Derek Paar

All of this began thirty-four years ago when I mixed up two words.

Except for the ridiculous two-hour commute, my job as a psychologist in the counseling center at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut was one I probably could have stayed in for years.  My new wife and I lived at the other end of the state up near Massachusetts and each day I would leave our apartment around 6:00 in the morning, stop for a Boston Globe and a GIANT coffee at the local Cumberland Farms, set the radio to the Don Imus show on the now defunct WNBC in New York, and enter the long line of fellow travelers driving east on I-84, all of us moving along as if we were slogging to ten thousand different funerals.  The first half hour of my trip was bumper-to-bumper, stop and creep, and I sipped my coffee, read the sports section of the paper and listened to Imus who more than occasionally called in sick with alcohol-flu.  Then it was over the Connecticut River on the Bulkley Bridge, I put the folded newspaper on the passenger seat, set the coffee cup in its holder, gunned the engine and began to get as crazed as every other driver who merged south onto I-91 at seventy-five miles per hour.  Every day at least one someone cursed me and gave me the finger.  Once in a while, I did likewise.  We commuters were not a happy lot.  On a good day, after seventy-five miles in the car, I arrived at my office somewhere around eight. 

And then one day the pregnancy strip turned blue.  I'm going to be a father.  A father?  Me?  I'm not ready.  Fathers are supposed to know stuff.  My father knew stuff.  What do I know?  Pretty much nothing.  

But with that news my brain exploded.  Every drive to work, this two-hour agony of a stupid person travelling alongside stupid people doing stupid things, suddenly became a carnival of thought balloons rising from my head.  And, to my dismay, every single one of those balloons flew out the window and was gone.  I had a fantasy, or maybe it was a hope, that each idea was able to find other good ideas lost to long trips and they all lived in cozy homes along the interstate waiting until they could leap into someone else's car, someone else's brain.

Because I imagined that these ideas might be just what I needed to be a good father I began bringing a tape recorder with me on my commute.  And then the damnedest thing happened.  Where before I had been bombarded and tickled with new ideas, with this apparatus at my side I could think of nothing.  Back and forth, up and down the highway, mile after mile, just me and the damned tape recorder.  And nothing.  Not one damned thing.  Apparently, these thoughts didn't like being told what to do.

I decided to give myself a commandment – Thou Shalt Not Edit.  So, anything I wanted to say or do, I did: tell a stupid joke, make some dumb comment about the state of the world, try singing harmony with the Everly Brothers.  But I still had trouble hunkering down with the kinds of ideas I'd been having.  After many hundreds of miles of bad singing and bad jokes I asked myself (on tape), "OK wise guy, if you don't want to talk about anything important, what do you want to talk about?"  There was nothing so I tried again – "What would you rather be doing?"  And at last the nut cracked. 

I'd rather be playing.

"Why?" I asked. 

Because it's fun. 

"And that's it?  That's all there is to it?  Why's it fun?" 

Because it's mine.  I own it.

And so it went up and down I-84, I-91, the Merritt Parkway, and the Connecticut Turnpike, over and over. 

Then one day I asked myself, "What exactly is play?"  And after many more miles I came up with a definition, that even now, still seems to hold water.  It is this: Play is the posing of questions – and not necessarily verbal – that both inhibits and enhances new movement.  I'll explain this later in the chapter on play, but suffice it to say, it felt like some sort of breakthrough and was precisely what I was doing on these drives to and from work.  I was playing.  I was questioning things.  I felt open to ideas and with each question, oddly (and by my reckoning, logically), a limit was created – I was questioning this and not that – but within that limit new ideas arose and new possibilities flowered, and then some other question could take shape which would close off some other possibilities but would open to new ones ... and so on, theoretically forever. 

At any rate, after a couple of months of my back and forth drive and this deeper immersion in some sort of questioning and this play of my own, I met a client that changed pretty much everything for me.  Tom was in his fourth year of law school.  This seemed odd to me seeing as how law school took three years but Tom explained that after messing up in his third year the law faculty decided that he was too smart to kick out of the program so they invited him back for another shot.  It turned out that this was Tom in a nutshell.  He was successful at most things he tried but he seemed to fall apart near every finish line.  Sometimes literally.  He ran cross country in high school and in practice he was terrific, by his account the strongest kid on the team but in meets, and over the same damned course they trained on, he would be among the leaders until, nearing the end he would trip and fall, or grab his side with a cramp, or just crap out.  The same thing happened each time he and I decided to talk and run in the park near my office that bordered Long Island Sound.  We would lope along for a few miles, chatting about life and school and his marriage and then right at the end where the road rose quickly, Tom would wheeze and walk.  My body is not a prototypical runner's body, my legs are shorter than they should be for my height and I have never been a slender man, but when I got to the top of the small hill I'd look back and see Tom bent and gasping.

One day, late on a Friday afternoon in a sit-down session in my office, Tom began talking about his father, a mean, angry, violent man, a man who drank too much, who was beaten by life.  He told me that when his father came home from work (young) Tom could immediately tell if this would be a night of empty beer cans, slamming doors and slaps in the face.  On those nights, Tom hid.  He might leave the house and return after his father had passed out or he might slink away into some sort of invisibility, but Tom would be gone.  It was a magnificent resistance to this threatening man and probably was the beginning of a pattern of resistance to the rest of his life as well.

I made an inane comment to Tom, "You know your father very well," and soon the session ended.

It had been a long week.  I was tired and eager to go home and a few minutes later I was back on the highway with my tape recorder talking to myself. 

"You know your father very well?  Is that right?  Or maybe it was, You no your father very well?"

For the life of me I could not figure out which word I had meant.  Did Tom know his father very well – in that he knew all the subtle signs that his father gave before the inevitable eruption?  Or, did Tom resist his father, in essence saying NO! to his father?

I felt like an idiot being so stumped and obsessed with this silly word play.  Most of the weekend I kept asking myself those two questions.  Did I mean you know your father very well?  Or did I mean you no (resist) your father very well?  I went over and over this, finally just shrinking the two questions down to their bits – Know? No?  And I must have chanted this a million times, know-no-know-no-know-no …  It reminded me of being sixteen and getting my driver's license and taking my mother's car for a spin by myself for the first time and, for some damned reason, I began saying my name over and over and over – rickrickrickrick… – until the connection between that sound, rick, and me just stopped (for a while).

And so it was with know and no.  The two words became one sound with no certain meaning.

That next week I was having lunch with a few faculty friends who were, as usual, miserable.  The University of Bridgeport was in horrible shape.  Where it once had something like eight or nine thousand students it was now limping along with barely a quarter of that.  Because students went home after classes on Thursday afternoon and never bothered showing up on Friday, the powers that be decided, a few years earlier, to do away with Friday classes all together which meant that students now routinely went home on Wednesday and Thursday classes were as sparsely attended as the Friday classes had been.  The place was a ghost town.  And on top of it all the faculty, who had been on strike at least three times in the previous five years, one of which delayed my start date by a month, were getting ready to go out again.  (Two years after I left, the whole shebang was sold to the Reverend Sung Myung Moon who had high hopes that The University of Bridgeport would be to the Unification Church what Notre Dame is to Catholicism.  But alas …)

In an attempt to get some kind of conversation going to break the gloom, I asked one of my friends, a teacher in the Art Department who was about to have a show of her sculptures, how it was that she managed to create such really spectacular works of art.  Susan, who had not said a word and who, to this point hadn't looked up from her lunch tray, shrugged and said, "I don't know."

Clearly, she meant K-N-O-W, meaning that she didn't have a clue how she did it.  But since I was thoroughly and completely insane by this time, having chanted know-no-know-no-know-no … for most of the past week, I was equally clueless as to which of the two words she meant.  So, I flipped a coin in my head and it landed on N-O and I tried to come up with some sort of sentence that might make sense.

"So, Susan, are you saying that you … (Where in the hell are you taking this sentence Rick?) … that you (Where Rick?  Where?) … that you don't say no?  That you don't say no to (To what Rick?  Dammit man, think.) … possibilities?"

And Susan looked me in the eyes, put down her tuna sandwich, began to nod her head, slowly at first and then with increasingly more enthusiasm, and said, "Yes!  That's exactly what I do!  I don't say no to possibilities."

And in a few hours I'm back in the car, back on the highway, tape recorder on, trying to catch some fragment of a thought about how in some way know-ing and no-ing were connected.  "When you know something – you no something?  Because Susan doesn't say no to possibilities she can make something different?  Does some act of creation require not no-ing?  Is knowing, then, a matter, or a product, of some sort of limit?  Some kind of no-ing?"

Goddamn it was great fun.  I did not know where these thoughts were taking me.  I did not no where these thoughts were taking me.  I had no limit.  I had no direction.  I followed my questions and with each question eventually some new order, some new limit, arose within which new questions were ready to be asked.  It was all great play.

But this new experience, as fun as it was, was not comfortable.  The ideas hurt my head, kept me up at night, sometimes they screamed at me, sometimes they whispered in my ear, they would not be ignored.  Eventually, they made me want to leave my counseling center job to look for another job, one where I (imagined that I) would get paid to think and tell people what I thought.  "Aha!  College teaching." 

So, never having published a thing, never having given a professional presentation, never having written a piece of research except for the dissertation I am certain no one other than I and two of the three members of my committee had read cover to cover, I set out to find a job teaching psychology.  With the Chronicle of Higher Education in hand I began applying to openings: big schools, little schools, two year, four year, doctoral programs, east coast, west coast, the great flyover middle, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, urban and rural, religious and not.  It did not go well.  

Not thirty seconds into the teaching demonstration at a college run by the Benedictine order of priests on my first interview, trying to explain some of the ideas I'd been having about how we make sense of the craziness of the world, in front of an audience of one third faculty, one third students, and one third monks fully dressed in robes, I looked up from my notes to see a forest of monk hands, each hand raised high and each perfectly still.  One monk spoke, "Are you saying there is no God?" 

"Come to think of it, I guess that is what I'm saying, isn't it?  OK, so let's just go with that … there is no God."  And the monk hands rose again, this time sleeves shaking and shivering and wordless sounds of disgust oozing from each exasperated mouth.  The circus lasted another hour and a half until, mercifully, someone who wasn't a monk, gave me a ride to the bus station.  As he and I were saying good-bye he said, "I've been here seventeen years and this was the first inquisition I've seen."  Through crossing letters, the university and I both agreed ours was not the best fit.

After a hundred and nine rejections (I have rightly concluded that I was not perceived as a particularly good catch), I finally got an offer from a small state college in Nebraska where I was surrounded by very gentle students who were remarkably kind to this odd stranger struggling with ideas he hadn't quite yet formed.  Because my chairperson and I very much hated each other from the first week, I was left alone trying to figure out how to teach which, all in all, turned out to be a good thing.  Even better was that I was left alone to live with these zygotal thoughts, abuse my interlibrary loan privileges, and think through what these ideas meant.  It felt a bit like my variation of Freud's "splendid isolation" and I loved it.  Over the years, and for the last three decades in Massachusetts, I played and thought and read and played and thought and read again and again and watched, almost as a spectator to myself, these ideas take some sort of shape, only to be re-formed and re-shaped.  God it's been fun.

This play of ideas, these curiosities with no intended direction, has led me this question, one that seems to be at the heart of my profession: How is it that I (and we) make sense and meaning? 

But, much like my definition of "play" (that it is a question that both inhibits and enhances new movement), imbedded in that question are other questions: What is sense?  What is meaning?  Who am I?  Who are you?  What is it that we're making sense and meaning of?  And it is this last question that has led to an even bigger question, one that is impossible to answer but has perplexed me for the past thirty-three years and will, if I'm lucky, keep me perplexed for the next thirty-three years, "Just what kind of universe is this?" because all else seems predicated on that, doesn't it?

What follows is what I have concluded … for now.  My daughter will be 33 in a couple of weeks, her brother – not even a twinkle in his old man's eye back when this all began – turned 30 three months ago, and these ideas which have been a constant source of pleasure and play since before either was born ought to do what my children both did years ago.  These thoughts need to leave the nest and find a place of their own, maybe a home along a highway somewhere with other thoughts lost to a long commute.