For Thursday, April 24, 1997 Drummer Column, Gibbs, 747 words

Burnt corn meal

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." -- William Blake.

We've been batting this idea around in lit. class lately. We watched the Montagues and Capulets, two old warring families, resolve their ancient feud and find peace. It only cost them the lives of their children, Romeo and Juliet, and the end of the family lineage. The characters' excessive behaviors brought tragedy and wisdom.

The world is full of wise, permanently injured people. Big mistakes often bring big lessons. If one follows each excess to injury, one may become the Buddha in a basket, but who wants that?

A good reader can experience a lot of adventures vicariously. Sitting home, in the comfort of his room, a good reader can journey to the farthest reaches of any idea. He can visit the Inferno and Paradise, war and peace. With insight and empathy, he can learn the same coping skills as the surviving characters. He can learn the nature of love, hate, greed, compassion, and truth.

However, there is another quote we toss in here: "Experience is the best teacher." -- Anonymous to me.

I suppose one can experience a good book, but I assume the author is referring to 3-D, flesh-and-blood experiences. One learns more about playing golf by playing golf than by reading about golf. Reading about love is far different than being in love. Books can only take a person so far.

The points seem to converge on the notion of experiencing as much divergence as possible in order to find the center. Learn the good by living it; learn the ugly and dangerous by reading it. The more data one gathers, the closer one gets to the palace gates.

Without this virtual and real double-teaming approach to life, one must either give up on the palace, suffer excessive hard knocks, or deprive himself of too much action.

I retold my students of one of my college experiences. In a creative writing class, a girl who hadn't had much real-life experience wrote a story about two characters in a pizza parlor. The author once worked in a pizza parlor.

The story tells of one dramatic day when the main character sprinkled too much corn meal into the oven. Corn meal makes pizzas slide better, but this oven was too hot, and the corn meal burned. Here are the girl's exact words from her short story, written back in 1977: "Nothing in the world smells worse than burnt corn meal."

All students had copies of her story to critique. I simply wrote, next to this sentence, "Over." On the back I wrote, "What about skunk whiz, bloated farm dogs floating in a stagnant pond, week-old battlefields, death camps, foot rot, forgotten nightcrawlers…" and so on. In fact, I went a little crazy and filled the whole back of the paper, two columns wide.

Now, after reading student essays for 12 years, I've softened a bit. However, I'm still concerned for the isolated kids who think their problems are excessively unique, excessively horrible, when in perspective they are actually quite common and corn meal.

An infant looks down from his father's shoulders. "This is high," he says. A child looks down from a tree and says, "No, this is high." A teen looks down from a skyscraper and says, "No, this is high." A young man looks down from Mt. Everest and says, "Now, this is high." A man looks down from a jetliner and says, "Man, this is way up there." A distinguished man looks down from a space shuttle and says, "Woo." Then he lands on the moon and looks down.

Here's another quote that hangs in my room. "That which does not destroy me makes me stronger." It's by Frederick Nietzsche. His angle adds an ominous variation to the same theme, implying we must wage wits with destructive forces right along. I suppose he's got a point.

Right now we are studying the story of "Harold and Maude." Harold is a suicidal teen-ager because his mother doesn't love him. It's a sad state for Harold, for sure. We sympathize with him, but we don't want him killing himself. His situation isn't nearly as bad as Maude's, and she loves life.

Maude survived the Holocaust and life in a death camp. Maude, you see, shows Harold some excess and gives him perspective. In the end, he drives right through the palace doors.

That's what we're batting around in class.