DragonBlog

Reading itself, to the aficionado, is magic. “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away,” Robert Louis Stevenson said in his Child’s Garden of Verses. This kind of magic, of course, resides more effectively in great novels than it does in, say, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. There is an even greater magical pleasure in books that take magic for their subject, where magic is freed from the taint of the incredible, the hallucinatory, the surreal, and treated as matter of fact. It may be a slightly guilty pleasure. Magic, after all, is not a serious subject for grown-up intellectuals. It is hardly an issue in the real world. We know better than to believe in it. We have left it behind with the Tooth Fairy. Of course, we accept that children’s books may deal in magic. Children, after all, still have teeth to be left under the pillow. And unless our religious beliefs confuse us about the moral value of magic, we offer children’s authors free range for flights of fancy. Moles and Rats dress like English country clerics, Hobbits go on adventures, Alice slips through the looking glass or down the rabbit hole, Harry Potter goes to a prep school for wizards, and singing dragons and talking polar bears carry intrepid child-heroes off to battle the forces of evil. When magic is entertained in adult fiction, it brings the taint of the “young adult”, from which sex scenes are no longer enough to save the author, or sends it to the genre section of the bookstore, the haunt of readers who have a favourite type.

Of course, gritty realism itself is no guarantee of literary quality (there’s a genre for that too, hard-boiled and bursting with violence). And the ever-whimsical South Americans, with their highly developed capacities for post-colonial play, introduced a strand of “magic realism” into literary fiction, heroines with green hair and second sight, whose cooking produces fugue states. And I had better warn you that the imaginative freedom of those novels charmed me. Indeed, in the interest of full disclosure, I had better admit at once that I find the labels of adult and child difficult to attach to fiction. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. Thank you, Mr. Wilde. I could invoke a week of delicious surrender to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, or tell you that it was just as wonderful to read The Hobbit out loud to my children as it was to read it to myself as a child. I regularly teach Carroll’s Alice books, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to serious students of English Literature.

I admit a touch of nervousness about taking up Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. Too much hype perhaps, trying to grab the golden goose of Harry Potter or the Twilight series. Which I have also had to read, because, after all, I teach adolescents. But while I was perfectly happy to suspend my disbelief in order to attend Hogwarts, or admit that glittering teenaged vampires might have their own sort of angst, comparisons with Rowlings and Meyers are not recommendations for me. These books are badly written, Meyers’ egregiously so. Ms. Morgenstern, in contrast, is a true magician. I need not have worried.

In case you’ve been living in a cave in the Outer Hebrides, The Night Circus concerns two young magicians, pawns in the “game” of rivalry played out by their respective masters, whose every move creates another level of illusion in a marvelous, mysterious circus. The general public takes these for sleight of hand, clever tricks, but the reader knows the magic is real. With the kind of inevitability which means an author has gotten it right, the two young contestants fall in love, perform for instead of against each other, and at last find a way to outwit the game, free the circus into reality, and realize their love. This brief account of the plot and its premises sounds like fun, but doesn’t begin to give you a sense of the subtlety and complexity of Morgenstern’s imaginative construction, or the magic of her writing.

The first kind of magic Morgenstern commands is the magic of youth. Why do I know from the book itself and only that she is young? It is filled with the exuberant energy of the young writer. She is willing to experiment, to throw caution to the winds. She travels freely and fearlessly in time and space, wherever her imagination takes her. She is at play. She lingers when an idea captures her, flies over what fails to engage. She imagines a wonderful clock that stands at the entrance of the circus, counting off the hours until it opens. She can see this marvel in her mind’s eye, and she indulges in a leisurely description, until it is as real for us as it for her. The intricacy and artistry of the clock suggest that Thiessen the clockmaker, too, is remarkable, and he becomes a character who is both within the story, a critical gear in the plot, and without, an observer whose musings on the Circus are shared with us, as they are shared with the reveurs, the group of loyal followers he spearheads. As for the backstory of the master magicians, the spectral Mr. A. H. and the flamboyant Hector Bowen, it clearly doesn’t arrest Morgenstern’s imagination. They simply are and were there, one of the many facts of this magical world. The wise reader simply surrenders, relinquishes questions the author does not care to answer, and allows herself to be swept up and carried on. There is an emotional energy which is youthful and magical. Love happens in an instant, experience is revelatory, the quick intuitions and observations reflect the sharp eyes and unerring reflexes of youth.

Then there is the magic of language. Morgenstern is poetic, not in the sort of ghastly, overwritten deep purple style that many would-be poetic writers indulge. She commands rhythmic flexibility, metaphorical and symbolic elevation (think of dancers who can leap straight into the air). And she does so gracefully, so masterfully, that you are not conscious of the mechanism, not distracted by seeing how she does it. Nor does she overreach, so eager to achieve originality that she misses the mark. The story is set in the late nineteenth century, the world of Wilde and Stevenson. Morgenstern does not overdo the London fog. Her characters speak with a courtly formality that carries the fragrance of the period without teetering into pastiche. The reader says yes, of course. The reader laughs out loud in pleasure. The reader is frankly relieved to travel in a closed compartment with a writer who can write, and is not ashamed to do so, who revels in her bravura performance.

There is visual magic too, which is not surprising, as Morgenstern is also a visual artist. What she paints with words is a world as vivid as dream, appropriately, since she has seen every detail of the Cirque des Reves. The black and white striped tents, the ice garden and the cloud-labyrinth, enticing the circus visitor to enter and explore, the wild luxury of Chandresh’s London apartment (Chandresh is the Circus’ financial backer), the transformations of the illusionists are described so pictorially that we see them too, the words transform into mental images.

“…she picks up her jacket from the stage, and flings it out over the seats where, instead of tumbling down, it swoops up, folding into itself. In the blink of an eye folds of silk are glossy black feather, are beating wings, and it is impossible to pinpoint the moment when it is fully raven and o longer cloth.”

And cry out, in turn, to be transformed into filmic images. You want to sit in a darkened theatre, exclaiming over the magic of the special effects. But Morgenstern’s visual magic, her illusionist’s skill, is so strong that they don’t have to make the film (although you know they will). Having read the book, it’s as if you had seen it already.

And then there is the magic of the story itself. There is pain, loss, abandonment, hard bargains and a steep price, but you want to follow every twist and turn, trusting the author. She will not leave you unsatisfied, or despairing. There will be a way for things to work out, for hope to flutter from the chest, you will arrive at the wished-for destination, the goal that lured you into the journey in the first place. The Night Circus works its illusions on the reader. You believe, you are happy, you applaud.

“You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Reves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.”

Most of us, teaching, have severe limitations on how much we can know about our students, and how much we can do about the things that worry us. These limitations are purely practical—how much time does any teacher have, facing some thirty kids in a course, and responsible for perhaps five or six courses? Others are political—in a litigious climate, boundaries are tight and inflexible. There is real worry about the risks of becoming over-involved, too unprofessional. In such large classes, in such a regulated atmosphere, you do what you can for the kids you see slipping through the cracks, but there is much you can’t do, and even more you can’t know. When the whole school population is hardly as large as two conventional classes, however, you see more, you know more, and you take on a much stronger sense of connection. And with that, a stronger sense of responsibility.

What are the problems we see and fret over? The usual academic signs that something is troubling a kid: lateness and poor attendance, poor performance on assignments and tests, failure to turn in work. Or the more personal signs: poor eating patterns, bad habits, bad company, bad choices. And of course the signs that mark the long term project kids: disorganisation, anxiety, failure of empathy. The ordinary toolkit seems remarkably inept. Can I motivate a child to study for a test, or come to class on time, or catch up with homework by assigning detentions? Call a frustrated parent to the rescue with poor grades and negative report card comments? If I know that Jason’s diet consists of oversized sodas, chips and doughnuts, that Mitzi is smoking at the corner during breaks, that Torek is missing morning classes because he’s up all night playing Warcraft, or Chan and Arthur are smoking up in the park before heading for the subway, is this extracurricular? Not my problem? Not my business? Can I help a child learn the method and value of keeping decent notes, reassure a child who develops a stomach ache on school days, or learn to put herself in someone else’s shoes by shooting off brisk reminders to her mother or entering “unsatisfactory” next to the learning skills categories on her report card?

When we raise such issues in our staff meetings, and struggle to find effective and often innovative ways to address them, it occurs to us that perhaps we have a “special” population of students. Why, after all, would parents elect to pay hefty tuition for a small school without bells and whistles, whose unique offerings are all rooted in the way we teach, unless their children were truly square pegs that no amount of accommodation or support could drive into round holes? But just a minute. The overwhelming majority of our students are academically high-achieving, working hard and to great effect. They do very well indeed on the sort of standardized tests that make me roll my eyes. They go to prestigious universities, in tough programs, and do brilliantly. A Dragon visits Bard College (Bard College!) and finds himself more knowledgeable about Nietzsche than the students in a senior philosophy seminar. A Dragon in first year successfully petitions to take third year courses. Another is short-listed for a Rhodes scholarship. Dragons now in graduate school write to tell us what they’re reading, or to ask us for feedback on an essay or a project.

I have a shrewd suspicion that the signs and symptoms of trouble are evenly distributed throughout the schools of our province (and likely, throughout the known world). Colleagues at schools that skim off the cream of the high-achievers tell me stories that could be told at our staff meetings, wring their hands over the same issues. But here is the difference. They are limited to report card comments (which in other schools are usually standardized), to assigning detentions, to send those regulation notes. And as for the non-academic signs, well, what happens in the park stays in the park. I think about what made a difference for me, swimming in all the turbulence of adolescence, what has helped my own children, what could help each individual child who passes through our doors—the respectful, truthful, personal intervention of a caring teacher.

It’s not a miraculous cure, or a panacea. First of all, it takes a long time to build trust, to get a kid to talk to you, really talk to you, and to listen. Most of these symptoms did not appear overnight. Many of these issues take a long time to correct. Like most destructive behaviours, these are habits. To break them, you need room to try repeatedly, to fail, to learn from your mistakes, to forget what you’ve learned, to try again. And what gives you the strength to confront these habits, to decide to battle them, to pick yourself up and keep going is genuine support. You have to know that your teacher sees the problem, acknowledges the problem, respects you enough to raise the problem and brainstorm solutions, is not going to give up on you, or take the easy way out. Your belief in yourself is immeasureably strengthened by your teachers’ belief in you. “But if you keep giving them another chance,” the common wisdom goes, “they never learn to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.” Or “It’s not like that in university, or the working world. You don’t get extensions, or the opportunity to rewrite tests there.” Or “Those things are not the teacher’s responsibility. They are the purview of the parents. Or the kid’s own problems.” Or, most troubling of all, “But what about the kids who are doing really well? Is it fair to them to give second chances to the kids who mess up?”

Here the common wisdom is not really so wise. The whole process of growing up is a process of trial and error, learning through experience. And while a child is learning, the adults around her are supposed to be protecting her, limiting the potential for harm. Everyone makes mistakes, in university or the working world. Teachers make mistakes too, lots of them. The answer is not to be perfect. The answer is to learn to advocate for yourself, to seek help, and persist. When you allow a child to try again, to do better, you teach that mistakes may be inevitable, but can be redeemed. Another really important shift in adolescence is out from the egocentricity of childhood, the recognition that you are not the centre of the universe, that others have feelings, concerns, rights. You learn this through connection with your peers, but you also learn this through the modeling and mentoring of the adults around you. And part of that move out of the protected and insular world of childhood is fostered by relationships with adults who are not your parents, but whose knowledge of you and care for you is of another order. Less visceral perhaps, but strong and reliable and enduring. And as for fairness, are we really rewarding those high-achieving kids by punishing those who struggle? Encouraging those at the top of the class to compete with, and feel superior to, those at the bottom is not good for anyone. Your achievements should be absolute, and absolutely yours, not shored up by the under-achievements of others.

There are no guarantees. An adolescent can turn away from you, in suspicion, in despair. It can seem easier (and this too may be a bad habit) to avoid trying than to try and fail. The whole point of making all this effort can be too abstract and too distant in the face of immediate gratification. But we are the grown-ups. We should be wiser than to make those same mistakes ourselves.

Contemporary Art Practises and Traditional Mindsets.

Oddly, I had the same heated discussion twice in the past month. The first time I found myself the perhaps unlikely champion of contemporary art practises was in the company of three very accomplished intellectuals. The second was in my grade 12 philosophy class on Friday. In both cases, the argument started with a contemptuous description of something seen on the wall of a museum, broadened out into a scathing denunciation of all kinds of contemporary work as unskilled, hasty, not art, laced with a suspicion that some kind of scam was being worked, a sort of Emperor’s new clothes, a criticism based in a certain reverential view of traditional works of art. I’m not sure that I convinced anybody, but I held staunchly to my Frankfurt school critical theory, and to my own experience.

The first time around, it was about three in the morning. Greg, a Toronto literary eminence, famous for his role in making this city and its Writers’ Festival a Mecca for writers, and I were the last men standing (actually we were all sprawled on the couch) at Laura and Martyn’s Christmas party. Laura is a screenwriter and film producer, Martyn a novelist and documentary filmmaker. So besides being brilliant and cultured, all three of these people are actually involved in making and critiquing contemporary art. Martyn had been in London to interview one of the subjects of his latest documentary, a war reporter, and had gone to the Tate Modern. Much of what he saw there irritated him. He did not stay long. “I’m not an art scholar,” he said, “but I’m interested in art. I collect art,” he waved at the paintings around us on the walls, by living artists, some of them really quite fine, and all of them representational. “I really like going through museums and galleries. It’s one of the things I always do when I visit a city. But what’s up with a bunch of photos on a wall, with a park bench in front of them, and you can’t understand it unless you read the artist’s explanation of what she’s doing?” I asked if he were talking about Susan Hiller’s “Monument”.

Greg leapt right into the fray., with dozens of examples of art works whose meaning had to be provided by the artist, works that were nothing in themselves, did not communicate with the viewer, and were certainly not beautiful. What kind of art was a shark cadaver suspended in a tank full of formaldehyde (Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”), or a photograph of a plastic Jesus stuck in a jar of the artist’s urine (Andres Serrrano’s “Piss Christ”), or a gigantic rendering of a balloon animal in metal, which was not even made by the artist, but by hired metal-workers (Jeff Koons’ “Magenta Balloon Dog”)? A painting you couldn’t even see was painted (Kasimir Malevitch’s “White on White”)? Or a big canvas with a single rough brush-stroke of orange pulled across the white surface? (I can’t figure out what painting this might actually be, or by whom, but I can kind of picture it, can’t you?) Greg, Martyn and Laura then gave all kinds of examples of works of art they did like, that were meaningful to them, art that didn’t need explaining, but spoke for itself, that was, that word again, beautiful: Botticelli Madonnas, the Sistine Chapel, Monet water lilies. I love these paintings too, hold them in my mind’s eye. But I tried to explain what I had experienced, had learned, from traipsing through the Power Plant, the Palais de Tokyo, the Whitney Bienniel. We had a lovely talk, as we ate the last few shrimp on the platter, scraped the vestiges of tsatziki from the bowl with broken bits of cracker, and held up various bottles of wine to the light, looking for a few more sips. I’m not sure I’m convinced them of anything but that I was aligned with the camp that will accept anything as art provided it has a label and hangs in a museum. I’m quite sure they didn’t convince me that my broader category of art robbed the concept of art itself of meaning.

Then, last Friday, the same topic, the same polarized perspectives, burst forth in grade twelve philosophy. We were starting a unit on aesthetics, and getting ready to read and discuss Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. We had a lively discussion of what philosophers of aesthetics cogitated: things that presented themselves to the senses, the nature and meaning of beauty, the rules of beauty, and of art. The kids certainly understood the basic tenets of critical theory, the critique of traditional art as an expression of social norms, and a medium for promoting them, the idea that beauty was not limited to the pleasing, the harmonious, that art could be a forum for social critique, for revolutionary action, and that there was a clear distinction between taste (“I know what I like”) and value. But that white canvas with its splash of orange came up again. Miguel had been to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, where he had scratched his head in front of this work. He argued that it wasn’t art because it had not involved effort or skill. The artist had just dipped a big brush in a pot of paint, and pulled it across the canvas. This was something anyone could do, that even a small child could do, or an elephant with a paint brush clutched in its trunk. (Here there was a brief excursus on whether animals had aesthetic perceptions, and made art.)

The class divided into two camps. By far the larger number were of Miguel’s opinion, that a lot of nonsense, pretentious, elitist, conceptually-driven creations, and childishly unskilled work had invaded the world of contemporary art, and infected it. A much smaller number, led by Olivia (who is herself a very talented artist), argued that drawing like Rembrandt was not the only way to manifest skill and vision, that before the orange line was drawn across the canvas, there had been much training, experimentation, thought, that every innovation in the arts was met by incomprehension and ridicule, that the traditional definition of art was too narrow, that art must evolve with society, must respond to the present, show a way to the future, to criticism and change. Praxis informs and is informed by theory, as Benjamin and his colleagues from the Frankfurt School would have put it. Aligned as I was with Olivia and her comrades, I tried to give clarifying and convincing examples, to draw the terms of the argument back to the thinkers we were studying. David countered with the Emperor’s New Clothes argument, that he thought the art insiders had intimidated the public by making them feel they couldn’t understand, and were fooling with our heads by putting pieces of trash on the wall and calling it art. (Duchamps’ “Fountain”?) Lani, who’s not even in philosophy, but was sitting at the cubby in the hall outside our classroom, trying to study (I guess we were rather loud), got so irritated she entered the fray, pulling in performance pieces and installations and Christo’s wrappings. They looked to me for an explanation, an answer. No matter how I try to undermine the authority of the teacher, the assumption that the teacher is not just older and more knowledgeable, a worthy guide, but in possession of the right and wrong, the solution, the answer. I was in the same position I had been in Martyn and Laura’s living room, an unlikely champion of contemporary experimental art practise, without a shrimp to sustain me.

Duchamps' readymade

What can I say? I’m not an art historian or a culture critic either. My academic field is English Literature, tainted with feminism, historicism, left politics, social criticism. Like Martyn, like Miguel (and, I’m proud to say, many of my students), I like to spend time in museums and galleries. I expose myself to art. My own understanding of contemporary practise has been informed by the artists I know and respect, my son Morris Fox, my colleague Sarah Beatty, my friends Pauline Choi, Vera Frankl, and Jurek Denis. In their company, I have gone to exhibits that I might once have bypassed, opened my mind to art that was far from traditional, easily comprehended, or lovely. Sometimes I too have been bored, turned-off, irritated. But there is something there, something authentic, moving, and yes, beautiful, though in a much expanded sense. Beautiful beyond pleasingness, beyond prettiness or harmony or wholeness or radiance, as Aquinas would demand. Rather, such things have beauty because they are true, they are revelatory, they change us.

It is important for the artist to possess a radical freedom. An artist like Cabanel or Leigh Hunt can be very skilled indeed, create works that are beautiful if your standards are limited to harmony, wholeness, radiance, to the smooth stroke and the months of patient effort, the years of technical study. But in offering only what society approves, expressing its values uncritically, they commit a kind of vulgar pornography (Venus on the half shell). They reify narrow social values. Shock is not something valuable in itself. Indeed, I am more shocked by Cabanel’s Venus than I am by Hirst’s pickled shark. I am sure there is some justice in the idea that fraud and manipulation are part of the art market, that the unscrupulous sometimes sell the meretricious to the unwitting by sophistical argument, that some collectors are so eager to seem au courant and daring, they will pay huge prices to own works they neither like nor understand. But the real task of the artist is to tell the truth, and to change what needs changing.

Cabenel

So when I went to MOMA for the Marina Abramovic retrospective and performance recreation, and walked from one room to the next through a narrow space between two utterly naked art students (a recreation of her piece “Imponderability”), trying, vainly, not to bump either, and having to squeeze through sideways, being forced to face one and turn my back on the other, I burst into tears. It was terrible to be forced to treat two people, exposed, vulnerable, individual, like objects, like obstructions. I don’t have to intellectualise or reach for pretentious argument to read this piece as a profound and disturbing commentary on alienation. I’m not strutting my superiority if I tell you it was deeply moving, an experience of art. I don’t know about that white canvas with the splash of orange, but I have stood for a long time in front of paintings by Mark Rothko. And by Jan Vermeer. What do they have in common? I’m looking forward to my next exposure.

http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/190/1974

EXPOSE YOURSELF TO ART

Art patron in the process

The first idea of museum-based education is that learning doesn’t always have to take place in the classroom. Even when you reconfigure the traditional space, get rid of the rows of desks all facing front, with the teacher in the position of authority (“All eyes front, please, class!”), and sit around tables seminar-style, old habits, old feelings linger. The teacher still feels under pressure to instruct, to place knowledge in the brains of her students like the framework of a high-rise. The students still feel under pressure to perform, to take notes, give the “right” answers, and the sense that they are under compulsion to be there tempts adolescents to balk, to disengage, to dream of being elsewhere. Go out into the world, and another model presents itself, more social, more free-spirited, more relaxed.

The second benefit comes from engaging with actual artifacts, real objects, not words about the objects, whether in a textbook or falling from the teacher’s lips. There is an immediacy that engages our energy, our attention, our imagination. You have an experience instead of a list of key concepts, relevant facts, noteworthy characteristics. You discover what you feel about the object, you analyse your own experience, instead of being told what to feel.

Museum-based education is a process of discovery. What you see and feel is relevant because it is yours, it finds a place in your memory and your imagination. The irony is that museums are not always ready for this process. The objects are there, the setting is inviting, but the guardians of the temple are not always welcoming, or well-prepared. Great energy is expended by most museums to control and limit the educational experience, particularly of students. They are not comfortable with the process. They want to set up tours, on the outworn field trip model. They seem to be worried that students will not prove worthy of admission, that they will disturb the experience of the “patrons”.

Of course museums are under a lot of pressure. Underfunded, criticized, often overlooked by governmental agencies, facing funding cuts and increased overhead, they need to maximize their earnings, which has led to the innovations of blockbuster shows, timed tickets, audioguides, and exiting through the gift shop. If you leave the exhibit, signs warn, you will not be readmitted. The lovely freedom to wander, the call of exploration, that have always so beguiled me about museums has been diminished, bounded.

I have been frustrated in the years since I founded Dragon Academy as a museum-based school by these limitations. What I would really like is to be able to come and go freely with my students. Sometimes there is a special exhibit or a particular part of a collection I would like them to learn about and from in a way that demands preparation. We will want to study the context of the objects we go to experience, perhaps have particular goals or projects in mind. Other times, we might realize that instead of looking at photograph of something, or reading a description of it, we could just take a walk out of the classroom and look at the real thing. And sometimes it is lovely to be in another setting, to do our reading and discussion in the open space and under the influence of the objects. I early realized that museums were not going to find space for a school in the building itself, though what a wonderful partnership that would be. But surely a dozen students and their teacher could walk through the grand doors and into the treasure house?

Chagall in his studio

How was this to be done? The school tour model was clearly inimical to every one of these kinds of visits. We neither need nor want someone else to map out our route, or guide us past the objects during a slotted time. There’s no possibility for spontaneity in a school tour—you can’t just up and go. And there’s certainly no provision for sitting under the dinosaurs and talking about a novel. Well, I thought, museums have student memberships. Museum members are supposed to have “free, unlimited visits”. This was certainly my experience of individual, adult membership. I waltzed up to the admission desk, presented my card, and was waved on in. But try that with a dozen students. Suddenly the presentation of cards becomes time-consuming. Museum staff look askance when you try to exercise your right of access to the Members’ Lounge. Guards hover. Interestingly, at a certain level of support, you can show up with twenty adults and be welcome, but try it with twenty kids.

How often have I come into a room in the Louvre to find a class of students, sometimes very young students, sitting in a semi-circle in front of a painting, while their teacher engages them in knowledgeable discussion. There are some instructive differences here. First of all, there is the assumption that children belong in a museum, that learning belongs in a museum. Of course it is important for them to go, and go frequently. Familiarity with the protocol and physical setup of museums allows students to feel comfortable there, to meet expectations of their behaviour. This is in stark contrast to many Canadian school groups, where the kids drag in a line behind a docent who is delivering a lecture. They are chatting to each other about… well not about art. They are noisy and inattentive, not because they are unworthy, but because they are unaccustomed, and because the passive role assigned them has little to offer. What they will remember of the experience is being led about on a tour, not the objects they encounter.

Then there is the question of the teacher. A number of researchers in the still young field of museum education have found that the average teacher is not herself a museum-goer, has little personal experience or knowledge of the sorts of things museums house. So the teacher, too, is part of the tour group. The cliché of the tourist posing for a photograph in front of the Mona Lisa without having actually looked closely at the painting is a cliché for a reason. Why take their class to a museum? They have been told about the importance of cultural institutions. It’s nice for teachers too to get out of the classroom from time to time. It feels like a holiday. But they too are unaccustomed to what museums are and hold. Hard to model what you have not mastered. Their experience too is bounded and controlled. They receive packages of “educational materials”, homework for teachers, things they must digest and impart. They too receive a lesson instead of an experience.

Double Portrait with Wineglass

Despite all the obstacles placed in the way of true museum-based education, you can still manage it. On last Wednesday, five of my teaching colleagues and I took twenty-seven Dragon students between the ages of 11 and 18 to the Art Gallery of Ontario to experience “Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris.” We had been meaning to go since the exhibit opened in October, but the catalyst for actually getting down there was student interest. I was talking quite casually with a number of my students about what we had done over the holidays. It turned out that several of us had gone to the AGO to see the Chagall exhibit, and agreed it was really wonderful. Why not all go?

We moved through the exhibit in small knots, a teacher with a shifting group of half a dozen students, drawn together because we shared an interest in a particular painting, because those students were already engaged in conversation with that teacher on the way down, or because those students were already particular friends, and enjoyed sharing the experience. We talked in low voices, pointing out details, expressing our opinions, sharing what we knew, steering each other towards particularly informative labels. We tried to put the work into historical context. Some of the teachers were particularly knowledgeable. Students who had just learned something illuminating moved over to other groups, shared what they had just learned. Some of the students were particularly perceptive. Ellen pointed out to me that the tiny building in the lower left-hand corner of “Double Portrait with a Wine Glass” was yet another representation of the synagogue in Vitebsk that figures so prominently in many of Chagall’s evocation of the village where he was born. Dr. Schwarz talked about the importance of the synagogue in village life. Dylan, who was listening to them, moved to my group, pointed out the detail to me, then sought out Ms. Beatty, who explained something of the architecture to him, which he shared with Ellen, and then both of them shared their discovery with several other groups.

Two days later, we are still talking about it. This morning in philosophy class we talked about Lenin and avant-garde art in the first days of Communist Russia. We remember favourites. Ms. Beatty’s print-making class had all spent a lot of time with Goncharova’s series of lithographs, “War”. There has been a little spate of posts on our facebook page. It has enriched our discourse, not just with talk about Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde of the early twentieth century, or expressive images, but our way of relating together. Our relationship to each other has shifted subtly. We have shared an experience. We will share others.

Perhaps the last word should be Rowan’s. “Blue Circus has me baffled and enraptured. The brilliant intertwining foreground and background is mainly why I loved this piece, but that reason also provided me with endless puzzlement. Is it a pool or is it an actual circus?” One could ask the same question about the museum itself.

Blue Circus

WHY I READ FICTION:  EXHIBIT B– A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

A. S. Byatt

I always hated those questions requiring you to pick only one, your favourite opera, what book you would take to a desert island.  So while somebody surely has to be the greatest living writer, I prevaricate.  All the same, I’d take A. S. Byatt to a desert island, without hesitation.  She has all the qualities of greatness: she writes beautifully, and of characters and places all her own, she inhabits the world she creates, and takes you there.  She is wise, luminous with compassion, with a vivid responsiveness to the tragedy, the beauty, the crazy humour of life.  I could answer the question of why I read fiction just by handing you a copy of Possession (certainly one of my favourite books).   I am grateful to read her, not least because she never takes a false step, strikes a false note.  I couldn’t find a sentence I would like to edit, a line I would alter.

Byatt has a habit, a pattern, of following a great big book with a slim one.  Or several slim ones: Possession with Angels and Insects, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye; Babel Tower with Elementals; now The Children’s Book with Ragnarok. The big books are big because they contain multitudes, generations of characters, each deeply known to the author, Victorian complexities of plot, enriched with poems and letters and stories and sometimes even academic papers or lectures.  Byatt does all these things wonderfully, and she is a spell-binding teller of tales, which have the feel, the weight, the archetypal patterning of true folk-tales and myths.  Now she has turned her pen to retelling the Norse myths of the Gods of Valhalla and the end of everything.

Writing about the book in an epilogue, “Thoughts On Myths”, Byatt is careful to distinguish between fairy tale and myth, invoking Nietzsche to argue that myths give Apollonian order and form to protect us against Dionysian chaos and destruction.  The gods and heroes of myth are not characters, she says, “They do not have psychology…They have attributes.”  Myths also don’t give what she calls “narrative satisfaction” either, that is, they are not built on the pleasurable patterns of fairy stories, where the good are rewarded in the end, and the wicked suffer.  So this book offers the curious phenomenon of a great story-teller, a profound reader of character,  an expansive intellect, re-telling the myth of the end of the gods in a compressed space.

Byatt offers several explanations of her choice of Ragnarok as a subject.  Asgard and the Gods was an important book in her childhood.  She read it over and again, and, she says, it “was the place where I had first experienced the difference between myth and fairytale.”  It caused her to wonder whether Christianity too might not be a collection of myths.  She was a girl, reading Asgard and the Gods, in the midst of the Second World War.  The battles and forces of the Norse deities offer an irresistible parallel to the dark forces of the war itself.  And Byatt also sees a parallel with the end of the world through environmental disaster.  “Every day I read of a new extinction, of the bleaching of the coral and the disappearance of the codfish the thin child caught in the North Sea with a hook and line, when there were always more where those came from.”

And she wished to write of the thin child, whom we read, perhaps dangerously, as Byatt’s young self, evacuated from London bombings, while her father flies dangerous missions in North Africa,  to an idyllic countryside, a paradise of species, renewed each spring, seemingly eternal.

What is promised, then, is a retelling of the myth itself, not as a novel, but framed in the experiences of the Thin Child who is discovering the myth, teasing out its implications. Drawing back, we can see an allegory of the end of nature, a failure of humankind as the lord of nature.  But this doesn’t begin to suggest the richness of this slim book, the novelistic mastery of it.

Begin with the myth.  Like Byatt, I too owned a copy of Asgard and the Gods, along with various other collections of mythology that told the story–Bullfinch, Edith Hamilton, Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire’s gorgeously illustrated Book of Norse Myths. Unlike the Thin Girl, I had a distinct preference for the Greeks, perhaps persuaded by Hamilton’s paean to the clarity of the Greek mind, a vision of the gods in human form divine. Or perhaps I just found the story unpleasant.  The Norse gods were no more self-indulgent, vain, foolish, or short-sighted than the Greeks, but they didn’t seem to be able to find a way to stave off the end of the world, ready as they were to die heroically on the way to defeat.  I was also disturbed by the death of Baldur, the idiocy of making him a living target while everyone hurled weapons at him, for the fun of seeing them fall harmlessly away.  The motiveless malice of Loki was something from a nightmare. Byatt understands this very well.

Loki as drawn by the D'Aulaires

“Myths are often unsatisfactory, even tormenting.  They puzzle and haunt the mind that encounters them.  They shape different parts of the world inside our heads, and they shape them not as pleasures, but as encounters with the inapprehensible.  The numinous, to use a word that was very fashionable when I was a student.”

I was moved by Odin, it is true, undergoing torture and giving up an eye for the treasure of wisdom, but he didn’t seem to have as much of it as Athena, serene, austere, generous.  I picked up Byatt’s Ragnarok because it was Byatt, not because it was Ragnarok.  Reading Byatt’s retelling was like reading the myth for the first time, breathlessly driven on by her deep poetry, by the way she imagines the world through the eyes of the gods.

“Sponges, anemones, worms, crayfish, nails of every colour, ruby, chalky, jet, butter-yellow, sea slugs magnificently striped and mottled, supping up jelly from the fronds.  Abalone were anchored round the holdfast, throngs of the shells in pink, red, green and the moist, succulent white.  Sea urchins, bristling with fine live spines, grazed the thick algae and hundreds of eyes peered out between the sheltering fronds of the great plant as it swayed in the slow currents.  Elvers moved like needles through cushions of sargasso.”

Yet though Byatt tells us she “did not want to humanize the gods”, that they are not characters as we understand character in novels, or on the analyst’s couch, she manages to give character to each one, and to suggest the origins of character.  She is a novelist, after all.  Perhaps she cannot resist exercising that power, perhaps there is an kind of anthropomorphic impulse at work.   “Homo homini deus est: Man is a god to man,” she quotes Feuerbach.  But perhaps she is also suggesting that the gods are men in human eyes, are creations of the human imagination.   In Byatt’s retelling, the most vivid character is the problematic Loki.

“As a child I had always sympathised with Loki because he was a clever outsider.  When I came to write this tale, I realized that Loki was interested in Chaos.  In the order in destruction and the destruction in order.”

Byatt’s Loki is a kind of Victorian scientist, kin to Byatt’s Randolph Henry Ash,  the myriad-minded poet of Possession, who collects specimens and follows the discoveries of his day.  Loki also resembles William Adamson of Angels and Insects, a naturalist who struggles to understand the forces that guide ants and bees, and human beings in society.  Insatiable curiosity, scientific exploration, move beyond good and evil.   But not beyond meaning.  Byatt the novelist creates and uses the character of Loki to unravel the order in destruction and the destruction in order.  Frigg embodies the blindness of mothers, Skadi, the storm goddess, the cruelty of love.  All Byatt’s gods are characters;  even Jormungandr the world snake is poignant, Freudian, a warning and a nightmare.

“The black thing in her brain, and the dark water on page are the same thing, a form of knowledge.  This is how myths work.  They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind.  They cannot be explained, and do not explain.  They are neither creeds nor allegories.”

But a fiction is also the dream of the author, and like dreams, as Freud well knew, contains the key that unlocks the unconscious, the root of character and behaviour.  Within the manifest content, what the dream seems to be saying, is the latent content, what the dream is really trying to say.

Byatt wraps the myth of Ragnarok in a more conventional fiction, a narrative that plays with her memories, and lets us suppose that it springs from experience.  This is the story of the Thin Child, the absent father on a quest against the Blatant Beast of Fascism, the mother who was heroic through the trials of war but collapsed into migraines and lassitude when domestic order was restored, the symbolic dismemberment of the wild ash tree.  The Thin Child must grow up, relinquish the rich world of myth, learn to savour the ordinary, peaceful world. But the writer cannot be imprisoned in dailiness. She knows we need “the bright black world”.

“The story did not mention any creation of wolves; they simply appeared, snarling and dark.  They were part of the rhythm of things.  They never rested or tired.  The created world was inside the skull, and the wolves in the mind were there from the outset of the heavenly procession.”

That war ended, the world of the Norse gods ended, we may be courting an environmental ragnarok, but how can the world end that has such writers in it?

Exhibit A: Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

I got a great big stack of books for my birthday, and I’ve been reading my way delightedly through them. Because of my strong interest in history and culture, a fair number of these books were not fiction, and I’d certainly recommend David McCullough’s The Greater Journey, or Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts. But there is a deeper pleasure in the novels. Taking up the challenge of my dinner companions, who, you may remember, averred they just didn’t read novels anymore (see my blog “My Night at Bob’s”, October 21st, 2011), I propose a series of book reviews of the best novels I’ve read in 2011.

I love used books, and since I’ve discovered ABEbooks, I certainly look for most things online. I revel in getting them delivered by mail, like a stream of birthday presents. Even recent releases show up in this massive coordinated listing of the holdings of most of the world’s English-language second-hand bookdealers. These are review copies I suppose, or the holdings of those rare booklovers who are not also book collectors and book hoarders. I can be patient, trolling the Abebooks site until the title I want shows up. But Michael Ondaatje is one of the authors whose newest works I can’t wait even a few months to read. There are qualities I know I will find in anything he has written– sensitivity to character, emotional richness, originality, just plain beautiful writing.

The first of Ondaatje’s books I read was perhaps his most famous—all those prizes, the lush glamour of the film. By the end of the second page of The English Patient, I knew I was in the hands of a master, a magician. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. Dazzled, absorbed, I lost all sense of being in the present, in my familiar world. I stayed up until nearly sunrise, in a state of complete surrender, unable to put it down until I had read the last word. Some very savvy, literate friends expressed doubt and even disbelief. This was not a thriller, a page-turner, they said. It was confused, fragmented, indecisive. What really happened? Why break up the story this way, fracture it into a kaleidoscope of points of view, jump about in time? The film script was better, they said, cleaner, more straightforward. “Everyone talks about Ondaatje, and what an important book this is,” my friend Lorraine said. “I’d be willing to bet it’s buried in a stack of books on everyone’s night table. You must be the only person I know who actually enjoyed reading it.” And more than once.

Each of Ondaatje’s books is radically original. He does not return to the same setting, or play with variations on the same characters. What he always does, though, is play with narrative, unwilling to tell the story, to assert “This is what happened.” He is the novelist as historian, confronted with piecemeal remains, which he reassembles in a number of plausible ways, confident enough to admit he is guessing, he is interpreting, constructing, inventing. Writers often talk of the strange reality their characters take on, the conversations half overheard, in the head, in the room, the way a scene comes to them, like something they’ve seen, something they’ve remembered. It feels as if Ondaatje writes from and in this mystical state, haunted, hallucinatory. By the end of each book, the reader, too, is possessed by haunting memories, emerging, blinking, from a kind of fugue state.
The Cat’s Table comes out like memory, twines itself around your own memories, vivid, unreliable, of the end of childhood. Sure-footed, stealthy, the author plays with that vexed literary form, the memoir. The narrator is named Michael. He is apparently the same age as the author, and like the author, he is a writer. He seems to have made the same sort of public appearances as the author—he attends master classes, he receives awards, he travels to literary festivals. The central setting of the novel’s action is a real ship, the Oronsay, carrying the narrator from Sri Lanka to England at the same age, eleven, and in the same year, 1954, that Ondaatje went to England from Ceylon, to attend school, just like the narrator. Ondaatje, like a practiced magician, even asserts there is nothing up his sleeve. “Although the novel sometimes uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography,” the Author’s Note tells us, “The Cat’s Table is fictional—from the captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat down to the narrator.” But like the very best fiction, it feels absolutely, utterly true. It is true. It all happened, in that very real part of the world which lives and breathes in the imagination.

Like other great fictional memoirs, Great Expectations, Treasure Island, Catcher in the Rye, this is a story of the passage from the clarity and potential of childhood to the ambiguity and loss of adulthood, a bildungsroman. The young Michael accepts the most unbelievable stories, the most unlikely adventures, as given. He roams the ship, wildly unsupervised, never caught and punished, with his scapegrace friends Cassius and Ramadhin, seeing everything, doing every forbidden thing they can cook up. The ship is freighted with mysteries, peopled with vivid and improbable and utterly convincing characters, characters with the power of transformation, the doubling of avatars, that mark the gods and demons of myth. The prim Miss Lasqueti, who points out that they have been seated at the Cat’s Table, most distant from the Captain, a little band of outsiders, is also a spy. The ship’s hold contains a magical garden. A tormented giant is its secret prisoner, whom the boys glimpse at night, clanking in chains, up on a deserted deck. A girl glides by on roller skates. A troupe of circus acrobats perform real magic, foretelling the future, finessing the prisoner’s release through legerdemain and banditry. A deaf, daft innocent reclaims a surprising identity, and heroically revives her father from the dead. A powerful financier withers under a holy man’s curse. Greased from head to foot, the narrator Michael slips into the guests’ rooms, enabling “Baron C” to plunder their valuables, and is never caught (though the Baron makes a speedy exit at the next port). Michael’s brief career as a sort of Oliver Twist is only one of many adventures on the Oronsay, but it is also a premonition of the writer’s special thievery, his ability to slide into the locked rooms of memory and emotion.

Ondaatje at 21

In his three weeks aboard the Oronsay, Mynah (the narrator’s nickname) learns the lessons that put an end to childhood: Authorities are not truthful; love is not always beautiful and hopeful, but may be a kind of slavery, a source of pain and regret; best friends may be taken from us and from themselves (the brilliant Ramadhin by a creeping, inexorable illness, the daring Cassius by the vagaries of fate, Mynah’s adored cousin Emily by her own reckless choices); we are not even ourselves whom we thought.

“There is a story. Always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You find in this way the path of your life.”

Ondaatje juggles the double consciousness of the narrator who remembers, looking back, what the boy saw, and what can be recaptured of that boy, what can be seen again as through his eyes. The novel is then a kind of Proustian voyage, a la recherche du temps perdu, looking both ways at once. The boy Mynah peers in at the world of adults with desperate curiosity and confusion, asserting answers and intepretations of things he cannot understand, cannot see rightly. The mature narrator Michael looks back with ruth. The whole book is suffused with nostalgia, with poignant loss. Age has made him another person, and the boy is lost along with his companions, there was a road not taken, a moral clarity now blurred.

“I am someone with a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief, I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall. Proust has this line: ‘We think we no longer love our dead, but…suddenly we catch sight of an old glove and burst into tears.’”

But though the reader colludes with this pretense of clear-eyed detachment, we know better. “Writers are shameless,” Ondaatje says. The writer, the narrator, the brash and heedless boy are all instruments of exquisite sensibility, compassionate, faithful, deeply feeling. For all that he writes in a very writerly fashion, there is a passionate living reality conjured in Ondaatje’s fiction. He shares fragments, that feel like fragments of memory, scenes so vivid we feel we remember them too, and yet they are incomplete, the explanation slides away, and even though the end of the book ties up loose ends, it doesn’t come down on the side of reportage. He tells a truth, he tells truly– these are the things that happened. But like the greatest memoirists, like Hemingway writing A Moveable Feast, Ondaatje comes down on the side of mystery. This is what appeared to have happened, but who knows?

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography, to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogomous in our taste or experience.”

The narrator’s reflections are our reflections, and spill over into our own memories, reshape how we feel, experience, understand our own lives. The Cat’s Table reminds Claire Messud (another writer I hugely admire, and whose each new book I eagerly seize from the shelves) of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It reminds me of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The narrator of The Cat’s Table, like Marlowe, is wise and unpretentious and heartbreakingly honest, the voice of our best self. What could be better than plunging into such a book?

MUSEUM-BASED EDUCATION

They’ve forgotten it all now, or rather their memories have been tidied up. When my kids (who are all adults now, thank you very much) talk about their childhoods, they speak of our many visits to museums and historical sites with fondness and appreciation. I am alone in recollecting the moaning from the back seat when I spotted a roadside sign in France reading “Eglise romane de l’onzieme siecle”. I admit, in their defense, that there are quite a lot of Romanesque churches in France, and that the Ministry of Culture is most assiduous in posting those elegant brown signs at every possible turn-off. And that I was keen to explore every blessed one, particularly since we always seemed to be traveling in France in the hottest part of the summer. Those clever eleventh century masons knew how to use massive thick-cut stone to keep out the heat. It was always palpably cooler when you came through the heavy oak doors. And then, of course, there were the elegant simplicity of the architecture, the lively immediacy of sculptures and frescoes made by unsophisticated hands. I dragged them along on quite a lot of expeditions, at home and abroad, to temples of culture. My children began going to museums, concerts, libraries, plays, when they were still in the womb. Not that they always appreciated it at the time—baby Eleanor responded to Picasso’s Guernica with loud wailing, and was only soothed when taken into another room, and shown the Douanier Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy”. A pre-pubescent Raphael went on a sit down strike in the Munich Pinakothek, right in front of a very gory depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, and refused to take another step, On the other hand, he remembers every painting in the roomful of Cranachs with piercing clarity, and thinks I am exaggerating his response. Morris made it through the National Gallery in London, room by room and painting by painting, because I doled out gummy bears. But there it is. Part of the joy of being a parent is the license to impose your passions on your offspring.

With the exception of some activities I could hardly discuss in polite company, there is hardly anything I would rather do than explore a museum. I’m not just talking about Queen Louvre and her royal family. A museum, after all, is a treasure-trove, filled with the things the Muses love. The word comes from the Greek, meaning “home of the Muses.” And the Muses themselves, those nine gorgeous goddesses, inspirers of learning and the arts, were sisters, the daughters of Zeus (ruler of the sky) and Mnemosyne (the goddess of Memory). So a concert-hall, a stage, an observatory, a beautiful garden, a university hall, the stacks of a great library, a laboratory, are all places where the Muses feel quite at home, and where the grateful recipients of their inspiration display the products of imagination. I spent some of the most vivid and memorable hours of my childhood in the company of my beloved mother, in all these places. Did I whine or plunk myself down on a bench or demand sweets? If I did, that is gone from my memory, and my mother, more gentle and uncritical than I, never told me of any recalcitrance. I love books (most perfect of information technologies), and have learned so many things by reading about them, but there is something very special in the experience of museum-going. Actual experience, to be precise.

The products of the human imagination are, paradoxically, sensual and material. An orchestra enfolds you in great waves of glorious sound, the actors on the stage are not flickering images, the dancing shadows of Plato’s cave, but living beings you can hear and see right before you, giving life to words, the marble of a statue is cool beneath your fingertips (I know, I know, you shouldn’t touch, but haven’t you sometimes been unable to resist?), a fragrance exudes from cold stone, a wall of books. Most of what we learn, in school anyway, comes to us mediated through textbook or instruction. But think about the difference between having ice cream described to you, and closing your eyes as you savour a creamy mouthful. And because experience is vivid and personal, you learn from it in ways you cannot learn from any other source. Parents, of course, know this to our regret. If we could just make our children learn from our mistakes! But surely that’s the point. We learned from experience. So must they. We learned, scientifically—experiments are experiences, after all—from trial and error. Experience is also the basis of comparison, of judgement. I know that I prefer Madagascar vanilla to pumpkin spice ice cream because I’ve tried both. I didn’t have much of a preference between calcium chloride and strontium carbonate, until Mr. Gragtmans, my high school chemistry teacher, shared with us the experience of how fireworks are coloured by burning those two compounds.

The experience of a museum is more complex even than the sensual apprehension of a painting. It is a little holiday, a playing hooky from the routine and the confinement of your workaday school life. You are out and about. You can talk as much as you like, and about whatever you like, as long as you don’t draw down the opprobrium of the guards or the other patrons. (And please, what is the disturbance caused by the uncurbed enthusiasm of a student compared to the disturbance of a theatre patron thumbing her Blackberry in the seat beside yours, or a cell phone jangling through the adagio cantabile?) You enter a very different relationship to your teacher and fellow students. You are joined together in a shared and open-ended experience, instead of narrowly defined roles. Insights come to you, and opinions. You have something to share besides the “right” answer, displays that you have understood what is being taught, or that you have done your homework.

I used the verb “exploring”. I’m not so sure about the full on, machete-wielding experience—it may be that I would rather read about sleeping on the hard ground or pressing on, day after day, through clouds of mosquitoes, a hot shower and an iced drink distant memories, or miserable longings. But wandering through the places the muses love, your chart new paths, not just from gallery to gallery, but in your imagination, in your knowing. You make discoveries, not just about things, however wonderful, but about what it is to be human, what human beings can create, which are, finally, vivid and personal, discoverries of yourself.

It was an accident of scheduling, really. I didn’t mean to chivvy all my friends into coming out twice in one week to hear public performances of my work with words. The reading from my fiction had been set up months ago, as part of a year-long roster of evening performances at Dragon, the Breathing Fire series. And this is not, I protest, a vanity platform. We pay rent for a lovely building we hardly use after sunset or on weekends. I am privileged to know a lot of very talented people, poets, composers, playwrights, novelists, who merit a hearing. Why not offer a chance to hear them, meet them, in the intimacy of a handsome space, easily set up with chairs brought down from the various classrooms? The success of last year’s series was encouragement to do it again, and I took my place in the roster in due course. But then I was whining about my disappointment in being overlooked by the Tarragon Emerging Playwrights’ Competition. And Sue and Mike offered their house, throwing in a turkey dinner in honour of American Thanksgiving, Taylor enthusiastically rounded up a team of young actors, and Moira graciously volunteered to read the character whose memories are the action of my play. So there I found myself, putting the word out, on Sunday and then again on Thursday.

After thirty-eight years of teaching and a career as an amateur actor that began when I was in nursery school, I like to think I could stand up in front of a crowd of hundreds without a twinge of stage fright. But while I can lecture, and mouth the words of others, with perfect ease, it turns out that it’s quite another matter when I am so deeply implicated in the words. Even though I wasn’t reading from my play, in fact could take comfort in the knowledge that those who were reading were wonderfully gifted and experienced actors, I paced back and forth in an agony of anticipation. And having done it once, and survived (people laughed at the parts I thought were funny, they paid attention, even though I clearly had no idea of how long it takes to read a page, and went abominably overtime), I thought it would be better the next time, after my baptism of fire. Wrong. On Thursday night, I prowled anxiously, wringing my hands, repenting of the chapters I had chosen with such optimism, wanting to flee screeching into the night. But then I sat down, a pile of papers on my lap, ringed round with expectant faces, and began.

Even though I like to say that I am not a hypersensitive, defensive sort of writer, prone to bridle and quarrel with well-meant criticism, that I am really trying to improve, and god knows there’s a lot of room for improvement, that I want, I crave, honest feedback, it’s all rubbish. What I really want and crave is for my audience to fall off their chairs in open-mouthed astonishment, overcome by admiration. I’m after what Gertrude Stein liked to call “gloire”. This is the more pathetic because I can’t, unlike Kenneth Grahame’s Mister Toad, provide the needed admiration for myself. Of course, sometimes I like what I write, sometimes I’m even pleasantly surprised to think it’s rather good. And no amount of self-doubt or even self-loathing (and there’s plenty of that) keeps me from sitting down and writing more. I revise stringently, I do take that honest feedback to heart and work things over, polishing, cutting, rewriting again and again. But not so I can add to the heap of manuscripts in my closet. The aim and end of all this scribbling is surely to get it out there, to be published, to be read, because that’s the only way you can know you’re really a writer.

Given the elusiveness of gloire, what keeps me writing? It’s a curious thing, a crowded mind, full of voices and settings, the stirrings of plot. I couldn’t bring myself to clear, pure meditation if my life depended on it. I have never emptied my head and thought of nothing. Or even been decently alone in there. How does it start? Take, for an example, the genesis of The Bones of Time, the novel I read from on Thursday. First, I was wrestling with the spectre of Ernest Hemingway. I had selected The Sun Also Rises as a text for my grade twelve English Literature course, along with a fistful of other important early modernist novels, The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, Home to Harlem, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Women in Love. Hemingway is a sort of literary bogeyman, the most famous writer of his time, winner of every prize you can name, an enormous personality, possessed of a distinctive, distinctly masculine, style, readily and cheaply parodied. (Why does a chicken cross the road in a novel by Hemingway? Alone. In the dark. It was raining.) The young women in my class gave me grief. I found myself trying to justify a womanizing, hard-drinking, big-game hunting, bullying brute as the truly great and important writer he was and is, a being of deep sensibility, a mentor, not a looming caricature. I began re-reading his books, then his biographies, and felt his life, his artistic struggles, as tragic, moving. I thought about my own way of telling his story, about an ambitious and uncertain young man hell-bent on becoming a great writer, then seared and ruined by fame.

And then a young teacher came into my office, looking for a job. (Reader, I hired him.) “You have a very Hemingwayesque sort of name,” I told him, and he looked the part of a Hemingway hero too. But there was also the manner, that diffident, slyly ironical Canadian manner, self-deprecating and enduring at the same time. And I thought, but that’s it. Hemingway’s heroes are really Canadians in their bones. They love the wild places, they are always a little alone, they are self-mocking, and decent, they embody grace under pressure. And there he was, the main character, looking rather like my unsuspecting colleague, wearing his name. (Later, when I’d got my character into all sorts of trouble, and in and out of bed with various women, I thought I really ought to change his name, but my colleague was gracious about it. “As long as the Brian in your book gets the Nobel prize,” he said, “it’s alright with me.”)

The next phase was even more curious. Even as I was plunging into research, and more research (every single biography, critical overview, histories of the Italian front in the First World War, memoirs by every expatriate lucky enough to reach Paris in the twenties, coffee table books lavishly illustrating the French Riviera, the Cubists, the Futurists, the Post-Impressionists), my head was filling with scenes that had almost the feel of recollections. I rode beside my hero in a jouncing ambulance, I looked down on him, confined to a hospital bed. I walked the streets of Paris, of Constantinople, the beach at Juan les Pins. Other characters crowded in, a rowdy group of Dadaists invaded the upstairs room at the Brasserie Lipp. A wild-haired painter of uncertain age and ethnic origins extended a long-fingered hand, and introduced herself as Cleopatra Sussman. Her past, her paintings, her friends were known to me, and in more detail than I told. As I sat there writing dialogue, and I was, well, writing it, making it up, even as I fidgeted with the words, it felt more like trying to remember a conversation overhead in a café, trying to get it down on the page. I’m sure I stole a thousand details and stories from all that reading I did, but I couldn’t tell you what, anymore. It all took on a life of its own, filled my head like dreams and memories.

It’s a commonplace that everyone has a book in him. I suppose we all try to shape our own lives into some kind of a narrative, with ourselves as the protagonist. But I seem to have more books in me than I can live to write. Even as I send out rivers of query letters for that novel (one a week, that’s my promise to myself this year), I’m deep into the next novel (page 628, double-spaced, of a big book about being young and radical in New York in the thirties), and other novels are visible in my peripheral vision, like clouds that take the shape of horses, ships, trees, laughing faces. So, I tell myself, surely that makes me a writer? I have to write, I am writing, I’ll go on writing. But I need to be read. This week, my stomach in a knot, I started reading out loud. I don’t suppose I’m going to stop that either.

In elementary school, the girls were not interested in being my friends. I was younger than my classmates, I was a show-off (the kid with her arm in the air, waving and murmuring “oo-oo” whenever the teacher asked a question), I was definitely not athletic, and my parents were Commie Jews. I was ignorant of pop culture–my parents thought TV was a capitalist brain-washing tool, comic books promoted violence, and Barbie dolls perpetuated sexist objectification of women. I was an only child, and a late one at that, so there was no one at home to introduce the latest trends in music or clothes. It didn’t help matters when I befriended the other loner, Kristine, who was a really sweet girl, and shared my love of books, but wore a truss for her scoliosis, had a weak bladder, and sometimes had accidents when tortured by bullies (one of whom was our teacher, who liked to make Kristine wait before issuing her the washroom pass). Outside of school, thank goodness, I did have friends who were girls, the daughters of friends of my parents, my cousins, my fellow students in drama and dance classes. Then for three glorious years, I was in class with my best friend from riding lessons, until my parents moved to Toronto, and were annoyingly insistent on taking me with them.

In the big high school I then attended, things did not improve much. I skipped grade 10, which meant I was barely pubescent and a foot shorter than my classmates. I didn’t own any mini-skirts. I didn’t know how to put my hair in rollers. I’d barely heard of the Beatles, let alone any other pop group. I carried around my latest book like a talisman. I was reading the sort of classic literature that made everyone else groan when it was assigned. I still wasn’t athletic. My father forbade me to try out for the cheerleading squad (“If you think, young lady, I’m going to let you shake your tuchus in front of a stadium crowd, you are much mistaken!”). I didn’t smoke, I wasn’t interested in drinking. My sexual experience consisted of dancing very close to Steve Cranach and noticing the physical evidence of his interest in me, and one prolonged and startling session of French kissing (the film stars of the fifties and sixties, you may remember, kept their mouths discreetly closed). I didn’t know how to join in on locker room and washroom conversation (the girls used to gather in the washrooms, fixing their makeup, smoking out the windows). I wasn’t adept at talking about feelings, or spinning out daydreams about popular boys, or ripping apart unfortunate girls who didn’t happen to be there. I was sickeningly certain that I was being mocked when I was out of earshot.

But in grade three, I discovered boys. Even though I couldn’t hit a ball with a bat to save my life, or catch one either, and could always be counted on to lose my marbles in the first five minutes of playing, they didn’t seem to mind if I tagged along. My interest in tadpoles and snake skeletons, dinosaurs and adventure stories seemed enough. The Pollack brothers, Jed, Eli and Danny, who could hit a ball, were the sons of other Commie Jews, friends of my parents, and they went to school with me. Eli was even in my class. They also played classical music (piano, cello, violin), took dance classes (all except Eli under duress), and liked to read. Boys, I learned from them and their friends, could be impressed by bookworms with big vocabularies. Showing off, even if it was only showing off in school, was a mark of honour. We played endless games of Monopoly, we built forts, we went exploring in the woods, and fishing in the creek. They never talked about feelings, or fashion. If they didn’t like someone, they got into a fistfight, and then it was over. In high school, they got political. They read newspapers, they debated world issues, they took part in protests. The other members of the debating team, the Model UN team, the school newspaper editorial board, were mostly boys. I suppose they weren’t the popular boys, the ones the girls in the washrooms swooned over, and likely they were persecuted by the football stars and the guys who’d been given an MG for their sixteenth birthdays. But they seemed to take it in stride, constructing their own in-group, and including me, not as anybody’s girlfriend, but as one of the guys, which was fine with me.

Girls continued to baffle me. My friend Joanie Sugar, who used to be on the debate team and was the top ranking student in the enriched math class, came back from summer vacation sporting makeup and a whispery little-girl voice a la Marilyn. She quit the debate team, and her grades dropped in math. I confronted her about this disappointing transformation—I had been hanging out with boys for quite a few years by then—and she told me, pityingly, that boys didn’t like girls who were good at math and belonged to geeky clubs. I pointed out that there were a lot of boys who liked me, listing off the names of my friends. “They may be boys,” she said, “and they may be your friends, Meg. But they’re hardly boyfriends, are they? I’m talking about getting asked on a date.”

In university, of course, I met a lot of other girls who were bookworms with big vocabularies, political activists, serious show-offs around the seminar table, who saw no point in spending an hour in front of the mirror every morning putting on a face, or dressing up along the lines suggested by Mademoiselle magazine. Like the boys with whom we stayed up into the wee hours arguing about the meaning of life, they had ambitions, fiercely held opinions, a sense of themselves as individuals, and an impressive stock of profanity. I hardly ever ran into gossip girls anymore, even in the washroom.

In a post-feminist era, you would think the model of girlhood would have changed. Instead, fashion consciousness has spread down to grade school. I see stick legs and little girl tummies revealed by leggings and belly tops. They sell Uggs and sweatpants with “Juicy” inscribed across the seat in toddler sizes. Lipgloss comes in the same flavours as chewing gum. Girls still go around together in tight groups, led by a queen bee, the merely hopeful clinging to the margins. The social media have only opened up a new and even more devastating medium for the kind of cruelty that once found expression in whispering and note-passing. Boys can be bullies too, of course, experts in furtive kicks and elbowings, open ridicule, lying in wait to gang up on their target, to steal his things or shove him into lockers. But terrible as it can be, it’s still active, naked aggression, not two-faced, underhanded manipulation.

I think about the difference between boy culture and girl culture a lot these days, because without any intention or effort on my part, I run a school where the boys outnumber the girls two to one. I have dark suspicions of the sexist reasons this might be so. A small, relatively new, distinctly alternative school feels like a risk beside the traditional offerings, even when we mock or criticize them. To enroll a kid at Dragon, you have to be quite disenchanted with the more conventional choices. Maybe parents worry more about boys who are not doing well at school. Maybe they aren’t doing well in greater numbers than girls. After all, the ways in which girls are traditionally socialized make us a better fit for the usual school culture. We’re quieter, more compliant, eager to please those in authority, which also means we are better behaved, do our homework even if it bores us, sit in rows, stay under the radar and out of trouble. Whereas boys are noisy, messy, bouncey, rebellious. They get into trouble when they’re bored. Certainly the preponderance of boys changes the atmosphere. The air is a bit blue—they like to use four letter words. A sedate teacher with an armload of books treads a perilous course between rooms, at risk of being knocked aside by a tearing banshee. Their lockers are a mess, their notebooks a joke, they interrupt each other in class, there’s a lot of teasing, some of it a tad rough. There are arguments and name calling. But there is nothing hidden, underhand, malicious. And anyway, they’re not that hard to settle down.

Maybe it’s not so bad for high school girls to hang out with boys, and learn boy behaviour. Maybe it’s better if you look on the boys as somewhat annoying brothers instead of as potential dates. It takes away the risk of putting some guy off by putting down his argument in class, or getting better grades. There is no cheer-leading squad, so you might as well join the chess club or the Model UN team. There are barely enough students in phys. ed. to make up both sides of a soccer match, so girls have to play alongside boys, and get the ball away from them too. One of my female students, who came to Dragon at first in a parade of fashionable outfits, carefully made up, told me she felt funny dressing that way at our school. Now she wears trainers instead of stiletto-heeled boots. She’s gone from being a mediocre student to the honour roll. Maybe there’s a connection? She tells me she doesn’t see her old group so much anymore. “They’re just into partying,” she says. Maybe a school culture that feels more like a casual family gathering is healthier than one where everyone dresses up like they’re going clubbing, sorting themselves into cliques, competing for popularity.

The studies that promote the benefits of all girl schools point to the lack of distractions, and the availability of models of female competence. But if you go to school with enough boys, paradoxically, it seems the same benefits prevail. There’s nothing distracting about the boys who’ve been in class with you since they were pre-pubescent. You’ve built a teasing, affectionate, unromantic relationship with them, that protects you from worrying about what they think of you and whether they find you attractive. If you’re really good at some subject, everyone in a small class knows it. There’s little reason, and no way, to hide from the praise of the teacher. And in spite of their dominance in numbers, the boys get the sexism knocked out of them. It’s not so thoughtlessly comfortable to parrot demeaning clichés about women when your female teachers and classmates are people you know so well, not some distant social subset on the other side of an invisible line.

For the sexes to be truly equal, surely they have to be familiar with one another. In all the cultures where the position of women is markedly subordinate, the worlds of women and of men are strictly separated, by education, dress, accepted tasks, association. Even in the twenty-first century, in a liberated western society, in big co-educational schools the separation of the sexes continues, and works its poison. Girls learn to wear the accepted masks, and dream small. Boys remain the heroes of their own adventures. I think that in a small school, packed with boys, girls learn to assert their genuine individuality, defend it, command respect. Not that I wish, with Henry Higgins, that a woman could simply be more like a man. But freed from the social pressures that turn even the most adventurous girls into models of femininity, by being themselves, unvarnished, unconstricted, girls can find their authentic voices. And get the boys talking about feelings.

Cleansing the doors

Let me tell you a story. Colin, who is eleven years old, came to spend a day at Dragon. I encourage this kind of visit, and in fact it’s the real entrance exam. I find that either the school fits like a glove, or, in the words of one visitor who probably didn’t realize he was in earshot as he said it, “Mom, why did you make me come to this weird school?” When I met with Colin’s parents, I asked, as I often do, “What other schools are you considering?” There are many approaches, I find. Some parents have put together a short list of schools that have a common thread with Dragon—they’re all small, academically oriented, alternatives to the kilt and tie model. At least on paper, they share our concern with enriched curriculum, fostering discussion, building strength across subject fields. But others, like Colin’s parents, take the Chinese menu approach—one from column A, one from column B. It’s a little difficult to see what a big, traditional “prep” school, a school which bases admissions strictly on exam scores, and Dragon have in common. However, I did my best to describe what Dragon is really like, and what we have to offer, and a daylong visit was duly set up. Colin was partnered with a grade seven buddy, and throughout the day the teachers whose classes he attended, along with the teachers and students who ran across him in the building, asked him how he was finding it. His answers to us were all polite and positive.

But when I called his parents to follow up, his father told me that he had been disturbed when Colin called at lunch to report an incident in the entrance lobby. This is a nice open area where numbers of kids tend to gather to eat lunch together. Since we are far too small to have a cafeteria, and many of the students go out into the neighbourhood to buy lunch and bring it back to eat with their friends at school, lunch hours are not tightly regimented or closely superintended. Teachers are always within earshot, and wander by, but they don’t take up supervisory posts, or herd the students. “Ralph” (I have since ascertained who it was, but I’ll follow Colin’s lead and use another name, to protect the innocent) pulled out a baggie, which had some white powder in the bottom, took a pinch, rubbed it on his nostrils, sniffing deeply, and behaved as if he had obtained great chemical relief. “Do you have a drug problem?” Colin’s father asked me sternly.

My first difficulty in answering came from trying to strike the proper tone. I could tell from the location and performative aspects of the incident that Ralph thought himself a great wag, and Colin was the perfect straight man for his prank. I knew that simply guffawing, however, would show a critical lack of gravity on my part. If I explained that Ralph had mimed this kind of thing before, and that he’d been told by absolutely everyone that he was behaving like a fool, I was unlikely to provide reassurance. That Ralph continued to think this kind of idiotic game was funny, and that he had not been stopped, let alone expelled, seemed to suggest a lack of discipline, a failure to handle the behaviour of my students. If I protested that we really didn’t have a drug problem at Dragon, I risked appearing either naïve or insincere. And if I asserted that while undoubtedly some of my students indulged in pot-smoking and beer-drinking outside of school and outside of school hours, I was confident that hard drugs and dangerous levels of use were not a problem for any of my students, I would either seem to be protesting too much, or displaying a most unprincipalish acceptance. Clearly, Ralph’s tomfoolery had raised a spectre I could not allay.

What is the reality? And what are the real risks? Let me begin by asserting that adolescent thrill seeking is a constant in all times and cultures. In 423 b.c.e., Aristophanes portrayed the frantic father, Strepsiades, lamenting the misbehaviour of his son Pheidippides, who has been neglecting his studies, wasting his money on horses, staying up to all hours, and drinking himself into a stupour. Two thousand years later, in 1599 or thereabouts, Shakespeare’s Polonius worries that his son, Laertes, is going to the dogs in a similar fashion. Things haven’t changed much. The wild party is a trope of Hollywood comedy, from Animal House to Dazed and Confused.

While we are invited to laugh at Strepsiades and Polonius, and Ferris Bueller’s father, at a deeper level, such behaviour is not very funny. Kids get in over their heads. Inexperienced, crippled by social anxiety, they are easily impressed by the sang-froid of the rule-breakers, read daring not stupidity in transgressive behaviour. They are afraid to say no, even to things that distress them, that they really don’t want, more alive to the risk of being uncool than the risks of conforming. Yielding, to peer pressure, to their own desperate need for acceptance and self congratulation, they risk more than a hangover or being grounded. They get into trouble at school. They get into cars with people who are in no state to take the wheel. They get busted, since neither luck nor police indifference are reliable. They become dependent, whether psychologically or physically.

There wasn’t much drug use that I saw in my high school. There was plenty of partying, but I wasn’t much interested in it. The kind of rebellion I found attractive was political and artistic. My one experience of adolescent bacchanalia did not impress me. In 1967, I took a telephone into the coat closet, and begged my father to come rescue me from a prom night after-party where my date was throwing up in the toilet, and for some radius around it, while an energetic and noisy game of strip poker was going on in the living room, and something rather more dubious was going on with several boys and an inebriated girl in a bedroom upstairs. My father was perfect, showing up in minutes, banging at the door, grabbing me by the hand with a great display of outrage, and rescuing me without making me lose face. Not that I shed any tears about dropping or being dropped by that crowd.

Just ask the Axis

University was another world. Liberated from parental supervision, bathed in sophistry about cleansing the doors of perception, dazzled by an alternative youth culture, a lot of my articulate, intellectual friends began experimenting, showing off. It felt as if we were seekers, refusing to be deflected by convention, intent on profound and authentic experience. We knew about the luminaries who had trod this path before, Coleridge, Baudelaire, Freud. We thought Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were glamourous and suffering geniuses. Most of us, all the same, managed to keep our grades up, to settle eventually into adult life, to appreciate single malt. But there were casualties, not just amongst the rock pantheon. My first love died of the sequellae of alcoholism. The most brilliant boy I knew in undergraduate studies died on the streets of Bangkok, from an overdose of heroin. A friend who was a terrifically talented graphic designer spent his last days in and out of rehab. A young professor went from diet pills to speed, lost her job, and was lost to sight. Less dramatically, there were those who just never got anywhere, who drifted in a cloud of smoke and pills, their potential unrealized.

Of course you don’t get anywhere trying to share these cautionary stories with the adolescents under your care. They’re no less confident of their difference than we were. They can’t see how our antediluvian experiences can have any relevance to what they’re going through now. Warning and worry sound like preaching to their ears. And anyway, they know what they’re doing. I’m perfectly well aware, as a parent, as a teacher, as a principal, of what’s going on. I know what it means when someone’s eyes are red and squinty, when a person stares off into space and chuckles pointlessly. I recognize that peculiar smell. Sometimes, pathetically, they get caught red-handed. A doobie by the dumpster in a nearby parking lot. A row of kids huddled around a pipe on a bench in the park where the phys ed teacher has taken her class for a game of soccer. I have sat in my office, mystified, trying to discover the attraction of it all as a student shuffles and prevaricates. I have called in parents to tell them what I suspect, watched them laugh if off, or wring their hands, or demand to know who else was involved so that child can be blamed and punished in preference to their own. I have more than once worked to get the dire cases into rehab facilities. I have washed my hands, and expelled a couple of students over the years. The net result, I think in my darker moments, has been no more than to push the problem out of the physical plant.

Availability, of course, is a huge problem. If, in 1967, in my North York high school, raiding the parental liquor cabinet was easy enough, now elementary school kids can lay their hands on a whole pharmacopia. In my father’s day, the dealers preyed on the children of the poor. You could certainly add in the abundance of pocket money, the drastic reduction of adult supervision, and our growing uneasiness with our own entitlement to dictate behaviour. In a strange way, nearly everybody’s children now share the dangerous freedoms, the forms of neglect, once restricted to the offspring of the very rich and the very poor. But the difficulty of doing something that really works is not new. It is related to the critical tasks of adolescence.

Young children accept adult rule, however grudgingly. Dependent as they are, it is easy to keep an eye on them. But adolescents are not supposed to be obedient. They have to find things out for themselves, they have to construct and internalize their own rules for living. It is their nature to push back against boundaries, real and imaginary. They have to learn to think for themselves, which can only be accomplished by testing and debating, risking failure, making mistakes in order to learn how not to make them. This is a principle of my teaching, of my parenting, of my at times unsteady navigation through my own life.

Authoritarian governance is bound to fail. A wiser aim is to hold to the highest standards of truth. Why is it that everyone asserts that their school has a zero-tolerance policy? Is there really a school that doesn’t have a drug problem? Where kids don’t experiment? This is not a problem you can drive underground with a policy of don’t ask, don’t tell. The three famous monkeys may hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, but that doesn’t mean that the evil vanishes. Why not begin with talking about it, with telling the truth? Isn’t the real goal to help them grow up? To take responsibility for their own actions? “Learn to have some sense!” I tell my students, because I think they are capable of learning.

Maybe your reaction to Ralph’s prank is a kind of litmus test, determining whether you are the sort of person who thinks such things shouldn’t happen or the sort of person who thinks they had better be recognized and thought through. As for the drug problem, I am reminded of a song made popular by the Troggs. With a very little tweaking of the words, they apply nicely to the current reality. “I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes, drugs are all around me, and so the problem grows. It’s written in the wind, it’s everywhere I go, so if you really love me, come on and let it show…” You know the tune.

The Troggs