Who looks out with these eyes?

I have just been trying to look in the mirror as though I were not myself, and trying to understand what I would see.

***

He told us about how,
himself 19,
he'd cleaned house for the Master in his last year of life,
and listened to one who'd ever-pondered consciousness
confounded:
"I just don't get it!" He would say, "the light comes in through my eyes, and it goes out! ...I just don't get it!"
and thought, if after so long this man doesn't, how can I ever expect to?

***

He was so glad to find out it was me who'd put up the Olde LJR around Reed
so that he could ask for the copy of the Perennial Pedagogy and Macbeth's Give sorrow words/ the grief that does not speak/ whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” that he'd nearly taken off the wall before.

***

He told us how,
at the Master's memorial service, Macbeth's 'Give Sorrow Words' was displayed, and
Calligraphers came from all over the Northwest to pay their respects and to write a weathergram. The quadrangle was feathered with hundreds of fluttering weathergrams.

***

Weathergrams are meant to be transient and brief,
meant to leave the artists hands
meant to be a fleeting thought, attracted into words for a time,
not belabored in the writing
hung in kraft paper and twine from trees
part of the scene
submitted for revision by the elements of nature.

You can read the poem
But that is not the poem.
Watch the white paper
Between the lines.
Look through that white
As through white snow
To see what buttercups and lilies
Are pushing up from below.

from “How to Read a Poem”
by Lloyd Reynolds

***

At lunch with Zeb Raft during his candidacy visit for tenure track in the Chinese Department, we'd asked him a number of tough questions including expectations for students, plans for classes, opinions of the Humanities program,... his answers to all of which I thought demonstrated his being made of the right material. After finishing his answers however, he turned a question around to us:

What is your ideal class?

stunned, it occurred to me I'd never thought of the question before. Here I am, claiming to be a student, and I've never formed a picture of what I think the ideal class ought to look like.

After some thought, I responded something to the effect of,
"I suppose I would want to find someone doing something I respected, and follow them."

"Like Jesus!" a friend piped up

Yeah. I guess so.

"Well, Confucius says wherever you find 3 men walking, one of them can teach you something," said Zeb.

***

A student, writing about Lloyd J Reynolds, said that he was born at just the right time.

Too early for me, I thought. Or perhaps I was born too late.
My timing trades the man himself for the benefit of reflections and biographies, able to see his life by looking down from the end, the time between making effects of his life on this world more visible. Then again, would I have thought a yet-living Master fit to follow?