Lecturing of Orpheus

I like my students--always have, whether I was teaching at my undergraduate alma mater Hobart and William Smith or at The Ohio State University, or here at the University of Iowa. (The graduate students are a salon of sorts, members of an atelier, lucid and earnest and beautifully strange). Yes I like the undergrads. They are filled with admixtures of hope and cynicism, doubt and wonder; the ones who love literature anyway, they've got an imperial affliction, something invisible has gotten into them and they're wholly capable of visions.  

This morning we talked about the Orphic voice in poetry. We spoke in particular about Robert Duncan but we took detours into John Keats and we jumped far into the illud tempus and mythic rings of Carl Jung and German mysticism. All on a normal Thursday in late November as the leaves fell and the trees looked skeletal for winter.

We can choose to be Orpheus, to travel in the lands of myth and bring back musical life. We can choose our own stories. We can choose to love the best that's in spirituality. We can make songs and poems from the better histories of love. We can choose to be healthy. We spoke of these things. We talked together in an institutional brick building on the campus of a big state university about the living virgin and the words within words that make it still possible to dream. We had in short "the Humanities" and we were sublimely held in the wonder of myth.

I worry that in these times of budget cutting Orpheus will be the first to go.

This would be a mistake for as the poet Charles Simic has written: "The poet asks the philosopher in us to consider the world in its baffling presence."

That very act of consideration is what the education types call critical thinking.

The gods do not play. They make the conditions for our thinking.

True thinking rests in the ability to make of bewilderment a useful sequence of stories.

Well, that's how the morning went.

I would like the state legislature to know.

 

S.K.

Comments

[melissa carpenter]

Enjoyed every word, especially the last few.

[Thad Nodine]

Greetings, Stephen, from Santa Cruz. I love your sentences above about the living virgin and true thinking and bewilderment. I've enjoyed your books and know your friend Ken Weisner.