The Terror of Teaching
This is a long post it seems, but I did not know where to break it up, so you get the whole thing. This is an attempt to tell, in narrative, my struggle to deal with how weird teaching has been for me the past few years. It has been amazing, but has had its share of oddities as well. Here it is.
“…Phantom faces at the window
Phantom shadows on the floor…”
How apropos that this song is playing now. I have my whole music collection on random shuffle playing on my Creative Zen MP3 player, and this is what comes up. God must have a sense of humor. Huh! Excuse me while I get some “medicine” for a restless mind…
…Ah, that’s much better. It’s a wonder how smoking a pipe full of tobacco and a tumbler of strong spirits can set a man in the mood to organize his thoughts on paper. Spirits…I’m just full of irony today. I guess that makes sense, given that I teach literature. Ah hell, that is I am teaching literature right now. Who knows if I will be able to keep it together long enough to hold onto my job?
The problem, what I want to record on paper to examine, is that I am sane.
How is sane a problem you say? Sanity is very much a problem when it makes you unable to explain what is happening in one’s life. Shit, if I was haunted by the past and was experiencing visions AND I was insane, then that would alright. That would make a strange amount of sense. Insanity, strangely enough, has its own consistency that can be explained to an outsider. If all this is going on, and I am sane, then I must be more fucked up than I thought.
Let me backtrack a few lines and repeat myself so we are both on the same page.
I am haunted by the past and see visions. You may call them hallucinations or products of an over-active imagination—odd, I just noticed how more menacing an “over-reactive imagination” is than a “hallucination.” A hallucination sounds like something malevolent and evil that forces itself upon someone no matter how much they try to resist it. An over-active imagination…that’s the person’s own fault and let’s all just pity the poor bastard while he or she destroys himself.
Nevertheless, I am losing sleep from this. I see things that do not exist and time holds no meaning for me. Reading Calvin and Hobbes as a kid, I used to think it would be fuckin’ awesome if time had no hold on me and I could travel back and forth in it. Now, it terrifies me. I can’t seem to keep a structure to time…it’s all melting together….
…How long has it been? Ugh, my liver is going to hate me. Two pipes worth of tobacco and one-third of a bottle of 15 year-old single malt, and still my thoughts are barely being kept together. All it has done is increased my nervous writing, hoping to find sense somewhere before I lose it forever.
It’s not normal for everything to be constantly disappearing and reappearing in my vision. I feel like I sometimes have to blink several times and dig at the corners of my eyes before re-opening them to test whether or not my sight has returned to normal. This makes no sense. How can two people occupy the same space? How can one disappear only to be replaced by another, so that there is always more than one person in the same space? How can someone’s face melt into someone else’s without screams of immense pain at the physical rearrangement of a face? Broken bones, melting skin, eye sockets shifting and thinning out. Why am I the only one that notices this? When did people gain the ability to break the laws of physics? Or, did I somehow wake up in the world of my youth, of video games and comic books, and not realize it? The worst part is that while two people seem to occupy the same space, what do I do if one, the other, or both can be real? I never know which it may be.
This is bad enough to deal with. On top of this ridiculousness, is the fact that time and space follow no known laws or rules when I am awake. The past swallows my consciousness and drives me into it’s depths, yet I go on living in the present. Surroundings and people change, but somehow I still get on with the day and no one notices the odd way I am behaving. I have no clue sometimes what when or where I am in, and oftentimes, if I do not think to intently, I find myself heading towards some destination other than the one I had originally planned with people that had not been in my car five minutes before.
Where did this all begin you ask?
Jennifer Edwards. I do not know why I thought of her after all of these years. Our friendship really hadn’t been the same after we had broken up in high school and as I matured and moved on in life, she stayed where she was in high school. The girl really could have been successful in life, at least monetarily if not spiritually, if she had only tried. Instead, she decided that she didn’t want to grow up, she didn’t want to be responsible, and she didn’t want to leave high school. She hated it while she was there…I wonder if she knows she never left….Huh. Being stuck in high school, unable to change or mature for the rest of my life, now that could certainly describe hell to me. And no, the irony of what I am describing in light of that last statement does not escape me. That’s why I’m terrified.
The strange part was, I hadn’t dreamt of high school, the band, and I wasn’t wondering if she was still alive somewhere in the world. I had looked at one of my students in response to a question, and the name rose unbidden in my thoughts.
“Jenn.”
“Mr. Erikson, who’s Jenn?”
I mumbled some excuses, unwilling to show how shaken up I was. You see part of the problem now, how time is playing a cruel trick on me. My sight and mind have betrayed me, and I cannot tell apart the people I am teaching and the ones I knew when I was in school. Two, sometimes three or four, people occupy the same seat and the same physical space. I myself seem to occupy several different places in space as well, even though I know that I have not been cloned or replicated in any way. I see myself sitting in a back desk in my classroom reading a book at every possible moment, at the same time that I AM in my memories of high school and I see myself teaching my English class. How can I travel backwards and forwards in time, to be a student in my own classroom, and to teach myself in the past?
Better yet, how the hell did my friends and acquaintances from high school learn how to do it? Is this some cosmic joke at my expense? “Ha, ha, ha! You should have seen the look on his face when he saw me in his class for that split second!”
I guess this could be reincarnation. That would be a logical reason for why my students remind me of ones I used to know, and that I was unnaturally sensitive to the old souls in them to be able to recognize my old friends. Yet, this is how I know reincarnation is false: none of my old friends have died yet. How can Jake drive a taxi and sit in my classroom at the same time? How can Max work at Medieval Times, live in Anaheim, and still inhabit my work place 30 miles away? Have they become spirit or dream walkers somehow? Can they project themselves into physical reality while they sleep? Are they tormenting me? I don’t know, I can’t know….The only thing I do know is that I feel like my senses and memories have fractured and are no longer from one unified perspective, but are instead from multiple ones. Good God, this is disturbing.
What could it be?
What? How could it be?
Huh. Something just came to mind suddenly. I guess maybe the Preacher is right, “There is no new thing under the sun.” Not really anyways. Yet, I cannot help but see what my friends and I have made of life so far and think that we could have done better. We could have been less lazy, more attentive, less taken with the here and now while we were in high school. We were distracted by what was happening and forgot to grab those important things we would need for the future. High school was our Jericho Hill and we forgot the Horn as Roland did.
Yes! That’s it! I’m not crazy. Yet, then what am I? Am I child of the Tower, its servant or something else? I feel like I have everything figured out, but that my mind just cannot focus on the answer. It keeps slipping out of my mental reach and is never where I think it is. What is it?
I found it! It is a terrible answer a horror beyond words, but everything serves the Tower in its own way. I am not crazy, people do not inhabit the same space, and no one can travel through time unaided by something greater than they. What I am is the door on the top floor of the Tower. I alone can open the way for personalities I see and know, the personalities of my friends to cycle back to the starting point of their quest, only hopefully this time with more of what they need for the future. The laws of physics have not been broken, I just bear a weightier burden than I knew.
I alone can make sure that as the personalities of Jake, Max, Jen, Anthony, Summer, and all the others recycle each generation to begin their quest anew, each time better equipped for the future…hopefully. Under this weight, I very well may go crazy……..
“…Phantom faces at the window
Phantom shadows on the floor…”
How apropos that this song is playing now. I have my whole music collection on random shuffle playing on my Creative Zen MP3 player, and this is what comes up. God must have a sense of humor. Huh! Excuse me while I get some “medicine” for a restless mind…
…Ah, that’s much better. It’s a wonder how smoking a pipe full of tobacco and a tumbler of strong spirits can set a man in the mood to organize his thoughts on paper. Spirits…I’m just full of irony today. I guess that makes sense, given that I teach literature. Ah hell, that is I am teaching literature right now. Who knows if I will be able to keep it together long enough to hold onto my job?
The problem, what I want to record on paper to examine, is that I am sane.
How is sane a problem you say? Sanity is very much a problem when it makes you unable to explain what is happening in one’s life. Shit, if I was haunted by the past and was experiencing visions AND I was insane, then that would alright. That would make a strange amount of sense. Insanity, strangely enough, has its own consistency that can be explained to an outsider. If all this is going on, and I am sane, then I must be more fucked up than I thought.
Let me backtrack a few lines and repeat myself so we are both on the same page.
I am haunted by the past and see visions. You may call them hallucinations or products of an over-active imagination—odd, I just noticed how more menacing an “over-reactive imagination” is than a “hallucination.” A hallucination sounds like something malevolent and evil that forces itself upon someone no matter how much they try to resist it. An over-active imagination…that’s the person’s own fault and let’s all just pity the poor bastard while he or she destroys himself.
Nevertheless, I am losing sleep from this. I see things that do not exist and time holds no meaning for me. Reading Calvin and Hobbes as a kid, I used to think it would be fuckin’ awesome if time had no hold on me and I could travel back and forth in it. Now, it terrifies me. I can’t seem to keep a structure to time…it’s all melting together….
…How long has it been? Ugh, my liver is going to hate me. Two pipes worth of tobacco and one-third of a bottle of 15 year-old single malt, and still my thoughts are barely being kept together. All it has done is increased my nervous writing, hoping to find sense somewhere before I lose it forever.
It’s not normal for everything to be constantly disappearing and reappearing in my vision. I feel like I sometimes have to blink several times and dig at the corners of my eyes before re-opening them to test whether or not my sight has returned to normal. This makes no sense. How can two people occupy the same space? How can one disappear only to be replaced by another, so that there is always more than one person in the same space? How can someone’s face melt into someone else’s without screams of immense pain at the physical rearrangement of a face? Broken bones, melting skin, eye sockets shifting and thinning out. Why am I the only one that notices this? When did people gain the ability to break the laws of physics? Or, did I somehow wake up in the world of my youth, of video games and comic books, and not realize it? The worst part is that while two people seem to occupy the same space, what do I do if one, the other, or both can be real? I never know which it may be.
This is bad enough to deal with. On top of this ridiculousness, is the fact that time and space follow no known laws or rules when I am awake. The past swallows my consciousness and drives me into it’s depths, yet I go on living in the present. Surroundings and people change, but somehow I still get on with the day and no one notices the odd way I am behaving. I have no clue sometimes what when or where I am in, and oftentimes, if I do not think to intently, I find myself heading towards some destination other than the one I had originally planned with people that had not been in my car five minutes before.
Where did this all begin you ask?
Jennifer Edwards. I do not know why I thought of her after all of these years. Our friendship really hadn’t been the same after we had broken up in high school and as I matured and moved on in life, she stayed where she was in high school. The girl really could have been successful in life, at least monetarily if not spiritually, if she had only tried. Instead, she decided that she didn’t want to grow up, she didn’t want to be responsible, and she didn’t want to leave high school. She hated it while she was there…I wonder if she knows she never left….Huh. Being stuck in high school, unable to change or mature for the rest of my life, now that could certainly describe hell to me. And no, the irony of what I am describing in light of that last statement does not escape me. That’s why I’m terrified.
The strange part was, I hadn’t dreamt of high school, the band, and I wasn’t wondering if she was still alive somewhere in the world. I had looked at one of my students in response to a question, and the name rose unbidden in my thoughts.
“Jenn.”
“Mr. Erikson, who’s Jenn?”
I mumbled some excuses, unwilling to show how shaken up I was. You see part of the problem now, how time is playing a cruel trick on me. My sight and mind have betrayed me, and I cannot tell apart the people I am teaching and the ones I knew when I was in school. Two, sometimes three or four, people occupy the same seat and the same physical space. I myself seem to occupy several different places in space as well, even though I know that I have not been cloned or replicated in any way. I see myself sitting in a back desk in my classroom reading a book at every possible moment, at the same time that I AM in my memories of high school and I see myself teaching my English class. How can I travel backwards and forwards in time, to be a student in my own classroom, and to teach myself in the past?
Better yet, how the hell did my friends and acquaintances from high school learn how to do it? Is this some cosmic joke at my expense? “Ha, ha, ha! You should have seen the look on his face when he saw me in his class for that split second!”
I guess this could be reincarnation. That would be a logical reason for why my students remind me of ones I used to know, and that I was unnaturally sensitive to the old souls in them to be able to recognize my old friends. Yet, this is how I know reincarnation is false: none of my old friends have died yet. How can Jake drive a taxi and sit in my classroom at the same time? How can Max work at Medieval Times, live in Anaheim, and still inhabit my work place 30 miles away? Have they become spirit or dream walkers somehow? Can they project themselves into physical reality while they sleep? Are they tormenting me? I don’t know, I can’t know….The only thing I do know is that I feel like my senses and memories have fractured and are no longer from one unified perspective, but are instead from multiple ones. Good God, this is disturbing.
What could it be?
What? How could it be?
Huh. Something just came to mind suddenly. I guess maybe the Preacher is right, “There is no new thing under the sun.” Not really anyways. Yet, I cannot help but see what my friends and I have made of life so far and think that we could have done better. We could have been less lazy, more attentive, less taken with the here and now while we were in high school. We were distracted by what was happening and forgot to grab those important things we would need for the future. High school was our Jericho Hill and we forgot the Horn as Roland did.
Yes! That’s it! I’m not crazy. Yet, then what am I? Am I child of the Tower, its servant or something else? I feel like I have everything figured out, but that my mind just cannot focus on the answer. It keeps slipping out of my mental reach and is never where I think it is. What is it?
I found it! It is a terrible answer a horror beyond words, but everything serves the Tower in its own way. I am not crazy, people do not inhabit the same space, and no one can travel through time unaided by something greater than they. What I am is the door on the top floor of the Tower. I alone can open the way for personalities I see and know, the personalities of my friends to cycle back to the starting point of their quest, only hopefully this time with more of what they need for the future. The laws of physics have not been broken, I just bear a weightier burden than I knew.
I alone can make sure that as the personalities of Jake, Max, Jen, Anthony, Summer, and all the others recycle each generation to begin their quest anew, each time better equipped for the future…hopefully. Under this weight, I very well may go crazy……..
Submitted by Malleus Dei at 9:25 AM
2 Comments:
You will think of me always and forever. You can not help this.
I like the style you use here, even if you weren't necessarily attempting it. The stream of consciousness doesn't necessarily have to be some Joycean device. In a way, your interpretation is more real, more true to life.
This also makes me think about how often I wonder if I've changed at all since those halcyon days of Maze Craze and awkward backseat fondling. Perhaps our generation's reluctance to mature in the first place is partially to blame for these perceptions.
Of course you, above all of us, have bucked that trend, haven't you? All married and having a real job. Like a grown-up and everything.
Me, I still play with swords and make fun of movies.
Of course... now I have a degree for it, so that's alright.
Of course you've changed since those days Max...hopefully by now your backseat fondling is no longer awkward.
Seriously though, I often have pondered the same thing. I don't feel any different than then, but am I? I used to argue with my parents that for my first few years in college about whether or not I had grown up in anything other than age. To me, I supported no one, did not work, was still a dependent, played video games, and was still succumbing to the same character flaws as always. How is that a mature adult? I found it curious that we both looked deep enough to ask ourselves that same question.
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