Clarity for Teachers: Day 42
‘Don’t try to solve the dramas that arise when you are not clear. Abandon the drama and invest everything in being clear. If you learn how to be clear, drama comes to an end.’
So, here we are at the end. We made it, we got to the punchline!
The story of these lines I’ve been following goes back a thousand years. The way Charlie tells it, they are the words of a teacher saying farewell to his students. He’s been with them for two years, teaching them what he knows, and he’s about to set off for home. They catch him as he’s almost out the door. They ask him: could you just sum it up, tell us the heart of it all, one last time before you go?
Late one December in my early thirties, when I’d come home for the holidays to the town where my parents were living at the time, I wrote up a blog post that ran to 5,000 words and I called it: ‘What I Learned: 2003–2010’. Despite the word count, I didn’t have 42 pieces of wisdom. In fact, in the end, I boiled it down to one line of advice: ‘Avoid allowing a situation to be defined by the oppositions and boundaries present within it.’
Drama is all about oppositions, isn’t it? You need a protagonist and an antagonist; that’s what sets the story in motion. Conflict makes good theatre: along with what he learned from teaching the ‘unteachables’, Keith Johnstone credits the professional wrestling shows he’d go to see on Sunday nights with inspiring his approach to improvisation. Conflict makes good sport: you have two teams and everybody knows which side they are on. At the chessboard, everything is black and white. In theatre and in sport, the play’s the thing; there’s nothing better, until it stops being playful. The men who played football together in the no man’s land of December 25th go back to their trenches and return to killing each other.
There’s a children’s book that I love, The Greentail Mouse by Leo Lionni. It plays on the old theme of the town mouse and the country mouse. In this telling, the town mouse comes to visit his cousins in their rural idyll, and they ask him about life in the town. It’s horrible, he says, noisy and dangerous, but there is one day a year when it’s amazing, and that’s when carnival comes around. So the country mice decide to hold a carnival of their own: they make costumes and masks, they grunt and shriek and howl and jump around like wild things. But then, at some point, they forget that they are wearing masks; they end up believing that they are the fierce creatures they have been playing at being, and their formerly peaceful community becomes filled with fear, hatred and suspicion.
In a remarkable essay, ‘How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened)’, David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that something very like Lionni’s fable went on, deep in our past, at the origin of what we came to think of as civilisation. Drawing together evidence from archaeology and anthropology, they suggest that rather than the usual story of human society progressing from hunting bands to tribes to chiefdoms and finally to states, for much of our history — and in some places, until very recently — there was a pattern of oscillation, based around the seasons:
shifting back and forth between alternative social arrangements, permitting the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year, on the proviso that they could not last; on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable.
It’s a tantalising theory: for thousands of years, we played at hierarchy, we had ‘kings’ and ‘queens’ for a winter, but whoever took that role would know that when spring came and the people went out onto the land again, no one’s status would be higher than anyone else’s. And then some of us got stuck. Like Lionni’s mice, we forgot that we were wearing masks; the play drained out of the hierarchy and it hardened into the beginnings of the states whose stories we were taught to treat as the start of history.
At the end of the story, when they have come to their senses, the mice make a bonfire of the masks. I always wonder about this scene. Maybe it’s the echo of the mask-burning times in religious history. At the height of puritan fervour during the English Civil War, the theatres were shut down and even Christmas was banned. Abandon the drama, indeed!
I don’t think that’s what’s at stake, exactly, in this last piece of advice. Rather, I’m drawn back to that line about not defining a situation by the oppositions present within it. Those oppositions may be real and powerful enough, they may matter a great deal, but there is always more to the situation than they allow for. There is always something left over, like the remainder at the end of a piece of long division. If you’re invested in the division, in drawing lines and taking sides, then it will seem an irrelevance; but when a situation is stuck, this piece that doesn’t fit contains the possibility that there are other ways of describing where we find ourselves, other ways of telling the story. To notice this, it’s necessary to loosen our hold on the drama; to admit that its oppositions don’t capture everything that is (or could be) going on.
There’s a patch of blue on a magpie’s wing that you’ll only notice if you look with care. If you know that a magpie is a black and white bird, you’ll never see it. I’ll put my faith in that blue patch, and I’ll walk with you along any path that opens our eyes to these things, as our ears catch the laughter hidden among the leaves.
Västerås, 4 May, 2020
This is the last in a series of forty-two commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as I take part in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
If you have enjoyed this series of commentaries, then let me invite you to join me for Homeward Bound, an eight-week course which I will be teaching over Zoom, beginning on Thursday, 14th May, 2020.
Find out more about this and future courses on the website for a school called HOME.
