(Written on Sept. 17, 2013)
We have a resplendently full moon tonight. As I was exercising in
the cool of the early evening, I couldn’t help but notice how it grew brighter
and brighter as darkness descended. The moon rose gracefully until it dominated
the landscape, one of the few celestial objects able to pierce the atmospheric
haze, and as it did, I felt the tug of the past once again.
According to whimsical legends, the moon is supposed to affect us
in unusual ways. In past centuries, before the advent of widespread artificial
illumination, when we were forced to rely on bonfires and lighted candles, it
must have been an eerie and dominating sight. Before gaslight fixtures in our
major cities, before cities were anything more than collections of ramshackle
buildings arrayed in a haphazard fashion, interspersed here and there with
monuments to powerful institutions, most people lived in the countryside, and
night must have descended upon them like a hawk, smothering everything in
blackness. It governed our daily rituals, and life back then must have been
wearying enough, if most of our ancestors were peasants who lived in
straightened circumstances. Such a bright disc suspended up in the sky, in a
firmament that was furthermore perceived to be dotted with a myriad of stars,
and the glorious vision of the Milky Way, back when our nights actually were
dark and not glowing with the reflected lights of our vast cities. No wonder
that legends arose about people being driven mad by the influence of this vivid
specter, one that is almost ghost-like, and why we associated it with
transformations, as people became overpowered by fear, anxiety, and panic.
It is hard for us, we who are used to the widespread illumination
of the modern age, to countenance how those in the past must have reacted. We
are attuned to different rhythms nowadays, and for the modern sensibility, we
tend to imbue moonlight with a certain romanticism. The young feel a certain
thrill at being able to divorce themselves from the daytime drudgery of school
and less-than-satisfying jobs, and plan social outings for the night hours. We
are different at night, more glamorous somehow, creatures of artifice like the
sweeping panoramic view of skyscrapers at night, and we find the moon romantic.
We have need of different symbols, those that allow us to distance ourselves
from the glare of what we perceive to be literalism taken to extremes (such as
our imprisonment in cubicles during the day, a predicament calling out for
release).
But the sight of the moon affected me as well. For some reason, on
this early evening, it transported me out of myself, as I was walking around
the track with a small crowd of hardy individuals who also exercise during the
early evening. I was thinking, in particular, about ghosts, and about the
imprint they (and we) leave on this world. Can we not view the moon, after all,
as a type of ethereal other, Selene, not as beguiling young woman but as old
crone whose profile some of us are able to see, the grandmother that we
associate with the past, looking down on humanity with a sort of detachment and
dispassionately viewing the flow of the centuries, the roiling passions and
energies that boil over but that then are dissipated, over and over, time after
time? Do things ever really change?
It prompted me to think of the people I had known before, for I
ascended for a few seconds of eternity up to join the moon, and to look back as
if from a height at the panorama of my own past, the planet below around which
I orbit. I may not measure time in millions of years, but the epochs of my life
have become distinct in my imagination, and I could not help but return,
obsessively, over and over to the period of my late adolescence, to those final
years in high school, where I yearned for nothing other than to be able to
escape the grip of my current circumstances, and to find my destiny somewhere
else, anywhere else but this town that I thought back then constricted my
possibilities.
We think about the people we met, many of whom we never truly
leave them behind. They pull on us with their own gravity, and if I may say so,
this gravity is felt in terms of emotional weight. There were times when I wish
I could disencumber myself of unpleasant memories, of slights and insults I
received when I was a child, wishing to forget times to erase what I had done,
to go back and shake my younger shoulders and try to bring sense to play. Back
then I felt that the world was hurtling forward inexorable and leaving me
behind, here in this backwater town of Corona, a town on the outskirts of our
great metropolitan center, a sleepy town of citrus groves and small dreams. But
for a moment, my vision was expanded, and I was able to reflect on the world
with a grander scope, and yes, to perceive more clearly the ghosts that haunt
me.
I was thinking in terms of history, and the panoramic view that it
represents. With regards to this academic field, the idea is that we are able
to look back on our past (viewed in terms of grander cohesive units, in the
movement and experience of communities, groups, institutions and, much later,
civilizations and nations) and parse it into periods that are understood in
terms of the elaboration of certain factors in play. For a young man of 15 years
of age, I thought it offered a framework that would help me to escape the
prison of my own personal subjectivity, by looking at moments and phenomena in
the past that were piercing in their significance. It is a commonplace to think
that history involves the study of momentous events, turning points that have
lasting consequences, moments when battles were won, treaties were signed,
empires were established, new people were “discovered” and social movements as
well as economic patterns shaped our way of life and our very identity. It
isn’t the story of individuals, although so much of history is studied in this
way, with textbooks that used to offer us a never-ending pageant of kings and
princes and generals and inventors, because they represented stories that were
easy to understand.
As we age we recognize that there are of course hidden institutional
factors at play, and that it is too simplistic to think in terms of narratives,
even though we are hard-wired to think in this fashion. Rather than think in
terms of the Age of Capital, it is easier to think of industrialists, and of
inventor of the cotton gin, of the steam engine, of Eli Whitney and James Watt,
and of the framework provided by theorists such as Adam Smith and the
elaboration of the theory of markets. When we think of episodes such as the
Civil War, we think of compelling personalities, of Abraham Lincoln and Robert
E. Lee, of emancipators and rebels, and of great causes, when history was in
fact much more nuances. We might review economic factors, and also, general
ideological impulses as well as institutional factors, for institutions also
exert and defend their interests, but this demands a perspective that is more
in tune with structuralist theory, that which is taught in our universities and
is endlessly quoted by university students in clumsy term papers.
I was thinking more along the lines of stories, and what it meant
to study history and to appreciate it as a form of moral but also uplifting
and, yes, entertaining instruction. I had been fortunate to have a teacher in
junior high school, Mrs. Cotnoir, who had fully recognized the potential of
history to entertain us, and we had regaled us by dramatizing in her own way
the Age of Pericles. We as young students loved the pageantry and drama of her
approach, and she brought to life the characters involved in the era of the
Persian Wars, describing the invasion of the Persian emperor, and the way in
which the Greeks had banded together if only for one brief moment to repel the outside
invader.
We heard about generals while she drew diagrams of bays and
harbors and the disposition of naval forces, doing her best to draw those ships
of the classical age, the triremes, and to evoke the otherworldly quality of
the oracle at Delphi, the one of the inscrutable prophecies that warmed of
disaster to come, but also seemed to speak of the possibility of being
safeguarded behind wooden walls (that of the triremes, of course, and not any
walls constructed around any city). She described the strategies of generals
such as Themistocles, and the haughtiness and discipline of the Spartans, and
the brilliant but also quarrelsome nature of the Athenians, they with their
messy democracy that we were to inherit over two thousand years later. We students enjoyed these lectures,
especially since we were not encumbered with any obligation to adhere to strict
historical protocols, to a dispassionate view of history, for of course our
modern history was taught from the vantage point of what were considered
“western” values, and it was easy to reduce the Persians to the status of
barbarians, a line of thinking that scholars have noted signaled the
commencement of what Palestinian scholar Edward Said was to brilliantly
describe as an “Orientalist” mindset.
It was a memorable year for me, but by the time I entered high
school, I was ready for another approach to the study of history. By then I
think I had already discovered the show “Jeopardy”, and had heard of historians
such as Barbara Tuchman, and felt the power of being, so to speak, a privileged
and somewhat detached observer of human endeavor. I still believed and continue
to do believe (we are hardwired as a human species to do so, once again) in the
power and seduction of stories, but I thought that there was also a vision that
could encompass a more scientific approach, something along the lines of what I
had read in the famous Foundation
series of books by Isaac Asimov.
In that series, which encompassed a narrative that extended far
into the future, when the human species had expanded to the stars and had
formed a galactic empire, I was introduced to the idea of history as a
psychosocial process that could be analyzed in accordance with certain
scientific principles. It was a way of divesting it of a certain chaotic
nature, converting it, on the contrary, into a predictive science. We could
predict the scope of human history if we understood the underlying social and
institutional impulses, a view that was, when you think of it, inherently
conservative, for it posited that we as a human species would never be able to
transcend in a fundamental way certain universal principles that defined our social
dynamic. This is still the view that is posited, in slightly different form, by
certain social scientists, notably those who publish books that wish to posit
an evolutionary framework behind our most fundamental impulses. I have to
admit, it does sound convincing when I read these books and these theories, but
I think that at times, it is actually much too flexible a theoretical framework
that can be stretched to encompass every single human act, almost a tautology
to say that we do things because we “evolved” to do so (the triumph of Richard
Dawkins’ Selfish Gene).
Maybe I am not such a confirmed materialist, after all.
But I was ready for another approach, and when I entered high
school, amidst all the other turmoil involved in adjusting to another hostile
and indifferent habitat that involved its’ own dynamic of insiders and
outsiders, I was left to fend for myself, and I was fortunate enough to make
the acquaintance of Mr. Zadra. He was my American history teacher when I was a
junior, and he made a lasting impression upon me.
There was something old-fashioned about him. He seemed very much
to come from another age, and didn’t have the typical relaxed persona or
patterns of speech of a dyed-in-the-wool Californian. He was a tall man, maybe
in his late fifties, and he had a rather prominent nose and a nasal voice to
match. He would lecture to us without the need to “ham it up” or dramatize the
episodes we were studying, taking care to note the importance of the periods and
the circumstances that were at play. Of course, we had a different type of
textbook at that point, a high school textbook that was more in line with a
more subtle and formal understanding of historical phenomena, and we were able
to read about the great processes (by great, I don’t mean to suggest
appreciation or admiration, but only, to speak in terms of a grander scope) of
American history. He opened my eyes, and stimulated my critical faculties.
As may be imagined, high school students were still, by and large,
squirming adolescents who were little able to concentrate at times on the
subject matter being taught. In my worst moments I thought that all teenagers
were incapable of letting go an opportunity to belittle or ridicule someone
else, and it was a difficult time for me. I sat in the front row, and I took
notes, and I responded to Mr. Zadra, all of which earned me reprobatory and
jeering looks from so many who sat around me. I would stay to discuss current
events with Mr. Zadra after class, or drop in during lunch time, and I always
appreciated that he would take the time to give serious consideration to my
questions and to offer thoughtful responses. I never obtained a sense of where
his political inclinations lay, if he was a conservative or a liberal, although
I do remember that he did seem to question the educational priorities of the
Reagan administration. He told me, after all, that Jimmy Carter had been “good
for education”, when I was falling into the trap of criticizing him for our
domestic as well as international policies.
I remember that we would hold what were known as history
tournament a few times during the academic year. I can’t describe how much I
looked forward to them, and we would be placed in small teams, to compete
against each other in what would be considered a game-show format. It was a
nice change of pace, and I bounced and squirmed in my seat, desperate to answer
each question, and being a little dismissive of the rest of the students
involved in the tournament. It gave me an opportunity to emerge from anonymity,
for I knew that wherever I was placed, my team would always look to me to
provide the answers, and we almost always won. It is embarrassing for me to
think about my mindset now, and now I squirm to recall how I behaved. I
mentioned that during that year my team won almost all the contests, because it
was the case that we did lose one. It happened when I found another opponent I
had never seen before, a blonde and lanky teenager who wore glasses and who
must have joined the class in the middle of the year. He similarly answered all
the questions for his own group, and it narrowed down to a duel between the two
of us. I was a little too overconfident,
and that loss hedged on one question the answer to which had escaped me back
then because it was offered in what seemed to be a footnote in our text, but
that has been engraved in my memory since then: Who invented the first
elevator? Elisha Otis.
I relished being in Mr. Zadra’s class, the way I would come to
relish other teachers who similarly stimulated my imagination, and who let me
escape for a time from what I considered the dreary social pageantry of high school,
the routine cruelty, the anti-intellectualism and the lack of what I would
consider was a grander historical vision. The kids were quick to insult and
mock others, and everyone was a target. I even saw a drug sale take place in
one class, and I question whether the teacher actually missed seeing this act or
chose to ignore that transaction as I saw her become more and more discouraged
during that semester.
It is probably the case that many public school teachers fail
because they can’t make the mental adjustment necessary for teaching in public
schools. They are all college graduates, and they are used to the idea of
discipline and to the respect that they themselves gave to their college
instructors. As I was reminded by one of my friends during a recent lunch when
we were discussing a junior high teacher we both had, one who was famous for
expressing what could only be considered open hostility towards all students,
she (and other beginning teachers) can’t get into the mindset that most classes
in public schools are not approximations nor analogues of the college
experience. We are talking about wholly different animals, two entirely
different species, those 18 and younger, and those 18 and older. The psychology
is different, although at times I am willing to recognize that there are high
school environments where the experience is much closer, an intermediate zone
so to speak. When asked, I always say that I consider my year taking English
classes with Mr. Philips at Corona High School as my first real experience of a
college class.
But in Mr. Zadra’s American history course, despite the best
efforts of our teacher, there were moments when student behavior became
somewhat uncontrolled. I remember one instance, in which he asked a student to
discontinue her disruptive activity, and she lashed out verbally at our
teacher. It seemed shocking to me, because it was occurring with a person who I
respected so much as a mentor, and who was very mild and could hardly be said
to merit such treatment. He tried to defuse the confrontation, and thought me a
lesson that it is never in the best interest of classroom dynamics to engage in
arguments or to answer in kind. It is a lesson that I am ashamed to say I
forgot over and over when I was a substitute teacher for two years, leading to
many unpleasant clashes that lingered in my memory.
On the last day of high school, I remember that I was released
from certain classes and was allowed to go to library or to visit with other
teachers rather than to take the final exams. This was the case in Mr. Engle’s
Chemistry class, as I was able to verify when reading my high school diary,
part of which I have uploaded to the web. One of the noteworthy things
that I did, to compensate for so many other mistakes when I didn’t reach out to
individuals or take a more active in the social environment or when I wasn’t as
supportive as I should have been of school spirit, was to go to visit a few of
my teachers. I recall that I visited Mr. Zadra, and I thanked
him sincerely for his instruction and his support. His class had meant so
much to me, and more than the gentle but respectful way in which he had taught
the subject, I appreciated that he saw something in me, and took the time to
continually encourage me. He always did have a gentle and hearty bearing, if
somewhat formal, and it is hard for me to see him as a military officer,
although I did know he had served in that capacity. I think I circulated around
the campus and thanked a few other teachers as well. I was in a daze because I
would shortly be entering the summer school program at UCLA, and this was the
culmination of so many of my dreams of finding a more compatible environment. I
also would venture to say that I felt what we all felt, a certain amount of
sadness at leaving these teachers behind.
While at UCLA, I took a few history courses, although this was
very much discouraged among engineering students. My first year I remember that
I took a course in modern European history with Professor Wohl, and performed
very well, writing with abandon on my
blue book. I always thought that if I
had been born under different circumstances, I would have liked to continue my
study of history, but it was a luxury that I didn’t have as a working-class
student. I thought my deliverance would come with solving formulas, the
traditional kind, not the ones that were based on psychosocial and
quasi-scientific principles a la Harry Sheldon in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.
I found out while at UCLA that Mr. Zadra had passed away a year
after I had graduated, when I had a chance to chat with a fellow Corona High
School alumnus. It filled me with sadness, for it really felt as if I had lost
a part of my soul at that moment. It also left me with regrets over not ever
having taken the time to go back to my high school, and to reach out to my
former teachers, to thank them once again for their support during that trying
time of my life. It was a battle that, like the incursion of the “barbarians”
upon the Greek mainland so long ago, had been won against long odds, and it was
an experience that, decades later, I had come to recognize merited its own
Greek historical epic, in the manner perhaps of a Herodotus who
combined strict observation with fanciful explanations that involved the
intervention of the gods (i.e., science and storytelling melded together). Well,
I am joking, of course, but I still think there is much to be gleaned from this
experience, and I find it frustrating that I haven’t found the way to share my
emotional experiences with other students.
As I was telling my childhood friends Frank and Richard during a
recent lunch, in my mind, emotionally, I harbor the illusion that things have
not changed since I left Corona High School. I know intellectually that they
have, for I have seen the campus transformed dramatically, and have furthermore
been to the campus to attend not only the graduation of two of my nieces (a
third is set to graduate in June of 2014), but also to complete a few
substitute teaching assignments a few years ago during that inglorious period
of my life. There are parts of the campus that seem excruciatingly the same,
and when I was on the campus, I found myself walking about as if in a dream.
It is easy and, perhaps, emotionally comforting to think that were
I to sit around long enough, I might see familiar figures on campus. I don’t
think anyone from my time in the 80s remains on at that school, but I can
imagine that if I were to sit in the central quad area long enough, during an
early evening as the moon shines brightly above, a night such as tonight, I
might see the ghost of Mr. Zadra walking along to his classroom, he wearing a
dark blue blazer and dressed formally as he always seemed to be dressed,
carrying his textbook in one hand or maybe a briefcase. I imagine him taking
note of me as well, another disembodied spirit on campus, looking down from the
vast distance of three decades past, and seeing how I
wished that we could have had all the discussions such as we used to
have when I was his student. We could have both shaken our heads about the
wonders we have seen, about the scope of historical events since that
period in the 80s, commenting as we would about the dissolution of the Soviet
Empire, and also about the rise of China, one that had been made
possible by the reforms instituted by Deng Xiapeng, a leader whose
rise to power he would have seen. We could have discussed the impact of
globalization, and the way in which we seem to have entered a new Gilded Age in
this country, one of robber barons in the guise of Wall Street technocrats
who so willfully gambled and nearly brought down the economy, and in which
income disparity has increased to levels that were only seen 100 years
ago. And we could have discussed the
enduring saga of the Middle East, and the epic struggles that have been
witnessed in that region, and the way in which so much of history seems to
depend, once again, on hidden but enduring paradigms, where autocracy, for
example, has been reestablished in countries where social movements sought to abolish
it, as in the earnest but failed revolution in Egypt.
It seems as if I am a million miles away, floating in space and
orbiting my past, and it is difficult to say who is more unreal, whether I am
or the memory of past friends and mentors. Looking at the moon put me in this
reflective mood, and it made escape, for a moment, the sullen grip of the now,
to dream once again about another unearthly period of my life. I miss Mr.
Zadra, and wonder if we are not all ultimately phantasms in human history.
Will I haunt anyone when I am gone? The moon carries with it, as
ever, a heavy emotional weight.
No comments:
Post a Comment