Charles P. R. Tisdale is a 1964 graduate of the University of the South.  This is a portion of the reflection he delivered as the Commencement Address for the English Department Recognition Ceremony at UNC Greensboro, 13 May 2005.

TRANSFUSION

When I attended Sewanee in 1960 there were many ritual events such as signing the Honor Pledge, class registration, and fraternity rush.  One of the now mostly forgotten rites of passage, though one that made an indelible impression on my memory, was the annual blood drive.  It took place down in the “village” in the dilapidated high school gymnasium about a half mile west of campus.  The gymnasium itself was not large enough to house a full basketball court, but more like a half court.  It was brick, old, and run down.

Early in the fall the entire freshmen class was rounded up and herded down to this site for each member to give his pint of blood.  It was a bonanza for the Red Cross, I am sure.  But it was not a good experience of community service for me.  The line, for one, was long.  It gave me plenty of time to think about blood.  As the line worked its way into the gymnasium, I could look around and see about a dozen stretchers with my classmates lying on them in all sorts of contorted positions, and the tripods, and the tubes, and the bottles of blood.  Bottles it was back then, I think, and not plastic sacks.  I kept getting fainter and fainter.  We were talking in line, and everyone was having a good time, but soon I was realizing I was growing cool and prickles of sweat were forming on my forehead.  It looked like a World War I infirmary, like in the movie A Farewell to Arms, with the white uniformed nurses and their caps hovering around the stretchers, and the guys with their sleeves rolled up and the needles and tubes running from their arms. Only there was no Helen Hayes to save me. 

Abruptly I just had to leave, or pass out.  I told somebody I wasn’t feeling well.  I went outside and lay down in the grass and in a few minutes I was okay.  But I didn’t go back in.  I walked back to my room alone.  Later, a few people asked me about it, and I was honest in my answer.  I told them I just got spooked.  Nobody teased me, nor ridiculed me.  But from that moment on, early on, I knew I was somehow on a different path.

That path is hard to explain.  It reminds me of Ovid’s great poem when Jason sees that his father, Aeson, is getting old and creaky, and he begs his new wife, Medea, to use some of her witch-like magic powers to save him.  Jason offers to donate some of the years of his own life if she could somehow transfer them to his father.  Medea refuses to use up Jason’s years, but she is able, through a very complicated and intricate series of prayers, invocations to all the gods, and a worldwide collection of various herbs and juices, such as “the fillet of a fenny snake,” whatever that is, to concoct an elixir, which she has Aeson drink.  She also pours a goodly portion of it into a knife wound she cuts into his throat after emptying out all his blood.  It works.  Medea restores Aeson’s youth, and everyone, for a while, is happy.

As I made the transition from a B student my freshman year to an A student my sophomore year, I have wondered what the difference was.  It seems as though every time I went to class, especially certain classes, it was like a blood transfusion.  Charles Harrison lectured on Shakespeare, which meant he just worked his way through King Lear, and I somehow sucked up a respect for the wonder of language.  But it was more than that.  I grew to honor and pay homage to someone whose whole life was consumed with the importance of the right words, not just the ones he was quoting from the text, but also the ones he was using to convey the meaning of that text.  The blood flowed from his veins through the tubes into my own sensibility as I sat there, both dumb founded and awe-inspired. 

Only later in life did I realize that there was something of the vampire in this transaction, that I needed the blood desperately to become fully alive to the deepest self I would evolve into being.  But also the teacher needs––his life depends on it––to give the blood. As my other most revered teacher, Scott Bates, opened up to me the mysteries of Gerard de Nerval’s Sylvie, or Verlaine’s exquisite little lyric, “La lune blanche,” quietly, even unspokenly, he had to have his every-other-day transfusion from me, too, as if the system of tubes had a kind of return network, as if the giving of the lifeblood of language had a receiving, too, a circulatory symbiosis, as it were.

I went back to my room from class and I would study.  I memorized so much.  I memorized all of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses and their family tree for Charles Binnicker.  I memorized the conjugations and declensions, all of the inflections one needed, for Latin, French, and German.  I memorized all of the myriad steps one had to go through to discern what was the analyzed quality of a given compound in chemistry for Thomas Felder Dorn, so much so that I was the only one in my section of lab to get my “unknown” accurately identified on the exam.  It was nickel sulfate.  I memorized the major case law of the U. S. Constitution and was commended by Gilbert Gilchrist for my summations of the landmark precedents on my political science exam.  God knows I memorized Shakespeare, not the lines themselves, but what happened in every scene of every act of every major play, so that I could describe the dramatic significance of any given utterance.

But it was not just memorization.  I sought to understand.  At first I wanted to unlock the secret of the nature of God; but then, failing that, just the nature of myself.  I discovered a secret blood bank in the basement of the library.  A lab was set up there, just a table and a chair and a tube that fed from my arm to the bookshelves and on out so far I could not see the end to the interconnected shunts and passageways.  I made it a habit to go there once a semester and read a certain book not assigned in any course.  One semester it was A. O. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being.  Another time it was a tome I struggled through completely in French by Paul Hazard about the crisis of conscience and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes at the end of the seventeenth century.  There was J. B. Bury’s treatise on how the idea of progress got started as a concept in Western thought.  One vial of blood that consumed me, was Derek Traversi’s explication of Shakespeare’s tetralogy on the origins of the War of the Roses.

These encounters, these transfusions, mystified me.  I don’t mean that I did not understand them.  Rather I did, and that was the mystery.  It was like my blood was being transformed to some rare type.  I would write essays for my exams that would seek to go beyond what the teacher had explained, as if there were platelets in my bloodstream that were constructing new hematrophic molecules.

I miss a lot of aspects of my youth, but this habit of study is the most profound one.  The only right I have to claim that my teachers, the great ones, needed the transfusion, too, is that I myself became a teacher.  I have felt, in the presence of about a third of my students, this same transforming power, that what I am able to give to them in terms of the fresh blood of knowledge, revitalizes and saves them.  For perhaps a dozen of the six thousand students I have taught in thirty-eight years, the experience has been more like the one I had with my professors.  It has been like I have entered into the minds of these students and found a permanent place there, as though I have been able to penetrate what is called the blood-brain barrier so that the transfusion becomes an intellectual Eucharist.

It was spring in my junior year when I finished reading the last chapter of Lovejoy’s book.  I left my dormitory and walked down University Avenue in the fresh, cool night air.  I could see the chartreuse suffusion of the new white oak leaves aglow from the streetlight behind them.  I thought, for at least that half hour, that I had unlocked finally the secret of why I, like a vampire, had become addicted to a love of learning.  True, being a student, at least in literature, was a very lonely occupation.  But it wasn’t just that, a solitary desk one had been assigned to, or one of a dozen cubicles down at the high school gym separated from each other by only a thin, white curtain.  I felt like I was being invited into a “conversation,” as one of my classmates, Frank Burroughs, put it years later, a part of the bloodstream of humanity, not just the replicated biological organism, but the lifeline of civilization itself.