A Day One

It’s the first day of class on the first day of school. Some of us are meeting each other for the first time, and, as always with Mr. Benton, he tries to make first days something different from the usual routine. (That's Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in a photo taken by his wife Jill Krementz at left, by the way, not Mr. B. Vonnegut died last year on April 11; Benton remains alive at this writing.)

So, the room is a jumble of tables and chairs (not student desks like every other room), and there are empty cardboard boxes all over the place. (At least there are places to sit. Those who have had first days with Mr. B. before have sat on the floor when all the student desks in the room were stacked to the ceiling in one big pile!) There are people in the same classroom taking Creative Writing and Literary Magazine and Science-Fiction and Multicultural Literature and Communication Applications. And one guy who got registered for Multicultural Poetry but doesn’t know how or why and doesn’t really want to be there anyway.
Benton explains that all the courses overlap in many ways because they are about thinking and expressing, reading and articulating, analyzing and responding. Yet each class has its own different emphasis. He invites the class to think about the boxes and tables all around the room from the perspective of the different courses:
* Creative Writing - Suppose you were writing a poem about this room. What would you think about writing? How would you proceed?
* Literary Magazine – If each table were a different category of entry for Wolfmoon, what would the arrangement of tables suggest about to genres and their differences and connections?
* Multicultural Literature – How does this arrangement of a classroom say about our own culture in contrast to some other culture’s way of educating?
* Science Fiction – How would you exlain to an alien the meaning of the arrangement of the room?

After ten minutes or so of thinking and discussing these ideas with tablemates, Mr. Benton offered his own reflections: He read a the opening page of The Sirens of Titan, a science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It begins:
Everyone knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.
But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.
They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.
....
The following is a true story from the Nightmare Ages, falling roughly, give or take a few years, between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression. (Vonnegut 7-8)

It was hard to connect these hastily read words with the thinking assignment, but Mr. B. suggested that, by treating the “fifty-three portals to the soul” and the “Third Great Depression” and other things as taken-for-granted assumptions, Vonnegut was playing with our minds in a way typical of science fiction.
He mentioned that in Breakfast of Champions, another Vonnegut novel, Vonnegut makes himself a character in his own novel. In a memorable scene in the novel, character Vonnegut is sitting in a bar in author Vonnegut’s book when the telephone rings. The bartender answers and tells character Vonnegut that the phone is for him. As he walks to the bar to answer the phone, character Vonnegut remarked, “On the way to the bar, I had to think up who was going to be on the phone.” Thus returning to author Vonnegut but not exactly because he was in the bar walking and... Entanglement of identities. What do you take for granted? What has to be explained? (Mr. B. offered two other examples from the same novel of Vonnegut explaining things that everyone knows or takes for granted thereby making us wonder what else is possible.
He read his own first thoughts on the way to a poem:
stanzas
sorted randomly
here and there
in a boxy blue room

students
thrown together
brains ajumble in the unknown
air

puzzle pieces
strewn about
on the desktop Excel spreadsheet tables
with boxes
sprinkled like crystals of brown granulated sugar
writ large

He explained that the poem-in-progress sounded pretty good to him with its language lacking rhyme or order much like the room itself, but he added that art (any kind of art) demands choices. Considering and reconsidering the right words (or color or shape) for the desired purpose.

He and Kalish S. explained the current exhibit of the sculptures of Ron Mueck at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Mueck’s sculptures are excruciatingly real in every way but size, and a video at the exhibit showed him at work on one of his pieces. The process from idea to drawings to rough clay models and on and on took years to complete. For each piece. Art, visual or written, does not become art by quick inspiration but by prolonged intentional choice.
Students the offered some of their own thoughts.

* John S. imagined explaining to an alien that the tables were for writing. Benton interrupted with encouragement and the idea of explaining what writing is. Pushing John to go back behind his own assumptions.
* Kalish observed that Japanese culture organized education if more rigid and orderly spaces, that many an African culture might have tables but with many more students gathered around each one and minimal supplies. Our culture’s approach to education was more free!
* Sarah W. reported thinking visually at first about lines and shapes, contrasting the straight lines of the regular classroom with the curving more random lines of a classroom like our own. Then she added words and phrases to the lines (e.g. rigid, inflexible, reasoned, rational; creative, free, spontaneous, unpredictable).
* Sierra N. observed that if the tables (and literary/artistic genres) were not different, they could not be brought together. Their differences and separations gave meaning to their connections.
* Ashlie F. noted that the amount of physical space one has to operate within has an effect on the amount of mental space, freedome of thought, and creativity one can bring to a task. Narrow rows and desks encourage narrow thoughts and ideas.
As Kurt Vonnegut repeatedly says in his novel Slaughterhouse Five,

“So it goes.”