A Word from the Publisher: Out into the Light
Robert J. Mooney
"Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it."
- POLLY BERRIEN BERENDS"He was so learned he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on."
- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Because one of my former teachers, William O'Malley—an essayist, playwright, and novelist—has taught in high schools and colleges for nearly a half a century, he has not a few things of interest to say about education. In his recent memoir, he works his way to the very crux of the endeavor when he says that none of us, no matter how intelligent and discerning, can truly understand anything meaningful if we remain uncomfortable with paradox, and therefore it ought to be the aim of all worthy education to create an atmosphere within which our students might finally-even if sometimes painfully-come to accept rather than dread contrarieties.
Any pedagogical aim that falls short of this dooms those in our charge to the Grandgrind school of narrow literalism that Dickens evokes in Hard Times-as if the rote transference of existing data is all that is needed to prepare young men and women to lead full lives. It assists in condemning them (lest they find a way themselves, as they often do, in spite of us rather than because of us) to sit shackled in the damp and uninspired confines of Plato's cave, allowed to witness only metaphysical shows of imitations of reality.
Fiction writers and playwrights and poets must, if their work is ever to be worth experiencing, not only accept but embrace ambiguity. There is no way around this; there is no faking it. Art feeds on dichotomies of thought and feeling, and it is apparent that gifted writers such as Sarah Blackman and Laura Walter and Max Orsini, evidenced in their poems among these pages, are well on their way to learning to cope with the rich vicissitudes of symbols and figurative language, with the differences between "literal" and "literary" truth, between the accurate and the meaningful. On the subject of literature, O'Malley asks us in his memoir if human beings are corrupted angels (as in Catcher in the Rye) or savages held in tenuous check by society (as in Lord of the Flies), and he avers that the answer is yes. Or take this question: In 1600, was Queen Elizabeth an aged leader or an attractive young maiden? Yes, says Stephany Fontanone in her essay on aging sexuality in early modern England. The Queen painted herself with cosmetics (though their use was thought to be the work of the devil) to both appease a misogynistic society and to confirm her own power. How's all that for juggling contradictions?
Even in science, the law of complementarity argues that, if you hold contradictory truths at once, you are offered a greater insight into reality. Is the electron a wave or a particle? Yes. Is Ehrman Tapestry in Chestertown, depicted in Fred Chalmers' fine anthropological study in this issue, a simple shop or a subculture? Yes. Is a human being, as Elizabeth Mumford asks, a uniquely conscious individual who interacts with the outside world, or, like any other animal, an embodiment of a tangled skein of genetic codes? Yes again.
Our mission as teachers, then, cannot be the reinforcement of our own certitudes as we "know" them and have learned them ourselves, else we all-teachers and learners alike-sit agape at a wall of shadows. Instead it must involve the forcible eviction of those in our charge from the dim ersatz reality of Plato's cave, out into the light. It is to foment intelligent doubt, to challenge the very certitudes that even we ourselves might hold dear, to baffle these young men and women into genuine curiosity, and from there guide them to an indefatigable eagerness to dig further, and then further still. It is, O'Malley reminds us, what education has always been about. It's about leaving the cave, and in the pages of this issue we see one example after another of perspectives adjusting to the light of the life they are struggling to see more clearly. It is a joy for this teacher to witness, to adjust to that light.