Thought, Speech, Action, Action, Speech, Thought

The term Aseret HaDevarim (which for some reason at some time we changed to Aseret HaDibrot) appears in the Torah in three instances: Shemot 34:28, Devarim 4:13 (where it says shnei luchot, opening up the idea that each side has its own theme), and Devarim 10:4.

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Not sure why but I am thinking a lot about the Aseret HaDibrot this year. It is striking to me that they start with thought, continue with a bit of speech, then contain a lot of action and then return to speech and finally end with thought. Besides everything, this represents to me the idea that action must be at the center of our lives, our service of G-d. One could also argue that thought/feeling comes first and last, but the primary message here seems to be to strengthen our action muscles.

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Maybe this chiastic structure of the Aseret HaDibrot is also a model for our daily behavior. We should think things through and then articulate and scrutinize our thought aloud and then act to the greatest degree possible. Then it is time to again talk through and process what we did and finally rethink what we have done.

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Speaking of Torah, last week Aviva Zornberg had an original comment (synopsized here) about the image of being carried by G-d on Eagle's wings. Her take is that this phrase represents what Kundera calls "the incredible lightness of being." We view our lives as kaveid - heavy and think of ourselves in terms of kavod - honor. Truly, G-d carries us. We are much less weighty than we think.

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Zornberg has a related, out of the box, thought about the death of Sarah. Traditional homiletics has it that the satan appeared to Sarah and started telling her the story of The Akeidah. Before he got to the happy ending, of the angel staying Abraham's hand, Sarah thought her son was dead and she died from shock. There's another medrash and in this version Yitzchak himself appears to Sarah and tells her the story. And she dies from shock. It's a little hard, but not that hard, to understand why Sarah died within this scenario. Her son was standing before her, alive. Everything was OK. What shock was there to die from? Zornberg feels that Sarah died from the realization of the precarious nature of life. Her son was almost lost to her, a thought she had never before - and couldn't - fathom in her life. The shock of staring the fragile nature of life killed Sarah.

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It dawned on me today that when Yitzchak married Rivkah, and we're told that he was consoled over the loss of his mother it relates to the above. Yitzchak was shocked when his mother died from shock. He too was struck by how we all hang by a thread. He grabbed a life preserver, a wife and the potential of new life. He was then relieved of a little of the heavy pain of the incredible lightness of life.

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The following has been burning a hole in my diary for the last two weeks. As another day of teaching and of life approaches I share this with you. Miss Kenny's poem is one of my favorite things.

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To what extent is a joke ever just a joke? The old hurtful, hurt induced jibe followed by, “Just kidding,” is perhaps only the most famous example of the aphorism that “In all jest there is truth.” They say that we can learn a lesson from the order of the parshiot Achrei Mot, Kedoshim, and Emor, because it describes what people sadly do. After someone dies they say how holy they were. I first heard that as a wry, funny – but not ha,ha – line. Then I heard it as a directional; after someone passes we should focus on the positive.
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During shiva I encouraged people to ask me questions about my mother. Perhaps no-one did a better job at this than my students. Lev asked if I ever wrote a poem about my mother. I told him that I wrote some adolescent poems and that the truth was that during her life I never wrote the positive poem that she deserved.
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There was a poem that my mother’s high school teacher gave her after graduation. My mother cherished it and gave it to me and I copied it. I cite and speak about it here. It’s a positive poem that I think of when I think about teaching and how my mother, a dedicated teacher, “got it.”

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..........My Coronet
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If I in my daily contact
....... Of school days spent with you
Have taught you
.......To live content with small means,
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
.......Refinement rather than fashion,
To be most worthy and respectable,
.......To study hard, talk gently and act
......................frankly,
To listen with open mind and heart
.......And grow up to be all that you should:
Cheerful, brave, and true
.......To G-d, home, and country;
Then I shall have completed
.......The setting of another tiny jewel, with
..................care
Into the crown of my life work.
O
FRANCES G.V. KENNY

Sunday Sunday Seven

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Errata And Other Word Related Words

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Someone got to my blog yesterday by searching the lyrics "I am high above the altar". This blog is the only result that comes up if you do it that way in quotes. It was in a post of lyric quotes. I did the quote from my head (and it seems someone out there heard and remembered it the same as me). The actual quote is "I am high upon the altar." I regret any inconvenience caused by the mistake.

The following is a popular tongue twister used by actors to warm up and practice elocution. I learned it in an acting class. The teacher said she used this in order to practice pronunciation, but for a different reason as well. We learned it in pieces over time, and the point was to show us how manageable it can be to memorize difficult lines.

It's from Merrie England a 1902 comic opera by Edward German which was filled with wordplay.

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What a to-do to die today, at a minute or two to two;
a thing distinctly hard to say, but harder still to do.
We'll beat a tattoo, at twenty to two
a rat-tat-tat- tat-tat-tat- tat-tat-tattoo
and the dragon will come when he hears the drum
at a minute or two to two today, at a minute or two to two.

Wordplay brings to mind this "Nonsense Song". Posting this poem prompted an email response from a reader who wrote about remembering this song/lullaby from his childhood. That reader recently passed a remark about my spelling. I've said it before and reiterate. I work hard to get spelling and other grammatical and editorial concerns right. If you see something say something - to me. Please comment or email me directly and specifically so I can correct errors.

Join this blog's team. Correct errata. Post comments. Contribute posts. Solve mysteries. Share your publishing related acumen.

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On Teaching

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Not that many years ago a teachers' (and a sitcom's, but that's a whole other post - seriously) role was to convey an approach to life, which included courage, courtesy, bravery, loyalty, and love.

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The following poem was given to my mother at graduation. The woman who wrote this was a science teacher. My mother rightfully cherishes this memento which speaks of country but wasn't written by a History teacher, which speaks of bravery but wasn't written by a life coach, which speaks of G-d but wasn't written by a clergyman ; this poem, which was written by the teacher who wasn't a poet, backed on cardboard by the teacher who wasn't an artist, presented dramatically by the teacher who wasn't an actress, given to each student individually by the teacher who wasn't a social worker. Miss Kenny viewed herself as a teacher, which ideally includes all that's included in her poem.

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Today this poem would fall somewhere between pretentious and weird to compose and present a poem like this. Who talks like this today? Who writes poems like this gives them to others? This was what a teacher once was, what a teacher is meant to be.

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..........My Coronet

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If I in my daily contact

....... Of school days spent with you

Have taught you

.......To live content with small means,

To seek elegance rather than luxury,

.......Refinement rather than fashion,

To be most worthy and respectable,

.......To study hard, talk gently and act

......................frankly,

To listen with open mind and heart

.......And grow up to be all that you should:

Cheerful, brave, and true

.......To G-d, home, and country;

Then I shall have completed

.......The setting of another tiny jewel, with

..................care

Into the crown of my life work.

O

FRANCES G.V. KENNY

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_________________________

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On Writing

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I think I'd like to teach writing. I am extremely pleased that others have started writing poetry, particularly haiku,under the influence of me and my blog. I believe in poetry. I believe that it is part of being spiritual, and part of being human.

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An older Y.U. musmach once shared with me the take of an old and famously sharp YU Rebbe on poetry. He described a beautiful forest and a perfect sky, birds chirping and flowers all around, a path that winds until it finally ends at a magnificent pond. According to this rabbi - who is a poet? A poet (he named a name) is someone who stand be in the middle of this scene and think that he is the great center of the picture as he stands and urinates.

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I disagree with that view in both content and form. And I believe that G-d does too, and that G-d passed on a poetic tradition, a song that we call Torah. Not all poetry is Torah, but I think all Torah is poetic. And I think that poetry enhances and even saves lives.

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Some people say that reading and writing poetry is not for them. Well, I say that exercise is not for me. Recently someone told me that I should do push ups and I said I can't. He told me to get down and try. I did two or three. He told me that if I did that small amount (which was infinitely more than I admitted to being capable of) for a week I'd then be able to do more. True. I have, with my own soul, seen people write one haiku and realize what they can do.

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The other day I found myself on the L.I.R.R. next to a young man with a Mead notebook. He was working on his novel by very slowly writing a few words and rereading and rewriting and then thinking a lot more. I asked if he heard of the approach of my teacher, the approach of throwing up on the page. He said he was taught that but couldn't do it. I say it's like exercise, just write as much as you can - and then next time write more. Eventually you'll write a lot without even breaking a sweat.

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Upcoming blogposts brewing: How my father has influenced the way I teach, write , speak, Tracy Kidder and Me, My Life As An Improviser, and more. Please G-d.

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An Old Time (Sic) Blog Post

I wrote here about an insightful video on stress. I never know what to write or where to write it.  I'm not sure how or why this blog started and/or why I keep it up.  It's interesting to me how quickly the personal blog, along with the simple cell phone, became old.

A few years ago my dad (HSLABW) shared a stack of letters with me from his army era years. It was a different time. People wrote letters.  These backs and forths between friends were filled with thoughts and words that were simmered on the stovetop, not nuked in the microwave.  There were jokes, and updates, questions and answers.  There were words that were carefully strung together by real people in real time.

Which brings to mind a poem that I shared with consolers, during Shiva, sitting in the basement of the house i grew up in. A former student from my school, a brilliant young man, who was never in my class but was my student, went home and looked for this poem online.  He found it, on my blog, several times.  That's it.

This is from a time when science teachers wrote poems about circumventing luxury, being respectable. listening openly, being true and brave to G-d, man, and country, and of jewels in the crowns of one's life's work. Sigh.

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..........My Coronet

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If I in my daily contact

....... Of school days spent with you

Have taught you

.......To live content with small means,

To seek elegance rather than luxury,

.......Refinement rather than fashion,

To be most worthy and respectable,

.......To study hard, talk gently and act

......................frankly,

To listen with open mind and heart

.......And grow up to be all that you should:

Cheerful, brave, and true

.......To G-d, home, and country;

Then I shall have completed

.......The setting of another tiny jewel, with

..................care

Into the crown of my life work.

O

FRANCES G.V. KENNY

I write this at the start of a day and the end, not the very end, the hard part of the end, of a school year. The thing with the school year is that at the start it's hard, then the middle part is hard, and then at the end of the year- yeah, it's a hard part of it. (Not to mention in too much detail  that this has been a particularly stressful and also meaningful year for me an the personal/familial front.) Teaching and counseling are challenging, and fulfilling, meaningful, spiritual, rich, and great.  I thank G-d for well over 20 years in a wonderful field and I look forward to more. I am grateful for the improv and poetry clubs I run, for the Torah and regular guidance I do, for the teaching of a variety of Limudei Kodesh classes and of a class in the English department, for the Mishmar class, the vaad class, for everything. 

Please G-d, bless me and everyone with rich lives of continued health and continued  growth in this world (it's been said that not only do we each have a share in the world to come, but also in this world), stress and all.

Have a good day, and may G-d bless.

Put An X On My Forehead

This story (interview here) has gotten my attention. I have many thoughts about it that are not yet congealed.  And yet.  I want to write this now...

We live in selfish times.  That's the fact, though it's not often stated that way, and I wish that at the moment I felt like saying it more kindly.  We are less respectful, less considerate, less loyal, less of most everything that makes us more human and less animal than we once were.

While I feel that I have shared this poem many times here, it's been only four.  And the last time I posted it here, though it seems like a second ago, was eight years ago, almost to the day:

..My Coronet

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If I in my daily contact

....... Of school days spent with you

Have taught you

.......To live content with small means,

To seek elegance rather than luxury,

.......Refinement rather than fashion,

To be most worthy and respectable,

.......To study hard, talk gently and act

......................frankly,

To listen with open mind and heart

.......And grow up to be all that you should:

Cheerful, brave, and true

.......To G-d, home, and country;

Then I shall have completed

.......The setting of another tiny jewel, with

..................care

Into the crown of my life work.

O

FRANCES G.V. KENNY

This poem was written by my mom's science teacher and given to each student when they graduated eighth grade circa 1950. It is a remnant of a time when regular people wrote poetry in praise of high and accepted standards of contentedness and respectability, gentleness and frankness, bravery and truth, G-d and home and country, and crowns of life's work. It was a time when no-one thought of using their phones during a play because it was not only physically impossible but because it was morally unthinkable.

It's the fourth Yahrtzeit of my mom.

She kept this poem, given to every middle school student by their science teacher, who wrote it.

She gave it to me.

....

My Coronet

If I in my daily contact
....... Of school days spent with you
Have taught you
.......To live content with small means,
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
.......Refinement rather than fashion,
To be most worthy and respectable,
.......To study hard, talk gently and act
......................frankly,
To listen with open mind and heart
.......And grow up to be all that you should:
Cheerful, brave, and true
.......To G-d, home, and country;
Then I shall have completed
.......The setting of another tiny jewel, with
..................care
Into the crown of my life work.
OFRANCES G.V. KENNY

That Article On Nabakov

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com
Cultivating a writer's rich past

Published April 10, 2005
claire hopley
on Vladimir Nabokov's
speak memory

Autobiographers dance onto center stage trailing clouds of glory. Lowering their masks everso slightly, they unfasten a ribbon so a veil or two falls away. The audience settles back warmed by visions of succulent secrets that will soon be theirs. But autobiographers are not in the business of revealing all.

Like striptease artists, they aim to entrance, revealing much of interest, but always keeping some chiffon and sequins in place. And after all, when the autobiographer is a great writer, who needs warts and all? Admirers who want to know what fueled their books can learn as much from their styles of representation as from life's nitty-gritty details -- titillating as these may be.

Nobody has ever been more fastidious about what he disclosed than Vladimir Nabokov. His "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited" (1966) collects a number of essays written and published in other forms between 1936 and 1951. Much worked over for republication in this book, they flit around his life from his birth in St. Petersburg in 1899 through the Russian Revolution that took him to England and Cambridge University in 1919, then into exile in Germany and France, and finally to America in 1940.

The chapters are arranged chronologically, but Nabokov often swoops ahead or looks behind, drawing curtains over many events and brushing others aside. But the events are not central. As the title suggests, the autobiography is about memory, which Nabokov lovingly cultivated, not least because it fostered connections.

He recalls General Kuropatkin making patterns of matches to amuse him as a child. An aide delivers a message; the general jumps up, and the matches scatter. Fifteen years later while fleeing from the Bolsheviks, an elderly man asks the Nabokovs for a light. It turns out to be the general disguised as a peasant. Nabokov reflects, "What pleases me is the evolution of the match theme: those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through. . . . The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography."

To spot "thematic designs" Nabokov surveys his life as a sunlit scene shaded by drifting clouds. There's an imposing townhouse, chauffeured cars, a silvery river, a pillared mansion, boys cycling down the lane, kerchiefed peasant girls kneeling barefoot to weed the flowerbeds. This is the landscape of a childhood spent in the family's St. Petersburg mansion and their estates in the country.

The eldest son of a noted jurist who campaigned against the tsarist government, Nabokov grew up cosseted in the luxuries of great wealth and the adulation of his family. When he was 17 an uncle left him a 2,000-acre property plus an amount equal to two million dollars. It had little effect. "Against the background of our great prosperity no inheritance could seem very conspicuous," he writes. In any case the year was 1916 and revolution was about to sweep inherited riches away.

Much more important, both as a child and as an adult, were his interests and skills. Brought up trilingual in Russian, French and English (he could read English before he could read Russian), he began writing poetry as a boy. He also began collecting butterflies and pursued them throughout his life, becoming in the 1940s a research lepidopterist at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

In addition, he taught literature at Wellesley College, and from 1948 to 1959 he was professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell. Before this, he has already made his name as the most talented of Russia's émigré writers. Unable to support a family on works written in Russian but not published in the Soviet Union, he contemplated writing in French, but chose English when he emigrated to America as the safest place during the Second World War. He compared this change to that of "a champion figure skater switching to roller skates."

His wife, a professional translator, insisted that having perfected a "very special and complex brand of Russian, all his own," equally he tamed English into "something it had never been before in its melody and flexibility."

Great wealth allied to great talents honed by stringent experience as an impoverished émigré in interwar Europe -- does this explain Nabokov's achievements? Only somewhat. Many people are talented, but none has combined mastery of the modern novel in both Russian and English with significant achievements as a poet, translator, critic and lepidopterist.

For the key to Nabokov's art, one mustturnto "Speak, Memory." It shows Nabokov's delight in memory as the source of joy. Recalling his uncle rediscovering some childhood storybooks and of himself finding the books years later, he explains, "I not only go through the same agony of delight that my uncle did, but have to cope with an additional burden -- the recollection I have of him, reliving his childhood with the help of those very books. I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." Clearly, for Nabokov memory stabilizes the ephemeral -- just as literature does.

The immersion in memories and the love of "following . . . thematic designs" made Nabokov a novelist of doubles, parodies, illusions, and puzzles rather than snapshot reality. His work is full of facets and reflections. Describing his passion for butterflies, he says "From the first it had a great many intertwinkling facets." As a tiny child he adored his mother scattering her jewels on the bed so he could enjoy their prisms. "I was very small then and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to be hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fetes," he recalls.

He loved the stained glass of a garden pavilion where at 15 he sheltered from a storm and was seized by the muse of poetry. "The sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip relief -- the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes."

Like quicksilver drops, stained glass windows, faceted diamonds, Nabokov turns dull everyday stones into brilliant festival jewels. "Speak, Memory" repeatedly catches him in the act. Describing his mother's return from picking mushrooms, he depicts her "Emerging from the nebulous depths of the park alley, her small figure cloaked and hooded in greenish-brown wool, on which countless droplets of moisture made a mist all around her." Her mushrooms redolent of the damp woods, she is like Mother Russia, nurturing and transcendent.

In another evocation of his country, Nabokov waves his wand over a snowy scene and the moon appears at his command: "For one moment, thanks to the sudden radiance of a lone lamp . . . a grossly exaggerated shadow races beside the sleigh, climbs a billow of snow and is gone . . . And let me not leave out the moon -- for surely there must be a moon, the full incredibly clear disc that goes so well with the Russian lusty frosts. So there it comes."

Looking back to 1909 he describes playing cards on a train whose windows reflected the lock of a suitcase. Suddenly he is an elderly man. "On this gray winter morning, in the looking glass of my bright hotel room, I see shining, the same, the very same, locks of that now seventy-year old valise, a highish, heavyish necessaire de voyage of pigskin, with H.N. elaborately interwoven in thick silver under a similar coronet, which had been bought in 1897 for my mother's wedding trip to Florence."

It is tempting to call this nostalgia. But while the reader luxuriates in nostalgic homesickness for the never-experienced vanished life of wealthy pre-revolutionary Russia, Nabokov scorned compatriots who mourned their lost riches. He never returned to Russia. "What it would be actually to see my former surroundings, I can hardly imagine," he writes after describing a teenage love affair. "Sometimes I fancy myself revisiting them with a false passport, under an assumed name. It could be done."

But there was no need. Nabokov's past remained fresh and bright as memory "gather[ed]to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past." Paradoxically, then, the power of Nabokov's autobiography is not that it tells all about his life, but that it harnesses recollection to manifest the magic of the world. One does not have to be a great novelist to do this; one simply has to cultivate Memory, known to the ancient Greeks as Mnemosyne, Mother of the Arts.

Claire Hopley is a writer in Amherst, Mass.