Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye

CHAPTER 5. The Notebook in My Back Pocket

CHAPTER 5 The Notebook in My Back Pocket Now it’s fine if the truth is real to you, but if it’s not, it’s you that are left out and not the truth. —John Howard Yoder, Goshen College Convocation address, October 22, 1973. I am too local a creature to take the truth unless or until by God it happens to me. —William Stafford, “It is the Time You Think,” Stories That Could Be True. These two statements have been banging around in my head for years. Clearly they conflict on several levels, but we might begin by noting the difference in pronouns. The first addresses a “you” who is presumably flirting with misguided individualism, if not apostasy or heresy, and it implies that the author, the “I” who does not name himself, has a solid grip on the truth and how to find it. The second locates the issues differently, within the authorial “I”—it confesses the difficulty of believing what does not feel real, rather than instructing others on the need to accept some particular version of the truth. Let me suggest that the first statement represents the natural stance of the scholar, the theologian, the historian, the literary critic: a stance that claims objective knowledge, that analyzes and interprets, instructs and corrects. The second is the stance of the 117 artist, the poet: it testifies to inner experience, speaks without apparent concern for consequences, and insists that the personal cannot be ignored; in fact, it suggests that the personal is in some way the measure of the truth. I know both of these positions from the inside, and the rewards and risks they involve. I believe in both of them, even as I know they conflict with each other. As a teacher and scholar I spend most of my working life trying to learn and transmit what seems true and real by more or less objective or at least external standards—ways of reading and interpreting literary texts, ways of writing effective prose and poetry, particular readings of history and tradition and the whole blooming, buzzing world. I am accustomed to evaluating students according to how well they have learned such information and practices, applying standards that may not be easily quantifiable but are not merely subjective either. I write pages of what I hope is carefully reasoned and convincing argumentative prose. But as important and valuable as these ways of operating are, for a long time they have not seemed entirely sufficient to me. And so, through all my days of planning and talking and grading, through the jammed, splintered weeks when I haul books and papers home every night, I carry a notebook just small enough to fit into my back pocket. While I’m about my earthly, timely, responsible duties, other possibilities thread themselves around and behind the regular routine. A little phrase overheard, an image out of the expected on a familiar street, a new slant of light, a stray impulse during a lecture, and something else begins to happen. The language of poetry happens as it will, and engages the truths I accept intellectually in strange and sometimes disconcerting ways. Surely being a poet in modern America is a curious, sideways venture in itself. Being a Mennonite poet employed by a church-related college contributes other sorts of dissonance, as does being an intellectual in a tradition long suspicious of book learning. Yet somehow I have found myself dancing and swerving through a life that includes all of these polarities, unwilling or unable to yield to any of them, to choose one or another pole. I want to be a poet and an American and a teacher and an intellectual and a Mennonite. What’s more, I want to be good at them all, not necessarily by everyone’s lights, but by my own at least. Let me 118 Scattering Point discuss further, trying to be faithful to these multiple allegiances by mixing abstraction and personal narrative as I go. Poetry, Religion, Oppositions, Contraries Many poets would argue that their art is entangled with the world but not subject to it, as it is concerned with but not merely answerable to ethics and even religion. “I cannot be a saint, and I would like to be,” writes the poet David Brendan Hopes. “Yahweh and Apollo make absolute demands. You can serve two great masters only if you intend...