Snippets

(Throughout any semester, I start writing posts and then don't finish them for whatever reason. Here, at the end of the semester, I share them so I can get some kind of read out of them.)

(FIRST: this first one is the beginning of a post about addiction and the twelve step program as a revelatory agent in peoples' battles with addiction.)

"...towards the door we never opened/ Into the rose garden."

When I was fifteen, I spent a month visiting a family member in an addiction recovery facility. It was a purpose furnished place with white walls and Kinkaid pictures on the wall. It was created as a place for people to step out their lives for a moment in order to reconsider the past, reconnoiter the future, and learn to live the present. Coneptually, it was a Burnt Norton rose garden. A more extreme form of Alcoholics Anonymous, the people who lived in this place were folk on the precipice of being consumed by addiction: a thing that undermines the very natures of what we talk about in this class. No longer did they even consider the past or struggle to redeem time, they simply had begun to ignore it. Treating life and limb as mere vessels, they had degraded their bodies and minds with corporeal pleasures.

This particular loved one was my father and for about three years previous, he had been terrorizing my family with a dour mix of alcoholism and depression. His roommates called him "The Professor" since he was a high school teacher. The facility was a renovated hotel with a single phone and dormitory style bedrooms that locked from the outside. Staffing it was a mix of burly orderlies and a balding young psychiatrist/shaman named Charles.

In this place, a person was to live the twelve steps. These steps are,

1.) We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.) Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3.) Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4.) Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.) Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6.) Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.) Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8.) Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9.) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10.) Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11.) Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12.) Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The twelfth step, "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs," echoes the goal of the capstone, to awaken something more ephemeral than tactile yet still resilient.

In the beginning of the semester and in the syllabus, Dr. Sexson warned us that this class's purpose is not to create epiphany but simply to cultivate an awareness of it. Though I'm not perfectly quoting him, he called any direct attempt to create epiphany absurd. However, the entire purpose of a 12 step program is to do just that. The whole reason my father allowed himself to be locked in a small room with heroin addicts and meth-heads and Charles was to generate an epiphany of sorts. One that would heal and allow for a seeking of forgiveness.

The irony is that my Dad was an Atheist. Shunning any sort of divinity, he sought only astronomy and geology from the world, not its cosmos. My mother, a Jew, always laughed at him for this. She saw the way he lit up when he hiked the Beartooth Range. She saw the idiocy of his belief and, I suspect, partially loved him on account of this contradiction. Of course, we are all wrong most of the time. Even mothers.

Every Wednesday and Friday my Mom, Dad, and myself would gather in a circle with a group of four or five other families in a type of group therapy. During the first session, Charles called what we were doing, an intervention. Wholly revelatory, the- END

(SECOND: This next snippet is about a conversation I had with some other classmates. I stopped writing this one because I simply wasn't remembering the even well enough to render and reflect on it.)

Alright so I think I had an epiphany! Well, at least, It felt that way.

I was sitting at Spectator's Bar with Brie and Robert and Holly on a day earlier this week and we started talking about the Four Quartets. Plopping his copy of the book on the table, Robert Loomis started unleashing his thoughts on T.S. Eliot, Ninja Turtles, and death upon the gang. Given the empty pitchers and glasses sitting on the table and given my respective mindset, this was a terrifying experience to say the least.

Doing that thing where he throws his hands up in the air looking like someone about to get hit by a bus, Robert started tying in his previous class on Nabokov and the zodiac to T.S. Eliot. After a brief moment of staring at the book in front of her, Brie chimed in about Robert's piece, about how it related to the river styx and everything else important.

The section Robert is covering is in Dry Salvages II. The section I am talking about reads:

" There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation."

He will elucidate more on this Friday but in short, we were hitting on pop-culture, Greek mythology, canoeing, New Zealand, and the Mississippi. The sheer number of pertinent references threw my brain into overdrive. It was like being thrown through a time warp on a roller-coaster while a midget inject adrenaline into my frontal lobe at the same time the short fellow's wife proceeded to punch me in the testicles. Staring at the TV screens around me, I started noticing things, and not just noticing them, I was tying them to things.

I saw a basketball game with Kobe Bryant which caused me to simultaneously reflect on a playing laser tag with my old friend Bryant Mawyer while also remembering the time dilation from playing sports. I saw - END

(THIRD: This one was going to be my posting about the lighthouse as a mythological text. I simply lost interest with this one after reading my classmates' posts. They were doing a bang up job on this one so I didn't think my late-to-the-party submission was going to be of any real worth here.)

In class the other day, we discussed the relationship between young James Ramsey and the Lighthouse from a Freudian perspective. In this case, it represented the reconciliation between the Oedipedal imperative which James felt. In order to fulfill his masculine obligations to the world, James had to acquire a certain kind of reconciliation with his father who, at the beginning of the book, taunts his son with his inability to reach this reconciliation, as exemplified by the lighthouse.

From a mythological perspective, I relate this story to the relationship of Daedalus and Icarus. In the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the tower, the vertical form, represents a kind of imprisonment. In order to escape this, the two must learn a kind of ascension, flight. Flight in and of itself is a divine thing, to attain the movement and freedom given by its procurement one has attained a connection with things that is akin to true understanding. However, one must not try to overstep their bounds, to reach to high before they are ready, for this is a misunderstanding of the very lesson that can be achieved from flight. Icarus, being young, does not recognize this and therefore perishes. Likewise, Mr. Ramsey fails to do the same, unlike Lily, and is left to the drowning feeling left with

(FOURTH: This post was my class ambitions post. It turned into a pointless ramble so I didn't post it.)

After reading my first post, a friend of mine told me that the pen story made me sound gay. And I thought to myself: "Holy Hell! That would be one hell of an epiphany!" You're just going along, thinking you're perfectly normal than all of a sudden you can fly. Soaring above everything, you touch the sky, dip to the oceans, go say hi to Greece and go neener neener at Daedalus with your thumbs in your ears and your fingers outstretched like you're giving the air a high-five. That is wicked gay.

Wait.
No.

Wrong definition of Gay.

Hmmm. Not going anywhere with this. I suspect there was something about the idea of a homemade epiphany that comes with 'coming out of the closet' or something. Ugh. I like the flying thing better. The other thing is just too, I don't know, easy. Sorry, I'm getting Oscar Wilde in my Ernest Hemmingway (this is much funnier than you give it credit). Gotta keep it short. To the point.

During this class, I want to learn how to horseback ride. I want to learn about learning because learning is everyday revelation. I also want instruction on how the hell one reads Finnegans Wake. Also, why the asparagus is it spelled like that? I miss my apostrophe.

I also want to

(So there are the random snippets of writing that I didnt finish. I think there's some alright thinking going on in some of those but none of them strike me as finished enough to be considered real blog posts. However, I think some of them are at least kind of entertaining.)