Chapter 11:
Of Tectonic Rifts


 Six hundred feet under Lincoln, Nebraska, there is something called a tectonic rift, a place where the continent once began to pull apart. It created a seam 30 miles wide and as much as 3,000 feet deep running from Nebraska northeast through Iowa, along the Wisconsin border, then under Lake Superior where it curves south through Michigan and ends somewhere around Detroit. A short arm runs under Thunder Bay and up into Ontario. Since it was formed in the Precambrian, when there were no fossils, it can only be dated by isotopes, but those isotopes say the rifting began about eleven hundred and eight million years ago, when the earth had been around for three- quarters of its time since its beginning. It went on for about 22 million years and then stopped. The rift filled in during the Precambrian and was covered over during the Paleozoic. You cannot see it from the surface but on maps that measure the gravity and magnetic fields of the North American continent it is, says John McFee, “the continent’s single most prominent feature.”

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For Judy, the place was a bad experience right from the start. We came east in a rented U-Haul with a dented roof that popped in the wind. To calm the boys, Judy would say, “King Kong and Godzilla, stop fighting up there.” She was sick when we arrived, but even before we took her to the doctor, we managed to buy a house--a drafty barn of a place--for $13,500. I grew to hate that house and was happy to sell it six years later for $28,500, enough to pay for the divorce and some accumulated bills. It’s had two major makeovers since, but I still get sad and angry when I drive by it.

 Once we got the furniture unloaded, we got Judy to a doctor who wanted to do a hysterectomy practically on the spot. We had read (or she had read) that premature hysterectomies were part medicine’s condescending attitude to women, so we found a doctor that would do a less invasive surgery.

So within three days of arriving in Minot in a U-Haul with a dented roof, we had purchased a house, Judy had had an operation, I had taken a bus to Bismarck to pick up our car (I had hired students to drive it there from Seattle), we had gotten Brian enrolled in school and Marc enrolled in a pre-school at the Lutheran church, and I had started teaching. Ah, to be 35 again.

I can remember finally having an hour to sit and read, pencil in hand, and feeling as if healing oil were being poured over me. The book as I remember was something called Education and Ecstasy, by George Leonard, published in 1968. I could get a copy from Amazon.com now for one penny, plus shipping. I think it was to be part of a course I had committed myself to teach, on The Literature of Educational Reform, that also included Emile and Whitehead’s wonderful collection of writing on Education, called The Aims of Education.

That was how the experimental college worked: teachers could invent new courses every term and post the titles and brief descriptions on the wall. Students would enroll by signing their names. If no one signed up, you invented other courses. There were six of us on the staff full-time: one in American Studies, two in Earth Science (not counting the director), one in Psychology, one in Math, and me. EC had its own suite of offices in the basement of Pioneer Hall, the original dormitory on campus. I had a huge office of my own where I was expected to do much of the teaching. The whole thing was funded by a half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation who had become persuaded, in the climate of the time, that a new generation of earth science teachers could spring from an environment designed to use all the alternate pedagogy then available.

And since the experiment would not be valid unless the students’ general education were also experimental, students also took their 60 quarter hours of generals from people like me. Some exchange with the regular college was allowed: students could take their generals with us and concurrently major in something besides earth science, taking their upper-level courses in the regular college. Since the regular college general education requirements were fairly highly structured and included college-level algebra, many students took advantage of our services who would not have been able to pass the regular college general ed courses.

We had a few students (perhaps a half dozen) for whom the program had been designed: bright, independent, well-adjusted, relatively free of drugs or radical ideology. Four come to mind: Bill Stevenson and his girlfriend Sandy,  Steve Fogarty and his girlfriend Jody. Both couples later got married. Steve and Jody still are.

We had more that lacked one or more these characteristics. Acid was the drug of choice for some. One young man, bright as they come, talked in double-speed monologues laced with incoherent references to legitimate literary and scientific classics. He brought a large German Shepherd to most of the classes. I heard later he stopped using and had enough brains left to get a two-year certificate as an electrician. God bless him. Another refused to read the Gita in my course in Hindu Literature because, through acid, he had “already had the experience it was trying to communicate.” He did offer to bring acid to class so the rest of us could cut directly to the chase. Another student, evidently one with a trust fund, was gone to California a large part of every term, attending one self-discovery “institute” or another: Rolfing, Transcendental Meditation, and the rest of it. He was killed by a falling tree in a woodlot near Minot, in circumstances said to be mysterious. Besides these memorable classes of students, we had a core of good, solid, North Dakota students who did their homework and tried to be helpful.

I arrived at the beginning of the second year of Experiment College. There was no curriculum. Teachers were expected to invent new courses each term, posting the titles and brief descriptions on the wall outside our offices. Students enrolled by putting their names beside the courses. If no one signed up, you invented other courses. This was no problem, for in those days I could summon up a half-dozen titles that would bear, however superficially, on any topic.  Some of the courses I remember teaching included: The literature of birds (The Hitchcock film of that name, and Emily Dickinson’s “I saw a bird come down the path”), The Literature of Urban and Rural America (John Cheever, Hamland Garland, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson), Hindu Literature in Translation, The Writings of Carlos Castanada, The Nature of Language (team taught with the mathematician), The Work of Buckminister Fuller (in which the students, guided by Bill Stevenson, built a geodesic dome), Zen Buddhism, The Literature of Mysticism (Blake, St. John of the Cross, Julia of Norwich), Letters as an Art Form (the letters of James Agee, the epistolary novel Humphry Clinker, Saul Bellow’s Herzog), The Literature of the Journal (Thoreau, Henry James, Camus), the Literature of Rebellion and Revolt (Camus, Dostoyevsky). There were plenty of opportunities for “independent study,” and there was a rumor, never fully disproved, that a student had gotten credit for hitchhiking to Chicago and keeping a journal. I myself gave credit to students who attended the Writers’ Conference in Grand Forks and kept a journal. There were endless geology field trips, some to places as far away as the Grand Canyon, but I didn’t go on those.

When I retired, I had a file folder with notes from every course I had ever taught including the dozens from the Experimental College. I evidently threw them all away. Only two I wish I still had. One was a year-long (three-term) course called Image and Value. It developed an insight in which I still believe: that values are expressed in images and that images in turn shape values, often unconsciously. The image of the machine, for example, becomes a constant thread in human thought beginning with the industrial revolution. It was not accident, we taught, that Calculus was invented in the in two places simultaneously in the 17th century, which as obsessed with change. The course was built around a half dozen paired concepts. Within each pair, we chose readings from many different genres and periods: permanence and change is one I remember. In it, our mathematics professor (Jim Senft) presented on the historical origins of calculus while our geologist (Clark Markell) told about the “cataclysmic” theories of the earth’s origins; a guest speaker talked about cockamamie interpretations of the book of Revelation, while I taught excerpts of D.H. Lawrence’s little screed on the same topic. I don’t think I have ever had more fun teaching anything.

The other was a course in the Literature of the Great Plains. I am sure we must have given the students handouts of two poems about the prairies, Emily Dickinson’s “To Make a Prairie,” and Roethke’s “Prairie.” The Dickinson poem is one of her “calendar poems”: fay, sentimental, gnomic:

To make a prairie
it only takes a bee
and reverie
And reverie alone will do
If bees are few

Roethke’s poem “In Praise of Prairie,” is not as famous as Dickinson’s, but I like it just as well. It ends:

The field stretch in long, unbroken rows
We walk aware of what is far and close.
Here distance is familiar as a friend
The feud we kept with space comes to an end.

But the centerpieces of the course were three books. One was Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, which I had first read in 1968. It’s big book, nearly 600 pages, one of the few big books high school students are still required to read in the Dakotas. It tells the story of Per Hansa and his wife, Beret, who come from Norway to Minnesota and then eventually to the Dakota Territory. Per, persistent and stolid, thrives, while Beret withers away. He is willing to find new ways to live: when the crops fail, he trades in furs. He does what he has to do: when he finds homesteading stakes inconveniently set by previous immigrants, he simply moves them. Beret is at first outraged, then broken at this violation of the sacred codes of the old country. He feels the endless sky as liberating; she feels it as an oppressive dome. He sees the emptiness of the land as opportunity; she looks around and declares, “Why there’s not a single thing you can hide behind.” She takes to cowering in an empty chest, brought from the old country. Per’s best efforts to cheer her up are not enough. The analogy with my own marriage could not have been more painfully drawn if Rolvaag had been living in my house taking notes.

 Only at the end did our stories diverge. Beret insists Per fetch a minister to attend to the spiritual needs of a neighbor. He goes, knowing he will die in a blizzard, and he does. So the story can be seen as tragedy: Beret sacrifices herself to Per’s values when she comes to the Great Plains. In the end Per sacrifices himself to her values when, at Beret’s insistence, he sets out in a blizzard to fetch a minister to perform rituals he does not understand or believe in. It is O Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” all over again. But, since neither Judy nor I could or would sacrifice ourselves for the other’s values, our story never reaches the book’s level of tragedy. This is probably just as well.

Willa Cather’s O! Pioneers I had read as part of another western Lit course, at Seattle. It tells the story of Alexandra, an intelligent lady who finds ways to bend her intelligence to the rhythms of the Great Plains, though she loves Carl, a restless man who seeks his fortune in the big city. She recognizes that “pioneers must love the ideas of things more than the things themselves.” She chooses to farm the wide prairies rather than the rich but confining river bottom. She plants an orchard. By taking the long view, by cutting her losses, by steadiness and thrift, she survives and even thrives.

But she wants something more for her brother, Emil, so she exposes him to the education and urbanity that she never had. He reads himself in to an obsession with the idea of romantic love and cuts himself off from pioneer values. He is unwilling to love the ideas of things more than the things themselves so when he falls in love with a married neighbor they die in each other’s arms from the husband’s shotgun blast in the orchard Alexandra had planted. If it is not too much of a stretch to say that I came to The Great Plains as Emil and slowly became Alexandra, then Cather’s book is part of the reason and I am grateful for it.

Each of these books went some distance toward bringing me in to harmony with the Great Plains, but Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow finished the job. I found the book before I left Seattle, in the remaindered bin of a bookstore. I had read a couple of Stegner’s books over the years –The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Angles of Repose--and I knew him to be a solid, quiet writer who had thought a lot about what it means to live in the West. As I reread the book now, it seems a bit overwritten, the lyrical prose too often forced. But at the time, it was what I needed. He does not write about the Dakotas or even about the United States, but about the prairies north of Montana in Saskatchewan and a little town called Whitemud. I think I must have photocopied the first and last essays of the book, because, rereading it, those are the two I remember.

The first, called “The Question Mark in the Circle,” is the most lyrical. In describing the dialogue of earth and sky on the Great Plains, he says:

And whatever the sky may do, however the earth is shaken or darkened, the Euclidean perfection abides. The very scale, the hugeness of simple forms, emphasizes stability. It is not hills and mountains which we should call eternal. Nature abhors an elevation as much as it abhors a vacuum; a hill is no sooner elevated than the forces of erosion begin tearing it down. These prairies are quiescent, close to static; looked at for any length of time, they begin to impose their awful perfection on the observer’s mind. Eternity is a peneplain.

My students and I both had to look to peneplain, but the context makes the meaning clear: “a nearly flat land representing an advanced stage of erosion.”

A little later comes a paragraph that I can almost recite:

It is country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones. At noon the total sun pours on your single head; at sunrise or sunset, you throw a shadow a hundred yards long. It was not prairie dwellers who invented the indifferent universe or impotent men. Puny you may feel here and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrows fall.

And so I became a flatlander at last. I did not expect to ever live on the Great Plains. I had assumed I would live near the mountains forever. Like everyone else who grows up in the mountains, I thought of the flatlands as anathema, or at best as something to be hurried across on the way to somewhere interesting. I had seen North Dakota only on New Year’s eve when it was under two feet of snow, so when we turned north off the Interstate at Bismarck, in late August of 1972, I was expecting to drive through something like the deserts I knew in SE Idaho. Instead I found myself driving through a lush garden. Golden fields of wheat spread out from the highway. Huge round bales of hay sat in the borrow-pits, looking like grazing dinosaurs that that been there 100 million years earlier. When we topped one of the low glacial hills south of Minot and saw the lights of the city, one of my first thoughts was “How odd to find a town here. How odd that there should be anything here at all.”

It took a long time, but at last I was given the gift to see empty space as an entity. Heidegger was right: Das nichts nichts. The nothing nothings. Emptiness does something; it becomes a positive quality. Now when I go east into the dark woods or further east into the heady unpredictability of the Big Cities, or west into the mountains, I am exhilarated by the novelty, but I am always grateful to be back where the summer light begins at 4:30 in the morning and is still with you at 11 at night, where the winter light is crystalline above the endless expanses of snow hardened into wave-like patterns by the wind, where the shadow of your car at twilight stretches out across the prairie for a quarter of a mile.

Even after I read these books, I tried to find work on the coast, partly because I was still restless, partly because Judy and I both thought she would be happier someplace else. I applied for jobs all over the country, especially in New England, near the ocean. Some of the job descriptions in the Modern Language Association vacancy lists seemed to have been written by someone looking at my resume: experience in off-beat programs, experience with teaching minorities, training in science. But all the responses came with that fatal opening line: Thank you for sending your application . . .

I had a long history with alternate education. Sometimes I called it that, sometimes I called it romantic education, and sometimes I called it radical education, depending on who I was talking to. Romantic Education rings the most true now.

The distinction between Romantic and Classic, like most distinctions, can become mischievous, but it remains more helpful than many such broad distinctions. T.E. Hulme’s version of it is still the clearest I know. Classicism, Hulme says, sees human goodness as a well. Its natural tendency is to just sit there, so you have to dig hard for it and then draw it up in buckets with considerable effort. Romanticism, on the other hand, sees the human goodness as a fountain: left unhindered, it gushes forth. The only work lies it scraping away debris and then getting out of the way. I first heard the distinction from a passionate but bitter teacher at San Francisco State. Later I found and found a written version in a book called Prose Keys to Modern Poetry.

That distinction seems particularly apt in teaching. Charles Dickens in Hard Times and James Joyce in Portrait of an Artist, offer compelling portraits of monstrous schoolmasters in the classic mode, who beat and berated and bullied their students into learning. Rousseau, in his book Emile, is the great advocate of Romantic Education built on his Romantic proclamation, in The Social Contract, that “Man is born free but he is everywhere in chains.” In my version of romanticism, I used as a mantra the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” This I supplemented freely with another phirase that I am know in in Rosseau but which I think can be found in Aristotle in some form: Knowledge for its own sake.

In some ways, I never stopped living by romantic credos in my teaching. To the day I taught my last class, I believed—whatever the evidence on a particular day--that at the core of every student was someone who wanted to learn, someone who could find learning for its own sake a joy and delight, and that all the evasion, the lethargy, cynicism, sneakiness, and procrastination were just surface features that I was called to “brush aside” so I could continually “reach through” to the “real” student.

Taken as part of the truth and as one half of a paradoxical full truth (and all full truths are paradoxical), romanticism is a viable theory of education. Who would want to be a teacher who did not believe that most students want to know? Who could sustain a career in teaching without the cases of truly curious students who use the wading pools of our classes to launch themselves out into the deep waters of learning.

These romantic assumptions came with a couple of corollaries:

One is that children can and should learn anything the way they learned their native language. In my eight years of teaching English Methods courses for prospective high school English teachers, I never tired of pointing out how easily we all learned our native language, a thing so complicated that brilliant grammarians like Noam Chomsky could work for decades and in the end admit that they could not adequately and elegantly describe what all normal five-year old children learned at their mother’s knee, without pain, without drill--simply by hanging out with their parents, internalizing the system by using it to ask if they could have a quarter for the gumball machine.

Another corollary of romantic education was that motive was everything. We believed that a student could learn something—even learn anything--quickly, easily and with pleasure, if they could be persuaded to WANT to learn it. At its worst, this meant teaching only what the students already wanted to know—how to hitchhike to Chicago, for example. At its best, it meant awakening the latent curiosity of the students by tapping into something they already cared about (how to survive a bad day, how to put on lipstick) and then building a bridge from that to whatever the assigned topic was for the day—the proper use of the semi-colon for example.

Of course, even in my romantic classrooms, students sometimes did not do their homework, or did it superficially, or showed up for class but nodded off, or rolled their eyes when I was making subtle points about Shakespeare’s genius, or mocked my mannerisms, or would not even read the comments I had laboriously written on their compositions, or (even more puzzling) did everything I said and still did not learn the material. When I could not overlook these anomalies, I explained them as the bad habits engendered by years of mistaken education conducted by unenlightened generations of teachers.

Some of my more mature colleagues took a wider view. They said classic and romantic views of education were two sides of the same coin. Some students are eager to learn and some are not. Or they said that the same student could be eager to learn on some days and reluctant on others and that you just have to live with that.

There is wisdom in that, or at least common sense, but I have since become interested in putting things in a wider context. The distinction between classic and romantic maps pretty well on the Judeo-Christian story of the creation and the fall. Man is created good (romanticism) but lives in a fallen state from which he can be redeemed (classicism). In classicism, the redemption comes from discipline; in the case of Christianity, it comes by discipleship—by the systematic and diligent study of and a commitment to believe in what Christian doctrine calls the “kerygma” that is not a set of propositional truths but rather a story: that Jesus, the son of God, inaugurated the kingdom of God thus fulfilling a long-standing expectation of the Hebrew Nation, that he taught us how to live in that kingdom. By his dying and rising again, he authenticated his identity. He changed our relationship to God, and insured us eternal life in His presence.

In the life of faith, that narrative does not compete with other truths but makes other truths reasonable and comprehensible. And without that wider context, any truth can become perverse. By failing to place my ideas in a larger context, I took them too far. I not only believed passionately in my own pedagogy, I adopted the position that all other pedagogy was mistaken or malevolent. I really believed that somehow the whole human race up to the year 1965 had been wrong about most of its social arrangements including the way it ran its schools. I had become imbued with a deep sense of rebellion based ultimately on pride, and pride spread like a stain into every crevasse of my life.

This included—incredibly—pride in being “urban.” In truth, my roots were in small towns, but after 12 years of traveling in the general vicinity of one ocean or the other, I decided I was from Seattle. I would not get ND license plates until the last day I could legally drive on Washington plates. I felt commissioned to enlighten these dour Norwegian inlanders, and for some reason that had to begin with contempt for what they were. While claiming in the classroom to have the deepest respect for my students “as they were,” I held their parents and their culture in contempt. I can think of a handy example: When I arrived the local chamber of commerce has just produced some cheap label buttons, the kind with a sharpened piece of wire that fits inside a crimped metal disk. The words said, “Talk up Minot.” With tape, I carefully modified it to say “Up Minot’s” and actually wore it as I taught my classes. I should have been throttled.

I know I risk becoming tiresome on this subject, but in my mind, I can connect this flaw with my apostasy from religious faith. When I stepped outside the faith in 1957, I declared my independence. That was inevitable and even healthy. But like many adolescents, I pushed independence from my parents to independence in general. I made psychological independence made into an idol that became a comprehensive inner rebellion which ran deep, even though it got expressed in trivial ways--like smoking cigarettes. Cut loose from religious faith, cut loose from any sense of being a creature, cut loose from any sense of indebtedness, any sense of dependence, any sense of gratitude, any sense of being part of a realm that was animate rather than mechanical, I see no reason NOT to be prideful. If all humankind stands alone, prepared to live by its wits, then each individual person also stands alone, committed to live by his or her wits. The only criteria for success are survival and material comfort. From here it is a small step to isolation, arrogance, and even viciousness. Ideas have consequences.

While I taught a demanding though exhilarating schedule of classes, I also worked to “finish my dissertation.” Like most graduate students of the time, I had been hired “ABD”—All But the Dissertation—with the understanding that I would finish it in the first years of teaching. For nearly two years, I mailed drafts of unwieldy project I had begun in Seattle—using Roethke’s notebooks as a case study in the mental instability of poets. The adviser to whom I had been passed just before I left, Richard Blessing, mailed them back to me, covered with sympathetic but dissatisfied comments.

I did most of that work in a damp basement room of my drafty house, sitting on a wooden box at a card table. To get the table to proper height for typing, I put pieces of 2X4 under each table leg. The basement flooded periodically, sometimes from rain, sometimes from sewer back-up. I still have books that are water-stained, including my set of one-volume Shakespeare. All forces conspired to get me to quit. Even my mother said that my parents would love me just as much as an ABD. The college was not, in fact, firing their ABD’s but promoting them up through Associate Professors. I wanted nothing so much as to bundle the whole mess in a pile and burn it. I have in my papers a note an invitation to a “burning of the accumulated drafts of the incomplete dissertation of George C. Slanger, on the lawn of his home at 1327 6th St. SW at 2 p.m . next Saturday.” A colleague of mine did put his dissertation-project in a plastic sack--and waved to the garbage truck that hauled it away.

But my wife reminded me that, yes, I might stay at Minot State as an ABD, but if I ever wanted to get another job, I would need the doctorate. We both assumed that we would move to a place that would be more exotic or hospitable or fashionable or at least different, and the sooner the better. Gamely, she tried to help. I remember at one point we spread the pages of the incoherent mess out on the floor of the boy’s playroom and went through them together, looking for focus, looking for hope. It was a touching moment and I am grateful for it.

Every Saturday night I would go out to my huge office and grind away. For the first time in my life, I used the methodical research methods that were taught in Freshman Composition classes then—every possible point and every possible citation put on one side of a 5X8 card, the cards shuffled into some order and the prose constructed by going through the cards in order. When it wasn’t working, which was frequently, I would lie on the floor and writhe and moan for 15 or 20 minutes, then get up and go to the writing table again.

I thought of myself as a woman in labor, but eventually I came to see it as a purification process. I was sweating the 60’s out of my system. When I began the dissertation, I believed that all writing was a matter of coincident energies, a little like water-witching. If I could tap into the deep resources of my inner self, at the same time attuning myself to the zeitgeist( that is, to the quivering need of the universe for this particular project at this particular time), then the writing would “flow.” Sometimes it felt like it was flowing. If my dissertation adviser didn’t like the result, he was obviously living in a pre-millennial age, blocking the path of the brave new world that was being born. Writing was like sex; If it wasn’t fun, you were doing it wrong.

And parts of those things are partly true. Much of the creative process is a mystery--as much for ordinary mortals as for geniuses. Some writing does flow some of the time. Bob Dylan talks about free associating many of his lyrics. I once heard more than one writer explain his craft by saying, “Things occur to me and I write them down.” Shakespeare could not have agonized his way through King Lear, Othello and Anthony in 14 months by thinking what effect he wanted to achieve in each line or even each scene, though it is possible to come along behind him and see that he has, in fact, achieved particular effects scene by scene and line by line and talk about them “as if” they had been consciously made.

But it is also true that every genre has conventions, and much of writing is turning out a product that follows the conventions. If tragedy is in demand, write tragedy. If you happen to be Shakespeare, the result will be King Lear. If not, not. Academic prose is not tragedy but its conventions have been worked out, for good or ill, over several centuries, beginning with students composing in Latin. In fact, academic prose is a kind of Latin, an artificial language. But artificial languages can be very good things. Mathematics is artificial in this way. The alphabet is artificial. Drawing in perspective is artificial. No one person, even a very smart one, will think of these things on their own. No child would ever rediscover calculus. These languages accumulate over many years, with many geniuses contributing, most of them anonymously.

There are breakthroughs, of course. Perspective drawing was invented in Florence in the 15th century, in only a few months but even that was a joint effort and it rested on centuries of fumbling attempts by others. When I was petulantly stamping my foot and demanding my right to “express myself,” I was like a person standing beside a glacier impatiently beckoning it to flow my way. I was like a spoiled child whose will had to be broken. I had to grow up. Consciously floundering about hoping to “tap into” deep forces was a terrible mistake, born of bad ideas. There was a job to be done, and I wasted a lot of time by not getting to it.

Finally, in the summer of 1974, I got in my Volkswagon and drove to Seattle to have it out with Professor Blessing. For five days, I stayed in a friend’s house and walked back and forth to the campus. Every morning I would show up at Dr. Blessing’s office with a sheaf of pages and he’d read them, and we’d talk. Every afternoon I would write another sheaf of pages proposing a new slant. He kept edging me away from the notebooks, into the poems. “That’s what he’s famous for writing,” he said. “That’s what he published.” On the fifth day, he pointed to a sentence where I had said Roethke’s poems told a story in three chapters, passing from Contamination, to Confrontation, to Contemplation. “I think that might work,” he said. I got into my Volkswagon and headed inland again.

Meanwhile my marriage continued to deteriorate.

There is no point is going to a divorced person for a “fair” account of the divorce. Divorce is evil and painful and the details are best forgotten as quickly as possible. In a nutshell, ours was a 50’s marriage that did not survive the 70’s. The dark clouds of feminism that had been gathering for years closed in. The simplest domestic decisions sprouted tendrils of patriarchy that ran back into the mists of time. At a certain point, counseling might have saved us, but Judy refused counseling on the grounds that all counselors were men. When I found a female one, she said counseling itself was corrupt, since it was based on the work of Sigmund Freud, a man. Check, and mate.

Yet seen from the outside, I was doing fine. My career was going all right. I was married, I had two children. I owned a home. The only problems were internal. My life was in shreds: My marriage was in tatters, I was hopelessly bogged down on my dissertation, I was fighting off fantasies of suicide, I was drifting toward adultery--for in any troubled marriage there is always a sympathetic someone, waiting to offer solace.

In the fall of 1974, I drove Judy to Jamestown for a job interview. While she did that, I wandered into the Raugust Library at Jamestown College and picked up a copy of Mere Christianity from the display case. I recognized it as the book I had shunned 10 years earlier when I was a cocky navy veteran, about to launch what I assumed would be a brilliant career. Standing at the display case, I read this sentence: “Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it. Either marriage with complete fidelity to your partner, or else total abstinence.” I was as outraged as I had been ten years before. “You son-of-a-bitch,” I said to myself. “What gives you the right to say what Christian virtue is and what is not?” But I also knew that my 17-year trek through modernism had led to a dead end, so the next week I went to a bookstore, bought the book, took it up to my office on a Sunday afternoon when I was supposed to be working on my dissertation and read it straight through.

I am sorry I don’t have that copy any more. The margins are full scurrilous retorts written with such violence that they tore the paper. More than anything else I was struck by the Lewis’s tone, which was brusque, straight-forward, business-like, take it or leave it. Here is a sentence chosen almost at random. Lewis has been talking about the existence of a “moral law,” something he examines in more detail in The Abolition of Man.

Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? For his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from the outside, could never hope to discover it.

The same tone that I found so off-putting in 1964 broke my brittle heart in 1974. Reading Lewis is a little like having your ears boxed, but there are times when we need our ears boxed and we know it. Lewis was not selling me Christianity; he was not pleading or scolding; he was just explaining it to me as if he were explaining a machine to a person who had asked him how it worked. He acknowledged there were differences of interpretation but he also made it clear that all Christians agreed on certain things—that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, that He had done certain things that changed our relationship to God, that the main facts of his life were accurately recorded in the New Testament. We were free to accept these facts or not, but if we did, then certain behaviors were required.

I got two things from Lewis that I needed at that moment: The first was the fact that a very smart person can take Christianity quite seriously. Of course I knew about Dante and Milton, but they didn’t count; they didn’t know about science. But that a 20th century man, who had read everything, including all the popular physics of his day, could believe that Jesus Christ was what he claimed to be, was astonishing. It was the old bug-a-boo, book smartness, raising its head again. Book smartness had made my life tolerable in high school and pleasant in college. When it seemed to me in college that the smart people were opting out of God, that is what I did too. I made book smartness into an idol, but I had quite literally outsmarted myself.

Second, Lewis forced me to confront the possibility of an objective, though intangible world. I was riveted by the opening paragraph of the book, that begins: “Every one has heard people quarrelling.” Lewis goes on to construct little bits of dialogue: “ That’s my seat, I was there first.” “Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm.” “Come on, you promised.” Then Lewis comments:

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies, “To hell with your standard.” Nearly always, he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does, there is some special excuse.

Later I got a more compelling statement of this idea from of all people Bob Dylan, who says in the notes he wrote for “Every grain of sand” in the pamphlet that comes with the album Biograph:

There does come a time, though, when you have to face facts and the truth is true whether you wanna believe it or not, it doesn’t need you to make it true. . . That lie about everybody having their own truth inside of them has done a lot of damage and made people crazy.”

Eventually I got to a sentence in Lewis’ book that went something like this: “Anyone can be a Christian for two weeks. If you are serious, try it for six.” I did a little research and found Epiphany was just six weeks away, so I took up the challenge, expecting that I would at least have the satisfaction of having proved this stuffy British writer wrong.

In the next six weeks I did three things: I read through most of the Bible in the only version I had, an old King James that my godfather (my uncle on my mother’s side) had given me when I was 9. I went to church every Sunday, and every night, I said some prayers, however halting. By Epiphany of 1975, I could feel the glacial ice melting inside me, as the frozen landscape thaws at the end of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I knew that whatever else happened, I was going to do those things for the rest of my life. I call this my conversion and note it gratefully on Epiphany Sunday every year,  but you will notice that I was making no commitment even to belief in God, let to alone to Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. I was only committing to go to church.  I was converting to the practice of Christianity, not to its substance. But substance followed practice soon enough, as it often does.  I could not tell you at what point after I started going to church that I came to believe in God, but it was not long.

Jesus came later, and in stages: first to figure of undeniable force, then then--through a little book called The Meaning of Jesus: Two Views, by N.T. Wright and Marcus Borg--to Christ as the New Testament reveals  him and as the church teaches him, who is (somehow) the Son of God, who (somehow) died for our sins, who founded the Kingdom of God, through which we have access, if want it, to the guidance and comfort of the Holy Spirit, to the fellowship of believers, to the accumulated riches of scripture and to commentary on it by the best minds  Western Civilization could produce over 1700 years.

Almost immediately, everything except my marriage began to get better. The next few weeks were astonishing. It was as if all the stars in my mental sky plunged and bucked in the heavens, rearranging themselves into new constellations. I had to rethink everything, or rather, everything had to rethink itself in light of new assumptions. I felt as if my life were quite literally being turned upside down. Instead of the purpose of life being to get what I could, the purpose was to give what I could. Instead of figuring out what I “really” believed, my job was to figure out how to believe what the simplest peasant in the middle ages believed, knowing that Dante and Milton believed the same thing. Rather than seeing the universe as a vast accumulation of accidents, I was called to see it as the breath of God, pulsing with purpose and meaning--things I was learning to call majesty and glory. Instead of reading the Bible as a collection of quaint and bizarre stories, I began to read it as the drama of salvation.

Pain and suffering, which had been the ground of my being since adolescence, became another kind of raw material for God: more clay for the potter. Like any good artist, He will work with what He has. Or in another image, pain was the great emptying: hollow spaces being ground into the surface of my adamantine sin, so they could slowly fill with grace. Psalm 84:5 offers the exact image: “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.”

When I came across Second Corinthins 12:8, I made it the organizing principle of my life: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” In St. Paul’s vision, that had once seemed so abhorrent , the more difficulty there is in one’s life, the more space there is for God to enter it. Incredibly, from this perspective (but only from this perspective) unhappiness creates its own antidote. Carried to its logical conclusion (though nothing should be), it would seem impossible for a person of faith to be unhappy. Gradually it dawned on me that almost all our unhappiness results from the failure of the world to meet our needs. When we feel as if we have been betrayed, it is the world, not God, that has done the betraying..

Other images flourished: Pain was something passing through my life; it was not my life itself. The conduit was created good and then redeemed by the suffering of God himself. As bad water can through a pipe and sweet water come along later, so depression and self-hatred could pass through my life and leave my life intact. As Christ rose again from his suffering, so I would rise from mine. Pain could be seen as going somewhere, as having work to do. The shallow rationalization of Roethke’s episodes offered by a ditzy German analyst—that episodes of suffering could be periods of disintegration followed by “integration on a higher level”—became true when (but only when) translated into the language of faith.

With the dissertation, I was starting over practically from scratch, but at least I had a plan, and I was beginning to have a life, and the rest was just grinding it out. I set myself a quota of two hand-written pages a night. If I didn’t meet the nightly allotment, I got up at 5 in the morning and did them. If I didn’t do it either time, I fined myself $2.00 and wrote a check to the Salvation Army each month for the accumulated fine. I remember my oldest son looking at the page of the chicken scratch and saying, “So many mistakes.” From the handwritten drafts I would do typed drafts and send them to Dr. Blessing, who approved them pretty much as I sent them in. I paid a secretary at the college a dollar a page to type the last draft on an IBM Selectric. It did not have spell check, so the word “lizard” got into final draft with two z’s, and one of my committee members was kind enough to point that out--the only comment he made. Dr. Blessing thought the work good enough to send to an academic publisher whom he thought might consider a rewrite as a book, but I assumed he was just being kind. What publisher would consider a book by a person who could not spell lizard? Besides, I was sick to death of Roethke.

I finished the dissertation in the spring of 1976. I once went to the shelves of the Suzallo Library and found it, though I trust it is now mercifully reduced to microfilm. A copy sits on my shelf at home. It still is not a very good dissertation, but it is the best one that I could write, and I am forever indebted to Richard Blessing (since deceased) for digging it out of me at great pain to us both. The focus is almost irresponsibly narrow. At my defense, in the spring of 1976, someone on my committee pointed out that I had not done much to Roethke in the wider context of American poetry. Dr Blessing gently let me off the hook by claiming he has insisted on the limitation. He tried to imply that I could have supplied the context had he let me off the leash, but we all knew that I did not know very much about the wider context of American poetry, despite having taught and taken courses in it. My scholarly skills, by nature, are limited, though luckily adequate for the paths into which I have been guided.

With those limits, though, the work is solid. It shows how a half-mad poet disciplined himself to produce a body of work and was a conscientious teacher as well. It shows how the early poems are haunted by abstraction, and it documents this precisely, by analyzing his use of the definite article, “the”--as contrasted to the indefinite article “a.” The definite article, you see, only seems to refer to one particular thing: the umbrella, the pencil. But with repeated use, in the absence of any actual thing to look at, the definite article creates icons. Consider a Byzantine icon, were the figure of the Virgin is meant to be “The” virgin, not “a” virgin. In the same way, in an (underrated) poem like “Dolor,” Roethke’s sad pencils and paperclips are presented as icons. He does this, I argue, to counteract a personal sense of contamination, which drips from his letters and notebooks and the fact of his mental breakdowns. In some ways, these early poems seem to be his finest work. They stand with a small but important body of poems by madmen: Cowper, Collins, Chatterton—men who, but for poetry, would have perished early and unknown and miserable.

The second stage, confrontation, is an attempt to explode the statuesque, frozen tableaus of the early poems. He does this in three ways. First, he has a series of very unpleasant, sneering anti-bourgeoisie poems, like “Suburban Lament” and “Suburbia: Michigan.” Second, he writes a remarkable series of poems based on detailed memories from his childhood, when his father owned a greenhouse. “Root Cellar,” for example begins:

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and dripped
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

Third, he invents a language that one might imagine spoken by an infant, or even one unborn. Section 3 of In “the Long Alley,” for example goes like this:

Stay close. Must I kill something else?
Can feathers eat me? There’s no clue in the silt.
This wind gives me scales. Have mercy, gristle:
It’s my last waltz with the old itch.

Though I do not quite say so in the dissertation, these efforts seem more interesting than successful.

If the first poems are thesis and the second phase antithesis, then the third stage is synthesis. The last poems return to conventional forms in two ways. One is to personal experience flatly rendered in long Whitmanesque lines, as in a poem like “The Storm”:

Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.

This is poetry by a creative writing teacher who has been reading too much of his students work: literalism marred by strain.

A more successful synthesis occurs in the iambic, rhymed poems modeled on Yeats, like the justly famous “In a Dark Time” that converted me to Roethke in 1964. It begins:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade
I hear my echo in the echoing wood
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den

 
This last poem is the only one that ever memorized itself into my consciousness. I have, alas, a pretty bad memory for literature. It was better when I was young, but even then I had to be sure that I had reread the material just before class. This poem, though, I can recite chunks of even now. Yet it too seems false in the end: The line I found most compelling the first time I heard it--“What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance”—seems both to epitomize Romanticism run amok and to summarize my own tours down the blind alleys of the 1960’s.

I have hardly read a Roethke poem since I defended my dissertation. That often happens with the subject of a dissertation. The effort kills the affection that drew us to the subject in the first place. Yet I do not want to seem ungrateful or dismissive. Ted Roethke has been an inspiration and I owe him much. He beat back the darkness in his way, as I have done in mine. It may be that he and I are not done with each other yet.

About the time I was finishing the dissertation, it was clear to everyone that the Experimental College was only a blip on the financial and cultural landscape. Lucky for me, they looked around for ways to keep me on staff. The newspaper advisor/journalism teacher had died about the time I came, and the student editors, left to their own devices, had run amok. I had some journalism experience. I had worked on the high school newspaper and in college had written an insipid column called “Once Small Voice.” I had started and edited a little ship’s newspaper on the EDSON, and at Columbia Basin, I established a literary magazine, call Gravel. Currently, I was editor of a little house organ that was originally called The Journal of the Experimental College. It was supposed to showcase the exemplary work that was destined to flourish in the utopian conditions the College supplied. That exemplary work never quite emerged, but I put together a staff, gave it a sassier title (The Ten O’Clock Scholar) and produced a readable little sheet every couple of months built around themes such as marriage, aging, or money. Each issue had handsome cover that Judy designed. I wrote something each time, either defending the Experimental College or on the chosen theme. I still have a stack of those around and take some pride and pleasure in going through them.

On the official college newspaper, my job was to clean up Dodge, and I did it quickly enough and fairly painlessly, riding the tide of normalcy that was flowing back into the academic world in the mid-70’s. It was a kind of work I had done in the Navy—using simple administrative procedures (newsletters, regular meetings, weekly schedules) to produce a conventional product on a reasonable deadline.

Most human activities seem to arrange themselves into a weekly rhythm, though oddly, the 7-day unit does not correspond to any astronomical cycle that I know about. I worked out a routine where assignments were posted the day the paper came out (on Wednesday) turned in a week later, edited Thursday, printed Friday, laid out Sunday afternoon, and so on week by week, with a predictable product emerging,  just like at church. The yearbook was the same, though it ran on a yearly cycle. There was the momentary satisfaction of looking at a little slice of codified reality--a thing done-- and then quickly putting our shoulders to the wheel to start it on its next cycle.

I was blessed with a succession of talented and resilient editors which whom I became close friends: Mike Vaughn, Joe DeLorme, Tom Nelson, Craig McCormack, Avis Rhodes, Jane Kostenko, Ellen Crawford. Some of them are my friends yet, after 30 years. One Sunday afternoon in the spring, after the paper was laid out, some of us shared a six-pack, sitting in Joe DeLorme’s Volkswagon bus, parked on a hill overlooking the campus and town. One thinks of such moments with profound gratitude, Wordsworthian spots of time that create an emotional deposit that one can draw upon for decades. Two or three would almost be enough to build a life on. Almost.

Besides producing the newspaper and yearbook, I was also the college’s first Public Information Officer—producing a sheaf of press releases each week with items about recent and up-coming events. I typed these on an IBM Selectric, edited them the edge of illegibility and handed them to a secretary, Diane van Laningham, who turned them into flawless copy that we mailed out to every radio station and newspaper in the area. When a college darkroom was about to be discarded, I persuaded the college to move it to some storage space near my offices and learned how to develop pictures. As the pictures were emerged in their tray of chemicals, I worked my way through The Portable Greek Reader, edited by W.H. Auden, holding the book up close to the red darkroom light. I found a small offset press rusting away in a back room and had it hauled up to the darkroom area. I hired someone to fix it up and teach me how to run it, and I began to print promotional brochures.

I also taught journalism classes. I had never taken a journalism class in my life, but I had liked throwing myself into new material, learning it on the fly as I prepared for each class. I especially liked the layout and design class with its arcane formulas for estimating column inches and for counting headlines to make them fit. I loved the specialized vocabulary-- picas, offset, linotype, slugs, plates, blankets, point-size, Helvetica, Garamond, cyan, magenta. I loved the precision and efficiency of the special magnifying glasses and rulers, and used them with affection as I had my slide-rule 20 years earllier.  Computerized type-setting was just coming onto the scene and I showed the college how we could easily pay for new equipment with what we’d save by setting our own type. The technology was hopelessly crude by today’s standards, but we made it hum.

With the dissertation done, things were supposed to get better on the marriage front, but they did not. Judy got a job at the college but agitated for her rights until she was fired. She taught some art courses part-time and found she liked that, so she started work on an MFA in Bozeman, living with her parents alternate semesters. When she was gone, I was a single parent, though we did not have the name at the time. I learned simple cooking skills, how to shop for children’s clothes, when a fevered child should be taken to the doctor. As I had since we were married, I went to the Laundromat every Sunday night, but now I took the boys along. I never owned a washing machine until I married the second time. Incredibly, Judy and I raised two babies in cloth diapers without a washing machine. I preferred that to making payments. In fact, I enjoyed the quiet and read all the way through Ford Madux Ford’s four-part Parade’s End while I was waiting for the clothes to dry. The boys went to aftercare, though we did not have that name either. We got through it. At every opportunity I would drive with the boys to Montana where they would see their mother. In the evenings, and she and I would have terrible scenes. In the last 30 months of the marriage, we were apart 16. When I began dwell on the location of my hunting rifle and its ammunition, I knew it was time to act. I threatened to file for divorce if she did not make an appointment with a counselor that week. She did, but we were long past counseling.

If marriage were not such a vital and sacred thing, its dissolution would not be so painful. The death of simple things is easy. When people say at their marriage, “Until we are parted by death,” they are not kidding. Marriages do last a lifetime, and every second marriage is haunted by a ghost that can be kept at bay only by humor, charity, and the strength of the new vow taken with seriousness born of bitter experience.

My lawyer urged me to surrender custody of the boys, and I did. “If you want to fight for custody, you can do that,” he said, “But you will spend all the money you have, and all you and borrow, and you will drag your children through hell, and you will lose in the end.” So in August of 1978, I rented a truck and loaded it up with a few pieces of furniture—she did not want much—and many boxes. She did not want to do much packing, so I did most of it. She took the bus and the boys rode with me in the truck. The roof was not dented and did not pop in the wind, but if it had, there would have been no one to say, “King Kong and Godzilla, stop fighting up there.” In Bozeman, I unloaded the endless boxes into her parents’ basement while she puttered about upstairs. When I went up to say good-bye, she stood at one end of a dark hallway and I stood at the other. “I’m sorry,” we both said. Then I got in the truck and drove back to North Dakota without stopping. At three in the morning, there was a spectacular display of Northern Lights.