Friday, May 16, 2014

I love college, and other boring crap.

This week I am going to post my Exit Essay for my Literature class this semester. I would encourage you to read all of the wonderful pieces that are cited. If you have comments on the works or the essay I encourage it, agree or disagree! I got an A and was very proud to see the professors encouraging comments. And those that are reading this blog, I thank you so much. It's not only a labor of love, it's a way to hone a craft I love and enjoy, and I would love feedback.





Clark Gillespie
Exit Essay
Eng 210 Intro to Lit
Heidi Naylor

 

William Faulkner’s Nobel Address

 

            William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize for Literature. It is safe to say that he earned the right to critique the state of his craft upon receiving this prestigious award, and critique he does. It was 1950 when he gave his acceptance speech for the prize. America, and the world, had just endured the greatest war in the history of man. We then transitioned almost directly into the Cold War, where fear and paranoia were staples of the every-day consciousness. Faulkner saw a kind of paralyzing fear settle over society in this protracted time of war and rumors of wars and challenged his contemporaries and those coming after him to not focusing on grief and fear and being afraid, the “basest of all things”(53), but to get back to writing about the “truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” (53)

Are these qualities found in his own writings? Do those that follow heed his advice? I will look at his story Barn Burning from our readings. Albeit before the Cold War, it was written while Nazi Germany was rolling their tanks across Europe, certainly a time for, if not the sustained numbing fear he spoke of, “so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.” (53), but certainly a time of a lingering nervousness . I will also look at some other writers after this time to see how they may have heeded his call.

            Barn Burning is a story set within a family that migrates from town to town, the father picking up farming jobs in each new place. But really, it’s the story of the youngest son and the conflicted relationship he has with his father and the reason they have had to move 12 times in his young life. That reason is that the father burns down the barns of the property owners he is sharecropping from, never in a way that can be proven in court because he asks his children to lie on the witness stand for him, but with enough of a knowing that the locals run them out of town. Faulkner sets this conflict up beautifully on the one side with the loyalty of family relations, of blood. “the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood…” (40) Juxtaposing against that desperate pull of blood on the boy is his own conscience. “His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And I will have to do hit.” (40) A brilliant move to show “the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing…” (53) The boy did eventually, after his father was finally shot, if not actually prevail, acquired the hope of prevailing, “and soon there would be the sun.” and finally, “He did not look back.” (52)

            These themes of blood versus conscience are also explored in John Cheever’s story Goodbye, My Brother, though the lines between who to root for in the story are blurred. In it we primarily see the conflict between the narrator and his younger brother, Lawrence. The narrator claims, “We are a family that has always been very close in spirit.”(54), yet throughout the book he highlights the battles of will and opinion between the family members, particularly Lawrence’s view of the family that show being “close in spirit” is a messy closeness indeed. “I had heard him say, years ago, that we and our friends and our part of the nation, finding ourselves unable to cope with the problems of the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a happier and a simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a measure of this irremediable failure.” (58) Ultimately in the end, the brooding younger brother, after the final blow, metaphorically and literally, to their bond, disowns the family when the narrator bludgeons him in the head with driftwood. This disowning is shown as a kind of victory, a fresh start and even a baptism for the family as illustrated in the vivid last lines: “The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw them come out and saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.” (66) I was left with an empty place, where hope was, for this family to reconcile with this ending. I myself have had a falling out with a sibling, the reasons for which were deeply personal and life scarring, yet we have become close again, the pull of a shared upbringing, a mother’s love, and of blood too strong for even the harshest transgressions to not fade. Ultimately I feel this story falls short of Faulkner’s ideal of what the writer and poet should write about, “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” (53) He feels a burden as a writer to not just document difficult truths, but to “help man endure by lifting his heart…” (53) While blood loses out in both stories, Faulkner’s boy sacrifices his blood for truth and we are left with an image of his following a path of higher calling, where Cheever’s narrator’s family bonds seem to be broken by nothing more than a difference in worldview, and yet we are given that powerful baptismal image in the end as if the brooding and melancholy brother was the weight that held the family under.

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were divisive characters in the world of poetry. Their critics say they used the shock value of tortured minds to achieve acclaim secondary to poetic artistry, while supporters might point out that they expanded poetry to a new place of raw emotion and autobiographical self-observation, dubbing it “confessional poetry.”  This kind of poetry was new for the time and ground-breaking. It seems that all new things do breed a certain resistance from any establishment, but does their poetry lift the spirit as Faulkner would ask of our writers? It certainly does not. “I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil” (Sexton 70) “And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.” (Sexton 71) The images of blackness and death are ever present in the poems “Her Kind” and “The Truth the Dead Know” by Sexton. Many similar images are found in Plath’s poetry, particularly “Daddy”, and ironically enough, even though it was 1962 and many years after WWII, her imagery evokes the time that Faulkner was imploring our writers to help society get past, Nazi oppression and the war. “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo”, (72) “Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars.” (72) “I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.” (73)

            It seems that Faulkner could see the change happening in his contemporaries and the new crop of writers as they transitioned from the modern to the post-modern world. He saw and felt that inspiration was giving way to a raw emotionalism. An emotionalism that was, for some, also a realism that looked in a mirror, instead of looking at the horizon, and he did not like it. I do not think, for the most part, that his call for the poet’s voice to “not merely be the record of man”, but to “be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” (53) was heeded by the writers that followed. Faulkner held his craft to a higher call, a call to lift society from the dregs of the fear and uncertainty in life, to see inspiration and attain higher things. The writers that came after were more interested in showing a life that, to them, was real, whether or not there was anything higher to be hoped for.


Faulkner, William. “Acceptance Speech Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 53. Print.

Faulkner, William. “Barn Burner.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 40-52. Print.

Cheever, John. “Goodbye, My Brother.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 54-66. Print.

Sexton, Anne. “Her Kind.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 70. Print.

Sexton, Anne. “The Truth the Dead Know.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 71. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 72-74. Print.

Biography, Anne Sexton. The Poetry Foundation. Web. 10 May. 2014.

Biography of Sylvia Plath. Poemhunter.com Web. 10 May. 2014

Saturday, May 10, 2014

One Second.


A Very Short Story.


          Walking to the head of the stairs, I am paused-- stalled like a soft breath in cold stillness. A note floats from the record player in the corner and haltingly snaps and pops. It's an F-sharp and it draws across the room like a thin pencil line hanging in the air before disintegrating and floating to the floor. Tilting my head slightly I look out the window and see the sun as it's sliding down to a last glint of blinding red light. It glints through a gap in the leaves of a dying papaw tree.

'Why did they think that papaw would survive here? The summers are much too dry.'

The leaves look stressed, sapped of life. It is still a long time before they finally will let go and mercifully fall to the dusty ground.
I see the sun's now golden sliver shrinking as if in slow motion, before finally disappearing with a scintillant flash, the size of a pin head, then gone. It leaves a hot orange glow shimmering through the tree and a white pin in my forward vision. I blink and the pin is blue at first and fades through green, yellow, and red my consciousness focuses on it and seems to slide in deeper as if it were a gravitational worm hole compelling my mind slip inside.
          'Where is she? She is usually so punctual.' It’s a quality I have grown to admire in people: punctuality. It takes a caring and intent, two things she has always had an abundance of. I anticipate hearing her ritual of arrival at any moment. First the rusty shed door squeals in protest as she forces it open and again to curse her as she shuts and locks it after putting her bike away. Then the front door opens and the sigh of relief slowly escapes her lips as she feels the warm air of home wrap her cold bones.


          Dusk is a perilous time to ride a bike. Even with the frenetic strobe of LED lights. There is a certain chimerical affect in the graying fade of twilight that seems to make everything else succumb to its deviltry. Light fades. Attention fades. Memories fade.
          She feels her knee buckle, compressed between the aluminum and steel on one side and the painted plastic and glass on the other as they dig into her skin. Out of the corner of her eye she sees something. Despite the shock and pain and rush of blood and adrenaline, she sees it. It is blue-- opaque at first, then it starts to glisten as little ripples and waves manifest and begin to appear. Frozen drops of rain seem to fall from the sky, skittering along, then flowing down over the edge of the rippling blue. She finds that she is looking down through the crystalline waters of a tropical sea and she can see fish of every color. Blue, yellow, purple. Neon. So bright, they seem independent and free from the water they swim in, as if suspended in a frenetic dance above the beige and greenish sand that they hover and dart over.
          Lazily looking sideways, through a suspended animation, she sees me, and in my eyes, the future, as if compressed in an illustrated timeline from a history book. As she gazes she feels herself shrinking and falling. Falling forward towards that future. It is as if gravity tilts while at the same time she grows smaller and smaller in a horizontal free-fall to the depths within my eyes. She sees my eyes widen as she flies directly towards the iris. Deeper and deeper into these soul windows she flies. It becomes like a flight over a land and place that circles underneath her like that of endless lifetimes. She can see the colors in my eyes transform into the sheep covered hills of Ireland, the Grand Canyon, and Mayan temples. Places where God and man created hand in hand the miracles and wonder. She flies as if she were flying miles above, and yet walks barefoot, feeling earth press against her feet. She kneels down and pushes her hands against the soft damp earth, feeling them make deep impressions in the soil.
          Suddenly my hand is pressing against and enfolding hers. Hand in hand we fly and we walk through the air and upon the soils of this earth together. We see the wonders of providence and of man. We see the people and places that would become the portrait of our lives. The hues of their personalities cascading out from love and pain and sacrifice and grief and victory to paint our conjoined consciousness. Painting us from the inside until it spills out and we shine with both light and dark all that we will experience together in this life.



          The light waned. As it did, it was the faded memories of another time that held on to that second. That stretched it thin. Thin like a young mother’s patience with an unexpected layoff. As thin as a the line connecting a young mother’s budget for food and need for rent...or maintaining a car. As thin as the wire to the right headlight that loses the strength to carry the current to spark the halogen to warn of the cyclist coming in the hazy air of the impending night. It took less than a second to feel the tears come into her eyes, to shut them momentarily while wiping the salty despair from their lids. It took the rest of that second to see the flash of the strobe disappear with the sun in front of the car’s blue hood and the lightless, and now lifeless, vacuum of that right headlight.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Time Crunch

It turns out that starting a blog a month before ones destination wedding isn't the ideal time to expect to post weekly entries! Then again when is? I'm not a writer. I have a day job. I have a new wife, two daughters...family. I have two classes coming up next semester. I have lots of interests and hobbies. How do I find time to write a weekly blog? The answer is I don't. I have to make the time. I constantly shuffle this here and that there. I weigh sleep, quality time with loved ones and friends, exercise, errands, playing music, listening to music, cooking, watching 30 Rock, go to work 40-48 hours and numerous other things on a weekly basis. When do I write?? Who's brain here shuts off? Mine certainly doesn't. One of the things I find difficult is to take the time to stop and write or record an idea when it comes. I have so many during a given day and, sadly, I rarely stop to make a record of them. It's so easy to just daydream the best idea known to man, as it flows from the recesses of the cerebral cortex and when the process comes to fruition, it vanishes before it can be recalled. Often I also find that when I stop to start writing it down, the flow is interrupted and the idea is often left sitting there, looking like a broken hologram, with no body or depth. Because of this I often find myself half consciously NOT taking the time to record my thoughts because the uninterrupted process of inspiration FEELS so good. I'd rather have the

(the above entry was started, oh, sometime in the FALL of 2013. And I just laughed at the irony of the last full line.)

So here I am. Starting again, only this time. I have a plan, an idea, a germination.

For my birthday last year or the year before that, my beautiful wife got me a book. "642 Things to Write About"

I hear by resurrect this blog and will, by this weekend, write you all a story, using one of those prompts. There have been a lot of #100days blogs and Facebook posts lately, so I plan to write a hundred of those stories, poems, or memories using that book. It won't be in 100days, but maybe over a year or two. I hope you enjoy. I am excited to get started

Cheers!.