Hold Nothing in Reserve

One.

They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.

A few years ago I read the Gospel of Mark with some friends. We moved slowly and carefully through the text, often spending a whole evening on just a few lines. One passage that struck me was the ‘feeding of the 5000’. In that story Mark describes the miracle of the fishes and loaves in which Jesus turns a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish into food for 5,000. At the end of the story Mark says, ‘They ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up the twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over’.

Those twelve basketfuls of leftover bread troubled me. I recall badgering my fellow readers about it. Why the excess? God knows the hairs numbered on your head, why not stop with food sufficient to feed the 5,000? Why create more than was needed? What would happen to those extra pieces of bread? Would they be eaten the next day or would they go to waste? What could this excess mean? Was it a symbol of luxury, a Gallilean potlatch?

My naive questions, generously accommodated by my friends, bellied a genuine concern about wasteful excess. But what I didn’t realise then was that the feeding of the multitudes isn’t a story about consumption. It is a story about what is given. It is a story about the abundance of a love sufficient to cover us all, a love that isn’t limited by number, a love available to any who might come.

‘Here, my brother, my sister, come and sit with us. We have food enough for you’.

Two.

I was reminded of the feeding of the multitudes again recently, while reading Annie Dillard.

‘One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes’ (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p78-79).

Here is another homily about the abundance of the gift. I like Dillard’s reflection on the writing process because it shows me what I couldn’t understand about the story of the fishes and the loaves. The gift isn’t economy. It doesn’t calculate impact or measure benefit or risk. It isn’t concerned with squander or thrift because it isn’t an investment. It doesn’t seek a return. It gives and that is all.

I also like this homily because it introduces the dimension of time. ‘Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book’, she says, ‘give it, give it all, give it all now’. The gift doesn’t hold back because the time of giving is now. The experience of gift is immediate. It has no future and no past.  And this immediacy asks for faith.

When you give fully you leave yourself naked, with no grain left in your stores and no strategic investments to protect you. Laid bare, you must be carried by faith, faith that the next words will come. In the moment of their own choosing, when the time is right, the next words will come. But only if you are laid bare.  ‘These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water’.

Three.

Thinking about the timeliness of the gift I am reminded of the contrary advice, often given to HDR students, to squirrel away significant passages that don’t fit well into their theses, to store up findings or questions that might be used for another paper. ‘Plan your current project’, the well-meaning givers of advice intone, ‘so that it can sustain the next project and the next. Make it last, so that it can be used to build a career’. Good advice, undoubtedly, but uncomprehending of how the creative process unfolds.

Research writing, like all serious writing I’m sure, is undertaken in two mindsets: process and product. The temporal horizon of the product is then, a future in which we arrive at our goal and finish the process. This is the realm of plans and maps and possibilities. The temporal horizon of process is now. The experience of now is concrete, definite. Decisions made are those demanded by the moment. They can’t be avoided or negotiated. They have the absolute certainty of law.

Four.

When I was writing my honours thesis I kept a second file, a document where I stored all the pretty passages that didn’t fit into my great work.  There went the sophisticated sentences and poetic paragraphs that I admired, but had the good sense to leave out.

A student of mine once told me this file was called a ‘slug’. Many times I have advised HDR students to create their own slug file so they can make the excisions that need to be made.

Five.

Never once have a returned to my slug. Never once have I used an abandoned paragraph to start a new work.

Six.

The function of the slug is not to hold in reserve. It is to embolden and inspire. The slug offers you the courage to give yourself fully to the work.

7 thoughts on “Hold Nothing in Reserve

  1. I love this idea of the slug, Demelza. It seems to be a way of allowing yourself the faith you need when you cannot quite bring yourself to it directly. Like trainer wheels to assist in learning faith.

    I wonder if the usual notion of heaven — as an after-life you’ve reserved for yourself through your good deeds — is meant to work in the same way. Except that people often cling to the trainer wheel version.

  2. But what about patience, I wonder.

    I am thinking of teaching, for eg. Often ideas of things that could be said pop into the teacher’s mind during a class discussion. Perhaps these are things that have worked in previous classes, or perhaps they are, personally, favourite ideas. But if the class isn’t ready for these ideas, isn’t able to receive them, here and now, the ideas are not really being given, but forced upon others. There is a narcissistic element in this largesse. I wonder now if this might be what Dillard means by the little phrase ‘what seems good’. This might itself be an ethical discipline, which distinguishes showing off from real giving. Perhaps the trick in Dillard’s formulation that the stores to be emptied aren’t personal stores, or abstract stores, but the capacities that are strictly of this relation.

    1. Well, Andrew, I think teaching offers us something else. I keep a notebook for teaching, so it’s a little different from a slug. The notes are usually hand-written and less finished than the eloquent paragraphs that I cut out of my more formal writing projects. I do keep quotes there too, but often not my own words.

      I wonder if the difference (if we decide there is one) is in the aim or purpose. I am thinking about service. The teacher serves the students. Their experience is the test that helps you decide what to keep, which ideas or activities to refine, which to junk altogether and when they are to be given. The decisions come from the class, as you say. The writing, on the other hand, if I am honest, usually serves me. So my attachments have a different focus, their usefulness to the work are measured by different things. I’d like to think the decisions come from the work, but it takes more discipline to see the work without the glory I want attached to it! The slug keeps you honest. In the classroom I’d like to think its the students who do that? I’m not sure.

      But I think your comments about timing are spot on. I was just reading Teachers Who Change Lives actually, and you and Ann make some comments about the readiness of the class. The teacher has to store up some things that might not initially work, or which the students might not be available for just yet. But I think the logic of giving is the same, when that moment arise, all is given by that moment. If something is stored up, its stored up for the class, relying on the teacher’s faith that the decision to spend will come from the class itself and won’t have to be made (entirely) by her.

  3. Demelza & Andrew, ‘holding nothing in reserve’ is an admirable idea. But how many people do this or are prepared to leave themselves bare? I wish we could all carry on like this – learn like this, write like this, teach like this, work like this, love like this. But don’t we all worry about the future and fear not having anything left in the tank? Saving up something for a rainy day? I wish we all had the courage to live life and ‘hold nothing in reserve’ and let nature take it’s course! But that may be for the next life…..

    What the world needs is more inspirational teachers and progressive parents and loved ones helping the next generation think and behave differently….

  4. thank you Demelza. This got me thinking. It reminds me of just how easy it is to slip into thinking of the gift as some thing rather than a relation. We tend to focus on the thing and then ask, well, in what spirit was it given. And, I really like this form of writing!

  5. Wow, loved this piece. I once had something similar to a “slug file” from previous studies, previous work projects, previous letters. Remember when we used to write letters to each other?? What a quaint notion…

    As my life journey progressed, I moved away from slug filing, as it felt a little “clingy” to a past methodology. Rather, I prefer to dip my toes into more creative waters and find new ways for expressive writing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. But there is always learning, and hopefully meaning and mindfulness.

    1. Thank you Simon. I think much of this (the blog writing) comes out of an attempt to find another,more creative, or more honest, way of writing. I recently read a wonderful description of a writing practice that aims at cultivating mindfulness through the writing. Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, Shambhala Press, 1998.
      She describes the ‘pre-writing’ or free writing we might do in a journal or note-book as ‘composting’. When you write from ‘first thoughts’, I think she calls them, you write from the immediacy of experience, as it arises in consciousness. So we can just write these out. Write them out. Then, when we’ve let it compost, through the unfiltered writing, we might make ourselves available to a more structured, or creative, or coherent form. A poem, or a blog piece, or an essay. We wouldn’t need to go back to the journals necessarily. But they would have been important in helping us sift through and cultivate what we needed to say.
      I think the key is trying to move past self-consciousness. I am not sure if a slug file helps with that. But compositing might!

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