Bargaining with Chaos, Self-Blessing, Good Friendship, and Galway Kinnell's "St. Francis and the Sow"

Reteaching a thing its loveliness begins very close to home...

“Old Friends”

In 10th grade, on my very first morning at my new country high school, I saw a kid get hit by a car. It happened right as I got off the school bus, on the road next to where the busses drop you off. I heard a sound like a flat board dropping, saw the person in the road disappear, heard brakes screeching, and saw blood rushing in rivulets down the steep hill of pavement. After a slow motion moment, adults sprinted over to help the kid, who was now a crumpled, still form on the ground lying face down. 

I remember looking out across the street beyond the accident to the green pasture and the cows grazing there and realizing that the cows and the pasture were an actual part of the school. I felt sick to my stomach from the accident and homesick from the cows and everything else. It was hot, and I was sweating through my new light blue peasant blouse.  Later that day,  I would get my period in the middle of Geometry.

I ended up becoming pretty good friends with C., the kid who’d been run over. After the accident, he had to get facial reconstructive surgery. I only knew him with his new face. One day sitting on the green, he took out his wallet and pulled out a picture of himself from before the accident to show me his old face. I told him I liked both faces, the one he had now and the one from before, and I meant it. He told me he didn’t really like either of them.

We talked about the accident. He said he didn’t remember anything from that day. I didn’t tell him what I remembered: watching them work on him, and then wandering with dozens of strangers up to a school building in a haze on a bright morning to start school like it was a regular day. Even though I couldn’t stop thinking about the kid in the road, or shake the feeling that I’d just seen someone die.

The day after the accident, while waiting at the school bus stop near my new house in the early morning New Hampshire dark, I made a deal with myself and God, or the force that was in charge of things. The deal I proposed/decided was that during the school year, I would alternate between having a good day, followed by a bad day, and so on. The self-imposed pattern gave me the illusion of something ordered and predictive, a container for the moods and rhythms of this new place and time. I wonder if most teens do some kind of inner bargaining like this. 

An old pic of a building at my high school

I was adrift during adolescence in ways I’m only now figuring out. From what I’ve seen and remember, though, I’d say that I was average as a teen in my level of bewilderment and sadness, and ups and downs: I was new to my high school, but then made a few friends. I said I’d go to parties, but then not go. I did some cheerleading, but then got kicked off the team for driving myself to a game. I read some of the assigned work, but not Moby Dick. I did enough homework, and smoked in the woods with the freaks. Up and down, up and down.

As you may have guessed, it wasn’t my success in school that made me become a teacher. Anyway, it went on like this– good day/bad day, feeling like an outsider, left to my own devices, and pretending it was all fine. Then one day in the 11th grade in Mr. Berchtold’s psychology class, I learned about the theory of “I’m Ok-You’re Ok.” It was a revelation.

As Mr. B. framed it, we all function within one of three power structures or “positions” in relationships:  I’m okay/you’re okay; I’m not okay/you’re okay; and I’m okay/you’re not okay.  It was a simple concept, really nothing profound (sorry, Thomas Harris), but it let me take a step back and think in a clearer, metacognitive way about a few pressing things: Self-regard as a prerequisite for having regard for others. Compassion and power dynamics within friendships. Why pretending to be subordinate or superior to others both feel like shit.

Having this conceptual framework and subsequent ones was way better than bargaining with randomness, or pretending I was all set and then keeping people at arm’s length.  I remember wondering why no one had explained something so simple and useful to me before. 

***

It turned out Mr. Berchtold had left out an important one: I’m not okay/you’re not okay. 

In most of the Friendship in Literature* classes I taught over the years, the not ok/not ok position was the one that got the most air time. Some students would come to realize that they often–or even mostly– bonded with their friends over dysfunction and being not okay. We talked about the pros and cons of disclosing mental health and other challenges to friends in real life and on social media, and the consequences of doing it too often, too early, or not enough. 

Kids discussed the social cache´ of having a difficult internal life such that I’m not okay becomes one’s identity–and the consequences of that. When friendship is built on being not okay, for example, we don’t root each other on for fear that we’ll be abandoned on the I’m not okay side of the equation. The other two imbalanced positions are red flags in a friendship, too. You can’t wish the best for someone and power play them at the same time.

We loved working with the poem St. Francis and the Sow, because it reinforces how transformative it is to be fully seen, and loved. It illustrates what a radical and rare thing “self-blessing” is. It makes clear that no one is exempt from deserving love  (It’s not “St. Francis and the Puppy…”) One kid said the poem showed “no-matter-what love” and then said all he could shoot for was “almost-no-matter-what-love.” That’s still pretty good. And if we can be in a position to “reteach a thing its loveliness,” and do it in the context of a friendship, or in the classroom, or anywhere? That seems close enough to perfection.

St. Francis and The Sow

The bud
stands for all things
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of the earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
​blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow. 

- Galway Kinnell

Keira and Me at The Cure. I’m wearing giant headphones because of tinnitus. It was still glorious.

*About the Friendship in Literature course

Of all the tears shed in my classroom over the years between and during classes, most had their source in friendship troubles. It followed (for me, at least) that a course that studies and centers friendship would do for kids what theI’m okay-you’re okay framework did for me. We would use literature and stories, along with theory and research to deepen our understanding of concepts like reciprocity, power dynamics, and intimacy. We could unpack great friendships in literature and film: Sula and Nel, Nick and Gatsby, Thelma and Louise, Patti and Robert, Max and Carol the Wild Thing, Wenders’s angels, Damiel and Cassiel, Key and Peele.

And so we did. I taught the class for years. It represented the challenges and rewards of teaching and parenting and being a friend, in situ: Why are boundaries important for intimacy? How do we make sure quieter voices are heard? What’s the symbiosis between intellectual inquiry and social-emotional exploration?  How can the teacher (or anyone?) recalibrate the boundaries when necessary, like a surveyor helping to decide where the property lines really are and where to place the fencing? Just like the students came to do bravely and regularly, I used what I learned during that class to inform my friendships and my world outside school. And vice versa.

Students were curious about my friendship with Keira, my colleague, their beloved English teacher and one of my closest friends. They saw us every day–talking, laughing, eating lunch, playing music together, dancing in a supplies closet (just once). Our classrooms were separated just by an internal swinging door. I think students liked seeing that two teachers they cared about also care about each other.

They’d ask me and Keira whatever it was they were curious about, maybe so they’d know what to shoot for later: “Do your partners get along? (yes) “What if they don’t? (n/a) “Do you guys go to concerts together?” (yes) “Do you see each other on the weekends?” (yes) “Karen, does your daughter babysit Keira’s daughter?” (yes). “Do you have fights?” (not really) “Do you think you’ll be friends forever?”  Yes.

Great, grateful news: Welcome news during this tricky, difficult summer: I just received grant funding from theNational Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to direct a residential summer institute for teachers from around the country (for Summer, 2024), Friendship in Literature, Film, and Adolescence. It’ll be my second time designing and offering this institute (which is inspired by those Friendship in Literature classes.) The first was in 2022, and thanks to that first cohort of 25 amazing high school English teachers, it was really something special.

More details over the next month or two.

Yay.

xo

!

First “class” of Alums: NEH Summer Institute, Friendship in Literature, Film, and Adolescence, Summer, 2022, Boston University