A Lesson on Symbol
Chris Ellery
October 6, 2024
I ask my students to think of a place
that represents who they are,
their inner self, totality of ego or psyche—
memories, beliefs, values, dreams.
I give them time.
Reflection and writing.
The alphas are the first to volunteer
to answer, athletes mostly, for whom
the self’s container is a stadium or an arena,
all strategy and striving, scoring and winning.
Two students describe their rooms at home.
One is black walls, pizza boxes, tossed clothes,
Nintendo neon and heavy metal chaos.
One is pink and soft, “arranged the way I want it.”
One student is a mall, one a Walmart,
others a pawnshop, a thrift shop, a junkyard,
a landfill—insatiable consumption
and detritus of consumption.
Another is her family’s cabin in the Rockies.
Another is a concert hall and stage.
A hospital stands for the future nurse,
trauma and pain and her careful hope of healing.
Someone says she is a weathered barn
on her grandfather’s ranch, hay and horses,
the stalls freshly mucked—or maybe
she is the ranch itself, bounded by barbed wire.
One claims the brain of a Faustus, Frankenstein,
or Jekyll, his inner life a laboratory—
Bunsen burners, boiling beakers, coiling wires,
caged mice, caged monkeys, cadavers.
One jokester says he is a castle in Transylvania.
Another is a prison (his cellmate is Clyde Barrow).
And yet another an asylum: “Straightjackets
and padded cells, but the mind is free!”
It seems time to sum up, make the point,
move on to the next bullet in my lesson plan.
But there sits Madeline, the quiet one,
whose silence, for once, seems to wish to speak.
“Madeline, would you like to share?”
“I see my Self as a cathedral.
Not walls of stone and mortar,
saints and gargoyles, stained glass and statues.
But a few green acres
in the hollow of a sacred mountain,
sanctuary of light and shadow,
home to wild things,
every inch an altar,
stream with shallows of living water
and a clear, deep pool frozen in winter,
monolith boulders placed eons ago by glaciers,
lush underbrush below the vaulting canopy,
shrubs, vines, roots and rot, ferns and fairy fire,
towering trees to carry the eyes
to sun and sky, moon and stars.
The heart of a rainforest,
primally breathing the clerestory air,
endlessly changing, hours and seasons,
dying, renewing, dying, renewing,
the bloom and ripeness of Eden before Eden.”
Not one of us says a word when Madeline pauses.
One deep breath. Then another.
Then she seems to feel
the need to punctuate the silence.
“That’s a picture of the Self, my imaginal Self.
It also stands for the soul of earth,
the Cosmos.”
Serene, beatific.
Her pale face glowing
like the polished marble of a statue of a goddess.
The classroom (my own best symbol of my psyche)
has fallen into silence, awe and adoration,
has fallen onto unspoiled ground, the stillness
of unbroken being, unwavering center of realization.
Chris Ellery, now retired, taught literature and creative writing at Angelo State University for 31 years. He is a member of the Texas Association of Creative Writers, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fulbright Alumni Association. A frequent contributor to and an avid supporter of Texas Poetry Assignments, his most recent collection of poems--One Like Silence (Resource Collections, 2024)--includes nine poems originally published on the TPA website.
