On Walt Getting Dummer

Walt started the day confessing how not being in school has made him dumber, and unintentionally (I’m assuming), reminding me that the same is true of me. I thought about commenting on his post, which would’ve probably been the right thing to do, but instead decided to think it through in my own post.

My short response would be: “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about, wh. And I think, maybe, having one or more small children makes you dumber too. Anyway, good thoughts on being a novice after being a master. Oh, and my spelling has gone downhill ever since I quit working for McGraw and being forced to look up any misspelled words in quickly written phone messages.”

“Pregnancy brain” is a real thing, you know. Documented, studied (though never conclusively found to be anything more than perception). But what they don’t tell you is that “infant brain” is worse.

Words are my thing. Short of trying to capture how intensely I feel about something/someone, I’ve never had trouble putting my thoughts together into cohesive sentences and speaking or writing them (though I’m admittedly better at the writing part).

But now? I say things all the time that don’t make any sense. The day after Caelyn was born, my friends Amy and Jonathan came to visit us in the hospital. Before they got there, Chris asked me why they were in DFW. I think I said, “stop by” and that’s it. I thought an entire sentence and only said that part of it. Then they got there and I kept doing the same thing.

You’re probably thinking, “That doesn’t count. You had just produced another human being from your body.” And if you’re in the know, “You were on major pain meds for the c-section.”

Those are reasonable thoughts. I thought them too and then I got home and spent the next 21-months not making sense.

I say the wrong word for something these days, know I’ve messed it up, and try to fix it, only to shuffle through another five words before finding the right one or just plain giving up. I’m far more likely to say part of the thought that’s three slots ahead of the one I’m actually speaking. Almost every single night, I ask Caelyn what she wants for “lunch, breakfast, lunch, snack, gah!!! dinner!” Not too long ago, I asked Chris for a Breath Buster. For me.

But having a kid is just part of it. It’s no coincidence that giving birth coincided with my quitting my job only a few years after earning an M.A

Walt talked about how higher education is about developing a skill and how he doesn’t actually use the skill he honed in his new farmer/dad/husband/home owner life. I agree with it being about developing a skill and, let’s face it, I’m not using my honed skill either.

And there’s a parallel to his having been a “master” in divinity and now a novice in farming to my having been a “master” in creative writing and now a novice in motherhood. (Master in school, novice in life — sounds like a good lesson plan to me.)

But there’s a decent-sized difference between Walt’s education and mine, besides the fact that an MDiv is probably a lot harder to earn than a master’s in English/Creative Writing. I’d think that the MDiv is a little more pointed, career-wise. Obviously, not everyone who obtains one goes on to be in “official” ministry, but I’d guess that a lot of classes are taught with the notion that its members will. That’s not so true of English/Creative Writing or even my undergrad, Communication.

There are plenty of jobs you can finagle with these degrees. But, in my experience at least, no professor teaches the classes with those careers in mind.

It’s about language. It’s about relationships. It’s about humanity. It’s about art. It’s about creating. It’s about immortality.

But, while literacy is a valuable skill in almost any profession, it’s not about career.

I’m not complaining. That list is pretty much a list of the things that are the most important to me and that I believe have lasting value. But the fact remains: my degrees are made for academia-lovers.

They didn’t prepare me to teach. I used my experience as a student and the knowledge I obtained in school, but the actual ability to teach just had to come built in. My degrees didn’t prepare me to be an editor or a copywriter or a proofreader. I never even took a grammar class. I used my experience teaching grammar and writing creatively on the fly for those jobs, but received no actual training in any.

Still, they did help me hone a handful of skills — expressing thoughts and feelings, publicly presenting information, listening, maintaining interpersonal relationships, developing arguments, critical thinking, literary analysis, rhetorical analysis, writing, and making poetry. But the longer I don’t use those skills (yeah, yeah, I’m using them right now), the harder it is to use them well.

And, like Walt, that makes me sad.

And afraid. Especially with poetry.

Poets are afraid anyway. They’re terrified and adrenalized by that surge of inspiration — the way it comes out of nowhere and then grows stale without any explanation. They don’t really understand where poetry comes from and when it arrives, they’re almost always surprised by it. So they can’t ever be certain they’ll keep writing good poems, no matter how many they’ve written in the past.

We poets are emotional beings, you know. Or at least the ones of us living as (Enneagram) Fours are. The push-and-pull phenomenon doesn’t stop with relationships. It crosses over to writing too. I can start the day exhilarated by writing and end it thinking I know nothing about good writing and never will.

I am a master and a massive idiot all in the same day.

And I’m not alone.

It’s a phenomenon noted by almost any poet who’s willing to be honest about creating poetry — the lot of them prefer to keep their image and their craft in the mystical, magical dark. Even guys like Philip Levine and Donald Hall have fessed up to it.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find it even in those who refuse to discuss it. It’s in their poetry. At least once, every poet lets that fear creep in. He probably even writes a poem about it.

Mine is “The Poet Contemplates Cancer,” which starts out:

At first, we believe it can be avoided
through a lifestyle as steady and unforgiving
as the driver who knows he cannot swerve
to miss the dog in the road.

The “it” specifically is cancer and its unbiased attack on almost everyone who lives long enough, which the persona relates to by comparing the cancer patient’s passing the time till death to a poet, resigned to waiting for the Muse to call. So, of course, it’s also the “cancer” that consumes the inspiration described in the middle of that poem:

Something in the way morphine drips
into the bloodstream, finding its path
through the forearm’s most defined vein,
resembles the manner of inspiration –
the way bursts into a writer’s system.

And the fear I’ve been talking about is obvious by the end:

Lying in bed, he wonders
what leads the body to turn on itself,
cancer easing into bones, as gentle
as a cliché slipping into a poem,
jaws unhinging, swallowing words whole.

It’s no coincidence that the title of that poem is a bloomin’ cliché itself. The poem kinda is too and I don’t love it, so I’m not about to give you the whole of it. (You gotta be one heck of a poet to write good poetry about poetry.) But it illustrates my point about fear and poetry pretty well.

(Side note: that poem started out being about ennui and a man and a woman meeting in front of a painting in an antique shop. “Jaws unhinging, swallowing words whole” is the only original line.)

You take that fear and add in not writing anything worthwhile in a couple years and things start looking downright hopeless.

Did I mention Fours are awful dramatic too?

PS — In case you missed it, this post is more or less just a restorative exercise.