JON FERGUSON
8
Betty and Farmer both still taught English. She worked for the city and taught the language to adult immigrants and foreigners. She enjoyed dealing with adults who were learning because they wanted to learn. She had never wanted to teach at the university. She and Farmer met at the University of San Diego where both were doing graduate work. Each had migrated south for a change in the weather. He was from Eugene and she was from Pocatello, Idaho. That morning, when he went to buy fertilizer to plant some new spring flowers, he was asking himself how much longer he could go on teaching the English language. He was like an atheist in a theology department. He was in his fifth year at Lewis & Clark and he had lost his faith. As a kid he had loved Jesus, but lost his faith in God. Now, he still loved Whitman, but had lost his faith in language…Like a dead god, language could no longer explain the world. It was a game that could make one feel good. Yes, poetry could warm the soul, but it no longer had any connection with truth. That morning he remembered a sentence he had read years prior in a poem in the New Yorker, “Where there are no more words there are no more illusions.” That was where he was today…that day. The meaning of that line had finally sunk in. Words really did always come up short. They never revealed “truth”. Not real truth. They worked fine for buying fertilizer, but they had lost their luster when it came to describing the reality of a cat…or love…or history…or a mind…or even fertilizer for that matter.
As he was pushing his shopping cart to the parking lot, his mind unwittingly came up with this…
Look! he said when he looked at that
That is a cat and not a rat!
Words! words! words! was all he could think
Written for years with pen and ink
Making our souls foolish and fat
He couldn’t help himself: the little rhymes came when they wanted to come, not when he wanted them around. He wondered if he had not been a slave his whole life long…
I’m a slave to my brain my whole life long
Ah! that could be a number one hit song
I’m a bigger slave to the words I use
That cement my brain and only confuse
Yes, Farmer thought, the trip to Seattle had been a Derrida moment…a kind of life changer. But life had gone on. It usually does. He had talked to Betty about it…
Why don’t you start thinking about doing something else?
What? What else?
Well, start thinking.
Okay………. Brain, I command you…Start thinking!
Well?
Nothing is happening so far…Wait! It just suggested I become a tour guide in Copenhagen…And now it’s suggesting that we move back to Thailand and become Buddhist monks.
Can a woman be a monk?
I don’t remember seeing any.
There you go again…A male dominated world of macho monks!
I’d say the opposite was true in this case. If the monks had all been women, everybody today would be saying men had forced them into monasteries where they couldn’t make love and had to sit on a hard floor and meditate all day! But because they’re men, everybody thinks meditating all day and not making love is cool… You can turn everything in every direction. Who’s to say what’s good or bad. When I was a kid I always thought my mother had the “best” life. My father was stressing out at the office all day. He was a damn lawyer. Why is being a lawyer better than putting diapers on kids and sweeping floors? I’d rather be a street sweeper than a lawyer.
No you wouldn’t.
Yes, I would…That’s what is so fucked up with our world. We absolutely need street sweepers as much as lawyers. Maybe even more. And yet lawyers have all this fucking social status. Most of them are thieves. They rob they’re clients blind…
There are some honest ones…
I said “most” of them…
Okay…I get your point.
Well…I say as long as we live in a world that values lawyers over street sweepers, the world will be a fucked up place.
But you always say it’s an amazing place…a wonderful place…
You’re right, I do…Okay, it’s a fucked up wonderful place.
Now I know why I married you. You can be both fucked up and wonderful at the same time.
That’s why I married you…Because you’re the only woman who understands me!
Haha.
They never got to seriously discussing a new job for Farmer. But as far as jobs go, his was a good one. He only taught nine hours a week. He didn’t have to publish that much. A few poems in poetry magazines kept him looking productive to his superiors. He had a lot of free time now that the kids were all out of the house. He was, however, beginning to feel that students were becoming more and more closed-minded. One would have thought technology would have opened their minds and thought patterns. But it seemed the opposite was the case. The left-wingers were way left, the right-wingers way right, and the feminists were making enemies of males. It was almost as if students “arrived” at the university thinking they already knew everything…as if they were already programmed politically, philosophically, and morally before they took a single class. It was getting more and more difficult to have a real “discussion” about anything. Students’ minds rarely seemed to change; they would simply build higher and higher walls to protect their ideas from the other side. And this, even with twenty-year-old students at a “liberal arts” school! It had begun to feel like they were coming to the university to reinforce the beliefs they already held, not to open their minds to new ways of looking at the world. This saddened Farmer. But it also confirmed his and Betty’s idea that their daughter hadn’t made a bad choice when she herself dropped out of Seattle Pacific.