Class sketch

Class sketch

The class is nearly empty when I arrive, arms loaded with books that will not fit in my bag; I throw them down on the desk and wait. I feel like a corn husk dried out in the sun, or a lamp stuffed with a headachey, caffeine-deprived genie. I look at the clock: five minutes to the hour, when class starts. Rhetoric students, I remind myself, are almost never on time. I don't expect my friend K. for another ten minutes or J. for another twenty-five.

K. is barely on time, or exactly on time by my watch. She lobs her bags onto the desk beside me. Her coat is flapping and her hair is shoved under a green cap; she looks harried, as usual. I know J. will be late; he's almost always late for this class unless we walk together, late at least by twenty minutes. For some odd reason, my friends' predictability lends me a bit of strength.

The prof begins the class and suddenly I am in a fighting mood. No, I tell myself firmly. Why? I ask myself when the arm goes up; self-frustration fills my feet, and begins to rise and rise and flood the persistent questioning fingers now waving in the air. But it's too late, as it always is.

She looks at me warily, halfway through explaining the complex box-diagram on the overhead projector, fingers loaded with green jewels pointing at the squares.

"These writers--Flower and Hayes--they are putting the process of writing into a scientific box. You can't do that; you just can't. They talk about the "composition session" of the writer under study--what writer has set "composition sessions"? They leave inspiration out of the picture."

I can't tell whether she is annoyed; but she is quick to defend Flower and Hayes. "How else," she argues, "can we even begin to understand the composition process, except through this sort of analysis?"

How indeed. I tune out; science cannot make itself interesting. Not today. Not today, or not ever in a composition studies class. No, definitely not here.

K. punches my arm. She's in a manic mood, one that only really surfaces when J. arrives, twenty minutes late, just in time for the composition exercise. "Why are you always late?" we ask him, and he is defensive, and it's all very funny, suddenly.

"I'm not always late. I got stuck behind a bus."

Water under the bridge. The three of us turn our respective weak attention spans to the subject at hand--the composition exercise. But K. is laughing, swearing, making jokes, poking me; the prof comes around and says something and K. is rude to her. K. doesn't seem to realize that we know her, we understand that she is being funny, only funny, not rude--but the prof is not amused.

She's felt threatened by our threesome for the last two weeks; I can sense it in her gaze when she turns her eyes to our raised hands and laughing eyes and animated group discussions. She sees K.'s wit and J.'s smarts, and by association I, also, am someone to be wary of.

No matter. But turning to the matter at hand--J. and I are researchers; K. is the writer. She must speak aloud the thoughts in her head as she composes a short piece, and we will transpose the process.

"Oh f*** this," she says periodically, halfway through a sentence; or she laughs, cracking jokes. "F*** you," randomly, to J., who looks surprised, laughs, doesn't understand.

When she lobs a word or two at me, even though I know her and I expect it, I feel the words hit my bones somewhere deep inside and shake them just a bit. I look at J. and he is bemused; so am I. But his expression never really changes from its placidity, its calm.

My turn: they are the researchers, I the writer. I write and write and K. is silent as I'm composing aloud while J. writes it down. Integrity, even in this silly piece, I think, and words hit the page like a steam train at a hundred miles an hour. It's not a great piece, by the end, but it could hold together with a bit of glue and a stretch of the imagination, with luck. We put the pens down. J. is thinking; K. is muttering.

We are too tired for this, today. But this prof never lets us out early. I can sense K.'s manic mood turning into a deep irritation--with herself, mostly. J. is calm and his clarity is thrown in sharp relief against K.'s abstraction. He is a bit of Shakespeare and she is a Picasso. And what am I?

I am still Sylvia Plath, feeling drops of rain like coffee saucers hitting the tiled floor around my feet. It doesn't surprise me that it's raining inside.

We can't be taught, today. Today, the sky outside is black and inside we are individual anarchies, walking time bombs, abstract art. We are too critical and too much ourselves, today. We are expanding and expanding until the classroom can't hold us any longer...

Today, she lets us out early.

For Sylvia, with thanks

For Sylvia, with thanks

Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath, what do we know of you? Who were you, at the age of eighteen? Twenty-one? Twenty-nine? ...Thirty, when you closed yourself up in a room and turned up the gas and went silent forever?

Why is it that life weighs so heavily on some people as to be literally unbearable?

"The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."*

Her own silence may not have been silent at all, really, while she was plowing through days and days of ups and downs, wild mood swings and deep, deep hurts which struck her one after another like stones skipping out onto the surface of a lake--skip, skip, skip--pain, pain, pain. If anyone knew pain it was Sylvia Plath. Her lake was full of stones.

Someone asked me the other day what all those writers--those depressing writers--James Joyce and Albert Camus and Sylvia Plath--really contributed to the world? She sighed as she asked it, thinking back to days when dark literature had blackened the edges of things, when life was dark enough, for her, all on its own. But her question is an interesting one.

What did these writers contribute? What do they contribute? Well--to cast the question in an easier light, what do they do for me?

Joyce opens windows into worlds that aren't mine, gives me insight into bitterness that isn't mine, casts perspective on the problem and obsession and joy of writing, creating, that is mine. He circles around truth and does battle with it elegantly. His writing is good.

And Sylvia Plath--Sylvia Plath, whose one and only semi-autobiographical novel (The Bell Jar) I am reading now for the first time (or consuming, swallowing, inhaling?)--is putting my ear to the door of her life. Listen, she says. Listen. This is who I was. This is what I learned when I lived.

Even at the moment she thought her life was too unbearable to bear any longer, Sylvia Plath had already given it away--to us, to her readers. In metaphor and story, as a gift.

How shall we receive such a gift, Sylvia, but with thanks?


*The Bell Jar

Wine

Wine

Oh Lord, great One
Who answers prayer,
Who opens His great eyes
And cries, but not in despair,
Who brings water
From stone:

How great a prayer is mine
That you could not reply?
That you could not shake the earth
With a breath—or lift wings to fly—
Or turn our weary water
Into wine?

Glory

Glory

"Now is the winter of our discontent--"

Quotes, misquotes, mistakes, blunders, blemishes, lies. But it seems so true--surely this is correct, surely this is reality.

Dim, dim, dim. Sometimes things feel dim from the minute you wake til the minute you sleep, and the little lights of inspiration or joy that might flicker on and off during the day become nothing more than illusions, mirages, your active imagination gripping your mind.

Why is it impossible to be inspired, sometimes, to feel holy wind rushing through your lungs and your soul, to be lifted up? Why is this not the norm? Instead of glory, the norm is the daily, the ordinary, the continuous spin and rumble of numbered squares passing by, gliding by, rushing by on the calendar highway. How do we find the better parts of ourselves in the ordinary? Is glory hidden in the ordinary, somewhere, somehow, buried under the dust and bother, hiding its shining face so that we can't possibly tire of its glow?

Oh glow already, glory, glow, glow. Life is waxing dim.

Quotes, misquotes--ah, I remember now!--it's not true. Now is not the winter of our discontent--it can't possibly be. Everyone quotes Shakespeare wrong; it isn't the winter any longer, we have no discontent--

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York."

--Made glorious summer--

summer

Damn dimness, winter, discontent. Life simply can't be dim when summer wraps its long warm arms around the edges of verse, sky, earth, to comfort us, reminding us that we are not abandoned to the cold, that after the blank space on the page comes a new line, glory.

Again and again

Again and again

Cold, cold, cold. Stepping outside is like stepping into a wall of ice. Breathing deeply is impossible; lungs protest. Fingers chill swiftly even through layers of wool. Un-plugged vehicles will not start no matter how hard you pray or plead.

This is winter, at last.

I stood at the window of the shop where I work, a week ago, and watched the sun rise. It rose, indeed, but swathed in violet ice. I watched as the sky changed from black to purple-black to grey-violet to violet, and the sun didn't show itself, but for a hazy, pale glow sheathed behind the purple. Passing cars sent curling banners of stark grey smoke trailing up and away; chimneys and smokestacks loosed waving columns of white.

Inside, we forget that it is so cold, again and again; but every venture outside reminds us that we cannot be so bold, so arrogant, as to forget what winter has to teach us: it is more cold than warm in the world, now, and we must not let our small squares of warmth lull us into false security. There's a war on--a war of snow and wind and ice.

How shall we equip ourselves to face it, to fight? With cloaks and coats, mitts and scarves? These, and also courage, because it takes more than the average soul to step out into the cold, morning after morning.

Old world

Old world

We ring in the New Year in a dying city--St. Louis, a town once known as a Gateway to the West, a fading ember of the trail blazed by Louis and Clark. Under the shadow of the white arch are soaring buildings and sprawling boulevards, Gothic and Classical architecture, gargoyles, statues, and once-grand hotels. It is a beautiful city.

But it is dying.

Over stir-fry a St. Louis native tells us that the city of once-great proportions has shrunk by half over the last 25 years. Five square miles of decrepit housing bear witness to abandonment, and a sense of unnatural quiet hangs like invisible smog over the downtown area. "People travel downtown to work and then go home at the end of the day. Nobody lives downtown," he says. Restaurants close down for the night in the middle of the afternoon; this week, the streets are empty of all but convention-attendees. Nobody lives downtown.

Nobody, we see as we walk to our hotel under a silver-dollar moon, but the homeless and the police. The former lie in doorways, under sheets or nothing at all; the latter prowl the streets.

In a hotel bar still gilded with an old-world feel, the bartender polishes the mahogany counter and asks us "where from?" But the wrinkled gentleman sitting beside us on a stool, sipping a beer from a glass with dignity, is not impressed at our city of origin; he's been to far more exotic places. "All over the world," he informs us with pride, proceeding to list twenty locations in the United States. "Anyplace overseas?" my friend asks him. "Oh yeeah, I been to Europe too."

I ask him about the medals and trinkets on his navy coat. "I served in Worl' War Two," he says, but this time the pride is hidden, or subdued.

"Thank you," says my friend, respect filling his tone like rainwater in a pool. The old man nods. "I went there so you didn't have to."

But his sorrow has less to do with the actions of the Axis of Evil, more to do with the attitude of his own countrymen. "Back then, I wa'n't allowed to sit in here," he says. "I could only come in and take the food out. They had a diff'rent bathroom for us--a diff'rent place on the bus. I coul'n't come in here and have a drink, like this." The words sink and settle into me; but for a moment I have trouble absorbing them. This is something you read about; this is history. We are talking to--history. To a regal old man with a young memory.

"Only been two black mayors in this town," he says, and it bothers him. The bartender is silent.

One war came and passed, for this gentleman; but a very different sort of war continues on. He's come to possess the full indignity of racism, political anguish, inside his frail old body. It is his greatest grief. In a way it defines him.

St. Louis is a dying city, but it has a living memory, a vivid history. Would there have been a better place in which to celebrate life, to redefine direction, to crystallize resolution, to ring in the New Year? No...

Isn't it possible that those things which appear most vacant, hopeless, ancient, fading, are those things most ready for renovation: for hope, for vision, and life? In the shadow of a crumbling arch, a testament to values passed and obsolete, new shoots can spring up. Grass pushes aside the concrete and the earth breathes a sigh of relief. Old hurts fade away and new purpose repossesses the landscape.

On the streets of St. Louis something is moving, changing. As twenty-three thousand convention attendees head home, and the city is abandoned again, something else yet remains. Life, hope?
The world is changing, must change, will change, for us and for St. Louis and for the man at the bar. How can it not change?

It is a New Year.

The old world is gone away.