The impact of education / What stays

In Antigone, the Anouilh version written in 1944

The line about wanting to cut off every soldier’s right index finger

So there could be no more warfare.

And then the reply,

“If they had one eye, they would be one-eyed soldiers, one leg, one-legged,”

The inevitability of human destruction.

In Huis clos, the inscription at the beginning

(Missing from the English version)

About how none of the characters have eyelids.

The worse fate, to be constantly stared at

And never have a moment’s respite of even one blink.

The bit about how at the end of one’s life

You draw a line, tally it up, c’est tout, nothing more or less.

My first encounter with existentialism. 

In Une si longue lettre, ruminations on how

Every career deserves careful consideration,

But especially that of teaching.

A maternal course, never decorated, often unsung

Requiring the precision of a doctor,

Planting flags of virtue and knowledge,

Territories yet undiscovered and

Formations still evolving.

Memory of an elephant, revelations that happened 

In school, in art, and finding the art in everything.

In malignant cancerous cells, what happens 

In their cycle is that they bypass the access point to know

When a) they are grounded to something and

b) whether or not there are too many cells, crowding

Thus making everything around them sick.

In beans and rice, the seed of both plants

There are all the 20 amino acids that humans

Ingest from food. You could very well sustain a life

On the might of beans and rice. Discovering health

In new terms, sustainable ways of nourishment.

The residuals, the moments of learning.

The pre- and post- of specific information gathering. 

It happens so often, through literature

Theater, artistic expression because if there’s something 

I know to be true, as the through-line of my being:

1- an obsession with language, the nuance and intimacy

2- the power of a good story.

It’s art that will persist, and the learning will return.