STORY GRAMMAR
ONE
The discovery, the week after spring break, of a rapidly decomposing body, virtually sealed within the ancient walls of Rockland High, spurred the student body’s spirit of inquiry as no mere classroom prompt ever had. Was it true rats were feeding on the face of the victim and that the body’s discoverers had to skirmish with them to claim it? Was the person nude or partially nude, as had been gossiped, casting a shadow of perverse sexuality over the crime? Do we have to come to school while the cafeteria still smells of that god-awful, mordant reek? The administration refused to divulge any details, not even the sex or race of the body, until detectives completed their investigation of the matter. Silence only provoked the students to wilder and grosser speculations. A senior who happened to be absent following the hiatus was guilty of the murder in some accounts and the victim in others. One unreliable kid (he routinely exaggerated his exploits on the hardwood) claimed to have seen uniformed men removing the corpse. The kid’s attention was fixed on the belly of it, white as the underside of a whale and shaped like a cobra’s head, flaring monstrously at the sides. His version was dismissed as confusion between the murder victim and the service tunnel within the bowels of the school from which the body was recovered. Other witnesses swore the corpse was removed from the tunnel in a rubber body bag, anonymous, invisible, and dehumanized.
The uproar over the lurid details of the decomposing corpse at Rockland High School created such excitement and distractions (police cars, detectives questioning, news vans circling the school) that many teachers all but gave up trying to teach anything from after spring break until graduation. These were mostly 20- to 30-year veterans who possessed vast stores of busy work: word finds, acrostics, rebuses, coloring books of famous people (Ben Franklin, Betsy Ross, Will Smith), and dozens of movies with a strained relevance to the official curriculum. As long as students were out of the halls, teachers deserved the congratulations of their peers for a professional job well done. Some teachers’ lounge analysts attributed the particularly stately and modest senior prom that year to students’ day-after-day obsession with the presumed murder. With their minds turned from scanning magazines for images of the perfect gown or from visiting the seamstress who made cheap knockoffs in the crowded parlor workspace of a tired, neighborhood rowhouse, the girls didn’t have time to acquire the usual excesses, the ostrich feathers and tiaras, the rhinestones pasted to human flesh, gauzy wraparound creations more Ace bandage than couture, or the diva tents that on the largest girls reminded one of a decidedly less regal Margaret Dumont, atrocities culminating in a wretched parody of a red carpet show, complete with white, stretch Escalades and Hummers, that was a prelude to a surreal ballroom experience right out of A Night at the Opera but with more lurid colorization.
Interestingly, some of the words accumulating around the grotesque outrage in the custodian’s service tunnel were the same used by one of the English teachers when explaining the rigors, more or less, of serious literary criticism. In his extended metaphor, a good reader was a detective pulling out the pertinent data of the work and making a case for its meaning in the system of the whole. Mirroring the composition of the writer was the decomposition of the critic, unpacking the accumulated matter of the book, cutting it bare and finding how it worked, to discover the author’s obsessions and modus operandi and the central act that set the whole concatenation of events into motion. Working backwards from the apparatus of the plot, a keen reader would discover the willful actions of the artist hiding behind the screen.
A student who may have misunderstood the teacher’s discussion of a “corpus of work” visited the English scholar when he was alone in his classroom. On the basis of these and other remarks, the student wished to ask the teacher about his possible connection to a string of gruesome events that had marred the term at Rockland High, events leading inexorably to the horror found in the access tunnel. What follows is a lengthy and one-sided account (a deposition?), neither so static nor circumscribed as a typical scholarly lecture or so evocative of character and place as a true narrative. We present it because of what it says and doesn’t say about the tragic school year just completed.
Your request puts me in an awkward position, as I am obliged to keep our relationship professional. Or is the necessary and logical word here clinical? What descriptor captures the precise flavor of our bond? How about institutional? I am the warder and you are the waif entrusted to me in your parents’ stead. That’s better. Your question fractures the boundaries laid down for all times between a low-level goon of the state and a client thereof.
Thou shalt not ask about my personal time: “Please sir, can I have some more?” When I tell you about my personal life, I put my job in jeopardy, and that’s without having anything noteworthy to disclose. Don’t forget intimate and intimacy mean the same thingto a pencil-pushing mo-ron. Satisfy yourself that my adult preoccupations are inappropriate for immature ears. I should have no heart, nor sympathies, nor blood in my veins, for only then would I be the ideal teacher. Wood eye!
Let me not set aside my dignity and professionalism by incorporating myself into any sentence about this past year. I would eschew the physical dimension, existing exclusively in the lesson plans on file with my section chairperson, may Dante take her. Do you know, I am celebrated for my amazing lesson plans, which record every wire I pull and every move I make in the classroom? That is, I would be feted for them if anyone ever read those things.
Well, okay, the lesson plans I submit don’t cover half of what’s going on in my classes. That’s because teaching isn’t moving information from one brain to another the way I thought it was back in my halcyon and transphonic college days. We teach students of a different stripe, today. The only way those lazy, nasty, spawns of apostasy will learn to read is if I sell them the book under onerous layers of stagecraft. Inconveniently, my skill as a clown and vaudevillian cannot be figured in advance in any lesson plan. Mine is an improvisational art, and I don’t braid with the same string the consciousness of every participant in the class or rip out my own heart with a stapler because anyone asked me to.
One of my lesson plans, I have to admit, seemed guaranteed to get school moms phoning and Keystone cops gesticulating. I didn’t nearly have all the ironic credenza graphed out on that one. Keep it in my pants, you say? I was a balls-out Bobalooey! My November capacola on the Book of Genesis had King James’ English and body English all down the line. I did more with a handclap or a finger snap than could be written into ten lesson plans. I was trumpeting about the maker of mankind and the innovator of language extemporaneously, because that was the only way to sell it.
To be sure, boneheads who won’t let the Bible be taught for what it is, a damn fine archetype of language and crimes, might refer to its hoary mechanisms in some other way. They might want to say God hangs over the public classroom, that He manifests His will in various political lost causes from time to time, or that He is mightier and newsier than us all. These are improper concerns for my English classroom. I only hope to convey the idea that in Genesis, God nails down his corpus on how the free-ranging word requites itself on this mundane plane.
In the beginning the Earth was void and without form and God said, “Let there be light.” To make the light distinguishable from the dark was a naming problem the God think tank was into big time in them days. Some angel might wonder, “For this caper, do we need our flashlights?” Or, “Am I gonna need sunblock?” and, in lieu of practical naming devices to distinguish one celestial state from the other, be forced to take his chances. Language is God’s discriminating gift to the ages.
Giving the formless void a name is hot but Holy work. I do it in the classroom every day, an’ i’s heavy lif’ing, i’n’t? How about starting with the blessed form and abstract of things and then following through creatively to the everyday reality? We have the words for whale kind, the form to make whales, that Leviathan there, and we also have the words describing every creeping thing on Earth, down to the last dang-blasted rodent and such. Plainly God has the ideas ready, and un-delineated life comes streaming through that verbal mechanism, which matter he then pinches off as either manatees or mayflies. I teach English the same way. I introduce some divine quality, and it is the students’ job to make the concept concrete, writing abstraction into reality through details and circumstances from their personal experience. Admittedly, dividing the abstract and the real with a God-like bearing doesn’t usually get the class doing the wave, but I regain the students’ flitting interest with the next scintillating tale, those naked primordials in the garden.
The story of Adam and Eve is the quintessential creation story following the first creation story, so like, hoo-boy, there’s an awful lot of creation going on in these stories! I try to instill in my students the idea that words are what makes humans human and that this is why so much rupture and heartache evolves out of Adam and Eve’s violation of the rules of the forest primeval.
In the King James edition of the Bible (admittedly not a firsthand account of the proceedings but still the first freaking Bible in Shakespeare’s bloody English and the only one for which I have any cause to get chalk dust on my hands), the creation of man comes in two versions, and the reader has to keep both versions in mind at the same time. Following the celestial abracadabra of the opening lines, chapter one, verses 26-30, has God making man as the smartest, fastest, bravest animal in creation. Man is anthropromammalized into the supreme living thing on Earth. All of man’s success as a tool-maker is preordained when the passage says he has dominion over everything, and, as examples, it names some particularly difficult nuts to crack that man has an angle for. Man under-stands how the fruit we eat can also be turned into more fruit trees and how some herbs that grow, while not particularly satisfying on their own, are useful in preserving the life in other dead fowl, and beasts, and creeps.
I’m trying to teach in this lesson that the Bible begins with the powers of language. So here’s the first man, bumped up from the hard seats, a good-looking guy, made in God’s image, a full head of hair, you can’t knock that, and he owes everything he’s got to one revolutionary, K-Tel appliance. This here amazing gadget is a tool, but it’s so convenient that it’s not even really a tool that you have to carry around physically and mess up your gear. Man can deal with concepts and ideas that aren’t in the immediate moment, and project either backwards or forwards in time. Thanks to language, he or she can dry up some Slim Jims and suck out that fulsome goodness until I don’t know when, the clock is still running on some of that dried shit; furthermore, after experiencing the odd glandular disturbance, he can plan some activity that he isn’t going to do now on account of the time won’t be ripe until later. Of all the gnarly powers in the primordial tropical jungle, this was the gnarliest: like the Creator himself, mankind can abstract his environment. Language permits description of some big fat behemoth or what-have-you that a single, little dude wants to kill, but he has to plan and scheme and go get his whole neighborhood to come over and pile on with him. Telling their peeps where to go to get the goods is a lot more powerful than folks having to bring down that mastodon with a pointy stick by themselves, in the immediate present moment they stumble upon it.
Occupying the selfsame book of Genesis, in chapter two, is a variant of the story of man’s creation. Is it a different version than the one in chapter one? Does it alter the relationship between Creator and created by a single mote? No. The difference between the first version and the next one is wholly a matter of language style not substance: thus the name “story variant.”
The staggering difference between the two variants of the creation of man is that in Genesis One, the writer emphasizes man’s bangin’ power to subdue and dominate all of nature, and in Genesis Two, he brings out the ironical limits of that dominion. Having already exalted man’s gifts as a maker of clubs and cutting edges, and having already alluded to man’s ability to do things by signs and gestures in the present that aren’t going to have any concreteness until days and years yet to come, the Bible establishes man’s shared lifeline with the rest of his Earthly paradise.
In chapter two, the moment of Man’s creation isn’t a further demonstration of the language and abstracting powers of man by which God has set him above all other life; rather, the metaphor is that God breathes life into the dust of Creation, giving man that oxygen-craving spark. The emphasis here is not so much that man dominates everything as that he is connected to everything. Man is made of the dust, the effluvium that remains after every destructive and all-consuming force in nature––grinding, rotting, digesting, and big-banging––has had its way. And on the other hand, man is connected to the breath and lifeforce of God, the voice that has but to speak the words describing some aspect of Nature to bring it bleating into existence.
This section of my lesson plan asks what it means to have a living presence, a dynamic faculty that understands and affects what is substantively present to the senses but also contemplates the abstract dimension of existence. Ray Charles or Charlie Brown, I’m talking about soul. A soul is the repository of the individual’s language describing life, that eternal and tenacious consciousness we have, which apprehends the present and formulates axioms about the future. Consider the difference between ourselves and our nearest cousins, the animals. Do lemurs and large-mouthed bass devise elaborate ceremonies to convey their deceased to halls of memory? Do apes take off from primate school a week each spring to celebrate the return of fertility and baseball to the Earth? No, they do not. No animal ever turned down three squares a day at the banana farm to torture a guitar, or racked their tiny brains to find a decent rhyme for opposable thumb.
I know from the outset of this lesson that some resistance to its methodology is inevitable. My students are content with their received versions of the Bible that have no basis in the actual text. Reading Genesis as a holy book of literature, on a par with Moby Dick or Gravity’s Rainbow, without amending the words with concoctions and contraptions, requires a disciplined application of intelligence that is sadly lacking in many who would have us believe they have perused the thing. When analyzing a text, supplying more than what the words themselves imply is a sin against the sacred trust of language. Let them that perpetrate this crime be struck mute as that bronze guy with his eyes bugging out in front of the Rodin Museum. One of the worst abominations I have to overcome when I teach Genesis is the ridiculous idea that our mother Eve is the originator of sin, in league with Satan, the cause of death and taxes, and that the small comforts afforded by her pulchritude and charm are tainted with rot and corruption. The words in Genesis, the second chapter, convey nothing of the kind.
What the words do is especially set Eve apart from the rest of the beasts and such in Creation. I’m talking about the part where Genesis says that God, determined to find a help meet or companion for man, brings each and every creature before Adam, who names them all. The connection between this naming function and the earlier passages, about the breath of life, and the forms of Creation, and man’s ability to use these handy language helpers to thrive in and dominate Nature, could only be discounted or ignored by the most uncouth illiterate. With this naming passage, Adam uses language the way it is used in Genesis in the beginning, pardon the pun, and that is to discriminate among the fixtures of his environment. Sorting through every conceivable item, in none of them does Adam find the help meet or companion he and God know he needs.