 Seeking the Smart |
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It is very strange to think that a year ago I was at Tintern Abbey. That was some day. It was so beautiful in South Wales and so meaningful to me to be at the ruins of that old monastery and think about Wordsworth and look down at the river with my sister and read that poem and send my professor who taught me the poem a postcard from there even though I never really met the man and would have to avert my eyes in his class to avoid letting on that I was actually weeping over his passionate lessons on the Romantics. I read a lot of poems in college, and I really don't think I ever loved any of them like I loved Wordsworth's. It's the sole reason we even went to Wales. I'm so glad we did. I will never forget that day. Poem or no poem, we loved Chepstow and the Abbey was a majestic and fascinating and awe-inspiring place. It strikes me that a year ago I was in a place I was drawn to because of its literary history, and now I'm sitting here trying to decide whether to take an English class in the fall. Months ago, I reapplied for admission to the graduate school (I was enrolled previously while pursing my master of education), which was easy breezy. Once I was in, I registered for a night class because I thought I might want to take one in the fall and should get into one while I could. Night classes and especially decent ones are few and far between. I found one with a topic I knew I'd be interested in taught by a professor who's renowned in her field and about whom I've heard great things. Then a few months went by, and I totally forgot that I'd signed up, and then I remembered the other night, and now the deadline to pay is tomorrow or you get dropped from the course. I had no clue when I registered that it costs kind of a lot of money to take a class. I was so shocked that I immediately decided not to take it. I'd never really dealt with tuition as it was covered by a scholarship before, and I never had a clear idea of what it costs to go to this school. It's more than I thought it would be. But then I gave it some more thought and thought why not? I spend money willy-nilly on things far less valuable than, you know, education. It would not serve any real academic purpose in that I'm not enrolled in any kind of a degree program, although I'd get graduate credit for it. It would really just be for me. I feel like I need to something with my brain. Spring is so challenging at work and everything kind of grinds to a dead halt in the fall, and it would be good to read some interesting texts and push myself a little bit. So in my nostalgia for school, yesterday morning before work, as I continued to mull all of this over, I pulled out some files containing some of my writings from college. There are a lot of them. Work from entire classes is missing, and I'm not sure where those files are, but I hope they're still somewhere in my house. I started out as a journalism major and wrote buttloads of stories and papers and ended up keeping it as a minor, adding history as another one, and majoring in English. And I had to write papers for anthropology, too. In these files are papers on the power of movies to reflect and influence American culture in the twentieth century, focusing on Eight Men Out, The Kid, The Wizard of Oz, and Citizen Kane; an Indigo Girls concert as a display of the aspects that define ritual; the title poem in Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle; a trip to the monkey cage at the zoo as an examination of Goodall's principles; culture, imagery, and point-of-view in "The Dead"; how the symbols of a new cultural order at the turn of the century were presented at Coney Island; language in The Bean Trees; a wonderful story by Robert Cormier called "Bunny Berigan -- Wasn't He a Musician or Something?"; three poems about death; my grandmother; my disagreements with Christian Science; voice and setting in Dream State; the dream world of Sonnet 27; the essence of Louisiana; contrasts in "Tithonus"; the juxtaposition of pagan and Christian imagery in "To Penshurst"; Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the high school classroom; anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice; the treatment of Vietnam veterans in biker films from the 1970s; humor and irony in "The Rape of the Lock"; the salvation of Hal's soul in I Henry IV; the satiric treatment of chivalric romance in "The Knight's Tale"; the deft comedy of "The Miller's Tale"; paganism in Tess of the d'Urbervilles; and I have to stop now because otherwise I would be typing these out for the next one million hours. I spent a lot of time on some of these and barely any on others, but I somehow managed to pull them all off. It makes me feel shy and embarrassed to read through my professors' comments now -- by and large, they spent a lot of time, it seems, going through the papers line by line, leaving notes, drawing lines and arrows and circles, writing comments at the end. I counted three professors who requested that I come to speak to them about my reading style, my writing style, or my future plans in the "field." I never went to see any of them. I don't even think I ever even talked to any of them. I think I was just kind of weird. There was no way I could face these men and women I admired and try to speak intelligently about how I wrote my papers or what I wanted to do with my life. I could do it on paper, but I could not do it with words coming out of my mouth. Plus, I think I was worried at the time that they wanted to tell me I was an idiot. Looking back, I don't think they did, but I was still far too chicken to contend with them face to face. I wanted to do well in my classes and was proud when my teachers liked my papers (even though sometimes I clearly had no idea what I was talking about), but there was always a shift at the restaurant to get to or a bar to meet in or a crisis with friends to attend to or a summer adventure to plot and plan. I don't think I took it as seriously as I could have or should have. I still think my magnum opus was my thirty-page paper on the evolution of Nancy on thirtysomething for the jewel of my English career (I do not say this sarcastically), Women in Television, in which we studied hardcore feminist theory and traced it back through the history of television. I loved that class so much; I learned so much in it. I didn't participate in it beyond the reading and the work I did, which was plentiful, and my teacher, at a meeting at some point, was like, "WHY AREN'T YOU PARTICIPATING, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD?" I just clammed up and stammered something about feeling intimidated by all of the women and gender studies people when I had no background in feminist theory and was just trying to soak it all in. Which was true. Anyway. I look back at the content of some of these papers and wonder how in the world I came up with this stuff at 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. What was I even talking about? And we didn't even really have the Internet back then; I mean, of course it existed, but not really in my world or in any way as a part of our coursework, and I know that for research sources I always used actual books or journals found in the actual library. I know I must have done a good job because I got good marks and comments, but I feel like such an imbecile reading them now because I don't know how I ever could have given such works such close readings and come up with such interpretations of them. I guess doing them day after day, week after week, year after year just became old hat and it was easy to fall into that mode of analysis, but I certainly have no idea of how easy it is to fall back into. What if I can't do it? In short, I am scared. I want to take this class, but I am scared. Of the extra work that will be required because I'd be a graduate student, of not being outgoing enough to talk to anyone or participate in class, of not wanting to spend my time after work reading and writing for someone who is surely a very demanding professor when I seriously, with about the same amount of attention as the dilemma over taking the class, I am sitting here contemplating whether or not I should get digital cable just so I can start watching Degrassi: The Next Generation. I mean, "The influence of the sun in her life sheds significant light onto her paganism, and Hardy's identification of Tess with her Druidical past culminates in her arrival at Stonehenge and solidifies her image as his quintessential pagan heroine." What? Apparently I was kind of obsessed with pagan everything. "That she 'walketh up and doun' seems to signify a dueling nature within Emelye. She desires to remain chaste, but she crafts a garland for her hair, recalling the May fertility rites celebrated in Pagan times," to which my professor responded, "Amen. You're really rolling now." (My sister remembers the burning love we had for this silver-haired fox of a teacher.) "Recalling paganism's marking points in the poem's portrayal of Penshurst, this lines lends itself to a deeper, more theological interpretation by which it might refer to the houses (or churches) of other lords -- the gods of a mythic past or of a wandering Renaissance soul." WHAT? WHAT WAS I TALKING ABOUT? "The poet is able to invoke the sense of complex emotions present in the stage of sonnets into which 27 falls by weaving fourteen lines together in which the speaker both dreads and eagerly awaits his illusory world. His imagination bars him from sleep, but it also opens a lighted path to thoughts of his beloved, the young man. While he 'finds no quiet' in his sleepless nights, it seems only suitable that it is in the spirit of his 'soul's imaginary sight' that Shakespeare, or the speaker, or both, can live out the Platonic ideal of a relationship in which physical desire is sublimated into the union of a mystical vision of the ultimate spiritual bond." Seriously -- I don't know. Except that I'm a total insomniac and maybe it's all this paper's fault. I am intimidated by the myself of ten years ago, the one who was clearly smarter, read more, wrote more, and understood more. I think I have to take this class if for no other reason than to try to feel smart again.
About this time in ...
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