Then & Now

​                                      Then and Now
 
            I noted in late January that I was back in the classroom.  It was familiar and revelatory at once.  Teaching for me has always been a fish-in-water situation --- it’s a natural (essential)condition.  But it had been ten years.  A decade.  Here are some facts from the year I retired:

• Barack Obama was President;
• The world health crisis was the Ebola epidemic;
• Robin Williams and Joan Rivers had just passed away;
• ISIS was emerging in the Middle East;
• Russia began its annexation of Crimea;
• Over 2200 people were killed in a conflict between Israel and Hamas;
• Malaysian Flight 777 disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand;
• The Winter Olympics were held in Sochi, Russia;
• The Seattle Seahawks crushed the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl;
• And  the San Francisco Giants won their third World Series in five years. 

There are some “the more things change” events there, but also quite a large portion of  “Oh, yeah . . . I forgot about that . . .”  On the cultural scene, it was:

• The year of Frozen,
• Taylor Swift’s 1989,
• Kanye’s & Kim’s wedding,
• The Bill Cosby scandal,
• And Jimmy Fallon began hosting the Tonight Show. 

The students I worked with this semester were 8,9, 10 years old at that time.  When I was that age (8,9,10): Sputnik had just been launched, those San Francisco Giants were just leaving New York for the West Coast (along with my family’s beloved Brooklyn Dodgers) and Dwight Eisenhower  was President (with Richard Nixon his Vice President).  That reflects just the tip of the iceberg  “gulf”  between me and my students.

            And now it’s May 13th and the semester is over.  As an educator, there’s always a question about “What am I learning?” or “What did I learn?”  The answer, at the end of this semester: quite a bit.  But it’s not easy to relate quickly. Time is needed to reflect, cogitate, sort through, and relate.  My impulse is to turn to T.S. Eliot and Prufrock --- so I’ll pull on that string and see what unravels.

            As with every class I’ve ever taught, I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to this class.  And, as with every class I’ve ever read it to, I explained that I first heard it in 11th grade when it was read aloud to me (and my classmates) by Lester Faggiani, my high school English teacher.  Mr. Faggiani had been an actor before becoming a teacher and his dramatic reading of Prufrock was exhilarating and inspiring --- and every time I’ve read it to a class I have tried, as best as I could remember, to imitate Mr. Faggiani’s version of the poem.  Hearing it aloud, as I read it, remains an exhilarating and inspiring experience for me (if not, necessarily, for my students).  After Mr. Faggiani’s dramatic rendition,  first heard in the spring of 1966, we spent days analyzing the poem --- and each day was a revelation to me.  Always interested in poetry, Mr. Faggiani’s reading and careful guidance through the stanzas, not only accelerated my desire to learn more but kick-started my writing life --- as a poet!  So, reading Prufrock  to this class, this Spring released a revelatory weight I’d been unconsciously carrying since early February.  Eliot’s words resonated with greater power than ever before --- and not just the “I grow old, I grow old” phrase. 

            Eliot starts Prufrock with that wonderful invitation: “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky . . .”  before he levels you with “like a patient etherized upon a table.”  Can you imagine a more brilliant start for a poem about an elder reflecting upon his life?  It’s sunset and there is a person in the twilight of consciousness, etherized, that state of being alive yet so close to . . . not . . . .  As I stood before these vibrant, talented, energetic students I vividly remembered being their age --- and was also strikingly conscious of my current age.  At once, I could see them absorbing Prufrock’s story --- his dilemma ---and appreciating the artistry of Eliot, yet never thinking they, like I, might someday become Prufrock themselves.  It was a teachable moment for me!  It conveyed the weight of the poem as it never had before --- and that was simply after reading the first lines.  We continued.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
 
                Eliot again beckons (“Let us go . . .) and we follow, of course.  For me, the image of cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells were recognizable images.  Having grown up on the South shore of Long Island, in a town where summering New Yorkers caught ferries to go to Fire Island, I was all too familiar with the hotels (motels, more often) and sawdust-covered floors of seafood restaurants.  My students, less so, given their far-flung and diverse hometowns (in Colorado, Missouri, Virginia, California, Georgia, etc.).  The real focus in this stanza is on the wonderful assonance of tedious and insidious and being led to an overwhelming question --- one which is not confronted until the last stanzas of the poem/journey.  So, there we are, somewhere near a waterfront in our etherized state and Eliot jump-shifts to some women (at a museum?) before bringing us back to those streets --- now as a cat.
 
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
 
                Providing us with a familiar image (a cat), Eliot introduces the eerie “yellow fog” and “yellow smoke,” continuing Prufrock’s journey into a world he has not known.  This is a journey my students are just beginning, one which may (or may not) present them with “unknowns” that will challenge, overwhelm, or fall by the wayside.  Looking back, it’s easy to recount my own --- but not something I need to share with them, not while we’re engaging with the energy of this poem.  The next stanza requires more immediate discussion and reflection.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
 
            It is only in your old age that you realize, if fact, how finite time is.  For my students there will be time ahead --- and this is the significance of reading Prufrock now --- at least that’s why I thought they should hear it and reflect on it now.  They are only beginning their journey of preparing “a face to meet the faces that you meet” and, as actors, singers, and dancers, especially so!  Ah, but “time to murder and create.”  Again, as artists, “creating” is their natural inclination but the need to “murder”  --- to edit, revise, to dismiss ideas you love --- ah, there’s the challenge.  How will they respond to those “questions” dropped on their plates?  And what about those “hundreds (of) indecisions/And for a hundred visions and revisions?” Eliot/Prufrock is foreshadowing a young person’s future while reflecting on an old person’s history.  And, after confronting the reader with those ideas, Eliot heads back to the ladies in the museum --- where, perhaps, they are “taking of a toast and tea?”

            But the journey, like time passing, persists.  Prufrock reflects that “indeed there will be time” for wondering (“Do I dare? and, Do I dare?”) but, most significantly, turning back and descending the stair.  The irony of J. Alfred Prufrock’s “Love Song,” of course, is that, as we read on, we discover:

I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

We are given a series of episodes in Prufrock’s life between his descending the stair and the Eternal Footman’s snickering that account for his fear:  his thinning hair and body, his concern with disturbing the universe,  his wondering about making decisions and indecisions --- as well as measuring one’s life in coffee spoons.  Prufrock has experienced women saying “That is not it, at all.  That is not what I meant, at all.”  Prufrock has recoiled at the eyes that fixed him “in a formulated phrase,” leading him to wonder, again and again, “how should I presume?”   He wonders if “it” would have been “worthwhile” to pursue any number of actions or paths --- or make decisions --- that would have altered his personal trajectory.  And that’s what leads him to admitting his fear as well as leading us to answering the first stanza’s “overwhelming question.”

            When Prufrock exclaims:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.
 
We all know Hamlet’s famous question: To be, or not to be . . . that is, indeed, the question.  And here is Prufrock, not only claiming he is not  Hamlet but describing himself in a series of damning descriptors, culminating in his vision of himself as the Fool.  The irony and impact of this “Love Song” is completed when Prufrock shares with us that he has not only heard the mermaids “singing each to each” but that he believes “I do not think that they will sing to me.”   The final image of watching those mermaids “riding seaward on the waves,” moving away while he has “lingered in the chambers of the sea”  and drowns is, at once,  dramatic and tragic.

            In discussing this poem with enormously talented and energetic young people embarking on their lives and careers, Prufrock, hopefully, serves as a brilliantly woven cautionary tale.  Reading it as a septuagenarian, it provides a balance sheet against which one can assess their own journey.  As a poem I have visited and revisited throughout my life, this recent reading --- particularly sharing it with this group (all born this century!) has had a powerful impact upon me.  The students were, by my measure, suitably impressed with Eliot’s artistry as well as his wonderful imagery and command of the language.  It’s hard to know how much power the message had, in the moment.  The hope is they will return to Prufrock as they progress in their careers/lives and consider their own “decisions and revisions.”  My take, starting with Mr. Faggiani’s reading in 1966, is that Prufrock inspired me on several levels.  It’s imagery and language captivated me as a high school upperclassman but it’s message, over time, provided genuine guidance.  I believe throughout my life there was an unconscious or subconscious voice always reminding me not to feel as Prufrock does when my “arms and legs are thin.”  Indeed, as I reflect on the years between my introduction to  J. Alfred and my most recent encounter, I can honestly say I won’t wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled and I will dare to eat a peach.  To borrow from another favorite poet, Prufrock’s Love Song “has made all the difference.”