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11/23/09

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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s style of writing might be considered a contrivance somewhere between Poe’s poisonously fluid mercury and Melville’s salty, watery compound of sodium and chlorine on the spectrum of American literature.  Just as Aylmer hones the careful manipulation of his beloved elements so does Hawthorne span the entire periodic table of literature, treading on the light and airy heliums and dipping carefully into the dangerous radioactivity of atomic numbers eighty-four and up – those that better men dare not touch and those that reveal the impurity of pure blackness – and dexterously complementing his writing with his authorial presence.  He is as yet undamaged by the elements he so fluidly commands and injects into the polymer of his literature; as yet unharmed in memory by the leaden weight of his words, for radioactive decay halts promptly at atomic number eighty-two and Hawthorne lies well outside its reach, within his personal alchemy of purest aurum.

‘It is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart.  You cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it… you but touch it, and you find it is gold,’ says Herman Melville in Hawthorne and His Mosses.  He stresses in short that the author perpetually impacts a book’s reception into society.  Either a famous author will transfer that fame to his mediocre work, or an ostracized novelist will draw shut the curtains of success upon his brilliant concoction of prose, confining it to a destiny of second-hand bookshops and clearance markdowns.  Just as Georgiana’s birthmark shadowed her otherwise flawless being and just as our human subconscious considers one failure to equate ten successes in magnitude of consideration, Hawthorne’s minute molarity of darkness perforates his entire style of writing and reveals the idealistic, scientific perfection consistently marred by human error.

Hawthorne concocts as part of his blackness scenes in which nature overrides the strongest nurture; Aylmer’s aspirations of the highest order are so sadly restricted by the physicality of his being, such as a man raised by wolves longs to run on all fours yet is prohibited by his essence and true nature.  In this way, humans are imperfect in their coherency, the instinctual perfection of symbiosis thrown awry by humanity’s consciousness and peculiar innate belief that their calculated judgment governs better than their intuition.  Aylmer wanted so badly to ‘fathom the very process by which nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece’ (203), to reach the intersection of humanity and science, if not completely transcend the boundaries of earthly confinement into the divinity of pure, unhindered alchemy, yet the force of the intrinsic flaws of humanity rendering theoretical perfection impossible hits Aylmer, and indeed young Goodman Brown, with the magnitude of mild insanity.  Hawthorne includes the ‘sad confession and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man’ to reveal the constraints of humanity and the darkest fears of the collective human psyche.  ‘His most splendid successes were almost invariably failures’ (207).  Earth rises up to conquer with its essences of  ‘sin, sorrow, decay, and death’ (201) – the very elements that Aylmer so desperately sought to eradicate from his table of perfection.

Melville expounds upon the Puritanical gloom that hovers about Hawthorne’s blackness.  In his otherwise bright exposition of the ‘light and playful secrets of science’ (204), Hawthorne toys with the ‘bewitching, yet indescribable, difference which always makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much more attractive than the original.’  The stillness of detail, the submergence of flaws exposed by the shadows, winds, and sunlight of nature are concealed perfectly in a scientific concoction – an image produced by light, a reaction of pigments and base paint, or a faint, otherworldly reflection of an imperfect being.

In its finality, Hawthorne’s dark-tinted literature is not so much an exposure of sin as it is an exposure of human nature, and all the facets thereof.  He reveals early in The Birthmark that only by becoming one with Aylmer’s science could Georgiana ever hope to hold his strongest affection, thereafter leaving dormant this idea of imperfect unity until the final paroxysmal spasms of the tale.  ‘You have led me deeper than ever into the heart of science,’ the alchemist enthuses; Georgiana overcomes her imperfections by way of drinking the purest essence of scientific perfection; she and science become one; her human imperfections are erased; success becomes failure; she ceases to exist.  And indeed, Aylmer loves her all the more in this, his ensuing regretful state.  This is Hawthorne.

A Cup of Chili and a Bucket of Flour

A Cup of Chili and a Bucket of Flour
the story of Saul, Polly, Lorraine and New England clam chowder

1.

It is crucial in all stories that the complete history of the time be known.  Henceforth it is to be assumed that some context is woven for which this story’s ensuing characters might fall into; such a context should be well made and suitable to their weight, yet not so heavy as to trap them motionless in their historical web, for the balance of freedom and expectations is what defines the actions of a great character.  This digression into the realm of polysyllabic literature is essential to the crystallization of plausible character development within the didactic vernacular framework.

Such framing historical facts can be summarized in that it was two-hundred-and fifty million years after the era of Pangaea; the sun rose in the east and set in the west, except when on one occasion it failed to rise at all, or on another when the sun turned the clouds white and the clouds shut up the sun like shutters and the horizon simply frayed into a dark blue, like the bottom of a well.

There was a time when every town had its own social pyramid, whether standard or inverted, and some argue that that time is still upon us.  Some towns are more proud of it than others, and some towns are, or falsely proclaim themselves to be but rhombuses, having dispensed in either direction with either the very rich or the very poor.  Everyone is entitled to their own problems, so much so that some flaunt the entitlement as if it is all they have to their names.  For some, it is.  They wear it proudly and look down their noses at anyone intruding upon their self-proclaimed state of destitution.

Such a town was Millville and such characters were Polly and Saul.  Millville was a point-down pyramid with the end hacked off, so that Polly and Saul found themselves conveniently near the bottom of this quadrangle and there they clung, precariously, at the edge of this flat world.  They were both young, aspiring artists, certainly not on the verge of becoming famous; both stuck in dead-end jobs and with third-party pop-up blockers, so that the dating site they mutually found, or rather let it be parenthesized that it more suitably mutually found them, unsurprisingly lured them with at least a promise of cured boredom.

Inasmuch as neither of them could afford a restaurant, much less a restaurant that took reservations – for in the upper-reaches of Millville, it is perpetually crucial to have a reservation – they found themselves on a damp Saturday in a fluorescently lit diner by the railroad tracks, the window pane beside them concealing a dense dusty darkness like lukewarm, melting chocolate and reflecting their nervous faces back towards them.  Every few seconds they would glance at themselves in that morose makeshift mirror, or steal glances at the customers on either side of them; here a trenchcoated businessman down on his luck; there a pair of teenagers sharing a milkshake; across the way at the counter a man swirling a mug of cold coffee cocktailed with cognac from the now-empty flask he turned on the table in a twisted round of spin the bottle.  The diner was quiet, its patrons keeping to their own devices.  The only sounds were those of metal against porcelain, the lazy whirr of the whitewashed wood ceiling fan through the air and the intermittent sound of the tap in the kitchen.  The hushed, brief, rumbling whisper of the train as it passed shook the roof a little, the hanging ceiling lamps swaying lazily on their chains.

2.

At times in the recesses of the educational industry lays a surplus of substitute teachers, either the ones un-requested by those tenure-wielding professors or those who simply seem to have been taken on by the school board as a charity, and who the unfortunate ratio of substitutes to absentees cannot place in any adequate or relatively permanent position.  Polly was one such victim of the aforementioned societal curiosities and had been given a supposedly temporary leave by her employer with the disclaimer, ‘until further notice’; this leave being unpaid perhaps to ease the administration’s pockets placed Polly at a loss for income and profession and sent her into somewhat of a depression, and if not so drastic a description let it be said that her state of mind was in no way unaltered.  She had taken at her worst to sitting resignedly at a window seat in her unused parlor, alone and beside herself (but it was alright, because at least she was not lonely, that way), her eyes trained upon the wild grapevines aiming to strangle the fir tree just outside the thin, fragile glass.  It was a funny sight, the big, yellow leaves decked around the scrawny thing, like Christmas in October; Polly had always liked Christmas, always known it as the time of year where everything smelled cold, and the air was crisp like May apples, whipping her hair around, poking through her pockets, so she felt at the same time violated and assailed by bad pickpockets and like a sailboat, and the wind is that buttery shade of forever, just a faint suggestion in the trees, and it makes her feel young again; but I digress.

It is easily discerned when someone has become lonely; particularly in the older generation thrust into this modern age of technology someone deemed ‘lonely’ might take to sending so-called ‘e-cards’ to their relatives at random intervals and for no particular holiday; similarly dejected enough had Polly become with no profession to take up occupancy of her time that she jumped upon the free trial of a dating website that intrusively marketed itself in forty-three different and possibly seizure-inducing neon shades and utilizing an electronically synthesized and barely-discernable-as-female voice to blare CONGRATULATIONS at her.

For all Polly’s emotional disturbances however she was in no way an unlikable creature; certainly this particular specimen was a delicate and arguably attractive female.  Her translucent skin’s blue-purple pallor was akin to a navy ballpoint pen having been smudged across her pale palms.  The color naturally veined up her arms in a clear blue-green that faded with her body’s warmth and resembled thin bruises underneath her brittle skin when the weather was cold, as it so often was as she sat by the frozen window pane and watched the world through it like a Dickensian specter.  Her hair was once all flaxen gold curls but she had in her youth too oft experimented with new-fangled technologies of the time and burned and singed the strands into ghosts of their former selves; indeed in her youth she had not realized the effect but as she grew older the bygone damages became apparent and a dusky twilight fell upon her hair, only a few spindles of sparkling light retaining their threadbare hold upon the horizon of her brow.

3.

Now Polly and Saul came to be sitting in this particular eating establishment on this particular night at this particular time because the latter, in his nightly, complete reading of the Bible discovered that the writing out of all the numbers in that book of scripture, side by side and then arranged into verses of iambic pentameter, would in the first six lines spell out like an acrostic that very date.  Having been keeping up a neat and purely electronic correspondence with Polly for plus or minus two weeks, Saul very subtly begged her attendance at dinner by finding her address, which she had never disclosed to him during the span of their communications, via a conglomeration of search engines and other internet-based sources and then appearing on her doorstep covered in mustard and paprika, a custom native to his Eastern hometown.  She accepted the invitation on the spot, having never been courted in such a manner and being inexplicably taken by his preference in seasonings.  Her only request was that he shower prior to their dinner; Saul of course, being a man and planning all along to wear the pants in any ensuing relationship disregarded these foolish female demands – for they were, after all, only truly requests and thus to be deemed optional and unlawful by his will, much as South Carolinians proclaimed certain tariffs unconstitutional and counterproductive towards the document on which this country holds its immensely proud roots – and settled upon changing from his stiff, residue-caked clothing to a fresher pair and washing his face, hair, and neck by way of a sink and a bar of soap, effectively washing all areas of his personage yet retaining his own knowledge that he had not bent to the will of a lesser being and outmaneuvered in a manifestation of the eminent dominance of his sex the wily contrivances of a creature certainly best suited to deception, as in his beloved Bible did the female Eve in her taking of fruit (certainly we would all have been much better off if simply Eve had been offered a pomegranate, or perhaps a coconut (for which’s tough exterior and difficulty of obtaining the flesh she would not have strayed (for women are at the same time both conniving and uncommitted beings, who would nary waste time in efforts requiring application of wit or strength))).

4.

The waitress’s nametag read Lorraine in big, permanent marker bubble letters.  She snapped gum like one would string beans; mindlessly, efficiently and with purpose.  Polly’s menu was filmed in grease and the warped, gooey, soft plastic radiated with distorted rainbows.  Sticky residue coated the middle fold of the booklet and seeped into the paper insert.  Polly and Saul both ordered the chowder.  Lorraine brought it on a lofted black plastic platter and unceremoniously clattered the mass-produced porcelain onto the blue marbled linoleum ringed with grooved metal siding.  With somewhat an air of unease Saul spared no second in sinking his spoon into the steaming soup.

The door opened with a hiss and bang and the introduction of variations between the atmospheric pressure outside and the diner’s void of melancholic silence created a vacuum that pulled a cloaked stranger into the room like a will-o-the-wisp.  Saul, captivated by the commotion of the door unwittingly dropped his hand.   The steaming chowder oozed down the shaft of his spoon and slid in congealing clumps towards the edge of the table.  He twitched as a few warm drops soaked through his dress pants.  Polly handed him a napkin.  Saul watched her carefully, wondering if she had noticed the spilled chowder dripping from the edge of the table.  All this had occurred in an instant, and in another the door had slammed shut behind the man and all momentary entropy erased and order restored over the sleepy regulars.

‘Are you quite alright, Sir?’ Lorraine breathed from behind him in such a way as would raise the hackles on a dog, had Saul been one.

‘Yes, thank you.  Quite alright… quite alright,’ Saul muttered.  Lorraine topped up their coffee from her pot of perpetual abundance and then dissipated from his peripheral vision and the cloaked man still stood the entrance, staring down upon the laminate floor where water was pooling at his feet, cascading down his sleek garb in rivulets like water over glass.  Saul flicked his eyes towards his soup.  Polly licked her lips.

‘Everything is going according to plan,’ Lorraine audibly stage-whispered, turning precisely two heads in the room – that of the cloaked man and that of the businessman at the counter.  Saul listened.  Polly ate her soup, and then stopped eating her soup, and then placed down her spoon beside her generally uneaten soup.

‘I do say, you’re looking a bit purple about the arms,’ Saul commented.  His own soup was growing cold, its surface knitting together into a film.  Films are quite stupendous; why, just the other day I was sitting in the local cinema watching one on the mass migration of lemmings.  Did you know that the producers in actuality placed a handful of the critters on a snow-covered turntable and fabricated with those few a migration sequence of seemingly hundreds?  At the end, they drove them off a cliff and into a river, concluding their documentary with the conclusion that lemmings were naturally suicidal beings bearing the tendency to spontaneously cut their own numbers in accordance with social and ecological trends.  Returning to the matter at hand; we now shift into the present tense for in this brief interlude of my digression Polly has fallen upon the floor and taken up spasms of seemingly involuntary movement (Saul is skeptical as of yet; by the nature of women she might well be effecting some predetermined plan).

5.
(epilogue, afterword, and nondescript ramblings of authorial origin)

It is my grave duty to inform you that Polly perished following the events of the unnamed diner.  My role as criminologist to this case is especially crucial in determining the facts surrounding her most peculiar and certainly unwarranted death.  Lorraine, you see, had contrived to substitute for Saul’s chowder a bowl of curiously altered chili, the origins of which can be found in the South American white bean plant, native to Chile and harmless if prepared in conjunction with various Atlantic spices, yet poisonous if otherwise served.  Upon discovering that Saul was indeed ‘quite alright’ from not having yet partaken of his chowder she resorted to a sleight of hand – a trick of the Devil, you might say – in which she slipped into both of their cups of coffee a powdered root of elderberry, in the hopes that Saul (who if it has not been mentioned once was engaged to Lorraine’s sister and shortly thereafter left her at the altar when she refused to reschedule their date of marriage for his pursuance of a venture to watch the planets align in convergence upon the equinox of their tangency) would drink of it.  It was an unfortunate side effect of her plan, then, when some minute grains of the toxic root landed in Polly’s chowder, ordinarily an insufficient amount to cause harm, yet by way of the film of the cold soup the grains sat victim to Polly’s spoon and ensuing bite, and ensuing death.  It must now be revealed that aforementioned cloaked man was none other than myself and in witness of this event I did obtain from subsequent testing all necessary evidence to secure in my mind the particular course of action to be taken; nonetheless she was a respectable woman until that point at which she gave in to temptation, and I could do nothing but fail to take into account the stigma shadowing her eventual actions, yet act upon the true virtue of the fact that a crime against the innocence of humanity had been committed before me.  This concludes the investigation.

Lives of Quiet Desperation

11/4/09

Lives of Quiet Desperation

What Dan McCall believes to be the underlying character of the narrator in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener is far from ‘the majority opinion.’ While the Lawyer seems to McCall ‘extremely intelligent, whimsical and ironic, generous, self-aware, passionate, and thoroughly competent,’ other critics ‘take it virtually for granted that Melville’s lawyer-narrator is… humorless, selfish, blind, superficial, and bumblingly incompetent’ (268). From where would a story be derived, might I ask, should such a dim-witted and purportedly safe – for safe is often synonymous with boring – actor play the arguable lead while the play’s namesake comes home with Best Supporting Actor on his paper plate and all the rest take their bows upstage and at the end of the curtain call? In order to address the persona of the reliable narrator, one must first define the unreliable narrator; in this case, one whose first-person perspective is skewed – as, invariably, all perspectives are by the very definition of the word – by some characteristic or other such plot device that renders him declaredly unreliable. ‘Some critics read the story as I do, but we are in a distinct minority’ (266), McCall declares. No piece of literature is perfect, nor can it satisfy the likes of all manner of men without indeed losing its substance and flavor, therefore a critical analysis that altogether overly critiques is as much a losing battle as too enthusiastically unfounded a defense.

The bitter tone with which we read Bartleby’s final lines, ‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!’ is ultimately a product of the modern call for satirical emphasis and the subsequent derivation of it from all manner of literature, regardless of the author’s bygone purpose. Indeed, Melville’s narrator is a mess of self-confidence and insecurity, strength and weakness, command and indecision, public and private; this is, of course, what makes him such a dynamic and intriguing character to the audience that stumbles with him through his mind. He is discovering himself while simultaneously the audience discovers him. For all Melville’s Shakespearean influence, dramatic irony makes no entrances as the narrator is the audience’s only informant. As the Lawyer stumbles down Wall Street glad to the brink of fear in his self-confidence and subsequent realization that his clamoring need for reassurance has gone unanswered, the audience bears witness to something thrillingly free from any air of predestination or Poe-like calculation of effect underlined by a sense of new discovery.

It is this constant change, perhaps, that stumps the poor historian as he yet again superimposes modern values and the stigma of the times in which he lives upon his interpretation of the past and renders it suitably unusable. ‘Critics do not so much interpret the story as oppose the narrator’s version to their idea of the truth’ (268), basing their analyses upon their understanding of how things should be, and any consequently unfortunate, offending literature is quietly and efficiently smothered by a textually supported pillow.

McCall’s thesis, or rather, one of his theses, lies in the idea that the narrator amidst all this mindless over analysis and critique has been thrown out of his context. Critics ‘fail to reckon with the wonderfully dramatic quality of the story, the Lawyer’s agonizing reappraisal of himself. He does not put it, back in 1853, in any of the language we use so wantonly more than a century later… to see him as a representative of a class, an unwitting victim of a social and economic system, is not so much creative interpretation as it is obtuse paraphrase’ (272). It is a mistake to analyze the narrator for who he is; rather one must consider him for who he is to the story. ‘To read him out of his own brave story is to lose what is most lovely and spiritually generous about him.’

McCall makes an admirable effort in his systematic progression of refuting certain analyses and towards his eventual portrayal of the Lawyer as a reliable narrator.  Particularly, his analysis of ‘kings and chancellors’ and common misconceptions stirred up relations to Melville’s Biblical influences.  The critical tendency to dismiss the value of the story on account of the narrator fails to delve into the metaphorical significance in the role reversal of the Lawyer and Bartleby as employer and employee.  Not once did the Lawyer ask Bartleby to comply, only commanded him as such.  When asked in clarification, ‘you will not?’ Bartleby replied, ‘I prefer not,’ yet the narrator remained in his stubborn position of power, if only in suggestion and not practice.  ‘For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt’ (Bartleby, 11) says the Lawyer of the passive refusal, which Biblically seats him in the place of disobedience instead of Bartleby.  This overturning of conformity parallels the narrator transcending his papery confines to ‘talk like Melville himself in a moment of profound self-examination’ (274).

Critics too quickly draw the curtain across Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener, dismissing it for a convoluted following of an unreliable narrator.  Dan McCall quite expertly disarms the pointed accusations by systematically melting the icy arguments into nothing more than watery residue.  His skill lends itself to the utilization of a plethora of integrated quotations which misused can spell the death of a critic but properly exercised bring a depth to critical analysis that goes beyond a thesaurus.  The very matrix of interested suspension that holds the audience at the right hand of the narrator as he unfolds his character seems to puzzle critics at each turn, yet there is something disarming about the charity, the search for justification and approval, the demolishing of hierarchy through Biblical quotation that likens this narrator to each reader and perhaps the most human of critics.  This context is what makes the Lawyer reliable in his humanity, or if he still be unreliable, perhaps not quintessentially so.  Therefore for once, break tradition and trust the unreliable narrator should it please you to call him unreliable, for his honesty remains that despite the adjectives prescribed him.

Empty Pockets Will Allow a Greater Sense of Wealth

10/11/09

Empty Pockets Will Allow a Greater Sense of Wealth

Embarking on a self-proclaimed search for ‘happiness,’ Chris McCandless quite literally followed another man’s book and perhaps misinterpreted Thoreau’s teachings, simultaneously acting in a very anti-Emersonian fashion by adhering so devoutly to the mantras of ‘man in nature’ and, ironically, ‘individual.’  By so decidedly throwing himself ‘Into the Wild,’ Chris attempted to break free from the constraints and influences of society and to immerse himself in the untamed, the inexplicable, the wild: nature. ‘If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed.’  Chris McCandless fuses the Emersonian inner nature and the Thoreauvian focus on the physicality of the wilderness into a quest for this finality of happiness that unfortunately results in his death.

The Emersonian self is very much the embodiment of the abstract aspect of the ideal of individualism; that quest for achieving something greater than yourself by looking within, to the Soul, through the lens of nature as everything ‘Not Me.’ Society ‘is a wave.  The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed, does not’ (Self-Reliance, 136) and not necessarily something to be avoided but simply to live within, and not live from.  Independence springs from self-reliance, yet self-reliance is not the evasion of societal influences but rather, to Emerson, the ability to reside among those influences and within one’s own thoughts without the necessity of reassurance, and to be stable and not swayed by ‘other men’s transcripts of their readings’ (The American Scholar, 60).  Emerson demands that one speak to nature on his own but not necessarily be apart from society; rather, he should take only minor influences from the ‘interpretations of other men’ and not be controlled as fully by those influences as Chris McCandless allowed himself to be, and then later attempted to completely eradicate.  Some intrinsic balance must be found.

The Thoreauvian self, and indeed Thoreau’s entire haphazard and contradictory genius, is built around the theory of nature as something mysterious and wholly more beautiful than the human self.  Thoreau is essentially an echo of Emerson, yet in a more frantic and spontaneous way, which perhaps explains Chris McCandless’s endless fascination with his work.  While Emerson distinctly categorizes the Soul and everything but the Soul as separate, Thoreau defines one in terms of the other and makes them out to be created of the same matter.  Chris takes Thoreau’s idea of finding ‘his own [human] nature’ within the wilderness and sets off to do, quite literally, that.  On the theme of the influences of literature, of the many thoughtful quotations from The Perks of Being a Wallflower perhaps the most so is, ‘even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have.’  It is not so much the situation you place or find yourself in, but rather what you do with that situation.  It is no more difficult or easy to discover oneself in the frozen Alaskan wilderness than from a downtown apartment.  Emerson sees this, but Chris McCandless does not, and this is his ultimate downfall.  He ironically still allows society to influence him beyond his own consideration, so that he only sits down to think for himself in the final moments of his life, scribbling his realizations in the margins of other men’s work.

Thoreau’s struggle to define the individualist approach while camping out in Emerson’s yard is a parallel to Chris’s reliance on ‘survival’ skills he learned from other people, and even the bus that was his refuge as opposed to a shelter of his own construction.  Chris’s idea of Thoreauvian ‘escapism’ very much misses the point of Thoreau’s teachings; ‘to set it down to escapism is, of course, to misconstrue what happened’ (Walden, 1954, 363).  Perhaps his readings of Thoreau were quite the opposite of Emerson’s ideal Scholar.  So bent on escaping the trappings of society as literally as possible, he missed the figurative significance of Thoreau’s urgency for ‘truth’ and failed to realize until his final moments that ‘happiness is only real when shared.’  ‘You are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships,’ Chris initially asserts, ‘God’s place is all around us; it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things.’

To view McCandless’s story through a lens of the Thoreauvian, Emersonian, or a combination of the two might be drawing out of context his situation, for actions are largely influenced by the times in which one lives, and so Emerson, Thoreau, and McCandless had very different social stigmas and driving forces about them.  While of course Chris’s actions may have been a misinterpretation of the philosophers’ ideas, is not Emerson’s thesis that man is a combination of all of the ideas he has heard before, and that the importance is not the ideas themselves but the synthesis of them into something unique and individual?  Ultimately, the work of a philosopher bears more significance to the reader than the intended message of the author, because it is more the reader who will utilize the ideas than the author.  As admirable an attempt, though, as Chris McCandless’s was, to forge a new identity in the wilderness, he could just as easily have stayed where he was, kept societal interactions to a minimum and thereby ‘discovered himself’ and that all-elusive happiness.  Instead, he thrust himself into a wilderness as inhospitable as the ideas he was trying to foster.

The Point of a Journey is Not to Arrive

9/23/09

The Point of a Journey is Not to Arrive

E.B. White’s Walden – 1954, written a century after Thoreau’s initial publication of Walden is a testament to what a proper reading of something as theoretical and indeed contradictory work as Thoreau’s is.  Unlike historians who dismiss quickly or analyze literally Thoreau’s more abstract works, White moves past the surface meanings – those which historians are so quick to skim off as cream and assume that the rest holds no substance – saying, ‘to set it down to escapism is, of course, to misconstrue what happened’ (363).  White realizes that Thoreau offers a far larger perspective than the simple decision of ‘escaping’ society; rather, ‘[Walden] carries a solemn warning… advances a good argument… rings with the power of positive adoration, it contains religious feelings without religious images…’ (360).  Thoreau’s meaning, White asserts, is simply to provide a ‘seductive summons.’

Without having read Walden in its entirety it would be futile to refute White’s arguments, yet his statement that one might read Thoreau’s work and find ‘how sweet are the uses of brevity’ (360) borders on misguided, if not laughable.  Forgive any reference to those lesser British authors, yet it is too colossal an observation to ignore that Thoreau’s ‘quality of ramble’ (364) is indeed comparable to Dickens.  Furthermore White seems to excuse Thoreau, in his patronage, from any sort of wrongdoing; he chides potential followers, stating that he ‘should hate to be called a Thoreauvian’ (366), all full of contradictions and hypocrisy, yet excuses Thoreau in earlier paragraphs.  ‘There is a horrendous cloud of inconsistencies and contradictions’ (361) yet while Thoreau is great for trying and ‘raising all that ruckus’ (361), his subsequent followers should not adhere strictly to these Thoreauvian teachings but rather take them in true Emersonian form – as guidance and not mandates.

White’s ideal day with Thoreau as a deliciously ‘delirious young man’ (364) would cast ordinary players into roles of philosophical eloquence, arguably White’s perception of perfection in a literary mold.  Thoreau had likened himself to nature, even defined himself in its terms, but never suggested himself to be perfect, despite creating the idyllic man from natural elements.  It is this apparent idolization for and fascination with Thoreau that renders White a particularly biased reference, and although it is perhaps an inconsequential rendering, it drags into question some of the analyses and conclusions in the paper.  White reveres the diction and haphazard genius that is Thoreau’s prose, and unconsciously (or perhaps very consciously) emulates, or attempts to emulate, accordingly.  In his second paragraph White used the phrase ‘the mass of men’ (360) which immediately brought to mind Thoreau (although it was brief researching that confirmed the quotation’s origin in Walden) – ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’  It is this very desperation that White believes Thoreau attempts to quell with words powerful enough ‘to resuscitate the youth drowning in his sea of doubt’ (361) with his somewhat ironic cry of ‘simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!’  The irony lies in the complete lack of brevity in Thoreau’s major works, and whether it is effective, deliberate, or otherwise is trivial.  Thoreau’s charge to the reader is to be what he is not, to do what he has tried to do yet has not completely done, with this ‘insistence of a fire alarm’ (364).

The drudging obedience to a sounding fire alarm and the taken-for-granted existence of such an alarm are perhaps in contrast to Thoreau’s alleged ‘ruckus’ and iconoclastic individualism that isn’t.  For, what is Thoreau but a frenzied echo of Emerson, like a young boy gone to church and suddenly been enlightened by the preacher, thereafter running down the dirt path in his short pants and calling it out to each of his neighbors on their porches, each time muddling the sermon until it retains only a ghost of cohesive and un-contradictory material?  White’s analyses trump those fact-fabricating and detail-doting historians, but contain within them some other flaw that stems from the unbridled idolization of and reverence for this 19^th century writer, which adds yet more to cloud his 20^th century lens and skew his perspective towards one of accurate interpretation of Walden’s intrinsic meaning filtered through by blind praise for its diction.

I Get All the News I Need on the Weather Report

9/22/09

I Get All the News I Need on the Weather Report

Joel Porte’s writing quite possibly could be likened to falling down a rising escalator – it goes on, and on, and on.  He decides, in the second paragraph of The Problem of Emerson to ‘concentrate here on the problem of getting to the heart of Emerson’s writing,’ (679) but doesn’t much accomplish it, for all of his eighteen pages, and furthermore refers in several places to what he alleges to be his ‘thesis,’ only to adjust it each time to include by the end everything from the value of transparent eyeballs to Thoreau’s mother.  In one such place, Porte asserts that ‘[his] thesis is simple: Emerson, as he himself frequently insisted, is fundamentally a poet whose meaning lies in his manipulations of language and figure’ (685).  By saying that Emerson defined himself in this way – as a poet whose writing, Porte hints, was to be valued as nothing more than a love letter to literature, flowery and thought-provoking but found to contain as much substance as a black hole upon reflection – is a subconscious attempt to back his beliefs in as close to the ‘truth’ about Emerson as one can get; that is, Emerson’s own words.  Porte is looking to justify his so-called thesis and in doing so calls into question his own confidence in his research and support.  To wade through the swamp of quoted historians and find that the ratio of integrated quotations to Porte’s actual writing is something akin to five-to-one leaves, finally, very little on the plate and certainly not much worth digesting.

Of all his acclaimed ‘tasks’ and ‘intents’ Porte seems most forthright in his proclamation of a thesis to prove Emerson’s writing and appeal to ‘reside in the imaginative materials and structures of his writing’ (684).  He is ‘exhilarated to discover a kind of verification of [his] views’ (684) in his students, and clearly seeks to transfer that sense of confirmation to what he believes he knows about Emerson.  Eileen Foley once said that ‘a classic rookie mistake is to assume that a student knows something.’  Porte, so desperate for this ‘verification’ assumes both that his students are qualified to act as anything more than a puppet of his preaching and that he as a student of Emerson is qualified to state his own assumptions as facts.  He finds Emerson’s work more valuable in the conveying than in the content, and therefore skips clear over Nature and ‘the great essays… hoping, nevertheless, that [English Traits’] example will prove instructive’ (685).  Porte then goes on to quote historians on their prefaces to Emerson’s work.  This is, in itself, yet another mistake; pretend, for a moment, that Emerson is God.  If one has the resources to study God directly, why turn to ‘other men’s transcripts of their readings’ (60, The American Scholar)?  Porte relies far too heavily on the assurance of men who are but names offering their interpretations of work by someone they claim to have only recently discovered to be ‘one of us’ (679, The Problem of Emerson), or, God forbid, a human being.

Porte continuously asserts that historians and literary critics alike place such an overarching emphasis on ‘Emerson’s personal authority’ (683) and that ‘strategies for redeeming Emerson… are rooted in the character of the man… and therefore depend for their force on our assenting to a particular reconstruction of Emerson’s personality which may have little to do with the common reader’s literary experience of Emerson’ (682).  It is difficult to separate the ‘strength of [Emerson’s] message’ from the power of his diction; Porte quotes William James to say, ‘the form of the garment was so vital with Emerson that it is impossible to separate it from the matter’ (683).  Emerson himself has said, however, that ‘the office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances’ (The American Scholar, 63).  Diction and rhetoric are undeniably important, but to lose oneself in pure deliverance and bypass the meaning is to miss the point by far.  Emerson’s point is this ‘chemistry’ of language and message, and instead of disregarding the message to entirely rely on the diction, one should realize that Emerson was far deeper in character than the elitist white philosopher ‘the compensatory biases of modernist criticism’ (679) had previously made him out to be, and therefore set his meaning and his language apart from modern analyses of his character.  Because Emerson has so recently been discovered as ‘one of us,’ and just as one should not rely on a book for one’s complete guidance, Emerson’s character should not be the entire basis nor context within which to view his message, only a slight representation of the truth behind his diction.  Historians have no way of eradicating their modern lens and thus cannot adequately deliver a portrayal of Emerson without skewing it to fit their concept of who he should be.

Wilton Playshop’s ‘As You Like It’ Succeeds

7/30/09

Wilton Playshop’s ‘As You Like It’ Succeeds
for The Wilton Bulletin

This past weekend, members of the Wilton Student Summer Playshop performed Shakespeare’s As You Like It starring Wilton High School graduates Christopher Kozlowski as Orlando, Alex Clapp as Rosalind, Amy Sullivan as Celia, and Jack Mason as Touchstone. Director Kevin McGuire took a drawn-out and far-fetched story and transformed it into something classical and simultaneously atypical of a Shakespeare performance.

The play opened to a terrific full house at 8 pm on Thursday and closed with a fourth and final show on Saturday evening, which gave way to much ad-libbing and antics by the cast to keep the audience on their toes. Most stunning was a substitution by Jack Mason that left the audience in tears – ‘you’re my sister in real life!’ he yelled at Jenna Mason, playing opposite him as Audrey.

Far from becoming an endurance test of Elizabethan English, Saturday’s matinee was delightfully entertaining and the actors did a stunning job of keeping the audience from drifting off amidst the many scene changes and long dialogues. Within the first few minutes of the play, the cast had showered us audience members in Mardi Gras beads, shouts of ‘carnival!’ setting the stage for a romantic comedy. Tim Cunningham as the lovesick Silvius toted around a stuffed Pikachu. Both Amy Sullivan and Christopher Dehn while walking through the center aisle fell onto seated audience members and gasped for deliverance, placing a more central emphasis on the spectators. The set provided the performance with a whimsical, dreamy air, and scene changes were accompanied by the relaxing, original compositions of Ginger Brooker.

Sarah Anderson’s portrayal of Jacques struck me as particularly stunning. Her light tone underscored by the mysterious, musing air injected into her lines by Shakespeare provided a contrast to the forthright and proclaiming words of Orlando.

The Wilton Student Summer Playshop has succeeded yet again in perfectly casting and performing a classic with a modern twist. The entire cast and crew has won much-deserved praise and I congratulate them on a job well done. The production staff continues to outdo themselves each year, and I am anxiously awaiting Pippin this December.

Selective Memory

5/10/09

Assignment : evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you [RISD prompt].

Selective Memory

‘Me duele, Papá, me duele.’  A little five-year-old girl protests as a nurse in crisp white assures her that the pain is normal, a simple side effect of the dwindling anesthesia.  A man stands by the little cot and cannot help but let a few proud thoughts creep into his mind as he hears her complain in Spanish.  From then on, he takes every opportunity to remind her of that Spanish.  Every time she speaks it, she anticipates the story before his lips even move.  Each time he suggests a visit to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, there the story is, laced with religion and fortified by his unwavering Catholic faith and belief in the holy icon.  The man made a promise to the Virgin that they would return to visit her if she would only help his daughter get better.  The girl never really believed in anything beyond the capabilities of the doctors and her father’s trust in them, but regardless she makes the visits every other year, climbing Tepeyac hill, looking out at the two churches built in the Virgin’s honor, and listening to her father tell that story of her Spanish.

Can there be pride in pain?

I cannot recollect my words, though I suppose the lost memory can be attributed to the last traces of orange-flavored anesthesia.  I asked for bubble gum but they gave me orange, and the last thing I consciously remember is my displeasure.  I question the brain’s tendency to selectively recall certain things and blot out others.  Is it a reflex?  Is it strange that the only memories I have of the biggest sacrifice my parents ever made for me are of stuffed animals, painted giraffes, and flavored anesthetics?  Since my birth I had urinary tract infections.  For five years my mother dealt with fevers and stomachaches, thinking them caused by a weak immune system and oblivious to the too-short urethra causing the problems.

My mother always said that the countless hours we spent with badly photocopied Disney Princess coloring books ameliorated my affinity for staying within in the lines.  Do I truly remember sitting cocooned in the crisp white sheets of the hospital bed beneath the bright synthetic light, surrounded by the mint green and white curtains that divided the cots in the room?  Perhaps the recollection is only painted by my mother’s long-ago words.  I do remember the eventual ride to the car in the little plastic wagon filled with get-well cards and stuffed animals from those who heard I was leaving, identical toys watching their friends go with beady eyes through the glass shelves of the hospital gift shop.  I remember trying to walk when I got home and having to sit down every few minutes, because it hurt too much.  I remember the giant painted giraffe on the wall beside the elevators of the Boston Children’s Hospital, the memory no doubt fortified by the checkups I made there every year until I was ten.

I remember the same Disney Princess coloring pages in the too-small waiting room, the room that shrunk each year as I returned for routine ultrasounds, and then being upset when my mother told me I didn’t have to get them anymore.  I thought they were normal.  I liked them.

Every day the six-inch scar below my abdomen reminds me of my narrow brush with death, but it isn’t a bad remembrance.  Sometimes I even forget its there.  It taught me the importance of valuing what you have, and what life brings you.  Would I be an artist if I hadn’t learned to stay within the lines?  That’s questionable.  But I must remember those coloring books for a reason, and success in art is impossible if you don’t start young, make mistakes, get back on your feet.

Before you can walk you have to learn to crawl.

The Haunting

3/3/09

The Haunting

The intense white glow of the stage lights blares in appreciation of the crowd’s applause.  Worn black curtains swish contentedly shut on my view of the audience, shielding me momentarily from the light and sweeping up ancient and familiar dust that induces cough and sputters to a chorus of barely stifled laughter in the wings. The curtains open once more and we take our bows to increasingly enthusiastic applause, the audience on their feet by the final fall of the dark cloth.

I rush from backstage, the thrill of the performance still resonating in my accelerated heartbeat.  The rest of the cast heads straight to the dressing rooms for the traditional, yet rather impertinent, post-show streaking, smiling and doling out hurried hugs as they swerve through the thickening throng in the lobby.  I couldn’t care less to join them.

Still in costume I skirt the slipshod barricade of cafeteria chairs constructed to dissuade passerby from entering the portion of the hallway claimed as backstage domain.  My flats scrape against the carpet as I race to the glass partition that separates me from the lobby, my fingers moving quickly on the keypad of my phone as I attempt to convey my location.  I dance around the hall with my phone in the air, waiting for reception to materialize in the form of a white bar.

The raucous laughter of my friends alerts me to their presence and they rush to issue glowing congratulations. Bonnie approaches in a perfect depiction of Rowling’s Trelawney, a flurry of hair and skirts.

‘Hello my angel, you were phenomenal, you are just so talented,’ she gushes in a manner that only she can execute with plausible sincerity.  ‘You know, there was a boy, a junior, I think, who was asking about you, he thought you were gorgeous; he’s a good kid, let me know and I can hook you up.’

Silence.

‘Oh, is this your boyfriend?’ Her eyes go wide behind her glasses as she spots my highly amused group of friends, but she maintains her equally offhand and commentary tone.  She does not seem apologetic or embarrassed in the least, twenty-five years as a Drama teacher having cured her of any regret for faux pas and deteriorated any filter she may have had between what she thinks and what she says.  ‘Well, come see me later, I’ll fill you in,’ she audibly stage whispers, giving me a conspiratorial wink and retreating with a loud clacking of boots to the theatre.

‘What?  What!?” says the boy beside me in false anger or disbelief, but behind blue-green eyes I detect a hint of pride.  The event is even now still a running joke between us, when we chance to joke.

He takes my hand and we walk down the hall to the choral room, commandeered for cast use before the show in conjunction with the hallway.  Mine is the only bag that still remains on the blue plastic chairs amidst the discarded husks of empty and half-full water bottles, slumped dejected and forgotten against the cold metal legs.  The carcasses like plastic tumbleweeds crackle and shift under the cold shower of air from the vent above, creating ambient noise and instilling a vague sense of paranoia in the otherwise silent room.

Constant vigilance.

He takes a seat on the padded piano bench and plays a few tentative notes while I struggle out of my flats and knee-high stockings, grateful for the comfortable warmth of my boots after spending interminable hours in the painful flats.

Seven months later to the day I sit bathed in the fluorescent glow of the computer screen, cocooned in a feather comforter despite the August air and quickly disemboweling a box of tissues.  The air aches with a humidity only rivaled by the daytime tar-filled atmosphere, the night providing little relief from the heat.  I open a new window and my Facebook profile greets me, the oh-so-helpful relationship status in the information box reading ‘Single’ in cheerful, hyperlinked blue.  A growing pile of discarded paper casts nightmarish shadow-puppet shapes against the backlit screen and threatens to bury the keyboard beneath its feathery weight.  Midnight works its magic upon the ordinarily mundane paper, transforming the sheaves into wolves and birds that cast themselves against a whitewashed wall.  They leap in time to the music pulsing from the computer speakers, silent enough to be mistaken by passerby for the whirr of the heater yet just audible enough to provide a haunting soundtrack for the night.  The track pad, having lost its matte texture from years of use, chooses to kick me further down by refusing to heed my directions and moving my cursor sporadically about the screen.

I talk to a friend online, flipping between a webpage of amateur poetry and the perpetually moving text of the instant messaging window.

‘It’s been ages and I still can’t get over this, how pathetic am I?’

He tries his hand at cheerful reminiscing.

‘Remember you said something like, ‘Where is my Romeo,’ or your line?  And he was like, ‘Here I am, I love you.’

‘He said he was joking.’

In my mind’s eye my friend runs his fingers through his dark curly hair as he searches for a reply.  A little speech bubble containing ellipses materializes in my iChat window, alerting me to his typing.  The bubble disappears, reappears, and disappears as he backspaces and revises, wracking his brain for an eloquent method of transferring memories to vernacular.  His words finally appear no-nonsense Helvetica and with supposed third-person objectivity.

‘Then why say it when only I would have heard it?  But let me finish about that night.  We were standing in the lobby after the show and had a big test for either Smith or Henry the next day, and I asked him, ‘Can you have your dad come soon, we need to study and missed some time due to Amnesty,’ and he said ‘You really think I am going to leave before spending time with her?’

I stare at the unmistakable words, crisp and clear in that no-nonsense typeface.  The capacity of a human’s capability to change hits me like a bullet, sharp and quick and dull all at the same time.  The only reply he received or I could manage to type out before the tears blurred my vision was gibberish.

Who Says, ‘You Can’t Go Home’?

2/28/09

Assignment : the best piece of advice.

Who Says, ‘You Can’t Go Home’?

Just reading the word ‘advice’ was enough to instill in me a sense of dread. I am not one to frequently ask for advice, and the prompt bore remembrances of the equally infamous standardized testing prompts, ‘Who is your hero in life?’ ‘What is your favorite season?’ and ‘If you had a giraffe, where would you hide it?’ Thoughts of, ‘Maybe she won’t collect these,’ and ‘I could just make something up,’ evaporated as Ms. Taylor informed us the following day that we had one class period to finish the assignments. I managed the first three entries with relative ease, and then sat in the library during my study hall staring at a periodic table and wondering how I was ever going to complete the final journal entry.

The secluded library chairs behind the brick outer face of the elevator shaft serve as my usual seating place. When accompanied by more than one other person, we typically make it through twenty minutes or so before a librarian takes it upon herself to remind us that ‘the rule in the library is, one person per chair.’ I am always tempted to ask if I could see it in writing, or, better yet, if they could kindly place more chairs in the same area, since they frown upon the moving of furniture. I have never been one to believe something without evidence. As I sat there, a few periods after receiving the unfortunate information of an impending essay, intermittently staring at a motley collection of graffiti-covered bricks and the still-blank front sheet of my notebook, my friend spoke up from the other chair.

He always has a story to tell. Between working at soup kitchens across DC or gathering used winter coats for homeless shelters, he somehow finds time to speak to people from all walks of life and collect fantastic tales that seem more suited to fictional novels than to reality. The only difference lies in the fact that there has not been anything like a storybook ending for most of them. I unconsciously began to write brief notes on his words, much in the same way that I have been conditioned, after a year of Humanities, to annotate any article I read. It was then that I realized that the best pieces of advice I have ever received have come to me in the form of stories.

Unloading boxes of canned food at a Norwalk post office food drive, he met a man. In his fifties and formerly homeless, the man shared with him the frustration of living on the streets, of searching for a parking lot free of security guards, of learning to look past the leers of judgmental passerby. ‘He said that I was smart, and that I had to stay away from drugs, because they mess with your head and will ruin your life.’

But, truthfully, he dislikes these ‘don’t do drugs’ stories. However much more powerful the stories may be, coming from someone who has endured hardships beyond the ordinary, drugs affect people a lot more in other places than they do here. ‘With a lot of the people I’ve talked to, really small mistakes, or just bad luck, ruin lives.’ And somehow, it is not hard to believe that those same mistakes would not impact people living in suburbia, not to the same degree. ‘I remember this one guy; it was he and his brothers, and his mother. Their family relied on his brother’s income, so when that brother died their family was forced to move from shelter to shelter.’

‘This one stuck in my mind because it was so different. There was this lady, white, maybe fifty, or older. And she had the most amazing story. She owned a farm right outside New York and, at some point, she decided to go to DC to become a political activist for a feminist movement. While she was in DC, whoever was taking care of the farm died, and it was somehow taken over by someone else. So, the only thing she had to her name was taken away, and though she filed lawsuits to take it back, they never could. She just ran out of money and was forced to be homeless.’

There isn’t a person on this earth who doesn’t have a story to tell. The newspapers overflow with these tales, tales that people so often refuse to understand. My own father, most likely the person I would write about in response to a ‘hero’ prompt, is known to say that welfare is a waste of taxpayers’ money and that, ‘if people can’t be bothered to find jobs, they deserve to be homeless.’ Hearing people say similar things just serves as a reminder that, for all our education and supposed knowledge, ignorance is so often overlooked. It is amazing that a fifteen-year old can see past what my father and countless others like him, in their fifties and blinded by their current lifestyle, can’t. Perhaps we aren’t affected as much by drugs, here, but we are afflicted by a different, and perhaps more characteristically human, flaw than pressure. We are afflicted by a lack of understanding and compassion. So many people have forgotten the clichéd Golden Rule. So many people refuse to acknowledge the problems that abound in society and choose instead to ignore them, or act scornfully.

Only when I reach the bottom of my page do I realize that I have been writing, and I look up in time to hear him say, ‘people forget what they want to forget.’ This strikes a chord. My father has gone through so much to get to where he is today. At sixteen he had a job to support his family; at 28 he moved from Santiago, leaving everything behind, and never looked back. He was looking for a place where ‘people are willing to work hard and honestly and advance in life on their own without waiting for the government to solve all their problems.’

I went home to write my essay and ended up looking back on a fifth grade project for which my father wrote his immigration story, and it left me in tears. I had heard it all before, but the sadness emanating from the written words was so apparent that I began to question why he once said, ‘once you leave, you never go back.’ I read about the conditions in Chile and all the problems he had faced, the undying hope he had had for a better life, the reverence with which he spoke about America. I realized how much he misses his home despite the problems, how much he sacrificed because he knew that life would be better here. And I suddenly didn’t want to read any more. I couldn’t understand why, having gone through everything he has, he would ever fail to sympathize with the suffering. I suppose he has forgotten.

‘What if I want to remember?’ I ask.

‘Write it on your face,’ my friend says, and the serious tone lifts slightly. I roll my eyes and he revises.

‘You just have to keep repeating it to yourself. You won’t forget.’

I wonder if other people forget. Reading those incredibly real newspaper articles in comparison to books such as Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle or Rick Bragg’s All Over But the Shoutin’ I wonder how much of the so-called memoirs are fact. Do they really remember their parents’ words to the letter? How much do they need to embellish? What do their editors change before publication? After listening to countless stories about people who’ve experienced so much hardship and not necessarily built incredibly successful lives or written books afterwards, I understand better than ever how lucky I am to live in a place where I can feel more or less secure. The advice I was given was stronger because it was backed by huge amounts of truth. Our society is riddled with problems and so many people are directly affected, and to see a former neighbour turn their back, or as with Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, to see your mother from the window of a car, rummaging through the trash, and to keep silent when you see her or lie to your friends about what she does for a living, is the picture of sadness. I do not ever want to make the mistake of forgetting.

‘The hardest part is that people assume that it’s your fault you are where you are, and that you don’t deserve respect. Circumstances beyond our control led us here.’