Zadie Smith, Lifevest

In which Carrie goes back to college . . . . 

This itch.  Once at the height of my intellectual stamina.  The time when the person starved of morality sees the world through literature, and begins, anew, on a quest for purpose.

Zadie Smith will save me.

Memories of dead philosophy professors, still living and some actually deceased.  Byron, vanilla-flavored pipe at the lips.  Simple-minded me telling you I will take a trip to Bhutan where they believe in Gross National Happiness.  You said, Professor, with a keen moral philosopher’s mind, are you sure it follows from the social structures availible?  Me, in my naivete, thinking surely this other culture has it figured out, why wouldn’t I believe this catchy abandonment of Gross National Product.

Fast forward to the decision of a profession.  The requisite undergrad initiation into literature proper.  E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End.  Followed by On Beauty.  Modern British Authors or something number 400 level course for English majors. An inspired body reaction stemming from a mind well-used in the recognition that symmetry is possible and two books side by side will yield the same message: social injustice.  Amazing to behold, one in each hand.

“One may as well begin with letters and emails sent between characters . . .” start Forster and Smith, signaling the conflict which invariably arise from relations with others.  Zadie says I will tell a modern day version of a brilliant commentary on upper class warfare on the less fortunate.  Forster, one in a setting favoring the genteel persons who are obliged to pretend concern for the state of the world.

“He [Leonard Bast] was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more.  He knew that he was poor, and would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich … But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.  He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable.  His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor …” (Chapter 6, HE)

Bast is on his way home from a concert where the classes mixed, and where he almost lost his precious umbrella to Helen, a stranger-to-him, of the upper classes.  He then goes home to his stuffy flat,  umbrella retrieved, which he shares with a desperate woman who won’t understand his dreams, and cracks open his copy of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.  He reads it slowly and with the performance of one separate from those who take Literature and Art for granted, struggling to understand it and integrate it somehow into his relations with people he wishes to rise above.

 

Smith, post-Modern British author, writes a similar scene centering on a middle to upper class, mixed race family.  They too have been to a concert, a free one featuring Mozart’s Requiem.  A mix-up occurs between the proprietership of similar discmans (not umbrellas): one belonging to Zora, the daughter in love with those in her father’s collegiate cohort yet able to mix with those in the hood, and a Leonard Bast look-a-like (except, in Beauty, a six foot something black man) named Carl.  Carl wishes to improve his mind through free concerts and lectures and poetry performances, and thereby his standing in the world of Art and Literature.

“‘You at college or . . .?’

“‘Nah . . . I’m not an educated brother, although . . . ‘ He had a theatrical, old-fashioned way of speaking which involved his long, pretty fingers turning in circles in the air.  His whole manner reminded Levi of his grandfather on his mother’s side and his tendency to speechify, as Kiki called it.  ‘I guess you could say I hit my own books in my own way.‘”  (Chapter 7, OB)

Like in 2007 when I first studied the British Moderns, I felt a sympathy for these characters, the poor wishing to improve themselves.  These who valued something which they were excluded from by birth, yet craving it for its intrinsic nourishment commanded by the elite. I, too, felt this craving to shed the skin of a confused past where I never learned to properly write or appreciate beauty in the way of scholars, and gain it through higher learning.

And so I return.  To the past of my betterment and the post-modern exploration of the same material. I now read these two novels in tandem – an exciting rejuvenation of a self slightly successful – and study the possibility of developing my own Art and Beauty.

 

 

 

Ghost Vision

In which Carrie was startled and nostalgic …

Ghost Vision

The light

Or the memory of light

Or her brain reaching

Outward toward

The light

Entered a subjective field of vision

Populated with

Tigers

Polymaths

Players of Poker

Time and spatial curves

Even things of light and joy:

flowers, children, summits of mountains, books

Which once made the seeing

blind eye

Grasp at the infinite

Nothing.

The Universe holds no color.

1/19/15

Greenbroke

In which Carrie writes a poem …

 

Greenbroke

When the rider is green

and keeps falling of

the old cowhands say:

She’s got too much horse.

But she always learned

To get right back up.

12/28/14

I Reckon

In which Carrie reflects on the matter ….

 

Explosion of earthly

Wonder

I wonder why

I am born a reckoner

And would I be

without our

Milky Way.

 

Orion points me true

I see you in the

spattered galaxy.

 

From Sisters

I stop and think

Of ways I might

have been

Startdust

Less beautifully.

 

1/10/15

Love and Grit

In which Carrie thinks of two “Bobby McGees”  . . .

 

A jarring purr-call of crows in the forest, which, to other avians must seem like a lion’s roar.  I ignore my labor and self-doubt with the distraction of interesting looking forest debris and idle chatter about things I would have a much easier time discussion were I sitting with my hiking companion over a cup of coffee.  It is eight in the morning and we put one foot in front of the other up a gentle incline which nature will turn into steep, loose cinders later on in the hike toward the end.  This is my first, my second, my third, my fourth attempt up the mountain.  They all blend into each other.  I have known this country.  My memory assures me it was I, Carrie Anne Ebner, who travelled there.

 

I also once tried the Portland Marathon.  I remember this September (or was it October) morning, after a night of watching two strange black-and-white movies (Pi was one of them) and not really feeling like sleeping, as the sun was rising by the second and I was smiling (at least internally) at the little downhill bit near the Naito Parkway.  An older woman passed me and I followed her skinny frame and the sign clipped to her shirt which said, “This is my 18th marathon.  How about you.”  I remember lime green something, and her moving farther along ahead of me.  It didn’t matter that she passed me or that this was my first official marathon, or that she was, like, 80.  I was happy to be there.  I wore a cut-off shirt with a giant sunflower printed on the front.

 

I have just read, and re-read a quote found in the book Running Away: “When a bad thought floats into your head you have to say, Thank you for coming, thank you for visiting, now go away.”  The runner Bobby McGee said it.  It is probably a well-worn sentiment used by coaches of many varieties to motivate their charges.  It has succeeded in both advising me right now while also invoking the Janis Joplin song which will probably be in my head for most of the day.

 

The trail is getting steeper, but I know there is relief coming, this being my multiple time here, the Three Sisters Wilderness.  Soon it will flatten into a plain and to the right of my companion and me will be Moraine Lake, and Broken Top, void of snow this August, farther off.  We’ll stop for a snack and some water up by those damn-tough looking trees.  They are probably five hundred years old or something.  How would I know, but that I suppose someone told me that they grow slowly, but enduringly, in this hostile habitat.

 

The other marathon was a lot more successful, though unconventional.  I might have worn that same sunflower shirt part of the time.  I remember waking up on my twenty-first birthday with something like a smile.  I had been thinking of running my own version of 26.2 miles for a week or two, and took two days off of work at Black Butte Stables to allow for the run and a day of recovery.

 

I jogged my first 5-mile loop in sweatpants.  I came home and ate and drank water, changed my clothing into something cooler–it was August– and went for a different loop.  Ten miles in a row was the longest set I had put in ever. My “training” consisted of ten-hour work days with horses and an occasional hike.  My ambition was fueled not by knowledge that my body was ready for this but that I loved something about the idea.  I wanted to at least try.

 

I went for another jog, had a longer break and completed the last 10 or so with a couple of friends of mine who seemed to admire me for this strange enterprise.  For some reason I didn’t consider it a big deal, not like getting an advanced degree or having a baby or buying a home.  I sipped a few gulps of merlot where they took me for a birthday dinner and complained of soreness.  I had run five and a half hours in one day which, by my loose estimate on my average mile time (13 minutes), was, indeed, a marathon.   I am the tortoise.

 

I miss running.  The book I read made me crave it.  I missed running and hiking long trails when I was studying philosophy and linguistics at Portland State.  I underwent a different genre of endurance–one where my thought and creativity and scholarship was remarked upon to the point of feeling not very good about myself–almost the entire time I was there.  I would read biographies about mountain climbers–the real ones who faced actual death every moment of their Himalayan treks–and would fit some homework in here and there.  Probably those stories kept me on track to graduate.

 

It was hard to thank the bad thoughts which floated into my head and firmly, but gently, invite them to leave.  I took therapeutic walks with my German shepherd while writing my papers in my head.  The verdancy of Tryon Creek State Park enriched me in my darkest moments in which I composed nothing resembling philosophical argument but passionate explorations of deep philosophies–useful ones.  Life-affirming ones. I would look upon the cyclical habitat with awe.  I came to know Wolf spider webs in the fall and explosive buds littering the trail in the spring.  Very different from where I grew up.

 

The summit of the mountain wasn’t really the end.  Nor the second or third one. Maybe that is what helped me think, It’s not a big deal.  Sure, nobody can take away those accomplishments one accrues in a lifetime, but there is still the downhill trek.  And the next unremarkable day unremembered now.  I faced other ambitions later which took longer and required the participation of more than one or two people in order to make me win or lose, more or less.

 

I finish and finish again and try something else and remember who I was in my sunflower shirt with nothing, really, to lose.

 

April 23rd – Poem in Your Pocket Day

In which Carrie shares her poem in her pocket for this most notable holiday from the ordinary . . . 

I’m a little fascinated with language for its own sake.  Georges Perec, a French author with many instances of the vowel “e” in his name, endeavors to write La Disparition (French), a novel which omits the vowel in its entirety.

 

The translator of my copy, Gilbert Adair, had an even harder task for the English version, A Void.  In this English version, syntax is convoluted, characters are always looking for something missing, and several of our poets–Milton, Poe, Shakespeare–are reproduced, without retaining that popular vowel in any of the semantic forms.  One such is a rendition of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

LIVING, OR NOT LIVING by William Shakspar

 

 

 

It is of personal preference that I recommend “Po’s” poem BLACK BIRD, which would take too much space here.

On Reading Infinite Jest, part I

Dave Eggers, forwarder, egged me on last summer, when I bought Infinite Jest.  He said all kinds of nice things about David Foster Wallace and non-lazy writing and what kinds of readers would like this book and much of it both spoke to my identity and my need for literary climbs to the yet unknown. Inspired to look into it by a friend who said it would be her “summer challenge” I decided thus it would be mine.  Eggers was right, though.  It isn’t to be taken lightly.  I put it down – it’s 2 inch thick, 40.8 ounces – noticing it would be both unwieldy to read in bed and that I definitely needed to restructure my life around its possibilities if I were to succeed in the way Wallace would want me to to.

I had read chapters “Year of Glad” and “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” already, so it was a review-with-pleasure that I indulged again, highlighting snippets of master-crafted energy, what I would have with pencil, greyily in my kindle.  Hal, with his strange noises representing intellectual mammothism, and the Insectdude, too polite to make himself a burden on society, allowed me into, respectively, the frustrated or secretive depths of their thoughts. Hal, in first person, thinks:

“The familiar panic at feeling misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds.  I expend energy on remaining utterly silent in my chair, empty, my eyes two great pale zeros.  People have promised to get me through this.”

And Insectdude, in third person limited, is shown to think:

“Once the woman who said she’d come had come, he would shut the whole system down.  It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside of him.  He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question.  It was now almost three hours past the time when the woman said she would come.” 

The reading of this novel will accompany a book on epistemology and done with a couple of other people.  I hope the pleasurable pressures of literary and intellectual rigor will keep me apace, and the companionship will also if they are not too whelmed by the work as I was last summer.

Exquisite Corpse

In which Carrie, Steven and Kariessa play a game of Exquisite Corpse … 

ROUND 1

Seed: It was a dark and stormy night at

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Always

It was a dark and stormy night at

the circus and the clowns were restless. It had

neva occurred to Smithey that for once

he had gone a whole month without drinking water.

But that wasn’t important now, because the

water was there, in his four-tentacled hand.

He took a deep drink of the salty brine, savoring the

burn of it as it went down his esophagus. “Oh how

much better this would taste with a twinkie!”

So, he made a twinkie out of rotting wood and slime.

But somehow it lacked that je nais sai qua, like

the way dust motes dulled vision in wind.

He sighed and realized that he was forever

restless, forever a clown, and it would always be dark and raining.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bella’s Addiction, Edward’s Reform

It was a dark and stormy night at

the end of a pencil when Bella snorted when

she was taking drugs. Then, Edward came

and pointed out that sugar wasn’t really a drug.

She looked up at him with dulled visage

as he hadn’t fed in weeks. His eyes gleamed

in a satisfied, easygoing sort of way, as he contemplated

the slimy snot running down her lips and

the gaping rents in his face, from which pus

had dripped. “You look good tonight,” he said with

Victorian charm. “Your earlobes look pale

and your scent…” He lunged forwards, crosses bared

and then changed his mind. There was a better way-which

involved vegetarians, and their little dogs, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conquest of the Eyeballs: A History of Their Victories and Pulsating Ways

It was a dark and stormy night

at the haunted restaurant. Eyeballs floated

nervously, unsure of themselves, but confident

of their ultimate design. Dawkins appeared

and the zombers wondered who he was. Then,

he pointed out how clever he really was, so much more than

the evil scientist so many had thought

was going to be the first to make ants dance.

But the eyeballs had a new though, that perhaps

they could evolve, or devolve from high rank.

So, their floating changed. Each started to pulsate

and stared intently, daring Dawkins and the zombers

to do what they might, but knowing how

they would eventually pulsate their way into victory!

ROUND 2

Seed: She was a bad cat, really, if you

How Kitty’s Heart Turned to Ice: A Cautionary Tail

She was a bad cat, really, if you

weren’t paying close attention. “Once,” I said,

“She walked all the way across the field, carrying a

mountain on her back (dwarves included).

And the next day, she lounged around all day,

weary and sore, but tender in her affections.” Then,

everyone realized that the last sentence didn’t

follow from the first. But a cat has its tail

tucked underneath, and like the every flexible feline

she could produce round droplets of slime from her

ears or her… But wait! She has some

other things she cared about besides slime and genes.

She also loved to eat slime, which was totally

divine to cat kind, the Opiate of Meow.

So she became content. No more mountains, no

more affections. Her heart became cold and desolate forever.

Bad Cat I

She was a bad cat, really, if you

looked at it from the bird’s point of view. But

who cared about the bird, anyway? He was just

“endangered.” All those hippies need to come to

realize that there was an easy solution. Penguins

just needed to be genetically modified so that

they stopped the tux act and blend in.

And the cat knew that – knew that in a way that

made the world make sense. So, her evil plot

started edging up the plot pyramid, vying

for Evil Plot Victory. The first step was to get rid of

the lesser plots. She did this by suffocating them with

furball clots. The penguins paled. They

knew they had just one chance. They had to get

the Dark Lord Voldemort to help them. So they did. The

Dark Lord gave free tux rentals & she was finished.

Bad Cat 2

She was a bad cat, really, if you

thought about how she had drunk dog vomit and

then vomited that up, and drank that, too.

But that wasn’t the worst thing. Not at all – for

she also loved to roll around in her scat, and

then cat skat at the local club where all

the kool cats sat, chewing the fat on the mat eating

their own flesh. After all, they could make

more! The gene-squencing cats at Washington

had found a way to power cats with nuclear energy,

turning them into warheads. Technically, it was the plutonium,

but, when used effectively, those suckers

really roll round ranking, rhyming, running, and

eating each other. What no one knew was that

Edward and Bella never kissed or ate

cats, after all. So she was finally able to sleep, purring contentedly to herself.

Wilkins-O’Riley Zinn (W-OZ) Reminds Me of David Foster Wallace

In which Carrie still mourns publicly over the death of her friend,  mentor, and teacher, Zinn, while telling her Smiling Ghost some stories of goldfish and the meaning of life…

Dear Zinn,

I find that I am thinking of you a lot this morning (while crying in the meantime) and wishing this manner of grieving the loss of your presence in my life could be exchanged for illumination.  You come to mind a lot when I have stories to tell of educational adventures.  And being the stronghold to the university where I learned from you, also the symbol of the question whether to persevere on this teacher-track or “to fly to others I know not of…”  I was recently in a classroom where lived a goldfish in a bowl on the teacher’s desk.  A student had given this person two, named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Guildenstern had died a couple of days ago, not by beheading as in Hamlet, but likely something to do with overcrowding of habitat.

I observed Rosencrantz throughout the day and toward the end he was spending much of his time up at the top of the bowl, sucking air it appeared.  I began to realize that he was probably suffocating, and after having a student do a quick check with google, confirmed the likelihood.  I was tempted to steal it from the room.  Some of the students encouraged me to do so. I almost did except for the questions I might have been asked upon leaving the school with a goldfishbowl under my arm.  I balked under the pressure of self-consciousness, and what an oddity my impulse would have seemed to those I passed in the hallways.  But, I cannot bear a suffering thing.  That I did not follow through on this impulse toward compassion hurts me now.  This heartache was reinforced by the following video,This Is Water, in what appears to be a commencement address by David Foster Wallace, who I associate with you.

And so I ask If it is not all about me, if I am not the center of the universe, why does it seem like I am?  I grieve the loss of you in my life, often.  I think of it mostly in terms of a question: who can I derive understanding and strength from besides the perfect person for the job?  You understood me and had just the right kind of encouragement for a “different” kind of teacher like me. There is the  default setting of missing you because of the benefit you brought to my life, now absent in the corporeal sense.

In another way – as I connect myself to a larger world as Wallace suggests to seniors everywhere –  that you have persisted in memory, I can recall your similar struggles in education and other places.  I still remember once staying with you in November (NaNoWriMo month) and how you confided your frustration over students “Philosophies of Teaching”  essays spread out in piles, as you were grading them, on your bed.  You lamented that they were writing “for you,” presupposing things they thought you would like to read in a philosophy of education stance. But you just wished they’d be themselves.  You wished them to be authentic.  I wonder now how they became so self-conscious, so unsure of their most authentic philosophies of living.

I wonder if your persistent fight to make the world better, to care for and affect the subjectivity of your students, killed you.  Did you feel the suffocation of objective thinking?  The dehumanization of our societies more in love with counting than with what counts? Were you adequately appreciated?  I am sorry for not reaching out to you more.  I think you could have used my help.

I write this to help keep myself going, because you believed in me, and are thus symbolic of something larger than my missing you as a person in my life.

Love,

Carrie

Academic Learning, Love of Learning, or Both

In which Carrie metacognizes learning surprises and vows to put love of learning as priority above grades…

I am considering the idea try not to let school get in the way of your learning.  I don’t know if it was Mark Twain or one of my very own teachers who instilled this notion in my brain, or if I realized it through a subconscious voice breaking the surface of my mind as I begin to study for an actual exam today.  I find that sometimes I forget to be interested in the material when there is a timeline and set structure to my learning already in place.  But as I read the chapter I discover myself wanting to learn – in this case linguistics and teaching content – while reawakening to a love of language (wordnerdism).  Like John Green explains about himself in the video below, I wasn’t a strong student in my earlier years.

There is a certain feeling which overwhelms when the learning process is happening, others might call it “flow” and really this technical term encompasses a great deal more than learning, I’ll suppose.  But when I am eager to crack a “textbook” open, and feel compelled to jot down vocabulary or hero-making bits of inspiration from the academic biophilic realm, I realize I am not resembling my 16 year old self at all, at least not the self I knew very often.  Occasionally there were times though, in my my youth, when I was behaviorally like this: excited to study, primed to exercise cognitive  linguistic, and academic processes.   Because I have experienced this myself helps me understand other learners, and hopefully empathize with them when the material seems plastic and forced, or real and enforcing of what they already know, love, and aspire to be.