LET'S PRETEND WE'RE LOVERS AND WE WRITE ROCK-N-ROLL SONGS

This horse needs your help. A butt-cleaning. I’m trying to get all the butt-ness I can here.

—Kid A

I used to teach a course called Environmental Literature. It was a sort of niche class at the time, and drew an odd mixture of students: four-oh-or-busts, former 7th grade Envirothon winners who had since discovered drugs, people who didn’t register for classes in time, and a few who had come to the wrong room but decided to stay because I’d said they “got a thousand points for showing up,” and they weren’t sure if the points were real or not and didn’t want to lose them.

(Lying pays. Or rather, charismatic nonsense can rescuscitate those afflicted with certainty.)

“I mean if you haven’t seen it it’s a pretty intense video I made of a banana singing. You might like it, because the woodpecker brought it. Very kind of him.”

—Kid B, talking to himself in the sandbox

The course sometimes felt like a little like a one-room schoolhouse, sometimes the aftermath of a small rave in the cruel light of day, by the time we got underway.

I began with nonfiction, in Environmental Literature—essays and books on homesteading, extinct birds, that kind of thing. No problem: students were game enough to try and track their food’s approximate mileage from its source to the dining hall; they were fine with reading about what really happened to the dodo (and finding out that it was a real bird).

When we got to poetry unit, more than a handful became more than slightly irritable, as if someone had chopped up a perfectly good sweater into floofs of yarn and left them floofing all over the floor.

Mom, please, I need to move away from this misery.

—Kid A

The students became disgruntled that no one was telling them what anything meant, or how to get the stinking sweater put back together, and so ultimately they really couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t going to pop out of the bushes on their walk home, hand them a quiz, and crow to the full-moon-lit streets, saying “Aha! You are in fact stupid!” and dance away with their dignity and hope, guzzling Fennel Twig Tea in my witchy skirt and earrings.

Eventually, as if I’d been coaxing barn cats towards a have-a-heart trap with tuna juice, week after week, I would come up with a few prizes— a handful of students whose eyes would cease to flash with rage and despair, instead reluctantly accepting the wee ear-scratch that was the occasional poem.

Some purred.

I ran a race and got my first medal! It was a rat-race of one hundred miles.

—Kid A

And then the fiction unit happened. As the years went by, I learned to keep my mouth shut while the genre transition happened, because a very fruitful confusion usually occurred, whereby about half of the class was unaware, after the first sizeable chunk of Rick Bass’s book Fiber, that the piece is actually fiction.

Fiber is an elegant and trippy telling of an activist’s struggle to save the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, a journey which eventually leads to some disconcerting and slippery beliefs that bring active, devastating harm to the thing he loves most.

So the students got to be outraged twice: once at the man for doing a “bad” thing— which is where the first conversation usually began in class— and then again, freshly, suddenly, and with outrage at the writer, for “telling a story that’s not true,” upon learning that this book was fiction.

This is my vini-van! I work at the dentist.

—Kid B

“Why are you mad that the story isn’t true?” I’d ask the students, blinking haplessly.

“Because I cared,” someone in the class would explain, letting me in on their feeling of betrayal— on the tender, exposed fact of their feelings at large.

Let’s pretend we’re lovers, and we write rock-n-roll songs.

—Kid B

“So… you had an experience?” I’d say. They’d look at me like I was that viper in the bushes, and only slowly make way for a small nod, while inching away from me inside the prisons of their institutional chair-desks.

“Yeah, I had feelings about it, OK?” someone would say.

Mom, if he starts asking for stories and then has too many feelings when you say no, just please go down and get Dad. I don’t want you to try and handle it. Can you do that for me?

—Kid A

I would nod at this point, and assure the class of how great it was that they could have feelings— that this wasn’t something to be avoided, or to be ashamed of.

“Is this table real?” I’d ask, and the students would nod. “Because it’s factual?” More nods.

“So…if this table, which we all agree is real, creates or allows no notable experience or meaning for you, but a book that’s ‘not real’ makes you care enough to get pissed off at the writer, and at me, which one is more real?”

Mom I just farted, and I JUMPED because it felt like a monster was tickling me!

—Kid B

But didn’t what I was implying make us all delusional hippie poets or something? Wouldn’t we all slide down the slippery slope I was setting up and become addled flax-wearers with bad haircuts and draw tarot cards instead of looking up the weather report?

I mean, maybe. But I guess I want to know what’s more insane: thinking that there’s even such a thing as objectivity— a “view from nowhere,” to borrow Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase—or to try and bring together our own internal experience/subjectivity with that which may be externally verifiable in order to come to a fuller sense of the reality and being that are already occurring, seamlessly.

After all, brain scans of people reading fiction—put another way, a synthesized and imagination-hosted version of reality—are the same as those engaging in “real” activities¹.

Which brings me to my point:

I am practicing how to do my writing songs. I am married to my work.

—Kid B

1. Sorry about the red tape here, but a few sentences that basically sum it up: “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated” and “there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.”