Mark Baechtel
Lecturer in English


9:30 a.m., May 16, 2004
Herrick Chapel
Grinnell College
Grinnell, Iowa

The first thing I want to emphasize today is how tremendously honored and pleased I am that you've asked me to speak to you, which pleasure is tempered with surprise that you've let me get anywhere near a pulpit. I'm very conscious of how many immanently qualified teachers you've had here, how many others you might have asked to talk before you for a few minutes, and I'm humbled to stand on the same dais as my colleague Bruce Voyles and the students you've honored by inviting them to address you within this house which, during its long history, has echoed with the voices of many whom I'm sure were much more eloquent than me.

I'm pleased, too, to be standing here before you now because I love ceremonies. In my six years at Grinnell, I've never missed a chance to give a talk, write an introduction for a speaker, or to get dressed up in my professorial robes and walk in the Commencement procession, watching each year's seniors do the same. I think as a writer I come by this tendency honestly. Writing is one of the arts, and Art is itself one of the human race's most important ceremonies. It is where we recognize the strangeness and the majesty of that most quotidian of things, our conscious experience, and where we use the apparatus of creativity-in my case, that grand ceremonial tool, language-to remind ourselves of the possibilities that fill every life.

Charles Dickens famously said that David Copperfield's task was to discover if he was to be the hero of his own story. I think this imperative became famous for a very good reason; it is the imperative we all face, and our ceremonies-whether they occur as they will on Monday on the lawn of this college, or on canvas, on paper, or an instrument, whether they are cast in stone or are spoken out before a crowd of listeners-are where we recognize this fact most immediately, most directly.

We are all artists in this regard; our lives are our works of art, and the long parade of acts and days which make up our span are the medium in which we work. I think of Shelley, who used to array himself as a bridegroom when he sat down to write: he knew that work should be approached with a kind of sacramental regard; that it should be something in which he engaged with a little awe, a willingness, even, to appear ridiculous in the cause of honoring the important thing before him that he was about to do. It's a risky enterprise, the creation of and participation in ceremonies, and in this it is a fitting metaphor for being. How could it be otherwise, for a thing emphasizes what we have said was important, tells us who we are, how we seem, how we do wrong and right, how we might be better?

One of those things that's said often of artists early in their careers-slightly disparaging, but not entirely dismissive-is that he or she "shows promise, but doesn't yet seem to have struck [his or her] material." It's this material-what constitutes it, how it might be found-that I chiefly want to address myself to today, and here I may risk being a bit patronizing. I think back on myself at your age-not so many years ago as many of you may think-and I remember thinking I knew exactly where I was going to go and what I was going to do. I was going to leave my college with my new-minted B.A. and go west-go to work for a small newspaper in Wyoming or Montana, places where-based on no experience with them at all-I figured I'd find space that matched my ambition, and would be able to begin the body of work that would make me a famous journalist.

Well... there's a reason one of my favorite proverbs is the Yiddish one which, translated, says: "Man plans, God laughs." Here I am, and I find I am neither disconcerted nor disappointed. Far from it; I'm grateful to have spent my life as I have; to have had six years among you, beneficiary of that very great privilege: a chance to do meaningful work while rendering service. I have loved my time at Grinnell and I'm terribly proud of what I've had a chance to do here. What better gig could there have been for a talker than this one: sitting at a table or standing at a rostrum, gabbing on and on about the thing I love doing with people who also love it, helping them to shape stories? It's an addictive thing, meaningful work is; the more you do the more you want to do, and if you let it, this addiction will take you to places you never thought you'd go-like Iowa, like a small town smack in its middle, where there's a yellow house on a quiet street where you never in a million years thought you'd end up living.

So this is my wish for you and my injunction to you: that you set out from here prepared to labor in the cause of finding something to do with your life which you love as much as I have loved this-something you love absolutely, passionately and completely, and which may, if you let it, take you in completely unexpected directions. Embrace this surprise. Listen to no one who tells you that these feelings are not reasonable things to ask from your life, or from your work. There is a reason Freud identified love and work as the two great rivers that run through our lives, and I believe that in lives lived with integrity and attention these rivers may even run at times in the same bed. The world has far too many in it who slouch resentfully through their days, working for wages alone, struggling with the uneasy conviction that the paycheck they're chasing is insufficient recompense for blood, muscle, breath and bone, for the hours that slowly become years, then decades, for the thinking and the dreaming that go on within cubicle walls.

The world does not require your boredom, your frustration, your conviction that what is vital and living is happening elsewhere and is being enacted by others, not you. Rather, the world urgently requires your passion, your conviction, your commitment, your creativity, the power of your fully engaged mind meshing like the gears of an engine with your fully engaged heart. This is how human beings-directed by compassion that is tempered with intelligence, guided by commitment and a fierce belief in the necessity of beauty, informed by an insistence that justice is not an empty rhetorical device for use in right-sounding speeches, and dedicated to the proposition that there is worth and meaning in even the most humbly lived life-manufacture the protean energies that, unleashed, change and enliven civilizations. These are the energies that manufacture righteousness, that body beauty forth into existence, that give our fellow humans courage or consolation, deliver wonder to those who need it as urgently as they n eed food or air. These are the energies that remind those who may have forgotten them of those moments when they have felt most keenly and most sublimely their role in the movement of history through its great spiral-energies that, expended, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that hold up a mirror for the race, and that urge our fellow humans to drive the nail of their close attention and thought ever more deeply into the hard plank of their lives.

Does this seem too grand? Well, if so I will respond that it's not nearly grand enough. It is the function of ceremony, as I see it, to gesture toward the large that is in us, not to preach on behalf of the small. We need daily, sometimes hourly reminders-to borrow and modify Wallace Stevens' phrase-of the voices that live great within us. Your lives-and the potential they hold for you, for your loved ones, for the good you may do in the world-are not small.

Don't waste too much time being anxious over how you're going to make your living; you will. There are a million ways to do that, no matter how gloomy the economic picture put before us by the media. Instead, ask yourselves this question: What makes me live?, and shape your lives toward finding an answer. In reply, you might say: Swell, Baechtel, a rousing abstraction, grand but meaningless. And I say: no, not true. Asking yourselves this question, assuming you find the courage to do it and are able to shoulder the burden of finding your answer and acting on it, will lead you where you need to go, until the abstract becomes the actual.

Asking you to think carefully about what makes you live is apt now, as we're getting ready to part company. You've spent four years here; you know how to ask and answer difficult questions. You've been neck deep in a world that's all about persnickety process-fussing over truth and fiction, heart and head, idea and experience, structure, genre, theorem, hypothesis; parsing endless sets of data, schools of criticism, voluminous bodies of knowledge that-in the wee small hours, when your thesis remained elusive, the flaws in your equation obdurate, when the numbers wouldn't add up, when the line of code you had been trying to force through the needle's eye had persisted in remaining the size of a camel-might have seemed worse than pointless, might even have seemed evil. Alas, this is an inevitable feature of any discussion of ideas separate from acts. In the end, we've spent an enormous amount of time talking about how things are done, but perhaps we've probed too little into why. This is not because of a lack of will or-God knows, knowing myself and my colleagues as I do-because of an unwillingness to make pronouncements. More, it's because the shaping of a life's whys is beyond the reach of any teacher, and lies entirely in the realm of the individual soul, the contract that soul makes with Being. So now I'm stepping up, advising you to take your courage into your hands as you leave here, consider your decision carefully, negotiate your terms wisely, and then sign that contract, headed The Meaningful Life, on the dotted line.

How you will make your way I can't pretend to know. I wish doing so were going to be as easy as writing an earnest speech for the ears of a sympathetic audience, but of course it's not. Keeping your heart open and your mind engaged will be a tremendous struggle; there is so much out there in the great wide world that exists beyond the Grinnell Bubble that will conspire to dull your wits, shrink the scope of your vision, drown your passion and slam your heart shut. What I hope and pray-and I do pray this, every night-is that the enterprise in which we have all been involved here will somehow have been enough to nerve you for that struggle. Suffering, borne with courage and hope, can enlarge the heart, can increase our capacities for wonder, for good words and works and, yes, for joy.

I don't use the word "joy" lightly. Asking that your life have joy in it has a cost, for joy is a complicated and demanding goal. It is only possible if you leave behind you the arid way stations of cool and irony in which our culture idles away so much time and energy. It is only possible if you leave behind the safe poses of indifference which we too often strike to avoid being thought naive or foolishly optimistic. It requires that we admit finally, how much the world matters to us-how much we love it, how much we fear it, how desperately we want to bathe in the tide in which it washes us: its hunks and colors, the drunken parade of object and experience, the nouns and proper names, the articles, the prepositions, the adjectives and the precious, precious verbs-all the parts of speech that are the parts of our larger, common body. Language, Laurie Anderson has said, is a virus from Mars. It's a disease I came down with when I was your age, and to a greater or lesser extent I have been sick with it ever si nce. It's a disease I suffer with willingly, which I have allowed to guide my life and my choices ever since, led by it through darkness and light, and with which I infect others whenever I can. It's been a hard malady to support at times, but I'm terribly, terribly grateful to have had the privilege of living with it, and to have had the privilege of teaching it among you as well.

In some ways, I and your other teachers have been engaged in very humble work. We are toolmakers who've been trying to do nothing more or less than to put certain tools in your hands and show you how you might use them to delve deeper into this impenetrable and ecstatic mystery in which we find ourselves mutually involved, and to suggest how you might fashion something new, something necessary, from the materials you find. We professors may have sounded like we know what we're doing, but that has been a very carefully maintained fiction; reality is much larger than any single mind that finds itself afloat within it, and anyone who tells you they've got the last word on the truth is no more to be trusted than someone trying to sell you a timeshare over the telephone.

So as you graduate tomorrow, you will have this metaphorical set of tools in your hands, along with some notions as to its use. Tools are clumsy when you're learning how to use them; I hope you will forgive yourselves your first errors, your embarrassing mistakes, the works of your hands, hearts and minds that do not come near to representing the grand dreams that will first present themselves to your imaginations. As anyone who's ever taken one of my classes can tell you, I believe great art most often happens in revision, not in first draft. Be willing, then, to fail and then to begin again. As an apprentice you use your tools over and over again until they come to seem as though they are a part of your hands. When this happens-after a long while, usually; after you've invested a lot of sweat in the job-you'll forget all about tools or patterns or formulae, and you'll begin to be able to shape works, objects, and that greatest of art forms, the fully lived life, in ways that are new in and necessary to the world, that have nothing to do with the invidious and limiting conventions of your day or of the past. I assure you-indeed I plead with you to believe-that it will be worth all the time, all the struggle and effort and, yes, the pain it will cost you to get to this place, and if it's in you keep at it, it will make you a larger person at last-a person the world needs, whose work is vital. Keep your courage up and stay in touch.

Keep going, and never, never give up.