We’re finishing up conference season. Another teacher at the school where I work has a conferencing practice I like. She has a conference with each of her students before she talks with parents. She tells her students (who are 7-ish) some version of most of the things she’ll tell their parents, in language that will make sense to them, and asks for their impressions and suggestions about the class. As well as fostering trust with the students and giving her a sense of how each student processes his or her own learning, this extra step gives her more material for the parent conferences if she needs it. I think I’ll do this next year.
I was struck, during my own conferences, by what a strange and good thing it is to speak clearly about another person. Each soul is its own universe, governed by a separate calculus. It’s why I love studying my students, but I also recognize (because I feel it too) how lonely it is to be the only person who is you.
Words can push our little universes closer together. These discussions with parents are a holy exchange, a casting of telegraph lines across the expanse, a linking together.
Walt Whitman was our class poet last semester, and when it comes to this issue no one says it better:
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
I found myself wishing, during conferences, that I could have a teacher’s conference about myself. Don’t pull any punches, Counselor, Friend, just tell it to me straight. How’s my handwriting these days? Where am I slacking off? How about social integration? I think this is what I was trying to say in my last post about evaluation. Life is muddy enough, and the separateness of each soul profound enough, that the truth about ourselves through another’s eyes becomes a relief and a help. Robert Burns has this one:
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!
If I could have my honest conference, though, on second thought I don’t think I would like it very much. Children get less privacy, but rarely do we pull away each others’ masks and postures with such clarity as adults, and look underneath. There’s a reason for that.
It seems to me that bloggers in Christian spheres can’t write two posts before pivoting around C.S. Lewis. Well, I’ve made it about twelve, but here goes: the end of Till We Have Faces. Orual has raged herself sick at the gods, asking why, if they exist, they will not speak to her, why she has been left to stumble in ignorance and live the consequences of her own actions when a word or two would have saved her from grief. This is where she gets to in the end:
“When the time comes at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk of joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
“Having a face.” That’s an interesting way to put it. Orual spends most of her life hiding behind a literal mask. Her face is not beautiful, but when she hides it she can make people imagine it might be. Sometimes we’ve hidden ourselves behind so many layers that no one can have an honest conversation with us. It would be too painful and we wouldn’t believe what they told us. The only other road to truth is a slow wending through our own consequences, a peeling of the layers.
This American Life had an episode a few weeks ago about the harshness of online communication. In one of the stories, writer Lindy West voiced her hurt online at a particularly cruel trolling incident, and the troll contacted her to apologize. She asks him in an interview why he did it. He says a lot of interesting things, but it comes down to this: never having seen her face or talked with her, he hadn’t thought of her as a person.
Writer and cultural analyst Stephen Marche published an article in The New York Times last week about the connection between “facelessness” and online trolling. He says that there are neuroscientists who posit a link between the human face and ethical behaviors as well as philosophers who claim that the face is the origin of human identity, that from it come “the sense of inevitable obligation, the possibility of discourse, the origin of the ethical impulse.” Of our newest innovation in the art of masking ourselves–the internet–Marche says, “the new facelessness hides the humanity of monsters and of victims both.”
Yesterday was Transfiguration Sunday in the Christian calendar. The stories that go with this day are weird. When veils are stripped away, it’s clumsy human attempts at intimacy and honor that stand out in the story: Elisha begging his boon and the comically literal Peter with his shelters. When reality reveals its sublimity, just like when it reveals its ugliness, we seek to draw reality back to some middle ground that we can comfortably inhabit. Human kind can’t bear very much of it, says T.S. Eliot. I think this relates to what Marche says about online trolling. But let’s read a larger bit of Eliot’s poem:
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Right after he says the thing about us and reality, Eliot says that all possible and actual events “point to one end, which is always present.” On the mountain, in the way of truer truth, Moses and Elijah, men who died centuries before, talk face to face with Jesus. The truest realities about our souls exist outside of time, which is part of the reason we can’t bear much of them, bound as we are to the temporal.
That’s what makes conversations about identity holy. In parent/teacher conferences, we are brushing against beings that will last forever. It’s best to speak respectfully of their formation. And as to my own conference, it’s possible that my whole life is a conversation with my teacher about what I am to become, a casting of lines across the expanse, with moments of clear vision here and there when my face is stripped of its mask and his face shines like the sun, but only as many as I can bear.
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CC image courtesy of Ricardo Liberato on Flickr.