After a Year's Hiatus . . .

It has been almost exactly a year since I last posted on this blog. I have been planting beans, and the season for harvesting now is over. Thoreau writes, “This further experience also I gained. I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops.” It is time to move on. This week I will send what I anticipate to be my last scholarly book concerning education and the classroom. This will be my ninth published work and the eighth in curriculum studies and the classroom. My seventh book, Symphony #1 in a Minor Key was subtitled A Meditation on Time and Place. That defines its subject matter.  I do not think I want anymore to write about education. I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but perhaps if the seeds be not lost I will plant other seeds that will perhaps grow with less manurance and toil.
     My new work is what I am referring to as a pseudo-memoir tentatively called Digressions and Stories. I don’t really know what I mean by labeling my work a pseudo-memoir. In fact over the past several years I have considered the dubious nature of memoir and autobiography and the tenuous hold on truth that these forms maintain. For fifteen years I have kept this blog. I have posted what was on my mind, though Dylan suggests that the preposition ought to be “in” rather than “on.” The blog portrayed my positions at the time of each post and was not ever meant as a memoir, but I think it became one over time. Or rather, from the pieces with some hoeing and weeding a whole could be written. I am taking those fifteen years that referred to many more years and as a foundation have in a more organized and even formal manner composed how I have come in these present moments to consider my life. The intended audience is very small: my two lovely daughters.
     Thoreau bemoans the fact that the seeds he had subsequently planted did not come up: they were either wormeaten or had lost their vitality. In this world where manurance abounds, those seeds, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence and the like will rarely grow despite the attendant care of those who assume an ethical view. Even now the Republican politicians are spreading shit all over the fields and the air stinks with the ordure. Many of us would stay inside to avoid the stench but it leaks in anyway and we breathe the foul fumes. I burn a great deal of patchouli incense. And when I think of Trump and his Republican horde I am reminded of Joseph Welch during the Army-McCarthy Hearings. “Have you no decency,” he accused, as Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn smugly cast slander and lies on innocent defendants. Seeds of honesty and decency will not grow in these degraded fields.
     Interestingly, Thoreau doesn’t pursue the idea of his unsuccessful seeds. It was enough to acknowledge the failure. I remember lines from Jackson Browne’s song, “Please don’t confront me with my failures/I have not forgotten them.” Amen, brother.
     I send out the book and return to the writing.