my professor

On Twitter, my friend Matt Thomas has been retweeting students who tells us about their professors. (He’s just been searching “my professor" and RT'ing the more interesting results.)

According to my professor, unicorns exist. I'm running with that.

My professor is saying we are robots. Ok.

My professor told us today that we should have sex with hundreds of people & then have open marriages so we can have even more sex.

My english professor comes in 5 minutes late with a poptart singing and dancing to prince.

Also, it seems, many, many teachers have decided to lead off the semester with references to twerking, just to show that they know what’s what. I guess.

I was chatting with Matt and others about what all this tells us, and while it may give an indication of just how lame — how clueless, how vapid, how trying-too-hard, how not-trying-hard-enough — many American professors are, I’m not convinced. To be sure, I'm totally convinced that a great many professors are indeed lame in just these ways; I'm just not convinced that the tweets are reliable evidence of that fact. (I don't think Matt is convinced either, and he's not presenting the tweets to prove a particular point.)

After all, how many of these tweets can be assumed to be accurate transcriptions? I mean, maybe your professor said you should have sex with hundreds of people, but maybe you were texting someone when he prefaced that with “Some people think.” And by the time it became clear to you that he wasn’t in fact telling you to have sex with hundreds of people, if it ever did, the tweet was already out there and why take back something funny and interesting?

So I’m just wondering how much of this is a game called “Sh*t My Prof Says.” There’s no way to know, of course; but I’m wondering.

And I also think of the times in my life when I have misheard or half-heard something and then preferred the error to the truth — as did the English novelist Henry Green when he grew increasingly deaf. Once he thought an interviewer was asking him a question about suttee and was quite disappointed when it turned out that the word in question was “subtlety.” The world of real speech was never quite as lively as the one his bad hearing enabled him to imagine. Distraction can have the same effect on us, can it not?

In this context I find myself thinking of Richard Wilbur’s great poem “Lying,” which begins,

To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Your reputation for saying things of interest
Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,
Nor will the delicate web of human trust
Be ruptured by that airy fabrication.
Later, however, talking with toxic zest
Of golf, or taxes, or the rest of it
Where the beaked ladle plies the chuckling ice,
You may enjoy a chill of severance, hearing
Above your head the shrug of unreal wings.

From there he moves on to the lies of poetry, and ends with an invocation of the small event that became the Song of Roland. Forget about Twitter for a while: read it.

advice to a prophet

My post a few days ago about natural signs received an interesting comment from Julana. She is wondering whether, if indeed we do largely lose our knowledge of the natural world — our very ability to name the things of Creation — we will also lose much of our ability to make metaphors. As it happens, there is a very wonderful poem by the great Richard Wilbur on just this subject. It is called “Advice to a Prophet.”

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us?-- The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding Whether there shall be lofty or long standing When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.