Essay

Final Essay E-268

The requirement is to write a personal essay. The piece must be between 6 and 18 pages long, and since the class is creative non-fiction, it must be, well, non-fiction. It must, in other words, be mostly true. I've decided to write an essay about a subject that for one reason or another makes people uncomfortable. Religion? Sex? Hemorrhoids? Nope, I'm writing about how I love my wife. And yes, it's non-fiction. 

 What is it about a spouse proclaiming their affection and love for their mate in public that makes people wince? Is it something to do with propriety? A throwback to our Puritan roots, those hoary values that have caused us no end of grief, anxiety and guilt in this culture? Does this fall under the rubric of acronym--TMI (Too Much Information), PDA (Public Displays of Affection), GAR (Get A Room)? Are we as a society this emotionally constipated that we can't even talk about our love for the person we sleep with (almost) every night? If true, this is sad beyond measure.

If it is, indeed, true it seemed to me a reasonable topic for an essay in a creative nonfiction writing class. I've already started the piece. In deference to social sensibilities I've placed the disclaimers first, not wishing to turn readers away within the first paragraph. The essay is not about our cutesy rituals, the icky-poo daily tics and touchy-feelies of some brand new, and some not so brand new marriages. It is not about our sex lives, relax. It's not about how we fixed our busted, clunky, run-of-the-mill poor excuse for a matrimonial match, a how-to manual for your own inert marriage. It isn't about how we overcome great obstacles, move mountains to be together, proclaim our undying love and affection from the top of the Empire State Building either. None of that. The essay is simply about how my wife and I came to a very early understanding that our marriage is truly sacred to us, completely removed from all the conventional, too often commercial aspects of marriage. We have a bond that fulfills our every need, not using all the devices noted above--the shouts from atop tall buildings in large cities etc.--but almost despite all that outward foo-farah. We even have a designation for what we believe is the one, vital, indispensable ingredient to a life together as mates: we are simply best friends. 

The word essay derives from the French essai, to try, to make an attempt. My essay on spousal love is not definitive; it is an attempt to tell our story of how marriage works for us. Everyone needs their own essay.

Freewriting

Freewrite--An Exercise in creativity, or...

It's an exercise in creativity, certainly, but much more than that. English 268 is set up as a creative non-fiction class, and it is every bit of that. The emphasis is on the creative part. Most every day there's a freewriting event. We're required to put the pen on paper, and not lift it off, scribbling whatever free association words, ideas, thoughts, wacky concepts and ephemera come to mind--no thinking; just writing, writing, writing. It sounds crazy, useless, mostly a way for the teacher to take a break in the middle of a two-hour class. But the exercise has an amazing ability to dislodge jammed up concepts, constipation of the brain and generally viscous thoughts that are otherwise begging to be born. Some of the stuff is even usable!  Try it sometime: take a prompt, let's say "I'm afraid to..." and go to town. Just scribble and write and jot and scratch until your hand is numb. You might be amazed at the direction and result you come up with. 
In the picture above, one of my get-rich quick products is shown. It was a diary of sorts, an E-Book designed with the basic freewriting concept in mind. Take one of the diaries--they were called Burn The Baggage--open to the day in question, such #29 which would be today, and read the prompt. Then write down all the scary, angry, fearful, useless, restricting thoughts you have about that prompt, and get it out of your system. The idea was to do this for thirty days, then burn the results, burn the baggage that keeps you trapped in place and won't let you create what it is you're capable of creating. Burn the negative to end up with the positive. Just don't burn your homework.

Traveling Light

Traveling Light is...

Ease and comfort are very good things. It's gratifying to live in a place where warmth, safety, comfort and convenience are a given. But it's equally good to know our footprint is as small as possible on a fragile planet, and maybe getting smaller. There's a growing realization in the world that we have not been sufficiently cautious with our resources or environment. As I wander the campus I see indications everywhere of new and useful ways we conserve, re-use and cut down on disposable items, from paper products in classrooms, to excessive maintenance of buildings and grounds, to simple things like recycling of otherwise disposable items. The trend is hopeful: more and more teachers are using on-line resources, new buildings are much more efficient and even toilets are more environmentally friendly. The best part of this is that we seem to be more aware of the need to address these issues, and there seems to be more political will to move forward on them. Let's hope we continue the trend, and our children and grandchildren will thank us for giving them the best gift possible.

Summer '10

Summer?

Welcome to Summer term 2010, and English 268, creative non-fiction. The picture doesn't look much like Summer, but that's the idea. Keats spoke about the concept of negative capability: It's being able to hold two contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time and still have the ability to function. I like to think of it as the willing suspension of belief. If we can entertain two seemingly opposing thoughts, and have them bounce around and be perfectly content interacting with each other, for long periods of time, then we're on the way to negative capability.  Here's an example of how this could work in reality as opposed to fiction. As I write this, a good friend is visiting her daughter at school in New Zealand. Here in Columbus yesterday the high temperature reached about 85 degrees F. Where Barbara is, the high was 40 degrees F. give or take. Not exactly snowy and blizzarding like the picture above, but not shirtsleeves weather either. So the two opposing ideas concept isn't so difficult if we expand our vision just a bit.

Summer term is going to be like that; I look forward to writing as much as I can in a very short time, bypassing my usual requirement to tweak, rewrite, edit, rephrase and redo any and all manuscripts. Rewriting has always been a necessity, but it appears my system, if you can call it that, may be considered a luxury in this class. English 268 started yesterday. Our first assignment was a free write lasting nearly ten minutes. One parcel of some value emanating from that exercise was the realization that writing in such a way drives out some of the fear of failing to write any other way, or in patching words together in a way that makes sense to me. One of the main fears in life, certainly for a writer, is that the product makes no sense. John Ciardi mentioned this fear concerning his poetic works. He said his fear was that he'd left part of the poem in his head. If we get away leaving even a part of the story in our heads, or still in the pen, then we've not fully succeeded. So perhaps the free write is always the way to go, at least at first. Then, after a bit of incautious scrambling and/or parsing of the words and meanings and expressions, we put the work out there fully and forlornly half-dressed, and see who gets it? Stay tuned. It will be an interesting Summer.

 

Finals week

Why Be Normal?

Finals week on campus, once again. It's been quite the term: more than a dozen entries in the student paper, lots of new stuff--like the student union which opened at the beginning of the term, a very productive and informative meeting with folks at the creative writing school and other signposts along the way to a goal I've dreamed of for 30 years.  I am firmly entrenched in the school, the curriculum and the method. I am well on my way to the degree that eluded me way back in the twentieth century. The fellow you see above is acting like a kid again, being basically abnormal because it felt good, and hey, if other students can act like this, why not me? I've seen way weirder stuff, things that make my hat look pretty lame in comparison. Besides, it was a great hat. It was manufactured on the spot by a balloon expert who was an alum back in '72, about the time I would have graduated had it not been for the fact that the balloon went up, and I traded my college hat for a helmet and all that boring, military history stuff. It's good to be back, especially considering the fact that I can wear such hats and no one thinks it's silly.  Why be normal? You see what it got me back in '69? Well, there you go.

Smart Kids

The Winning Team

2010 FEH At St. John Arena

(With 'Robot')

One of the unintended pleasures of returning to school after all these years is the opportunity to spend time with some really bright kids. As much as I've disparaged certain classmates in these pages, my experience is that, as Garrison Keillor is fond of saying, these kids are, by and large, above average. And, though a few of them are a bit woebegone at times, aren't we all? Some of them are bright as a new nickel, and not the least bit shy about showing it off.

Take Jimmy, if you can. He's a gangly, effervescent, walking atomic pile in speech, mannerisms and demeanor.  Look up scary bright in your search engine, and Jimmy's name will likely pop up. I've concluded that he is skinny and somewhat frail looking, because taking time to eat would mean wasting time better spent studying quantum neutron nano-physics, or perhaps it was just pre-cosmological calculus he mentioned, my hearing isn't what once was.

In either case, Jimmy and his mentally-precocious pals want to change the world. If my doubts extend to such things as Bush V Gore 2000, or the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa, they do not extend to this Jimmy and his colleagues' ability to alter the arc of this sorry planet that they're about to inherit. Jimmy and his team of pre-engineers are a group of about 200 young people--first-years all, mind you--at the college's annual robot competition. One of them told me that they "basically got to build toys for six month." Be that as it may, there's nothing childlike about what they built. These robots of theirs had to not only fit certain critical dimensions, they had to perform several tasks autonomously, from coding installed inside their teeny 20 Kb brain by a kid with a lot more Kb than that, and adding more all the time. 

The show took place on the floor of the old basketball arena. Appropriately, the robot competition--there were 78 of the little contraptions--was tracked and scored like the sweet sixteen of basketball. When the G-5 team, Jimmy et. al., wound up in the final four, I edged closer to my seat, and held my breath for the two minutes allotted for the little machine to do its job on the circuit. And, like Short Circuit, the movie, 'Robot,' as the team named it--I told you they were smart--performed just as coded, zipping along doing its appointed chores, tracking the lines, following its internal logic till it backed into its tiny stall with one last whir and giggle, and won first prize! The energy was everywhere. As you can see from the picture, the G-5 team, plus 'Robot,' had worked to perfection. Smart kids. It's a pleasure to know them.

Fast company

Dr. Gee & The OMOC 5/17/10

There are a few perks involved in returning to school at my age. One of them is the realization that certain activities, opportunities and events are just there to indulge and have fun with. The photo is of yours truly with the president of Ohio State, Dr. E. Gordon Gee. The event was a reception at the new student Union for whichever arts and sciences students wanted to drop by, grab a slice of free pizza and meet the prez. Hey, why not? One thing about going back to school, and immersing oneself in the atmosphere of academia is feeling the energy, the positive sensation of moving forward toward a goal, and being surrounded by people who not only share that momentum, but want you to succeed right along with them. There are certainly people on this campus who have a dim view of the way things are run, the political predilections of the administration, the seeming disregard for common sense approaches to matters which appear to be achingly simple. There will always be those people; I am not one of them. The more I study and allow myself to be exposed to the inner workings of things--whether a campus newspaper, a quasi-political organization or a massive educational edifice like Ohio State--the more I realize there are no simple answers. Hell, there aren't even simple questions.

I'm grateful for the chance to meet the people who call the shots, and to ask questions that they actually take time to answer, and to hear from them what intricacies are involved in running a show like OSU. Is it a bit obsequious on my part? Perhaps, but I'm convinced that the people in high places, regardless of which high places we're discussing, are for the most part capable, well-intentioned and conscientious when it's time to decide things that have an impact on all of us. It's good to know they're also approachable, and generally good people. Plus, the pizza was free. Life is good.