What's inside ...

I am a recovering historian. You should know this. Second, I am not a real writer. I must be honest about this. A true writer writes regularly, generally daily, consuming quarts of ink. The hard stuff. Smell their breath. Reeks of ink. Palpate the liver. Enlarged. Real writers are literary winos.

That is not me. I write by fits and starts. This makes me a dry drunk most of the time. (Besides, what I call a book is really no more than a long meditation, which doesn't qualify as a real book anyhow.)

There is a deeper, more disturbing reason why I'm not a real writer. I am running out of language. I sometimes feel like Alice's Cheshire Cat, a bit of me disappearing with each volume. This might seem like a paradox from someone who has published several books. The important thing is not that books were written, but where they have led me—to the far side of language.

My first book (Keepers of the Game) established my reputation as a historian, winning the "best book of the year" award from the American Historical Association. So far so good. Any normal person would have followed that up with something reasonable, like "Son of Keepers" or "Further Adventures of the Keepers of the Game." Instead I plunged into a protracted quarrel with the very idea of "historical consciousness" (The American Indian and the Problem of History and In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History & Time). These two books firmly dis-established my reputation as a historian (historians lined up not to review them)—except that I was a tenured professor of the stuff. I found myself teaching something I no longer believed in.

I managed to hold it together till I made the mistake of living with Eskimos (no, I don't mean Inuit) for a couple of years. (They don't believe in history either, I soon discovered. "Not in time's covenant": TS Eliot put it beautifully.) I learned to my delight that they live within a substance very different from history. I was hooked.

I came back to New Jersey and resigned. (Anyhow, who could go back to commuting the Garden State Parkway after camping with grizzlies?) I resigned my professorship and gave myself over to exploring what this substance, this fairy gold, is. My last book was about that exploration, and I called it The Way of the Human Being.

You're surprised, perhaps, by the term "fairy gold"? It's my shorthand way of saying what WH Auden said better: "All answers expire in the clench of his questioning hand." Whose questioning hand? Mine. Calvin Luther Martin. Offspring of Adam. Namesake to two titans of the Protestant Reformation. Add in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Bacon. For I am, as well, the fruit of their loins.

My questioning hand alarms me. Mainly because of two strange years spent in the company of Yup'ik Eskimos (most of whom were in prison, ironically). I am now afraid of my questions. This is the focus of my writing these days.

Our questions determine the answers we get in response, while definitively excluding other valid answers. "There is, we know now to our sorrow, more than one world to be drawn out of nature. When once drawn, like some irreplaceable card in a great game, that world leads to others." The words are Loren Eiseley's, and they trouble me.

My response has been to write "The Language of Wildness," which I expect will be published in the near future.

One of Adam's tasks was to name the animals. (Listen: the river of language is about to change direction.) "Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them" (Genesis 2:19). We must place Adam’s great achievement within the context of the yardstick. Le cheval ("the horse") by the score shapeshift across the membrane of stone we call Lascaux. "Sometimes they were people and other times animals, and there was no difference." In the voice of an Inuit woman we hear the Logos that Adam betrayed.

Only against this background can we properly appreciate Adam’s revolutionary act. Adama, First Agrarian Man, finds himself caught between two massive continental plates now, just now, beginning to move in opposite directions. The tension between wild and domesticated is tremendous. Literally, untenable.

Adam's god screams at him to name them. It is modern man's defining moment. For hundreds of thousands of years language flowed from loose-limbed undulating wildness, moving like a flickering flame across rock walls and open-air boulders, moving like a Dark One emerged from winter sleep in the spring snows of Yellowstone Park. Language flowed from the Logos of wildness and leaped into mankind. A word was alive, breathing—a presence "wet with our breath," a Navajo woman described it. To hunt was to engage Dark One in conversation, was to participate in the Great Dance (the Bushmen call it), was to engage in courtship (ethnologists describe it). ("Someone's mind came to me just then!" exclaims the Winnebago who hunts the Dark One.) The hunt is all of these. Knud Rasmussen learned this from an Inuit woman. I learned it from a man named Puffin and a woman who knew that loons speak. The linguist Lucy Lloyd learned it from a man named /han=kass'o.

—from "The Language of Wildness"

I confessed to being fond of writing meditations. (What I call books being nothing more than extended reveries.) In this spirit I have written a number of short essays under the title "Meditations," found, again, under Works in Progress. From time to time I add and subtract from these. They are of uneven quality.

Low, on the northern horizon, a faint white light forming. Even as the night unfolds, this light forms. Amid myriad stars. There is no moon. Pleiades dance in the east, seven—I count seven.

Black except there, on the northern horizon, low: faint white light gathers itself. "Now it ripples, now it murmurs, ripples, it sighs, hums" (Quiche Maya, Popol Vuh). Constellations wheel slowly, night sinks in darkness. The light grows, glows brighter, sending silent fingers arching across the sky, to the very dome of heaven. Then—ripples. Huge, cosmic ripples. The aurora comes alive, flowing into the vault of heaven, sending long jets, volleys of light. Rippling, discharging, immense. White, green, some red. Half the night a shimmering tissue of light—jets, streams of cosmic matter.

All this above this mountain pond this autumn night. Loons call—a rippling. Barred owls growl and scream, echoing strangely through spruce forests.

Was it this way at the beginning of creation? The Maya say it was; the wise men, they say, remembered and wrote it down. "Whatever might be is simply not there: only murmurs, ripples, in the dark, in the night."

This autumn night I witness creation again.

—Aurora Borealis

Do I miss anything from those 20 years of teaching? You betcha I do. I miss teaching. (Like a dog that can't bring itself to retire from chasing cars, I deliver profound lectures to my longsuffering wife once or twice a week. Sunday morning over breakfast seems to be my favorite hour. I need, I admit, to find a better solution.)

I started out as an outstandingly lousy teacher. (And hating teaching, besides.) By some miracle of God, I ended up teaching classes of close to 500 students, and loving it.

So I wrote about it. Mainly I wrote about how to teach college students, which, dear reader, you must understand, is an art none of us Ph.D's is taught how to do. We're supposed to somehow know how to teach by virtue of having a Ph.D. (Sort of like knowing how to sail a boat because you built one.) Ludicrous? Of course.

I have called it, "On Teaching" (see Works in Progress).

On the other hand when it came time to run my own class as a new assistant professor, this was terror. I had grown up a shy kid in rural French Canada, son of a minister. My public school teachers were grim souls, especially in my high school years, and my college professors (minuscule Baptist college with Christus Primatus Tenens stitched into the school crest) were overworked and lackluster as well. I can think of no role models from either experience. Added to this, I was a terrible public speaker. I mumbled, generally with my hand over my mouth. This did not go unnoticed. In college I was obliged to take a speech class, easily one of the most painful courses I ever took. Each of us had to give tiny speeches to the class. Eight people, maybe? My little speeches were inaudible and incoherent. The professor was close to speechless. God bless him, he gave me a C. I deserved a D.

But, then, I had no love or passion for what I was assigned to talk about. I'm Irish; I'm capable of passion. That class never aroused it in me.

My point is that I was a bum candidate for the job when I walked into my first classroom as a professor. "But we're going to hire you despite your seminar presentation," I vividly recall the department chairman confiding in me after the job interview. Luckily I had done a little publishing as a graduate student and my new colleagues hoped there was more to come. They figured I would learn to teach soon enough—by being forced to do it. Not a bad motivator—force—although there's no guarantee of the results.

I write this little book as a life vest for poor saps like me: young faculty who are obliged to stand still and expound for sixty to eighty minutes, twice a week, before thirty to forty college freshman and sophomores. It's a helluva thing to walk into your first college classroom filled with people you have never seen before, everyone now looking at you. Their lively chatter turns to scattered whispers, then becomes perfectly silent. And they stare. What's worse is when the students aren't talking at all: you stride into an utterly silent classroom full of strangers. It's like walking into a nightmare.

—from "On Teaching"

News

September 21, 2007

Jordan Klassen, my web designer (www.jklassen.net), has added a helpful feature to Works in Progress. Genius that he is, Jordan has made the books flexible—stretchable—in both the horizontal and vertical planes.

To stretch the book sideways (to see more text on each book page), place your cursor on the edge of the window, hold down the mouse left-click button, and pull the window outward (or inward, to shrink the page).

To change the vertical aspect of the book page, set your cursor on the top edge of the window and stretch upward (or downward).

— CLM