AIRPORT

The shortest distance

between two points isn’t

a straight line

Earth is geoid like

bumpy golf ball

cancerous hickory nut

boarding pass scans us

Trans Air Atlantic

via tundra to London

great arc of shortest route

smooth long distance

fairway drive

over Greenland over

ice cool sleeve of

four dollar Titlist Pro V’s

for Father’s Day, as fraudulent

as Columbus day the

Earth’s not round but

He’ll love the sweater

she’ll sweet perfume of

aromatic Starbucks notes

paying for ULTIMATE flavor

before gates close 10

MINUTES before departure

10 MINUTES before departure

confirm A+ travel rewards

must fit in this box

too heavy the weight

we carry we are

the weight we carry

for quickest route from

frozen patty to mouth to

layover in the restroom 10

MINUTES before departure

lug your weight beeping

golf cart past

duty free jet lagged

AXE effect massive

overhead: gate CLOSED

see Zales desk for diamonds

the gift of forever

21 celluloid bulbous butts

 

–MKS (flew to Vegas recently. For a conference, be assured.)

 

 

leverage

Muddy sneakers won’t cover it.

Neither will the spent butts, bottles

or broken glass cut it.

The cyclists swerving fenders weekly

can’t peddle a deal.

 

The vagrants,                                  (construction men)

the real backers,                             (and forthers)

from site to Corner Mart,

of these middling lawns

for their brown bag booze           (lunches)

haven’t even spooked a petition.

 

These 1950s burbs aren’t that nice.

Now classed “urban,” but passed by,

their chipped brick, carports, and

rusty awnings are the next to go,

after the owners. Because out here,

the estate sale this week

means remodeling next week

for more student housing.

 

Meanwhile, the lawns remain,

so pedestrian,

and perilous at that.

 

What will it take?

Must someone die,

maybe one of these banker’s kids,

in order to get a sidewalk?

 

-MKS

skeptic is as septic does

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m White. And a skeptic:

Given the distinction between formal and concrete (operational) thinking, between the ability to handle abstract ideas, even juggle them, and the inability to think beyond concrete terms, what are your feelings about mass marketing? If it’s really the “largest psychological experiment conducted on human subjects,” and if as much as 40% of the population never develops beyond concrete thinking, then as a psychologist, are you concerned about their ability to resist the messages compared to formal thinkers who can recognize and, if they choose, be critical of such ephemeral concepts as “ideology?”

I thought it a good question.

“Well, when you phrase it like that, you’ve got me worried that maybe I should be concerned. But I guess I’ll sidestep the question by saying I haven’t much thought about it.” He paused. “However, it seems to me that while there may be something to that, there are many worse injustices in the world, don’t you think?”

No. (To the professor, though, I merely nodded. Shame). Hence this reflection. As a thinker wooed by connections and prone to abstractions, it seems that consumer ideology is very nearly synched with the dominant ideology of this country and, increasingly, the world.

If our culture has a locus of control, consumerism would be the node closest to it, emanating linkages and associations, tentacles flying wild, the lifelines to economics, politics, entertainment, and sadly even education and religion. The tentacles may well stimulate all these other economies of our daily life, but they may stimulate them with neurotoxins.

Of course there’s never just one problem. Always myriad problems. Consumerism isn’t behind every injustice and never will be. May we all hope.

Then why am I so vehement? A week before asking my question, I’d mused that my top goal as a teacher would be to cultivate the critical faculties in my students insofar as they could recognize, criticize, and make their own informed choices regarding ideologies. Again, it seemed like a locus. Without such awareness, could they really become individuals? Could they resist manipulation? Could they be creative? Democratic citizens? Leaders? Content? Contemplative? Resilient? Balanced? Healthy?

Marketing lends itself to teaching students about criticism for how it moves between the concrete/formal divide. It is both tangible, everywhere on the stuff, and abstract, an ideology trying to seduce emotions, impulses, and even (il)logic. As an idea, it is memorable. Because it gets constantly reinforced. Once students, even the concrete thinkers, “get it” and see the napkins at Starbucks as not just paper but agents of ideology (“you aren’t just buying coffee; you’re buying into an ethic”), then concrete examples start to abound. It’s an easy game to play, just open your eyes and you win.

And its easier than so many of the “isms” your professors go on about, even easier than identifying racism and sexism (harder than we believe), but the kind of thinking required is analogous. Marvelous! I truly believe if say, 40% of the population were more apt to recognize and resist toxic ideologies, then many of those “worse injustices” would be ameliorated, from immigration hate to poverty to ecological crises to the sad, juvenile state of religious and “tolerance” “dialogue” in the pop-media.

I wish I could promise not to make your eyes roll, promise that I’d stop posting about consumerism, but…

As a skeptic, I suppose it’s my ambition to point to the unseen field lines we don’t want to think about, the shit flowing just beneath our open front lawns–whole networks of it beneath our society, unpleasant stuff but keeping our networks moving apace. It’s important.

MKS

a certified expert

Before moving here to Winston Salem, a friend bade me farewell with “now you’re one step closer to becoming a certified expert.” We both half-laughed, and acknowledging the sad half-truth of his statement, I mumbled something like “screw you.”

His reference came from a passage in The Unsettling of America:

“The average—one is tempted to say ideal—American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturalists and “agribusinessmen,” the problem of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on.

The beneficiary of this regime of specialists ought to be the happiest of mortals—or so we are expected to believe. All of his vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts. He is a certified expert himself and as such he earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together. Between stints at his job he has nothing to do but mow his lawn with a sit-down lawn mower, or watch other certified experts on television. At suppertime he may eat a tray of ready-prepared food, which he and his wife (also a certified expert) procure at the cost only of money, transportation, and the pushing of a button. For a few minutes between supper and sleep he may catch a glimpse of his children, who since breakfast have been in the care of education experts, basketball or marching-band experts, or perhaps legal experts.

The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstance and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people’s. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found to be incurably ill. And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties.

The program I started last week is an admirable one in many ways. It seeks to improve education by shaping good teachers–not just taking any student and churning out any teacher, but choosing top students with an array of talents and so laboring to restore respect to the title of “teacher.” Rest assured they tell us, in a year you’ll walk into a classroom and think I know what I’m doing. Beyond classroom effectiveness, the program’s goals are to make us “researchers,” “teacher leaders,” “developing professionals,” and “experts.” Indeed, in a year my research will be published. I’ll be the next step closer to becoming a certified expert.

While I admire these goals in theory, I disagree somewhat with the method. I don’t wish to become a certified expert. I fear that developing my “expertise” might diminish my variegated awareness–cultural, ecological, poetic. My brain will be slinging jargon instead of slang, seeing subjects instead of beings.

But shall we agree on the goal? Let’s create a culture where the most witty, driven, gifted people view “teacher” as a role to which to aspire.

Would this not require a cultural shift, and a large one? In my eyes, trying to use labels such as professional, expert, and researcher as a means to accomplish this goal is counterproductive. These are the same labels that litter every nook of our specialization economy. They’ve been applied in myriad casual and reckless ways as to have lost meaning. Precisely for this reason, “certified expert” is not actually redundant. Anyone can be a researcher, expert, or professional, and so in order to retain at least a shred of meaning, the true researchers and experts have to find an additional means of certification by which to distinguish themselves. Undoubtedly my research will have to undergo such review and certification.

Wouldn’t a more appropriate way to recruit better, original, witty teachers be to use better, original, witty language? Why not teachers as poets, culture jammers, mystics, mathletes, and innovators?

I’m considering conducting my research on how educational research and standards have altered both teachers’ and students’ perceptions of their own roles and value in classrooms. Of course, conducting it as objectively as possible, I may find that teachers actually feel more purpose and value when branded as experts rather than feeling like the most “impotent unhappy citizens in the history of the world.” Should such findings be the case, I still doubt I’d subscribe to the term myself, but rather go on teaching my contrary methods and leave the research to better, more qualified certified experts.

 

–MKS

a dose for despair

For those prone to despair from reading the news, driving past big boxes and rectangles on stilts, overhearing the quotidian garble spewed from citizenry on sidewalks, or from mere looking around, awake, I’ve got some Tuesday morning inspiration sure to blow your Chaco straps off (if they haven’t been already, due to quality decline when they started manufacturing in China). Or, perhaps none of this causes you to despair, in which case you’ve at least learned something about me.

Yesterday before work I was explaining to my boss what it meant to consider oneself an Agrarian. Beyond concern for land care, I explained the term as a wider collective of thought both contemporary and millennia old that cultivates social, political, and spiritual needs/health in concurrence with the soil’s own needs/health. She asked, “Don’t you think the current environmental movement is gaining momentum in that direction?” “For a while it did,” I responded, “but I think that movement is being hijacked by ethical consumerism.” 

Enter fourth-grader (she is 9). As if on cue at the phrase ethical consumerism, she said, “You mean like Whole Foods and how they’re really not as good as people think? You know the signs by their produce that look like chalk hand-written on a blackboard? That’s fake. They print those signs off ahead of time at the headquarters and ship them.” 

What the ?

On Facebook yesterday I saw a post: “Whenever I’m feeling like a genius, I just remember that at some point in my life I was learning how not to shit myself. That always humbles me.” This meme, of course, didn’t humble me but rather gestured toward despair. But here’s an authentic humbling agent: a nine year old masterfully articulating and giving an example of ethical consumerism, a concept I didn’t hear much less understand until 21. Be inspired; hope endures. If you’re not, at least you’ve learned another thing about me. 

In the joy of sales resistance,

MKS

 

and to cud you shall return

On long days inside I wonder,
Behind all that matter(s),
Is there a Fund of things
With its mouth agape
That we fall back into?

Churned up, ingested by God,
Do we satisfy?

Or does the divine vomit,
Bring up as cud,
Us, ruddy creatures
From that muddy fund,
Full but not sated?

One thing is certain:
More chewing.

On long days outside I kneel.
Matter has no “behind”
Other than the one we’ve created
In this earth, stinking mouth agape,
Swallowing and expelling us also.

Kneeling, churning soil,
I am satisfied.

As for the Fund of things,
Brought up as cud,
I, too, chew and ingest the divine,
As my part goes,
Not full but sated.

All things are certain:
This great material fund into which we fall.

Might we be brought up again?

—

So I’ve been working with a concise, vivid, specific set of images, hoping to collect them into a short piece. But… instead I filed them and posted yet another reflection full of abstraction and philosophy. Well, chew it.

MKS

 

thirteen months plus two years

Last week I assumed no news meant bad news, which would have been okay. But earlier this week I received a phone call from Wake Forest announcing my acceptance to their master teacher fellows program. I begin a thirteen month MAEd in June followed by a two year commitment to teach in North Carolina high-need schools. 

Feels strange to have a three year plan. While living on the fringe–trailside shelters, hostels, backyards, the guest room at home and, currently, a sunporch–entails uncertainty if not due anxiety, it also satisfies cravings for adventure and a live-with-less philosophy. Hopefully some of the connections I’ve made with teachers here in Durham will help me get a placement back here for those two years. 

For the next few months, I’ll enjoy the last of my hiatus from school and learn what I can from my kids in Afterschool. I’ll also keep writing, gardening, and cooking with a renewed gratitude for leisure, in light of its now numbered days. 

Sneezing pollen and pulling silkworms out of my hair,

MKS

 

 

contentment and other inappropriate things

A day is enough. Come Ten at night and I see a green banana on the counter labeled “Fresh.” No, don’t start, not now. But then I wake up to bird noise and my seedlings sunning by the window, content.  What would I have thought if I’d seen the banana in the morning instead? Or, if I’d seen it three days later, yellow, would I have thought at all?

Could I never speak again? Apparently the experience, if ever achieved, of hesychia is euphoric despite its frailty. Life becomes streaming worship, luminous, intense in its deep tranquility. But Abba Antony cautions: “Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so do monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with persons of the world lose the intensity of inner stillness.”

Sober up, you could spend thirty years just breathing only to deflate that raft in a matter of minutes by sharing the pond with some blabbering fishermen. Or even by paying too much attention to the fish.

Abba Arsenius describes a slackening of the heart’s silence (whose?) when hearing “the song of the little sparrow.”  Well it worked for Merton, famous by his twenties, after taking the vow. He was content in his undisturbed thoughtful way for a while. He deemed it good. Then quite seriously he asked, “But is it good enough?”

Is anyone else finding this sobering? Can you imagine how hard it must’ve been to be Merton, to have taken a vow and lived it faithfully, and ask that question in earnest? I’m trying to, but to be honest, my mind snagged whiles back on the phrase “persons of the world” (as opposed to? Someone who doesn’t eat, drink, or evacuate bowels?) and I’m getting distracted by the sparrows out my window. Ah, that’s it—I was just remembering why I’m not as sober as a monk.

But I am content. And I like hearing the birds even if I’m losing my grasp on the What in me that isn’t me. I like seeing the patterns on fish. A monk’s way is one, valuable; there are others. This page is contentment—odd, disjointed, fractured, yet imbued with a certain imprecise unity (that’s me). Health might not be a state of integration so much as a state of stable disarray.

For all the talk and tallies of happiness, we know so little about it. We give weight, research, and money to understanding its absence while we can’t seem to envision its presence. There is no oasis, endless downhill, or plateau to reach; you’d get bored, idle, or worse—anyway, discontent. Happiness soon curdles. “And yet,” said Freud, “we wish each other happiness and contentment and other inappropriate things.”

Think more of homeostasis. We oscillate, gyrate, shift responsively to shifts, rebalance, and hopefully hold it all together. So next time, what we ought to say to folks is: “gyrate deftly.” You first.

“You’ve got problems,” one of my 4^th graders told me. “Yeah, hair problems,” added another. This was after I’d shaved, too. I can already tell one of these boys is gonna pass me up when puberty gets through with him, but I didn’t want to scare him yet. I laughed with them, but I was thinking, I do, don’t I?  We’re all a little hairy and we haven’t figured out how to wear our fur. We can deny it, trim it, or wear it like a tail, but we’re uncomfortable.

Here he goes again, he’s starting. Why always start back at the beginning of an issue? Why get so abstract? Why over think? Yes, yes, we are animals and yet human. Stop there. Move on. Fresh green banana.

Because this helps me gyrate. This is why I’m content. This helps me not be a denier of the quirky mind that holds my personalities together. And because can you really move on? When every day you pull on your hair, eat, drink, and evacuate your bowels. When kids remind you of your fur.  Happiness is hairy. Don’t think you can control your mind in the slightest, though it may convince you, in sleight.

Merton had hair problems. His implications can get a little hairy too. He asked questions he didn’t have to ask. He’d taken a vow. Move on—no going back. The answers won’t influence you because you’ve already made your commitment. But it was the questions that mattered because he asked them in earnest and let them shape him. He still had to figure out how to wear his fur, how to regard the sparrow rather than always dwell in undisturbed thought.

Wear it well. Gyrate deftly. Keep it fresh.

-MKS

Dear Adbusters

Think they’ll print it? Think it’s provocative enough for them? 

 

Dear Adbusters,

I won’t be renewing my subscription.

I first gave you a serious look in 2009 while studying abroad in London, and you became a necessary aid to my studies and my sanity—and soon, to my vision of the world.

It was an appropriate time to find you, as we were taking an economics course on “what went wrong” in Ireland (and everywhere) in the fall of 2008. We were told, of course, that capitalism would recover; this was just another blip in a long line of blips, but that capitalism always adapts. “Bet on it,” we were told, “it always wins.” 

I didn’t bet on it, but instead went to debates where scholars and economists were actually putting capitalism on the chopping block and asking can it, should it survive? Both sides were persuasive, and I didn’t leave with an answer, but I felt the excitement of witnessing a serious historical debate of our time. It was relevant, and people were talking as if it mattered. Never before in my own country had I experienced such a healthy form of academics. It was public and scholarly, theoretical and practical, contested and relevant. Our public debates seem unscholarly and usually tilted from the start. The questions aren’t serious. We already know the outcome but go through the motions anyway. Capitalism always wins.

I’ll admit, you didn’t really convert me. I was already sympathetic to your counter-cultural opinions, but you helped me articulate what I’d only sensed before as a queasy feeling. You also helped me see how pervasive consumerist ideology really is, helped me blast it from its last hiding places within me. I knew it from commercials, yes, and media, but now I see it every second. The myriad little vectors, all of which point toward accumulation and excess, are hiding in every corner—on the edges of our words and ideals, on napkins and coffee cups, in universities, government, and churches. They are the small tugs of ideology that amass into the strong undertow. They are the small phrases that add up to the big seduction suggesting the world is for me, about me, and most frighteningly, that I deserve it.

        I know you’ve helped thousands reach this same stage. Many are angry with you for destabilizing them but offering no solutions. I too am angry, but not with you. I’m angry with those who abuse power, those who dilute our language with excess packaging, different but equally dangerous as the kind piling up in landfills. I’m angry with those who bastardize our ideals, who divorce names from their meanings, lives from their purpose, and religions from their humble thanksgivings. I’m angry with those who think art is worthless and freedom is individual.

The only reason I’m not angry with you is precisely because you don’t presume to have the solutions. You recognize our collective hypocrisy but don’t embrace it further by dethroning one ideology and crowning another in its place. You know that the solutions are plural and that, however frustrating, they are left to us to find. I’m leaving you now, so that I may go out and find them. I don’t want to read you forever. I don’t want to be entertained by you. I hope the need for you ceases to exist in my lifetime. I hope that I say, ‘good riddance.’

Sincerely,

 MICHAEL SHORT

part III: piedmont

Still, I think I’m missing the mountains.
No other fad can top the arrangement matter got itself into in the Permian.
Not even war.

In them, I can get lost,
for their disruptive lumps, layers, dizzying topographies, razorback ridges,
and for their slowly cooled destruction.

They put me in my right mind,
where shadowed, I feel of proper size, wit, and thrust, which is to say
small.

In them I have no “gaze.”
My eyes don’t seek out and lift toward High Point. I don’t sprint for the overlook,
which is aptly named.

Rather, my molten awareness spreads out
broadly over this world, but of course unevenly with lumps and layers,
disproportions of its own.

From the dimpled crestline above Nantahala,
I could at once feel a sense of Appalachia, and a nonsense as I recalled
Fondwa and Cuernavaca.

Brecht said there are times
when one can consider it a crime to write of trees. When the house next door
is burning.

He meant that, amidst urgent necessity,
one ought not fiddle with precision. That would be treason
to thy neighbor.

But we speak as bad fiddlers,
so when we sound the alarm, it often doesn’t help either, because
we’ve obscured the real issues.

Political writers may always speak of trees,
if to see atrocities in context, to fiddle less, better, to figure why we are so bent
on wrecking both people and place.

Go to the mountains if they’re your mind’s own space,
where you see what’s before you but also what’s absent, where your awareness lingers widely but disproportionately on what matters. Or go to Mexico.

Go wherever, just don’t fiddle yourself out of context.

You’ll have found your place when you hear this poem:

The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,
tilts into the valley.  The clovers and tall grasses
are in bloom.  Along the foot of the hill
dark floodwater moves down the river.
The sun sets.  Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.
I have climbed up to water the horses
and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,
letting the day gather and pass.  Below me
cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,
slow and preoccupied as stars.  In this world
men are making plans, wearing themselves out,
spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

When at the end,
You don’t have to ask yourself:
I wonder why he said that?

When the rural is no longer romantic,
but no longer debased either. When it is recognized as having a place
within the vocation of the world, we’ll have found it.

I may have found mine.
We are probably both surprised to hear me say
it’s not the mountains.

That would be too easy. It’s the piedmont, that great tease,
where I can almost see the Blue Ridge, but not quite, even though
I’m standing on it.

It reminds me of the hypocrisy
of yearning for what I’ve already got and of stubbornly insisting
on seeing with my eyes.

This hill pasture, with an occasional retreat deeper, will do,
will keep me in my place, slow and preoccupied
with the work of preserving life.

-MKS