Rules, Desires, Literacy, and Goodness

Broad, leaky title for a blog, I know. But this one is easily captured in something that happened on Facebook recently (does anything really “happen” on Facebook?) and boiled down to that second term, “desire.”

A friend had posted a provocative statistical map on his Facebook page showing how few high school and college graduates continue to read after graduation. The statistics are abysmal, and as a teacher, my friend expressed concern with getting his students reading.

As an occasional poster on his page (and even more rarely, an occasional “wit”), I joined the fray. I wrote, “We need to teach our students to be ‘life-long’ readers for pleasure.” As soon as I posted this, I added, “…or we pass a law requiring all Americans to read at least two books a year.”

Alongside the IRS we could institute the BRS, or Bureau of Reader Services, and for reporting purposes, all citizens could make use of the old “book report” genre they had forced on them in grade school.

And then, dull wit expressed, I sat back and realized that the either/or dilemma I’d captured here equally applied to other issues than reading—certainly religion and dieting as well.

Many people, after all, say they want to read more. They say this, anyway, though it is usually because they think reading will be good for them in some vague sense—not so much because they seek a dialogue with different or greater minds than their own. They say they want to read more like I say I want to lose weight. What we get instead, when we don’t find the desire to read or eat right and exercise, is the rules.

Rules and Desire

The intention behind any rule, of course, is not ever oppression, though that’s how it sounds at first. The bullies at the pool are told to stop pushing younger kids into the water. One usually hopes that continued conformity will teach love for the law, but let’s be real.

As for me and my new proposed literacy law, I’m fine with it, of course. I’ve usually read my second book by the tenth of January. I like to read, find it pleasurable in a way I imagine great saints find pleasure in God. No rules are needed to force my nose to the text.

The rules are there for people who lack desire or to check desires that run in other directions.

This—the ruled state—is the state I imagine is found in most churches, synagogues, mosques, and high school and college classrooms. As the Misfit says of the grandmother at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s story, “She’d of been a good woman had there been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This isn’t really about killing ourselves to be good. It’s about desire, about finding pleasure in what is good. People of faith refer to this as being given a "new heart." Most of the time, we don’t find this sort of grace, and so it takes some kind of faith on our part to consider that though we can’t see it at the moment, putting others before ourselves now might actually lead to feelings we’ve never had before.

In literacy terms, it's having faith that in finishing the book, we’ll find something worthwhile we couldn’t have imagined on choking down those first few pages. 

Toward a Curriculum of the Imagination, part 2

Last month, while visiting Las Vegas, I found myself thinking about the adult imagination. This month, while hearing the same ideas about creativity over and over from my students, I began to wonder. Could the adult imagination be traced back to its roots in school, where we are taught to respect facts and rules and deny the imagination?

This past month, as I've said, I’ve heard over and over again a belief my students hold to as a dogma. “Creativity,” they say, “means throwing out the rules and just expressing your self.” I've noticed that they usually do say "self" and not "mind," but that is a point for another blog.

What we basically have here is a widely held belief about "Creativity." But those who hold to it should not be shamed for accepting it any more than those little girls, who haven't yet had music appreciation, should be shamed for their love of Justin Bieber. In the few General Education classes where my students had to write, they were told very little, at least in comparison to the ancients. They were not told that good writing meant rewriting (as Mark Twain wrote, and as my father always told me). They were told to follow rules--and punished when they didn't:

Rule one: Never use first person.

Rule two: Never begin a sentence with the word “and.”

Rule three: Have five paragraphs, three of which form the body of the paper.

Rule four: Have seven sentences (or five, depending on the teacher) for each paragraph. 

Rule five: Write grammatical sentences. (And this led to about ninety other rules, each followed by exceptions.)

Post-Rules

That’s about it. The rules are stupid, of course. 

Oh, but to be creative means to throw them out.

And I can see why my students want to throw them out. They aren’t of any real help when we want to communicate our most important ideas to the real world. They are not about generating ideas or examining them. They are not about reflection or idea development. They are a series of rigidly correct moves to make at all times, regardless of audience, subject, or purpose. 

But tossing the rules is doing little more than the equivalent of elementary school finger painting and is really not much help either. If it were, the world currently would be noisy with creative writers. And it isn’t. This mirage of creativity, this hope, is so different from what I read from creative writers. Flannery O’Connor, for example, referred to habits of mind.

To most of us, there is no need for habits when creativity is supposed to flow like a stream from the average consciousness. There is no need for paying attention, concentration, learning about ideas, or learning anything about how language works or how other writers and poets have learned about language. The idea is that nature is by itself enough.

Nature is What Happens to Us

Well, nature isn’t really enough. Nature is what is happening to us all the time and what will eventually be our undoing. Instead, we need to practice. We need to fail. We need to have others around to critique our work and to tell us, in effect, where and when our ideas are stupid or poorly realized or too sentimental. We need a process. We need to write, read, rewrite, rewrite again, and learn what others are doing.

But my students generally do not accept the idea of process. They accept format.

But a format is rigid, a one time deal.

Though I fear I am being too obvious, I am coming off another semester of teaching writing classes to people who do not believe that process matters.  So I need to say this. It does. 

And we need to place it at the center of any curriculum of the imagination.

Without process, we are left with the rules or no rules approach. And that is, to sound the cliche, to be between a rock and a hard place.