It’s this damn time of year, and it’s always been.
Autumn is nostalgia, it’s this strange ache that hangs in the valley my home looks out on from the mountainside like a fog. It rolls in from the West over the Continental Divide and the great Rocky Mountains that have held me all my life, and it settles. It swirls.
Every year, September comes and I am saturated in it, this heavy wet blanket of something that almost feels like sorrow, but isn’t quite as potent. It’s school starting, it’s the thought of first bells each morning calling out to students like a beacon. Some dread, some adore.
I was the first then, the black-cloud-dread of being forced to be in a school from morning til late afternoon each day, of being stuck, trapped, handcuffed to someone else’s rules on how to spend a day. Strange then, I think often, I’m so in love with this silly season still.
I remember the first time I saw the scene that made me feel understood, that gave me some tiny glimmer of hope that I wasn’t as broken as I always thought. Just not in the right place, I thought, just not seen by the right eyes.
It was the sound, too, the ripping of pages from the introductions to their precious textbooks. It was Keating telling the boys to rise, to leave their desks, to stand atop them to see the world in a new way. I remember watching, mouth agape and eyes wide, as the boys were told that all they were once told was wrong, I remember the rolodex of everything I’d been taught scrolling through my own busy brain. I remember thinking of the consequences of getting it wrong. As Keating said:
“This is a battle, a war. And the casualties could be your hearts and souls.”
Dead Poet’s Society, the freight train of a film, the way I finally felt seen. Powerful enough that this is only Part 1 of 4, an entire month of essays dedicated to the things it taught, the way it moved, the lessons that stuck. To the opening of a door to more in my soul, in this world, in this beautiful, beautiful life.
I’ve always been a “rip out the introduction” kind of person, in truth, probably something even further out.
I was a “don’t even bring the textbook” kid, I was a bum a sheet of paper from a friend sitting close enough to whisper to, a Gel pen from another. I was the kid doodling on scrap pieces of their notes, college-lined and micro-perforated.
I remember the liberation of that scene, so early in the film, I remember being moved across the room, hell, the city I call home, the first time I saw it. For a kid that never fit into the rules others made, this triumphant tearing out of the introduction, witnessed just a few months from starting High School, was transformative.
To unlearn a rule is a risky thing, to push back, silently or with rebellious fervor, is to put it all on the line.
Until then, until late August blurred into early September and homecoming bonfires on the mostly-weed-filled field the football team practiced on, I’d been forced into following the rules. Even if I didn’t, I had to pretend I did. Undiagnosed Autistic, ferociously curious, strangely adept at masking internal overstimulation with external chill, I taught myself ways to navigate a world I didn’t, and didn’t want to, belong in.
Then Keating came and told me to unlearn the rules. Then the ripping. Finally, I think I made sense. If only to myself.
We are told how to measure value in this life, told the ways to quantify the beauty, to categorize it, rank it, hold it up against all we’ve seen before it. We are told the hierarchy of our curiosities, our passions, told of our talents and if they will, or will not serve us later. I remember my Honors English I teacher freshman year, telling me I should never attempt to become a writer, that some people just do not have in them what is required to follow the dreams they dream.
I remember being measured, long before I was even understood.
Keating, and truthfully, Robin Williams becoming Keating, taught me otherwise. He taught me, like he taught Todd Anderson in all his vulnerability before me, that what truly matters cannot be measured. It exists, as it is, as it was, and any attempt to do so steals it—the creativity in us, the worth, the magic, the art it all deserves to be.
This is how we love, this is how we live, he taught us, and I remember sitting in the glow of the old Magnavox and the dancing lines of a VHS tape that’d been recorded over multiple times to hold the bootlegged copy of Dead Poets from its airing on HBO, and understanding that it’s the ripping of the introductions in our lives, it’s the unlearning of the rules, that strips away the soulless expectations that are placed upon us.
That set us free.
Permission, then, I think was granted. To go into high school free, fresh, unchained by all that once locked me inside myself. Permission to think, even if it cost me, to believe, even when no one else did, to dream, even when first teachers told me to abandon them.
I sit to type poetry today, 30 years removed almost to the day from my first steps into Helena High School, and I am surrounded by ripped out paper from worn out books. Scraps of novels and textbooks, cookbooks and non-fiction tomes about topics already outdated, and I rifle through them to find one suitable for whatever new poem I am typing. I hear the sound when I tear them to fit into the old 1927 Remington Rand Seventeen typewriter, and I think back to Keating, to the Dead Poet’s Society that taught me to unlearn the rules, and it hurts.
It aches, and it will always ache this time of year. This perfect, nostalgic, desperate time of year that somehow always returns, no matter what else has changed.
I type the words, I turn the knob to pull the paper out, I fold, I crease, and finally, I rip.
I love you all.
Be good.
To unlearn the rules,
tear out the introductions,
and begin to live.
