Blake's Lost Children

I created this blog because I wanted a place to post about the things that I don't say in class about the literature that I teach. Contrary to what non-teachers might imagine, teaching literature at the college level is usually not about communicating or even expressing your personal feelings about the text under discussion. One's performance in the classroom is, of course, always driven obscurely and fundamentally by one's own emotions and experience; but to get from what you do with a text in a classroom to what happens when you encounter it on your own you have to go through many, many layers of mediation. I believe that this is as it should be. The romantic/confessional/charismatic pedagogical model so beloved of Hollywood films about teaching is great entertainment, but as far as making the learning happen, it's really not very effective in an actual classroom.

One's research is also obscurely driven by one's own subjectivity. But there, the layers of mediation proliferate even more aggressively because of all the different things our research has to prove to all different kinds of people. Indeed, my fear of being caught out by some other member of the profession expressing a subjective response to a text is so great that I have adopted the pseudonym Lucy Cannon. It won't be very hard for people to figure out who I really am if they care to try; but somehow it comforts me to post this stuff under a name different from the one that goes with my 'real' scholarship.

Anyway. I just finished up teaching Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. I had a mixed experience working with the images of the original plates at The William Blake Archive; I love the art, but the site makes it difficult to compare images from different plates. SOI&E includes a number of poems about lost children, most of whom are found in the end--though exactly what being "found" means changes dramatically between poems.

It is a strange experience teaching those poems now. In 2009 my brother and his wife lost their second child at the age of 3 months. Though I don't often talk about this in the classroom, that experience--and the experience of surviving cancer, also in 2009--have radically changed my response to a lot of the literature that I teach. Everything is different once you understand mortality--I mean really understand that you are going to die, that death is not just something that happens to everyone else. But going through the death of a child, even in my once-removed way, is a different kind of change. The first time I taught Blake after 2009, it suddenly occurred to me, in the middle of a discussion about something completely different, why I was having such a visceral response to Little Boy Lost. The poem itself is deeply unsettling. So many unanswered questions: where is the father? was the father ever there? what is this 'vapour' that the boy is following? if the father ever was there, why did he take the child through this swampy wasteland in the first place? Why is it that even in "Little Boy Found," what the boy gets back is not his actual father, but some divine simulacrum of him? Is that a "vapour" too?

But looking at the art it came to me: This image represents so many of the nightmarish things about losing a child. When I make a prayer flag for my lost niece for Day of the Dead, I always draw her being held in the arms of God, which due to my artistic limitations sort of look like disembodied human arms. This is the only way to find consolation: imagining that God now holds the child who can no longer be held by her own mother or by any of us. And Blake's image is the reverse of that: the child unmoored, floating in a void, still a child but no longer capable of being held or comforted, drifting alone in all that vastness. A nightmare for the child, for whom as we all know this kind of isolation is supremely terrifying; a nightmare for the parent too. Being able to see--to imagine--to envision your child, but to know also that you can no longer touch your child, that your child exists somewhere in some form but you will never be able to hold your child again.

This is perhaps why the Newtown massacre still has its hooks in me, and in many of the other mother/teachers I know, long after much of the rest of the country has moved on. Since 2009 there is a lost child inside me that was not there before. There is a place, created by the death of my brother and sister-in-law's baby, which is permanent, and to which I will always return when I recognize its image elsewhere. And it's strange to be in that place in a room full of people who know nothing about me, really, while I talk in this veiled and remote and impersonal way about the work that this poem does.

I love teaching Blake. I don't know that I do it well; certainly I don't do it very often; but I do enjoy it. And sometimes I'm not sure, when I look back on it all, how much the quality of the instruction really has to do with how people respond to the literature. Because the professor who taught me most of what I know about the English romantics was, pedagogically speaking, disastrous. All of the people in that course with me were by turns baffled, bored, and infuriated by it. But all the same, I read the material; and though I found much of it baffling and impenetrable (go read the books of Los and Urizen and tell me what you make of them) it obviously stayed with me. I wonder sometimes whether our primary job isn't just to keep people reading the material.