“Dad, what do you think happens at the end of Pan’s Labyrinth”?

That was the question my sixteen year-old son put to me two nights ago. The film had come up in a family discussion of what to watch together — it is currently streaming on Netflix — but ended up dismissed for The Meyerowitz Stories (which was also plenty worthy). But it put the film back in my mind, so I rewatched it on my own last night; probably my fifth viewing, but the first in several years.

And my son is a serious maker and reader of stories, who believes in their power and really wants to know the answer to questions like this one.

So I am going to try to answer him.

For me, El Laberinto del Fauno (The Faun’s Labyrinth, original Spanish title, which is important to me, because the titular creature sure isn’t Pan) is one of del Toro’s several explorations of what it is to be an innocent cast on the waves of the terrible world. He has acknowledged that the film twins with the one that preceded it (The Devil’s Backbone), set in a haunted orphanage, and the relation between Laberinto’s ten year-old Ofelia and her mother echoes the connection between Pacific Rim’s orphaned Mako Mori and her adopted father, Stacker Pentecost.

In each film, the world is at war: the Spanish Civil War in the first two, and an imagined future conflict between kaiju and mechas in the third. Even his breakthrough film The Shape of Water has the dynamic, as Elisa finds her own life interrupted by the casual cruelties of a military that regards the lives of others as a commodity to be molded, exploited, and cast aside when no longer needed.

But within all these stories, it is clear that human protagonists make important ethical and moral decisions to be humane, to themselves and to others (even when others are not human). Self-sacrificing compassion shapes small lives into something far larger. The legacies of those who care extends far beyond their own understandings.

And there is a fainter, but still persistent, note across all these films too: stories matter. The cuentos de hadas (“fairy tales”) of Laberinto and the movies projected in the theater above which Elisa and Giles live in Water both penetrate the daily lives of their protagonists. Sometimes literally, sounds through the floor — and sometimes less (or more) literally, as in the book the faun gives Ofelia, which is blank until some other power (supernatural? her own imagination?) conjures the precise text she needs to read to know what to do next.

So in Laberinto, the stories you are reading and making up — and believing — matter a great deal to the reality you inhabit.

The question my son was asking, I assume, was whether Ofelia’s story is “real”: whether she is a long-lost princess offered the chance to embark on a mythic quest to reassume her throne, or merely one of the nameless millions of defenseless creatures who perish as collateral damage in war as we wage it in the twentieth century and beyond.

When I try to respond, I note that there are tantalizing Easter eggs in the film to try to answer this question (and while I am sure a web page somewhere catalogs them, I am relying on my own viewing here).

What is real might turn on the piece of chalk that Ofelia is given by the faun, with which she can draw a door on the wall of any room and escape into a safer place. We know the chalk is real, we think — because Captain Vidal, her cruel stepfather and psychopathic leader in Franco’s resistance-crushing army — finds it, and crushes it as well. The chalk is an item that crosses over, so to speak, between worlds: no one else sees Ofelia’s magic book, and the adventures she goes on are hers (and ours) alone to witness. Only the chalk. And Vidal finds it and crushes it, and Mercedes sees a square on the wall that she has drawn with it. The chalk is real (so is the mandrake root, if you are keeping score at home) — and it came from the faun, so the faun is real and Ofelia is a princess and it’s all real, yay.

But here’s the thing: when Vidal comes across Ofelia and the faun in the penultimate scene, Vidal can’t see him. So that might mean the faun isn’t real — because Vidal is a grown up, no one can deny, and he doesn’t see him. So unless this is a Peter-Pan / only-kids-know-magic-reality kind of story, it’s all made up. The faun is a figment of the cuentos; Ofelia dies a forgotten martyr to a false story; nothing matters, and the gears of fascism grind on.

But — and this what most matters — Vidal isn’t reliable either. Maybe because of the aguardiente he drank before the chalk-finding and the faun-not-seeing, which is laced with a triple dose of the medicine the doctor was giving Ofelia’s mom to sleep earlier the film.

But even more, because Vidal is merely seeing the stories he himself has been reading and believing. Stories from his father, about how the way a man dies determines how he has lived and the legacy he deserves, a childhood story which has bent the whole of his career as he has sought to be worthy of that legacy. Stories of rigorous routine and discipline; of records played over and over; of polished boots and clean shaves, always. According to his story — trauma and controlled response, escalated into oblivion — there can be no fauns.

And we must remember that poor Ofelia with her cuentos is also in a heightened, even altered state. Torn from her home and her “real” father, a tailor; transported to the rural mountains of central Spain; her mother at risk of dying from childbirth; her prospects radically foreclosed by forces beyond her control. She is Mako Mori in the rubble in Pacific Rim, and Carlos facing ghostly Santi in the orphanage in Backbone. For del Toro, childhood itself is trauma, a story no child cannot hear.

And so perhaps all of it is a retreat, a response to the pain. When we first meet her in the car to Vidal’s mountain garrison, we see how easily she walks away from the car where her mother is suffering, into the woods to find something more capable of giving her what she needs. It is not the first time her mother has been ill, we know. She has adjusted, and will continue to. If the adjustments mean fauns and frogs and labyrinths and quests and unspeakable monsters to flee from, so be it.

So what happens at the end of Pan’s Labyrinth, for me, is both less and more satisfying than the answer I think my son seeks: we learn again that the stories we believe shape what is real.

At some moments, we have more control over which stories we listen to than at others; sometimes the stories we listen to are reactions we can’t help but have, and sometimes we have more choice. But it’s all stories, all the way down. Fin.

There’s another important detail I caught in last night’s viewing as well — one I am ashamed not to have noticed earlier, being a former Spanish major who lived in Spain for two years long ago.

The film is not set during Spain’s bloody Civil War, which ended in 1939. Rather, it takes place seven years later, in 1944 — after the cessation of formal hostilities, but still early in the decades-long struggle between Franco’s military and the maquis, who were “Spanish guerrillas exiled in France after the Spanish Civil War who continued to fight against Francoist Spain until the early 1960s.” The film’s setting is the mountains of central Spain, where the maquis held strong, usually in close cahoots with the country folks who supported them — and defied Franco to route them, which took the jackboots another twenty years to accomplish.

The point being that the military conflict of the film is far from the action, both geographically and temporally. The conflict has been going on a long time, and the people on both sides have been largely left to their own devices to shape and persecute it. In a way, the conflict is no more or less than what its constituents say it is.

That’s the thing about long struggles, endurance contests, wars of attrition: eventually you more or less become your own scorekeeper. So the story you are telling that compels what you are doing can become your only compulsion.

Franco excelled at shaping the stories of his people. When the country folks line up to receive their rations from the storehouse, a Guardia Civil officer (Franco’s stormtroopers, who managed local occupation and whose tricornered hats became a symbol of oppression and fear in that nation that still casts a shadow) walks down the line with a small bollo de pan. “This is our daily bread in Franco’s Spain,” he intones over and over, echoing the language of the Lord’s Prayer, compulsory in Franco’s Catholic state. “Kept safe in the mill! The Reds lie, because in a united Spain, there’s not a single home without fire or bread.” So goes the daily, ground-level indoctrination of totalitarianism always and everywhere.

And totalitarianism is only effective as its public-facing functionaries — and Vidal is an excellent one, because he’s personalized its story. In a dinner Vidal throws for the local church and lay leadership (soft power exercised — the interpenetration of the church and state in Franco’s Spain to keep order remains a world model of efficient perfidy), one of the local officials flatters Vidal by thanking him for his service, acknowledging that “he is not here by choice.”

Vidal’s reply speaks his truth, and maybe the truth of all for whom there is no daylight between their stories and their actions:

You’re wrong about that.
I want my son to be born in a new, cleansed Spain.
Because these people hold the mistaken belief that we are all equal.
But there’s a difference: the war is over, and we won.
And if we need to kill every one of them,
Then we’ll kill them all, and that’s that.
We’re all here by choice.
(And raising his glass into a toast, which all join): by choice!*

Vidal, and Ofelia, and all of us, choose what our stories are — especially en extremis, especially under duress, especially in long struggles. The physical violence of the film still startles, even when I know it is coming. But there is violence in both the real-life and fantasy passages of Laberinto. Stories are themselves no refuge from violence. As another innocent venturing into darkness was once taught when he asked, “what is in there?”, the answer remains: “Only what you take with you.”

I write this at the beginning of what looks like a long struggle. The siege, really, that COVID-19 is lowering upon my own stronghold and yours, weaponizing our usual coping mechanism — turning to each other — into its most effective way to breach our walls. In the age of “social distancing” we will find new ways to connect, for sure, and already are.

But I think we will also be left, inevitably, even more alone with our stories. As weeks turn into months, we will be even more responsible for listening to what those stories are and — to the extent we can, choosing them.

On one level, we are all merely traumatized animals, and our brain stems will do what they have evolved to.

But we are also storymakers and tellers. May our stories reflect our best choices, our real values, and our deepest pleasures.

*I am confused by the subtitle here, because Vidal actually says “por gusto,” which I’d translate as “for our pleasure.” But I understand from Wikipedia del Toro took a month to do his own translation for the subtitles, having been displeased with the job done on “Backbone” — so we know this is the intent. Maybe “for pleasure” would have made Vidal’s horrors seem merely an act of individual sadism, and therefore fascism as implemented just a matter of bad actors. Still: the overtones of pleasure remain.

I am going to tell a story about the future, and about the past.

I have to call it that — just a story — because I am accustomed to knowing what things really are, and calling what I am about to write just a story is the only way that I can write it.

It might become a true story. Indications today are that it is likely to. One sentiment I have read, in several ways and from several sources, is that whatever you do in anticipation of something like what is coming always seems excessive, but in hindsight you can always see that it was never nearly enough.

This story is trying to be enough, before it knows what “enough” is. So it is going to reach beyond what seems probable, because that is what it has to do in order to accomplish what I hope it will.

And this story will be more general than specific, as I write it. Because I am imagining that, generally, all of us will have a tightly-focused and specific version of it, and as you consider this story I imagine you’ll populate it with what’s unique to you.

But it will still be very specific in some spots, because I am not capable of telling a general story. My own life is too specific, too utterly mine, to keep any account of it general. Yours is too.

This story really frightens me. And, oddly, it also doesn’t.

In five parts.

First:

We cannot imagine what is about to happen in this country. We think we know that something is about to happen that will be cataclysmic. World-ending for many, world-changing for all. We look to other nations and extrapolate and predict, with more confidence by the day, what is about to happen here.

There is a tremendous appetite for this kind of prediction. We are all hungry to know exactly what is coming so we can get ready, and we feel like we know enough to do some things. Some of those things we have done before, when cataclysms have loomed, and some of them are new. We prepare, in some familiar ways (store, plan, resolve) and some unfamiliar (wash, isolate, tune in to what is happening in ways we didn’t used to have).

But extrapolating and predicting is not the same as being able to know what will happen. So I look instead at what I do know — at what already happened. I look at other historical moments when reality grew larger than our capacity to comprehend it.

These moments rush in for me. You will have different ones.

1865. 1917. 1941. 1945. 1963. 1995. 1999. 2001. 2005. 2012.

They come closer together as they get closer to the present — perhaps because I actually witnessed the more recent ones unfold, perhaps because we documented them more fully, perhaps because they are getting worse. This is an incomplete list, but it is mine right now.

Terrible events sometimes are more intense examples of the same thing we have seen before, and sometimes are utterly new. What is happening now seems to be some of both. It is both sudden and anticipated. It is both understood and mysterious. It is both manageable and uncontainable. It is both visible and invisible. It is both something we have seen before, and something we never have.

Second:

Despite its uncertainties, I think it is certain that it is going to require us to find a way to live with experiences and sensations and feelings and states of being we never thought we would have to.

Horror, both experienced and witnessed as others experience it.

Deprivation, in small ways and overwhelming ways.

Losses, both those eventually made whole and those that are permanent.

Pain, both acute and sustained.

Suffering, in a word: in all its hues.

Some of these experiences will recall ones we have already seen in our own lives. Some will recall things our forebears told us about as we listened and strained to imagine. Some will recall things we have read about or been taught about, and tried to imagine, but couldn’t.

Maybe those last ones we could finally let in through a specific story or narrative — something small that, like individual stories always do, let us grok something huge. (A soldier in a landing craft. A girl hidden in an attic with her family. A child under a desk.) Maybe it is time to seek out those stories again.

Third:

What I learn about what has happened before is that, if we are going to get through it, we are each going to have to do the things we do well harder and better than ever before.

The scientists are going to need to research and imagine like they never have before.

The makers are going to need to make things they have never made before.

The artists are going to need to give us things to see and hear and feel that they never have before.

And — this is key, if history teaches — not just the big ones.Not just the famous ones. Not just the ones in positions for their work to have great influence or reach or impact.

All of us.

The community organizers and the spreadsheet makers and the letter writers.

The balcony singers and the mudroom painters and the 5:00 AM bloggers.

The people who eat out of their victory gardens they’ve tended so carefully and still have enough to share, and the people who carry their well-maintained chainsaws down to the end of the road, and the people who leave covered dishes on doorsteps.

All of us make the world go round. All, in our way, teach, each to our measure.

We are each going to need to do what only we do so hard now.

We are all going to need what each other do, so much, that we really have no other choice anymore. There can be no more moments of doubt or inhibition. No gift is surplus any longer. We can afford for none to be lost.

It all has to come forward now, freely and beautifully, for our own survival and the survival of everyone else.

Fourth:

Even as we all lean in with what we are already best at, we are all also going to need to become willing to try things we have never tried before and learn things we have never learned before.

We will have to develop new abilities. Even those of us who thought we were done with learning.

The shy people will need to learn to be bold; the introverts will need to learn to come out. And the extroverts will need to learn to stay in; the loud people will have to learn to listen.

People who always buy things will have to learn to make them or go without; people who always make their own will have to be content with store-bought.

People who want to go it alone will need to turn to each other; people who thrive in community will need to learn to go it alone.

You see a pattern. I am not making this up.

This is what people just like us — or we, ourselves, in the pasts we remember — have been called upon to do, to create, to become, before.

None of us will already have what we need to get through what is about to happen. None of us will already have what we need; none of us will already think what we must think; none of us will already be what we need to be. We will need to evolve. There will be no opt out.

Fifth, and last:

This is all terrifying to consider.

But, I venture, if we learn from the past — in its broad truths, which I’ve tried to foreground here, as well as its specificities — we will have exactly what we need to get through what is about to happen.

That is the greatest lesson from the past, after all. Some number of us have come through everything that has come at us.

Not all of us have come through. Many, many have been lost, often horribly. And those who did come through have often been deeply changed as a result, sometimes in ways that baffled their children and their children — and then what they knew was forgotten as they left and their children became the new adults and the new normal.

Maybe it has always been thus. The new stories forget the old and have to relearn and rediscover, and also build their own ways.

It is so tragic, so wasteful, the way things happen. But I don’t think we need to feel foolish for what we have forgotten, or what we never knew. We’re just people making our way, like all of them were.

And we will have to go through this like they did their own horrors, their own losses, their own tragedies. We will have to be changed in the ways only our moment requires us to be — before our moment passes and our stories become memories, become histories, become forgotten until they have to be remembered again.

We have no way out but through. And there are no guarantees any one of us will make it through. But “we” will make it through.

That is the story I dream up today, and it is a lot like the stories I have heard before. It is terrible, and it is beautiful. And it is ours.

All over the country right now, teachers are being asked to work double and triple-hard. In response to widespread shuttering of schools — for weeks, maybe longer — thousands of districts are asking their staffs to create, sometimes out of nothing, credible and productive work that can be done by students from their homes or shelters. They are being asked to learn new technologies, sometimes with little sense of whether or not the students they will seek to reach with those technologies will be equipped to meet them. They are running so hot. And no one has any idea whether it will work. No one has been here before.

Don’t forget that the district that sends out the we-all-have-to-pull-together-in-this-crisis emails is the same district that will turn its back on you the second you run out of sick time.

Don’t work for free.
Don’t spend your own money.
Follow your contract.

That was a social media post I saw yesterday, from a friend who is a career teacher and union rep in a large American city. The image above is another expression of a similar sentiment that is is going around.

It seems some who are not teachers are meeting this sort of wary response from those who are with alarm. Why are some of the teachers “so bitter”, they wonder? Why are they so guarded? It’s an emergency, after all! Everyone needs to pitch in!

I think the answer is that teachers are cagey right now because their experience has taught them to be. And, down deep, such responses reveal what I think is an irreducible contradiction inside many teachers’ hearts:

The quality that is most sacred about a great teacher — which compels them to do their work well — also makes them uniquely vulnerable to exploitation.

Let me try to explain.

Anyone who pays even casual attention to the plight of the public school teacher will discern a long arc of those who control their professional lives seeking ways to ask them to do more with less. This is reflected in teaching’s efforts to professionalize itself, following the template that the medical profession did a hundred years ago. As well as in the groundswell of public agitation over the last years that seeks to keep the reality of the teaching life on everyone’s minds. The low pay*, of course — but also the loss of autonomy, and especially the funding disparities that ensure schools without many resources seem to stay that way, to the detriment of their students’ learning.

Public education also has a long history of acute crises deployed as leverage to effect dramatic change — often with concomitant negative impacts on teachers’ lives and their capacity to do their work. From Sputnik to Obama’s Race to the Top initiative: educators have learned to look askance at a sense of urgency thrust upon them, because it usually results in their world being upended and something new being taken out of their collective hides. (Put another way: teachers are frequently asked to do something new. They rarely have existing duties taken from them.)

This phenomenon can be understood as an expression of what Naomi Klein famously termed the “shock doctrine”:

the exploitation of national crises (disasters or upheavals) to establish controversial and questionable policies, while citizens are excessively distracted (emotionally and physically) to engage and develop an adequate response, and resist effectively.

This is the contemporary story — but it is not a new one. The very existence of public school, from its earliest beginnings under Horace Mann in Massachusetts, were predicated on the notion that teachers — especially female teachers — would do the work for less than its value, because the opportunity to care for what Lisa Delpit much later called “other peoples’ children” offered them a unique path to their own self-fulfillment. As Dana Goldstein writes in her terrifically readable history of the profession, The Teacher Wars:

…The home and the school (were) intertwined, two naturally feminine realms in which women could nurture the next generation. “Woman, whatever are her relations in life, is necessarily the guardian of the nursery, the companion of childhood, and the constant model of imitation,” (Catherine Beecher) wrote in her “Essay on the Education of Female Teachers.” “It is her hand that first stamps impressions on the immortal spirit, that must remain forever.” Historian Redding Sugg dubbed this the “motherteacher” ideal — the notion that teaching and mothering were much the same job, done in different settings (p. 18).

Goldstein goes on to explain that, with so few other opportunities available outside the home for (white, educated) women to pursue, Mann and the Massachusetts legislature sold the idea of the “motherteacher” to the public as a welcome alternative to the itinerant, abusive, and alcoholic male teachers (think Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) who dominated the period — men who, presaging the still-heard and hurtful saw about “those who can’t do, teach,” actually taught because they could not do.

So any time the conversation turns to teachers and compensation — in my state, and everywhere in this country — we must not be surprised when we encounter an underpinning of “why should we pay them more?” Because the very existence of the profession in this country is predicated upon the notion that a great teacher would actually do it for free — because teaching completes them and elevates them.

True story: last year I heard an otherwise-progressive member of my state legislature affirm that the best way for a North Carolina teacher to thrive is to marry a man with money. Shocking — and not. (As is the fact that firing teachers upon marriage — or, god forbid, pregnancy — was widely practiced well into the 70s. Once you are married, why do you need to teach? You have your own kids now.)

This is the deep history of systemic exploitation that underpins any effort to ask teachers to do more, to hustle, to run hot.

But many do it anyway. Work beyond their contract. Pay for supplies out of their own pocket. Take “their” children into their own homes, and otherwise go way beyond their professional mandate, asked or not, in the service of the perceived need of the students and often to great personal detriment.

Why?

I am deeply impressed by the literature and research that seeks to understand the observable qualities — and the inner life — of those who have long and fruitful teaching careers. Especially those who do not merely survive the work, but thrive in it: that thrive because of it. There’s a perpetual-motion-machine aspect to considering these peoples’ practice. The impossible machine that engineers have sought for generations: one that runs without friction.

How is it that the precise elements of the work that “burn out” so many teachers actually sustain others?

We know about the “burn out” part; the rule of thumb is that half the teachers entering the field will no longer be teaching in five years (though those numbers are a little soft, it is still a hell of an attrition rate).

A few folks have offered really compelling explanations of what compels good teaching — and why those who do it well are vulnerable to exploitation.

David Hansen finds a “sense of vocation” that motivates many thriving teachers. Vocation is “a form of public service that yields enduring personal fulfillment to those who provide it” (preface). He figures that the place where one’s own desire to be of use in the world meets the world’s great need is the place where such folks thrive.** This is why when young people come to the College of Education with no sense of why they want to do this work other than a vague desire to “love those kids up, because they don’t get it at home,” I persevere — despite such unexamined beliefs being saturated with deficit stories about people and homes they imagine so different than their own. At the core of even such a statement is the beginning of a desire to be of use to those who need you, and that is sacred.

I have learned to use “sacred” the plainspoken way Parker Palmer does: “something worthy of respect.” In “The Grace of Great Things,” he invites educators to get in touch with their own deep sense of the sacred, and see the way it turns into being of use to others — not in a paternal or better-than way, but because to live in respectful relation with the world and those who inhabit it rhymes with deeper patterns of thriving.

It’s Wendell Berry who first (to me) explained those patterns — in the formidable little essay “Solving for Pattern” (from 1980, before sustainability was even a thing!). It is a piece about farming more than anything else, but he finds the lessons taught by the intractable realities of that work illuminating of so much more (“It is only when it is understood that our agricultural dilemma is characteristic not of our agriculture but of our time that we can begin to understand why these surprises happen, and to work out standards of judgment that may prevent them”).

Briefly put: for Berry, the only solution that truly solves a presenting problem is the one that ramifies into more solutions. Too many solutions are short-term, heedless of the long term expense of “running hot” (an engine, a field, a teacher) because they are focused only on long-term gains. The choice that enriches the soil and ensures long productivity is often the one that means fewer yields in the short term. Likewise is a life turned to service to others, while less remunerative or prestigious than other lines of work, often in keeping with the deep need of each of us to be embedded in the lives of others. The need so many of us feel to meet our own brokenness through encounter and work to heal the brokenness of another.

And here I arrive at the very core of this line of reasoning: the notion that we are all broken, incomplete, and can only find our wholeness in our identification with those who surround us, and our application of ourselves to the needs of others. This is the Saint Francis Prayer, of course, as well as a core precept of other faith traditions. In my own (Christianity) I found it well-explained in the thinking of theologian Henri Nouwen, who describes its mechanisms in terms of hospitality. Here’s a lovely passage that limns the experience of losing oneself in teaching another — and the truth in the teacher cliche about “learning as much from my students as they learn from me”:

Old and New Testament stories not only show how serious our obligation is to welcome the stranger in our home, but they also tell us that guests are carrying precious gifts with them, which they are eager to reveal to a receptive host…When hostility is converted into hospitality then fearful strangers can become guests revealing to their hosts the promise they are carrying with them. Then, in fact, the distinction between host and guest proves to be artificial and evaporates in the recognition of the new found unity…Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.

But if this is in fact what most deeply motivates a life in service to other peoples’ children — and the needs of other peoples’ children are, in fact, an inexhaustible resource — then what could possible prevent teachers with a sense of vocation from thriving? After all, they are doing the work they must to find their own peace and sense of fulfillment. What else do they need?

Well, they need the ability to do it and be adequately compensated for it that they can have lives of dignity. And they need to know that they have reliable access to the sense that their work is of worth: that they are having impact and making a difference.

Doris Santoro, though, explains how almost every top-down reform inflicted upon teachers complicates or ends the possibility of access to the sense that one’s work is of worth. She terms such outcomes the “moral rewards” of teaching — but notes that, as teaching becomes more a task whose value is assessed by the performance of students on high-stakes standardized measures, the less opportunity a teacher has to access those “moral rewards.”

Because such labor is by necessity atomized, piecework. “Standardization,” by definition, requires the reduction of the infinitely complex and situation-bound reality of teaching to specific tasks performed up to or not meeting expectations, followed by the enactment of a feedback loop to remediate and get a better outcome next time. In this way of thinking about the work, the teacher is merely a functionary of another’s intentions — an object, not a subject. And a student is just a set of outputs that are either acceptable or need more work.

So Santoro pointedly shuns the term “burnout,” because it places the cause of the failure to thrive on the individual teacher — on some inchoate personal or moral lack that makes this teacher unable to “make it” where another might. Instead, she insists on using the term “demoralization”: the institutionalized loss of access to the life-giving moral components of our work. Failures which are systemic — designed in — and not individual.

So in closing, this is all in play when a teacher is asked to run hot; to take one for the team; to dig deep and just get it done, just this once.

• You have asked me to do that before.
• A part of me wants to — because I am made whole by being of service.
• That’s sacred, and I want to honor it.
• But when I have honored it in the past, you have exploited it.
• And so I won’t do that again.
• But a part of me wants to.
• But I just can’t anymore.

Round and round, And that’s why teachers are both working themselves to death this week, and why they are torn up about it. Why those who lead and advocate for them wish to serve the kids, and at the same time wish to save the profession from its own best — and worst — impulses.

The profession is doomed to be exploited. It was set up that way.

*A starting teacher in my state will earn $35K/year this year, with a $1K raise each year over the first fifteen years, until they top out at $50K for essentially the rest of their careers (up to $52K at 25 years of service). There are are of course local salary supplements that are paid by specific districts and areas, related almost wholly to that area’s tax base and ability to pay them — which leads to the perverse incentive for the most competitive teachers to seek jobs in the best-off districts and, sometimes but not always, not in the Title I schools that most need their skills. And you can earn a 12% bump by becoming National Board Certified after your third year. But that’s about it, in my state, where salary increases for graduate study was 86'd several years ago.

**Here he paraphrases, knowingly I think, theologian Frederic Buechner: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

(So many spoilers.)

Last night, I finally saw Mike Flanagan’s film adaptation of Stephen King’s 2013 Doctor Sleep. The book a sequel to King’s 1977 novel The Shining, and, by extension, the film necessarily a sequel to Kubrick’s iconic 1980 film reimagining of that book.

I was so excited for it — because The Shining, both book and film, elevated my own young understanding of what horror could be when I encountered them each in my formative years. And I am Flanagan fan number one — ever since I came across his Oculus unawares on Netflix and saw what he could do with a sheer surface, a still tableau, a subtle change in what is expected that you notice subliminally first, and then with growing horror that it is the only thing that matters, desperately.

It was a ride. Partly because I saw it on the university film series, which is always a ride. Through some vagary of distribution I don’t understand, the campus always gets films well after they have closed in feature houses but just a couple of days before they are released on home and streaming media. Since such films are shown in an eighty year-old lecture hall that is adapted into a cinema on the weekends — and the screenings are run by undergrads whose sense of the technical demands of the job can be touch-and-go — I am always guaranteed none of the attention to volume or clarity of image of the former, but also none of the complete control over my experience of the latter. The screen may billow a bit like the poorly-tensioned sheet it is, and the digital projector won’t handle darks well. Last night the captions were inexplicably left on.

But I also can’t press pause.

The part I was anticipating was more terrifying in its anticipation than its actual event. Namely, the re-appearance of the Overlook Hotel, which is teased in the film’s second scene, with stunning attention to sound design and shot-for-tracking-shot specificity. Incredibly effective. I did not realize how completely I had metabolized the Kubrick film until I physically caught my breath when little Danny’s tricycle suddenly turned right instead of left. It amounted to as effective a turning of the screw as a single cocked head in Oculus, or a single shot being queasily reversed in his terrific shaggy spooky mansion story The Haunting of Hill House, which no doubt got him the look for this project.

It also emphasized the stakes of being asked to take on a horror property that has such gravity in the firmament: a film whose images actually have attraction, whose images have entire systems of lesser bodies orbiting around them. What do you do with that sort of visual legacy?

And narrative legacy, since King famously disavows Kubrick’s choices as violence to his own story that effaces its most important, occult parts in the name of its own new, seen terrors?

Well, he splits the difference. What else could he have done? The Overlook still stands, as is possible as sequel to the film but not to the book. And so it is Schrodinger’s Overlook, here and not here. The reproductions of its vistas, creatures, and horrors are reverently re-created — and also not, also fucked with. What we remember as sheer and antiseptic is here shown as muzzy, moldering, in truer gothic haunted-house style. It’s disorienting, and not in the fun “wait how is there a window there” way that many of us enjoy the first film. The scale is oddly off: lobbies and hallways foreshortened, everything kind of at 4/5 scale. And when the hotel’s several demonic entities finally materialize, all at once, it is mostly cosplay. The similarities to those roles and performances in the 1980 film only startle us into realizing this isn’t that, and the discontinuity takes us out of the story and the whole conceit jarringly, disconcertingly.

Some critics especially go after the “Jack Nicholson look-alike” who portrays Lloyd the Bartender — both narrator and Charon in Kubrick’s film — but I disagree. Lloyd is the first to insist that you have mistaken him for someone else, multiple times. The slippage in portrayal is delicious here as it always is, more intensely so. But the decision to both have and not-have the Overlook as setting and character eventually eats itself, as overdetermined objects — an axe, a typewriter — are suddenly asked to carry new narrative weight that they just cannot ever, and it turns into Halloween.

So much more to say about the performances in this film, especially Rebecca Ferguson’s Big Bad, much more terrifying here than in the book. She deserves her whole own thing.

But I am typing around the film’s central horror. One I have never quite seen, one unexpected and for some (The New Yorker’s David Denby among them) unforgivable: the choice to portray, realistically and at length, the torture and murder of an eleven year-old boy.

My first response to the scene followed Denby’s (and I have decried such choices elsewhere). It felt cheap, abusive, and exploitative to suddenly be witnessing the powerlessness of the heedless violation of a defenseless small body at the hands of seven adults. It broke the rules, the contract between filmmaker and audience that this will be this kind of movie, not that. (Yorgos Lanthimos does it too: fuck with your expectations of what a film experience will be, though he does it so comprehensively that for me viewing his work is always just waiting for the next of his violations to emerge. Which has in the event perhaps become his entire identifiable aesthetic, and not ineffectively.)

But this is not a Lanthimos experiment. This is a sequel to The Shining. Which chooses to include an uncut, explicit portrayal of something dreadful that is the single event among the movie’s horrors that actually happens in the real world, daily. The exploitation of a child.

It is almost unwatchable. Restrained and helpless, the child asks the leader if they are going to hurt him. And she responds that yes, they are. (It is a gang of vampires — no blood consumed, but King’s creations have all all the literary resonances of those who raven for their own pleasure and sustenance at the complete expense of others.)

And then they do. At length, mostly depicted, until his death. It is outrageous. It is unbearable. It is indelible.

And here is where I am still trying to figure it out. Why go there, filmmaker? In a picture that is playing with depicting what is real and not — at several levels, dancing your own images with others that will always haunt them — why go to vivid torture, to abject suffering, to real domination and violation?

Unlike Denby, I am inclined to allow it, and to let it draw the circle around what the film is about bigger.

Because at its core, this story is about addiction as the daily, human manifestation of self-will run riot. It is about how the annihilation of ethical relation to other people is consumed by it. “Torrance,” Danny and his family’s last name, always brings “torrid” to mind, for me: afire, consumed in heat and pain. Lloyd presents eight-year sober adult Dan with “his brand,” the Jack Daniels that his father drank. Dan remembers smelling a bottle once, and how it smelled “like something on fire. Which, I suppose, it was.” And the main decision of Kubrick’s that most alienated King was the decision not to destroy the Overlook at the end — in a cataclysmic boiler explosion and fire — but to leave it stand, frozen solid, blood congealing.

From that perspective, all is redeemed here. The Overlook burns to the ground. And also, in the realistic portrayal of the minute-to-minute suffering of a defenseless child, so do those in addiction’s grip, and anyone unfortunate enough to have their lives tied to them. Addiction doesn’t care, anymore than a band of ancient vampires do. It just needs its fix. These monsters turn on each other too, we see — they consume anyone and anything that promises to make them feel better for a moment. The torture and murder of a little leaguer is just one moment along the way. The real horror of this story is how many such exploitations and consumings we haven’t seen. How many will happen, unattended, today.

But it’s a labyrinth of pain that King (and Flanagan) do find a way out of: in the novel and film’s tender and hyperrealistic depictions of recovery, which have received far less critical ink.

I was surprised to see all the usual pretense of a “recovery group” depicted in film stripped away: that’s a real AA meeting. Those are the actual banners; that’s a real chip. AA notoriously — as a matter of principle — avoids its own depiction in “press, radio, and films,” because it teaches that the spiritual practice of anonymity is a door through which important energies of service and humility can enter. I don’t know if the combined power of King and Flanagan and the studio exerted influence to allow its marks to be used; I don’t know if the potential power of this platform in the hands of King (long sober) and Flanagan (don’t know, but sure looks like it) was thought to be a powerful way to spread the message. Or maybe they just did it. After all, AA is the epitome of a public domain property.

But for this viewer, those scenes of recovery and community and making a different choice — right now, in this moment, whether confronted with supernatural demons or one’s own — were among the most powerful.

And they wouldn’t have been had not the actual, banal horrors of the ways that addiction burn through lives been similarly depicted. “The man takes a drink,” says Dan at one point, mouthing a cliche I had somehow never heard before. “Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man.” Only by showing where addiction will take you, all the way down, can the quiet power of such a fall — interrupted — speak.

There’s a lot more to consider in this film. As King so often does, young people prove wiser and more resourceful in how to confront the evils that underestimate them than ever. School is banal and pointless: everything important happens there, but despite there. And parents are well-meaning but powerless, misunderstanding their children’s needs, saved from the truth by children who choose not to tell them what they could not bear to know. They are at their best when they are in the dark, because when they try to help they are ineffectual, or a liability. The kids know what they need. They’ll tell you if you listen.

But what matters most is what matters most. It’s a hell of a picture: uneven, unsatisfying, unsuccessful. Enough, sometimes exquisite. Great.

This week, the New York Times is enduring a spasm of self-inflicted Gen X nostalgia, and it is kind of messed up.

To start with, they’ve dispatched people who were four when NAFTA was ratified to talk about it. To experience, Encino Man- style, the reality of twenty-five years ago as a series of bizarre reveals in which one wonders how anyone was able to get around, get in touch with friends, metabolize and excrete and carry on generally, before internet and iPhone and Insta.

The first thing I noticed at midnight when the clock struck 1994 was the sudden silence in the room. The second thing was the deafening volume of my inner monologue…all I could hear were my own thoughts.

It’s not the ending of the world
It’s only the closing of a discotheque
I used to go 3 times a week
That was a long long time ago
And that roaring that you hear
Is only the blood that circles constantly
No, it is not applause, my dear
No, that was a long long time ago
That was a long long time ago

The answer to these questions — How did they manage? — of course, is quite well, thank you. Which is why these are exactly the wrong people, these Style Section reporters in their late twenties, to weigh in. They weren’t in their own time, yet, when the moments under consideration were taking place. The author of this piece spent that year consuming Dunkaroos in the back seat of her parents’ car. She wasn’t buying her own Dunkaroos yet, let alone her own back seat. When you are that young, time is observed as someone else unfurls it.

And as I sit on the edge of fifty, I realize it really shouldn’t be someone my current age either. Because by the time you are lucky enough to get as far as I have, a year is a week; life is rarely experienced as new or unique enough any more to be commented on, let alone considered in detail and filed away correctly.

But the me of 1994 would be exactly the guy for the job of deciding what was going on that mattered. I was born in 1969, so 1994 is the exact center of my own life thus far — the nail in the wall that the whole portrait hangs on, perfectly balanced on one side and the other. Could we call that guy up? Or leave him a voicemail?

Twenty-five! Three years before, I was an ex-missionary trying to get clear of a bad church and re-enter civilian life; three years later, I’d be married and well-begun on what my adult life had become. In 1994, I was exactly in the middle of it all. Nothing was taken for granted. Everything was keenly observed and felt, because I was inventing myself as I went along. All the data were relevant.

And I sought out a lot of data in 1994, mostly at Tower Records. 1994 was a moment where finding music often started at parties asking the host what was on the stereo, and ended late in a two-story (!) shop full of CDs and posters with thirty dollars and a determination to go home with something new. I had an appetite, and I went out to sate it. Other inputs: what musicians I had loved in college were doing now. What was on WHFS. What cooler or scarier friends were listening to. What my high school students were listening to. True stories — at least a few records in my collection from each source. This is how we got along before Spotify algorithms gave us what was our to like, kids. It was hand-to-hand, ground game. (In fairness, I think the kids are doing something similar on SoundCloud. I hear. I hope so.)

The David Byrne record quoted at the top came out of the first of these vectors to new art. His eponymous album, also released twenty-five years ago next week, smack in the middle of 1994. A record few love, even among that attenuated group that have listened to David Byrne’s output carefully over the his career, not just when his art has broken through on MTV or resonated with the critics. I love that record though. Not because I am hip, but because I am weird, and greasy and mortal and obtuse and obscene, just like that record is.

Quick orientation: in the late eighties, DB leaves Talking Heads through a multi-year slow-motion train wreck of solo projects and ego. He’s a tough guy to work with, we hear at length from those who would know. He doesn’t seem to care too much what anyone has to say. He makes Rei Momo, a grad-school thesis in Latin and Caribbean rhythms and song styles, carefully cited — and then uh-oh, the dissertation, in which he mashes all he now knows into something new and blazing and terrifyingly fun, backed by a huge band he calls “10 Car Pile-up.” None of it sounds like Talking Heads. All of it seems connected to his Luaka Bop label, which is reinvigorating “world music” through re-releasing vital old tracks and giving platform to new artists. He’s not who he was, but those of us who love him are getting a bead on who we think he’ll be. He’s Alan Lomax with a big checking account and his own guitar. That’ll be fine.

And then this record, like a slap to the face. Gone is the genial large band; now he’s backed by only a bassist and two percussionists — a few more on the studio project, but when I saw him live at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium that year the whole of the record, and a good deal besides, was ably managed by just three guys besides him.

And the music is creepy. It’s scary. It’s physical. The cover art leads us that way, too — black and white closeups of his feet, hairy and simian. The lyrics even more oblique than usual. No David Byrne narrative gives a coherent story, but there’s an even greater preponderance of apocalyptic and desperate impressions. People trapped, lost, profaned, abandoned.

I saw my love by the restaurant
Diggin for home fries in a garbage can

It’s a record built around fierce guitar hooks, laid down in a bed of cranked-up piccolo snare and vibraphone and a dozen percussion instruments left around from all those Luaka Bop one-offs. It’s a rag-end record, rough and ugly and you can’t look away.

And then, tucked into the B-side, a rave-up partier that would have worked on the last record (“You & Eye”) and two incongruent little ballads (“My Love is You” and “Buck Naked”) that seem to remember that music is made by people for people here in the civilized world, where we like our art to tell us what it’s for. “You & Eye” is about how hell is one big party — but at least it’s the best party you could ever imagine:

They have barbeque & beer
Better than they do up here
And you know all the words to the songs
Yeah — we smoke cigarettes
We dance with the dead
They’re soft to the touch
We drink way too much
And darling, I think you’ll like it here

“My Love Is You” is the sweetest DB ever gets. You can put it on a cassette mix and give it to your honey. Some did.

And “Buck Naked” is a callback to TH’s “Nothing But Flowers,” pre-nostalgia for that moment that’s coming after pop eats itself and the world besides and we’ll be left wandering in what’s left of the garden waiting for evolution or the aliens to reboot the program.

It’s astonishing, really, this record. And it mostly sank without a bubble. No one knew what to do with it. No one does still — well, no one thinks about it at all, any more.

Much less snarky millennials consigning 1994 to Dunkaroos and Joan Lunden and no Google Maps OMFG. But so much more was going on that year. Not just DB in full effect. The Downward Spiral AND Dookie were released, each spawning its own revolution in sound. “Wild Night” was covered by John Mellencamp and Me’shell Ndegeocello, prefiguring genre-bending collapses that were to come and continue. And Ace of Base held down plenty synth loops to slam our meat sacks around to. Can’t forget those. The world kept turning, throwing off ridiculousness and sublimity in equal parts, for those who were really paying attention like their lives depended upon it, because they did.

So what of it? What’s my beef?

That the remembering of my most important time is being managed by those ill-equipped to remember it, let alone reflect on it. Not just because of their youth: because of their very organisms, limited by the ETEWAF reality of a supercomputer in your pocket so why ever go really looking for something. Whatever else we were in 1994, we twenty-somethings emerging squinting and blinking into the possibility of adulthood — we were listening. We were looking. Since nothing was served up to us, we had to go find our own. And wow, was there a lot to find.

I am in full get-off-my-lawn mode how. Sorry. I wonder if I’ll be around at seventy-five to see the Dunkaroos kids summarized and rolled into a ball by their own children, and me and mine consigned to complete irrelevance and early bird specials at Uber Eats or whatever. It would serve me right.

There’s probably something inevitable going on here, accelerated by the ease of fast-fashion hot takes and disposable typing, like this. And something very old too.

Who know: maybe we’ll be okay after all. It’s not the first rodeo, remember.

Just ours.

I stutter-started my semester this fall. I met with all my students once, then abandoned them to substitutes and videos and left for a week to take our eldest to college far away in the north. He’s in a dining hall having breakfast right now, or the palatial a la carte facility that passes for a dining hall these days. I miss him. He is gone.

His departure, though anticipated, has still surprised me, because it has me thinking about how I learned about leaving. What I got wrong, and what I know now.

I was the eldest son of only children. My grandparents passed early, no aunts or uncles, little extended family to speak of other than my parents’ chosen one. And Dad was active duty military, which meant a lot of moving around in my early life, most of which I remember too deep inside me to actually recall.

He became a reservist when I was in third grade, and we stayed put for seven years. I made good friends and made a place of my own.

And then we moved again, one more time, just as I was starting tenth grade. It was devastating to leave the first people I had really let into my life. The friends that had begun to co-make me, and I them.

I remember so clearly my Mom telling me that when you move around a lot, the key was to sink your roots fast, and sink them deep. It was always implied that they would be torn up again soon, and it would be terrible. But you’d be better off having dug in than stayed aloof.

But leaving is still leaving. Suck it up.

So the real nut here is that the past is not supposed to come back, for people like me. But I have learned that it does, for many many people. For many many people, the past never leaves. Here in the mountains of western North Carolina, there are a few ubiquitous surnames. There are families inseparable from this place. There are people who have never been to the other end of the county. “Provincial” means of this country, utterly. It’s not always pejorative. When you see yourself reflected back to you in every turn, every barn, every stone, you never wonder who you are.

So there are many people for whom what I did last week would not have been existentially weird. I was dropped off at that same college thirty-one years ago. I schlepped my son’s record crate up the same stairs I schlepped my own in the waning Reagan years. Every turn on move-in day was haunted in the deep way that things you’re never supposed to see again, then do, are. Everything dripping with import and echoes, not a stick or brick without a story.

But then, suddenly, it wasn’t. I shook my head and it cleared, and it was just college, and I was just another dad delivering my boy to his future (neither “best dressed” nor “most stressed,” two categories the campus newspaper apparently reports on every move-in day).

What a weird and wonderful view, this double vision.

It helped, a little, to realize that the stones in the cemetery at the top of the hill at the center of campus said the same things they said thirty years ago, or a hundred. The buildings still had the same names as the headstones.

It even helped to recognize the names of a few new buildings from my frosh class schedule. Beckham Hall, Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall. I was a part of that history too, now, through no effort other than daily persevering. The history was only visible because I had moved away. Life did what it does, and we all play our parts. I’m to play mine by remembering the stories and telling them when it is time, and putting them aside when it is not. (Which is usually.)

The capstone was at the end-of-day alumni parent do, when I recognized a nametag and did the math on a graduation year and was suddenly face-to-face with someone I’d sung with in a campus production in fall 1987. Her performance of a song had seared into my memory (frosh year I was wide open, more susceptible to searing than perhaps I’ve ever been since). She had been lost to my history, another cooler upperclass student who’d been part of something precious and now was gone. But her voice had stayed with me, the cardinal performance of a song I’d lived with ever since.

And now here she was, another punch-drunk, heat-stroked parent at the end of a dizzying day. We caught up on the intervening decades, our measures of tragedy and joy, and marveled at it. Here we were in a building that hadn’t existed then but now did, dropping off new people to have their time. Sad and beautiful — and so specific, so true and so insignificant, all at once. Lives forming each other and moving on.

So now I know that it is good to sink roots deep — and to leave them there, at least partially, when it is time to go. Leave them buried deep, but still vital, ready to sustain us when we need them. This maybe my parents did not know, or at least did not tell me, or I did not hear. But I know it now, and am grateful for it.

The past is past and still here both, as close as a (carefully-deployed) social media account, as close as a twelve-hour interstate drive. It looks like for the next four years I’ll have the chance to walk next to my past and within my son’s glorious present all at once.

What a privilege to have this second sight. What a responsibility not to overdetermine the now with the then unless asked, and even then not too much. (History only matters if you want to read it, anyway.)

Soon our son will show up in the Facebook feed of the campus eatery that opened my last year on campus. He started working there, for two old friends, last night. I now have photos of our youngest son on the hill where I played at eighteen, and my Dad before me, and a thousand thousand dads and moms before him.

“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!” posted a dear poet-bard friend, meta-digging our shared past as deep Star Trek TNG geeks. A story about how we are no more than our stories — and our stories are enough.

We’ll all be young again together.

Life’s short; then fill with joy its span.

Old Genesis fans have it rough these days, despite our current and profitable pop culture obsession with all things eighties. We are the wrong kind of nostalgia.

I mean we who are pushing fifty. We who first found the band through the big early-eighties albums Abacab, Genesis, and Invisible Touch. Our fandom was as ardent as Rush’s, as dedicated to particular lifestyle choices as Zeppelin or Van Halen’s. We were soft boys, usually accompanied by our female best friends. We were good students, made no trouble, and were over-represented in band and A.V. club. We were a mild community, emphasis on mild. We hid Reese’s Pieces in our lockers, not weed.

We were pretty invisible then, and still are now. But I suspect there are a lot of us. Someone bought twenty-one million records. Statistically, you were probably one of us, at least a little.

Like fans of other bands, we usually took our radio-play entrance quickly back to earlier records, and got good and lost in their seventies fantasy perambulations. (Zeppelin headbanger: your first record was Coda, but someone gave you Phys Graff quick.) I first started blissing on the china-boy crashes in the bridge of “Abacab,” bought the 45 so I could hear it again and again. But it wasn’t long before I dialed back into Duke, and then A Trick of the Tail and all the rest.

And love for Peter Gabriel-era Genesis has actually aged quite well. A working knowledge of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is now a legitimate cred, something that gives you a perspective on, say, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. Everyone knows it’s a record you need to hear before you die, that you need to have an opinion about, like 2112. If you loved it back in the day, you were ahead of the curve. Your taste is affirmed.

But that’s not what we did in 1986, mostly. Thought about our taste. We mostly just loved when “Tonight Tonight Tonight” showed up on a Michelob commercial or “Miami Vice,” and set our VCRs for it. We dropped “Man on the Corner” or “That’s All” or (gulp) “Illegal Alien” in our Pintos as we drove home from high school, blasting through leafy suburban streets at sensible speeds. And of course we had all the Phil Collins stuff, every monster hit that made America dumb again. We were the ones buying it. We popped the collars on our Lands’ End rugbies and nodded placidly, eased the seat back.

Being almost fifty is hard on us, see, because we now know what we could not know then: those records were bad. Well, Abacab is the strongest of them, by far; it was the first they created through a group improvisational process, and maybe they still had some formed ideas coming into The Farm to track it. But the other two are mostly irredeemable. They are bad records! Critics at the time were mixed, at best; critics in retrospect are (worse) silent. Collins himself has essentially disavowed this part of his career, apologized for giving us what we wanted so completely and gunking up the decade with gated reverb and “oh-ohhhhh!”s. At least he gave Joe Strummer something to push against.

How extraordinary a legacy, then. A non-legacy, a lacuna. How orphaned we are, among our peers who still love what they love. Duran Duran has been vindicated as style leaders; also Depeche Mode, even Def Leppard. Their first fans all have smug houses to live in now that they are grown up. See? We were right. This music ruled. Not us.

What do we make of what we first loved? How do we own it now? What did it do to us, for us?

Well, to start, I’ll go down fighting that grown-ups who loved anything ardently when they were kids are better grown-ups now. I think that wanting a beautiful experience — of any ilk — really shapes who you become, for the better. And if your tastes (and taste) change, under your feet, along the way, no matter: you still loved something enough to listen hard to it. To seek it out, in a time of limited technology and access (and resources: how many lawns did you have to mow to go to a concert?). Being a seeker changes you, for the better. It means that, as a grown up, you are more likely to still be watching and listening to the world. More likely to hear a new beautiful thing and support it; more likely to have a rich inner life where beauty matters, where the space between your ears is recognized as important and cultivated. You don’t have to still care about music when you are grown — but you probably do. If you loved something when you were young, chances are you still love things, and that makes you a better person.

But if you loved Genesis in particular, though? Well, at least you dug something complex and carefully made. Even though our ears now chafe at all the Simmons electronic drums and synths, it was well-crafted music. You learned to become attentive to nuance. And Collins is still a soulful singer, and history will always know him as one. He ain’t Wilson Pickett, but he put you in generally the right direction to love Wilson Pickett, once you found him. And at least you were listening to a great drummer, one of the monsters of the whole rock and roll craft, even before his studio sound became too ubiquitous to hear anymore. You were in a good pocket, most always. That’s a plus.

And something else: you learned how the past colored the present. Because Genesis did hold onto their weird, even as they became pop. For every “Invisible Touch” there’s a “Domino”; every “No Reply at All” has a “Dodo / Lurker.” We got to see people changing who they were, shaping themselves to a market to find the success and acceptance every artist craves (well, except Joe Strummer) while still remaining the same weirdos they started out as. That’s exciting. That’s wholesome. That’s got an integrity to it.

And the whole change happened so quickly. Twelve years after Lamb, what is left of Genesis releases Invisible Touch. Twelve years! The speed of the change; being in the presence of artists who transform in response to what they are hearing in the world and in their own heads. The Beatles are, of course, the cardinal example of this kind of responsiveness and plasticity (and most of us got to them pretty damn quick too — Phil Collins was one of the strongest living heirs of Ringo’s aesthetic when Dave Grohl was trying to pass algebra). But we learned from Genesis that people change, and that change is exciting and good, gives us more to see. That makes us better now, having witnessed such a change in the artistic lives of musicians we love. It perhaps forms us as people who can similarly change and grow.

There’s a reckoning coming: a moment when we won’t have to hide the fact that we still know all the insipid verses to “Throwing It All Away” and drum on our steering wheels to “Mama.” The ardor that burned in us shapes us as people who know ardor. That’s a win, even if we don’t get to talk about it much, or ever. Love is love is love, as the cool kids now say (yeah, even him).

I hope these mild men enjoy their retirement, even as nostalgia passes them by. I hope they got a little royalties jolt from “Glow,” at least.

They shaped me, Phil and Mike and Tony (and Peter and Steve), and maybe one day it will be cool to talk about it.

Wait, I just did. Turn it on again? Maybe not yet. But soon.

Stop Throwing It All Away was originally published in Festival Peak on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(A little spoilery, but still leaves a lot unmentioned.)

Believe it or not, the most memorable moment for me in horror movie of the year Hereditary is a relatively quiet one: a mom speaking to her son.

Annie looks hard at Peter, both in profile. And suddenly something true, but horrible, erupts from her lips: she says something a parent is never, ever, to say to her child. And she claps her hand over her mouth, lightning-fast, desperately trying to stuff it back in — but of course, she can’t. And then something else unspeakable comes out, and again she claps the lid back on. Mouths are supposed to say what we mean for them to say, but instead sometimes say what’s true. The performance might win Toni Collette an Oscar, so convincing is the impression that the truth wants out of her, despite her will in the matter. She is a woman possessed, in small ways long before large ones.

I read the film as a long meditation on who knows what about things that actually matter (not many), and who gets to have a say about it (no one we meet, in the film’s leisurely two hours). Many others have worked over, with remarkable speed, how aptly writer and director Ari Aster locates this meditation in a dysfunctional family drama; how it’s a relationship story almost before it is a horror story. I am drawn to it as an exploration of how what matters to an older generation gets shared or not, with the younger. In a word, how it’s also a story about teaching. About pedagogy.

Pedagogy is, after all, about relationship. The word derives from the ancient Greek paidogogos, the name given to the trusted slave in well-off homes whose role was “child leader.” An older one who guides the younger through the day, keeping them safe and indicating what is worth attending to and what should be avoided, bit by bit forming a new self through the million micro-decisions that characterize intimacy. Teaching is transmission. Hereditary is about what deserves to be transmitted and what does not, and the ways that decisions shape possibilities, or their lack, in long echoing succession down the generations.

Like so many films I am attracted to, Hereditary is an oblique “school movie,” in that some important stuff happens in and around school. School, per usual, is so overdetermined in our collective memory that barely any of the family’s two children’s experience there needs to be fleshed out. A droning teacher declaims to rows of bored students, some of whom enact a “discussion” while the rest zone out or daydream about sex and weed (nothing new there — with one exception, below), or do their own more important work until they get “busted”. The real action is under the bleachers at lunch. In an unimaginative expository touch, the text being taught in class that day is Homer’s Iphigenia, sacrificed in the Iliad to the gods for the greater good.

The peripheries of school are more interesting sites, where important action goes down. In at least two instances, a threat actually lurks outside the school’s perimeter, like a vampyr not yet invited in, waving or incanting at a distance with intent that ends up being sufficient to penetrate school’s containing membrane. And Charlie enacts one of the earliest cues that all is not right with her smack in the middle of school property, in one of the undersurveilled areas outside a classroom window that I understand school safety experts are beginning to refer to as “zones of negligent privacy.”

But perhaps the most powerful role that the formal pedagogical space plays in the film is how it allows itself to be finally violated. Some have noted how genre pictures, especially “elevated horror,” succeed by simultaneously honoring audience expectations and subverting them. My own favorite example of this is the first Paranormal Activity film, where (spoiler alert) the unspoken audience promise that daylight has some prophylactic effect against demons is violently smashed. What is supposed to only happen at night suddenly happens in plain daylight, mid-afternoon, the benign hour of stories on the TV and waiting for the kids to get home.

Similarly, in Hereditary, the presumed “safe space” of the classroom is progressively violated, until Peter’s possession occurs in full force at his desk, during a lecture, before his horrified classmates. Assaults on the boundary of the classroom start early. A bird smacks into the window, breaking its neck; a reflection in a cabinet window reveals someone else looking back (Oculus taught us how unsettling that can be).

But even It Follows, which also played with our expectations of safety in school, didn’t go full Grand Guignol right in the middle of third period. Peter’s transformation, and its timing, above all signals the most deeply disturbing aspect of possession films: the heedlessness with which malevolent forces take what they want, when they want it, from the humans they possess. Nothing in the world cannot be made to conform to the school schedule: but a demonic possession is not of this world. The horror of the possession story from The Exorcist on is that bodies will be broken and torn, used unspeakably, maybe right here, right now.

The deepest horror might be the helpless, aghast stare of the teacher in whose room — on whose watch — the transformation goes down. “Are you all right, Peter?” he impotently asks, his face contorting into the slow-burn “Spielberg face” of abject terror this movie so delights in. The class all turns and stares (the worst school nightmare, for all of us: Did I say something stupid? Have I wet my pants?) but can do nothing about what happens next. The teacher is revealed as just one of the gawkers, another looky-loo who never leaves his assigned spot in the front of his class — the spot as rigidly his as each students’ desk is theirs.

School is a slow-motion horrorshow, after all, for many. For most. As Howard Nemerov wrote,

Each fall, the children must endure together
What each child also must endure alone:
Learning the the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That world invisible and visible
Bow down before it…

For an educator, there is special horror is seeing children brutalized by a force “arbitrary and peremptory.” The victims of Hereditary’s curse do not know why they have been picked to endure this, and there is no escaping their fate.

But is it too much for we teachers to understand ourselves as similar agents of inscrutable but demanding forces, requiring dreadful sacrifices of our students that are unknown to them, but delivered — as in the note Annie finds in one of her Mom’s occult books — with the promise that the reward will be worth the sacrifice?

I had my own “Annie moment” last week: a taboo truth sprung from my lips, and I couldn’t put it back in. I am an education professor, and was chatting with other faculty about how to respond to course evaluations. I observed, “The one thing that all students have in common is that they don’t know what they need.” (There was a long pause, and one of my colleagues ventured, “I think you may have been doing this too long.”)

While perhaps briskly expressed (student evals, after all, can give valuable feedback on how to improve as instructors, if regarded correctly), there is an inconvenient truth at the root of of my blurt. Good teachers (coaches, directors — all paidogogos) know what needs to be done next by students, and its relationship to discomfort and struggle. They know what can be done assisted, what can be done repetitively, and what should be expected to be done alone. All that ZPD stuff.

And every coach I have ever worked with must explain to their athletes that there is a difference between hurting and being hurt. Hurting is training. Hurting is growing. Hurting is learning.

If our students, or other charges, are on an inexorable path toward learning — toward being irrevocably changed as a result of their time with us — then it seems nice to help them understand why this hurts now, why you can’t budge on that expectation. But not necessarily required. Ultimately, they have to trust us. They don’t know yet that we are right.

Hopefully we earn their trust in enough small ways that they let our judgment about bigger things — like their discomfort — carry the day. But at the end of the day, even if we don’t, that does not mean we are wrong. It is, after all, a school truism that the exact classroom practices that students complain most about (small group work and role play, first among them) are the exact practices that lead students to the most transformative learning experiences — a realization that sometimes shows up at the end of the semester on course evals, but often doesn’t.

Does that mean we should stop teaching that way? That we should only do the funny lectures, low expectations, and lots of movies that students rate highly? Of course not. Because we know what they need, not them.

But that’s a hell of a responsibility, and one that, if carried casually (as I think my colleagues suspected me of doing) teeters on the edge of abuse. Of course we must heed our students’ responses to our teaching — but because they tell us whether we have proved ourselves worthy of their trust when we ask them to suffer in the name of growth. Not because they know what they need better than we do.

Hard truths come out, and do their work. Hardness in and of itself, though, is not truth. In Hereditary, Annie is revealed to have been playing her role in a grand design that was set in motion long before she had a say in it. That truth is hard. Pedagogy, for all its claims to transformation — the high-modernist, social-engineering fever dream of a new world, calving out the next generation of adults when they are still children — is ultimately a game of reproduction. The best critical work in education now reveals how and where we remain complicit in a design for replicating existing power structures. We didn’t start the fire — “no man” did (thanks Odysseus) — but we still make it burn.

For an educator, then, the grimness of Hereditary feels familiar. Violence is wrought on young people we cannot protect, often right in front of us, in the spaces we promised would be safe. We enact rituals of subservience and catastrophe we didn’t even know were possible, let alone involved us. Those who seek to comfort us end up needing us for their own ends, and using us until we are all used up — and then, new vessels appear, to watch us be cast aside.

The horror is in the hideous truth, spoken plain, for once. We stand aghast, like so many characters in this film — horrified before we know what horrifies us.

But we will know soon enough. Deep down, maybe we already know.

Of all the things I’ve lost in the shift to streaming music, I miss wanting it most of all.

The first music I really wanted came from a cooler older student I asked to bootleg some Rush albums for me. He happily obliged, using his famously high-end stereo to record a mechanical performance of his pristine vinyl onto the best, darkest, most expensive Maxell 90-minute cassette tapes I could afford.

The result was a set of three objects, titles written carefully on the inserts in his best handwriting, rubber-banded together and handed to me with some small ceremony in the band room after school the next day. He’d been up late getting it done. I’d been almost unable to sleep with anticipation.

Here they are, he said. These are yours now.

I sometimes went to find new music based on things I’d read about the artists that created them. Sinead O’Connor and Shirley Horn, both. I read reviews of their new records in the newspaper my folks bought and left around on Sundays, and decided I wanted to hear what the reviewers described. So I went to the record store with my money and I looked them up and I bought them, and I brought them home and I made choices about what I was going to do with them.

All those choices involved objects and unwrapping, slow technologies of presence that made me tell them what I wanted them to do next, specifically, with this specific record or tape or disc. It involved then a time of doing nothing but listening, anchored to the experience by the liner notes and images I held in my hand. A time of communing with one objet d’art as it was revealed to me by the best stereo I could afford, in the quiet of an afternoon’s uninterrupted hour.

The seeking and finding wasn’t always this focused or perfect, but it always happened. The technology demanded it: I need to know what I wanted, on some level, in order to get it.

It could be as casual as asking the Tower Records guy to “take me to the new funk,” and being led to the Brand New Heavies.

It could be as easy as hearing something at my friend’s party and asking him the name of the artist and making a note, mental or otherwise, of the name so I could check it out next time I was in the record shop (if the friend weren’t close enough to ask for a copy).

It could even be sneaking a look at the jewel case on the CD player the hep NYC fraternity brother was cranking while he cleaned the basement on a hungover Sunday.

You never had to talk to people who somehow had something you wanted to find new music, though you often did. You never had to read, or watch MTV and wait for the white words in the corner at the end of the video, or find your wallet and Turtle’s stamp books and walk or — eventually — drive to the store.

But you usually did one or more of these things. You heard something, and you wanted more of it, so you followed your desire and let it do to you what desire does.

Most of the other artifacts of recorded music that have also gone by the wayside — sound quality, album art, record store bin diving — I only really miss to the degree that they enabled and amplified my wanting. They were merely the objects and processes of desire. The works and the business with which I acquainted myself to feed my hunger. To get well, as often as I could.

I don’t know if younger folks have a different quality of experience than I do when they hit a curated playlist on Spotify, or Apple Music, or Tidal, or when they just let Pandora run.

Who knows: maybe they really want “Chill,” or “Focus.” Maybe they really want what the algorithm says someone who likes Janelle Monae would probably also like, never mind how utterly sui generis her art is. Maybe they really do express their deep relationship with the video to Childish Gambino’s “This is America” by recreating it with their squad, in Lego, in Fortnite, and blasting it to Snapchat.

I really can’t believe they do, though.

The smart folks said this was coming, you know. This would be the evolution. Walter Benjamin and Fred Jameson and Roland Barthes and all the pomo folks insisted the beauty would be in the recombination, the indiscriminate blender of the infinite remix, the revolution hiphop supposedly ushered in. William Gibson would nod at how easy it would be to choose the color of stim you prefer and jack it in, modulate it just right with a few others and ease into your day. Aldous Huxley would ask you what flavors and power boosts you want in your soma today.

Cool, we said back then, wow — but wow, really not, here as it’s actually happening. What’s lost in the transfer to a frictionless technology of art consumption? When you don’t have to know what you want — when you don’t even have to know that you want something — before you begin consuming it? What has been lost?

What has been rendered impossible in your relationship to music, when the conditions under which you experience it have been stripped by any will on your part to experience it, other than opening the app and hitting play?

To be sure, I can still have something like a delirious, desirous experience on Spotify. Last night I dived into Jack White’s incredible journey since 1999, filling in the many blanks in my understanding of what that ceaseless quester has been up to, and what he’s left the rest of us to pick up and puzzle over. Armed with the perseverance and fortitude I learned in record store days, I went in with headlamp and pickaxe to understand a career, and was thrilled to find the whole vein laid out before me, on successive screens. There’s nothing they didn’t have. I could listen to it all, right there in my chair. No trips to the mall, special orders, wheedling of cooler friends required. Awesome.

But you know what happened. You know it deeply, because it happens to you too, maybe yesterday. Confronted with the everything-machine of a Spotify (or an Amazon, or a Wikipedia), one wanders instead of digging. I sampled two or three songs from the records I had heard of; one from the record with the cover I dug. I listened to three songs all the way through.

That’s a lie: one song, three times. I tasted many more, but invariably got something else on my tongue before the last thing had dissipated. I FOMO’d that shit, click click click. All the lessons Willy Wonka tried to teach us about variety, pacing, moderation: out the window. Eventually I got swollen and purple and stuck in the pipe. No chocolate factory for me.

I’ll probably go back in today, but only because I have a researcher’s training and habits, and an old man’s love and respect for what used to be precious and scarce. (It is not lost on me that White himself loves the challenge of the old and difficult, inveterately distrusts the newfangled.)

If I was younger — even if I had really loved what I heard — I wouldn’t have to. Go back in today, to hear more of it. After all, the complete oeuvre is right there on Spotify, for free or damn close to it, and it isn’t going anywhere. If I ever wanted it. But there’s so much else to listen to. Sort of.

If you never have to really want something to get it, do you eventually stop really wanting? An ex-student from twenty-five years ago replied the sweetest thing to one of my crazed Jack White posts: “I just like how much you like things.”

If we don’t have what we love, what do we really have, friends? Ever?

Have we given our hearts away, a sordid boon, in the name of having everything we want whenever we want it? (Wordsworth would plotz to see it. He would fall OUT.)

Are we in fact at the end of love, because our technology has brought us to the end of appetite?

Well, not appetite, surely — all that scrolling seems to show me wanting something. But not satiety. Because I don’t know about you, but when I am online, I rarely stay with a dish long enough to eat it. Long enough to metabolize it. Long enough to make it part of me. There’s so much on the table, and it’s all free. So I never eat.

I sold all my vinyl years ago, and before the last move I gave away all my CDs, all my cassettes — even the Rush three-pack. (Which had held up impressively, let’s note — well done, Maxell.) The vinyl seemed ephemeral, garbage in its ubiquity, and I needed the cash. The CDs and cassettes seemed outdated and in the process of being supplanted. The undergrad I gave it to had helped us with the move, and I even had a rush of bequeathing something to the next generation as I offered it to him. Take these if you want them; they’re all in my head now anyway. His eyes widened and he thanked me, stashed them in the backseat of his hatchback and drove away.

Maybe he went on a deep dive of his own that night; maybe he took them to Nice Price to liquidate; maybe he threw them away, that week or eventually.

But whatever he did with them, he did one a time. Slowed by the limits his tech, he — or someone — probably looked at each one and weighed its worth, decided to trash or listen. Analog processes that will be remembered by big data as quaint: one or two people trying to decide what they like in a series of discrete events.

Wendell Berry wrote, “We don’t learn much from big numbers. We don’t understand them very well, and we aren’t much affected by them.” Algorithms add value, but they remove affection, was his thrust. And it all turns on affection.

Of all the things I miss, I miss wanting most of all.

Of course, I can start wanting again whenever I wish. But it’s up to me to take back my own desire. To listen to it and feed it, by giving it what it needs.

Slow. Serial. The liberating power of constraint.

The flavor of the only record I have right now, played over and over.

Do not click away. In music; in film; in beauty; in love.

Be here and only here, now and only now.

Want it.

On Spotify and Wanting It was originally published in Festival Peak on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

American teachers are about to end the debate on gun violence. There are almost four million of us, and we are about to say what only we can say. And when we say it, we are finally going to accomplish the common-sense steps that will make murdering children in their schools much harder to do.

I know you don’t believe me. But I am right, and this is why.

You think that you send us your children each day so that we can work with their intellects and imaginations. And you’re mostly right. We know how to do that.

But we also know that your children’s intellects and imaginations only show up inside their bodies.

The rest of the adult world has agreed to pretend that no one has a body. The rest of the adult world pretends that we are all just our deliverables, our value-added, our performance reviews and our Slack profiles and our monthly numbers and our parking spaces.

Not us teachers. In our professional lives, it’s all bodies, all the time. We have to see, hear, and smell your children. We have to organize the flesh and bones of your children before we can even start thinking about their brains. Their bodies are our computer screens, our cubicles, our delivery truck dashboards, our cash registers. They are the stuff of our work.

We put their bodies on carpet squares, sit them on hard chairs next to our desks, tell them to keep their hands to themselves, watch that they include each other on the playground, apply band aids and ice packs and thermometers and quiet cots off the front office until we can reach Mom or Dad.

We notice when their bodies’ clothes are the same ones they wore yesterday, discreetly hand them deodorant after gym, insist they carry huge bathroom passes, keep them from making out at each others’ lockers, confiscate their phones in a big basket we keep on the desk so everyone knows where they are even though they can’t touch them until class is over.

We holler at their bodies on basketball courts and in weight rooms, place them on yard lines holding trumpets and flags and drums, arrange them in rows to take interminable tests, cast an eye toward them in the parking lot at lunch, scoot them in front of cameras at prom before they disappear again into the night.

And we hold them close, once, on commencement stages in May for the briefest second, slippery in rented satin, and say good job. Good luck. We’ll see you soon. Take care of yourself.

Because of all this, I am certain that we teachers feel what is happening to our students’ bodies when horrors like last Wednesday’s happen. I think we feel what is happening to their bodies more than you do.

We teachers can imagine the obscenity of violence done to children’s bodies, because we spend our days tuned to their bodies’ experiences. I do not actually know the obscene experiences of the victims of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Stoneman Douglas. None of us do. But I imagine them beyond my ability to bear, because I am a teacher. We teachers imagine the worlds of the children with whom we are entrusted. Reflexively, even unbearably.

I know that we all imagine their obscenity for a few days after they occur. It is a national habit now, a ritual practice with predictable stations of ablution and repentance, denial and acceptance and vow. But then the obscenity drops below the fold, replaced by a new one. And we all make whatever peace with those imaginings that we must make in order to keep our lives turning. Despite the fact that while we held our meetings, wrote our emails, ate our lunches, these things happened in schools, to children, and shall happen again. We push these imagined experiences away so they are hidden enough for us to be able continue on.

And there they remain, these unimaginable experiences, hidden in plain sight on their Wikipedia pages. If you have not imagined these experiences lately, I humbly suggest that you read about them, again, to help you imagine.

These readings are easily found. And you will find there what you need to find, hidden between the declarations of fact about shattered glass and kicked-in doors. About children ducking uselessly under desks, crouching futilely in closets, huddling beneath their teachers’ ultimately insufficient bodies.

We teachers spend our days imagining children’s fears and dreams, the better to inspire them to outrun the fears and nurture the dreams. And so we reflexively imagine those moments which they can’t outrun, too. The moments in which the world slowed down for some children: the children damned by chance to endure the unimaginable moments.

We imagine terror spreading from the base of their necks while they moved as if through quicksand under the desks, into the closets, behind the doors, against the walls, and time stopped as they wondered if it would be them.

And we even imagine the moments when they realized it would be. Them. We imagine their fear. We imagine their pain. We imagine how cold they must have felt. How they must have looked up at the horrible drop ceilings, and looked around desperately at the bulletin boards, and seen the world we had made for them, that we promised would be safe for them: the last things they would see.

This is horror, and we know it. We do not want to imagine it, but we must. And that is why we will be the ones who stop it.

Because we teachers cannot forget what you who are not teachers keep finding a way to.

Because we are called to imagine into our children’s lives, and are therefore the only ones, save their shattered families, who can truly bear witness to you of what you are missing, and what you must not miss.

That you must change your life, and make this problem your problem. Because it is your problem, if you have ever been a child, or have ever loved one.

That you must hold your leaders to account. That you must vow that no greed, cowardice, cravenness, selfishness, or inertia will remain between our will as those who love your children to protect them, and the steps that will be necessary to do so.

You who do not live with children may not ignore them any longer. We who do live with children — who make it our lives’ business to hear and know and support and celebrate them — will no longer permit you to.

We are the ones to do it, because we have always done it. Cared first for their bodies, then their minds. Told their stories. And now we will do it also about their unimaginable suffering, so that you will also imagine it. And then it will end.

We will speak for those who can no longer speak.

We will speak so that those who still can speak will not be silenced tomorrow morning by a weapon of war legally bought by someone too young to buy beer.

We know you don’t think we can change this. We know what you think of us and our capacities. But you, world, rarely think we can do what we can do.

We are already doing it: changing the world. Every day. We will change this too.

Will you listen to us? Will you help us? Will you march with us, and the children who are currently leading us, who are stepping into the responsibilities their adults have abdicated?

We hope so. Because the change is coming. With or without you.

Our children’s bodies — vessels of their sacred intellects, their holy imaginations, and their precious souls — demand it.

And we work for them.

Image borrowed from Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, with whom the author is not affiliated.