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When I speak or write of myself, I try to tell what happened; yet I know, as all must, that memory itself is a creative organ.
A few years ago, as I was standing to the handlebars pumping my old bike up the hill to St John's College--where one teaches everything in a four-year program of philosophy, math, science, languages, literature, music, and seminar, all pursued through great books and original papers--the Santa Fe Toonerville Trolley for tourists, open under awnings, crept past me. A youth I had known as a student was at the wheel, driving and talking over the public address.
"Now that man pulling up the hill," he said, "is Charles G. Bell, one of the most learned men in America. Once a week at St John's he gives his cultural shows . . ." Here I fell behind; though my knowledge of that student concluded what he would say: "Studies beyond any which have been or are likely to be."
That I was pleased by such half-imagined praise--I, who was trying to shape and eternize something--encapsules the danger of teaching. How hard the self-contained perfection of an art; how easy the talk-successes of a classroom.
Indeed, the gloom which still undergirds my flights as I give shows, read poems, lead seminars in the compulsory halls of learning, hammers home how little I aimed at that calling. Some romantic imperative of stars and atoms, space-time, man and cosmos, of what I am and burned to say, drove me from the Yazoo and Mississippi flood plain of my Huck-Finn-and-Tarzan-of-the-Apes origin, to hardly marketable arrogations of thought and utterance--such as closed Faust in the book-heaped cell in Wittenberg, and alienated him from it: "That's your world; they call that a world."
For years I have treasured a dream (used both in poetry and prose) where Plato's Cave--become the vault of the planet we have smogged and soiled--expands from torch-lighted calcite glints, through Byzantine mosaics, to a summer sky, starred with constellations of a symbolic destiny ("World Cave," from my 1986 Five Chambered Heart):
I light the torch
And lift it to inscribe in smoke
My curse, my warning on the wall.
Is it rock crystal
Shining? Gold mosaics? Shapes
I have known: Cross, Lyre, Crown!
It is hopeful to shift loyalty from self to earth; the revelational shift will be from earth to cosmos. |
