Refliction

Computers buzz with melancholy, or so it is said. I was hearing a buzzing then, on the couch. It may have been from my computer, lying on my lap, or it may have been from other, wiser wires.

Some text and images on a screen: numbers, names. I read, Number Enrolled: 18. What happened to the nineteenth? How is it she has wandered away? I heard her speak in class once, saw her curly hair.

Well let’s hope that seat stays empty for her ghost.

I’m tired now because it’s Friday. By then, every hair on my head has hurried to bed. But there’s a bright light in my eyes. It reads, Number Enrolled: 19. An intruder. Six days have passed without him there. He must know his place, so I type away.

There are murmurings among my students, eighteen. I had been silent awhile, first, and I had wondered what to say (for the silence was surprise). Really there’s no need for me to speak. He’s a sophomore and as silent as the rest.

Here, I’ll introduce you to the class. Six feet tall. Skinny. Looks a little like me. Short hair. (But not that short.) Eyes like violets. Speaks and sounds annoyed. Trouble.

I yawn at the screen. It’s Yom Kippur. Or Rosh Hashanah. Either way, there’s a void in the place where discussion should be. Lyrical exercise. His own problem, and let’s hope he stays away.

He joins and looks unsure, but that’s just my reading of it.

A second essay fired my way, and thank the Father with hesitation for that. Yet where’s the physical? I hold no paper in my hand, angrily, late at night. I chum around online until I know it’s here. And here it is: a lab report I’ve now forgotten, talking while I churn my legs.

An attachment mistake.

Well, just get it to me very soon.

They say the truth will come to the bright fluorescent light, but to tarnation if I ever see it. Instead, a forced reintroduction. I’ll tell it like a poem, obscene. His lungs are as dark as the cold side of a pillow. He misses Marlboros and his mom, whose disease eats away where he sucked as a child.

There’s a lump in my throat when I think about it.

It turns out the cubicle is occupied, so we meet amidst grandeur—promises, warnings, handshakes, deadlines. He’s confident. I shrug solidly. Wednesday it is.

He doesn’t return.

He doesn’t leave.

I make enough copies for him with each press, and I feel plastic on my finger. My class is perfect, except that they laugh when I suggest that not everyone has a body. I’ve heard we laugh a lot in there, but I say that’s a generalization, and that’s what we discuss in the heat of the sun. We find sentences that take for granted. Elaine Scarry once wrote that “[b]eauty always takes place in the particular.” My students would probably ask me who that is, and I would probably say that she’s over at Harvard or Princeton somewhere, bringing beauty back to the believers. But that’s not why I trust her. I trust her because she’s on a syllabus for a class that makes me think and draws when she should be writing. When I imagine her in a freshman composition class, I think of that worm or snake with a foot in a shoe and a German hat. Such a statement would confuse my students, and they wouldn’t write it out without a wiggle and smile.

Now take out the smile and count.

sircresponse

Damn.

Just let me write toward a composition-made hole.

See its edges: round and lean yet scraggled like a horseshoe.

Is this “that “first step toward poetry”” or a step around?

Art-riding or dick-writing?

Expressivist or Pony Express?

Click here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here.

If I were to write a literacy narrative, I would talk about that one time, at Giant Eagle, when I found the book of my dreams. I was just a child then, and my mom had curly hair. She had a pick with a fist for black power. 41 souls murdered in 50 hours.

Make this my modernist masterpiece, my waste land.

It is a certain disequilibrium contrived within the indifference of white paper; it is a certain hollow opened up within the in-itself, a certain constitutive emptiness—an emptiness which, as Moore’s statues show decisively, sustains the supposed positivity of things.

Oh, so David wasn’t meant to turn me on?

I felt as if I had experienced life with the person this brain once belonged to, even though I had never even knew his name, his story, or anything about him.

Who is it that I write to? Do you have a body, too? How does yours feel? Well, I guess mine feels just fine. Is it strange that I’m always hungry?

In the past, if you pictured events, like a black tie / What’s the last thing you expect to see? Black guys.

Post-Google, Why Is Citation Important? (Always trust the dot-e-d-u.)

Red coat.

Did you see that photograph of Peyton Manning riding on Tom Brady’s back? Giggling on the sidelines.

Here’s to Quentin Pierce, the words that have never once fallen, and a Sid Vicious riddled with bullet holes. Now wake back up and dance with the poor kids.

If Paul Revere and Yankee Doodle had been friends, would they have put together that fucking Yankee Candle Company?

Now click here for the Susan Kipnis-Laura Griffin-rock-till-your-socks-turn-blue multimedia (read the comments) presentation.

Jackson Pollock over Andy Warhol, eh?

Is he he?

turning brother into a crack baby

turning somersaults into a cracked baby

turning somersaults into a two-lane, double-decker highway

the fascinating insanity of a bumper-to-bumper heart attack city death knell

Is the indecision to take a life or let it live productive enough for you?

I realize any recuperative history like this will smack of nostalgia and idealization. I suppose that’s inescapable—if the art and theory of the era didn’t have ideals I felt were valuable, I wouldn’t look longingly back to compositional ideas I feel were abandoned too quickly. But please don’t think my nostalgia for kickier times blinds me to the problematic aspects of the Happenings theorists; there are aspects about them I find troubling. (28)

(Here, I refrain from scratching.)

So, Bartholomae urges a course “that investigates the problems of writing at the point of production,” in which students practice the ability to produce a critical reading” (28, 28, 28, 28), but what he offers is nostalgia, a course in art appreciation: “the point of the course was to teach students how and why they might work with difficult texts” (26).

A whisper from inside the stall.

April is the cruelest month / my uncle called me ghoulish once

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

Punchier.

Touch each other in black and white.

I was there to touch but just out of reach.

The soul thinks according to the body, not according to itself, and space, or exterior distance, is also stipulated within the natural pact that unites them.

Look, I found her.