... is getting out of hand. I feel like some kind of addict now--snorting new literary passages when no one's looking ... hoping no one will notice. (Actually, virtually
no one
does notice, except for Joyce, to whom I recite them once the passage is (sort of) in my head.)
It wasn't all that long ago that I was swaggering around, chest out, because I'd memorized 100 pieces. In fact, I so was full of myself that I gave a PowerPoint talk at Western Reserve Academy (where I was teaching at the time). November 8, 2010. Almost exactly seven years ago. (I've pasted the text of that talk below.)
I thought I could quit then. A hundred seemed just fine.
But then I snorted another--and another--and then I reached
two hundred. And swaggered around, chest out--though I couldn't talk at WRA about it: I was retired by then.
I thought I could quit then. Two hundred seemed just fine.
And then I snorted another--and another ...
I'm now at two hundred and fifteen.
I just can't stop. Since I reached 200, I thought,
Well, hell, I don't know anything by Milton. (So I learned one.) And
I should learn one by William Blake. (So I learned one.) And so it went.
And then I reached 213--and I don't like the number 13 (I did a blog post about it once upon a time--October 6, 2012--
link to it.) So I could just
not stop there, so I learned those two little guys by William Carlos Williams ("The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This Is Just to Say").
Oh, and a
huge one I learned recently was not even my fault! On Facebook, Joyce posted a Father's Day poem by E. E. Cummings ("My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love")--probably the hardest one I've ever learned--took
weeks. (
Link to poem.) And, after learning that one ...
... I swaggered around, chest out ...
But then I saw one by Robert Louis Stevenson I liked (I snorted it). (As I've written here before, rehearsal time has become an ... issue. But I'll not get into that right now.)
I once again deceived myself, thinking I could quit at 215--a nice chunk of a number.
But just last night we went down to the Hanna Theater in Cleveland to see
A Midsummer Night's Dream (for the gazillionth time). I loved it (more in blog tomorrow). And when Theseus delivered his speech about "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," I thought,
You know, I've always wanted to memorize that one.
I just now printed it out. And will commence snorting, very soon ...
Daniel
Dyer
WRA
Chapel/Morning Meeting
8
November 2010
By Heart
The older you get, the more stuff
happens. And most of it, believe me,
ain’t all that good. Yes, the road of
later life has detours, potholes, long empty boring stretches, marauding
outlaws, bridges out, road-kill (fresh and otherwise), roaming ravenous beasts
named Age and Illness, Loss and Dotage.
It’s just … AWESOME!
But every now and then I pass on
this disintegrating road an odd, amusing milestone … and I want to tell you a
story about one of them. It involves
that heart up there on the screen—and that most beloved homework task of all:
memorizing poems.
I still remember the first poem I
ever memorized, back at in Enid, Oklahoma, at Adams Elementary School, in the
early 1950s. But I can’t repeat that
poem here in this historic Chapel. It
was a dirty, nasty, filthy little playground rhyme that started out “Fatty,
fatty, two by four” and involved a bathroom door. My smutty little satanic third-grade friends
and I thought it was fall-down funny.
But let’s leave that one back in the Sooner State …
The first poem I had to memorize
in school was “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—a.k.a. “The Night Before Christmas”:
[QUOTE] I’m sure many of you know some
of that one. For an Adams School
Christmas Program I recited it for the parents, many of whom—the whole
time—cooed like contented pigeons.
Later, in high school, there were
others, but the only one I’m certain I learned then was A. E. Housman’s “When I
Was One and Twenty”: When I was one and twenty, / I heard a wise man say, /
Give crowns and pounds and guineas / But not your heart away ….”
But by the time I began teaching
in the mid-1960s, memorizing was falling out of favor in schools. A surprise: For centuries, you see, it had
been a standard part of the curriculum.
Students in Shakespeare’s day, for example, memorized vast chunks of
literature—in Greek and in Latin. Books were rare, expensive. Memorizing took
their place. Learning things by heart.
And did you know that we can trace
that expression—learning by heart—back to the ancient belief that the heart was
the seat of memory? Although biology and
neuroscience have taught us otherwise, I still like the idea that we keep what
we’ve learned—those things we care about—in our hearts.
Anyway—because memorizing had
become “bad” back in the 1960s, I didn’t ever ask my classes to do it, early
on. But—sometime in the mid-1970s I
resurrected the idea, and I’m not even really sure why. But then I started teaching Shakespeare to my
eighth graders over in Aurora, and I decided to have them memorize a bit
too. We read The Taming of the Shrew,
and I had them learn one of its famous speeches. “Well come, my Kate ….”
And soon I was having students
memorize other things, too. I’d come to
believe, you see, that truly educated people have some famous words in their
heads. Not that there’s much call to
recite something in its entirety these days.
(It’s not likely that a flight attendant, say, is going to summon you up
to the microphone and ask you, mid-flight, to entertain your fellow passengers
by reciting all of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: As you know, they’d much
rather watch Jackass III-D.) Still …
when you know something—by heart—and when hear or see a mention of it later,
something goes abuzz in you—like a tuning fork.
And that buzzing gets nearby neurons a-throbbing, and who knows what
that can lead to? Not that it matters—I
just like being both sober and buzzed—don’t you?
The human mind can memorize a
stunning amount of material. Performers
could recite all of The Odyssey from memory.
Shakespeare’s leading actor, Richard Burbage, played a different major
character in a different play every day, six days a week. My dad had a university colleague who each
Christmas recited from memory all of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—nearly
30,000 words! And some of you may
remember Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451?
At the end of that futuristic novel about the government’s burning of
all books, we meet characters who are books—people who live in hiding, people
who have memorized entire texts so that they will not die out.
As many of you know, I still
require my English III students to memorize a dozen pieces a year, including
all of “To be or not to be” and a number of other things by famous American
poets like Emerson and Holmes and Longfellow and Dickinson and friends.
Well, I’ve always memorized these
poems along with my classes. On the
practical side, it makes grading their quizzes much quicker, but I soon
discovered that I just plain enjoyed knowing those poems. I started putting them on little cards,
carrying them around in my pockets and backpack to glance at whenever. I started learning other poems, too—not just
the ones I gave my students. Among them
were ones with special significance to me—like Robert Louis Stevenson’s “My
Shadow,” a poem I remember my grandmother reciting to me more than sixty years
ago.
And so my pile of cards started to
grow. And because I knew I would forget
them if I didn’t review them—you retain in memory only those things you want to
keep there, the things you work to keep there—I started reciting them in my
head several times a week—when I was walking somewhere, or riding the exercise
bike, or even driving—hey, it’s safer than texting!
And then last summer I started to
wonder how many I’d learned. I put all
the cards together and counted them.
There were about ninety of them.
Ninety! I couldn’t believe
it. I was sort of proud of myself, then
decided: I wanna know 100. There’s
something about a milestone like that, isn’t there? A hundred just sounds a lot better than
ninety. Even though it’s not.
So I went through anthologies
looking for poems I really liked—or ones that meant something to me—picked out
ten more, started learning them. And a
couple of weeks ago, I finished #100—a couple of those shorter speeches from
Hamlet: the one that has “what a piece of work is a man,” the one with “‘tis
now the very witching time of night,” the one with “there’s a special providence
in the fall of a sparrow.” Here’s a list
of all of them …
But when I reached one hundred, I
didn’t know quite how to celebrate. What
do I do? Buy a helium balloon out at
Acme? Post the news on Facebook? Shoot some video and upload it to
YouTube? Jump on Twitter and Tweet about
it? Rent an airplane to sky-write over
Hudson: DYER REACHES 100! And then … an
epiphany: I’ll write a poem about it!
And I’ll make the whole school sit there and listen to it! Awesome!
So here goes … and—no!—I don’t
know it by heart!
Oh,
you can have your Londons,
Your
Parises, your Romes,
And
you can have your Hudsons, too,
'Cuz
I got all them poems!
Yeah,
some of them are sorta short,
But
some: enormous tomes—
And I
have got a hundred now,
A
hundred freakin’ poems.
Now
you might think it’s awfully hard
To
cram inside your domes
So
many lines, so many rhymes,
So
many famous poems.
But
it doesn’t take an Einstein—
Require
a Sherlock Holmes—
It
takes no Stephen Hawking
To
learn a hundred poems.
(If
Dyer can do it, that old man,
Then
you can do it, Homes—
Just
get a book, and take a look,
And
pick some purty poems!)
No,
it’s no harder than it is
To
drink a drink that foams—
All
you need it to decide:
“I
wanna learn some poems!”
You
copy/paste one on a card—
A
sort of mobile home—
You
take it with you everywhere,
Your
precious little poem.
And
soon … like we have Hudson, and
Alaska
has its Nome,
And
Canada its Winnipeg,
You
have got your poem!
You
then take newer cards along
Wherever
your heart roams,
And
soon, before you know it,
You’ve
got one hundred poems!
Now
that I’ve got that hundred,
Perhaps
you think I’m done?
But I
have got another card—
It’s
time for one-oh-one!
Yes,
there are strange diseases, and
Some
stranger sick syndromes,
And I
still suffer from the worst—
Memorizing
poems!
But
there’s a simple message that
I
wish here to impart:
That
what you’ve truly learned in life
Lies
anchored in your heart.
The
ancients knew it; I have learned it—
One
of life’s best guides:
An
educated mind and heart:
True
wisdom there resides.
