Posts Tagged ‘ schoolwork ’

17.04.2013: The Fish

I firmly believe that things are more than they seem.

Elizabeth Bishop seems to agree with me in her poem, “The Fish“.

This poem reminds me of that fact that everything has a history. Every person, every animal, every object, and certainly every web browser. The history might be evidenced by things that you can see visibly or by looking beneath the surface.

This weekend, I visited three colleges. I already knew what they were like on the surface. I already knew the things they really wanted me to know. I knew that one presented unique research and internship opportunities (Northeastern University in Boston). I knew that one was located in an idyllic hillside town (Denison University in Granville, Ohio). I knew that one was renowned for their Conservatory of Music and the way it affected the non-Conservatory students by creating an atmosphere of creativity and passion (Oberlin College in Ohio).

What is more important is what I do with the information I learned by delving beneath the surface of these schools. The facts I gleaned by talking to the students and spending the night with a host are the things that will impact my decision most of all. Like the speaker in the poem, I have to decide whether I should let them off the hook or not (so to speak).

My plan is to look at the history behind the schools. For example, Oberlin has a history of acceptance. They were the first college to enroll women and black students, and they have a reputation of a commitment to equality and progressiveness.

Honestly, there are so many factors I have yet to consider. I’m still reeling from the idea that I have two weeks in which to choose the place where I will become a real person, with real responsibilities and deadlines and a career. I find it extremely hard to place all my interests into set categories and try to figure out where I want to go based on that. I want to have opportunities I never thought about having. I think that I will eventually find the best school for this undeniably daunting task.

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2013
04/17
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10.04.2013: Letter Sent to Summer

Most of my friends long for summer. They want the sun, the fun, the sleeping in, the hakuna-matata-esque lifestyle they lead for a a few warm months each year.

The poem “A Letter Sent to Summer” by Jane Shore reminds me a lot of that longing.

In some ways, I completely understand why people love summer so much. Sunshine can invigorate you. It makes you feel good on the inside and the out. It’s scientifically proven that warmer climates promote more positive attitudes. Now, I can’t cite that, but it’s what I’ve read.

Personally, summer kind of bums me out. I have fair skin which burns easily. I don’t like swimming. I detest the beach (it’s heat, humidity, sand, and salt).

So, I’d rather talk about the underlying theme of this poem: the summertime of the the mind. It reminds me of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The longing for bliss, for an escape from the harshness of the world, the bite of the cold, the loneliness of the winter. It’s easy to get stuck in that “season” of the mind.

But even the good times aren’t all good. Summer, for most students, is a time of mental stagnation. It’s a season during which we are programmed to “relax and have fun”, even when there are better things we could be doing.

I don’t think that we should have school during the summer or anything like that. I think breaks are a healthy part of the developing mind and important when you’re learning, well, anything. Sometimes you have to take a step back and look at what you’ve done so far in order to figure out how to progress.

In fact, I had to take a break from writing this very entry before I could finish it. Often, when you set something aside, you can see it from a different perspective when you return.

Moving to a more personal note, I think that this summer will be especially important to me. During it, I will wash myself clean of whatever high school crap may be clinging onto me. I’ll prepare myself for the brand newness of the four years to come by discarding the staleness of my life thus far.

I need to step out for a while. Spring break did nothing for me because I was surrounded by the same people, the same people who weigh me down and inadvertently force me into unhappiness.

So, while I don’t like the season of summer, I love and I need the idea of summer. And I’m going to embrace it.

2013
04/10
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18.02.2013: In a Station of the Metro

Many people find it difficult to get their message across in a mere two-line poem, but Ezra Pound does exactly that in his brief poem titled In a Station of the Metro. He wrote it, presumably, while pursuing the art of “people-watching”; I can just imagine him sitting on a bench, notebook in hand, looking at all of the faces as they come and go, making little more impression than a ghost might. Indeed, the scene is perfect: puddles reflecting the high gray ceiling, litter thrown carelessly on the dirty cement, trains whooshing violently by but eliciting less than a flinch from the crowd…

I really enjoy his description of the people. Apparition. Like they’re something ethereal, drifting through the author’s consciousness, waif-like and forever lost. It’s accurate. I’ve rarely seen anyone smile at any venue of public transport. It seems to be against tradition. After all, no one wants to be there. No one wants to be crammed onto a smelly bus with smelly people and be forced to breathe the stale air and try to be content with their stale lives.

After all, why do people take the metro? Because they have to get to their jobs, or their homes, or their meeting, or to the mall, and they can find no other alternative. It’s cheap. It’s a necessity. It’s almost a metaphor for these people’s lives. They do what they have to do and they get off the bus as soon as possible.

No one talks on a metro. Not to other people, at least. It’s one of the most unfriendly environments a person can find themselves in. You may say hello to someone if you end up sitting next tot them, but god forbid you try to talk about the weather or engage in any other sort of conversation. The metro is for getting from Point A to Point B, and there’s no use in talking to strangers, particularly when you get the feeling that one of them wants to steal your wallet.

I don’t know, but I have often felt that people appear like ghosts to me. They have no substance, no way to make anything they do affect the place they’re in, much less the world as a whole. I think it’s a phenomenon which is rapidly spreading, and which is (slightly less rapidly) being realized by the public. We don’t matter. No stranger will ever remember our face. We’ll be gone out of their lives as soon as we’ve left their field of vision.

Likewise, we’ll be gone from the thoughts of others soon after we leave this world.

2013
02/18
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02.05.2013: Tulips

Tulips by Sylvia Plath is a complex poem by a famously complex woman. The most interesting thing about it for me is the distinction Plath makes between the sterile, clean, empty feeling of the hospital and the dirty, disturbing, vividly uncomfortable feeling that seems to be oozing from the tulips. I think that it’s odd that the tulips are the cause of  such turmoil in this poem. Most people think of flowers as peaceful and beautiful, one of the great achievements of nature. The author obviously disagrees.
I love how she describes the emptiness as peaceful. I think we all crave a bit of emptiness. People seem to fill themselves up with things that don’t really matter, with things that, ultimately, make them miserable. One you remove yourself from the rest of the world and the all of the things you use to define yourself, you can know what peace is. It’s like a huge thermal blanket, to be empty, to not feel anything. It’s warm and soft, and everything else in the world has jagged edges that tear at you.
For the first time in my life, I’m now finding myself frequenting a hospital. Until Friday, I had not been inside a hospital for over a decade. However, my grandmother was admitted for arrhythmia caused by her neurodegenerative disease  and since then, I’ve tried to visit her as often as I can. Plath’s description of the nurses is particularly interesting to me.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
The nurses I’ve seen in the hospital seem to correspond to this description of them. It’s eerie. They walk around in the halls and they always seem to be busy, but it’s nearly impossible to tell what exactly they’re doing.
Plath also makes a comment about how she is an eye that won’t close, a pupil that constantly takes everything in. This, I think goes back to the whole filling yourself up bit. Every moment that you are alive, you’re soaking in information. There’s a ceaseless tide of images and sounds and thoughts and feelings that never seems to assuage. The wave of reality beats down upon relentlessly on us poor inhabitants of the universe.  It’s no wonder that people go crazy. Sometimes I wonder how we can possibly stand it.
Sometimes, I feel so helpless. Like things are happening and that they will keep happening, regardless of any attempt I might make to stop them. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a hospital bed, trying to feel good and embrace the peaceful emptiness, and someone puts tulips in my room. What a horrible feeling! You can’t be left alone when there’s something gnawing on your safe little box. Life goes on, and people will never understand how to make you feel better.
I really didn’t mean for this to get so depressing, but then again, I did just write about a Sylvia Plath poem.
2013
02/05
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29.01.2013: Richard Cory

I just read the poem Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson. It’s about a respectable man far more rich than the narrator and the rest of the town in which he lives. He eats fine food and seems, for all intents and purposes, to be the model of a successful gentleman. Yes, perhaps there is an odd gleam in his eye, a little hesitancy when he talks to the townspeople, a sort of unstettledness about him. The townspeople all wish they were him while they look at their meager rations of bread alone. The light tranquility of the poem is disrupted at the end when we find that this man, respectable Richard Cory, has shot himself.

It’s not unlike an average suicide in today’s time and culture. You never really expect it until it happens, and then you realize that you knew it was coming all along. You saw the signs, the loneliness. You heard the quiver in their voice, you saw their disease, and you did nothing about it.

There is so much more to a person than you could ever imagine. That face that is presented to society is nothing more than a facade, hiding the things no one wants to talk about. Deep desires, unbearable pain, tiredness, jealous, agony. They exist in all of us, and some are simply not equipped to deal with them, so the only option is to get rid of them, and with them, themselves.

I can’t tell you some sad story about how someone I knew committed suicide. I can’t tell you that in changed my life, or that it makes me look for the signs of depression in all of my peers. What I can tell you is that I know what it’s liked to be looked right over, to have my blood boiling and for no one to notice. It’s the strangest feeling, not to be known for who you are, but for who people want you to be.

People have a tendency to create a picture of a person in their head based on what they look like or the people they associate with. It’s natural. It’s an automatic reflex to try to contextualize a person. How else can you figure them out?

In any case, this poem stood out to me. It’s sixteen simple lines that paint a picture of Richard Cory’s entire life to the reader. The generalizations I drew from it could be correct, and they could be entirely off the wall. However, it’s my believe that the entire point of writing is to force people to make their own generalizations, whether they be what the author “intended” or not. Reading is about thinking, not about being told what to think.

I may or may not have gotten a little off-subject here, but those are my thoughts.

2013
01/29
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