Don't Drink the Water
(November 19, 1996)

Let's begin with a list:

 

                        1.         Hillary Clinton:                       9,264

                        2.         Tom Cruise:                            32,742

                        3.         Brad Pitt:                                 7,641

                        4.         Jenny McCarthy:                     4,311

                        5.         Inspiration:                              5,417

                       

So just what, you may now be asking yourself, could those numbers mean? Until I got to that last item, inspiration, you probably had several plausible explanations in mind: presidential write-in votes or hourly wages or perhaps even plastic surgery bills. But then there's that perplexing last item, inspiration. How is it supposed to fit in? I'm not going to tell you right now, of course; I'd like to keep you in suspense a bit. We'll come back to this question in a moment.

           
One of my favorite chronic losers from Greek mythology is Tantalus, that poor schlepp who was forced to spend eternity standing thirsty in a pool of water that would -- with wonderfully cruel consistency -- recede into nothingness whenever he stooped in quest of a drink. Above his head hung the branches of fruit-trees, studded with glossy rinds, but whenever Tantalus reached up to pluck a piece, an ill wind would rise to pull the branches back just out of his grasp. Tantalus spends eternity tortured by an aching mouth, a cotton-dry tongue, a groaning stomach with the means to quench his thirst and sate his hunger in plain sight, but always -- tantalizingly -- just out of his reach.

           
I've been thinking about Tantalus quite a lot these past few weeks, as student after student from my Composition classes has dropped by my office to express frustration with the grades he or she has been receiving in the course. With the possible exception of Dante, that exemplary Italian revenge artist, I had thought that no one could ever surpass the Greeks in their ability to dream up impossibly cruel fates, but I have learned, these past few weeks, that Dr. Strain and I are, apparently, giving those classic torture artists a pretty good run for their money with the assignments and grading standards we've come up with in Composition. A little like Tantalus stooping for a sip or reaching up for a life-giving morsel, students hand in their papers and editing exams, hoping that this time, maybe, just maybe, their efforts will finally be rewarded with that elusive, apple-bright A for which they all hunger. Most of the time, of course, these hopes have been disappointed.

           
But if the students feel as tortured as Tantalus, few of them have given up on the idea that continued effort will, in the long run, pay off. Of all that has happened during my first few months here at the U. of O., nothing has more impressed me than this willingness in my students to push on through their frustration, to continue reading through my comments closely in an attempt to learn how and where they can improve their writing, to continue working hard on their papers and exams even when the effort has not translated directly into the high marks they would prefer to receive.

           
Such perseverance in the midst of adversity is, of course, a figure for human life. You need not be taking Comp. right now to comprehend my meaning. Perhaps the bane of your existence is an incurably sloppy roommate, or an inconsiderate boyfriend who once again forgot your birthday, or a boss who simply hasn't a clue about what's really going on at work. Perhaps you're tired of eating Top Ramen seven nights a week because OK Food Market hasn't had a good sale on Macaroni & Cheese in a long time. Perhaps, horror of horrors, you are simply a Chicago Cubs fan. Whatever your special burden in life is, you have had to learn to shoulder it and move on, not letting it drag you down, not letting it hold you back. Whatever your special burden in life is, whether monstrous or trivial, you have had to push on with it in search of those rare moments, those rare experiences, that inspire and re-inspire you to realize that the intended end of your labors does in fact justify the often-tedious or -difficult means.

           
Last August, when I received the letter from Dr. Stephenson inquiring my willingness to participate in this semester's Chapel Series on Inspiration, I was flattered, of course, but also a bit apprehensive. Inspiration, you see, at least as the concept is typically invoked, has become something of a sore spot with me. Most of the movies, books, and speakers who, it was promised to me, were inspiring have turned out, in my experience, to inspire little more than waves of nausea. One of my personal versions of hell -- and there are many, let me assure you -- is to spend eternity listening to one of those inspiring movie soundtracks scored by schlockmeister John Williams, who, with his endlessly swelling violins, shamelessly attempts to jerk our tears and touchy-feely our emotions into submission, the musical counterpart of a group therapist reaching out, all greasy fingers and inane smiles, to hug us, Stuart Smalley with a conductor's baton. Whatever level of heaven Carpenter is trying to transport me to with his music, he succeeds only in sending me to the shower to cleanse myself of the effects of his tawdry inspiration.

           
In my experience, legitimate inspiration is a rare and precious commodity, that singular life-buoy of an A amid the sea of C+'s that would, did we grade our experiences, flood the report cards of our lives. Moreover, inspiration does not merely happen; it must be sought -- actively, passionately, and eagerly, with a purposefulness and a brutal sense of honesty that few of us manage to maintain. A few weeks ago, Dr. Cater noted in her Chapel talk that the word 'inspire' means, literally, to breathe in. What that means, among other things, is that it is up to the inspiree to detect and absorb inspiration -- not the other way around. If you want legitimate inspiration, you have to go looking for it, wading your way through a lot of drek before you find the prize.

           
Recall now that list I read to you at the beginning of this talk. A few weeks ago, I took those four celebrity names and the word inspiration and, one-by-one, plugged them into the Internet search engine WebCrawler. According to this search, there were 5,417 documents that represented themselves, in one way or another, as possible sources of inspiration. Now, I did not personally proceed through the list to see which of the designated links might actually provide some inspiration, but I guarantee that if you did so, you would, long before you reached the bottom of the list, give up on the futile quest in favor of looking up a few of those Brad Pitt or Jenny McCarthy links. Legitimate sources of inspiration are, like legitimate A's, hard to come by.

           
But let me add that, also like A's, sources of inspiration should always be sought with all our hearts, all our souls, and all our minds. Its very rarity is precisely what makes inspiration so worth seeking. If we did take the time to proceed through those 5,417 Internet links, we in fact might find one or two sources of inspiration, however wearying the search. Similarly, if students do continue to read the assigned chapters in their books, if they do continue to pore over their teachers' comments, if they do continue to work and re-work the drafts of their papers before handing them in, they will find, at some point, that the effort does pay off. And what they will learn in the process is not only that the end justifies the means, but also, and perhaps more importantly, that the means justifies the end, that finally the pot of gold itself matters less in the long run than the labor of love we have undertaken in making that seemingly ceaseless journey to the end of the rainbow.

           
Hopefully, presumably, one of the main reasons you chose the liberal arts education we offer here at the U. of O. is a desire to learn how you can detect the true sources of inspiration that life has to offer us, no matter how subtle, how rare, how nearly undetectable they may be.  Professors and students of the liberal arts cling to the faith that human life does not consist of lists of numbers and facts to be memorized -- a method of learning that turns us into mere mental machines, data injected into our crania for no greater purpose than automatic ejection a few days later on a test. Rather, we spend our time studying paradigms of human existence -- the forms, concepts, and structures that have reappeared throughout history and in all human cultures -- in an effort to learn what it is that makes us human. In a favorite phrase of my alma mater, uncoincidentally a small, private liberal arts college itself, we proselytes of the liberal arts learn how to learn. Anyone can memorize 1949 as the key year that the current strife in the Middle East began, but it is the liberal arts scholar who can take the next step in understanding and explain the roots of this strife in the psychology of religious territorialism, in the context of tribal impulses that have lent a violent character to human interrelations from time immemorial. This latter knowledge is more subtle and certainly more difficult to acquire, but in the long run, it is by far the more rewarding, the more fulfilling, and the more interesting mode of knowledge.

           
A friend of mine once told me about a game he and his girlfriend used to play in airports. They would pick out a passerby and decide what sort of a reader he or she was. They had three categories: newspaper-reader, magazine-reader, and book-reader. As you might guess, it was a rare passerby who made it out of the first two categories. Book-readers, like A's and inspiration, are hard to come by, and yet this is precisely what we liberal arts teachers would like to make of you liberal arts scholars. One of the main reasons Dr. Strain and I decided to junk the old Comp. I format in which the only thing students were asked to read was Time magazine is that it's really a waste of your preciously short time in this class and in this liberal arts institution to assign you cheap glossy magazines to read whose articles amount to little more than specially-packaged filler to take up the space between the slick and highly profitable advertisements. Our job as your teachers is to introduce you to those rare experiences that do not tie themselves relentlessly and narrowly to a specific historical moment, experiences that touch not your momentary, passing moods but rather that human essence buried deep within you that so precious little of our mass market media are even aware of, much less that they touch upon. Polls increasingly show that you will read newspapers and magazines entirely without our help, but not books, especially not books that will stretch you, books that will break you down, exhaust, and finally educate you. So our job is to help you learn how to approach such books, how to seek out and benefit from such experiences; our job, in short, is to help you continue stooping and reaching and striving for that elusive but legitimate source of inspiration. The process is difficult, the price of admission quite steep, but in the long run of your lives, the rewards will be greatest with this more trying method. If, in your four years here, we can teach you to learn from Plato and Locke, from Da Vinci and Picasso, from Mozart and Telemann, from Newton and Einstein, from Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, then we can send you off with your diploma happily knowing that you can tackle anything a silly newsweekly can throw at you.

           
This personal investment we teachers have in you students is easy to overlook or even, if it is misunderstood, to resent. It is easy, as a student, to look on the tests and the reading assignments and the papers and the lab reports and the presentations as little more than terrible burdens, unreasonable demands we instructors make on you merely for the sake of justifying our paychecks. Perhaps some of you have heard of Dr. Strain's nickname -- Frankenstrain -- the sort of nickname that is, by its nature, best taken in vain. The names of teachers from hell are quick to circulate every college campus.

           
But as the good Dr. Strain would be the first to tell you, this endearing nickname of his is a bit misleading, or, at the very least, easily misunderstood. Those of you who have read Mary Shelley's original novel Frankenstein know that the name refers not to the terrifying, homicidal creature who in fact never acquires a name, but rather to the young medical student, Victor Frankenstein, whose misguided attempt to create a new and better form of life only succeeds in ruining his own. When Victor Frankenstein looks on the creature he has brought to life -- so different from, so woefully short of the superior being he has envisioned -- he is repulsed, turning away, thereby sealing the first link in the disastrous chain of events that ensues. The creature becomes an outcast and Victor Frankenstein, the would-be Creator, his eternal enemy.

           
Although our methods differ, we all as teachers are, in one way or another, emulating Victor Frankenstein's goals. Although we do not seek to create you students from raw material, we do -- like Mary Shelley's ambitious scientist -- attempt to mold, shape, and finally improve you, our charges, to ensure that you leave our courses and our college better people than when you entered. The process is not easy, but the stakes are high, and so, correspondingly, must be the demands we make on you. But none of us -- not even us sadistic stalwarts in the English Dept., not Frankenstrain, not Dr. Sieg Heil, not even I, Walter the Hun -- makes these outrageous assignments or dreams up these impossible tests or pores over your papers relentlessly in search of comma splices for any intention other than the only one we teachers will ever acknowledge or hew to: namely, to help you improve.

           
This is finally what inspires us as teachers: the opportunity to foster within you students the means of a creative, independent, and self-sufficient knowledge upon which you can build an enriching, a fulfilling life. In this enterprise, we mimic not only Victor Frankenstein, but, at the furthest remove, the original Creator himself, who, as we read in Genesis a little while ago, breathed the breath of life into the original human beings in the Garden of Eden. The second chapter of Genesis provides us with the original scene of inspiration, for not only does the term mean to breathe in, it means also, quite literally, to acquire life, to attain spirit, to take that last crucial step from a crudely physical existence into a life characterized by mind and spirit. In-spire: to take in spirit, to animate, to come to life. This is what makes us human; this is why we can say that we are made in the image of God.

           
Belief in the liberal arts requires that we teachers seek the liberation of that part in you students -- that most gloriously human part -- that is too often confined by the mundane circumstances of life, that we show you how, where, and why we humans have been and can continue to fulfill our original promise as the spit-and-polish image of God. This is certainly the approach Jesus took with his disciples, transforming a collection of whiners, hypocrites, and social rejects into the best darn debating team in the whole Mediterranean basin. Perhaps no teacher has ever been faced with a more discouraging role call than Jesus. There was Thomas, the doubter, the tragically-hip, black-leather-jacketed toothpick-chomper who always sat in the back of the class, arms unimaginatively crossed, mirrored sunglasses perched imperiously above a fixed scowl, much too cool to do anything but look scornfully at all those rubes who actually believed what Jesus was telling them. And then Jesus had to look around for those terminally tardy frat-boys, James and John, the Sons of Thunder, which, as one preacher I heard years ago put it, is the kind of nickname you get for branding racing stripes into your camels; however that may be, you certainly don't acquire that nickname because you like to stay up all night studying for your editing exams. And let us not forget Peter, brown-nosing, Arnold Horseshack-wannabe Peter, always the first with his hand up, always begging Jesus to call on him so he could blurt out the answer and look better than his classmates, the same Peter who would so miserably fail his mid-term exam (as his teacher predicted), denying Jesus three times on the eve of the Crucifixion. And yet, out of this highly unpromising class of disciples came one of the most improbable success stories in human history. It was these same highly unpromising pupils who -- with the aid of a healthy dose of the Holy Spirit -- a healthy dose, in other words, of inspiration -- founded the Christian church some 2,000 years ago -- and the world (to use a comic book cliché) has never been the same since.

           
We have several of our own improbable success stories here at the U. of O. A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure to spend two-and-a-half-hours of a Saturday afternoon at my first Board of Trustees meeting. Now, I won't say it was boring, but I will say that, after the first fifteen minutes or so, I occupied myself with mighty efforts to find something, anything, in the various presentations that could inspire me to continued consciousness. Near the end, one particular item did make me sit up and take special notice. Apparently, the beautiful fountain which, with this venerable chapel, stands as the centerpiece of the campus, almost never came into being, a near-victim of our thinly-stretched building funds. But fortunately, the powers that still be on this campus pulled together some resources to ensure, at no small strain, the completion of this marvelous figurehead. When you walk out of chapel today to face the fountain, consider its enormous importance as a symbol of endlessly renewed, endlessly inspired life. The water climbs upward toward heaven -- never reaching it, of course, and in fact falling over and over again flat plash to its face on the hard concrete below. But it recirculates, never coming to a complete halt, never succumbing to the urge to dormancy, making its way around again finally into the path of the jets to be shot once again heavenward, though it cannot reach, though it cannot stay. Water, the stuff of life, seethes and roils in the fountain, animated by the jets, groping the sky with slippery fingers, enduring down time only to rise violently and hungrily into the air again. In the sheer unlikelihood of its existence, the U. of O.'s fountain is a fit figure for our inspiration.

           
But be warned: if ever you develop a taste for difficult, enriching books, you may never be able to return to those cheap magazines. If ever you discover the wonders of intellectual paradigms, you may never bother to memorize another meaningless statistic. If ever you find -- unlike Tantalus -- that the water of inspiration finally stays (even just this once) for your trembling touch, don't drink it -- unless you are fully prepared for the consequences, unless you are prepared to spend the rest of your life shunning mediocre substitutes for the real thing, unless you are prepared to experience the gnawing pit at the center of your being that will not be filled by anything less than representatives of true spirit. Don't drink the water, unless you are prepared to come aching, gasping, and groping to life -- life in all its daunting and demanding inspiration.