Things are violin bodies

Part of a conversation in a separate blog with two colleagues, Mary and CeCe

Photo by Michelen Studios on Unsplash

1.

When we were having dinner the other night, CeCe described how she felt when teaching some students who didn’t seem, or who clearly weren’t, touched in the slightest by what she was teaching.

I remember those times. I remember writing to my university friend Robert Dessaix about this dreadful feeling. He was a Christian Scientist at the time (he is no longer, as you can tell from his books), and he would write back such long and wonderful letters trying to get me to see what was going on in my classroom through a completely different lens, where my experience of what was happening (and especially with certain ‘unreachable’ students) was more to do with the nature of my perception than with any objective reality. 

I was never convinced by the Christian Science version of this. But there was something about the idea that the key was to be found in my perception, rather than in what that perception was ‘seeing’, that resonated.

When I am in the grip of a rational frame of mind (a mind which sees itself as separate from what it perceives, a mind which imagines it is standing back and perceiving an objective reality being played out in front of it), I have moments of classroom triumph and moments of humiliating powerlessness. 

2.

I lived in the thrall of that way of thinking for much of my teaching career, up until the late 1980s when I took a break from teaching and trained to be a therapist.

When, in about 1990, I stepped back into the classroom, colleagues would ask me whether being a therapist had influenced the way I saw teaching. At the time I remember saying ’no’; these were two different domains operating under quite different conditions and influences. But gradually I began to see that I was teaching differently. My time as a therapist, learning about the unconscious and disciplining myself to wait to see what emerged, meant that I listened differently to my students, and that I not only tolerated silences better, but actively worked to create moments of apparent emptiness when things might come to the surface.

3.

CeCe will have heard me (in our workshops) read out this fragment from a Rilke poem.

My room and this vastness
wake over a darkening land – as One. I am a string,
stretched tight over broad rustling resonances.

Things are violin bodies
Filled with murmuring darkness.

What happens if instead of perceiving a classroom as a place where a teacher teaches (guided by explicit outcomes) and where students are either swept along or left unmoved by these teacherly moves, we think of a classroom as filled with violin strings stretched tight over broad rustling resonances in a murmuring darkness? 

This is a view of things shared (I think) by philosophers like Spinoza, Jung, Deleuze. This is a view of things more in tune with indigenous mythologies and cultural practices, and a view which seems (to me anyway) a necessary antidote to the assumptions that nature exists for the benefit of humankind (as if the latter were separate from the former).

I am wanting to make a connection, here, between (on the one hand) the ways we view our classrooms (a field where teachers  need to herd students along a defined path towards a desired outcome), and (on the other hand) the way humankind has disastrously come to view ‘nature’.

4.

English classrooms are filled with violin strings stretched tight over broad rustling resonances in a murmuring darkness. One violin string vibrates (partially) because an argument at home and a harsh voice outside the classroom have some unconscious connection. Another because the teacher’s hair is streaked with happy colours. Another because the poem being read aloud sounds like a prayer a grandfather used to say. And these are just the most obvious in multiple dimensions of visible and invisible resonances, many interacting in countless unimaginable ways.

The teacher doesn’t have to perceive all these resonances. It’s an impossible task. She just needs to know that this is what a classroom is, and that she’s playing a vital though mysterious part in what’s invisibly being manifested. She teaches English (has the students read and write in many ways and forms), but she doesn’t control what happens and cannot direct the flows of desire and moments of resistance that are continually present.

This, at least, is what I want to continue to think and read and write about.