I must in the first place disclaim any concurrence in the doctrine that to us, in our legislative capacity, religion is a matter of indifference. I am deeply impressed with the conviction that it is our paramount duty to promote the interests of religion and it influence on the human mind. I am impressed by a conviction that the spirit and precepts of Christianity ought to influence our deliberations; nay, more, that if our legislation be at variance with the precepts and spirit of Christianity we cannot expect the blessing of God upon them. I may, indeed, say with truth that whether my decision on this question [of the Jews’ civil rights] be right or wrong, it is influenced much less by a consideration of political expediency than by a deep sense of religious obligation.

Between the tenets of the Jew and of the Christian there is, in my opinion, a vital difference. The religion of the Christian and the religion of the Jew are opposed in essentials. Between them there is complete antagonism. I do not consider that the concurrence of the Jew with the Christian in recognizing the historical truths and divine origin of the moral precepts of the Old Testament can avail to reconcile the differences in respect to those doctrines which constitute the vital principle and foundation of Christianity. If, as a legislature, we had the authority to determine religious error and a commission to punish religious error, it might be our painful duty to punish the Jews. But we have no such commission. If the Jews did commit an inexpiable crime nearly two thousand years ago, we have had no authority given to us–even if we could determine who were the descendants of the persons guilty of that crime–to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, not unto the third or fourth, but unto the three hundredth or four hundredth generation. That awful power is not ours. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

In other words, if we were a religious Christian government, not merely a secular government guided by Christian principles, we would, perhaps, be in a position to make the Jews pay for their sins–in particular the sin of killing Christ, but, more generally, the sin of being Christianity’s antithesis. We are, however, not that kind of government and so (this summarizes Peel’s argument as far as I have gotten) we really have no choice; if we are going to be consistent, but to grant the Jews their civil rights.

What I find disturbing in these words is the, to me at least, clear implication that there is a part of Peel that would not mind having “the painful duty” of punishing the Jews, though, to be fair, I don’t know where the logic of the rest of the speech leads Peel and so it is possible that these two passages are part of a rhetorical strategy that does not necessarily reflect the actual position that he takes. Nonetheless, Peel’s implication that a theocratic government would, indeed, be justified in discriminating against, if not outright punishing the Jews is one that I hear echoes of in the US-is-a-Christian-nation rhetoric of some of our Christian politicians; and perhaps I will trace that echo in another post when I have the time. For now, though, while I am not suggesting that any of those politicians are out to get the Jews or even that any of them actively desire a theocracy, I will not deny the fact that their rhetoric makes me wary.

The leader of my first graduate poetry workshop—this was 1985—was telling us about a challenge she’d issued to the men in the group of poets she hung out with when she was younger. “None of you,” she said she told them, “will ever write a successful ‘cunt poem,’ because, when it comes to cunts, men only understand clichés.” We all laughed, the three of us who were men perhaps a little uncomfortably, and then she informed us that a poem her challenge had inspired was in the anthology she’d assigned as our text. I read that poem four times when I got home that night, finding it harder to believe with each reading that anyone could have thought it deserved publication. Not only did it rely on precisely the kinds of clichés I understood my teacher to have been talking about, ending, for example, by calling women’s genitals, without irony, “the gates of paradise;” but the entire poem was built on the biggest cliché of all, treating The Vagina it discussed—because I still cannot help but think of the word as capitalized and in italics, even though it never appears in the poem—as nothing more than an object of the poet’s contemplation, like the Grecian urn had been for Keats, as if all the vaginas The Vagina represented were not in reality attached to the living, breathing bodies of actual women.

///

The first thing I did was trash every poem I’d written to that point. Then, once I’d let go of the baggage all that old work represented, the poems that became my first book, The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), began to take shape. At last, I felt like I’d found a language in which I could speak about my body as my own, in which my desires and my fears, my vulnerabilities and regrets, my joys and my failures, were mine and no one else’s to give meaning to. Committing to that language meant committing to a radical honesty about who I was, both as a survivor of child sexual abuse and as a man; it meant rejecting utterly the rhetoric of invisibility with which the man who forced his penis into my mouth had so effectively and for so many years hijacked what I had to say.

That kind of honesty is precisely what is lacking in the clichés my teacher defined as the limits of the male imagination when it comes to writing about women’s genitals. Take, for example, the cliché that ends the “cunt poem” I spoke about at the beginning of this essay, “the gates of paradise.” The dishonesty in this metaphor lies primarily in the way it objectifies women’s bodies, describing not women’s experience of being embodied, and not even men’s experience of women’s bodies as bodies inhabited by women, but rather the particular experience men have of our own bodies when we have sex with women. It praises women’s genitals, in other words, not for being what they are, but for how men can use them, and so, on a cultural level, renders women as invisible and voiceless as I was rendered by the men who used me. To meet my teacher’s challenge, then, to be a male poet who writes a successful “cunt poem,” is not simply to find a non-cliché way of calling women’s genitals “the gates of paradise.” Rather, it is to discover language that will make visible the women whose genitals they are, unwrapping from within a male perspective the layers of misconception and misrepresentation in which they are bound by the sexual objectification of women that is so central to our culture. It is, in other words, a profoundly political endeavor, one that requires a man not only to refuse complicity in the inherent violation that sexually objectifying women is, but also to articulate a way of being a man who sees women as sexual beings that does justice to who they are as human beings.

Just because they almost never sit together like this and they remind me of a yin-yang symbol that’s been pulled apart and I want to see what it is like to post a photo from my phone.

Holding literally to the claims of any particular myth…is a great error in that it mistakes myth’s values for science’s facts and results in the worst sort of religiosity. Such literalism requires a faith that splits rather than unifies our consciousness. Thinking particular myths to be valuable in themselves undermines the genuine power of all myth to reveal value in the world: it transforms myths into obstacles to meaning rather than conveyors of it. Frozen in time, myth’s doctrines come to describe a world removed from and irrelevant to our timely one; its followers, consequently, become strangers to modernity and its real progress. Those of such blind faith are forced to sacrifice intellect, emotion and the honesty of both to satisfy their creeds. And this kind of literalism is revealed as fundamentally idolatrous, the opposite of genuine faith.

but it has been years since I have been able to create at the center of my life a space for the kind of reading that nourishes me as a writer, reading that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that experience, that connects me to language in ways that are challenging and revitalizing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world simply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me possibilities of being I would not otherwise have imagined.

His question is a good one, but I don’t really have the time to dig into any of the books I was thinking about when I wrote that passage, so I thought I would answer him by sharing an excerpt of an essay I am working on. The excerpt, though not the essay, tells the story of how I began to read poetry and how that reading led me to want to write poetry, and so it is about reading that took place a long time ago, but the experience it talks about is the kind of experience I was talking about in the post. Regular readers of this blog will likely not need any background to understand some of the larger context, since I have written about it many times before, but for those of you who may not have read some of my previous post, it may be useful to know that part of the context for the excerpt is the fact that I was sexually abused as a boy and that reading and writing played a central role in my coming to terms with that fact. Here’s the excerpt:

The first volume of poetry I remember taking down from the shelf in the public library across the street from where I lived was Conrad Aiken’s Selected Poems. I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I read the first eighteen lines or so of the first poem in the book, “Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait” (Aiken’s poem is the first one in the pdf), and I knew I needed to make poetry part of my life.

Well, as you say, we live for small horizons:
We move in crowds, we flow and talk together,
Seeing so many eyes and hands and faces,
So many mouths, and all with secret meanings,—
Yet know so little of them; only seeing
The small bright circle of our consciousness,
Beyond which lies the dark. Some few we know—
Or think we know. Once, on a sun-bright morning,
I walked in a certain hallway, trying to find
A certain door: I found one, tried it, opened,
and there in a spacious chamber, brightly lighted,
A hundred men played music, loudly, swiftly,
While one tall woman sent her voice above them
In powerful incantation… Closing then the door
I heard it die behind me, fade to whisper,—
And walked in a quiet hallway as before.
Just such a glimpse, as through that opened door,
Is all we know of those we call our friends.

To say that I identified with the woman in these lines would be an understatement. I might have been keeping my own door well hidden and tightly locked—I did, after all, have real secrets to keep—but I also needed someone to open it who would hear my voice, as Aiken’s speaker had heard the woman’s, carrying it back into his own life and thus reducing, by however small a degree, her isolation. What I thought consciously at the time, however, was that I wanted to understand how Aiken had made that woman so real for me, how his words had left me feeling that his speaker had heard me too; and so I started reading a lot of poetry, taking books off the library shelf pretty much at random, jumping from Aiken to Frost to Sandberg to Eliot to Williams—I don’t remember if I read any women at the time—and finally to e. e. cummings, whose work, especially his sexual love poems, spoke to me at least as powerfully as Aiken’s poem did. Take, for example, the first three lines of the last poem in & [And], cummings’ second published volume:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.

Nowhere else in my life—not in the pornography I was looking at or the sex education clas-ses I’d taken, not in what my male friends who’d had sex had to say or in the sexual wisdom the adult men I knew occasionally chose to share, and certainly not in own experience—nowhere else had I heard a man state so plainly that, whatever else it might mean, being sexual with someone could also be about liking his own body. I desperately wanted to feel that way myself, and so I de-voured as much cummings as I could, trying to internalize his vocabulary and technique and then to use them in my own poems about sex, which I failed at for years, well into my early twenties, when I was sitting in the workshop where my teacher told us about her “cunt poem” challenge. In part, this failure had to do with my immaturity both as a poet and as a lover, but it also had to do with the fact that I couldn’t just write the consequences of having been sexually abused away. Learning to like my body meant unlearning the self-hatred, physical and otherwise, that I’d been taught by my abusers, and that meant puzzling through the particular form this self-hatred took in me.

I also thought it might be fun to list some of the books and writers that have had this kind of effect on me since then, even though the specifics might be very different. Here are some, in no particular order, that I see on my bookshelves right now, though most of them are books I read years, and some of them decades, ago:

• Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin
• Talk Dirty to Me, by Sallie Tisdale,
• Peel My Love Like An Onion, by Ana Castillo
• A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, by David M. Friedman
• The poetry and political essays of June Jordan
• The poetry and critical essays of Hayden Carruth
• The poetry and essays of Albert Goldbarth
• The novels and essays of James Baldwin
• He Sleeps, by Reginald McKnight
• The Waves, by Virginia Woolf
• The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien
• Imajica, by Clive Barker
• A Poet’s Work, by Sam Hamill
• Love, Sex, Death and the Making of the Male, by Rosalind Miles
• Men on Rape, by Timothy Beneke
• Transgender Erotica; Trans Figures, edited by M. Christian
• They Whisper, by Robert Olen Butler
• 1982 Janine, by Alasdair Gray
• Greenvoe, by George Mackay Brown
• Sex and other Sacred Games, by Kim Chernin and Renate Stendhal
• I Am The Clay, by Chaim Potok
• Jewish Self-Hatred, by Sander Gilman
• Violence, by James Gilligan
• Eros and the Jews, by David Biale
• Manhood in the Making, David D. Gilmore
• The Jew’s Body, by Sander Gilman
• Cunt, by Inga Muscio
• A Dangerous Profession, by Frederick Busch
• The Yellow Wind, by David Grossman
• Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis
• The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin
• City of God, by E. L. Doctorow
• God’s Phallus, By Howard Eilberg-Schwartz
• Soul Crisis, by Sue Nathanson

I had an unsettling epiphany that probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise but nevertheless left me disheartened for the better part of an afternoon.

I won’t get to all the books I want to read in my lifetime.

For the average reader, this is one of life’s relatively benign epiphanies; as a writer it’s a serious limitation. After all, writers are readers first. Most of us were consuming books long before we ever picked up a pen or pencil, and confronting the fact that there is a limit to the number of them we will read feels a bit like realizing there’s a finite amount of oxygen in the room.

I don’t really buy the oxygen metaphor, but I endorse wholly the idea Bodwell is trying to get at. Indeed, a jolt of regret ran through me more strongly than I have felt in a long time when I read the words “writers are readers first,” because I can’t remember the last time that statement would have been saying something true about me. Sure, I read. I read for school, both material that I am teaching and that my students write; I read the newspaper and articles in magazines; I read blog posts and occasionally the discussion threads they spawn; I read emails and memos and occasionally scholarly articles and other similar material that feeds my academic work; but it has been years since I have been able to create at the center of my life a space for the kind of reading that nourishes me as a writer, reading that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that experience, that connects me to language in ways that are challenging and revitalizing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world simply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me possibilities of being I would not otherwise have imagined.

It’s easy to lay the blame for this state of affairs at the feet of my adult responsibilities–having a job, needing to work extra hours because we need money, being a partner to the woman I married nearly twenty years ago and a parent to a thirteen year old boy–and, to some degree, putting the blame there is not inaccurate. Those responsibilities do take up time I could otherwise spend reading. It is also true, however, that I simply have not prioritized reading the way I used to, not so much in terms of how much time I can give to it, but in the sense that I’ve made choices about how to use my time that have pushed the kind of reading I am talking about here to the margins of my life. I did not start this post thinking about New Year’s Resolutions–since I don’t really believe in them anyway–but it is appropriate that I should be starting it on New Year’s Day, the day after I finished the first book in a very long time that I read just because I wanted to read it–though I didn’t start reading for that reason (about which more below)–Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.

Fish divides his book into the two sections named in the title, treating the first, roughly, as a discussion of form and the second, more or less, as a discussion of content. Of course, since the two are not really separable, his analysis of one often bleeds over into an analysis of the other. Nonetheless, the distinction is useful, since it allows Fish to ground a lot of what he has to say in the notion that a sentence is a material thing, like paint, an object with a structure and characteristics independent of the particular content the sentence has been fashioned to convey. Too many people who want to write–at least this is true of too many of the students I meet who say they “lo-ove” to write (and they almost always turn “love” into a two syllable word)–just don’t get this. Here is the first paragraph of Fish’s book:

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sentences?’” The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that “if he liked sentences he could begin,” and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. “I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I like the smell of paint.’” The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabor it), is that you don’t begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will have in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other. (1)

There are few pleasures that I enjoy more than getting my hands dirty in the tangled mess that the sentences of my first drafts usually are; and if we’re talking about poems, in which case you need to add to that mess the lines over which the sentences break, and perhaps a meter and/or a rhyme scheme, then the pleasure is even greater. Right now, there are two piece I am working on, an essay and a poem, each one needing revision. I have set them aside until I finish prepping my technical writing class for next semester–I am writing this post to take a break from that preparation–and I can’t wait to be able to pick each one up again and give to revising it the solid chunk of time that it will need (and deserve).

My students, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, feel no such pleasure in revision. Indeed, most of them barely know what revision is, thinking instead that the only changes that ever need to be made to a piece of writing they’ve produced are grammatical or proofreading corrections. These students, I think, can usually be divided into two large groups: those who find writing to be a real chore, but who are nonetheless able and willing to write for class with some degree of competence, and those for whom writing can be a truly painful experience, who are convinced it is a skill they will never acquire–that they are congenitally bad at it anyway–whose work is most commonly labeled remedial and who therefore hate writing.

There are reasons that this second group feels the way it does, and I could devote an awful lot of space to meditating on why, but those reasons don’t concern me now. Nor am I really interested in why the first group feels the way it does. No one is obligated to like writing. What I am interested in is a stance towards language that, in my experience, these two groups seem to share. More interestingly, it is a stance I remember being articulated in an essay on poetry that I read a long time ago but that I can’t lay my hands on right now. (I want to say the writer was Wendell Berry and that the essay was called something like “A Poet’s Education” or “The Education of a Poet,” but I can’t remember for sure.) In any event, according to my memory, the essayist was asking why people so resisted the idea that writers in general, and poets in particular, should have, or require, as formal an education in their art as painters, say, require in theirs. I read the essay at least 10 or 15 years ago, and it is likely older than that, so I think the piece was part of a conversation about why MFA programs were necessary. The reason the writer felt the essay was necessary, if I remember the argument correctly, is that while everyone seems to understand paint or sound as material about the properties of which people might be ignorant, and about which, therefore, aspiring artists or composers need to learn, since just about everyone who wants to be a writer is already a native speaker of–has already, on some measurable level, mastered–the language in which they want to write, it is much harder to see how people might be ignorant of language in the same way.

This is a point that I think almost every freshman composition text I have ever tried to use has missed, with the exception of They Say, I Say, by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein: the idea that college freshman need to learn how to write not at the level of large rhetorical forms like narration, description, comparison-contrast and the like, but at the level of language, of how language works to structure and create meaning. Graff and Birkenstein do this by foregrounding the use of linguistic templates that they say every competent writer uses. So, for example–and those three words right there are an example of such a template: so, for example–their book contains examples and exercises that resemble a kind of academic Mad-Lib (remember those?). Here are two moderately sophisticated examples of templates:

In recent discussions of __________, a controversial issue has been whether ____________. On the one hand, some argue that ____________. From this perspective, ____________. On the other hand, however, others argue that ____________. In the words of one of this view’s main proponents, “___________.” According to this view, __________. In sum, then, the issue is whether _________ or ___________. My own view is that ____________. Though I concede that _________, I still maintain that __________. For example, _______. Although some might object that _________, I reply that ________. The issue is important because ________. (9)

Anyone who has ever written an argumentative or persuasive piece of writing should recognize as one they have used the structure of reasoning that is given form in those two examples. More to the point, that structure is available to everyone; and it can be learned, like the playing of scales or the mixing of colors, through practice. My students often resist this notion because they think that using the templates will make their writing programmatic, that it will straitjacket them into a voice that is not their own; and it’s not only my freshman composition students who feel this way. My creative writing students who worry that reading other poets will somehow contaminate their style, rob them of what is unique in their work, are expressing a similar fear; and I think it is in part a fear rooted in a consciousness of themselves as already having mastered the language they speak, in which they express themselves using a voice that is already no one else’s and that they feel they will lose if, for example, they try on for size the templates that Graff and Birkenstein are talking about or really study as models to learn from the creative writing of established authors.

The irony, of course, is that those students who do consciously and attentively work with the models I provide for them in the classroom–whether that work is to adopt the models or to work purposefully against them–start to sound more like themselves than they did before; and this is because the scaffolding that the models provide actually allows the content of my students’ ideas, or creative vision, to reveal itself more fully than the muddled, muddy, poorly edited language in which they all-too-often otherwise write. Indeed, Graff and Birkenstein make precisely this point in a couple of different ways, pointing out, for the benefit of instructors using the book, that “templates have a long and rich history. Public orators from ancient Greece and Rome through the European Renaissance studied rhetorical topoi or “commonplaces,” model passages and formulas that represented the different strategies available to public speakers” (xvii). Later, in a section addressed to students called “Do Templates Stifle Creativity?”, the authors make the point more directly:

As for the belief that pre-established forms undermine creativity, we think it rests on a very limited vision of what creativity is all about. In our view, the above template and the others in this book will actually help your writing become more original and creative, not less. After all, even the most creative forms of expression depend on established patterns and structures. Most songwriters, for instance, rely on a time-honored verse-chorus-verse pattern, and few people would call Shakespeare uncreative because he didn’t invent the sonnet or dramatic forms that he used to such dazzling effect. Even the most avant-garde, cutting-edge artists…need to master the basic forms that their work improvises on, departs from, and goes beyond, or else their work will come across as uneducated child’s play. Ultimately, then, creativity and originality lie not in the avoidance of established forms, but in the imaginative use of them. (10–11)

Fish’s goal in How to Write a Sentence is to illuminate some of those forms, not in the template-sense that Graff and Birkenstein are referring to, but as sentence “styles,” by which he means ways of organizing the world; and he wants to do this illumination with as little reference to formal, prescriptive grammatical terms as possible. By and large he succeeds, though not at the level which first excited me about his book, which was that I might be able to use it in my classes. Published as a hardcover, the book costs just $19.99, much less costly than the relatively inexpensive (for college texts) They Say, I Say, which I think costs around $40 or $45, if you buy the volume with readings. Unfortunately, while I really like a lot of what Fish has to say about sentences–“the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the [writer’s intended] effect has been achieved” or “The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is ‘What am I trying to do?’” (37)–the sentences he chooses as examples, throughout the book, would be entirely inappropriate for my freshman composition students, who are neither aspiring writers nor English majors. Here, for example, is a sentence from John Milton’s An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642) that Fish uses as an example of the “subordinating style:”

For me, readers, although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of truth, and that whose mind so ever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words (by what I can express), like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command, and in well ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places. (Qtd. in Fish 57)

It’s not that I think my students are unable, intellectually or otherwise, to appreciate sentences like the one I have just quoted, but were I to assign them Fish’s book, I would be derelict in my duty if I did not provide them with a good reason to use Milton to develop that ability. Fish takes for granted Milton’s relevance to his readers, and to the degree that he does so, it is clear that I, and people like me, not people like the overwhelming majority of my students, are his audience.

An obvious point, perhaps, but thinking through this distinction in terms of audience between They Say, I Say and How to Write a Sentence has been for me less about the differences between the audiences, or even between the books, than about figuring out the relationships between and among myself as a writer, a teacher and a reader. I started out by saying that I miss doing the kind of reading that feeds my writing, and Fish’s book, despite the fact that his example sentences are taken overwhelming from canonical (white male) writers (with whom there is nothing wrong; it’s just a very narrow field of vision), connected me once more to one of the ways that reading can be so nourishing. Here he is taking apart, as a writer, not a teacher and not a critic, but as a writer, the first sentence of Agatha Christie’s book Nemesis: “In the afternoons it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper.”

Even before we meet Christie’s detective-heroine, Miss Marple, we know a great deal about her. She has a routine, she follows it, and it occurs daily. Indeed, it is more than a routine. It is a custom, a word that suggests tradition, duration, and an obligatory practice tied to social class and norms. (These suggestions are enhanced by the slow progress of her full title, “Miss Jane Marple.”) Moreover, oe senses that “custom” is not for her a thing easily trifled with. Her customs, we intuit, are methodically, even ritualistically observed. We know this from the word “unfold”; unfolding is so much more formal than opening; merely opening a newspaper, in any which way, would seem indecorous and overhasty to her.… The word that sets the seal on this mini-portrait is “second.” The word is casually delivered, but because it comes late and constitutes a small surprise–it tells us that this is part two of her custom, something we hadn’t been expecting–it calls attention to itself and to its message: Miss Marple is not content with one source of information; she has to know everything. And she will know everything. You wouldn’t want to be someone who has something to hide. (100–101)

I remember when I used to write paragraphs like that in my journal trying to figure out how and why the words of certain writers were able to move me as powerfully as they did, and it makes me sad that I have not done that for a very long time. Or at least that I have not done it for myself, for its own pleasure, its own sake; that, most recently anyway, I have done it only in the service of teaching. Indeed, I had not realized until I finished How to Write a Sentence just how thoroughly teaching had infiltrated my sense of myself as a literary person, a reader and a writer. It’s evident to some degree in the form this blog post has taken, moving as it does through a discussion of writing pedagogy in order to get to here, to the issues that are most important to me.

I used to dismiss the warnings of writers who talked about the dangers that teaching could pose to being able to write, to do one’s own work. For a long time, I was teaching and I was writing, and I was productive. I’ve published five books after all (The Teller of Tales is not yet on the page that link takes you to); I have begun to make a small name for myself as a translator of classical Iranian poetry; my own book of poems was well-received and well-reviewed when it came out; but if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that the more I became immersed in my professional life, the more I pushed writing and reading into the corners of the larger life I was living as a husband, father and more, stealing time for it when I could, always putting other things first, and it’s only now that I am allowing myself to feel how deeply unsatisfying this has been, how, little by little, I have let this part of who I am–where I am most fully engaged with the world; or, better, where my engagement with the world takes its best and most enduring and most meaningful and even most joyous form–slip away. I love teaching and everything it stands for, and it’s important to me to make clear that this post is not about being burned out. I’m not leaving my profession. Rather, it’s about remembering that my profession exists in the context of a much larger truth about who I am, that I am, as e. e. cummings said of poets in his introduction to Is 5, someone “to whom things made matter very little–somebody who is obsessed by Making.” It is time for me to organize my life once more around that truth.

And likewise, mythology does not hold as its greatest hero the merely virtuous man. Virtue is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight, which goes beyond all pairs of opposites. Virtue quells the self-centered ego and makes the transpersonal centeredness possible; but when that has been achieved, what then of the pain or pleasure, vice or virtue, either of our own ego or of any other?

I also found myself thinking when I read this passage, and I continue to think this as I make my way through the book, that Robert Bly and most of those who relied on Campbell in fashioning the ideology of the mythopoetic men’s movement back in the 1980s and 90s really narrowed and impoverished Campbell’s vision when they hung it on the political agenda of recovering and repairing (or whatever) traditional masculinity and manhood. They clearly did not take to heart what Campbell says is the “prime function of mythology and rite:”

to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back.

I mean this not as a defense of Campbell, or even, really, an endorsement of what he has to say; but as someone who spent an awful lot of time reading and critiquing Bly and others, I am struck by how wrongly they seem to have read him–at least as far as I can tell from my limited exposure to what Campbell is saying in this book.