The Spiral Organ

Four weeks.  A month. 

It’s difficult for me to chart, a la Demetri Martin, my progress or evolution here after my first month at UI.  Really, I wonder if it should be charted – but it’s always funny when Demetri does it, like when he charts neck thickness against thickness of books read (a personal favorite), or analyzes his charted analysis of himself and fails.  (That somehow feels familiar.)  But in sum, I’ve got fifty new acquaintances and a handful of new friends; new music (thank you, Kate, for The Black Keys), new terror/laughter/challenges (thank you, historians), an increasing vocal repertoire of popular music (thanks to the English department’s karaoke predilections); and because of these things I have a new humility as well as a new strength, a new edge.

That could be ‘cause I’m listening to the Keys as I write.  Maybe.

I just woke from ten hours of sleep, thanks to Dave’s Narrative Theory seminar, which always seems to combust my brain and then knock me out for half a day.  It’s really in thinking about my own work in connection with that seminar that I catch sight of new horizons, emotional and psychological, because I remember that Life is a narrative, constructed entirely through internal and external language.  We live in a sea of language, a sea of personal constructions, bumping into one another – refracting, even damaging, but ultimately growing each other.  Vonnegut, Momaday and others have written similarly, but I think I prefer Henry Miller’s take on the connection between imagination and being, his insight on our constructed selves; he’s a man whom I deeply respect and wish was living, if only so I could pester him for an autographed copy of Tropic of Cancer:

“We are only, alas, what we imagine ourselves to be.  But in that “only”, vast universes of being are capable of taking form and shape.  If only we knew that we can be all that we imagine!  That we already are what we wish to be.”  --from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

 …and some words on silence from the same essay:

“I could not help but thinking what this continent was like before the white man took it over.  It seemed to me that silence was a great factor in the world of the Indian, that he made no unnecessary stir, that he took the long way about rather than the short cut.  Perhaps his mind was at rest.”

Fuck yeah – imagination’s the only thing I’m really good at.  But it’s the silence I have to remember, that I have to learn not to drown with noise.  Even if, as I like to think, we are alive, if nothing else, to make noise.  To make the universe admit that yes, we were once here.  That we once laughed and cried and fucked and said beautiful (and sometimes horrible) things about one another.

But as for my time here at UI and my "home"sickness, there’s just no proper way to communicate the bittersweetness of feeling wonderfully new yet nostalgic for the old.  Anything I could say would be incomplete.  So, in the spirit of Miller and others, I’ll sit in silence and imagine.

jdm 

As I’m currently on the precipice of so many life changes, I figured it was a good time for my inaugural blog post on the website that I redesigned a month ago as both a literary and personal digital home on the WWWeb.

Three weeks ago I was thrust, despite so much focus on teaching and graduation and PhD/moving preparations, into the upper heart of Idaho on simultaneously the worst and best excursion of my adult life.  Utter isolation assaulted me on our first night near the headwaters of the Salmon River’s Middle Fork – not from people, necessarily, nor even from all modern amenities (river guides conjured unbelievable food from a portable stove) but rather from the post-modern information overload we experience everyday.  A few of us run from it; but I tend to revel in it – which is why the trip to Idaho was in many ways a frightening experience.  Waking up in the black, I’d hardly ever felt more alone without the internet, cell phone, television, music player, or even a reliable source of light at-hand.  I would have done anything to see a human face, reading human language.  Even solving a human-created puzzle would have been enough to stave off an anxiety attack.

Naturally this anxiety faded while heaving myself headlong over the crests of class-four rapids in an inflatable kayak.  So my six Idaho day-times were also the most exhilarating in recent memory.

Now that I’m back and have decompressed (or perhaps recompressed, al la information overload), I’m on the verge of another frightening experience.  What was once a wonderful and beautiful horizon is now an intimidating, lonely corner that must be immediately turned:  picking up and moving to Iowa City to begin a PhD program at the University of Iowa.  I’ve gathered that everyone is a little intimidated, but at 27 and a good four or five years older than many other first-year PhD students, I’m embarrassed to be feeling that kind of fear.  I’ve already been through a Master’s program and succeeded – this is the next logical step, right?  Cake.  PhDs, though, are more about career, more about making a name or mark, and so the stakes have been raised.  The amount of work I’m expecting/imagining is staggering.

The combination of these two experiences has made me consider lately “making a difference in the world.”  Let me explain:  with my compulsion to stay wirelessly connected to the entire world, I often had my writing students this year call out news stories for us to discuss at the beginning of each class – (as I once heard Junot Diaz say, great writing teachers “don’t teach writing, they teach compassion”) – and it was this I often remembered during my Idaho isolation.  I recalled carefully walking the Roxana Saberi saga with my one Iranian student and the rest of the class, or exploring the odd connections between the Somali pirate attacks and the young Afghani couple who were murdered for eloping in the spring – namely, how differences in the levels of law or lawlessness had allowed each system of hurt to arise.  No doubt incidents such as these happen regularly, but it is those internet microstories that stick with us postmoderns and help us contextualize our own lives in the wider world.

Because of these, I’ve often struggled with how to make a difference in the world as a scholar of literature and cultural studies.  Fiction writers and scholars often feel “useless” in the immediate aftermath of events like these – we all remember the crisis surrounding 9/11 and how many of us evaluated what we were doing, wanted to go join the fire or police departments, become doctors, politicians (maybe), and so forth.  How to make a difference as observers, as critics, as thinkers, and not doers?  I wonder if I will always feel inadequate for not being a doer.  Maybe there’s a novel to be had there, somewhere.

In any case, I’m ending this inaugural post with a call to action, so to speak.  No, not to do.  And not necessarily to not-do (that is, observe), either.  Merely to look at yourself and find out where you fit in this big, unhappy yet glorious machine of ours.  And then spend the remainder of your life comparing yourself to all the other cogs out there—

Er, wait.

jdm