The Pile
Sometimes, every few weeks during the fall and spring semesters, my home is overrun by a creature I call The Pile. The Pile is a stack of student papers, usually some 25-30 in number, in dry times as few as 10 or 15, at flood-tide (the unholy confluence of, say, two written assignments in a row) some 60 or so. The Pile is squat and thick, in various shades of white, off-white, and cream; it is rarely stacked evenly, but shows throughout its recumbent bulk the edges and corners of the individual papers that compose it, each as sharp and barbed as a strand of razor-wire: The Pile as threatening porcupine, Don’t Touch Me. Usually the same paper stays on top until I decide to attack The Pile wholesale, which gives an odd impression, as if this growth of paper and ink had a single author who, instead of typing up one big document, madly split their work into seemingly innumerable smaller parts. Some of the papers are unstapled, which causes them to shift with the bulk of The Pile as it is moved and tossed about – sometimes intentionally, as when I first remove The Pile from its temporary traveling home in my bag and place it, still quivering in the light, in the center of the desk in my office; sometimes unintentionally, as when the accumulated matter that also occupies my desk (books, papers, Star Wars figures, photographs, cups and glasses, a lamp) vies with The Pile for dominance amid the chaos and swirl. I have an odd tenderness for these unstapled papers, the freak offshoots of The Pile’s hybrid fecundity: Who will care for them?
This isn’t really so much about teaching or pedagogy – the designing of curricula, the grading of papers and tests, or work in the classroom – as it is about the obduracy of mere matter, what the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich called "the tyranny of objects." For before The Pile can become a collection of readable texts, before its Word may be made flesh, it must remain simply what it is, a stack of paper, one needing a rough sort of order and care so as to avoid complete dispersal, but little more. (For me, at least, although I know quite a few colleagues with Piles of their own, and the conditions appertaining thereunto.) Thus it happens that The Pile may take up extended residence on my desk, living there like some half-neglected, half-resented long-term boarder, one whom I didn’t invite and who I desperately wish would leave. Grading actual papers, their texts and webs of ideas (or lack thereof), is actually gravy, quite easy, in fact, a cinch, and generally fun to boot. But in The Pile’s pupal stage, before the resplendent butterfly of thought can emerge from the chrysalis of printed matter – and sometimes horribly printed: I’m shocked, shocked to find that people still use dot-matrix printers these days, like some abject denizens of a forgotten Soviet satellite state for whom the Cold War never ended – anyway, before The Pile can become the divine Logos, it must fester awhile, lie fallow, sit on brood. My attitude toward The Pile during this incubation stage follows roughly the famous Five Stages of Grief as outlined by the late lamented Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I say "roughly," because it’s actually much closer to a single long unbroken period of the first four stages mixed indiscriminately together – with denial and anger strongly predominating – followed by a quick, bitter acceptance and the beginning of actual grading. I may like to imagine that The Pile needs this time so that it may grow to full maturity, but actually it’s I who need this time to stew, fret, and worry. The Pile is almost incidental, a blank slate, like Melville’s White Whale, upon which I can project some of my deepest, darkest fears and desires: my love-hate relationship with procrastination, my fears of failure and change, my frequent wish to lie still and be left alone, even my odd, growing feeling of being a dimly complacent cog in a brutal, inhuman machine, a mechanized beast with the reek of blood on its muzzle – all of this gets imprinted upon The Pile, all goes into the general morass of pity, fear, trembling, and bad vibes. The Pile is voracious, it is never not hungry.
But finally I’m moved to say fuck it all and go at The Pile directly, and actually grade the papers of which it’s composed, the papers that, like money loaned, have been entrusted to me for a brief time only, and which have to be paid back eventually. "Finally" and "eventually" can sometimes take as long as two or three weeks – I’m not proud – and it’s often the hangdog look on my students’ faces, the dawning realization that not only are they not being catapulted overnight into some pantheon of great writers, but that their eccentric, wild-eyed adjunct lecturer hasn’t even read their work yet, that motivates me, like a repentant drunk on a small-town Sunday, with all the bars and liquor stores closed, to clean myself up and get my act together. Sometimes I’ll fortify my assault upon The Pile with a quick jolt of martial inspiration – the testing of the bow scene in the Odyssey, for example, "no missing of the mark, see, and no long labor spent to string the bow" (a slacker’s mantra), or maybe Siegfried’s "Trauermarsch" from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, a real Teutonic stompfest, equal parts grim and grand, fitting music for the massive girding-of-loins and gritting-of-teeth needed before any grading orgy worthy of the name. Or sometimes I’ll dive right into The Pile’s textual heap, having spent enough time demonizing it, apostrophizing it, feeding it with my energy and my time. And soon after that The Pile is gone, and it’s as if it had never been to see me, and I wonder what all the fuss was about. And soon after that another Pile comes to stay, and I can begin the whole sordid, self-loathing process over again. I think I love The Pile, in all its messy manifestations, its lumpiness like buried sinful treasure, its refusals, and its silence. I really think I do.
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