EDUCATION
OR
… “IT WILL HAVE TO DO UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG”
Another semester is ending. I have been doing this for a long time and yet I get up every morning excited to teach the next one half chapter of American or English history to the latest classes of thirty to fifty students. I have little or no clue as to why material I have been discussing for about forty four years is so impelling to me. There is something to telling stories to a room full of people that energizes me. Perhaps that is it too. I am really stitching historical stories together with the required facts of the course. It feels more like an art form than teaching. When a felicitous phrase or word grouping rolls out I chuckle. When the story is ironic or when a surprising turn of plot is about to emerge I feel like it’s the first time I have heard it and can’t wait to share it again. When we do the story of the rise of the religious and philosophic communitarians it’s like the first time I had a drink of “soda Pop”.
My dad had stopped at Andy Anderson’s gas station on State Street. I was about three I guess because we were still living in Andy’s basement apartment and I wasn’t in school yet. I was sitting in the spoke wheeled, leather upholstered, rumble seated Chandler coupe while the attendant pushed the lever back and forth and the red gasoline pumped frothing into the big glass bulb atop the gas “Pump” before it flowed down into the tank of the car. It was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the sunlight slanting through the “pop” bottles in the angled; open wooden pop box’s holding dozens of glass bottles of various kinds of soft drink. They were variously, gloriously, gold, red, and green. I was enthralled. “Dad” I said, “what’s that”. He turned and said in surprise, “Haven’t you ever had pop?” “No” I said precociously. “Oh hell” he replied. And he dug out some change and took my choice, gold color I believe, and pried the lid off in the bottle-opener screwed to the wall. I put the bottle to my lips and sipped. Flavor exploded into my mouth. I had never experienced anything like it. I took the whole mouth of the bottle into my mouth and chugged it.” Awesome! Astonishing! Magnificent! Or whatever words a little kid might have used. And today when I teach “the Communitarians,” or almost anything else, the mental equivalent happens.
Of course lately I have to stay away from large words. Three days ago I was dealing with Edward the Third and under his name I wrote some descriptive comments. He was amiable, magnanimous, chivalrous and ostentatious. It struck me that a few students might not know some of the words so I stopped and asked, “ do any of you not know what I mean when I say that? It turned out after some gentle probing that in a class of thirty or so no one knew any of the words. Several students thought they might have an idea and, risking breaking words into their possible component parts or utilizing other languages they did know, French in particular, tried to come up with possible meanings. Nothing was even close. So they are sitting there, smiling, nodding, and clueless. It’s a good thing I’m having a good time cause I don’t know what they are having. It’s apparently not an education. Since November 5th I have been asked to define prohibition (as a word not a movement), banned and obscene, and to explain what the wavy lines on the map are. (Rivers) Earlier this year anti was a mystery though “pro is probably in favor of, is that right?”(Did I mention that this is college?) Because I like these guys I have been thinking of issuing a study guide with possible words in it that would be good to know before taking the course and which the students obviously did not know. . I mentioned that idea today while correcting papers in the office. One of the teachers said we already had one in print and turned and pushed Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary across the table. He had been having the same problem I was having.
But with all of that, the stories remain. If they don’t pick up on the nuances, they remember, (I hope they remember, as I remember) the stories. Our collective memories are enriched by:
Historic Vignettes:
The Lord Edward in his tent in the holy land, seated, in his tunic. The Islamic ambassador was ushered in and instead of the document he was expected to present, he drew a dagger from his sleeve and attacked Edward. Edward deflected the blow with his arm, arose, wrenching the knife from the assassins hand with such force it gashed the mans head and proceeded to kill him with his own knife. Or alternately, he arose and beat the man to death with the stool he had been sitting on. If we get a choice I vote for the wooden stool.
Edward the II riding across country, expected to be king-like saw a peasant digging a pit and stopped, dismounted, climbed down into the pit and with great satisfaction proceeded to take over the digging. He later halted to watch a peasant thatching a barn. To the horror of the barons Edward climbed the ladder and learned to tie on the thatch. Kings were not expected to hobnob with the actors who entertained them in the evening, and certainly shouldn’t be behind the scenes swinging a hammer and making the sets. Edward loved rowing the racing skulls on the river, chatting with the men who delivered the beer, racing horses as the jockey. The “poor wretch” shouldn’t have been king. He was a failure because the Barons didn’t respect him. But in any of a number of other endeavors he would have shone and in fact did shine.
George Rapp in Germany decided that the churches of the world were no longer the churches of God and had fallen into apostasy. They no longer preached Christ and him crucified, nor sin and repentance. The pastors thought only of their own bellies and gave sermons of practical advice on worldly things. One might not even sing any more. Choirs were hired and sang sophisticated music. Rapp began to preach from his own home and hundreds were attracted. The climate for new religious ideas was a bit lacking in Germany at the turn of the 1800’s and he and his followers came to America. Since the New Testament says “the multitude of them that believed had not ought that they called their own” they lived a communitarian form. They built one home and knocked it apart, numbered and measured the parts and built every home identically. Awakened by French horns playing, they formed up in the street in the morning and marched singing into the fields, accompanied by a brass band. Working gently but perfectly and continuously (what else was there to do) they prospered. They got along with their neighbors whom they thought belonged to the church of the devil. However since they said it in German it offended no one. When Rapp found a passage in the Bible that said that the man of God cared for the things of God but the married man for his wife and how he might please her they quit having sex and lived in family units in celibacy. They lasted until the turn of the twentieth century. No mean feat, everything considered.
John Humphrey Noyes was converted in the Second Great Awakening and touched by the ideas of Charles Grandison Finney became a “perfectionist”. Finney preached that “one should not cease striving for perfection until one is as perfect as is his maker.” Noyes also believed that since the primitive Christians lived some sort of communal order so should the modern Christians. He “converted” a number of people in Putney New York who bought and moved into a large house and lived in charming primitive Christian commonality. Then one day reading his Bible he ran across a scripture that said that in the heavens they neither marry nor are given in marriage. Since heaven is our great example we should follow their pattern. To him that meant that since in heaven everyone is married to everyone else so should it be on earth. He broached the idea to one of his female converts and she said, “wasn’t that interesting” she had been thinking along those same lines herself. His little community agreed, established “Complex Marriage” and every man became the husband of every woman and every woman the wife of every man. That didn’t go down so well in Putney and they fled to Oneida, New York along the Erie Canal. There they established a model community, supporting themselves with commercial canning and manufacturing. One of the things they made were Oneida Stainless Steel Humane Killing traps.
Ah. I can do better than that. One of the things I inherited from my father, along with the Chevy with a blown head gasket, was a gunnysack full of “things”. One thing was a blackened iron frying pan my Grand Father had used when “Cow Boyin” with Abe York up the South Fork. But, there were other things too. Dad had run a trap line in High School. Arising very early he ran the line before chores. In the sack, and now hanging on the wall of my bedroom, were, are, three various sized, incredibly rusty Stainless Steel Traps. I know decorative material when I see it and have them stapled them to the wall. I just took one down and have it before me now. The trap says it is a VICTOR ONEIDA COMMUNITY N.Y. U.S.A. PAT. DEC. 16. 02, May 28, 07. I’m sure it wouldn’t lie. It doesn’t need to. Its big enough to impress a wolf.
The Oneida Perfectionists all shared the labor in a communal form, lived well, ate well and prospered. Ultimately the communal, religious and matrimonial aspects of the community faded (as they tend to do) and today they are said to be the world’s largest manufacturer of stainless steel tableware. I hope the stainless portion of the tableware holds up better than that of the traps.
And peppered and salted through the whole of history we have such things as :
The History of the Potato
Plagues and People
Rats, Lice and History
Climate in History
The life of the peasant
It is Sam Houston on his way to Texas, standing on the deck of a steamboat. The eagle swoops down and almost strikes him. Shearing away at the last second it flies off. Sam is convinced that it is a sign from the spirits that he will prosper in his endeavors. The Eagle when interviewed later says that it’s just that from directly above Sam looked like a beaver. (Well, that’s as likely as that the spirits were sending Sam a message)
So we get that sort of thing or: anything else that comes within ones purvey. And that’s what’s so exciting about history. It is endlessly any thing that is provocative or interesting that men and women have done. If at times it’s as sweet, “lite” and bang on flavorfully fizzy as “Soda Pop” it is also the meat, and potatoes and gravy of life. I like it.