Author: Angelo Bonadonna

Reflective Action or Reflective Living?



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Blogger’s Note: This reflection was written in response to
a class reflection
written by Carol Medrano for one of her courses in the graduate reading program. Carol’s essay may be read by clicking this link.

Carol–I appreciate this opportunity to engage in a little dialectical discussion
with you here, so thanks for asking me to take a look at your reflection. Several
thoughts . . . I’ll share a few (ah, summer, when I can play hookey from the
required task, whatever it is, and diverge a bit in some side roads of thinking
and discussion):


You do a wonderful job countering the myth that reflection is solely a private
activity. It’s social. You summarize many other features from the analysis of
Dewey, but the social aspect is your main focus.

As teachers, the challenge is, "How do we create spaces, opportunities, requirements/threats/cajolings/pleadings
for reflective action? for reflective dialectical action?" It’s challenging,
but I’m beginning to see ways whereby the whole class can be organized–at the
point of conception–around the needs/rewards/dynamics of reflection.

The challenge becomes not merely one of having a single "reflective action"
added on at the end of something, but to have the reflective attitude guide
the process of learning from the onset and throughout. Part of this can’t be
taught, of course. Some people are "naturally" more prone to reflective
stances than others, etc. But reflectiveness can certainly be coached in all….
And therein is the challenge.

There’s a similar problem with group work. How do you shift from an ineffective
and rather typical use of small groups (I’ll characterize this ineffective use
as isolated instances of small group work thrown in randomly from time to time
to address certain lesson needs) to a more effective practice in which the teacher
perpetually supports and coaches collaborative interaction as a genuine social/intellectual
skill and disposition? One solution, I think, is to start your pedagogical planning
(in July) with the principles of "group" in mind rather than the task
they’ll be doing. Our usual procedure is to start with the lesson, and from
there proceed to the method of group work for engaging in the lesson. I’m suggesting
we turn the planning around. Why not start all our planning with the idea of
the group as the pincipal thing? We then ask in our day-to-day planning, "What
activities support, challenge, grow the group….?" We design learning
goals, curricular approaches, activities, etc. with the idea of the group impact/dynamics
invovled. In essence, the group becomes the organizing principle of our teaching
rather than the lesson itself.

The same holds true for reflection. How do we organize things if our main objectives
are rooted in the processes of reflection rather than the external learning standards,

curricula, etc. that are handed over to the teacher (often with a flick and a
threat)?

I’m beginning to see ways of doing this kind of reversal of prioritization.
But it’s really more than merely making a "priority" of reflection
or collaboration. It’s deeper; it’s starting with reflection and collaboration
as founding principles that give rise to all else. And at this point, I’ll close,
and only suggest that yes, I’ve begun to glimpse ways of organizing this way
(and relegating standards, goals, curricula, and other externals to afterthoughts—serious
afterthoughts that exert powerful shaping influences, but that keep their place,
too :).

But I have an exit analogy–on a somewhat negative slope. I’m reminded of
other highly effective organizations that might serve as models for the planner
of reflective/collabortive pedagogies: the military, cults, and gangs. They
start out with organizing principles of the "group," the "unit,"
"loyalty," "obedience," "duty," etc. They build
the organization first, and then apply actions to this or that situation. But
there is nothing "ad hoc" about these groups (unlike us in school
who are often so perilously ad hoc). These organizations are modes of being;
they are so un-ad hoc that, on their surface, their routines apppear to be the
antithesis of pragmatic, efficient action. Rather than dealing with the specific
issue at hand ("today’s lesson") they deal with the organizaiton
itself–its needs, its values, its code. But ultimately pragmatism and
efficiency do get nailed, and big time. But what if–in thinking about how to
coach reflection and collaboration–we look to the rituals and principled modes
of organization of the military, cults, and gangs?


Montana, 1948, Isolation, Adolescence. . . 



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Of the many reactions I had to Montana, 1948, the one that stands
out is my appreciation of the narrator. He’s an adolescent boy, caught in the
middle of things within and beyond him—his childhood, adult crimes and
crises, differing forms of love, punishments, justice, and various kinds of
typical and atypical forces. The boy is archetypally "adolescent"
(I can’t even recall his name at this point, though it was only a few weeks
ago that I read the novel). In him meet all kinds of extreme forces, and his
narration provides a patient and deep view of internal and external turbulence.
He explains, for instance, how he is driven by a type of unconventional "wildness"
(this aspect of him is so internalized that no observer could have ever detected
it through the boy’s behavior or speech); most of all, of course, he is afflicted/affected
by the fierce landscape of Montana, 1948, a place and time whose "definition"
winds up being the full presentation of the novel itself.

This book teaches, in its quietly desperate way, the need for extended
definition. In doing so, it prompts sympathy, the humane outcome of understanding
and involvement. The book takes us into troubling extremes, the real history
of a place, the kind of history that is never written in history books, but
only literature, and here in the form of "sexual abuse, murder, suicide"
(170). Read hastily or inattentively, this extended definition of Montana, 1948,
might well lead us to an easy outsider’s conclusion, as typified in the comment
of the narrator’s wife years later at a family meal: "David [ah, that’s
the boy’s name! I found it in looking up this quotation] told me what happened
when you lived in Montana. That sure was the Wild West, wasn’t it?" But
the more proper conclusion comes from the father’s almost violent and deeply
resonant (to David) response: "Don’t blame Montana! […] Don’t ever blame
Montana!" (175).

Amidst it all—between the wildness and the father’s fierce final defense
of Montana, the boy is there—invisible and serious—and he holds
his world together. Amidst all the extremes swirling around him, he functions
and acts—or rather just functions. Action is for adults. The boy is not
a major player in the unfolding crises, but all the events register with him;
they take root in his understanding, and so we have to ask, to what extent do
they become his understanding? Whatever effect they have, the influence
in one-directional: the boy is a recipient of Montana, 1948, not an agent in
it.

The isolation of adolescence is archetypal, and the depiction of it in this
novel reverberates in my unconscious and in the collective unconscious, one
feels, of all who have survived adolescence. The boy is just part of the landscape,
and he is maneuvered around by his parents and others as they attempt to solve
monumental personal, family, professional, and community problems. Everything
David hears—he hears a lot—is overheard. At one point he wishes,
poignantly, that someone would just talk to him about the goings on—to
have things explained, to provide him his opening, to have a discussion, to
break through the loneliness, to set right some of the upheaval….

The boy remains quiet, and the cauldron simmers, though the lid never blows.
On the one hand, I’m reminded of a quote from somewhere in The Rhetoric
of Motives by Kenneth Burke. Burke says (I’m paraphrasing), as though to
offer a formula for mental health therapy: find the secret; therein
the neuroses lie… This boy is beset with secrets. He learns, even as his mother
and father learn, of the secret crimes of Uncle Frank, the town’s doctor and
a respected pillar of the community. Despite his sophistication and power, Uncle
Frank has committed grievous crimes, and these crimes command redress. The burden
of addressing Frank’s actions falls primarily to David father, Frank’s brother,
who happens to be the town’s sheriff. But a deep portion of the burden falls
to David, who must come to terms with the brutalities and the confusions of
Frank’s actions. And in following David’s narration, we chart a process with
odd resonances to similar times when our characters were tested and buffeted.
For while most of us do not have an uncle like Frank, all adolescents/adults
have been tormented by "the secret"—if not of sexual abuse,
murder, and suicide, at least of sexuality, competition, and
guilt.

Like the best optimistic Young Adult fiction, the story chronicles a survivor’s
tale. What it doesn’t do is glorify the bravado or authority of adolescence
the way so much of our culture so stupidly does. I bemoan the cult of adolescent
superiority that runs rampant in our culture. Adolescent cool, the cluelessness
of adults, the liberations of sex, drugs, and extremes—whatever its forms,
such romantic nonsense gratifies adolescents with an opiate of assurance—however
wrongheaded, dangerous, or just plain irrelevant that assurance is to the real
afflictions at hand. Montana, 1948 depicts a sensitive, intelligent,
virtuous—and yes, confused—child-adult mixing it all up in the quiet
chaos of ordinary life. David is not "cool," but his shortage of cool
and superiority is as relevant to his problems as the shortage of bourbon was
relevant to the problem of all that extra ice on the Titanic. As we read on,
we see that this kid needs the adult world, and he is unapologetic
in that need. Unfortunately, the adult world is just "there" for him.
But truth be told, he is just "there" for the adults, too.

So the story takes root. Individuals, though intertwined, fail to interact—at
least overtly. Deep down, in the secret recesses of individual psyches, the
wounds reverberate. Adolescence is tough, but the realistic portrayal of it,
in literary works like Montana, 1948, brings redemption and satisfaction,
if belatedly. . . .


Towards Shared Planning in Team-Based Instruction



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As far as team-based instruction
goes, I have one main recommendation: I think that the team must find a way
to share their curricular plans in as much detail, in as much advance,
and as regularly as possible. Teachers rarely get into the specifics
of their teaching/learning goals and methods when they work individually. If
at all, such sharing would happen at the department level; it likely happens
with new teachers. But I think in most cases it tapers off, particularly as
teachers become busy managing and organizing their workload. I’d be interested
to hear from those who have worked on teams. Does lesson planning go differently
when a team is charged with the task? Does the team plan themes and goals together?
Specific goals and methods?

For example, consider how a team meeting would go if the English teacher led
off by saying something like, "In teaching Othello, I will lead
the children through an exploration of the notion of ‘women as property’…"
What if the teacher then proceeded to quote lines and share specific lesson
plans and activities on how this issue will be investigated by the students
in her English class? Such groundwork might lead to insights and possibilities
not necessarily possible if individuals planned in the traditional, isolated
way. Might not, in such a collaborative environment, the social studies teacher
get an idea for a unit on gender in different cultures or across the ages? Or
for a unit on notions of monogamy? Or any of the themes…. What if the team
decided on having each member take turns to bring to the fore the ways that
an agreed-upon theme plays out in his or her subject matter? The crucial part
is that the group members all share what their angle in is–so
that every teacher might make references day-in day-out to the various "radiations"
or "spokes" all protruding from (or to) the "hub" of the
theme. It’s unlikely, however, that there is shared ownership of the curriculum
and methods across the most teams, as they actually exist in the real, hectic
world of school teaching. It ‘s unlikely in our posited example–the interdisciplinary
team teaching Othello–that everyone on the team has read Othello….

But consider the possibilities if the Othello brainstorming were shared,
and the planning were consensus based. Consider, for instance, if the group
decided the shared focus was to be on the theme of "manipulation."
Possibilities blossom … in the individual minds of the experts, all supported
by the group dialogue, all differentiated by members’ specialized disciplinary
lenses. The math teacher steps up and asserts: So much of math, which involves
simply shifting numbers and variables from one side of the equation to the other,
is simply the legal, premeditated, deliberate practice of manipulation–taking
what Iago does and stripping it of its moral charge (its negative moral
charge, says the mathematician with a devilish grin)–and getting away with
what you can get away with–because the symbol system at hand allows for (some
would say encourages) such processes–all to the end of securing some
advantage. The language of jealousy (or any human emotion or experience) in
this sense is not all that different from the language of algebra. So many wonderful
lesson plans about manipulation could help children exercise symbolic, linguistic
prowess. But first, you, as teacher, would have to strip the term of its pejorative
sense, and come to appreciate it almost as an art form. Iago’s performance looks
quite different in those terms. Have the class cull examples of manipulation.
Have them engage in one-upsmanship. The prize goes to the best tale of manipulation!
Create a portfolio of nominees of "The Iago Achievement Award." OR!
Shifting things around, what if you had the kids in math class take a "Show
Your Work" episode, and retell it in terms of the morality
of human manipulation? Go Shakespearean on that quadratic equation. Talk about
the scheming of subtracting an entity from your side (protagonist), the left
side, so that your "opposite," the right side (antagonist), had to
do exactly the same thing, lest the equality of the equal sign, that which may
not be compromised, the beloved parallel shafts in eternal balance and beloved
by all (even that right side), should lose its balance and collapse into itself
and in that collapse, threaten that greater collapse, for where might balance
ever be found again, if equality itself was to be made unequal…?

Now this all seems heady stuff, but I have to say–from my recent experience
working nightly with my freshman daughter on her algebra that it was a major
stumbling block getting her to understand the notion of manipulation for manipulation’s
sake that is at the root of so much of algebraic prowess (not to mention Iago’s
highly stylized machinations). She would say, whenever I tried to get her to
"play" with an equation, to manipulate it (according to rule) this
way or that way, she would say with a roll of her eyes, "What’s the point?"
Since she couldn’t see the outcome, she couldn’t take the leap simply to engage
in algebraic maneuvers right there at her disposal. Over and over I pleaded:
So many of the good results of the Solved Problem stem from
the sheer willingness–and ability–to manipulate like expressions simply for
the sake of manipulating them. To know that "5-2" and the number "3"
are exactly the same thing, and that the one can be substituted for the other….

Anyway…anyway…

I think the power of a team approach is unleashed when all the teachers involved
are able to make regular references to what is going on in the other
classes. I am convinced that the value of a team approach does not lie in the
"lessons" per se; it lies in having the teachers all on the same page.
But to make this happen, you really need to insist that your team gets to the
specifics of its curriculum. Every teacher must somehow be
willing to take the leap to be conversant in every discipline. To some
extent. That’s where the potential of the "in-class connecting reference"
lies…. If approached in the right way, this "bringing up to speed"
of one another could be highly collaborative–or it could be divisive and threatening.
I don’t think, however, teams should just assume that the issue is solved or
not an issue–simply because you’re all colleagues and professionals. The most
damaging attitude is the one whereby individuals, out of collegial respect or
personal fears about their competence in other disciplines, leave interdiscipliary
planning to each expert. That’s not collaboration! Just as I think kids in the
classroom have to be taught explicitly how to collaborate, I think teachers
need to be taught (or to teach themselves) how to be teammates. What if there
were some formal team-building activity that oriented everyone to the vision
of interconnected planning and instruction?

I anticipate that one rejoinder is going to be, "Who has the time for
this kind of shared planning?" But anything worth doing is worth doing
well. In this sense, the costs of such an approach are analogous to the costs
of integrating technology in your teaching. To do it right involves excessive
costs; it can take over. But after you let it take over, you’re in a different
place, and you begin to glimpse possibilities you haven’t seen before. And with
the other rewards comes a new, heightened efficiency–and the freeing up of
time in unexpected ways. But this whole process would take lots of administrative
support so that such planning meetings might be continued and supported over
extended periods of time. For I would emphasize that in the shared planning
model the advance planning (before the semester) is not nearly as important
as the day-to-day, in-process team interaction as the lessons are being taught.
The day-to-day activity ideas flow from the in-process brainstorming and discussions
of the team.

So in a nutshell, here is my formula:

  1. Get the team to share specifics of their curricular plans. Be formal about
    this. Assign each team member one day to bring the group up to speed on his/her
    upcoming lessons, goals, activities.
  2. Come to some agreement as a team on the theme of each chunk of time.
  3. Find some way to keep the focus on team meetings during the semester,
    rather than just before the semester. Find some way to achieve agreement
    on the structure of the meetings; so often teachers need to de-pressurize,
    so there are powerful lures just to vent and short-circuit real thinking in
    team meetings. It can be a lot of work to have the kind of curricular-sharing
    meetings I’m talking about, so I think the group needs to be strategic about
    protecting the productivity of the day-to-day, in-process meetings.

Finally, I would simply say that the kind of collegial discussion I have sketched
here does happen and has happened since the creation of the
first school at the very dawn of collegiality. I’ve seen it in various schools
where the faculty members do talk to each other. So I’m not proposing
anything new. But I don’t think the "institutions" of school and professional
life support these practices. People engage in them because they are
professional and dedicated and intelligent, and they see what is needed to make
something work. The question I’m getting at is how can we reform professional
structures to be more "friendly" to the kinds of interactions and
collaborations that are needed to make innovations like team approaches work
in the way they need to work to tap into their potential?


Avatars of the Word and Disintegrating Educations



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Our book club read Avatars of the Word by James O’Donnell, a classicist/techie/vice-provost,
who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Near the end of Avatars, O’Donnell made some points about the future of
higher education. Although I’ve found myself nodding in agreement through much
of the book, I took a little issue with some of his ideas about how we should
reform our teaching-learning practices. In particular, he mentions the need
for learning experiences in colleges to be relevant to or modeled on the kind
of experiences students will have as adults in the world: "the traditional
classroom is among other things a place for rehearsing behaviors of use in later
life" (185).


I do agree with this notion, but my encounter of it here has led me to a somewhat
tendentious quarrel with it, along these lines: Might we, through
such thinking, be overly fitting the purposes of college to the (superficial)
purposes of society? Might not one argue that, rather than provide
direct preparation, or “training,” for adult life, college should instead provide a
countering or corrective influence to adult life?

I’m thinking of an individual who has, in fact, made such an argument. That
person (no surprise here to those who know me) is Kenneth Burke, who in his
1955 essay, "Linguistic Approach to Problems in Education," describes
the purpose of education as a kind of "preparatory withdrawal" from
life in order to equip us for life. Burke’s notion stands as a kind
of counter-statement to O’Donnell’s view: Education should function, Burke implies,
as a thing unlike life (thus the withdrawal) that helps gird you for
the struggles of life (thus the "preparation"). We go to college to
experience something different than the kinds of things and ideas we
will experience as adults. In this view, college provides not only a "broader
context" to adult experiences but also functions as an antidote to them–a
"counter-statement" to the assertions, or pressures of life. College
might equip us for life by stimulating our imaginations to think in grooves
very different from those that are etched by the pragmatic purposes of career
and social involvement. This value of college, Burke suggests, might be connected
with experiences of mortification, humility, appreciation–I think he even calls
it the "fear of God," though in a very secular sense. So what of it?
What do we think of this notion of college as a place set aside to scare us,
make us tentative, slow us down in our assertiveness?

More than anything, Burke seems to be promoting a cult of "interfence,"
as a type of protection against the efficiency of easy certainties. This is
an ironic approach to education–education as a kind of systematic complication
of our knowledge rather than mere confirmation, expansion, or application of
it. There is another Burkean context that come to mind–his essay on Thomas
Mann and Andre Gide in Counter-Statement. There Burke is talking about
the writer’s "art," but the points apply readily to concepts of "education."

Burke’s celebration of the perverse conscientiousness of Mann’s heroes and
the decadent irony of Gide’s anti-heroes points to a curricular ideal in a would-be
school of "preparatory withdrawal." Gide’s approach to irony, for
instance, helps us to break the spell of the "adult world" and its
ready-made reality. Burke quotes Gide, whose autobiography speculates on the
creation of "a whole civilization gratuitously different from our own"
(103):

I thought of writing the imaginary history of a people,
a nation, with wars, revolutions, changes of administration, typical happenings….
I wanted to invent heroes, sovereigns, statesmen, artists, an artistic tradition,
an apocryphal literature, explaining and criticizing movements, recounting
the evolution of forms, quoting fragments of masterpieces…. And all to what
purpose? To prove that the history of man could have been different—our
habits, morals, customs, tastes, judgments, standards of beauty could have
all been different—and yet the humanity of mankind would remain the
same. (103)

From Mann’s conscientious attitude of "containment," we get a "sympathy
with the abyss," an orientation quite inefficient for "rehearsing
behaviors of use in later life." Or to put it more positively, what of
the notion of college as a type of a "magic mountain" experience?
One goes to the magic mountain to experience routines and purposes of a very
different pace, style, and quality than those afforded by the hustle-bustle,
work-a-day world.

College as a "magic mountain" may be a traditional idea, and one
might even cite conventional notions of higher education’s role to promote independent,
critical thinking. But Burke’s notions of "preparatory withdrawal,"
inefficiency, and irony imply a goal of discomfort for education more
than anything else. In summing up his analysis of Mann and Gide, Burke asks
a question that for me functions as a first principle for an educational program:
"Irony, novelty, experimentalism, vacillation, the cult of conflict—are
not these men trying to make us at home in indecision, are they not trying to
humanize the state of doubt?"

Anyway, what of this notion of college as a "magic mountain"–a place
to which we withdraw, so that we might gain the (often ironic) resources
to encounter (or simply counter) the shaping forces of the world? O’Donnell’s
statement (that I have pulled out of context for my own purposes) made me think
of all this–most of all, the quote below from the conclusion of the Thomas
Mann and Andre Gide chapter. Just change the word "art" with "education":

…society might well be benefited by the corrective
of a disintegrating art [EDUCATION], which converts each simplicity into a
complexity, which ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies, which concerns
itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication works
corrosively upon those expansionistic certainties preparing the way for our
social cataclysms. An art [EDUCATION] may be of value purely through preventing
a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself. (105)


The Way Beyond

Kenneth Burke’s “theory of comedy” is really more a theory of education and human relations than an analysis of a literary genre. According to the lessons of Burkean comedy, we should not take our troubles too seriously. Rather, we should use them as a means of self-improvement. Do not grieve your mistakes or discouragements, but cherish them for the way they enable possibilities of insight.

I take pleasure in the notions of mistakenness and trouble, when these aspects of human behavior prompt such eloquence as they did when Kenneth Burke wrote his great treatise on comedy, Attitudes Toward History. On page 41 of that miraculously human book, Burke writes, in ways that still make me shiver:

The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.

Burke was talking there about the “poetic categories”—comedy, tragedy, satire, and the like—explaining how their resources, their methods, their potentialities offered strategic ways of understanding human motivation. Comedy in Burke always led to humility, the discounting of one’s grandeur. Comedy “keeps us in trim” by knocking us down a peg. Whereas in tragedy we get all elevated—”man in the cosmos” shaking his fists at the gods—comedy pulls things down to a human scale, portraying a mistaken, misdirected “man in society”—a comedy of errors, where the hero forever must find correction and chastening by the “truth” and all its complicated circumstances and largeness of perspective, ungraspable in this human realm, but best and most accurately approached with a compassionate smile.

Comedy teaches, first and foremost, the “discount”—stepping back from the intensity of an experience, a conclusion, an endpoint and realizing that maybe our calculations are not quite hermetically sound. Comedy warns us that our plans are like wishes made on the Monkey’s Paw. Or that our calculations are more like those of Dr. Octopus (Spider-Man II) than Einstein. We certainly have miscalculated. Comedy admonishes us not to abandon the project but rather to adjust our attitude. We must slog ahead through the muck of “man in society” but let us do it with the proper humility. Rather than deny the errors in some attempt to bolster our case, we should embrace those errors, own them, be thankful for them. Let us value error as the reading specialists do in a “miscue analysis”: Errors are our friends, for in seeing just where we go wrong, we have the hope of a greater precision the next time. As Burke puts it in his novel, “you should have lived twice, and smiled the second time. . . .” If there must be tragedy, error, and trouble, the trick is to not let it stop there–but to take the edge off (through the “discount”) and come back at it again, a second time, with a smile and a lesson learned (not in that order).

So the comic frame helps us redeem our troubles—even those that are not directly the result of our own mistakes. We take our lumps from others—and like Rocky getting pummeled by Apollo Creed, the comic frame says “ain’t so bad!” We learn to value our struggles in life as opportunities for growth. Burke presents the “comic frame” as a “method of study (man as eternal journeyman)”—one that leaves us with a “better personal possession” than mere wealth or material possessions. The comic frame opens us to the possibilities of education. Burke writes:

The comic frame, in making a man the student of himself, makes it possible for him to “transcend” occasions when he has been tricked or cheated, since he can readily put such discouragements in his “assets” column, under the head of “experience.” Thus we “win” by subtly changing the rules of the game—and by a mere trick of bookkeeping, like the accountants for big utility corporations, we make “assets” out of “liabilities.” (171)

Treating our liabilities as assets—that’s the type of “transcendence” that led to this blog entry. For I was thinking of all this lately, as I was involved in a troublesome “liability”—some committee work with a colleague that had gone bad, and left me with a conflict. There were disagreements, principled stands taken, and much anguish over the possibility of error and offense. After it was all over (at least most of it for me, personally), I found myself writing to an administrator who was deeply embroiled in the matter from another angle:

Will this thing end, and end well? When I think of all the work you are involved in [. . .,] I think we’ve got to move beyond these little blips, which often become great chasms. . . . But I do feel the best way beyond is directly through. God gives us both canyons and mules. The rim view is nice, but a little too unreal. The mule trip across–that’s process! Anyway, anyway. . . .

Thence came the transcendence! Ironically, I was talking of mules and process and plodding through the thicket as a way of getting “beyond.” In essence, I was arguing for anti-transcendence, when, in a moment of poetic inspiration, I was able to “rise above” the whole matter and write a poem. Transcendence in the service of anti-transcendence: Methinks I would have my cake and eat it too. . . . But that’s what poetry and comedy do: they let us inhabit our contradictions, and wherever there be liabilities, we’ll take those too, for they are part of us too, and add to our measure.

This poem is the result of my committee work, of my scholarship in Burke’s theory of comedy, of my need to make peace, of my weekly work with my pre-service teachers, who had me reading about the use of poetry writing in getting students to tap into their experience, of my colleagues who keep me sane, of my love of paradox, of the play of language, with the word “blip” leading to “chasm” leading to “canyon,” of my need to transcend with my clodhopper boots trudging on in the morass of things. . . . We must try to get our house in order down here; we must get the human scale of things tweaked just so, for just above this microcosm of detail and setback and tiny elegance is that macrocosm that we sometimes catch a glimpse of—that true “beyond” where God in his awesome ways is quietly, eternally trying to chasten and overcome us with glimpses of just what can be.

The Way Beyond
     by Angelo Bonadonna
     March 1, 2005

God gives us both canyons and mules.
The view from the rim–that’s beautiful
but that’s hubris, too
too beautiful
too transcendent
too detached
Is that the other side?
So close, so bridged by a mere glance?

God gives us both canyons and mules.
That’s me down there
the mule with its 40 acres
too
to there
through there

God gives us our place,
and our way out of it, too.
Though the forest be lost for the trees
the trees are all we have
so mark them well

And with bark and leaves
and sweat and toil
and this smelly mule
we may reach the rim
and bridge all with a glance,
collapse all in silent awe.