The Push

I don't know about you all, but I am thoroughly exhausted.  A fifteen week class is almost too much on the old brain, isn't it?  But we push on . . .

I suppose that's what I am asking you to do.  Push.  Through safe writing and perfect grammar for  something more, something new.  (Look, a sentence fragment.)

Some of you seemed to struggle today, and I may have lost one or two of you after grades were logged.  That saddens me.  The most valuable A I ever earned was with Jon Bolton after believing it would be that horrifying B (after all, that is what he put on my paper).  And the best B I ever earned was with someone much more dangerous and looming--and I learned more in that class than any other.  But, I suppose, that will come in time and retrospect when your "real lives" become your daily lives, or when you have to give a student you are just flat crazy about anything less than a 100.

I've mentioned before: what if this were the last class I ever taught?  What would I give to it?  What would I risk?  Which makes me wonder: what if this were the last class you ever took?  Are you sure you would just want it to slide by?

I remember one of my professors telling me to not be so invested, so close-chested, to my work as to not see its potential to be even better.  So, instead of waxing philosophical in this Monday blog, let me ask you:

Can you?
Push harder?
Write harder?
Be better?

Or do we all sincerely believe that we are "good enough?"

Where do you see yourself backing down from the battle of writing?

And if this is all just a bit too academic, let me insert something more poetic.

I had a student back in 2004, let's call her Susan.  Susan asked questions that others would have balked at, backed away from, and ignored.  Susan revised and revised and revised and bled all over her page, never missed a class, peer-reviewed with a vengeance, and read her assignments with a voracity that bordered on hunger.  I remember that she was tall, blue-eyed, and wore a lot of hats.

On her last paper, I gave Susan an A.  She asked me how it could get better.  Stayed after class and picked my brain and talked about how words were magic and how she wished she could spend every day eating them, crafting them, and making them spin in the air.

Susan had only three weeks left to live.  The brain tumor was taking that spark out of her eyes with every breath she shared with me, yet, she went down fighting with a kind of courage that I have only seen in old men.  And she never backed down.  I went to her funeral, stood in the sweltering heat in Mississippi and listened to poetry she had written as a child--something about peanut butter. Hugged her mother and cried all the way home in an old beat-up Chevy Nova, all I could afford as an English teacher and the best car I ever had the honor of sobbing in.

And I became a better writer.  It was the least I could do.  I had time left. Time.

But wait.  I'm not asking this kind of sacrifice of you, it's not even on the syllabus.  I am asking for more push.  I see those sparks, that love for words, and I wonder--

How far are you willing to go, Advanced Comp?  How "advanced" would you like to be?  Have you, at the end of the day, given it all you had?

And lastly, a quote:

"I'm not ever going to feel that way again. You don't get that twice." 

Investigator:
 "Most don't get it once." Mystic River

Blog Two

Potrait of My Body

I'm sitting here actually trying to link "Portrait of My Body" and "Why We Crave Horror Movies."  Sober.  I think I've got it, but it all seems a bit too strange for a blog, or for sharing, or for thinking even.    I wonder if several of us were pulled in easily to "Portrait" simply because we wanted to connect to it somehow, have the scars made beautiful or the imperfections justifiable.  What a jolt those of us must have had when it all went wrong halfway in and our tender author betrayed us, made it a bit uncomfortable, and stank up the room.  I wondered the same thing halfway through King's piece.  It was all fine and good until he started saying things like "we" and "madman," and sheesh, so close together like that?

Which brings me to another bit of a loser supposition: what if certain folks are right?  What if there is no "true" us, only the performer on paper?  What if we cannot escape him/her simply because we (the reader) are the intended audience for us (the writer) and, here's the kicker, we know what we cannot bear to hear?  Then, riddle me this Batman, is there any point at all to this academic, masturbatory, narcissistic exercise called writing?

Come on.  You didn't think I was that innocent, did you?

Let's try something here.  Portrait # One:

Long fingers.  Granma loved them, called them piano chasers.  (And they were, years ago, chasers along porcelain sound). Here, a sliver of a scar in the shape of the glass that sliced it, either side of my middle right knuckle.  Hands just beginning to crepe up a bit after years of washing dishes, cleaning houses, working dirt.  They held babies and stroked hair and clasped others and enunciated sentences.  Married by joints that ache when it's going to rain and sometimes just because.  They were the prettiest thing I had and are now the most belligerent sign of my wisdom.  The left one bears a wedding ring so heavy that it has left a permanent, soft dent.  I find comfort in them, the bones and the thinning skin that are the closet thing to my writing, my history, my life.  My hands.

Sookay.  Now.  Portrait # Two:

Cuticles long scarred by permanent teeth, ripped and bit and torn until they bled.  I curl the tips under to hide the flesh when I pay in cash, cut the nails to cripple their chances of self-mutilation.  Veiny and branded by a drop of velvety hot grease -- a moment of self-defense against someone I loved.  Fingers so long that they will have no choice but to become claws in the next two decades, bony things that held cigarettes and formed obscene gestures and slapped a friend once in a drunken rage.  I am terrified of these appendages for they just might one day turn on the rest of me in jointy glee.  Premeditated.  Justifiable handocide.  My hands.

Saalright.  Pick one.  Which portrait is true?  Why, both, of course.  And neither.  Somewhere in the middle.  Whatever I choose to remember or believe or tell.  I think that may be the point, after all: to tell the truth, but to tell it slant (English majors, unite).  Tell it ugly, sometimes, otherwise the writer in you will call bullshit on the whole sweet thing.

And for reasons beyond my own understanding this morning, the following verse just came into my head:

Would you believe in a love at first sight?  Yes, I'm certain that it happens all the time.  What do you see when you turn out the light?  I can't tell you, but I know it's mine.

KPD