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Nudging the Impossible Into the Realm of Real


As I continue to reflect on a humanities conference that I just attended, I understand better why I got my two graduate degrees in education and not in English to match my BA. The problem that I have with literary scholarship is that sometimes we have to forgive the improbable, seemingly fantastical leaps in critique.

As a poet, I would always be astounded when I would do a reading and someone waits around for me to tell me that they know how this character feels because (and then they give me their interpretation). Sometimes the connection is so bizarre that I am not sure where they are getting that connection from and I find myself going through my pieces again trying to find that reading that is invisible to me. However as someone who has been made to feel stupid, literally told "that's wrong, stupid" I also need to honor Rosenblatt's argument that each reading is a transaction between the reader and the text and this interaction is unique to the reader. To me, it feels like critique on literature, then is whimsy and triangulation of whimsy. Education is practical. It is a practice. You get immediate feedback when you teach. You know when you did a good job and you know when you bombed. Immediately.

But more and more I am understanding that when I say "trust the process" to my students, I am really "nudging the impossible into the realm of real." Trust takes faith. The process, although I have seen it work multiple times and in multiple contexts seems magical because there is always a point when we are on the brink of chaos and I need to have faith that the pixie dust will allow us to fly. And it does. That is the magic of teaching. I just need to be willing to write about the magic, the spirituality, the connections that seem unconnected. I need to be ready to write about complexity and "hold eternity in the palm of my hand."

Source: Schulz, K. (2017, November 6). Fantastic beasts and how to rank them. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/06/is-bigfoot-likelier-than-the-loch-ness-monster

What is Sacred:
This article has nothing and everything to do with what I am talking about above. I think I may be seeing things that are not there, but I see this as a way to talk about how the moʻolelo of Hiʻiaka and Pele can actually become a realistic manual for this time now and moving forward. This article is about how there is a logic to ranking magical beasts based on their ability to suspend disbelief by connecting to scientific laws and orders. 
That world, the one we inhabit every day of our lives, is a yeti--a fantastical thing constructed out of bits and pieces of reality plus the magic wand of the mind.

Connections:
Yes, make connections.
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