Pigeons on a Post

Sue is still miserably sick. Driving over to her house to check on her in mid-day gloom, I saw these pigeons huddling in the rain and fog, and a vivid teaching memory came to me. I snatched the camera out of the bag beside me and shot this through the windshield.

Driving on, avoiding trucks, bicyclists, and pedestrians blinded by their own umbrellas, I savored a memory from a Queer Studies class. I always introduced my teaching of Gertrude Stein by writing on the board one of my favorite Stein quotes: “Where there is communication, there can be no creation.” I would toss it out and ask students to make sense of it before we discussed Stein's libretto for an opera called Four Saints in Three Acts, which includes the famous aria, "Pigeons on the grass, alas." One morning a sleepy-eyed student suddenly sat bolt upright and waved her hand excitedly, “I got it! I got it! She’s not telling you what she wants you to think, she’s giving you words and saying, ‘here, make what you like!’ She’s being a bottom, not a top. She’s giving us this total permission!” 

I no longer remember that student’s name, but I can still hear the thrill in her voice and see her eyes shining with excitement as she realized that what critics called nonsense verse was Stein’s way of inviting us to play, giving us, yes, “total permission” to make whatever meaning we wanted to make. It was a sexy teaching moment.