Читать книгу The Story I Am - Roger Rosenblatt - Страница 34

Flower Children

Their heads are bowed at their desks like the flowers I have given them. This is an in-class writing assignment: Write a page on what the flower smells like. It is an exercise in stream of consciousness for my students at the Southampton campus of Stony Brook University. The school is small and unadorned, spread out on a rise overlooking a bay. It is about to come into flowers of its own in the reluctant spring thaw.

Write what it smells like. Go into the past. Follow your nose. This is what you will do as writers. You will plunder the past to explain the present and make the present more intense. Think of stream of consciousness as a detour off the path of the narrative. Go where it takes you, and when you get back, the main road will have changed. So they sniff, dream into the pictures their minds unearth, and write. A boy’s hand is fixed to his forehead, covering one eye. A girl touches her lips with her pencil. They are all very still, separated from one another and from the classroom and the cold sun streaking in.

While they do their exercise, they become mine. Write what they look like: fifteen young people in jeans, sweatshirts, and sweaters, bodies hooked over a white sheet of paper, pursuing memories, dressing them up, and watching to ascertain that their hands are following their minds’ instructions. The flower is laid aside on the desk, its work done. The students are off now like hounds. They follow the scent to funerals, weddings, proms. One girl will remember lying in the night grass under a blue moon with her little sister. Another will recall a last dance with a midshipman in navy whites. A boy will alter the scent to that of lilacs, and swoop back to a childhood Eden near his father’s rectory.

This is where education becomes private. This is the nub of it. It is out of sync with the conventional images of education in America. Write about those images: the teacher is a pale, bloodless deacon, drained by unsatisfied longings, preposterous, out of things. She is the withered maiden, he is Ichabod Crane, humiliated to death by the village nitwit. The only way he gains respect is to become Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle