Monday December 31, 2018

Taut on the road, palms pressed, wheeling frankly. Where I grew up, it’s all boardwalks and water parks. Like our baby nephews, we dip! we dip! Just so long as there’s some lime and vodka to counteract the sounds and ideas of the cranberries. Let pawtips be pawtips, trusting the divinity and compassion of the whole person. Understanding goes without saying, beyond words, daily life reverberating with metaphor enough to crowd out the voice that says, “Fix it.” Education leads me to minding after Rudolph Steiner and curricula informed by the Waldorf method. M.C. Richards describes this method in her book Centering as one where “The teacher works in a certain state of mind, with certain knowledge and aims, primarily listening to what the child is telling him through its body and its behavior and its fantasies and its play and speech. He does not try to apply to a situation a form conceived in advance” (101). I take note of some of Richards’s suggestions, in hopes that her book will help me connect the dots for my course on Hippie Modernism. “Certain tendencies we should try to cure, others to strengthen,” she writes. “We should not neglect the child’s relation to hero worship and ceremony and ritual. He lives naturally in a world of myth and poetry and invisible beings. He loves sound and movement and color and drama. He loves to laugh and to cry. […]. As he grows older and learns to think abstractly, he will do so as a person in whose organism is rooted the wisdom of fairy tales, and saints’ legends, and cultural mythology” (Centering, p. 103). Hippie modernism produced what was and remains a revolutionary literature. It evokes, it exhorts, it grants permission to imagine radical creative transformation of social reality, beginning with exercises of individual freedom, particularly at the level of speech and intercourse with citizens in a loving global community. Authorly life coincides with experiments in communication and lived practice amid networks of revolutionary literary-artistic peers. No need to venture so far, though. We don’t want to write the introduction before having read the books. Why do I feel like I’m plotting a prison-break? Is it wrong to want to teach hope and possibility? It’s no naive hope; Charles Olson contemplates both ruin and survival as pertinent facts of our condition in his poem “The Kingfishers.” But into history’s mixed message, Olson introduces a message of hope, a factor to induce a change of state, only to then announce to his readers, “This very thing you are.”