Gospel & Universe ❤️ Three Little Words

Teacher

The Apple Cart Before the Horse - More Uncertain than Socrates

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The Apple Cart Before the Horse

After eight months of spinning the apple in the air, the college teacher gets his four months off to read, to sleep, perchance to dream.

During this time the notion of teaching transforms itself, from explaining and marking essays, into something else;

the world of ideas no longer seems like a classroom with four walls and long lines of fluorescent tubes — but the very zeitgeist of the sun!

Apollo himself, dressed in an Athenian robe, pulls light downward into the cylindrical bodies, down from the heavens.

Crisp as the Doric sun comes Thought, lifting the bored eyes from the tedium of the medium of the present age.

Ideas now burn with solar precision, as if a magnifying glass had set fire to that exact spot where kindling sparks from a dull desire, and students are reborn as deities: Be ye therefore as gods!

The hall of learning explodes in apocalyptic reverie, and the heavens meet the sea, and in Eden there's a dryad perched on an apple tree.

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With rested eyes he sees the lavish gifts: disciples praise, eyes brimming with thankful tears, and a cartload of gleaming apples. Macintosh apples beaming in his Scottish soul.

He takes the top one and bites into it, as it perches on Mount Seymour covered in a caramel coating, like the latte that glides down his throat in this café

as he reads through the day, watching the world work, and walk, and honk and smirk — but he's reading about Dante and thinking about how he'll raise them all

from this world of dirt to the Heavens above, clinging to Beatrice’s skirt.

During these four months he forgets what it'll be like in the second month of the coming term,

when he’ll chew through the pulp to the spongy worm. 

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More Uncertain than Socrates

Later in your teaching career (long passed youth and university, where you explored with the expectation that you'd discover) you discover that you know almost nothing

and the more you learn and the larger you understand the universe to be, the smaller becomes that part of you that knew, till it becomes a particle in the Heisenberg physics of uncertainty

and then you find yourself in front of a classroom, trying to explain Camus to a field of young faces, like poppies blowing in the wind on a July morning, row on row

for the only thing you can think about is death, and how Marvell was right: the grave’s a fine and private place / but none I think do there embrace

and the only thing you can tell them with honesty is that you have some statements and some reasons, but no Answer

only overwhelming questions and a wariness of the capitalized Answer, or any capital letter that isn't a proper noun, in a title, or placed at the start of a sentence,

for if all you have to do is, then we would have done that already;

love is the finest thing, but it isn't the only thing;

and if All we need to do is place more specimens beneath the microscope, then we would have seen the truth by now,

so you give up writing words like hierophany or Age of Enlightenment on the blackboard, and you talk instead of Heraclitus and unraveling

and of the million visions and revisions and telescopes and microscopes yet to come, and of freedom of inquiry and of the beauty & angst of disillusionment.

Also, on occasion, you talk of one other thing, which is no thing at all: the Daoist path, which is no path at all, but is fashioned by the footprints you make

and by the enjoyment you take in covering them up with maple leaves and cherry blossoms,

and in pretending that you barely exist. 

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Next: Montaigne’s Balance

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