NOTES ON AN ALMA MATER

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming. I had been posting a group of -- for lack of a better word -- "poems" in this space, all from a series I've dubbed American Cosmologies. Each of these thirteen "cosmologies" consists of thirteen thirteen-word sentences. A la the thirteen colonies. Thirteen stripes on the flag. Thirteen arrows clutched in the eagle's talons on the dollar bill. These cosmologies are meant to be snapshots of America's culture, my place in it, my reading of it, and I had intended to present them each week, two at a time, without comment. But I need to shift gears. I need to comment. Life interrupts.

(I suspect this one will be very, very long, so bear with me.)

A COINCIDENCE

One of the next "cosmologies" I had intended to post was -- believe it or not -- the following:

The Cosmology of Pretty Wives and Handsome Husbands

If one matriculates at the large state university, one will acquire various things. There will, certainly, be beers to drink, lifestyles to seek, spouses to meet. Later—perhaps a decade or so—a graduate will attend a holiday party. There he will encounter other graduates: the beautiful Casey: bee-stung lips, Audrey-Hepburn grace. She’s married to dark, handsome Joe, a corporate somebody who drives a sportscar. On the other end of the couch sits rock-solid Steve, his doctor-wife Renée. Bryan and Stephanie are able hosts, bringing beers and nachos, taking everybody’s coat. In a crib upstairs sleeps their little Evan, tow-headed and two and adorable. The alma mater’s football squad is on TV and everyone bathes in union. GO TEAM…HOLD THAT LINE…BLOCK THAT KICK…(Could you pass the dip?). The other team drives the field, steals victory with a last-second field goal. Appropriate Doggone-its and Oh-wells before everyone scuttles away to their standardized suburban homes. There’s always next year, true, but did State U. teach us anything else?


I think I have the answer to that question now.

You see, the "State U" I refer to above is a tucked away, idyllic university in a picture-postcard setting. Extreme natural beauty all around. Everywhere. Dynamic, dramatic gorgeousness and gorgeousity. Autumns that out-do the very essence of orange, of red, of yellow. Winds and clouds and weather systems that are larger than life. Mountains. Crisp, achingly cold winters that offer up audacious night skies, high and bright with stars. When spring comes and the ancient nearby river melts, the afternoon sky is so clear and warm and free, you can be convinced the world was born there.

And it isn't just the natural environment that's beautiful. Campus buildings -- all of them -- are rough-cut stone, extracted and shaped out of limestone slabs indigenous to the very mountains that define the landscape. And the people... God, how beautiful. Students, thousands of them: they are earnest, they strive. Some have clear skin. Some don't. Some have crew cuts, some don't. Nowadays, I am sure, some are pierced, tattooed, and some are not. Taken as a whole, they think enough but not too much. They do exactly the things that very young adults are supposed to do. Which is to say, they screw up in the ways that young adults in America are allowed to screw up (too much beer, perhaps, or a forgotten quiz) and they want, in the end, what young adults in America are supposed to want. Families. Careers. A respectable station in life. It is the very essence of college in America.

It is, in short, Virginia Tech.

Now -- as like never before -- it is my Virginia Tech. Not merely mine, of course. I am, in many ways, far afield of the events of the past forty-eight hours -- 500 miles and over a decade removed from my six years and two degrees there. More sobering still, I have lost track of so many people I truly loved in those days. Loved so long and so hard and so deep that I will never really stop loving them.

But what draws me back to Tech -- into Tech -- isn't simply longing, not just a wish for something long gone and irretrievable. I know now that it is, instead, the things that have stayed with me.

WHAT VIRGINIA TECH TAUGHT ME

Virginia Tech taught me how to read: intensely, closely, without foregone conclusions. It taught me how to be a part of something larger than myself. It taught me to resist being part of something larger than myself. It taught me to be anonymous. It taught me to be heard. It taught me to fail spectacularly in every single important aspect of my life. It taught me that when you fail spectacularly in every single important aspect of your life, the world doesn't end. Most important, and as a fitting culmination of all that, it taught me to teach.

In the fall of 1991, I took my very first creative writing class -- a poetry workshop from poet and novelist Lucinda Roy. The same Lucinda Roy who was featured in today's NY Times Op-ed page, and who encountered Cho Seun-hui and his troubled writing in a class like the one I took sixteen years ago.

In that long-ago writing class, Professor Roy did more than inspire me to write good poems. (In fact, I must admit, she was mostly unsuccessful in that task -- through no fault of her own, the poems themselves were fairly bad.) She helped me unearth an identity. I read, I write, I think. I earned three degrees doing those very things -- a BA and an MA in English at Tech and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama. I now get paid to do those things, and to help other people do them.

But more than that, this tripartite combination of things is who I am every moment of the day. Any existential angst I might have about its utility to me ("Did State U. teach us anything else?") is really just another product of the never-satisfied mind Lucinda Roy, Bonnie Soniat, Ed Falco, Tom Gardner, Jeff Mann, Peter Graham, Eileen Schell and many others helped me develop. A type of mind I would not -- could not -- trade for anything.

FOR THE RECORD

Virginia Tech also taught me that some people do, in fact, lead lives of quiet desperation. For all its beauty and its particular kind of perfection, I found Tech a fairly easy place to be sad. That is not a condemnation of the place -- America itself can be an easy place to live a desperate life. It stands to reason, then, that an institution that so successfully prepares masses of young people for entree into what Emerson called "decent, solid citizenry" would also be home to its share of disaffected people. When I was there, there were those who called the town "Bleaksburg," mostly in reference to the gray winters, but maybe partly too because there has always been something "high-lonesome" about the mountains. Also, perhaps, when one doesn't quite fit the mold in a place where the mold can be so prevalent, it can sometimes be hard to buy into all the idyll.

Make no mistake: Cho Seung-hui was a sociopathic killer filled with irrational rage and he was therefore, by any definition, a menace to society. This afternoon, I was left speechless and aghast after reading the bizarre one-act plays he turned in for one of his creative writing classes. Clearly, these are not the product of someone who is merely sad, or quietly desperate, or even clinically depressed. This work comes from a mind that has lost touch with reality, that is blinded by rage, that seems far beyond repair. Even the people who read the work without the benefit of hindsight thought so.

But please do be aware (beware, too): Virginia Tech is, in many ways, a microcosm of the megalopolis where Cho (and I, along with a sizeable percentage of each year's student body) grew up. Northern Virginia. NoVa, as we called it when I was at Tech, can be a No-Man's-Land, just like any other sprawling suburban ring surrounding a major American city. Nameless, faceless Others whiz past each other in the endless streams of traffic. Some inside the Beltway complain of President Bush's "bubble" (and they're right), but life in the D.C. suburbs consists of going from one hermetically sealed bubble to another. What with E-Z Pass, you don't even have to roll down the window to pay the tolls.

So while Blacksburg, Virginia Tech, and even its far-flung alumni base represent a very well defined community -- Hokie Nation, in fact -- it would be over-simple to think of the school as simply a small-town, tight-knit community. Contrary to what might fit in a nightly-news sound bite, it is very easy to be anonymous in Blacksburg, whether you want to be or not. By virtue of the university's sheer size (many introductory survey classes are large enough to fill auditoriums), some of the warmer, fuzzier attributes of smaller schools are simply impossible. Direct, name-to-face interactions can often be few and far between. Combine that with an ever-expanding, electronic "virtual world" and a trend toward more privacy for students in dormitories, and anti-social behavior can all-too-easily slip underground.

A CALL FOR ARMISTICE

By no means do I blame Virginia Tech or its culture for what Cho did, or even for his state of mind. No one is responsible but him. And please, Keith Olbermann, Lou Dobbs, Paula Zahn, and all other talking heads who want to express personal outrage or cast about blame regarding any aspect of how the university has handled this affair...please don't. And here's why I say that.

Objective analysis and review can and will help us move past this ordeal. It can even, in some small ways, help us all be marginally safer. Not just at Virginia Tech, but in any public place.

But we are far too quick to spit invective at targets we have conveniently dehumanized, and now I feel how insidious this problem is. I didn't feel it before yesterday, though I would have certainly agreed with the sentiment. I did not yet have a dog in the fight. But now. If I am so affected by these events -- numb, moved to tears, sleepless -- I can only imagine how it feels to be closer to the scene, the people. This happened to everyone in that community -- administrators, teachers, police officers, counselors, everybody. They are traumatized too.

Should the decision-makers at Tech have done more to safeguard students on campus? Did the creative writing teachers do enough to flag a troubled student? Was there enough counseling infrastructure, and was it proactive -- and insistent -- enough? I think so, but I don't know for sure. (Why would I?) Students, parents, and Tech employees have a right to ask those questions and to get clear answers. And they won't need the help of a CNN expose to do that, either.

More germane to me, however: Could I have done any better, been any wiser, affected any meaningful change if I had been an administrator, a counselor, a teacher in this situation? This one, I should be able to answer. I have taught and attended classes at this very university. I have also encountered a few troubled students in my eleven years of teaching writing, and I've wrestled with how to respond to some frightening work. For me, in this case, empathy is instinctive. I cannot in good conscience say, "Yes, I would've done it differently and that would've changed everything!" Or anything at all. And I doubt anybody else can say something like that either. Not even a cable newsanchor.

But most important, I know -- now, in my bones and not just as an intellectual exercise -- that we ignore civility at our own peril. Maybe we do it in the name of accountability, but it is all too easy to turn a search for accountability into a maddening, finger-pointing blame game. The true definition of accountability is when someone stands up, of his own accord, and makes his accounting for what he has offered into the world -- warts and all. I have no business doing it for other people. I can only do it for myself.

TEN MORE THINGS FOR THE RECORD

We have a problem socializing boys. In this country. In the world. We better do something about it.

I better do something about it.

Misguided and indiscriminate blame is a scourge, perhaps most to those who engage in it. It is most problematic when it masquerades as a steady drum-beat for "accountability."

The biggest threats to America and the world are disillusionment, disaffection, and disassociation.

There are too many people in too few schools in this country.

I have to be aware of my surroundings and use the best protective weapon I have, my brain, to ensure the safety of myself and others around me.

I can only make the world-at-large a better place by working consciously and persistently right here, right now.

I have to make hard decisions with less than perfect information and live with the consequences, even though they may be dire.

Someone else, somewhere in the world, has had to make an impossible decision, with little-, no-, or misinformation, and has had to live with unthinkable consequences.

Touch hands with people, look them in the eyes, be brave.