school

Typecast: brief thoughts about school buildings

Typecast: the holy baseball game

I liked medieval warriors before it was ironic