Life update what what

So here's the skinny:

Winter quarter sucked some serious balls.

But it's over now. The crappy classes are finished, the sun is hopefully coming soon, and I only have to drag myself through two more classes to be done! Done!

My grudge against a certain professor will persist, however. To maintain some anonymity, let's just call her Legging Lady. We'll call her this because she seems to think that leggings are an appropriate substitute for actual pants.

Which they are not.

Anyway, I toiled all quarter in her patronizing presence, putting up with her three-page long essay prompts explaining how to properly cite, listening to her inane lectures in which she insisted on reading long passages aloud in Middle English just to hear her own voice, and having to hear her coo out, "Very nice! Goooooood! That's a great point...really lovely!" to every comment a student might make, however irrelevant or obvious it might actually be.

So why am I still so damn bitter? Because she gave me an A-. Now, that in itself is not too offensive. I've had much worse. The real kicker is that the thing that tacked that minus on was my participation grade. Yep. That's right. Apparently, my voice could not be heard over Laughing Guy's (in the front row, of course) outbursts of obnoxiousness at every single awful joke that Legging Lady would let forth from her mouth.

Some people just aren't funny. Which is something they should just accept and not try painfully to remedy in a college lecture. You are a Chaucer scholar. This is what you do with your life. Deal with it and move on. Unfunny people can make it in the world, too.

UGH.

I'M OVER SCHOOL.

This is an extremely immature rant. I thought I had gotten out my frustrations on her evaluation, but apparently not. I take full responsibility for it.

In other news, the one good thing that did come out of the quarter was my independent study project. As always, my quarters usually seem to boil down to the only thing I care about being my writing projects.

My original conception for the thing was going to be a piece about war. About violence and physical trauma and the fascination that exists in this world with cruelty, but it turned into something else.

I ended up with a hefty collection of poems and when I was writing new ones and combing through all of my old ones, I became very much aware of a deeply-engrained tension between silence and speech (in echo of my real life, I suppose).

Not too long ago I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which I liked very, very much. There is a particularly lovely passage, close to the beginning, where the grandfather, in a letter to his unborn child, writes about his post-traumatic stress following the bombings at Dresden. Of course, he doesn’t call it post-traumatic stress. PTSD didn’t even have such a name when such a letter would have been written. The grandfather proceeds to talk about how he systematically loses his capacity to speak as a result of the trauma, until he is reduced to tattooing YES on his left hand and NO on his right, in order to communicate at the most basic level. Then follows a very beautiful rumination:

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

I've really begun to realize the massive role that silence has played in my life, and just how crucial poetry has been to overcoming that silence.

Alan Grossman insists, in Summa Lyrica, that “the creation of silence is the condition of the articulation of speech. Silence mediates difference” (19.7). I've wondered, does he refer to the difference between noiselessness and speech? Or, is "difference" more a reference to schisms that can emerge internally when speech is finally articulated from silence?

To even arrive at a place of possible differentiation, maybe it's important to ask how silence is birthed? Or really, why.

Trauma creates silence.

Emotional clamor creates silence in its incapacity to articulate itself meaningfully.

Awkwardness creates silence.

Silence is perpetually in the making.

If I gained anything at all from Legging Lady's class this quarter, it was Chaucer's House of Fame. There is a long passage where, after being hauled into the sky in the great beak of an eagle, the speaker is then forced to sit through the bird’s long diatribe about all sorts of things, from jibes regarding the speaker’s corpulence to the concentric nature of ripples in ponds. At one point, the eagle begins to discourse on sound, saying:

Soun in nought but air y-broken,
And every speche that is spoken,
Loud or privee, foul or fair,
In his substance is but air.

Silence, I think, is sometimes interpreted or defined as the absence of sound, but this is entirely problematic in its assumption that the natural human state is one already rife in sound or noise. Chaucer takes an almost diametrical position to such an assumption in his notion that sound is not the inherent state, but rather silence is, and that sound is inconsequential—merely broken air—and substanceless.

But then I thought about music. An air-breaker, to be sure, but one which ascribes its own intentions and meanings for the individual listener. That is to say, I hear a song, or a classical composition, and I am left without the burden of any established semantic ties or references. I can interpret it and feel what it provokes within me without the weight of etymology or history, with all its various connotations and vicissitudes and calamities which words encounter in their course. So surely then, not all sound is damaging or dangerous. Music proves this to us.

In another class we're always talking about “post-catastrophic poetic speech.”—how language in its most true and moving form arises from a moment of plenary upheaval—or, in Grossman's terms, the “occasion generative of speech.” Grossman always says a lot of important stuff, but among the most important are:

1) The ‘occasion generative of speech’ is some dislocation or ‘disease’ of the relationship of a subject and an object (for example, as between lover and beloved or a god and his world). Creation is not the speaking itself but the primordial disease or fall which thrusts me into a predicament in which speech is the only way (3.3).

2) The silence which precedes speech is the first representational event of the poem. It is the poem’s first artifice (19).

3)Poetry is a version of the unutterable in human scale. (25.7)

Unutterable. What can be unutterable? Let me say that I think silence is always rooted first and foremost in human trauma, in all of its manifestations. Poetry that finds its origins elsewhere holds no real interest to me. Those poems are boring poems because their speech occurs with a sort of ease. Poems with traumatic silence at their roots are poems which must heave language up from terrible and tremendous depths.

Utterance. It is what becomes impossible in moments of cruelty, or maybe love, or when a body destroys itself. There are times when speech just doesn't seem enough.

I think here again of Grossman: "We awaken in the poem. How did we come here?" (33)

To which he answers his own query: "Indeed, we came there because the straight way was lost" (33.2) (Divine Comedy, canto 1).

In our lives, the straight way is indeed lost and only something like poetic speech can have the potentiality to contain such badness.

Silence is what the poem overcomes.

Silence is displaced by the poem.

Without silence, the poem would have no function.

So, I called my project An Etymology of Silence. And it is that...a history of my silences, a study of origins, and something truly, inherently good and healing in the process of speech, whether written or not.

Phew! That's a whole lotta rambling. If anyone is still with me, I also have other news!

I spent Spring Break in Las Vegas, which is a fascinating and bizarre experiment in human behavior.

I saw the entire world there.

I saw Paris:


I saw London:



I saw Ancient Rome (finally got to put that Latin to use!):



And I saw Celine's back:


It was quite an adventure and quite an excellent way to celebrate both my recent 21-ship and my impending graduation and jobless future!

Also, I chopped off 9 inches of my hair! I've been wanting to donate it for a long time and I finally had enough.


Now I can use about 1/4 the shampoo I used to, and if that's not something good, then hell, I don't know what is!

This is a ridiculous life update. My life, however, is mostly ridiculous, so I guess it's fitting.