We're all still here (except for those of us who aren't)

[tote]

Hello, Slip friends, I've missed all of you tremendously. I assume that like me, many of you have been too busy with the demands of life to check in here frequently. I wanted to let everyone, including BAM, know that I haven't forgotten them despite my apparent absence. In fact, I wrote a final retrospective essay at Columbia that includes a quote from "Suffocation Keep," which I thought I'd share with you all, because it seems like so many of us, myself included, have faded away, and I'm sure that isn't true. It's just that "there's so many rivers you can draw from, so many spaces to fill."

My Personal Strauss Park

In the early days of Scott Halvorson’s Fall 2008 University Writing class,

the professor issued an early warning, which I shall paraphrase. He said

that Columbia University, with its vast requirements of both reading and

writing, often has the tendency to make its students feel a bit insular in

relation to the outside world. Students, he said, have an easier time than

most New Yorkers of feeling exiled, rootless, and ungrounded, like the

experience Andre Aciman describes so vividly in his essay “Shadow Cities.”

Looking back over the course of my first semester at Columbia, the effect

has been hard to pin down, although I’m certain it has taken hold to some

subtle degree, and I’ve begun to wonder why that is (the subtleness, that

is). Certainly the amount of reading, notating, and writing I’ve done has

been a new high-water mark for me. This is in addition to the fact that I’m

living in the biggest city in the world for the first time in my life. I have

more questions than answers about why this is so, why I feel so unchanged,

so overwhelmingly usual. Could it be that I have become insulated from my

own thoughts and feelings, in addition to my surroundings? Or, like

Asimaan’s Strauss, have I too found some island of familiarity to cling to,

perhaps the local Harlem jazz pub on my corner?



Or had I already been insular, and thus academically acclimated, long

before joining the ranks of Columbia undergrads? I have always been an

active reader and writer; beginning in my early teens I’ve filled countless

notebooks with my thoughts, mostly in the form of bad poetry. For example:

Owls

The days have turned into owls
hunting in the couch cushions

flashing silently
silhouetted against
the cold starlight

Immemorial

Whew!!!

Made it past another day's daze
scan my card and cross my paws
ligaments all cringing to the bone
thinking about marriage and mortgage
and space, infinite room in time shrinking

Bad love poem after bad love poem
these nights of bliss mice sex
living in a hole warm and snug from
winter wind
huddle close

we are beyond worth
we claim this territory
in a flurry
of parking lots
and birds of prey



The above poem, written at once about a true love I felt slipping away

as well as the general lack of control we have over events, life, and death in

general, could just as well have been about my experience as an exiled

young writer. The act of writing is sort of by definition a solitary enterprise,

and yet, it isn’t. When I write, it’s as if I’m coming to reckon, be it with

white flag or the spear in tow, with whoever, or whatever force (or lack

thereof) is controlling the manifold circumstances that rule one’s life: the

ancient ancestors shot by cupid’s bow, for example, who brought about the

delicate chain of events that not only brought me here, but brought so

much of this present reality into being, likely without meaning it or

imagining it were so. The ability of any given person’s free will to alter his

or her surroundings is so small, it is sometimes hard to believe it exists at

all. Owls is a personal literary example of that reckoning with the infinite,

and it represents for me an honest attempt to find refuge, roots, and

reprieve in the very infinite itself, the dark engine that wraps us up at night

when we dream and keeps us separate from each other as well as the true

extent of our effect on the world. It was one of the few “white flag”

moments in my writing. Or was it a rare spear-carrying instance?



But maybe the fact that it was either one or the other is enough. Bob

Dylan wrote “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry,” and the train

metaphor, to my mind, held at least two significances. The first is that when

lovers fall in love, they let down their guard, and thus hitch their fates to

one another for a spell, like the cars of a train, and with neither one driving.

The second meaning is that it often takes a train-like force to open up our

hearts, let down our guards, to cry, to wave that white flag of surrender to

the ones we love, to ourselves, to the moon, to the powers that be. So

whether it be in the spirit of surrender of or the spirit of battle, it takes a

tremendous amount of spiritual will to let down our guards and cry, love,

share the reigns, or even write.



So much of the time Bob Dylan seems to set off with the spear in hand,

but ends up waving the white flag instead. The final verse says it all:

Now the wintertime is coming,
The windows are filled with frost.
I went to tell everybody,
But I could not get across.
Well, I wanna be your lover, baby,
I don't wanna be your boss.
Don't say I never warned you
When your train gets lost.

Like an alcoholics anonymous member, he had to go through worlds of pain

and reckoning before he could ever reach his enlightening moment of

acceptance. Worlds that only a mighty coal-fired train engine could traverse

are yet nothing when compared with the final, heartbreaking revelation.

She’s leaving, and he can’t do anything about it. He tried to share with

everyone his great insight, but the river was too wide, the task too great. In

the end, his greatest insight was that acceptance of defeat is insight

enough. It can be dicey to interpret Dylan song lyrics, among the most

abstract poetic form. Still here is one possible interpretation that seems to

reaffirm my own writing process.



They say the pen is mightier than the sword, and there’s no question

that hard work can achieve the unimaginable. Writing is certainly a strong

part of that equation, and yet, ultimately, there is always a point where

hard work can no longer determine outcomes. There are always truths that

will be sought but never known to living minds, one assumes. And yet to

me, good writing is the acknowledgement of this fact, whether it be poetry

or prose, nonfiction or fiction. I’m not sure, pragmatically, just how that

acknowledgement takes place for me as a writer, much less how it becomes

apparent in the mind of the reader. Perhaps it is by recognition, by virtue of

the fact that we all have that will to surrender within us, and we’ve all for

the most part begun to acknowledge our own incredible inheritance and

luck, at one time or another. Writing can certainly help us reach that

moment of empowered powerlessness, as it did me when I sat down to

write that terrible poem, so many years ago. If the poem says anything, I

mean it to be a celebration of the small amount of power we do have when

it is used for loving others.



I’ll end with a beautiful sentiment, from another song called Suffocation

Keep by a Providence, Rhode Island band, my hometown. It begins: “People

are strange, that’s why we’re strangers. Words go in, they don’t come out.”

Maybe the words we write and speak are the only things we ever do take

with us when we die. We certainly leave behind all the junk and materials

that we’ve acquired. We leave our families behind, and they hold onto a

mere caricature of what we’ve known. By and large, though, the words we

speak, think, and write are essentially the only things that we spend

accumulating for a lifetime and don’t leave behind at the end. That makes

words and knowledge spiritually superior to material objects. And writing,

the communication of that knowledge through some gross physical medium,

is doubly valuable because it is a physical manifestation of that sacred

fodder. Therefore, it is incumbent upon all of us with half a brain to use our

vast fortunes of good genes and supportive families, resulting in wonderful

educations, to finish those projects that we’ve been thinking about doing, to

work as hard as we can, to materialize the sacred ideas we carry in order to

help others.



In the process of this perpetual creation, we may at first find ourselves

feeling rootless, connected to the world in mostly indirect ways, and thus

detached. I for one feel that I’ve found my little island of refuge, my Strauss

Park, if you will. It’s my self expression, and that of others, that keeps me

grounded. It’s knowing that I am percolating ideas that have real potential

that keeps me from feeling rootless. And it’s using my incredible good

fortune to work towards the good of all that I count as my Strauss Park.



Works Cited:

Aciman, André. “Shadow Cities.” False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory.

New York: Picador, 2000. 37-49.

Dylan, Bob. “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry.” Highway 61

Revisited. Columbia, 1965.

The Slip. “The Suffocation Keep.” Eisenhower. Bar None, 2006.

[Phrazz]

You're wallowing in self-centeredness ...instead, direct your writing outward, not inward. If you get outside your skin, the whole world will shine forth in magnificent splendor. That essay more "introspective" than "retrospective". Looking back in time doesn't always mean looking from the inside out. Free your body and free your soul.

I want to hear about what you experienced, not as much about your inner reflections thereupon but more the details of the story. Let us readers try to make up our minds about your mind instead of psychoanalyzing too much.

I can give specifics, but it will take some time. I appreciate your sharing your essay with us, and I hope you take this criticism constructively.

When you see beyond yourself then you may find,
peace of mind, is waiting there.

-Phrazz

[tote]

I wasn't sure why I posted this, but that's actually exactly what I'd been waiting to hear. It was sort of bothering me somehow, I think, and you hit the nail on the head.

William Carlos Williams... "no ideas but in things!" My professor says that. He's probably hating my latest effort, but so goes it.

Problem was, (not meant as a defense, I agree completely with your assessment) this was supposed to be a retrospective of my writing process. I'm like most of us, and have seen so much it's hard to know where to start writing, so I played it safe instead of talking about all the goofy things I've done.

But man, do I wish I could take another crack at it. I wrote another essay that was more of a life-story retrospective at the beginning of the semester, about a short time where I was closet-homeless, and all the crazy shit I saw. I could post it, but I can't fix this one. I was up all night last night writing about a nonprofit social justice CBO in Harlem called CVH. I am pooped.

Jam cruise sounds fun, btw. I will make it, eventually.

p.s.

A Sort of Song
William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.