This article was downloaded by: [University of Strathclyde]On: 17 October 2014, At: 09:03Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Educational ForumPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utef20

A Pedagogy of BlissDelese Wear aa Human Values in Medicine, College of Medicine, NortheasternOhio University , Rootstown, Ohio, 44272Published online: 30 Jan 2008.

To cite this article: Delese Wear (1990) A Pedagogy of Bliss, The Educational Forum, 54:3,283-291, DOI: 10.1080/00131729009335549

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131729009335549

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoeveras to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of theauthors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy ofthe Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms& Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

A Pedagogy of Bliss

Delese Wear

Sit in a room and read-and read and read . . . and you have a nice,mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.

- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Of all the continuing unanswered questions I ask, one of the mostperplexing is how I found myself (happily) so passionate, even obsessive,about literature. I revel in books. The emotional range I take to readingis wide-happiness, malaise, confusion, fear-and there I look foranswers, simple pleasures , explanations, affirmations, new perspectives.And I am unabashedly self-absorbed when I read and look to concretizethe printed word with the particulars of my life. As I read, I suspendeverything around me and believe that the book is mine, the author wroteit for me, and the characters are talking directly to me. That is, I am asolipsistic reader, in Wallace Stevens's words." and I become the book.But then I inevitably look up from my reading, and find that not onlywhat I see is changed, but I am changed because I read.

How did this happen? Of course, I look back to my parents' zeal forreading which they thrust on me (if I know my reading-teacher motherand my bookish, scientist father) from infancy on . But because I havespent most of my professional life teaching literature, I also look morequizzically, with more wonder, at how this passion was nurtured ineducational settings, and at how similar passions evolved in my peersand in other sources, say, in physics, or mathematics, or art. WhatI am referring to, then, are not random Zen-like bursts of existential

Delese Wear is coordinator, Human Values in Medicine , College of Medicine,Northeastern Ohio University, Rootstown, Ohio 44272.

The Educational Forum, Vol. 54, No.3, Spring 1990

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

THE EDUCATIONAL FORUM

awareness, but lifelong revelry with a project, a subject in this case, whichforms successive approximations toward "meaning making" in ourindividual lives. Implicit in my thinking is the belief that thereflectiveness, the consciousness that occurs when one is passionatelyengaged with a subject, is an essential dimension of teaching in anycontext, in any domain.

I begin my inquiry with both imaginative and professional literaturethat describe an individual's essential and continuing engagement witha subject. Such engagement has been described as transcendent , orspiritual, or finding and following one's bliss . But I also raise questionsregarding the teaching implications for nurturing passion, one of the mostpersistent and important challenges for me in my professional life.Teaching literature I can do, but evoking passion for literature? Howcan I do that?

Bliss: Some Ethereal Definitions

Writing about her childhood in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, Annie Dillarddescribes her early absorption with books.

I began reading books, reading books to delirium . I began byvanishing from the known word into the passive abyss of reading,but soon found myself engaged with surprising vigor because thethings in the books, or even the things surrounding the books, rousedme from my stupor . ... A book of fiction was a bomb. It was aland mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your wholeday .... Books swept me away, one after the other, this way andthat; I made endless vows according to their lights , for I believedthern .?

She mentions being knocked from a stupor, but where did she land?Foshay, drawing on perspectives from psychology and theology, callsthis a symbolic landing, not a definable concept : "It is as if the ...experience begins in the mind. But it doesn't. It begins as a kind of assaulton one's sense of existence,"3 an assault to those who have managed tokeep, as James describes it, a "mystical susceptibility ."4 And whilepassionate engagements of any sort can be discrete events, they are open­ended in their more essential form, part of the energy that propels usforward, marked by a never-quite satisfied hunger. Campbellcharacterizes such passion as bliss, and exhorts us all to follow whateverthat might be:

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that

284

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

A PEDAGOGY OF BLISS

has been there all the while, waiting for you , and the life that youought to be living is the one you are living . When you can see that,you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and theyopen the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid.And doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.s

Following one's bliss thus becomes self-generating; we press ourselvesto experience more widely, more variously. Mary Morris writes aboutthis lifelong, never-quite satisfied search as follows:

Our lives seem to be lives of endless possibility. Like readers ofromances we think that anything can 'happen to us at any time ....We keep moving. From anecdote to anecdote, from hope to hope.Around the next bend something new will befall us . . . . Our motionis forward, whether by train or daydream. Our sights are on thehorizon, across strange terrain, vast desert, unfordable rivers,impenetrable icepeaks . . . . While the journey is on buses and acrossland, I begin another journey inside my head, a journey of memoryand sensation, of past merging with present, of time growinginsignificant . . . . I longed for what came next. Whatever the nextstop, the next love, the next story might be."

We search for a common language, to borrow from Adrienne Rich, ?andin the absence of such language, seek by example to communicate themeaning of our bliss to others. Vivian Gornick writes of her awakeningat City College of New York where her education, primarily in literature,"provoked and nourished" her life inside her head. She describes whatit felt like:

The space inside me enlarges . That rectangle of light and air inside,where thought clarifies and language grows and response is madeintelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self­pity . . . . That space . It begins in the middle of my forehead andends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body,as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall . On days when thought flowsfreely or better yet clarifies with effort , it expands gloriously. Ondays when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast itshrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully , I taste the air ,feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited,beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I'm safe. I'm free.I'm thinking .f

Still, this idea of passion or bliss is slippery. What is it? Is it tied tobehaviors or actions? To language? To a way of living? Foshaycharacterizes two attributes of the spiritual experience that seem to

285

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

THE EDueATIONAL FORUM

parallel passionate engagement with some thing: the experience of awe,and the experience of connectedness with something greater than one'sself.? the latter being what Phenix has called "transcendence.T' ? LikeDillard's jolt, it is an "awakening, or sudden awareness of the connectionbetween that which is immediately apparent, and a vastly larger sphereof being."11 On her part, Dillard puts it this way: "The visible worldturned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to theworld. "12 I think of the long tradition of physician-writers who followeddual passions of medicine and writing, Richard Selzer in particular, whose"psychic energy" for writing inexplicably appeared at 40, an "appearancethat was to knock over [his] life." Yet his passion for writing was"fertilized" by medicine; he, too, was propelled back into the world ofhospitals and patients where he could walk in and out of "a dozen shortstories a day."13 I am inclined to believe that bliss, or passion, orwhatever we are to call it, is more fully realized by living in the world,following one's bliss around in the every day moments of happiness andbitterness and frustration and eagerness. Following one's bliss becomesone's perpetual, open-ended project that is never really finished. Rather,the formation and carrying out of a self-renewing project is ongoing; infact, sometimes our apparent reluctance "to finish a complex workperhaps stems from a feeling that this freezes it, consigns it to the past,and closes off its future . [Our1personal project must remain open at anycost; and so these incomplete works stand as reminders of [our] existence,always free and extensible."14

I am reminded of Walker Percy's Binx Bolling who made the distinctionbetween the vertical and horizontal search, passionate searchers beingof the latter sort.

During those years I stood outside the universe and sought tounderstand it. I lived in my room as an Anybody living Anywhereand read fundamental books and only for diversion took walksaround the neighborhood and saw an occasional movie . . . . Thegreatest success of this enterprise, which I call my vertical search,came one night when I sat in a hotel room in Birmingham and reada book called The Chemistry of Life. When I finished it, it seemedto me that the main goals of my search were reached or were inprinciple reachable, whereupon I went out and saw a movie calledIt Happened One Night which was itself very good. A memorablenight. The only difficulty was that though the universe had beendisposed of, I myselfwas left over. There I lay in my hotel room withmy search over yet stillobliged to draw one breath and then the next.But now I have undertaken a different kind of search . As a

286

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

A PEDAGOGY OF BLISS

consequence, what takes place in my room is less important. Whatis important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wanderin the neighborhood. IS

Binx, then, confirms via his searching that following one's bliss does infact lead us back and forth from our private rooms to the world, andthat searchers, if not to find themselves '1eft over" from a definable world,must undertake a life of wandering. Binx also points out the hoax of"proficiencies": what might be left over, still, once those are learned?Campbell similarly describes the subtle differences in the nature ofsearching. Like vertical searching, chasing explicitly after the "meaningof life" implies the existence of a reachable destination, a project's end.Campbell suggests that when we follow our bliss,

what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our lifeexperiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances withinour own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel therapture of being alive . . . . The way to find out about yourhappiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel mosthappy, when you really are happy-not excited, not just thrilled,but deeply happy. This requires a bit of self-analysis. What is it thatmakes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. Thisis what I call "following your bliss."16

Teaching for Bliss

Be that as it may, the question remains-how can we as teachers evokebliss? I think of several ways, from my own experience of having hadsome bliss-evoking teachers. First, as a very condition for teaching wehave to care passionately about our subjects, our projects, and tocommunicate our passion to students, not letting long-establishedcustoms regarding self-disclosure prevent us from doing so. Greene talksof the "great climactic moments in teaching" when we "find ourselvesthinking in front of the class, with the end open, unresolved .... Thereis something about the open-endedness and even the uncertainty involvedthat enables us to reach out to our students, to communicate a kind ofpassion to them, no matter what we are teaching."17 In addition, wemust note that dictatorial prescriptions for "excellence" seldom createclassrooms characterized by reflectiveness and questioning. Over andbeyond mere enthusiasm, or the ability to lead lively discussions, thecreation of such classrooms requires teachers to have found their bliss.Without it, "learned teaching behaviors" and glib teacher talksurrounding "subjects," to which no personal connections have been

287

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

THE EDUCATIONAL FORUM

made, can give way to equally unauthentic student response. Makingexplicit our own bliss, that passionate engagement that marks ourindividual, ongoing projects, is one starting point for a dialogue betweenourselves and our students that can awaken and nurture the kind ofrestless and reflective wonder in which any educative activity must begrounded.

Further, we may consider with our students ways in which teachingis craft and art, clearly more slippery than its technological dimensions,yet worthy of serious examination throughout teacher education. Eisnersketches four ways in which teaching can be considered an art. First, onecan teach with such a degree of "skill and grace that ... the experiencecan be justifiably characterized as aesthetic." Second, like an artist, ateacher may make "judgments based largely on qualities that unfoldduring the course of action." Third, teaching artistry is "not dominatedby prescriptions or routines but is influenced by qualities andcontingencies that are unpredictable." Fourth, in such art demonstratedin teaching, "the ends it achieves are often created in process."18

I think of one influential teacher I had whose subject matter wasincidental to her startling, confrontive self-questioning we witnessed andwere a part of both in and out of the classroom. By her example, in thecontent of her questioning and the questioning itself, I was hurled intoa receptiveness for naming, examining, and trying to follow my bliss.By her example, I learned for myself that following bliss in this receptivestate was never going to lead me to a peaceable kingdom, but would,in the best Kierkegaardian sense, "create difficulties everywhere."19 Iwondered if I would ever be comfortable with the restlessness andrelentlessness and ambiguity of following one's bliss. By her example,I learned of the wonderful and terrible freedom of following one's bliss.It would be far easier to look for signs and validation from others,refusing to recognize that, as Percy would say, we really are "stuck" withourselves.P By her example, I was confronted with the fact that unlessI lived both inside and out, it was possible that I could miss my life "inthe same way one misses a plane. "21

A second way teachers might nurture and awaken bliss in students isto ignore whenever possible unquestioned, externally-imposedpedagogical dogma. Of course, bliss may emerge from traditionalencounters with the canon, like my bliss was fed in every English classI found myself in regardless of content or teaching style. But I waslucky - my bliss was well established, since I had already been readingeagerly, voraciously. Yet, as Will Rogers was said to have oncecounselled, "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you

288

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

A PEDAGOGY OF BLISS

just sit." I was on the right track, but I needed encouragement to keepmoving, and it was the several passionate literature teachers I had overthe course of my education who validated by example the wonder andmystery and joy of following one's literary bliss. In one such teacher itwas the slow burn of his Shakespearian fervor. There in his classroom,he would quietly yet fiercely brandish Shakespeare's language, firingevery synapse in my body. He'd whisper lines, sway to the iambicpentameter, embellish soliloquies. He wore his Elizabethan bliss outsidehimself - it was visible, tangible, thick in the air, and I was surroundedby it. I do not think any of us emerged from his class as even a mediocreShakespearian scholar. But I do know that I return often to passages heelectrified us with, and am able to venture on to unexaminedShakespearian texts, energized by his exhilaration, by the passion he livedand passed on to us in the classroom. And I am quite certain that thatwas his unstated, perhaps unconscious objective, similar to what Greenehopes for her students.

I want still more opportunities to make contagious my passion aboutliterature and the pleasures it has provided. At the same time, I wantto learn more about the ways of making it accessible, so that manykinds of others (different from myself) can interpret what they readagainst their own horizons and see from new perspectives the waythey are in the world .22

Where else than in teaching are there these opportunities to live ourbliss, spread it around to receptive others, and help others name andfollow their own bliss? I believe that we, as teachers and teachereducators, must make explicit our own bliss, talk about it, examine it,show by example how following our bliss influences the way we live andwant to live. We can make "following one's bliss" a curricular theme,inserting at every possible opening, so that teachers-to-be are ascomfortable talking about bliss as they are with mathematics methods.For myself, my missionary zeal surrounding literature will always beexplicit. But I realize that not all of my students will come to loveliterature (if they don't already) the way I do. And I realize, uneasily,that the fact I am even able to entertain the issue of bliss is derived froma position of privilege, a position that influences the very questions I askand the expectations I have for myself and the students I teach. Thus,a self-conscious critique of our motives, questions of imposition, andreflections on the values of the dominant culture of which we are a part,must all be essential considerations of a pedagogy of bliss. With that

289

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

THE EDUCATIONAL FORUM

realization, I admit frustration, and must guard against what Greene callsa temptation to "impose- not only protocols, but an informedawareness ." This, too, she discloses to her students.

I reveal my own consciousness of contradiction, my ambivalencewith regard to their freedom, my ambivalence with regard to myown. After all , I realize that learning happens only when personschoose to pose the questions, choose to gain the understanding thatwill enable them to see and say and hear and feel. And I believe thatby making my own incompleteness visible, I may be more apt to stirthem into taking initiatives, exerting energy, choosing themselvesand their projects, overcoming the passivity and the privatism thatfrustrate desire and malnourish as well. 23

What I can do, then, is to take risks with my students by disclosingthe blessings and difficulties I have encountered while trying to followmy bliss. In the end, I believe Campbell was right: all this has to do withthe "experience of being alive."24 What more could we want for ourstudents-and ourselves?

References

1. Wallace Stevens, 'T he House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," TheCollected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books , 1982), pp.358-359.

2. Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: Harper and Row , 1987),pp. 80, 83, 85.

3. Arthur W. Foshay, 'T he Peak/Spiritual Experience as an Object of CurriculumAnalysis." (Paper presented at the joint meeting of the Social Science Educationconsortium and the Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung, Irsee, Bavaria, WestGermany, June 18-22, 1984), p. 15.

4. William James , The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longman,Green, and Company, 1925), p. 383.

5. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York : Doubleday, 1988), p. 120.6. Mary Morris, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs ofa Woman Traveling Alone (New

York: Penguin, 1987), 164.7. Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (New

York: W. W . Norton, 1978).8. Vivian Gornick, FierceAttachment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp .

102-103.9. Foshay, 'The Peak/Spiritual Experience, " p. 8.

10. Philip Phenix, 'Transcendence and the Curriculum," in Conflicting Conceptionsof Curriculum, eds. Eliot Eisner and Elizabeth Vallance (Berkeley, California:McCutchan, 1974), pp. 117-132.

11. Foshay, 'The Peak/Spiritual Experience, " p. 9.12. Dillard, An American Childhood, p. 160.

290

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014

A PEDAGOGY OF BLISS

13. Richard Selzer, "The Pen and the Scalpel," New York Times Magazine (August21, 1988): 30.

14. Charles D. Tenney, "Aesthetics in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre," in ThePhilosophy ofJean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle, Illinois: OpenCourt, 1981), p, 121.

15. Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1962), p. 60.16. Campbell, The Power of Myth , pp. 5, 155.17. Maxine Greene, "Sense-Making through Story: An Autobiographical Inquiry,"

Teaching Education 2 (Autumn 1987): 9-14. Quoted from p. 12.18. Eliot Eisner, The Educational Imagination (New York: Macmillan, 1979), pp.

153-154.19. Soren Kierkegaard, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the 'Philosophical

Fragments'" in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 194.

20. Walker Percy, The Second Coming (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux , 1980),p.123.

21. Ibid.22. Maxine Greene, "Quality in Teacher Education," EducationalPolicy 2 (September

1988): 235-250. Quoted from p. 245.23. Maxine Greene , "Sense-Making," p. 13.24. Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 5.

291

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f St

rath

clyd

e] a

t 09:

03 1

7 O

ctob

er 2

014