Keep Your Head Out of the Elephant's Ass

                                              Address To The Senior Class

                                                

                                                       Michael Casey

 

          Thank you for inviting me to speak.  I regard myself as an odd choice for a speaker on this occasion of your recognition for years of hard work and significant accomplishment.  It would seem that this event calls for a speaker adept at praise and inspiration, who can evoke the bright day dawning and the shining future that beckons you onward.   My contribution to your well being has been of a different sort.  I am notoriously stingy with praise; to my knowledge I have never inspired anyone to do anything; and all I know about the future is that it contains as much toil and trouble as it does joy and delight.   So you see my dilemma.  The things I know in the marrow of my bones are made of caution and warning, not warmth and encouragement.  I have always endeavored to prepare you for the bad stuff and the mean people--even meaner than me--that will cross your path in the years after high school.  So I'll go with what I know.  I do have "life-advice" for your future.  But my focus is not so much how to thrive but how to survive, so that you'll have a shot at thriving despite the odds.

          Recently, I was in conversation with a young teacher--not a teacher here--who was speaking about her first year teaching in a new school with a new principal.  She was puzzled and a little upset that the principal had said to her, "you know, you did a really good job this year, but sometimes you're a pain-in-the-ass."  I congratulated the teacher on receiving that performance review. There is great value and leverage in being a pain-in-the-ass.   Establish yourself as such and you will survive and thrive.  A person who is a pain-in-the-ass does not adopt a purist approach to this mode of presentation of self.  The best results are achieved when one is a pain-in-the-ass-with-a-purpose. 

   What is meant when a person is so described?  First of all, such folk are hard to ignore.  They are presences because they pester, persist and persevere.  They send the memo, the follow-up memo, and the third communiqué.  In between they make the phone calls, knock on doors, and enlist compatriots in causes they care about.  Be they students, scientists, parents, entrepreneurs, teachers, CEOs, artists, or administrators, a pain-in-the-ass has an indefatigable resolve and is extremely hard to discourage.   If you yourself are not one, you want one working for you or with you.

 

   Another strategy for surviving and thriving--especially in the groves of academe--is to learn the intellectual and strategic value of the sham of feigned attention.  Henry James, a genius of modern fiction, said: "Strive to be a person upon whom nothing is lost."  Act like you are such a person.  Some of my own students here have developed this trait admirably.  It consists of pretending to be interested in what the teacher (or your future professor) is explaining or describing.  The slightly bugged eyes, the cocked head, the beaming visage, distinct but not overly eager nodding in agreement and assent, all these can do wonders in making a positive impression on the person in charge.  But be forewarned.  There's a danger here.  Investing energy in this posture can result in your actually becoming interested in something you thought you were bored with, and then you have real work to do.

   Thirdly, whatever you do with your future life, develop an appreciation and appetite for money.  Remember Iago in Shakespeare's Othello.  "Put money in thy purse."  Iago of course was evil incarnate.  But that does not mean he was wrong in what he urged Roderigo to do.  Money may be the root of some evil.  But the lack of money is the guarantor of much pain and misery.  If you are employed by another, learn how to negotiate and squeeze all the dollars you can out of the employer to whom you sell your services.  Money matters because with it you can build the resources to advance social justice causes that activate your passion and values.  Or, if fortune truly smiles and you are the next YouTube mogul, money matters even more because then you can realize your ethical obligations, and bequeath generous donations to nursing homes for retired teachers.

 

   These are three tested and true modes of operation.  But all of them take a back seat to a more fundamental principle upon which all other means of surviving and thriving depend.  This is so important, so profound, that I want to show it to you visually before examining it verbally.  Turn your attention if you would to the screen.

         

   The baseline lesson is unmistakable.  Keep your head out of the elephant's ass.  The literal danger is clear.  It's not a place you want to be.  But the meaning of this dictum is not simply literal, it is a matter of major metaphor.  And all metaphor requires attention and investigation.

   What is represented by the elephant's ass, and what is represented by the head inadvertently placed therein? 

   The elephant's ass is a modern form of Conrad's "heart of darkness."  We can call it the abyss of asininity, the thoughtless or witless response to danger or complexity.  The abyss of asininity is a force that will shallow you up if you do not look up to see where you are and whither you are going.  The abyss of asininity is a force that can take the form of pied pipers, fads, half-baked notions, paradigms, canards, shibboleths, bigotries, popular misconceptions, fatuous institutional goals, inane corporate values, and almost anything that is put forward as new, improved, cutting edge, transformative, globally true, or life-changing. All of these chimeras, all of these come-hither siren songs, are in the elephant's ass.

   Your head is not simply the cranial casing for your cerebral cortex, it is the locus in quo, the place in which the center of your self-ness resides.  You are your brain, your heart, your will, your soul. To survive and thrive, Keep your head out of the elephant's ass.  Keep yourself to yourself.  You do not belong to your parents.  You do not belong to your siblings. You do not belong to this school, you belong to yourself. You own yourself.  Take care of what you own.

   Lay claim to your self-ness and decide on who you will become. That decision is a journey but it need not be a lonely road.   It is true, as I have reminded my senior students, that 24 months from your graduation, if you return here, no young person in the building will know who you are.  But you will always recognize each other, the members of the graduating class.  Look to your right, look to your left.  You are a part of each other.  You do not belong to us, we do not own you.  But we are a part of you.  You take us with you as you go. 

So here's a benediction for your parting, the old, familiar Irish Blessing, . . . old, familiar, and true. 

 

May the road rise to meet you

  May the wind be always at

               your back

May the sun shine warm upon

               your face

   And the rain fall soft upon

                 your fields

   And until we meet again,

   May God hold you in the

          Palm of his hand

                                                                       

Thank You

 

The Ticking of History in Time

                      

 

          “Literary fiction?  Hmm . . . not sure I’d like that.  What is ‘literary fiction’ anyway?”

     It’s the sort of fiction that Colum McCann writes, not only in the novel under review but in his earlier works such as Fishing the Sloe-Back River and Let the Great World Spin, fiction that requires of itself artistically ordered language of a different pith and pitch than most popular novels employ. In literary fiction, the writing itself is at least as compelling as the narrative. McCann and his contemporaries, Colm Toibin, Aleksandar Hemon, J.M. Coetzee and others create literary works that are imaginative experiences rendered in carefully constructed verbal form. Such writers are impelled by “the constant search for the better word,” as is Emily, the writer character in TransAtlantic.  Authors of literary fiction are usually committed to a way of perceiving the world that proceeds through words rather than things. The “idea of the literary” that animates literary fiction is honored in Mark Twain’s distinction that “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening-bug”; and in Yeats’s claim that “words alone are certain good.”

     Colum McCann has an array of narrative skills in this absorbing new novel, but we would do well to attend to the thematic tensions that are suggested before the story proper begins.  The epigraph combines the genres of fiction and history by citing the Uruguayan journalist and novelist, Eduardo Galeano—a passage that reminds us of the continuous ticking of history in time.  “No history is mute. . . . human history refuses to shut its mouth.  Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.” Then a prologue, although not named as such, but marked with the date 2012.  In this prelude, the reader is quietly nudged to notice the gulls.  They fly over the Irish lough and drop oyster shells that crack open when they hit the target of the slate roof.  The gulls disperse and survive by this stratagem, a trick that forces food into the open. Hunger is satisfied, ironically presaging an gorta mor (the great hunger) which has an important place later in the novel.  The prologue is brief, and we do not know as we read it that the woman who listens to the pinging on the roof is the fourth generation of an Irish matriarchal clan that will weave throughout the story; this opening scene is a partial screen capture from the end of the book.

     The gulls at the beginning and the end (and along the way as well) swoop over a triptych of historical figures: pilots Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown; African-American icon Frederick Douglas; and mediator George Mitchell who leave their place of origin and ford the Atlantic in order to—respectively—accomplish an aviation feat, shed slavery, and reconcile reckless forces.

     The novel is structured by these characters and events, which are in turn interlaced by the sensibilities of mothers and daughters who contact, challenge and comfort the men.  In their restlessness and perseverance, these women set into motion the stimulus of the “trans antic” energy that is named in the book in a brief meditation on the wide reach of the title word.  

     “Antic” in the zeitgeist of the novel can be understood in the sense of crossing over and seeking to seize, as the airmen of the Vickers Vimy do when they lift off from Newfoundland, poised on “the point of flight.  To get rid of oneself” and revel in “the miracle of the actual.”   TransAtlantic  presumes a spirit of zest that is more measured than manic.  McCann draws on a kind of grim levity inherent in the Irish manner, resident and resonant in the language, attitudes and proclivities of his own ones.  For example, he has George Mitchell reflect on Irish speech.  “It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once. How they mangle it and revere it.  How they color even their silences.  A fluent menace.”   The patois here includes humor both wicked and wry.  “He was told once that any good Irishman would drive fifty miles out of his way just to hear an insult—and a hundred miles if the insult was good enough.”  There is also the more subtle description of a political sentiment, “written on a wall on the road out near Ballycloghan, in large white letters against the gray, a new piece of graffiti: We will never ever forget you, Jimmy Sands.”  A character’s silent reaction to this cri du cœur is all McCann allots to explanation. 

     McCann rightly assumes that his readers can be trusted to recognize jokes and allusions to well-known persons and events in Irish history and culture.  So he gives us Daniel O’Connell and expects us to have at least heard of him; he imbeds a reference to Joyce’s Ulysses in a joshing “tip” to bet on a nag and presumes we will chuckle; he has Hannah, the great granddaughter of Lilly Duggan turn in repose to a volume of an accomplished Northern Ireland poet, whom she identifies simply by surname.  The diction deployed throughout the narrative has a similar literariness, some of the words are Irish argot, some are not culture based but interestingly unusual.  That is an amalgam we expect to encounter in literary fiction.  So when we come upon Saoirse, we know it is a freighted term —as does George Mitchell—and the freedom it bespeaks weaves throughout the story as an illusive force that beckons all parties to break from the past, reconcile, disperse and thrive.  

     Escape is a dominant metaphor in the section named “freeman.”  It is an account occurring from 1845-46, when Frederick Douglas was traveling in Ireland and the Irish famine was beginning. Douglas is a popular visitor.  He meets with Daniel O’Connell and throughout his trip is given the sobriquet, “the black O’Connell.”  Even though he’s well received, he’s race-conscious of every move he makes.  He attends to his appearance, sartorially and physically, being fitted by a Dublin tailor and keeping himself fit by working with barbells he totes in his luggage.  Douglas is puzzled by the Irish, and by the women in particular.  He encounters Lilly Duggan, a housemaid of his hosts and she is haunted by his presence years later.  Ultimately, a scholar tells Duggan that Douglas left Ireland unslaved, and that word burgeons into bloom for the whole story.

     The airmen, Alcock and Brown, pull off a high risk pond-hop in the same year (1919) that Yeats publishes his poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” a premonition which pivots on a motive the three of them share:  “A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”  George Mitchell, with preternatural patience and implacable resolve, moves lifelong enemies to the parturition of the Good Friday accords.   And Lilly Duggan’s clan of women struggles to fly free of servitude, war, spousal and offspring loss; the theft of credit and recognition for what one has written; and a warding off of eviction, the specter inherent in “the ancient iconography of the Irish imagination . . .  .”

     And, at TransAtlantic’s end, the movement of the “trans antic” impulse pursues a letter sent with Alcock and Brown.  It goes astray and is tracked down nearly one hundred years later, never opened; a missive whose contents are a mystery.  An apt conclusion for a book wonderfully worded by the ticking of history in time.      

  

         

 

 

 

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