On...

We stand positioned around the base of some impossibly large mountain.  

Our paths are varied and far apart.  

As we make our way up, we see our landscapes change.  

By the time we pass the tree-line, our paths are similar.  

Ascending higher, we begin to see the others; people who were perhaps miles and mile apart at the base are within shouting distance.

As we climb higher still, we partner up and make pleasant conversation.

In the end, we are all on the same summit.   

Chance brought me here the first time.  I was accepted into Teach for America, and I had offered to be assigned “wherever a high school English teacher was needed.”  Apparently, high school English teachers were needed in the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost region of Texas.  Once there, I put my best efforts into my work, and I learned to love it along the way.  I loved the earnestness of my students.  I loved celebrating their small victories over English, their second language.  I loved leading classroom discussions on Dante and Homer, editing a research paper filled with bold and idealistic claims, and witnessing the spark of knowledge kindle into brilliant understanding behind a student’s eyes.  

This was not meant to be permanent.  My time as a high school educator was time spent in the trenches.  I was earmarked for officers’ school - a graduate department, a teaching fellowship, and, eventually, a professorship.  My students were bright, but they operated at a level lowered by low-performing schools and even lower expectations; I had to slow my pace and my thinking.  I thought the work I was doing with my students was good, but far from interesting.  I wanted interesting.  So, after two years, I resigned from my post and headed up north to continue my studies in Boston.

There I was, insulated from the northern chill by a towering book-fort.  I read voraciously - more than I had ever read before.  I felt atrophied synapses snap back to life, my writing flower into something more ornate and beautiful, my seminar comments laced with allusion and critical heft.

And yet, there was something amiss.  Holed up in an old brownstone, my soles began to miss the hard caliche of South Texas.  I began to forget the ground’s firmness and yearned for the unguarded comments of students whose cynicism had yet to calcify.  

I continued my studies, but I was only going through the motions.  When I was told I was not admitted into the Ph.D. program, I felt no disappointment; let some tireless and dedicated soul climb the tower I had already begun to abandon.  I had no place at such heights.  I set my sights on returning.  What energy I had, I directed toward my applications.  Eventually, I accepted a position at a charter school, located less than five miles away from the first school at which I taught.

There were some who saw my returning to the high school classroom as a step down.  They still saw me as that officer-in-training, already decorated and ready for advancement.  I was not that man.  I was bred for the outpost and shod for the trenches.  I thirsted for the struggle I shared with my students; our grappling of English - man wrestling with things higher and more lasting than himself.  We may have won, we may have lost, we may have gotten hurt in the process, yet it was beautiful and noble and true.  Yes, I wanted my work to be interesting, but I needed it to be good.  Chance brought me here the first time, Fate brought me back.    

Trail Marker at Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge - Alamo, TX

“Became a teacher.  Got an education.”

Several days ago, a close friend sent me a link to an article called “How and Why to Write Your Own Personal Manifesto.”  You can read the article on the website, The Art of Manliness.  A challenge was set betwixt the two of us to draft our own manifestos.  How could I refuse?  And, more important, how should I begin?

Eat your heart out, Ezra.

Until that day, I had only vague notions of my personal philosophy.  My working manifesto resembled the contents of a metaphysical ragpicker’s cart: a scrap of movie-hero wisdom, a bit of fatherly advice, and a few lines of poetry and religious liturgy thrown in for good measure.  Nevertheless, I set to the task and learned three things along the way:

1) A manifesto is not a document for half-assery.  Language must be strong and convictions must be even stronger.  The latter proved difficult.  After spending years occupying various literature departments, I was conditioned to avoid essentialist thinking with more vigilance than a nun chaperoning a bunch of high schoolers during a slow-dance.  And though I never fully swallowed that post-structuralist pill, I had to work against my academic’s reflexes to write in a language that was naked and audacious and pure.  After all, what would a vacillating and obfuscatory manifesto say about its author?

2) A manifesto must take the long-view.  If I was going to stick with this document, I ought to have considered what’s coming down the road.  While most of the manifesto operated in my here-and-now, I felt compelled to consider my hypothetical wife and family.  Looking even farther down that road, I knew I had to consider my inevitable mortality.  This is heady stuff for a twenty-five year old man.  This is heady stuff for anyone. It requires a bit of soul-searching and chutzpah to put onto a page.  And when I stopped to review what I had written, I saw I had penned some of my most unrestrained, essentialist, and thunderingly embarrassing ideas, which led me to my third realization….

3) Writing unrestrained, essentialist, and thunderingly embarrassing ideas feels really, really good.  Too often, we construct fortresses of cynicism and keep the world at an ironic distance.  By writing a manifesto, I was forced to level the walls and close the distance.  By sharing it below, I encourage you all to do the same, at least for a few sentences.

Manifesto:

— Over the course of my life, I will combat the evils of ignorance and apathy.

— I will be open and fair in all of my dealings, and I will treat all people with the consideration and decency they deserve.

— I will be brave whenever there is an occasion for bravery.

— I will love my wife and family unconditionally, and I will keep the grace of their affections and the priority of their well-being at the forefront of my mind and in the strongest chambers of my heart.

— And when the hour of my death draws near, I will greet the Unknown with neither trembling nor regret.

Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite authors, and Blood Meridian: or the Evening Redness in the West has been considered by many (including your’s truly, until recently) to be his masterpiece.  No one has an ear for poetic prose like McCarthy.  No one has a sense of the caliche-dry hostility of this world and its people like McCarthy.

And so, stuck in a reader’s rut, I decided to return to Blood Meridian.

This was my third time around McCarthy’s American West and my first time reading this book since I became a teacher.

When I was younger, I loved the novel’s splendid isolation: the each-man-in-it-for-his-ownness of it.  Now, as a young adult partially responsible for the education, well-being, and future of a hundred and ten teenagers, I feel myself wanting more from Mr. McCarthy.  I believe there’s something in this hard and hungry country worth salvaging, worth passing on to a younger generation.

Nowadays, I’d recommend his Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Road.  It took the task of raising a son to pull McCarthy out of the depths of meanness and into the light of intergenerational responsibility and care.  Don’t let Oprah’s stamp fool you, The Road is still a tough book, but it’s a book with an ember of affirmation at its core.   

Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age. 

Hello Readers,

I’ve kept “On…” an outlet for critical and opinion-based writing.

At the same time, I’ve found a need to create a blog dedicated to creative writing.  So, in an effort to keep my oil and water in separate containers, I present “Prose (Poems)”, which can be read here.

Currently, you will encounter a vignette called “The Words.”  I hope to keep it populated with poetry and prose as often as I can.

And don’t worry, you will still find plenty of opinion pieces uploaded to this blog.

Thanks for reading friends,

- Ross 

We stand on the aft deck looking back and seaward.  The wake breaks before us.  Our ship moves forward, but we cannot see its direction; all we can see is where it has been - its highs and its lows, its crests and its drops.

 I hope for our ship to keep moving.  I hope the wake will continue to unfold like some endless Himalayan range - ever fascinating and nuanced.  

 If our ship stops, if the motor seizes up and its gears lose their inspiration, our bodies will be wracked by the halt and we shall watch as the wake spreads and settles back into the vast and featureless sea.

 The motor churns and groans - it has gas yet.