The Day My Students Wondered: "Who Might Affix My Head to a Spike?"

Recently, my students finished reading Lord of the Flies, and I had them perform this thought experiment: What would happen in an all-female retelling of the novel?  My students hadn’t heard of the proposed movie remake, so thankfully their thoughts were all their own.

It’s strangely interesting to watch students stare at their peers and wonder, “Who would cut and tear my flesh, affix my head to a spike?”  Their responses ranged from the silly to the macabre, the sexist to the mundane.  Some argued that the girls would have lacked the survival skills necessary to survive, while others contended that the girls would have collaborated with ease, finding a more truly democratic means of maintaining order.  Some painted a picture of kumbaya-singing solidarity—a complete reversal of what transpired with the boys.  A few conceded that the girls would have splintered into factions and suffered from bitter infighting like the boys, but most maintained that the girls wouldn’t ultimately stray into violence.  In the words of one, the “white savagery” that steered the brutal path of western history was only the curse brought by men.

We all laughed at the shared responses, the thought experiment easy to brush off.  In the end, my students did not, as Capote put it, regard each other strangely, and as strangers.  As we read this novel, we grappled with the essential question of who we are.  We read of Jack leading his tribe in the brutal pageantry of violence, sharpening their sticks into spears as they chant, “Kill the pig! Split its throat! Spill its blood!”  We discussed the horror of when this “demented but partly secure society” finds a safety valve for its fear in a communal act of violence. 

But this violence felt remotely distant from our white-tiled classroom in cozy Northwest Arkansas.  After all, the novel is itself a mere thought experiment, based on data from a world war far removed from our own time.  At least, we hope it’s distant.

Still, in many responses students hinted at real twinges of pain suffered in these early years of their life, mostly from the young women.  In their descriptions of the splintered factions and betrayals, I saw the broken friendships of their junior high days.  In their descriptions of violence, I saw the imprint of a cruel and often violent world on their impressions of human nature.  These responses reminded me of all the pressures these students have to bear, unspoken and often unnoticed.  That in their eyes life can feel as savage as life on Golding’s island.

Books of My Life: Part Two

"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."                       - The Wizard’s First Rule 

So many books have left their inky traces on who I am, yet the next book I want to highlight stands out as a seminal turning point in my reading life.  In Middle School I began to dabble in those longer fantasy tomes housed in the other side of the bookstore.  I began with works like Terry Brooks’s Shannara series and the Dragonlance trilogy. 

But the book that hooked me into the fantasy universe for good was Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule, the first in the Sword of Truth series.  Its protagonist, Richard Cypher, was a typical but compelling unlikely hero, a woodsman more at home around a camp fire than striding into battle.  He was aided by Gandalf, cough, I mean Zedd, a powerful wizard who took on the older mentor role with gusto.  They explored a universe that was enchanting and expansive, populated by magical beasts, individuated kingdoms with vying political aims, and myriad dangers that lurked in every thicket or seemingly empty sky.  The book propelled me into the action and immersed me into its world from the first page. 

And I’m still living, breathing that same world.  The names have changed over the years, from the D’Hara to Middle Earth to Two Rivers, and more recently to the Kerch haven of Ketterdam and the Blackcliff Academy at the heart of the Martials Empire, but the song I hear when I turn these pages is an echo of the one I first heard years before. 

It was here that I fell in love with world building, in this ground that the seeds were planted for me to write fantasy works of my own.  I only hope that someday my own worlds will spawn the worlds of others. 

What books caused you to stray into different worlds?

Man the Sum of What Have You

What is man?

What The Sound and the Fury says:

"Man the sum of his climactic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire."
............................
"Father said that man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said. A gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged. You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity."
............................
"Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not."

What White Noise says:

"But you said we had a situation."
"I didn't say it. The computer did. The whole system says it. It's what we call a massive data-base tally. Gladney, J. A. K. I punch in the name, the substance, the exposure time and then I tap into your computer history. Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn't mean anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means that you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that."
............................
"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain."
"Heinrich's brain theories. They're all true. We're the sum of our chemical impulses."


Interesting the difference 57 years make.  I wonder what answers the next decades will bring.

Ah love let us be true...

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Recently the words of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” have been echoing like a mantra in my head: “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!”  The past few weeks have been a cavalcade of tragedies, from bombings to mass shootings to police brutality to sniper executions.  In my white, middle-class corner of Northwest Arkansas, it’s difficult to place these events in any sort of meaningful perspective.  And sadly, my first inclination is to hold them at arm’s length, to refuse these events and their implications entrance into my thoughts.  But they must be faced.  This is the world we live in.

And so I’ve turned, navel-gazing introspective that I am, to literature to help me, not to make sense of these atrocities—for I simply cannot fathom the ideologies of hate that spur such violence—but to at least absorb them, to admit them into my reality. 

In “Dover Beach” the speaker seeks to find some means to navigate the world he finds himself in, a world whose tremulous cadence is an eternal note of sorrow.  He mourns the receding Sea of Faith, blaming its retreat for the senseless misery of life as he knows it.  His only consolation: love.

While this poem deals more with existential angst than with tragedy, and the speaker turns more to individual romantic love than to love in the broader sense, I’ve still found myself circling round this parting stanza.  Sometimes I, too, feel stranded on a darkling plain, beset by confused alarms and clashes by night.  But I, too, turn to the only answer there ever was or is: love. 

To conclude, I offer the benediction I wrote for my church’s service the morning after the Orlando shooting:

If we let it, this world will set us adrift, sever every tether as the winds of tragedy and enmity buffet us this way and that.
Because it is so easy to hate.
But a man laughs as he pumps round after round into screaming, pleading victims, a brutal reminder that this is the face of hate.  These are the depths it beckons us to.
So we must, at all costs, embrace and embody love—that life-giving movement toward others in the world. 
So let us move.
Let us love.

The Gift

What a legacy fathers leave. 

My own son, at three and a half, mirrors my actions in so many ways.  In me, he finds his bravery, comfort, and joy.  He laughs my laugh and sillies my sillies. 

It’s an awesome responsibility, one full of mini-failures.  For he also takes on my impatience, reads my fatigue at the end of a hard day.  But those failures are couched in love, and that is a banner that I hope envelops all.  My son knows he is treasured.  He understands that he should value others the same. 

What a gift, to be a father.  It’s one I try never to take for granted.  Happy Father’s Day to all of you fathers and non-fathers out there. 

“The Gift” by Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.