Instead of grading…

Lately the feeling that the activities on my to-do list might just smother me in my sleep, creep off the page and into my unconscious, has left me with little emotion for anything else. I feel a flat sort of happiness when the sun comes out, or when I allow myself the luxury of a cup of tea.

Otherwise, I am: writing a 15 page paper on possessive determiners, writing reviews of other people’s 15 pages of possession, not reading that assignment on reserve in the Library, (or the preceding weeks’) making cryptic notations on 50 students’ essays, introducing the next essay, asking the director of composition if my introduction was correct, plotting to change the course of freshman history by making said 50 students actually love to proofread.

There are humorous moments as well, though. The other day I was having my 10:30 class do a group activity; the group in the front row turned to ask me more about the assignment. This degenerated into rapid-fire personal queries: how old I was, if I did in fact have a brother who was on the football team, where he lived (“I’m not giving you his address,” I told them), and what I was doing, exactly; if I were a Grad student. It occurred to me that I knew them all; their names, their personal histories, their majors, their strengths and weaknesses even, to some extent; and they knew little about me. I stood in front of them and talked about grammar and sitting still long enough to really observe something. Many of them still spell my name wrong.

At this point the entire class stopped to listen. “I still don’t understand this next essay,” said J.S., a girl with a sister and two brothers; her sister once pushed her down the stairs and broke her wrist. “I mean, it seems like it’s for artsy people. Like you would write it. You write really well, in your examples. I don’t know enough adjectives.”

Nobody knows enough adjectives. I don’t know enough adjectives. That’s not the point. The point is to think on paper, to force me to get what you mean. All it takes is a brain and a pen and basic knowledge of grammar.

And maybe time enough to breathe, too.

Companion to Shakespeare’s sonnets

In honor of long-standing argument that I am going to win one of these days — if the telling of it or the moral itself is of more value; not that these must be mutually exclusive. The beauty of Shakespeare’s originals, I’ll warrant you, however, surpasses these moralistic reductions as the first of May surpasses the first of December:

Sonnet XXIX:

(reduced to the bare bones)

Thinking of you cheers me up

Sonnet LXII:

(reduced to psychological drawback)

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Sonnet CXVI:

(reduced to Christian catch-word)

Agape

Sonnet CXXX:

(reduced to really bad Emo Indie Rock)

I love a girl who is normal.
She’s got frizzy hair.
Never when we’re smoking and the men are passing
Have I seen them stare.
No, no, oh no. She has bad breath and teeth
And when she asked to sing in our band I said:
“my dear, you’re too mediocre. I like your voice
but, darling, others would only if they were dead.”
But I’m singing to say
I love her anyway
And anyway Vogue is a ruse
But my love, my love, it’s true.

Sonnet CXXXI:

(reduced to lawyerese)

Your pulchritude is not of wide repute, albeit that Party 1 (hereafter referred to as amant) has conceived the opinion that it meets the standard of amorous myopia/acceptance insomuch as to render you endeared/capable of social tyranny. Amant proposes that aforementioned lack of reported pulchritude may be due to the latter, executed by you so extensively as to establish this as your reputation.

On Romance

“Part of the problem is in our expectation of marriage,” author Esther Perel writes in the September 2006 issue of Self. “We come to marriage today with high hopes of satisfaction on many different levels. Not so long ago, the desire to feel passionate about one’s husband or wife after years together was considered a contradiction… Today we turn to one person to deliver what an entire village– friends, community, extended family– once did. We expect our partner to be the primary supplier for our emotional connections, to provide a bullwark against the problems of everyday life. We seek security, as we always have, but now we also want our partner to love us, cherish us and excite us.”

I’m not sure that ancient marriage was so devoid of the idea of long-lasting passion. Given human nature, I imagine girls have been dreaming about it since the dawn of time. You know, the handsome husband coming home to the nicely swept cave, with some juicy, freshly slaughtered Mastodon; arranging the spit just so, complementing him on his ability to make fire, getting distracted over the beauty of the sparks dancing around you…

Or, handsome husband comes home to the tent (shut off fastidiously from the howling sands of the desert) with a few dozen snakes for snake stew. You pretend to be afraid of them so you can see him get impatient, see the nice muscles of his neck stand out, and he teaches you the best way to skin the snakes (he learned in his bachelor days) and you say: “but, strong and handsome man, I am not afraid when you are with me,” and he is so appeased he decides to put off getting that extra concubine.

You know how it goes. Your teeth are like a flock of sheep. Your navel is like a goblet. Etc. Humans kind of like romance. And, dang it, handsome husband coming home with a freshly slaughtered bag of peeled carrots and a gallon of milk at the end of the day just doesn’t cut it. Not when he’s wearing bad jeans and his nose hair isn’t trimmed. He’s probably been flirting with the secretaries, anyway. Good thing they have better taste than you do.

Francis Shaeffer, and I forget the exact quote, said something in “No Little People” about how we expect life to be perfect, how we expect ourselves, our friends and our spouses to be perfect — not because we have any indication that this is reality, but because we have bought into a cultural romantic ideal. But humans are innately flawed: we can only feel disappointed, cheated, and abused if we expect perfection from one another.

Within the romantic ideal lies the cliché that we long for the love we do not deserve. Unrequited, boundless. This is ours for the taking, though a spouse cannot provide it. Not ever, not as it was meant to be. We only glimpse agape in the eyes of our most beloved. Without grace, love is merely a nice word. It takes humility to see that all we have to offer is broken, unlovely.

But for all that I still want a handsome husband to be bringing home some freshly slaughtered sentiment after years together. Maybe I should accept the fact, though, that he’ll probably have untrimmed nose hair, and that I may even be annoyed with his sterile bag of peeled carrots.

Bess

My little sister is getting married. I just found out. Not on the Internet, though I had been afraid I might — so had she, apparently. I called her on a night off, which I am still on (hence the typing). Had been expecting it, sort of, for awhile, but still cannot fathom the thought of Bess walking down the aisle to become some man’s wife. Fortunately, the man is worthy, and good for her.

Bess, Bess, Bessie, who was always almost as big as I was and finally grew to surpass me.

Bess the mess: she ripped her tights five seconds after walking out the door every Sunday on her way to church. She had trouble talking then. Made up for it in volume. I thought she was a necessary evil: my fantasies needed a second character; my sins needed someone less adept as the scapegoat. She took everything so seriously; I could crush her with a word.

I was way more intent on growing up and plotted to leave home at 17, before I had even gotten my driver’s license. She left home at 20 (was it?) and moved in with me. Not because she was shy: because she was loyal, I think, to everyone back home, who I considered dead-end people; hicks who would age there where they flash-lived youth. Snob. Yes, I was a snob and still am a snob.

But my little sister is getting married. My little sister. My sweet little sister who cried when I did not: would not: I was a stoic. Nothing could get to me. Ha ha. How wise of me: I laughed when we fought, when she kicked me, to prove nothing could get to me.

As we talked tonight, she said: “When you get back, we can talk about colors and stuff, because you’re artistic but don’t have too many frilly opinions.” And of course that got to me; everything gets to me. My little sister respects me enough to ask for my opinion on random importances. Weird. My little sister, who is nothing like me, yet shares nearly everything with me; who knows me probably better than anyone else in the world. Who knew my snobberies, cruelties, idiocies, pretensions, and loved me anyway. Who is getting married.

Bess. I’m so happy for you. I love you. A lot. I sit here in Durango and try to look stoic as tears well up thinking of you. Congratulations, and peace be with you.

Durango

26 hours 55 minutes and 1053 miles after starting in Moscow, I am at Durango Joe’s in Durango. My brain has that chaffed feeling of too little sleep and too much heat (the latter being the reason for the former) as I got a solid hour, maybe; “solid” not indicating the calibre of the sleep itself, that being of the sort drifting in and out of waking, when the mind dialogues with itself without ever truly sinking into dreams. But it was a good trip; I raced the dawn to Moab along the black highway, hurtling towards some fuzzy destination, just myself in the peace with the moon above me.

Now I’m going to camp. If I can find the way. I have not gotten lost yet.

Romans 1:20

The world works a certain way, regardless of how we perceive it. Yet we have no excuse for not perceiving it — in no culture (that I know of) is murder lauded, or cowardice. This does not mean all men are one being, connected by our roots beneath the soil of disregard, for we still flout this standard, and no one hates his own flesh. This standard is higher than we are. We know it but rarely practice it, as if it were hardwired and still completely against our nature; nor does one need to believe in a higher being to perceive this. Olive Schreiner, an atheist, asserted in her Story of an African Farm that the universe is based on a certain ethical standard which we discover sometimes only after having violated it: “In the end experience will inevitably teach us that the laws for a wise and noble life have a foundation indefinitely deeper than the fiat of any being…”

A universal standard, then: as there are physical laws, so there are spiritual or moral laws. Where they came from is a great source of debate. Are they imposed by men for self-benefit (which would negate the survival of only the best and the fittest) or are they older than man himself? Is this magic deeper than time, and broader than the systems spinning by it? We understand through what is made, and I understand the yes to this because it seems apparent here, to me, to us — to you, perhaps, as you look out beyond want to what is.

Saturday morning

I sit listening to my cousins play their harps, accompanied by Dad on the guitar, the wind outside buffeting the Iowa cornfields. I drink green tea as Grandmother drinks coffee in her nightgown. This is beautiful. This is peace. Since I got here I’ve been reading Madelaine L’Engle, her family stories, trying on ancient aprons and my own family stories, like so: The generation before us walked these fields pulling weeds, fed livestock; sweat, had accidents with tractors. The generation before them survived real tragedy: a son killed in the war; another dead from premature heart attack or stroke. Grandmother’s brothers. Before that was the Depression and changes of the early 20th century. Before that, the emmigration, settling-in, ekking out, in the homestead still standing behind the trees outside this window. Five generations now — I am the fifth, the oldest granddaughter. I don’t know that we will have many stories to tell from our childhoods here, besides “we had a lot of fun playing in the rododenron bush and we wouldn’t let Bess in.” I think growing up I was aware of this, and almost resented the fact that nothing ever happened to me; that I’d never been run over by a tractor or had underwear made out of boiled flour sacks. I had no suitors called George the Paratrooper who walked the railroad tracks from town to see me and of whom I could fondly say: “he was so easy to be nice to.” I had no suitors who died. Nothing. Our generation rarely tells compelling stories because we have nothing to tell. The forests have been felled. The grain for winter is stored by machines. Gone is our rhythm, except the rhythm of the school year (and Abercrombie jeans), the minivan wheels, and the washing machine from the next room. We flit from around the country and back again to somewhere else, but we want, we want, we want a sense of purpose, this larger generation, a sense of something. We find it in denial of rhythm and do anything to feel: we lack war, but we never lack a war; we will fight our families, our authories, our own bodies, our language, thought. “There is neither right, wrong nor logic,” a boy told me on the bus. We are a generation of drifters and egoists, drunk on our own nihlism.

I don’t know that there is a cure, except time.

South by South East

It seems eons have passed since I was in Moscow. In Boise I laughed and screamed till I was hoarse, and then the bus… the station, filled with deralicts… how is it that these people look this way, I wondered; does their appearance stem from their particular vices, or is it because they are unattractive that they can’t get a break? Should I be afraid? Of that guy, with the missing teeth, standing too close, or those kids, with premature beer guts? I don’t know. I don’t want to squeeze next to them for 23 hours. How uncharitable. I got on the bus and it was nearly full — one of the kids with the premature beer guts beckoned from the back of the bus. No thanks, I thought. I glanced to my right. Boy, about my age. You will be safe, I thought, and sat down. He asked where I was going. Durango, I said. Why, he asked. Kanakuk, I replied, suspecting already his response: “me too,” he said.

He was the only other person travelling from the Northwest for staff week besides me and my two friends from Idaho. He was from Vancouver.

Skip ahead 11 days, past the culture shock of extreme sports as viewed by sorority girls from the south. It’s my 25th birthday, and I’m greeting first-term kids at the airport. I look at the list of 3:55 arrivals, and out pop the names: Rocky Low, Carolina Low. No, I think, no way. I know these kids; I held Rocky in the hospital after he was born; I heard Carolina, after the Oklahoma city bombing, talking in her 4-year-old intensity about everything she’d seen on the news. My mothers’ paintings hang in their house, and trees my father planted line their driveway. But I haven’t seen or heard from them in years and years. I remember everything: the kindness, the generosity of their parents, their huge cerial cupboard, Montana saying, as we played hospital: “I’m sick because some bad guys glued a cigarette to my teeth and made me smoke it.” The Ice Capades with Alison. I’d never seen such spectacle. Everything. My goodness. How good they were to us, and I never knew it until afterwards, they were so gracious.

And here they are, and I got to pull weeds for them.

Skip 4 days, to now, in Iowa. I’m writing to pass the time until my cousins get here. I haven’t seen them in 16 years. I am very curious. Ten minutes maybe, now. Or an hour. Hard to tell. Oh, here they are. must go.

Notes on Law, Language and Memory

Law, though it be found written in stone, like the code of Hammurabi, or on the Internet, with its nanosecond updates, has about the same staying power as any other cultural expression. Law students are no fools. They do not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to tie themselves to something they cannot manipulate. They know well that people rule the law, not the other way around.

Law may be manipulated by is interpretation, by the precedent chosen, or by enactment, complete with due process and cross-examination.

Elizabeth F. Loftus writes in Lingustics at work of law, and more specifically the way “witnesses” respond to questions put forward with minimal differences. Loftus explains that results in several studies showed a varying of what subjects recalled, depending on the wording of the questions asked of them. Supposedly minimal syntactic changes spurred subjects to “recall” things that did not occur in the study videotapes they had watched.
Does this, then, as Loftus asks, refer to the structure of language or to the behavior of people? I would suggest that it is both; that behavior and language are intrinsically linked. Within the field of linguistics this might be described as pragmatics, though, pragmatically, this is simply the way the world seems to function. Phrasal of questions affects the outcome of the response.

When I trained as a journalist, the importance of the way we phrased our questions was beaten into us. Explicitly, over and over, we were told: you must not bias your articles, either by your writing or by the way you lead your sources. Something as minor as the choice between the definite and the indefinite articles, put forth in Loftus’ study as “Did you see the broken headlight?” versus “did you see a broken headlight?” could change the entire outcome of an investigative report, we were told. Such minor differences may therefore not be minor at all, as the difference between “definite” and “indefinite” or “guilty” and “not guilty” is also the difference of a few letters.

I would suggest in general that even minor syntactic changes make for drastic linguistic difference. One of Loftus’ experiments dealt with tag questions, and “Did you see a bicycle?” is not the same thing as “You saw a bicycle, didn’t you?” Tag questions are not neutral. If someone supposedly gathering information in a neutral forum — a lawyer, a journalist, a doctor — were to ask me a tag question like this, I would not think: “Oh, he/she wants information.” I would think instead: “He/she wants a certain type of information.”

In such forums, one is not to feed people presuppositions by one’s questions. The question “why did Lucy bring the dessert?” obviously presupposes that Lucy brought the dessert. People evaluate reality based largely on input, and input from other people is not least in this. It would be entirely natural to think if someone asked why Lucy brought this disgusting dessert that Lucy had brought a dessert of some kind, though its taste and consistency might or might not be disguising, as disgusting is a matter of opinion.

Adding time to the mix only complicates things. We used to ask our youngest brother if he remembered going on a walk with Dad in the prairie when he was not yet two years old and finding a rattlesnake, and for years he would say yes, until he finally confessed that somewhere along the way he had lost the memory, and only remembered the story as it was told by our questions.

Memory is to some degree a by-product of comprehension. Two-year-olds rarely comprehend their surroundings. This may be the reason that early memories are rare, and often linked to great pain or basic emotion. In the same way, people seem to think that memories linked to pain or emotion will be more vivid, more accurate, but I’m not sure that this is true.

In which the Hunchback gets no grace

“Years after I worked with the [RAF burn unit] airmen, I read a profoundly disturbing article entitled ‘The Quasimodo Complex’ in the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. In it, two physicians reported on their study of 11,000 prison inmates who had committed murder, prostitution, rape, or other serious crimes. They carefully documented a trend that I will summarize with one overall comparison. In the normal adult population, 20.2 percent of all people may be said to have surgically correctable facial deformities (protruding ears, misshapen noses, receding chins, acne scars, birthmarks, eye deformities). But research revealed that among the 11,000 offenders fully 60 percent showed such characteristics…

“Whether a murderer on death row or a crack pilot in the RAF, a person forms a self-image based largely on what kind of image other people mirror back.

“The report on the Quasimodo complex reduced to statistics a truth that haunts every burn victim, handicapped person, and leprosy patient. We humans give inordinate regard to the physical body, or shell, that we live in. It takes a rare person indeed… to look through that shell and acknowledge the inherent human worth, the image of God inside.”

– Brand and Yancey, 1984.

There are two ways to look at this apparent link between ugliness and crime (not that all criminals are odd-looking, but it almost seems odd to us when they aren’t). First, that unhealthy living rarely leads to healthy-looking individuals. However, from this description, these were physical traits correctable by surgery; that is to say, deeper than jaundice or blackened teeth. The second is that our society links crime and ugliness, creating self-fulfilling prophecy, ostracizing “creepy-looking” people, flinching at their approach until they learn to associate themselves with such reactions. This is not at all P.C. to mention, but from my own observance, marginal groups of outcast persuasions rarely boast super-hot memberships.

Obviously not all unattractive people are doomed to a life of crime. In fact, a lot of them end up ruling the world. I doubt this is entirely due to upbringing or intelligence or drive to succeed; it may be access to power or access to trophy wives, but this would still be oversimplification. Terrorists are intelligent enough to build and dissemble bombs, and they also have drive to succeed. They may or may not get trophy wives.

So what’s the difference between Prince Charles and Charles Cullen? We would give the prince some measure of respect (however ridiculous we might find him), whereas the only respect we would give Cullen, probably, is the respect of distance.

Respect, then. How much of it is in our faces when we address another human being. How much of it we give ourselves for the accuracy of our first impressions, when that guy we hated turns out to be an axe murderer.