Of Cuttlery and Cowards

~~Taken from "The University: A Solace for Scholars and the Academically Scorned" ...
Page 210 of Part 4--Restitutions~~

[Note: This tangent was likey inspired by a very happy memory of my last summer course (which I've mentioned extensively within this blog) when my professor brought his Veggie-matic to class and demonstrated how shoddy it was. I am not sure why I loved that so much.]



The relationship had been a fair-weather fling, and always I’ve thought these modern-loved romances—and specifically when we believe they are something more than such—are an act akin to those ineluctable late-nights when one succumbs to the seductions of an infomercial, peddling some shoddy product that you know you don’t really need yet for some reason purchase, knowing it will never look as-seen-on-TV; but everyone falls prey to the occasional con—those times when we are in a vulnerable state of mind, ever-more exhausted as the sleepless night wears on, and in a moment of weakness we wonder if this time could be different, forgetting that the last time left you with a slicer-and-dicer that did neither and, just like every bad breakup from our past, shiny new knives sell us on the hope that our last purchase was of the only set of dull-edged cutlery on TV and this twelve-piece set is surely the real thing—at some point, it’s safe to say, we’ve all been sold.


These relationships we try are like the late-night things we buy: we know, somewhere in our minds, the real price of $19.95, that shortly after receiving the item in the mail will break or bend or at best be used a few times before it inevitably loses its novelty, but the act of tossing the broken or useless gadget in the garbage would be an admittance of fault—making it impossible to deny the fact that this time was not different and it is never in life as-seen-on-TV—and because denial is so much more pleasant than buyer’s remorse, you won’t immediately throw it away; it’s likely that you will, at first, go to great lengths to make that impulse-buy seem useful, buying potatoes because, otherwise, your new spud-scrubber would seem rather silly. Like a recurrent relationship that becomes worse with each reconciliation, we all have times when we are decidedly diluted, trying in vain to make the slicers slice and the dicers dice until frustration drives us back to cutting-boards and knives. Sometimes we are strong enough to trash our past mistakes, our impulse buys and summer flings; but other times we’d prefer to keep pretending, to keep telling ourselves that the day will come when we’ll need that hand-held electric vegetable peeler, or the celebrity-endorsed rotisserie oven, and this is particularly true if the seller’s pitch was prefaced by but wait there’s more, in which case the item is sure to be so shoddily contrived and utterly useless, keeping it would have to be out of principal or perhaps because it hurts one’s pride to real-ize uselessness in the items we purchase posthaste.
Though the first time we find ourselves stuck with a 32-piece set of carving knives—everything is always a little lackluster once it’s on the other side of the television screen, from behind the glass and glow in narrowing-hours of night nearly anything can seem selcouth, but the splendor stays in television, and though the televised-items backlit in the gray-glow of screen-light will be a familiar kin of what you bought, it will be devoid of the splendor which sold you; in real life these limited-time offers that are able to thrive in a world behind our silver screens are instantly withered when removed, much like it is with wildflowers: if you’ve ever seen a field of them midsummer, flourishing in the place where they naturally belong, they seem far less fragile than they actually are, their deceptively adaptable nature, their strong, sticky stalks and stems blanketing entire acres of land where no one spread a single seed, and the sight of them as they rise to sky, outstretched in-midst a patch-work pallet of their kith, the poppies and marigolds, the assortment of sun-swollen hues painting in its path a spectra of sporadically variant colors, each flower a beaming fan of feather-light petals, and from budding tendrils to the fullest blossom in the season’s lull, always while in growth they’ll wear a vibrant hue, even in the wake of Fall, their unwavering luster has yet to yield to the passing weeks , most of the plants retaining the loveliness of spring throughout the warm-weathered months until slowly the summer-lush start to wane as gradually the earth becomes again winter-stark and barren, bewithered by an early autumn chill. But if you pluck a flower from the ground, severing its embrace with soil and sun, the plant will droop with grief, falling instantly insipid—dull where once it wept with light—and though it bears a likeness to the flower it was while enrooted with the ground, it—like the products we’re peddled on late-night TV—will never have again that quality that compelled you to pluck it—or to purchase it, as it were—thus we learn that flowers are lovely but best left where they grow, and equally is it so for an infomercial’s offerings, the veggie-matics and foreman grills like wilted wildflowers upon arrival at our door, far from the world behind the box and screen, a place aglow in an electronic-blue haze wherein even the most cheap and unnecessary contraption can be enticing, spellbound in perfectly pixilated pictures, slowly etching away at our better judgment as the images and mantras cycle repetitively, playing in hypnotic loops throughout the night.



When we do buy something useless, it’s hard to admit it to ourselves. In an effort to avoid doing so, we’ll hang on to these items for a while, keep them for a day never to come; out of sight and mind they’ll remain, banished to that drawer for the miscellaneous and misplaced—the actual location of Lost—the items within, an assortment of things to be forgotten, only found when you’re looking for something else, everything inside leaving only in mind a vague impression of having just-seen-it somewhere, but never will you remember exactly where, the item which you seek is surely to be found only when you no longer have need for it, and if we were to say there’s a place where things find themselves when we lose them, a definitive locale, acting like a cast-net adrift in the sea among many schools of swimming fish, this drawer, a place which captures the things that swim astray from that which we use every day, a mesh of things in the dark recesses of one’s home—lost in some place never looked, under a bed or in a box or a hollowed wall behind the cupboards. But always when searching for something useless I go to that drawer in the kitchen—and everyone I’m sure has such a place: a place meant for things without meaning, or the things we keep just-in-case—a small flashlight or a needle-and-thread, faded receipts with ghost-blue ink and wallet-worn business cards from strangers (a social exchange like handshakes you have to keep); it’s a strange place that seems to vanish from existence as soon as something is stowed away within, and even our awareness of what lies garbled inside seems a little less concrete while unopened and unseen, certainly more so than other places we keep things, unlike a chest of drawers where we keep our linens which never seems out of reach; when we get cold feet we know where our socks can be found, that chest of drawers never becoming a void in physical space, only vaguely real in mind like the items in a junk drawer where nothing lost is found; what is found—never lost.



If Lost were a tangible place it would certainly be the household junk drawer where useless things go to die, and, like the refrigerator light, it may or may not still be there after we close it off and walk away. Therein exists a whole farrago of these faddish contraptions—turkey basters and meats thermometers, juicers that don’t juice—along with take-out menus and junk mail, ambiguous parts and pieces that don’t belong to anything, renegade keys belonging to old doors with new locks, spare change…everything you can never find…all of this a jumble of junk in-waiting—a storage for those things in limbo, each in a state somewhere between necessity and trash. And there too is every single man I’ve ever wished I never loved.



~Rest in Peace, dear tangent~

xoxo

The Words that Won Me the World

In keeping with the theme of the present in my life--given that I have recently been accepted to the school of my dreams, Sarah Lawrence in New York for their MFA Creative Nonfiction Writing program--I have decided to post the personal statement responces I sent to them for my application. Though it isn't exaclty keeping with the primary purpose of this blog (namely to act as a recepticle for all the pages-upon-pages of prose that have no place in my memoir, but equally are not flawed so much that they deserve death-by-deletion) I feel that, since I posted such a long aside when I was in the process of writing (or trying to write) these personal statements for Sarah Lawrence, I ought to post the final result...just in-case, you know, someday someone actually stumbles upon this blog and has the patience or personal masochistic-itch to read any length of this webpage I've thrashed my life upon.

So here are the two documents I sent them (not including the excerpts from my memoir, of course--the same memoir from which I take these tangenital passages typed as fast as they are thereafter hated, and then left for dead here on the Delenda.

I will add these personal statements, then, for the continuity of the book--or blog, as it were--which no one shall read. I take some solace and, admittedly, some sadness in this thought. Also I feel that, because I wanted Sarah Lawrence so desperatly, I achieved while writing these statments, something a great deal more profound than just something entrance-worthy: in my desperate plea, I found the most utter sincerity...and in that sincerity I found...the most honest me. Myself mirrored in prose therein more naked than I could have ever willed myself to be by any other means--sloughed from me was all the parlor-trickery, and what remained was something so starkly true (something which I only realized in hindsight) that I came to know myself because of it--learning myself by means of my own biography (the irony is odd in itself, I think.)
It's the kind of shrill child-like cry that reads like the prose-brethren of a kneeling man pleaing for his life....though do not mistake Sarah Lawrence for some villian....oh so inherently the opposite is true...I was begging for a blessing I have yet to deserve. But I will make myself worthy in time, because I love it so, if by no other merit than that.

I'll desist no further.
___________________________________________________________________
Personal Statement Responses
“Why do you want to attend Graduate School?”
& “Why do you want to attend Sarah Lawrence?”

The writing samples I am including with my application are from a memoir I wrote while in my last semester of college—the memoir details my experiences throughout a lifetime of formal education, and was written as my creative thesis for a course that did not require any such laborious-commitment, being that it was only a five-week summer course in expository writing; and this class for which my memoir was composed was only asking for, at that time, a seven page paper on Emerson and Auden. Though I never intended it, these chronicles were quickly engorged with all the aspects of my education—records of school and scholars and of feeling sick and shamed—and it fast became a beast—my memoir as it is today, epic to say the least, has now doubled in length. But given that my mind had a decade decayed I surely suffered a writer’s atrophied; albeit at times but a tantivy transcription of the wild rantings of a madman, my memoir was at least at-length, all of which I wrote in the span of a few weeks, and the better measure of which I, in truth, avidly arranged during a few long-feverous nights, which crept without cessation into the subsequent sun-stretch that elongates until night again, all the course of the day.
Of this monstrous memoir, my best work therein—my most coherent, strangely, and my most profound, not surprisingly—were willingly written in long, lucid nights, sleepless, inspired, and given way to compulsive bouts of preoccupation with prose, instead of—as many tend to write—in sporadic sittings for short periods of time. Page upon page passed by as I wrote into the nights of that blissful summer, nearly 100 were written over the course of several straight-25-hour stints, the muse that wakes me from the slumber-hush hours and rouses me till I spend long, lucubrations in the lull of night, nothing I’d rather do than stay up and write. My professor for that class was the most paramount influence on my life as a student, a writer, and significantly-so as a person; he is responsible for my reawakening to my most essential selfhood: myself as I was in youth, myself as I hid for years, myself as a writer. I was so very fortunate that, at the very end of my college career, at the end of four long years of waiting for some scholarly guidance, the fates tired of toying with me, and sent me some brief reprieve—and, of Professor Armintor’s class—not only was it a blessing to find an educator left in the academic world who wished only to quiet the censor of the young, dreamy mind, but equally I am grateful that he allowed for me to compose such a ridiculous and squandering self-indulgence as most surely my memoir is and was. He reframed his course to suite my needs and that was something I had almost given up on, and now for which I find myself in tireless quest.
All of that was to confess but a shamefully simple thing: I, the girl who took a prompt for a 7-page paper on Emerson and decided, out of sheer lunacy and love-of-words, out of a vicious case of logorrhea and long lucid nights, to instead—write over 120 pages for that 5 week class—most over the course of a few spellbound, word-struck nights, soul aglow in gossamer computer-screen light; yes, I, this very girl who boasts such things, must lamentably admit that I have had the most taxing time attempting to write a single word in response to the personal-statement question your applications prompt. Specifically it was the question “Why do you wish to attend graduate school?” which proved an obstinate and unwavering obstruction to the voice which usually speaks so freely, like a siren to the mind she sings to me the verse and line I plant in prose; still though, I know the love of words can be a wicked affliction, casting sentence clauses like sailors to the rocks embraced beneath the still insipid sea, the sea on which in-mind I drift always, listlessly. But I cannot seem to birth a even but a word of-late unless I’m babbling on about nothing at all—as, to my embarrassment, I am doing now, and just as I have done on so many countless drafts before, though I have never once needed to draft heretofore!
So after many discarded drafts I set myself to thought and pandered to my own heart for some fragment of insight into why this application quite literally petrifies me when I try to write—not in anxiety, nor in fright, but by some unseen tether which has shackled me to these perpetual deletions and arrest of thought, always some flux of page from pedantic, passive-voiced bombast to the anemic bare-cast page-of-white. So to-now I've had various beginnings and no endings, and then the opposite of the two, but nothing near completion has even begun to stir within me, despite many a day and night dawned-and-lost, hours mount as I toil these words, the waning crescent time leaving me plagued with self-deprecating worry, too much so to write. But when first I forced myself to lay-rest to this silly jeremiad kept on tip-of-tongue, only then was I clearly able to discern why in-fact I can always write so much about absolutely everything, but about the one thing I want more than anything in the world, I cannot seem to muster even a single word.
It struck me quite suddenly, as though upon a midnight notion, that perhaps I should try instead to approach this problem from the hind and write the essay concerning why I wish to attend Sarah Lawrence first, instead of writing them as they were assigned—the first prompt being to give an autobiography, and then to write of your personal motivation to attend graduate school in-general, not specifically to the graduate school of Sarah Lawrence, for which the second statement had been denoted to comprise. I felt a banished burden immediately upon offering myself this strange solution, which I didn’t really think would make much headway in this dream-draught battle with my oddly-unyielding will. Stranger still is that I was suddenly, at this thought, again the swelling sea, all my prose singing again from the depths of mind and memory. Then I felt like myself again, back in lock-step tandem with my imagination; and alas I was writing again, no sooner did I think of Sarah Lawrence in particular--which has, for some time now, been my first, last and only choice in graduate schools. This is why I could not write of just some any-place, some generic stock-writ academy with their football teams, their stadium seating, everyone in apathy until the big game—I shudder at even the best of these. I cannot write you a personal statement expressing why I wish to go to graduate school in-general, because I wouldn’t wish this on any artist or fine-mind. The university is a place of few true scholars or students, so many sleepwalkers in formal-stagnation, or else they are sycophants and serpents who serve only the faceless bureaucratic force. I am not a number, nor but a name on a role; I am not one in a row of many, in a classroom with seats roof to floor; I am not a well-trained brute, nor a machine who enjoys the academic regurgitation of cogs-to-wheel they call prose. But of all these sad-facets by which I suffer in my search for the promised-kind of education, most of all it’s the scholars I seek, like the one I briefly found in the midst of the utterly unlike-him, a shepherd in a den of wolves.
I want for a mentorship like what I had before; when a serendipitous summer course befell me in great fortune, the wakes of my ending academic career, when I found myself with this great solace from a scholar who’s kind of mind I shared. And to think nearly instead, a drill course on Nietzsche, changing my enrollment but the night before; and it was the saddest thing of all, truly—of all my days—to leave that class, to part with the unchanged summer of that room, to know for this I waited four years and got but that in weeks, and to weep and thank in this moment the same, grateful for but a moment of real guidance, for being returned to myself, restored, for the heart-trade hours of Charles Ives for the life of me I can’t recreate, for the words and books and memories which to a hungry soul first-feed, then shall fully-satiate. It came upon the lunar-spell a winter rides, riding across my summer in the light, when the last days witness the craven twilight colors suspend everything in gray; I knew summer was of shorter months, of warmer days and the heat-wave haze that I scarcely noticed come and pass, and if I had only seen such things, I could have—I think—better prepared for the day that was my last; the mentor whom but-before I was someone merely in-wait to be me -- a time when, too afraid to write again, not so much as a grocery list would leave my pen -- and he restored me to myself in but a few days, mere moments out of the four-year war and early winter, sheltered, away from the cold and complacency contagion that spreads with the heat of mythic bible plagues until all the students seemed consumed, and by some greater germ have so many professors also fallen ill, the life-robbing leech of lethargy consuming the lot of them, and what few are left suffer more—the worst fate befalling our academies, striking like-dead the deans and dons and all the others that drain the alma mater—in truth you are the pestilent disease—though not the whole of you can be condemned, as surely a sorrowed few are left for whom such a gruesome fate has been avoided or passed over; but for the most, the most I’ve known, the university is a wicked beast of many disjoint arms and limbs, not one knows what the neighbor is doing and not a one will be privy to the passing files and forms, no one except the head himself, but so high in rank he cannot see the limbs from sky and so as such he is blind-struck to it all -- and thus, the rabid brute, our bureaucracy, is born; this is the source of my scorn.
But my memoir, entitled “The University: A Solace for Scholars and the Academically Scorned” is not some fantastical feat of dreams; With the vividness of present-day I remember clearly, that even in the most aching hours back then, when academic abusers hung the gallows with all the last to remain awake, I was by one professor pardoned, and thus I saw no sign of hate or haste; for I was being safeguarded somewhere near, in a classroom of but a few friend-won students -- havened by the scholar who keeps the lucid safe. But so many slept and wept outside of this summer-spell place of books and words, though in memory and mind I know the summer as being one of placid peace, of my blessed teacher, fostering between himself and us an unwavering devotion stand-to-last for years and years—and this ever-rare professor nurtured also, a flourishing fellowship between a farrago of peers, and the days were sweetened by this.
But in the end I’ll most remember that this professor was the one who returned my words, forever silenced my censoring fears ... and of the songs that no one hears—the songs of the last day of summer, when we all listened to Ives with ashen-mourner’s fallen eyes and of, of course, those quixotic songs, only sounding sweet for you and I and a precious few -- you, and I the last to hear Charles Ives cry.
Though graduate school is something I never questioned, just always knew—I was going, even as a child I understood the value of higher education, for the soul and mind and the world itself, and beyond that I hold but a passing interest—for degrees and dons and regal robes, for recognition, reputation, and laughably less so for the trite and common catalyst that drives so many sleep-fallen children to the lap of our ever-generic schools, each just lumber mills for the human-sort, or a processing plant for meats and so forth, they just make identical ground chuck patties, in life, college lends them to be shipped for selling in a store of a white-collar sort. This is not for me, as I am an avid lover of words and dreams and lovely things and I’m always happy and enthralled, but the university is a place meant for apathy, and compliant lethargy is your only hope. I miss that place I had in Professor Armintor’s class, and every day I feel it grow in mind, a little less vivid, more and more robbed by time. There, I was the writer I remembered in my award-winning youth, when I knew since the tender age of three that the inner most essence of me was always the same: a writer. But in a decade of rebellion from my imagination, wanting the typical-teenage things, none of which was writing, and I’d waste years with the other future lean-ground-beef, the trivial and forgotten landscapes of friends and parties none as crystalline as those outcast years from age six to nine, and clear-still are all the lost hours, stolen nights with school at dawn await, happily alive in some childish brilliant writing.
I worried once that I was too spirited for the universities of our modern age—not because of the authorities in classrooms, as it is they to whom I happily obey, but mostly it is those of whom I’ll never see, but wallowing in their wicked forms and the alma mater misery, they will never suffer scorn, behind glass pane doors, for they are the almighty university. Maybe I’ll get to see their secretary. But there was that one class—and of course it was my last—wherein my inner-muse was given the freedom to fly and the room to fall, and all the while I flourished while fed by the dreams of minds like me, and of my wise, wonderful professor—he has the gratitude of so many, and will never soon flee from memory.
If there can be just one solace-of-a-scholar among all the others lost to treachery, then so too am I right in hoping there is an entire academy like he and me! And I am veiled again in a sheltered-summer kind of peace when I dream of this new place; I feel it as soon as I began to muse upon your meadow-tucked manners, the blanket-clad sweep of dew-green grass where atop yearning minds lunch and nap, while others laugh and read, the sidewalks of Sarah Lawrence a concrete river-weave that roams the stretch of sun-loved campus, bustling scholars and their brilliant pupils, happy among like-minds, as much to their relief, Sarah Lawrence has bestowed upon the brilliant, an academic Eden of shared reprieve. I have studied with passion, suffered in silence, and succeeded in-spite of all the rest, and when it comes to the sacred scholars, I want nothing more than to be with them among the best; Sarah Lawrence is my scholastic soul-mate; the only place where I belong; and I cannot go a lifetime wanting, for the warmth of a summer gone.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Applications Biography:

An Autobiographical Musing
On My Life, Thus Far.

My name is Erin Emily Wheeler and I am twenty three years old.
I was born near Tyler, Texas during the muggy southern winters that annually offer brief amnesty to the arid land beneath unyielding sun. Though I was very young when I moved away, the very name of my birth place calls to mind the most vivid of my earliest memories: of being hot, of red wind from upturned soil, of how the entire world seemed made of scarlet mud. At the age of six I moved with my family to a more hospitable part of Texas—to Dallas—and I have stayed in the surrounding area ever since. Ironically, my favorite color is red, and so too is everything I own; I wonder if I have not unconsciously furnished my apartment to resemble the same rust-washed landscape of my birthplace?
I was born to a brilliant scientist and a survivor of World War II—the former being my father and the latter, my mother—and before me they conceived three other children, one of whom is still alive today. My parents were married when my mother was sixteen and my father was eighteen, and two years later they had a son—my brother—whom I’ll never meet. He died long before I was born, tragically, in a scuba diving accident when he was only eighteen. Soon after the death of my brother my parents suffered the loss of another child; a daughter they named Christina, who died hours after birth from an ill-formed heart. For years my siblings’ deaths has festered silently inside my mother and father and, as a river in time will carve a canyon from a flatland, so too did sadness slowly shape my parents, fashioning them into the grief-born people I’ve always known. My mother is a cynic who loves most to sleep and my father is shy and silent, alive in his mind perhaps, but socially withdrawn. Though I often feel like I was born to be their Band-Aid, still, my childhood was nothing but bliss, and my parents—endlessly self-sacrificing and always lavishing me with love, encouragement, and support. I am quite fortunate in that way.
My only living sibling—my older sister Dea—is eighteen years my senior and a mother of two. I have been an aunt since the age of three; my sister’s son is just now sixteen and her daughter, my niece, is only three years younger than I am, and having just had her first child, I am now a great-aunt—though I hate this title, as it makes me think of wealthy old women who drink tea from tiny porcelain cups and have a house full of delicate things I’m not allowed to touch. My niece and nephew have always been like siblings to me, but my actual sister—somehow more estranged. Though I love her dearly, she is my absolute antithesis. Even my parents wonder how two such essentially-opposing children could be born of the same two parents, though I’ve always thought genetic markers were the most conceivable things we shared.
Growing up, my mother and father repeated their mantras which my sister and I would come to identify with forever, always saying to us that I am “the smart one” and she is “the sweet one”; neither of these titles were entirely desirable, as having one attribute seemed to denote the absence of the other. To some degree I suppose these titles are befitting to us—my sister is the epitome of sweet and has a countenance to match; she wears her southern smile as faithfully as others wear clothes, and she would very much seem naked without it. Though we are both Jewish, as is our mother, I am the only one in the family to have embraced Judaism as a religion and more than just a cultural-heritage, whereas my sister, over the years of small-town life, fell prey to backwoods fears of fire and brimstone, and soon became a religious-zealot. While Dea is the one who brings apple pies to family dinners, I’m the one who ends up standing on a chair before desert, raving like a madman, loud and livid and usually ignored, in sudden hysterics over something my sister has said, yelling down at her as she smiles vacantly from her seat, half-listening to me as she passes my mother the dinner rolls, and in a fit I’ll argue my case—fork probably still in hand—ranting about the war-profiteers my family elected or the illogical fallacies inherent in a religious view that dates the earth as younger than the dinosaurs. It’s not a stretch to imagine why I wasn’t called “the sweet one,” but I’m fortunate to have family who loves me soap-box and all.
My father is my hero—especially in his academic achievements, and I grew up around education as a central part of one’s life, some of my earliest and fondest memories being of the books my father would leave laying around while writing his dissertation for his PhD in Artificial Intelligence—and even now, no longer a child, I still really believe he knows everything. In fact, it is because of his comprehensive genius that I was even born—were it not for his brilliant mind, certainly I wouldn’t be here. Allow me to explain: after the grief of losing two children, my mother had no intention of bringing any others into the world, but my father desperately wanted a child upon whom he could impart all the knowledge and wisdom that only comes with older age—though they still had my sister, she favored my mother more, and my father likes to say “in Erin I found my pupil, my little scientist”. Feeling the urgency of my 40 year old mother’s waning window for safe-reproduction, my father—the brilliant scientist—microwaved her birth control pills inside the very thin foil of a Twinkie wrapper, thereby altering them into mere placebos. Though the microwave didn’t make it, I certainly did; turns out those birth control pills have a weak carbon bond—and thus, here I am—my father’s “little scientist”, a product of Twinkies and a microwave, or as my mother likes to say in her half-facetious half-embittered tone “a product of too much champagne is more like it!”
I am a first-generation American, my mother having been born to my grandmother, a famed dancer for one of Europe’s finest ballet companies, in Karlstrue, Germany just before World War II. All was well until the war, and though the ballet company offered my Jewish grandmother and her young daughter protection for a short while, it wasn’t long before all the Jews were being hunted by the Nazi regime and eventually even the most prominent German citizens were powerless against their mounting force. My grandmother and my eight year old mother were helped by a good-hearted German—a friend from the ballet company—who hid them beneath their floor boards for some unthinkable amount of time. My grandmother never sought love again, having lost her first and last to the Polish camps, and so she settled for the next best thing: an American soldier who offered her and my young mother refuge in the United States in exchange for marriage. Luckily for my mother, she married a man who would be nothing less than the finest husband and father, and repressed memories of her mother’s marriage sometimes surface in her mind and serve as a bittersweet reminder of this. . She is the strongest woman I’ve ever known, and her often ill-fated life is one which she has—all things considered—endured and enjoyed, and that is the kind of unwavering will and valor I hope to make my own.
This is my heritage, the life from which I came.
In my life, I’ve seen much of the world; an incessant restlessness drives this desire in me to travel far and frequently. A plaguing anxiety befalls me when I sit still for extended bouts of time, when I stagnate in life or loom too long in one place, and I’m not sure what caused me to be this way. Perhaps it was the fear of ending up like one of those east Texas families I remember from youth, those families of people who always stayed contently put, three generations or more coming and going without one of them straying past state lines. The secret to happiness, I soon decided, was perspective: a little perspective makes the worst of times seem a gift worth feeling grateful for. I would immediately make plans to visit some forsaken part of the world where such concerns would be a blessing, and this would give me a real sense of happiness that even the most dire of times couldn’t soon shake.
When I was sixteen I backpacked Thailand with a boyfriend and, just the two of us, we spent over a month making our way across the country side, living on coconuts and sticky-rice, and when he favored a length of time in Bangkok, I decided to make my way up North to see the temples. It was there I’d find a place I could stay a while, studying Buddhism and Eastern philosophy with the monks in the mountains of Chaing Mai. The Northern forests of Thailand and the temples therein havened by tree-hidden hillsides were a refuge for me, and there I found the kind of inner-lull I have long since lost but still remember, the spellbound smile and else-where eyes I wore in photographs taken at the temples, pictures of me in the gardens with flecks of gold leaf ornamenting my brow and orchids blooming around my face, each little blossom woven through strands of hair, but it is the strangeness of my stare that draws me to these photographs time and time again, each an image of me with this beautiful look of vacancy, like someone who’s roused from slumber too soon, and it’s a face that hardly looks my own. If I could recreate that stillness of mind and steadiness of heart here at home, I’d have nothing about which to write, and I’d take passion over peace any day—so, in that way, I suppose my neuroses suits me fine.
I spent three long months in Israel attending seminary where I went to learn “what it means to be a Jew,” just as my grandmother had asked me to do in her last, dying breath, where she had said, “if we forget who we are, the Nazi’s have won.” While living in Israel was the most difficult time of my life, it has been an experience I wouldn’t for the world think to trade. I wasn’t sent with much money, because the seminary in which I had enrolled was supposed to pay for nearly everything I might need—three meals a day, room-and-board, even bus fair and phone cards. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in seminary but a few weeks before a malicious rumor was spread that I wasn’t really Jewish—a very serious matter to the ultra-orthodox Jews, as you are only considered a Jew if your mother is born Jewish, as it is a matriarchal religion—and when the seminary confronted me, I of course refuted these absurd claims, but had nothing with which to prove it. Every document affirming someone’s Jewish bloodline was burned by synagogues during the war as, in Germany especially, it was not safe to keep such records. I decided not to tell my parents I had been thrown onto the streets by the school paid to shelter and safeguard me—I knew they wouldn’t sleep until they had forced me home. I certainly got plenty of perspective, more than I ever hoped to have. I lived in a free youth hostel for Jewish girls, which was located in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem, meaning that the building itself was 5,000 years old (as old as time, if my sister were dating it) and as such, it was without the basic comforts to which I was so accustom—no running water, no air-conditioning, just two floors of crowded rooms, rod-iron cots stacked from floor to ceiling with those awful one-inch foam mattresses and musty old quilts, sewn from an array of sad things—donated clothes, old army uniforms, even their used parachutes. But the hostile provided a one-way bus fair to a neighboring suburb called Ramat Eshkol, and there I had heard of a more liberal seminary which offered classes in orthodox living but in a less judgmental environment. So, five days a week I would wake up early, visit the Western Wall before sunrise and say the morning prayers with haste, as I almost always missed the bus that came just after dawn. If I missed the bus, I was stuck in the Old City with nothing to do but sweat for twelve hours until the hostel opened up again—it was a free place to sleep, so no one could complain when they forced us out on the streets, remaining closed from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, except on the Sabbath when we were allowed to come in a little early. I’d opt to walk through the constant inferno that is the Israeli summer, all seven and half miles, driven by my desire to learn and uphold my promise to my grandmother. Lovely, strange things happened during those days in the Old City, but they were always so hard. I watched my friends from seminary pass me on the busses in route to Jerusalem, watched them peer out the window, watched them eat their sandwiches, and I will never forget what it’s really like to be hungry. When that crazed feeling of being sick with starvation finally passes, when over the days it dulls to a foggy stupor, only a vague ache, familiar but unplaceable, like a name that slips you mind. American tourists would come to the Old City—they were so much louder than everyone else, had they always been this way?—and they would sit outside on the sidewalk terraces of the bagel bakeries and schwarma shops near the Rova (the city square), and after they ordered twice the food they needed, they’d waddle off like ripe gourds, leaving on their plates enough to sustain me for the week. Eventually, I found myself sneaking off with their leftovers, which I would share—in times of plenty—with a homeless cat that lived in my favorite garden nook, and in exchange for sharing his hidden space, beneath the city where the Roman ruins have been made into a mall, I would bring him food when I had enough, and together we’d sit and watch the people—the tourists with shopping bags hanging from their arms like a coat rack at a Christmas party and their hands juggling an array of western comforts I’d forgotten—cell phones, digital cameras, mp3 players; and others that passed were soldiers, the men and women with Uzi’s strapped to their backs, their guns duck taped—gifts from the US, relics of World War II—and each of them wearing a tired green uniform which I always thought was a strange color choice for camouflage in the yellow Israeli desert; then there were the rabbis and their twelve children, averting their eyes so as not to see me, not to look upon a woman that wasn’t their wife, and that—as silly as it is—never stopped hurting my feelings; and also there were the Armenians, often seen walking frantically to and fro between the markets and the Arab Shook, stumbling along, walking while peering down at their feet from over the top of the large wooden crates they carried, each filled to the brim with fiery bell peppers and limbs of plump olives, and these were the sites that inspired the pangs of hunger, and they were the forbidden fruits from which I averted my eyes, the cat and I sharing a stolen bagel as all the fresh produce was carried away, transported back and forth from the market place to the little cafes where tourists would eat them with their falafel and lamb schwarma, and hopefully leave behind as scraps.
In search of lasting perspective and to quell the stirring sense of adventure within, I continued my travels—always alone or with only a single friend, and never on tours or in organized groups. For the most part, I backpacked—there’s an odd sense of comfort in the notion that everything you own and need is on your back, and you can just pick-up and go anywhere—and usually I stayed in hostels and cheap motels. I backpacked Europe with a friend, and for a month we roamed from country to country, sleeping on trains and taking the Eurail to all the distant places we’d been highlighting in travel books for weeks.
Of my travels, my other adventures and travails, I have always taken great pleasure in all such experiences, which somehow bring about a great spring of inspiration from which I can draw all of life’s sacred details, otherwise forsaken, forgotten, and in an attempt to preserve passing moments—about such times, I write. And being that my self-as-a-writer is the most essential characteristic by which I am self-defined, I can never be any less than utterly grateful for every day that brings me something new to ponder and record.

--Tangent taken from Page 154 of my Memoir. I haven't quite decided whether or not I am going to remove it completely, or if I'll instead just find some more appropriate place to insert it. I think a lot of it is repetitive, and most of it--as usual--overblown and archaic in description. It occured to me today that it is not a normal thing for a writer to never edit their work, to never draft, to hardly do more than run a spell-check. I write quickly and almost from beyond myself, and I rarely edit, and I never draft. This makes for a lot of mistakes, a lot of jumbled prose, but it also makes for something more raw and real, I think. When I "free-write" I sound positively insane, but when I consiously control the thoughts that swarm from mind to page, I am able to produce something lucid enough that it needs almost no-editing to stand as what I'm trying to get it to be: Me.

From
"The University"
"Part 3: Reclusions"


Machiavelli and the fight for what was rightfully mine were like the first tentative spark in the tender of who I once was; I wouldn’t have predicted the dramatic effects of my budding disillusionment, but this bundle of tender-wood, the cold ashen remains of what once burned with passion, would soon ignite again under the mentorship of a like-mind (though our minds seem akin, mine is surely but a fraction of his, my abilities never to catch the shadow of his brilliance as I trail behind his lead) and someday, again, my obsession with the written word would be incited and stirred to rising flames—the same flames I remembered kindling in my youth, when my prose was always effortlessly aglow with an authentic voice, even though it was little more than awful as a narrative—and this fire, which one professor would evoke from mere embers, nursing the needs of all things analogous to fire: giving me the room to breathe, to be wrong and erratic, in my writing and in school, to encourage me to silence my censor and ramble until something familiar and my own appears, emerging from the recesses of my dream-cast mind, my innate imagination returning to my work like an old brown bear roused by the coming Spring, seduced by season’s change to leave his cave; like the snow-bound bear my prose hibernated within me while the world outside was barren and fruitless. At first my writing was noticeably worn by the years of lethargy and, particularly with my first endeavors, for a while my words were this way—like something still somnolent from seasons spent asleep, visibly atrophic in both thought and execution, but eventually it all became something more: after many pages devoted to my natural narrative tendencies—writing like a madman rants—something real showed up, my imagination awoke from a sleepy-state of self-censorship; although, by this time, an entire decade had come and gone in the absence of real inspiration. So even if my current and still somewhat-pathetic excuse for poetry and prose is not yet a thing of beauty, it is nonetheless the most honest thing that’s ever come of me—so much so that I find myself peering into the pages I write as though they were a mirror made of my own words, and I have come to use my writing as a way of seeing myself clearly. But after the four-year war, at least I can wear my wounds with pride and quell the nightmares that speak of war with a kind of consolation—the notion that I am somehow better because.
As of now, I am able to stand aside from my former self and say I have been altered from my previous state to one I feel is more a-fit to me; the comforting cliché whispered in despair like country-church prayers, the hypnotic mantra I keep repeating, saying again and again to myself that by the triumphs and tragedies alike I am restored—but I know that, though the tragic times did change me, the parts of me that I know as myself were lost and forgotten until my last college course, and I would not know myself, nor would I even enjoy being the person who I was if I were to have remained that way and were as such still the same today—I remember girl as someone else entirely, like an old friend I used to know quite well but lost touch with her in time. That person who was so essentially antithetical to myself as I am in-truth would surely still be the cloak that veiled in-rigor-and-rhetoric the imaginative musings of my sleepy-soul, keeping it bound to bed-time journaling and bombastic critical reports, robbing my college years of any real artistic endeavor or self-expression, and this would certainly still be the same if it were not for one force acting upon the odd undulations of my obsessive and repressive tendencies—it was not by tragedy or even by victory that I was restored to a place of passion and it was not because I was fated to have a life trying enough to merit my telling about it that I always have a memoir in mind, but it is instead because of my last professor that I have the will and words to write at all, and equally it is because of this professor that I am a person I like to look at in my pages of mirrored self-image.
Further still, it was this last professor who gave me the permission I required to return to who I once was, and at the same time, made me into someone I’d always wanted to be—namely, a free and fearless conductor for a highly-charged and churning web of thoughts forever funneling above my conscious mind. Equally, it was he who first unearthed the writer within me, something innate to my very essence which in youth I had decided to burry alive, and there beneath my academic analyses and the day-dreams that numbed me from the pain of this drudgery, dulled the ache from a droning world, and within my well-ordered mind there laid a stirring within the grave, something still awake in the recesses six feet under my outward self, and though it was entombed beneath the layers of soil, each a passing year and another layer under mounds of monotony above it, still how quickly he shock the soil from the sleeping side of mind that loves to write as though no one will read it, and that corpse of a past-self quickly became the most active aspect of my inner-self, ruling the reasons for my every want and will.
More than merely coax my muse from the grave, this professor revived my writing and imaginative mind in-full, and in a matter of mere weeks. I never intended to write creatively again, and I had come to regard the ghostly aberrations of my forgotten self as a part of living a scholarly lifestyle, meriting a pat-on-the-back for every day I didn’t give into my imaginative tendencies, and when the process of smothering the breathe of my muse had all but silenced my will to write, it was a kind of silence inside my mind that I once heard described of the fallen house of Usher; the act of burying a part of myself beneath my active mind akin to the story of Roderick Usher, whom as I earlier discussed, buried his sister Madeline beneath their house while she still clung to the last of lingering life and the physical world, and because of her purely of-the-flesh existence (essentially, in a vegetative state) Roderick soon finds her to be little more than a pestilent reminder of the last of the dream-hindering tithes still binding him to his stake in the tangible realm and, as his twin sister—who was all present in body and absent entirely in mind, the antithesis thereby of Roderick—was the flesh-and-blood chains which shackled him to the world he longed to leave for his own mind, and as long as she lived, her very presence in the physical-realm would keep him from fully immersing into his intellect, her only existence linked to the very part of himself he so desperately sought to amputate, the genetic likeness of his antithetical sibling was the last thing still tethering him to the tangible, and so he decided to do with his sister as I did with my imagination during the peak of my academic obsession, physical depravation, and utter reclusion from the waking-world; equally there was another time during my college years when I performed this ceremonious burial of some part of myself, banishing it to the dirt and darkness in the forgotten underworld of my imagination: it was in my profound reclusive withdraw into my mind most primarily that I began to daily dig a deep hole inside myself, eventually it would become the plummeting gravesite to cradle my own body in soil, burry the demands of my flesh, over-turn the earth upon my physical needs whenever they would break my focus on whatever I was so intensely reading, writing or otherwise studying
This was not at all unlike the tale of how Roderick buried Madeline, as my perfectionist inclination prematurely placed my imagination in its untimely grave, both my muse and my physical attachment buried under earth where it remained through my college years, affixed beneath the surface side by side just under the house of my conscious mind, just as Roderick had buried Madeline, underground deep beneath the soil upon which the Usher house sat in a dilapidated repose, six feet or so below, somewhere not too deep and not too shallow, buried between layering soils and sediments somewhere just below dusty surface where immediate-memory grows and just above the lower depths where everything tends fade until forgotten, and in this hallowed crevice beneath the house-of-active-thought, therein I left the best part of me to rot in solitude, entombed to draw the last breath of life from within a ground-gripped coffin, my muse laid to rest before its time because I was taught to preserve ambiguity in academic essays at all costs, my narrative voice hush-fallen by my own hand, an unthinkable span time wasted on rigor and recitation, all the while the nagging call from that coffin-cast part of myself dissipating until it haunts only in sleep, whispering the words and phrase I never wrote, writing the stories I was too busy being scholarly to tell, so much of myself lost or maimed because a syllabus required it of me, and now I mourn my mechanical compliance with the requests of a jaded instructor; to quickly did I destroy anything uniquely my own in hopes of winning their favor in grade-point or praise.
In a matter of weeks my professor uncovered what I had long since left for dead, and while my muse survived to see beyond its internal grave, it was still as useless as a pile of old bones unless I could silence the voice within me screaming to stay true to scholarly style and not my own indulgences. My professor was quick to quiet my inner-censor, giving me permission to write whatever foremost came to heart and hand—without stopping to structure it properly, or to ask myself if that extra adjective really serves a vital function, or if a comma is extraneous, or whether or not I am using too many em-dashes—and from this honest, ugly, unbridled sloughing of imagination came hundreds of problem-wrought pages: countless lines left in fits and twists of strange punctuation, the arrangement of it all amounting to, at most, a filibusterous farrago of functionless metaphors—each like a labored breathe between the rushing tides of thought and text—the words huddling between punctuation and ordering themselves into tantivy tangles of love-worn alliteratives and fragmented phrase, many orphaned and unfinished, left to fend for themselves; so much of my work is filled with these fledgling clauses, each struggling to survive among the snarls and snares of shifting thought.
Still, even in the worst of my work, when I am really feeling self-indulgent, my tendency towards repetitive, long-winded digressions and heavily subordinated, clause-laden sentences are still a thing far greater than well-written rote; what could be more distasteful to eye and ear than my censored expositories—always I find that when I write for someone to read me, these sad, Sisyphean attempts to please an audience will prove about as fruitful as those aimed to earn the favor of the academy; both so fickle and unforgiving, especially when they read your work, as with regard to a audience and academy alike, they daily read with a growing disinterest and, when they do review you’re the product of your passions, even just a few pages of it, it is always met with the same cyclical series of sighs and scowls, and their source of displeasure is undeniably your foolish musings, just an unruly cluster of words like the fingerprints of a feral mind, this nonsense which you’ve been peddling to them as something functional and informative, and all that can be said for this is that the world would surely be lost without both the Zinsser’s and the Emerson’s among us: either our world would fall by way of the former—losing itself in frivolous fact and function—or else it would falter from the latter, and alas, our fangled world would be infinitely lost in a fool’s fanciful fadaise. For most critics and the perpetually unimpressed of their sort, nothing will satiate their hunger for something they haven’t yet heard, and when they read, they thusly read as so: first their focus is so festinate, then fastidious when they begin finding flaws.

For the Love of Sarah Lawrence

In applying to graduate school--at present, only to Sarah Lawrence--I've found myself more meandering than ever, writing entire pages under the title "Autobiography--My Life in 1,000 Words or Less" that has nothing to do with the arbitrary details of my life. I can't so much as manage a sentence giving my birth date, and the passage that began with "I was born in Tyler, Texas" was off to a fine start, but ended up 6 pages of shamelessly irrelevant musings. I cannot seem to commit myself to the simplest of tasks--like a truly obsessive compulsive person that cannot for all the world keep himself from washing his hands four times, or stepping gingerly over a crack in the pavement while crossing a sidewalk--I cannot even force myself to just say "My name is Erin Wheeler, I was born on..." even now I can't do it. It's so bland, it's blinding. I simply can't stare at a blank page and leave it with something so trite, so trivial, so essentially me in the worst of ways--the part of me that is so naked, stripped of the words that veil me in their light, the glow like star-spun twilight that radiates from my mangled passages, and I, but batheing in the beaming verse, hoping the lines that come from beyond me can seem my own, and can let me shadow in the path of their loveliness--their sanctity I can almost pass as my own.

And so as the deadlines grow nearer I find myself with pages of false starts, paragraphs on the red dust of East Texas when I meant only to mention that this is where I was born. But the words! Oh how they take me! I am ill with them, afflicted by them, in love with them. These words! These images! These pages and pages of battle between my mind and muse--it should not be so hard to make myself say just-a-simple-thing. Just the facts, ma'am.

But alas, I am weak-willed and cannot withstand the devastating temptation to hard on and on about absolutely nothing, just because it quells some plaguing inner thirst for a visible symphony of words which have so captured my soul and spellbound my mind.

My boyfriend wanted to test just how much I could possibly say about nothing at all, or about one thing entirely. So he devised a simple test: He asked me to take a subject that provoked a plethora of seductive imagery, about which I was really inspired to write, and then he told me to take just the tiniest minute detail about that subject and harp on that instead--I could talk about that one little aspect for as long as I wanted, and I should try and see how long I can really do so, but the rules were that I wasn't aloud to have what I call "chain-metaphors" (a metaphor that requires a metaphor that requires a metaphor until the original point and image are entirely lost to some image-laden simile-sick tyraid), only one metaphor per sentence. Also, I wasn't aloud to veer from the description or discussion of that one focal aspect upon which I had decided to write. Anytime I caught myself veering-off on some tangent, or trying to talk about something other than the focus, I had to stop the sentence right where is was and type [end]. This was supposed to show me some pattern in my logorrhea, hopefully to give me some insight into what it is that spawns the compulsive episodes.

So my boyfriend decided to give me a little help, a prompt, if you will:

This is a picture of me when I visited the Lost Coast, CA. I will go in to detail about this place when time allows me to do it justice, but as it were, I haven't that luxury as of now. Still, suffice to say it was a place of unwavering beauty, with black-lava-sand beaches sheltered amid the King's Range mountainside and the Humboldt County Redwood forests so beloved by Julia Butterfly and the like, this place is a refuge for all the brave souls who make it here--though uninhabited by man and ravaged by wild bears and lions, from the rock-cast rookeries -- seals that sing their siren songs from the stone-crest cove and the elk that bedded outside my tent, it was a place that few had stepped foot, most never even finding the place and others becoming lost along the way, being that there are no real roads going to the lost coast, only winding, contorting unnamed, unpaved roads that quickly wither into little pot-hole and pit-fallen trails, herding paths mostly, that made a narrow pass through the 8000 ft elevation of the unforgiving King's peaks, where Highway 1 planners had intended to hug the coast the entire length of the Pacific, and upon finding this 28 mile stretch of land, the mountain heights and sudden drops, the wild beasts and relic redwoods, the tsunamis that thrashed the shorelines creating the nightly thunder you hear from the forest, the washouts that often take the lives of adventure-avid surfers, and everyone who has tried to build here (with the exception of a small community called Shelter Cove) has died or been otherwise brutally thwarted in their efforts. This place is the last of forsaken shores, the only real untouched land--at least as close as we can get. The last of the secret places, where the little roads that tangle themselves across mudslide mountain-sides are only known by rumors and word of mouth, tips from traveling surfers and backpackers having survived the hike. I hiked ten miles of the coast with a 103 degree fever, sick with strep throat--after that, the fevers befell me too fiercely, and I was forced to turn around. Nothing will ever shake from mind the frightening frigid night spent camping on the coast, my selected site being in an abandoned national park over-taken by the bears and wild elk. This elk slept just outside my tent, nearing the fire in the midnight frostful hours to listen as I read "On the Road."

Anyway, the point to all that is so as to say this: The Lost Coast is, if anything, a place about which one could write endlessly (as I have thus above demonstrated), and it would be difficult then to write about only one aspect of such a strange and mysterious place. So that was my task.

I was to take all of my poetic images of the Lost Coast, and with all of it swirling and clamoring in mind, I was to write about only the sand. Just the sand. Nothing but the sand. The sand in every possible literary light, all the ways I could think to describe, define, relate or recall it, and to keep doing this until I absolutely run out of things to say about sand, or my fingers fall off from typing--which ever came first. But I was not aloud to break the rules:

1) no chain-metaphors

2)no tangents that lead off-topic

3)if I stray from the topic or find my metaphors leading to more metaphor, I was to stop the sentence immediately and simply type [end]. (this was supposed to give me some insight as to when and where my tangents start, and hopefully then, why.)

4)I could talk about sand as long as I wanted, use simile and metaphor to describe it, but I could not veer too far from this topic or write about some other aspect of the lost coast--a very difficult thing to do, even for one who likes to harp.

So here's how it went:

The Lost Coast
A Comprehensive Summation

(A Diagnostic Exam of the Extent of my Logorrhea)

In the end, it really all begins with the sand. The Lost Coast is lost to the greater population of the world, and even to those who seek it’s secret shores through mountain tops and countrysides, along roads unpaved, unnamed, twisting and contorting through canyon crevices until these snaking trails collide as if by mistake in an intersection made impassible by the [end].

The sand is what sells the secrete of this forsaken place, a wound worn on the western shoulder of our country, sported with a weary sense of pride, like the soviet shrapnel forever sunken to the shallows of subdermian flesh and from this tissue entombment you can see the profiled encasing wherein the seeds of war still wait for water to grow, still in the arms of the few, the proud, each more likely to sport a lost-coast scar, shoulders of erratically-limbed soldiers showing off war wounds and saloon tattoos framed by rolled up cuffs and blue collars, a bomb’s everlasting eulogy in a fibrous encapsulation embracing the twisted tufts of metal beneath the arm, [end]

The sand is a solemn wind-song cyclically oscillating on the beaded breathe of sirens, sunken ships swaying near the gray-cast ghost that will slowly sluff it’s silken robes of sea-breeze and the lapsing distance waning beneath the tidal chariot of rabid waves like arms outstretching to pull closer the shore, grasping at the black sands of the shore as one would if they had fallen down-cliff and as they cling to the crumbling sediments of salty mountainside they find the strangest of strength to cling to the heights above their heads and with all that amounts to man they force the rockcrest-mass to their chest again and again, and so as though in some dark hour clinging to cliff and life the ocean pulls its heavy ship mass closer still to the coast that intrepidly awaits to ensnare [end.]

The sands are sweet in memory but course upon the step of real-time, and the feet soon grow soar and sloughs the skin from generations protected by the secrete Zulu means of French-defeat, and as this forms it makes for terrible abrasions invisible to the eye but delectably to the blood-lust seas, and as it laps at your ankles your amble becomes more aching, the tongue of the tides milking painful steps and as the beastly blackness in all its sullen charm seek to strip the wayward walker of their chance to navigate the earth-havened shores we were never supposed to see, the step becomes more of a fluttering than a footprint in the echoed wakes trailing the traversions of our trepid path, each time becoming more and more crescent in impression until the foot-print like a ghost that clings to attics in old houses where furniture sleeps beneath insipid sheets or the way a canyon consumes the voice shouted in shallow-lung, [end].

The sand erodes the mountains and eats away at the metal cans that surfers bury from the bears and the feet upon which we livenly laud a beach of normal caliber, of normal stature, which with pearly clusters of silken sand caresses our feet like a whisper from wing-beats as a summer lark loftly-looms anear. But not here. The black sand of this sacred shore, both disparaged and divine, will eat the feet of the western traveler, and even the Zulu step tender-footed here. A chalky residue begins to foam on the skin when the sea is kept to far at bay—and though to ones back it is always best to keep the wind, there too will the ocean stray, if one is not mindful to cast a stoic stare to the salty beast that tastes the air, that samples the strangeness of flesh, a carnate delicacy which, to the pallet of this shore is rare. The sands are ashes from the depths of hell of itself, the poetry of an ocean birthed-floor; the sands themselves are granule deposits washed up from the fires of the pits and purgatories of our earth’s very core, where all is molten weeping furrows of festering underworld cascading along the forever inflamed, a river not of old world religious tales where devils feast on stolen souls in a brimstone enclave; no; this real world centric cove is far worse than the feeble mind of purloined zealots and Puritans of more inquisitive times—there is a world beneath our feet which writhes with a perpetual burn and in the moments of belly-woe the beats with bellow with the breathe of real-world hell-fire, and though the obsequious sea will shake with the fevered trembles of fault-lines feathering the ocean floor, from a jutting ascension of rocky crust and reefin-coral the mouth of our world will incite from a livid locus a magma labor from which our treasure lost coast sand is born. This volcano, ill with liquid-earth, will turn old and black, a tar-baby splathering will make nursery on the cold ocean shallows and there will the water reer the sands our children will see. Like a smoker’s lung, carcinogen-curdled with doughy doldrums black and bubbling in the tissue pockets where cavities of air flee the reach of the noxious tar, so too does the lava leech the sea-floor, casting a dismal darkness like depths that aren’t there to even the most shallow-sheltered water of wake-pools and the banks left behind in the evening recede.[end]

The sand is sheltered by the tossing tides, tumbled by the roaring waves, thrashed to stone and shore and ship-deck by the tide-treading tempests of the unseen seas, each becoming more and more the precious stones they are in their true infancy as sand, these kinder-kindles of cast-off mantel evoked to the surface of the rushing, receding waves, and eventually they will cleave from their grounded childhood place, the coral reef beneath, and from there they will dance lock-step in tandem with the tides and each jostling gesticulation of an ocean dancing without regard for some judging eye, these shards of charren core will become salt-shaped and water-polished, like precious stones we mine for trade, these lava beds the ocean bears bringing after decades of disquiet among the jigsaw-pieces of the mantle, each negotiating the hostile heart of the world itself, will burst forth in a birth of someday-sand, and from the pits of pergatude comes forth every human-lifetime or so an unseen devastation muffled by an abandoned stretch of coastal gulf, and in this silence sand sleeps in the shroud of surfs and shallows, few every venturing to their shore. Each ember-dance dislodging of lava will churn with the turmoils of the tides, lost to moon-lust and fitfully provoked by the lunar pull, livid or lulled with her. Each piece will be sparkle-shone with moon glow and strange treasures of the sea, giving it a captive rarity admirers will not be able to place though will readily be able to see. They will become finer and finer, smaller and smaller, and each time they will be more weightlessly suspended in the throes of tsunami-saunters and sickly storms, weathered still by the winter winds and wake-pool wash-outs they will be polished to dagger-like dust until they are swift and smooth like the breeze itself, light and breathable just enough to scratch the lungs; in night-terror telling of the coast, surfers sleep through the high-winds of summer storms safely beached on a hillside embankment, only to have the warm-gulf gales sift the finest grains of sand through the air, and the cherub breath of summer sleep befalls the surfers for the final time, black breathe in a last listless tuft of sea-polished cooled and powdered lava core, their lungs seeped with the cancerous tar of intrepid wind-whirled sand, the embankment area veiled in unnatural nightfall darkness, a black like cooled lava from the earthen-heart at times of illness, the frigid frost left in place of ashes when it is the fire of our planet that stretches silt and soot across the forsaken west coast shore. A fear of black air is always there, but never has it robbed me of the romance inherent to the black sand beaches of this treasured god-havened shore, absconded from the road builders and realistate developers by the centric flames of hell-fire from our liquid core and by the incited trill of trembling exchange that the sky encourages between the warm tropic winds and the cool Arctic fronts, causing even the heavens to seem at hand in the taking back of what humans never deserved: the lost coast, a place beyond us and beside us, a place that rightfully kills us

when the earth is awake and when heaven and justice—not this and mercy—are in accord. [end]

like the air that ate out the eyes of school boys road-side of the dust bowl sand-swells that came in swarms more than storms, like locust in biblical lore. until to the beach itself they are sorn. [end].

From the ocean void rumbles a pit-trebble sound as the waves awash the newest polished stones. Smaller and smaller they become precious still, but always will they hurt us slightly, and never will they lose their shadow-cast pour which all things retain from the womb of which they came, the blackness of heat never meant to dull or cool will always blazen these sand-stone pieces with the fiendish fellowing glow of the underworld hidden beneath the ocean floor, which, like a seawater-blanket, covers the unsightly innards of our otherwise gutted world. The glow of the deepest fire pits clings to the shine of each grain of sand and every sauntering stone, always vaguely there, like the glimmer of a vacant gaze, as with a pair of eyes that meet your own in an unfriendly stumbling of your sight across a crowded saloon, those old-west eyes old trivialized in bad movies now days, the ones black as cultured soil, or smithered steel or more so, as in the cold blank stare of your own eyes into the empty blackness of those belonging to a body wherein the soul no longer resides, a black eerie presence that can only be the presence of nothing at all, of real void, of black sand on forsaken beaches and boy who will never see again; of the old west and it’s warriors, roughed up and whiskey-wise, staring back into the face of their conquest, into vacant black Indian eyes... [end]

The sand is really where the soul of the lost coast lies, the dirt underbelly of a world-rocked wasteland too beautiful not to compulsively describe, and each little grain of sand, every last piece, is a precious, precious stone, the diamonds of the earth, the coveted of the sky, each spec of hushed liquid earth is the lava tears of all that is black and beautiful. A mournful countenance does this hue lend the stretch of shore, and in this sack cloth does it spread ashes where there was but sand before, and the black ashy arch of hostile forests and mountainside shelter the last of poetry in nature, and it is all from the sand, I’m sure. The coast is lost in doleful isolation, only the bears and redwood beasts to groom and rouse the slumber-seaside, the staggering solitude of the sand draped in sandy self-slashed robes, that anemic pasty gray replacing the distant visible curl of cove, the vibrant blackness of the death-dark sand towards the fore withering with distance and mountain fog til it seem sickly at first sight, cast in that particular flesh-hue of grayish blue that we absently associate with illness and impoverishment, with infant jaundice, with the long since dead, with those who have died by the most gruesome means—by suffication, by the sea, by sickness and starvation and disease. The coast looks increasingly pale as it creeps into the distant king’s range shoulder, and just before it disappears, it dons a last look at the sand, still slightly gray with that color of shiva shorn attire, the coast itself takes on a soul. This is that upon which the few who tread the lost coast trails trepidly tread, upon a raw-jewel harvest where the crops of crimson swells hushed the heated embers of upturned molten-earth that weeped from the world restless below. [end].

First of all, yes--clearly the first problem we can see is that when there is no spellcheck to keep me shackled to sanity and the OED, I go on a word-invention feild-day, and start making up words (or at least altering them until they are but my own soulless bastardizations) just to suite my alliterative needs or beat-of-verse or whimsical fancy. Shakespeare did this often, and from his made up words we get some of the most beautiful in our language today--I believe the word "tempest" meaning "storm" is one of those words, and also one of my favorites. But, needless to say, I hardly fancy myself a Shakespeare -- ha, laughable even to type -- for I am less than dirt that sits atop his grave today. But that is, I suppose, still something.

Notice all the times I typed [end]? I didn't even get passed the first line before I was off topic. Had the topic been about the water, I could have written a novel on sand without trouble, but wouldn't have been able to say a word about the water. What my boyfriend and I concluded is that I place entirely too much importance on a single sentence, struck by some subconcious fear that any given sentence could be my last, or the only one ever read, and therefore each must be able to to bear the weight of the entire subject matter, and each much fully represent the best of my skill, style, voice and ability. This is why I can never write simply "I was born on October 6th, 1985, in Tyler Texas" without deviating from the topic at hand to go on a tangent about the red dust of the town where I was born. The pressure of worrying that any given sentence may have to represent me fully as a writer, I feel such responsibility to the words I love, it's crippling.

Also, notice how LONG I was able to go on and on and on about SAND (veering sometimes from the point, but mostly, sand.) I didn't even run out of words, my boyfriend just said, finally, "ok, that's enough, this is ridiculous. What could you even be saying?" I have no idea.

Keep in mind that the above musing on sand is not meant to be representative of my best work--it was free writing, writing in my most raw state, without spell check or grammar check, without page count or concern for punctuation, paragraph, or formal structure. It's not a poem, not an essay--a musing is all I can think to call it...and that's a bit of a euphamism.

It's rough and raw and vaguely awful, like seeing a picture of myself when I was thirteen and still awkward and unsightly--recognizing my face in the pictures from that time, but only in a vague, somewhat disgusted sort of disconnected way.

If the sand-musing is me at my very worse, me with no holds-barred, me where my censor and even my spell check is utterly silenced--well, there you have it then--I stand naked in my craft before the world; thank god no one's reading. If someone is reading, thank god you find me amusing enough to have read thus far. Forgive my fledgling prose.

Alas, I know not what the anwser is, what medicine or magic spell or parlor trick could possibly hold the cure to my writting's delay, and I fear it is dying under the burden of my verbosity.

If only I could do this place real justice, rather than just exhausting the topic of sand...

xoxo

More tangents soon to come--they're stacking up qucikly as I pretend I'm trying to write my autobiography. Who's ever heard of a memoirist who can't write their own autobiography? If only I was alotted 5,000 words...maybe then....

Procrastinatory Prose

I don't know why this memoir of mine is suddenly hard for me to write; I still average 6,000-7,000 words a day--sometime much more--but I'm no longer saying anything. The story is not moving forward, merely harping on--it's as though I'm actively procrastinating with my words...playing with alliteration for too long...metaphors leading to metaphors leading to metaphors until nothing is clear: long, quixotic sentences that are beautiful at first, but clause begets clause until the entire sentence is swollen with imagery, weeping like a puss-laden wound and puckering at the very seams of my syntactical creation, the pressure mounting with every new word and pointless insertion until they burst forth like infectious fluids escaping afflicted skin--and then I see the sentence for what it is, for what I have made it, and when read it is heavy and meandering; it is ugly and it and fills me with disgust--disgust at this open sore on the page which I continue to aggravate and soil.

Perhaps the story is subconsciously painful--though, I honestly feel emotionally disconnected from these memories, the only real feeling with which they leave me is one of exhaustion at the very memory of those tiresome times.

Perhaps, then, I am simply too tired to write these things; but what puzzles me most is that, when I was first writing this memoir as part of a project for a special-problems writing seminar I had the pleasure of being a part of during my last semester as an undergraduate, during the time I was writing it for class I wrote with speed and precision and never lost my self to these procrastinatory periods wherein I write so much and yet say so little--I managed to write over 100 pages of this memoir (about 36,000 words) in the last three weeks of the five-week summer course for which I was writing it, and at least a quarter of those 100 pages (I think the best of those pages) were composed over a single 25 hour period, where I wrote straight through, only taking a few five-minute breaks to drink water or use the bathroom.

That was the kind of writing I thought I would always be able to do, and while I still tend to write for long periods of time, stretched out over sleepless nights, I no longer have that coveted-ability to write outwardly instead of inwardly. Now my prose produces wild loops and tangles of dead-end ideas and meaningless tangents where I self-indulgently find ways to use all these beautiful words I love to taste in text.

Now, as the memoir approaches 200 pages, I realize it's taken me twice as long to write the same amount I wrote while in school, and not for lack of will or work-time; it's as though I'm battling some unseen force just to say something worth a damn! It's terribly frustrating, and worse still--no one seems to have this problem--blank-page writer's-block is oh-so common, but this sort of 100-page procrastination is hardly such. I am alone in my compulsion, in my debilitating love of words.

Here are a few passages I'm deleting from my memoir this week, but in an attempt to preserve them somehow--as they are so sacred in essence, and far be it from me to be their judge, as I would never dare fool myself into thinking that I, their humble medium, were somehow worthy of deciding their fate, the fate of these sacred words--I will leave them here; this Delenda, their final resting place. May they find their heaven here, in this silly little blog, this sad waste of Internet space--my contrived confusion of words so shameful it is a waste of even that which is unlimited....the world wide web....a world-wide web of words awarded a far greater justice than that which I have allotted my own. This is their requiem, a prayer for their fate in this afterlife of sorts. May it at least be better than nothing at all, than true deletion.
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Taken from page 127--Part Three: Reclusions--From my Educational Memoir "A Solace for Scholars and The Academically Scorned"


As I sit and survey the damage to my apartment as it is now, I see it lay in spoil; a sad and dilapidated devastation, barely even an abstraction of what it was. Now I live in a ghost-town vestige of a strategically decorated home—a life lived in the memory of lovely things, the listlessness clinging to the walls cigarette smoke in seedy motels, the old, tattered furniture still swollen with the imprint of solitude and yet, still my belongings are belolled by echoes of the past, their shape and color preserved just enough to be reminding, still ghost-laden with vague familiarity, a couch buried in books and papers still bears a pallid memory—the self-image of its show-room days—a designer dining set remembered as it was in its prime, before the chairs served as a stray cat’s scratching post, and the table—as a poorly chosen place to practice oil-paint art projects. The fall of my house happened too slowly to see though the disparagement advanced too quickly to cease entirely, and I watched the saturnine demise of what was once my high-rise haven—the steady downfall of my physical existence to both my health and to my home was, in truth, nearly unnoticeable until it was too late—like an overgrowth of vines snaking their way up the outside walls of a house, a movement that can’t be seen in increments and being something likely to flourish and thrive unnoticed.

Like the real world I left for books and dreams, my home reduced to ruins and still apander to the errant forces that loom and haunt in my absence, the decay that ensued while I indulged in lengthy periods of compulsive reading and writing, and though my brain prospered in these mental immersions, I was becoming more and more detached from the tangible realm, and, neglecting hunger pangs and sleep-sick fits of lethargy, quickly languid reclusion would leave me too frail to withdraw from mind, soon faint-spells and fevers befell my body, my flesh in the tantivy throes of utter depravity, and like the unseen approach of physical decline, illness and death a stealthily and creeping affliction—much like the leeching, throbbing tendrils of succulent vines—and it’s the subtlety of an ivy’s invasion that allows it to slowly swill entire houses as if they were bottles of beer gone-flat. Once the sight of flourishing foliage is too encumbering to be visually ignored, by then it has probably become so advanced in its wayward ascent that hardly a brick or window can be discerned from beneath the thicket, and the sight of this elicits the kind of surreal awakening back into the physical world; a world for which the process of falling had been slothfully slow, while as for the awareness of that fall: it is strangely sudden. My home was not swallowed by creeping vines but instead, by my own wandering mind, though still the sobering site was the same, as a house in the wakes of ruin, ripped apart by the leafy twists and tangles dexterously dismantling a forsaken fortress from the outside-in, a team of vines claiming vengeance upon all works of the human-hand, nature taking back the houses made from stone and wood—I suppose when a house falls by way of nature, the degradation is a kind of justice, the earth’s revenge against the creatures who continue to rob it with great irreverence of all natural resources, which lends the image of a house slowly torn apart by vines a certain poetic justice, the romantic notion of human artifacts repossessed by natural forces, our great stone monuments seized in plain sight and at the hand of simple organisms—the plants, trees and streams—a return to harmony as the earth heals all the we’ve plundered; the acres of wasted rainforests, used as fuel to feed our cities’ sprawl. Eventually even the most avid dreamer will notice the disparagement of their assets within the living world, and the awareness of this lurches you back to the realm of the real world, where houses fall and humans starve in the absence of the mind; these dreamers present in body as much as is a sleepwalker interacting with waking-world around.

This lucidity always falls upon one suddenly and almost always after it’s all too late, when a towering stone fortresses has already been devoured in slight and silence—not by fire or storm—but by the merest of force; a slow consummation by growing, leeching leaves. Though it was by slower forces than even that of the patient ivy plant—by dust and dogs and other forces which I have yet to catch in the act of ageing, though in studying the shelf-ridden objects that ornament my home, it seems that the things I cherish the least are those which fair the best in the absence of my attention—the effects of letting dust collect on surfaces and allowing spiders to drape stacks of old textbooks in silken strands are effects which seem to be slower to occur upon the mundane and negligible of my belongings—equally, it appears the lovely yet useless artifacts encased in a china cabinet decompose rapidly when left unattended, and these fixtures which I tried to preserve even as I felt the physical world crumbling around me, soon even the glass cabinet doors failed to shelter the crystal and china from the suffocating effects of mental withdraw, all in time beginning to show the wears and tears of years-yet-to-pass having sat too long in the absence of an admiring eye. The sudden reawakening into your body, when you wake up from weeks spent in a walking-coma and you abruptly feel a flood of bodily pains--the language of the flesh which speaks in varying dialects of discomfort and it is our ability to discern the demands of our body, though this act of being fluent in the foreign language of flesh is something that most people practice with near innate comprehension, the reason for this ease is something which I attribute to the fact that the majority of people, is in general, at least evenly divided in their devotion to the needs of the mind and the body and further still, a great number of those most would call “normal” are seemingly more engaged in the physical realm than that of the mental, and by quite a large margin.
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Rest in peace, dear tangent.
xoxo