Passing of Dr. Art Seamans, Professor Emeritus of Literature

Dr. Art Seamans taught me how to experience poetry.

Before college, I had always been drawn to meaningful lyrics in songs, but Art opened my eyes to poetry in a new way. Other professors could talk at length about structure and style, but Art wanted to know something deeper: Does the work speak to you? Why? Let’s talk about it. For him, poetry wasn’t just something to study. It was something to feel. 

More than once, while reciting a poem or talking about the beauty he found in the words, Art would tear up in class. I sure didn’t snicker. And if others did, well, maybe they were still trying to play it cool. Because hopefully, we’ve all had those moments, a line in a poem or a lyric in a song that catches us off guard and tugs at something deep inside. Something that makes us a little more in tune with ourselves, with the people around us, and maybe even with God. Art lived that way, day in and day out. He wasn’t afraid to be moved by beauty, and he wasn’t afraid to let his students see it. I remember him beginning a class one day by saying something along the lines of, “You may be cruising along happily in life, but then one day a wind will come out of nowhere and knock you sideways, a great storm in your world.”

And then he read from, likely, one of the Romantic poets he loved: Wordsworth, Lord Byron, or Keats. I’ve thought about that moment over the years. Those poets seemed to be Art’s way of facing the world, a way of making sense of beauty, suffering, love, loss, and the storms that find us. That was one of the greatest things he taught me: Don’t just read the words. Let them move you.
 

Doug Brunk
Class of 1988

Art Seamans was my friend. In the mid-1980s as a Point Loma sophomore, I found my way to the Literature Department after trying Political Science for a year, a year in which my heart continually said “No” to PoliSci and “Yes” to words and stories. That's where I first met Dr. Seamans. I was a young intellectually insecure kid, and he was a seasoned and confident lover of literature, and a committed teacher of the same. Any person who ever paid even the slightest attention would be taken, as was I, with the joy, intellect and energy Art exuded about everything he was talking about at any given time. That's because every conversation with him exuded joy and intellect and energy.  His mind was remarkable, and his passion and drive for knowledge insatiable. And he assumed everyone he talked to shared that same drive. For me, during the course of several English lit courses, and a course in composition and writing, it was contagious. And, throughout, he would ask me what I was writing. His sincerity and clear interest was unsettling at the time because I lacked confidence and, frankly, I had nothing to show him. Or, more precisely, I lacked anything I would show him. I knew he knew good writing. And I was sure anything I wrote, particularly any poetry I wrote, would fall short.

After graduation, I taught high-school English for a few years, and then headed off to law school and a law practice downtown after that. Periodically I would run into him, at church, at Point Loma events, even on the street downtown while he waited for the bus home after swimming at the YMCA. Each time he expressed great interest in what I was up to and the cases I was working on. And he always asked what I was writing. And I always felt the same embarrassed insecurity rise inside as excuses for having nothing found voice. 

For years, though, decades really, another voice also increasingly found its way into my head. This one said, “You need to take Dr. Seamans to lunch. Do something. He’s a good one and he cares.” In 2020, as the Covid pandemic lockdown left us all stuck at home, I found myself, all-of-a-sudden, extremely concerned that Art, who lived only blocks from the apartment I was living in at the time, might be forgotten.  He hadn’t been, but visitors were few.  So Lindsay and I started spending time with him every  week, reading journal articles he was interested in, reading long-form essays by great writers, and talking about … well, everything. And, as always, the question, “What are you writing?  Do you have a poem for me?” And, as always, I dodged.  A man in his 50s still afraid.

But Art can be persistent.  And he was, for years, during the pandemic, and all these years since, discussion after discussion, meal after meal, drive after drive. Finally worn down - maybe just having spent so many years in the presence of a man, my old professor, who expressed only love and care and interest - sharing a poem simply stopped feeling so scary. So, I read him a poem I’d written for my daughter when she went to college. His response was to include it in the book he wrote about one of his college professors, Bertha Munro.        

After that, I read him others when he asked. His criticisms and comments were always honest, informed and respectful, making him the safest of critics. And when I asked him what I could give him for his 95th birthday, his response was expected – more poems, which I gave him happily and without reservation.

Here’s the point, and it isn’t about me or my writing. This is about a teacher, Art Seamans - a joyful, intellectual, energetic teacher - who never stopped teaching me, teaching me as a young man, teaching me throughout my adult years, teaching me throughout my 50s, even up to just shy of my 60th birthday.  Teaching me, among so many other things, that writing is to be shared.

Thank you, Art, for all you taught me. Thank you for all you lovingly taught to countless others, everyone you met, I expect.  Thank you for caring.  And thank you for being my friend.

With Art, I always felt a profound curiosity and interest in other people (including me). There was no continuity in the types of people Art befriended and found interest in. I don't think Art thought of people in categories like class, race, IQ, attractiveness, or any of the characteristics the rest of us get consumed with. Art was friend to the widest range. He was Christ-like in that way--never seeing himself as superior because of his education, Christianity or any of the myriad qualities that made him a remarkable man. I met him when I was a student at Point Loma and visiting his North Park apartment over the years was as regular a staple of San Diego as anything else. There was a constancy and a relief that whatever happened in the world—elections, pandemics, churches disappointing you—there was always Art on Idaho St. I’d read him short stories and share life updates. The older I get the more I realize how Art’s brand of friendship—reliable, deeply interested, generous—is rare, especially that combination. What we lost with Art, was a beautifully paradoxical blend of strong convictions and wide open-heartedness. He was a good friend to me, someone 60 years younger yet he treated as an equal. When I read poetry, I’ll think of Art. I suspect I’ll think of him even more often now that he’s gone.

Thank you, Art, for your deep goodness. You blessed my soul.

It’s the 1980’s and your parents are the coolest game in town–they’re basically you with analog tools and primitive tech, but awesome hair.  PLNU is PLNC.  Like Spicoli, all the students need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz (coffee?), and they’re fine.  Some are up to scratch academically while others (most) are secretly scratching their heads.  Church, choral and classical music floats out of Madame Tingley’s old home, Cabrillo Hall, standing where Cooper is today.  From boom boxes, Walkmans and car stereo tape decks, you hear U2, Def Leppard, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds, The Thompson Twins and other artists with amazing hair.

We’re grappling with a lot of questions.  Why am I here?  Who are these historical figures and political characters?  What are these concepts, experiments, quotes and questions from all the disciplines floating around campus?  WHY should I care?

Madonna’s onto something – Life is a mystery.

How to get decent grades and escape to Cotija’s with friends for some rolled tacos after our $3.35 an hour minimum wage jobs?

The profs – they’re obviously human beings, definitely older adults.  They’re not exactly like my peers and me, they’re extra – obviously something happens somewhere after the 18 to 22 zone in life.  It’s hard to know what the profs expect from us.  Each class is so much work it’s like the teachers each think theirs is the only class.  

Around Sophomore year, it’s another first week of classes.  Into the Taylor Hall classroom for chosen elective, British Writers, sails a man in short-sleeved Oxford shirt and dark trousers with half his tie thrown over his back, one shirt button undone near the faint coffee stain around the breastbone, two mismatched socks, and glasses somewhere between his hairline and the end of his nose.  With a joy and enthusiasm far beyond cool, Dr. Art Seamans directs the class to crack open the Norton Anthology of British Writers and turn to the Prelude by William Wordsworth.  He begins reading.  Now and then, he gets emotional.  

Geez, is he gonna cry?

Once Doc puts somebody’s Rush LP on the record player – Today’s Tom Sawyer – because a classmate felt it connected to ideas we were discussing about the world, how and why we might take our places in it, why we matter in this enormous, often confusing older adult world.

As the weeks flow by, we read work by John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and other dead poets from the British Isles whose spirits live on; who used big, beautiful words – lots of them we don’t recognize anymore.  We think about the world’s natural beauty and how it connects us to ourselves, each other, to God, and the metaphysical realm.  We uncover vital truths about humanity in these writings that we deeply intuit, but may not be able to express.  

Through accumulation of knowledge and experience, over time, in this campus community we begin to develop practical ideas about how to carry what we’re learning to those around us in our individual pathways.

 One day we’re full older adults.  Our bodies and life choices morphed us into employees, supervisors, parents – an entire range of roles.  Music of the soul inspired by Art Seamans and other PLNC profs and staff, friends, our time here by the sea plays on.  Our lifelong friends, the profs, are listed in our cell phone contacts.  Our kids helped us find and input them so we can call to say thank you.  I heard you call my name and it felt like home.

Our Dearest Dr. Art Seamans

If I’m talking about what Art ‘taught’ me, it was “The British Writers.” But If I’m talking about what I learned from him, it was Passion. Passion for writing, and for words that could ignite something within you. 

The undeniable fact about Art is that he was an encourager. And what he seemed born to do was encourage his students to write. For years I would call him on his birthday: I would ask if he went to get doughnuts and he would ask what I was writing. 

And every year, he would invite me (and so many others) to his Tamarack writer’s retreat in upstate NY.  He absolutely believed that we all needed to be writing and that we all had something to say. 

For Doc it was a joy to gather with ex-students. In September of 2022, a few of us (Scott, Julie and Doug) gathered for lunch at Shelter Island. Inevitably, he asked what I was writing. Sheepishly, I admitted I wasn’t writing anything at all. He couldn’t hear well and asked me to repeat what I said, and when he did finally hear me, he slapped his hand on the table and announced in a loud voice, “What???” (he was incredulous). “You must start writing at once!” 

Art was such a believer in each of us, our talent and our potential.  If there is anything we can do to honor him, it would be to write, ‘at once. Start now, on a scrap of paper. Or tonight, in a notebook. Or on your computer if you must.  “Write!” he would say, “Write, Write, WRITE!” 

When many of us think of Art, we initially remember the occasional absent-minded moments. Art—using a ballpoint pen to poke holes in a Styrofoam coffee cup while enduring a lengthy speech and then refilling the punctured cup with fresh coffee. Art—habitually walking into class with coffee cup in left hand and briefcase in right, tossing the briefcase on the desk as he begins the day’s lesson, reciting from memory passages in the literature for that day. A beautiful tradition, until the day he enters with the briefcase in the left hand and coffee in the right.

These absent-minded incidents do not summarize Art, however. On the contrary, they exist because they exemplify Art’s incredible present-mindedness. Art always focused on things that matter far more than spilt coffee or stained clothing. His heart, soul, and mind remained locked onto three things of much greater importance: God, people, and the complex thought that is the foundation of learning.

I love the fact that the hospital nurses knew he was awake when they heard him singing hymns. No hymns meant sleep. God accompanied him in every moment of the ICU. I love that he was fully present with others, that he was interested in everyone, even the homeless man who asked us for money as we were making our way back to the car late one night in Balboa Park. Art saw him as a person rather than an inconvenient intrusion or worthless grifter. Art asked about him and his life. Always the nurturing teacher, Art offered positive encouragement as he gave him 20$. I love that Art was always thinking, always questioning, always open to learning something new. Even with failing eyesight, Art continued to read, learn, write, and share ideas. Most of all, I love that his interest in God, in people, and in careful thinking were not three separate things, but always merged.

As the youngest of four boys in a highly religious family in upstate New York, Art wanted to experience the traditional joys of upstate young men—the joy of hunting. However, the values of family and church forbade guns and violence. So Art and his brothers drew pictures of bear, elk, deer, and rabbits and hid them in the woodpile and the bushes. Then, armed with homemade slingshots, they would hunt the elk and the deer. Religion and alertness to the larger ethos aligned by creative thinking. Many people greet the world like the prince with Cinderella’s slipper: they look for an exact match. They want to find people whose belief in God looks exactly like theirs. They look for someone whose personality fits theirs precisely. They are ready to embrace ideas that echo and confirm the ones they already hold. The beliefs, the people, and the ideas that do not fit are ignored, discarded or devalued.

That was not Art. The solidity of Art’s faith allowed him to listen to and appreciate the faith of others. He was always ready to hear God’s voice, no matter the source. He met people exactly as they are, never attempting to transform them into his idea of acceptable. He practiced a religion lived out in the treatment of others, in the honoring of God’s creation wherever he encountered it. He approached with no pre-judgment, no agenda other than recognizing the uniqueness of others. He listened for their heart and encouraged all that is good within them. He listened critically and judiciously to every scholarly word I ever wrote. His opinions were invaluable, his encouragement inspiring. When he was the chair of the department, he taught me how to lead by constantly soliciting the opinions of the people he was leading. When someone expressed an idea he did not agree with, he listened respectfully and, at most, voiced questions to consider. He never made objections, pronounced summary judgment or cut off discussion and thought. He modeled how care for people, selflessly clear thinking, and Christ-like living could combine in dynamic teaching and effective leadership.

Art approached everything as a witness for God’s love. He did not present his faith as a powerful wind, sweeping away other people’s ideas. He did not present his faith as an earthquake, ready to demolish the structure of someone else’s thinking. He did not present his faith as a fierce fire, poised to destroy all in its path. His faith arrived in all encounters as a gentle whisper, the still, small voice of a love ready to accept people and dialogue with them, unafraid of whatever difference lay between them, always willing to listen, to question, to wonder. His love of learning and thinking did not fear new ideas. He approached ideas as a humble seeker of truth, never as an expert, never as a competitive PhDeity wanting to impress others. He affirmed and strengthened my belief that a professor can always learn more about his field, that students have much to contribute, and that professors need to nurture the seeds of student thinking, no
matter how embryonic they appear. He modeled being a humble classroom expert, always ready to learn more about students and about his field. He entered class with a mind like a divining rod, searching for hidden or buried thought in students. His respectful listening heard them into speech and students grew in his class. He taught students to think fearlessly, to believe in themselves as learners, and to see the beauty in ideas and in the search for truth. Ironically, his refusal of self-aggrandizement, of being the undisputed source of knowledge, made him far more impressive than any self-proclaimed expert.

As many people age, their world shrinks; their heart and their mind narrow. As Art aged, however, his world continued to grow. His family continued to grow as he added former students, varied workers, and even frequent taxi drivers into his ever-expanding circle of “family”. I suspect all these varied individuals think of Art, in their heart of hearts, as family because when they were with him, they felt seen and accepted. To those of us who knew and loved him, he always felt like home.

In his 95 years, he did so much. He headed up the Girl Scouts of Ohio; taught prep school and university. He taught in the East, Northwest and Southwest. He taught in a prison where he discussed life and regret with a man convicted of murdering his wife. He trained as a soldier and served his country proudly. He shepherded generations of young people. He talked religion with individuals of different faiths. He wrote numerous books. He talked about writing regularly with other writers. He started to write poetry. He created his your own YouTube site where, as King Arthur, he gently dispensed some life wisdom. He continued to keep himself fit and strong even though this required the patience to endure the tedium of repeated exercise. He tended to the health of the body as well as the mind.

The title of a recent film, “One Battle after Another”, could provide a fitting summary of the process of aging. In this ongoing battle of life, Art was an incredible fighter. He arrived at age 95, not as an unhappy, wounded survivor, but as a determined soldier, ready to do battle when needed. For me he was an inspiration because he was so much: a warrior, a learner, a teacher, a questioner, a guide, a follower of Christ, a thinker, a writer, a poet, and an encourager. I am grateful and honored that I could also call him my friend. 

I feel your loss, dear friend, keenly. But I am convinced that God has greeted you with the phrase we all hope to hear one day: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”

We got to Art’s apartment late after circling the crowded streets of his trendy North Park neighborhood looking for parking for what felt like an hour. It was Sunday morning and the sidewalks were lined with couples and friends waiting for tables at popular brunch spots. Outside a church, two men in suits welcomed parishioners with folded bulletins, and across the street, families lined the perimeter of a park where kids were playing soccer in the morning sun.

It was the kind of neighborhood in which Art Seamans, Doc as he is fondly known by former students, couldn’t have been more out of place. Then 94-years-old, the long-retired professor of British romantic literature seemed from another era. He wore a felt Trilby hat with a tie and suit jacket to church on Sundays (where he’d get misty-eyed belting out the old Wesleyan hymns), spoke with a faint New England accent, developed as a child in New York, and even into his 80s, would take the city bus to the YMCA once a week to swim. 

We finally arrived at his apartment, late and flustered, and made our way up the stairs to his flat where he was waiting in a smart button-down shirt and trousers, ready to go to church. His apartment was small, with dark wood floors and dusty bookshelf-lined walls. It was often stiflingly warm. Against the main wall was an old Chesterfield sofa, with deep burgundy diamond-tufted leather, brass detailing and elegant rolled arms. There was an aged photo of him as a young man, with friends on a river in a small boat, him looking out to the distance while his pals gaze towards the camera. There were water bottles on the counter (and an unopened bottle of Martinelli’s—his favorite), and a trash bin on the floor with a crumpled napkin beside it. And everywhere, mementos—hanging from the wall and lining every surface: old lanterns, carved wooden whales, model ships, a wooden ship’s wheel, several sculptures of faces with different expressions: one of gladness, the other of contemplation or uncertainty. 

The focal point of the room was a brick-lined fireplace with two artificial poinsettias where the wood would normally go, and a mantel crowded with old copies of Wordsworth and Shelley and a pewter chamberstick whose electric candle lit a painting of the holy trinity by Andrei Rublev. At Christmastime, his assistant (who, along with a small band of helpers, facilitated his daily life) would string lights up on the mantel and get his old manger scene out of the box and arrange it among the poinsettias.  His little apartment felt like a strange oasis of oldness and slowness and stillness, like it feels to sit inside an empty cathedral in the late hours of the afternoon and watch the flicker of a candle set against the clamoring business of life outside. It was a place somehow outside of life that was at once bewildering and greatly comforting and somehow truthful and confronting.  

Art was born in 1931 in upstate New York to what he described as a very devout family. When he was two years old his “daredevil” dad (as he once described him) dived into a rocky river and drowned. As a young man, he joined the army, taught at a preparatory academy in Washington, D.C., and not long after receiving a PhD from the University of Maryland, became a university professor, eventually making his way west to teach English literature and poetry at a little college on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.  

Most of Art’s relatives growing up were part of the Church of the Nazarene, a holiness denomination similar in theology to Methodism, and he spent his life devoted to faith. The college where he taught was a Christian college, long before ‘Christian’ came to be so associated with anti-intellectualism and cruel, vengeful politics. In Art’s world, there was no contradiction between faith and intellect. To the contrary, his mind was a great God-given gift to be exercised and shared.  1 Art’s other devotion was to books. His apartment was lined with them. He made pilgrimages to England where he would visit Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage, and Keats Georgian villa. He went every summer to the Tamarack Writers Conference in New York, both to share his writing and simply to be around writers. He pored over studies of literature and poetry, theology and science, while quoting poets and other writers, no matter how seemingly obscure. He spent hours with students and then former students, reviewing their drafts of various things—essays, short stories, poetry—encouraging them.  

In the middle of his life, Art began to lose his sight. It started, he said, with some fuzziness, until all that was left were dark shadows and memory—all the passages he had memorized and loved. The university bought him what was at the time a highly advanced reading machine that, when he laid a book flat as you would onto a copy machine, would read the page aloud. He would listen, and then turn each page, replacing the book on the machine, and so on over and over again. As he got older, he moved on to books on tape, and then to a Kindle, and then to people like my husband and me and his old professor friends who would read to him, sometimes in person, sometime over the phone—Art straining to hear because, along with his vision, by the time he’d reached his late 80s, he’d lost a fair amount of his hearing, too.  We started reading to Art during the pandemic, and then, when things began to reopen, we took him to the morning tide service in the little chapel at the college. Although he couldn’t hear the sermons, he loved listening to the music. He would sit back and sing and hum along to the old hymns—And Can It Be? Great Is Thy Faithfulness, It Is Well With My Soul—and to the instrumentals, a rising piano crescendo, the mournful strings of the violin, the fleeting chirp of the flute.  

After church, Art would “take us to lunch.” He always ordered a black coffee with fish tacos or fish and chips, and we would sit by the bay and watch the boats while Art would tell us about whatever book he was reading. We’d tell him, speaking into a microphone device that fed our voices into his ears through a large pair of earphones, situated on top of hearing aids, about our latest professional endeavors, our travels, our family, and together, we would talk about faith and science and politics and writing. Mostly we watched his face: those blue eyes like the ocean on a soft day, the tanned, wrinkled face, the soft white almost boyish hair. The wry grin.  Art could be cantankerous and crotchety, god knows. He worried about the state of the world, about the state of the university, and the state of the church. He made references to not hearing from friends as often as he would have liked, and to the dwindling attendance of his Sunday School class during the pandemic.  

But I often wondered how he managed to be as upbeat as he was. He was a lifelong bachelor, on his own in old age, blind and practically deaf. And yet he went about with a startling lack of self-pity. One year, we’d had him over for Thanksgiving and asked him to say the prayer to bless the meal. He closed his eyes and bowed his head and the words that came out were so unsentimental, so straightforward in their gratitude for life, so perspective-demanding, and so quiet and unassuming, that when my husband and I looked up at each other and we both had tears in our eyes. At his apartment, we’d had to wait a few minutes at the gate to get buzzed in when my husband turned to me and said: do you hear that? That’s when I caught the sound. Wafting through the air, from his second-floor apartment and out into the courtyard, I could hear Art’s voice. He was singing a hymn, loudly, unabashedly, unencumbered, full throated out into the cluster of apartments, his voice carrying across the rooftops, to the sidewalk and the street beyond. Strange and unexpected and embarrassing and wonderful.