Why I Write (Essay 8)

I write, most simply, because I cannot bear to be alone. There lurks just beneath the surface of my soul a constant shadow, a harbinger of the profound loneliness that is the human’s most abject and terrible fear. This loneliness repulses and attracts me; I am forever drawn against my conscious will towards its awful grasp. I reach towards its depth even as I shrink away, testing it as a child cautiously tests the monster under the bed with the gradual descent of a single bare foot. I write because I cannot accept the certainty that I will ultimately be consumed by its gruesome power, and the process of manipulating language provides brief respite from the terror of solitude.

Yet in order to write, I must stare into the fangs and jowls of the beast itself, and I must welcome its colossal chasm into my very being. In order to write, I must be consciously and completely alone. Writing is for the endless hours of the dark morning when there cannot possibly be anyone in the world as achingly awake as myself. It is for the nights when immortality seems the only alternative to suicide, and for the unceasing days that follow. Always there is the frantic battle against the certainty that the words can never be enough, and the dread that somehow they will be excessive. Thus the writer fears not obscurity, but greatness, for successful writing displays most poignantly the failure of all but the rarest words to convey more than base meaning. To write is to consume and become consumed by the insurmountable inadequacy of language and therefore existence. There is nothing beautiful about the process of writing; the writer will die by her task.

Still, what I so desperately seek and fear in this process are the occasional flashes of rightness, the moments in which the words together form authenticity. I am driven to order the words in ways that create meaning outside of my own isolated consciousness. I feel eternity in the words that I use; they are words that have passed from the pens of the common and the great, words that have been tasted by sinners and saviors, words that have danced in the dreams of toddlers and ancients. When I mold these words, I am merely a scribe, nothing more than a medium through which flow the past, present, and future of all of humanity. Beneath the force of language I cease to exist in my individuality and for an instant, I become everything that has ever been and that ever will be. It is an ecstatic moment of transcendence, one in which the solitary I is eclipsed by the enormous power of human connection. I write for that moment.

Harvest Hymn (Essay 7)

A head of cabbage is quite a bit heavier than it looks. I almost dropped the first one I cut, surprised by the sudden weight of it in my unskilled hands. Yet it did not take me long to find the meter of the field, the rhythm of the blade in my hand and the rows of vegetables before me. Pierce, twist, pull, toss. Pierce, twist, pull, toss. The monotony of this harvest hymn was soothing, the damp coolness of each rubbery cabbage a relief from the torrid Florida sun, the bending and stretching welcome to a body so often too still. Setting down my knife and tossing the last cabbage of the row into the black crate, I pressed my hands into the earth beneath me and felt intimately and immensely connected to the universe.

As I filled crate after crate with heads of cabbage, the repetitive physical labor encouraged my thoughts to roam. I realized that before I arrived in the cabbage patch, I had not even known how cabbage grew. To me, cabbage had been coleslaw at the diner where my brother works, sauerkraut at the local hotdog stand, or at most, the perfect pyramid of uniform spheres under the strange yellow light in the produce section of the grocery store. I had never considered a field like the one in front of me, full of perfect grocery store cabbages, yes, but also riddled with those that were misshapen, too small, oddly-colored, or already beginning to rot. When I walked through those fields of cabbages plants in every state of growth—from tiny sprouts to harvested stalks—I began to feel a deep sense of shame for the extreme lack of connection between myself and the food that I buy and eat.

Kneeling into the next row of plants, I was reminded of a book I once read about migrant farm workers in America. The book told the rarely-spoken story that is behind those perfectly-shaped cabbages in our grocery stores, and behind so much of our nation’s food. It was the story of a broken family just trying to survive in a land that refuses to acknowledge even their humanity. It was the story of children who are choked and strangled by carelessly sprayed pesticides, of children for whom school is not even a distant dream, of children whose parents must decide between food and basic healthcare, of children who become old long before their fifth birthday. Yet when I read that book, my head hurt, my heart hurt, but my shoulders did not, and I soon forgot. All too quickly I forgot the plight of the migrant worker and her stillborn daughter, her bleeding hands, and her broken faith. It was not until I felt the earth beneath my palms and the weariness of a single morning in the cabbage field that her heart beat in my chest and I began to understand.

By now that field has been plowed under, the soil that once rested so calmly beneath my pulsing palms is now scattered across the plot. Soon the workers will plant a new crop of cabbages and it will not be long before they are again singing the rhythmic refrain of the harvest hymn. Pierce, twist, pull, toss. Pierce, twist, pull, toss. I will hear their song; the pulse of the field rhythm now burns through my veins and I will not forget.

Assignment/Essay 6

This one is not going on the blog. Email me if you'd like to read it.

The assignment for this week was to write an essay in the form of a letter to either a well-known person or a literary character.

Little Tree Forest (Essay 5)

When I was eight, my family moved from a large, posh house in a ritzy subdivision on River Road to a one hundred and thirty-one acre parcel of undeveloped land in a county called Goochland. When I caught the scent of sunlight, I may as well have been taking my very first breath because it was on that day I came alive. The tiny farmhouse into which we moved was far too small for our family of nine, but my siblings and I hardly noticed. By the time the sun rose each morning, we were out exploring our new territory, collecting treasures, wading through the meandering creek or the shoulder-high grass.

The place to which we returned again and again in our adventures was a small creek that trickled through a thicket of young pine trees. Because a line of much larger trees bordered the area, we named the grove Little Tree Forest, and slowly became familiar with its every tree and every rock. Drunk with the newfound power of ownership, we staked our claim by naming the trees and rocks and any other feature distinct enough to catch our attention, and the names became as necessary and significant to us as those of any lake, street, or city.

It has now been many years since my last visit to Little Tree Forest, but I suddenly feel the urge to go back. As I leave my house one cool Saturday morning I am worried that I will not be able to find it, but my body remembers the way, and I soon recognize the familiar spread of pine trees. I once could have drawn an intricately labeled map of Little Tree Forest, but that was so many years ago. Taking off my shoes and socks, I step into the March-chilled water, and our elaborate names begin to tug on the strings of my memory as if they are kites gently drifting on the wind. I wade over to the base of the Great Mud Wall, suddenly remembering how we used to race each other up the slippery creek bank, collapsing at the top into a giggling pile of innocently naked bodies.

As I jump over the creek and duck under branches more nimbly than I thought I still could, I come across a slab of rock, precariously perched upon three other rocks to form what looks like a miniature stone table. I am amazed that the stones are still there, for it has been well over a decade since we arranged them into an altar for my then eight-year-old brother’s wedding to our next-door neighbor. On the day of the long-planned ceremony, we stood around that altar, my twin brother solemnly reading the marriage ceremony from a tattered old Methodist hymnal we had unearthed in the attic. Rachel had on a stained and torn white nightgown of her mother’s, and Dylan wore one of our father’s old ties, tied in a sloppy double knot at his neck. I am oddly glad that the pictures we took that day were never developed, for the images in my mind will always be of an elegant bride and groom, not of the children in comically large costumes that a photograph would have shown.

Just past the altar, near the very edge of Little Tree Forest, a gnarled tree that hangs out over the creek before turning sharply towards the sky. We called this wise-looking old tree Spirit Tree; he was the deity of Little Tree Forest and we were thus required to respectfully close our eyes each time we passed under him. I am amused, now, at this charming childhood belief. Yet, as I pass beneath the thick trunk to leave Little Tree Forest and head back to my adult world, I find myself closing my eyes for just a second in deference to Spirit Tree.

Assignment 5

Think of a place where you spent a lot of time as a child. Write about visiting that place again at least five years later.

Imposter (Essay 4)

(I almost did not post this one because I don't like it. I had trouble thinking of something to write about and finally put this together, but it is NOT my best work. Oh well.)

As I stood before the ugly mint-green doors of my high school on the first day of ninth grade, I fully expected to be denied entry. I was just thirteen, at least a year too young for high school, but I did not know that yet. I looked like a parochial school boy in my pressed khaki pants and tucked-in polo, but I was not yet aware of how completely wrong that was, either. No, as I stood before Maggie Walker Governor’s School in Richmond, Virginia on that September day in 2003, I was not worried about my youth or my clothes. I was simply absolutely convinced that I was not smart enough to be there.

Indeed, Maggie Walker is not just an average public high school. Newsweek and other national publications routinely rank it among the top twenty public schools in America. It is a school to which students must apply, and with an average yearly acceptance rate below ten percent, it is more difficult to get into than many Ivy League Colleges. And my own acceptance, I felt, was a fraud. I had gotten a phone call just a few weeks before, informing me that a spot had opened, and that I was the first person on the waitlist for my county. So I packed up my pastel purple backpack, ironed those khaki pants, and waited outside for the school bus.

Maggie Walker was supposed to be a Mecca of sorts for gifted students, a place where we could meet and make connections with people like ourselves. But for me, being gifted had been, and would remain, an experience of profound isolation. When I was a young child, being gifted meant nothing more to me than yearly ability and achievement tests, after which my twin brother and I would compare results and go out to lunch with our parents. But as I got older, my label as a gifted student started to bring teasing, and rejection by my peers. Worse than the teasing, it created in me a constant need to live up to the expectations created by that label; because I was considered gifted, I found myself constantly expected actually to be gifted. And now I had been accepted into a school in which those expectations would only increase and become more pronounced. It was anxiety over those expectations that caused me to hesitate before the doors on that first day of ninth grade.

After I walked through those green doors for the first time, it was many weeks before I stopped expecting to be called to the director’s office and informed that my admission to Maggie Walker was a terrible mistake. Eventually, however, I did settle into the routine of high school, which I suspect was not entirely different from that of most other high schools. I joined the academic team, started playing field hockey, and ultimately made some very close friends. I managed to leave my mark on Maggie Walker, and there are still plenty of teachers who remember me when I occasionally go back to visit.

In June of 2007, my friends and I donned our forest-green caps and gowns and strolled one last time through the halls of the school that had become as familiar to us as our own homes. In spite of my freshman-year anxieties, I had somehow successfully completed four years at Maggie Walker. But as I walked across the stage to collect my Maggie Walker diploma, I was still not truly convinced that I was smart enough to be there.

Assignment 4

Talk about a time when you felt like an outsider of some sort.

Forsaken (Essay 3)

In the years before we started attending church, Sunday mornings were sacred to my brothers and me. We spent many of those mornings outside, on the banks of the creek that trickled through our large parcel of land. Naked but for our underpants, we splashed in the waist-deep water, delighting in the sensation of sun-drenched water on bare skin. When the water was not warm enough for wading, we would build elaborate fortresses out of tree branches and mud, fighting gallantly to protect them from dastardly invaders. In the winter months, Sundays were pajama days, reserved for reading by the fire, doing thousand-piece puzzles, or playing endless games of Risk or Scrabble.

When I was nine, my mother decided that it was time for my family to begin attending church. We were not at all a religious family, so my mother’s sudden attempt at piety seemed rather odd to my father, my siblings and me. Yet my mother’s word was law in our house, so we traded our nakedness for stiffly starched linen, our fortresses for upright wooden pews, and our storybooks for musty-smelling bibles. I was furious at the loss of my Sunday morning freedom, but church inspired less anger in me than it did profound bewilderment. I attended church every Sunday morning only because I was coerced, and I could not understand why people would willingly subject themselves to such torture. Nobody could give me a satisfactory explanation, so eventually I stopped asking questions, made a few friends, and won prizes for memorizing more Bible verses than anyone else in my third-grade Sunday School class did.

Although the weekly sermons, Sunday School lessons, and scripture readings bored, confused, and often irritated me, I did love the hymns. The angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament readings became kind and gentle, soothing in the cadence of the music. Intolerance and hatred were so easily softened by 4/4 time and consonant keys, and I could almost forget the discrepancies and deceptions that often so bothered me. As hard as I tried, I never did believe those hymns to hold any truth, but they were beautiful lies, thick and sweet like golden honey on my tongue.

When I finally became old enough to make my own decision about being involved in church, I did remain active in one for about three years. The ten prior years of mindless perfect church attendance had planted a seed of uncertainty in my once convicted mind, and that doubt brought me back week after week. As a small child, I believed that everything from the towering pines behind my house to the smallest pebble on the bed of my backyard creek had inherent, uncomplicated worth, but as a young adult I could not even find that worth in my own being because I was just unable to believe in the higher power from which I had been taught to derive that value.

Eventually I realized the wisdom of my earliest belief system, and I was finally able to return unapologetically to the quiet, carefree Sunday mornings of my childhood. Every so often, I still wander into a church on a Sunday morning and eavesdrop on a hymn or two before slipping back out into the bright morning sun, but I know that my children’s Sundays will be reserved for pajamas and puzzles.

Assignment 3

Write about a time when you did something that you did not want to do, either because it went against your conscience/values, or just because you did not want to do it.

Wielding Words (Essay 2)

I was in a street market once, in Italy I think—it is difficult to be certain for I was quite small and we traveled often—and I remember being arrested by the incredible noise of the place. It was not especially loud under the yellow striped tent, but the multilingual transactions had an urgent energy to them that pierced me. All around and above me, tourists were haggling anxiously for cheap-smelling bags and flaking gold statuettes, and sensing their inexplicable desperation, I began to cry. I was a stoic child, rarely moved to tears by anything but acute anger, so these sudden sobs bewildered me as much as they did my parents. I still cannot be entirely sure why I cried that day, but I think it was because I recognized the restless throbbing hum of the market as the sound that has relentlessly occupied my own mind for the entirety of my conscious memory.

It was around that time that my mother began reading the Hardy Boys books to my brothers and me. I was about four, and had been reading proficiently for a couple of years, but there was still something magical about being read to. My mother was a Real Estate agent then, and she took my brothers and me with her to showings and open houses, meetings and closings. So we read every book in that series in a different living room, on a different stranger’s couch. As my mother read to us, she would often pause and ask us to define a word, and if we could not, we had to look it up in a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary that was far too heavy for me to lift.

I was intoxicated by that dictionary. I hoarded words like my brothers hoarded couch cushion nickels, sharing them only most reluctantly. I delighted in the dictionary’s enormity; nothing pleased me more than the knowledge that my language was beautiful and terrible enough to contain me and everything I had been and could ever be. For each word I could use to describe something, there was surely a better one possible, but this thrilled rather than discouraged me. I think I knew even then that my life would always be at once consumed and enriched by the search for the perfect word.

Thus I was but an infant when I discovered the power of words to bring delight, and before my childhood was over I also would come to understand their ability to cause ineffable devastation. Yet even in the most desolate moments of my relationship with language, I remained in awe of its splendor. Indeed, is there not more beauty in one moment of intense pain than in a hundred of great joy?

When I was seven, or perhaps eight, I was given an assignment to write a descriptive essay about a place. I remember the feeling of the writing more than the work itself, but I believe I described a cave or a cavern of some sort. And as I sat there with my pencil and my wide-ruled composition book, the humming energy coursing through my little body connected with something and I began to write. It was not easy; the words did not flow unimpeded from my brain to the page. But it was exhilarating, and it was exactly right. When I finished, I was accused of copying the passage from a book or a magazine. Although nobody was able to prove my guilt, the doubt lingered.

Face burning in shame for something I did not do, I buried my words beneath the day’s waste in the bottom of the trash compactor. It would be almost ten years before I again felt the exhilaration of writing with my whole being.

Assignment 2

Write an essay about some of your earliest memories. Use Virginia Woolf's essay "A Sketch of the Past" for inspiration.

The Old Hospital (Essay 1)

(Assignment 1: Describe and/or analyze what place/person/event/thing best represents the Harrisonburg/Rockingham area.)

It is a curious phenomenon of the English language that causes a thing to become old overnight. With just a few ordinary hours and a small bit of fanfare, the hospital across the street became the old hospital and linguistically passed into the realm of overgrown ivy, broken windows, and sighing support beams. French, of course, does not allow for such confusions or illusions. In that policed language of poetry and love, “l’hôpital ancien” is that which used to be the hospital, while “le vieil hôpital” is the one with the ivy. But where is the romance in such clarity of expression?

I walked through the halls of the old hospital not too long ago, finally giving in to the morbid but irresistible curiosity that draws me to the places that people have left behind. The beams were perfectly solid and most of the windows remained unbroken, but, in the empty hallways, the air itself felt somehow dilapidated. Gone were the gurneys and white-coated doctors, but that distinctive smell of hospital sterility lingered, pathetic in its refusal to let go of the vacant building. I call it pathetic, but it grasped me still; it filled me once again with the indescribable excitement of meeting a new baby brother or sister, the detached sadness of visiting a dying acquaintance, and the nauseating panic of struggling to understand the mechanics of a parent’s chemotherapy and radiation.

The antiseptic harshness made me contemplate, too, as it always does, the hospital’s ghosts. I thought about all of the people who had died when the old hospital was still the hospital, and I wondered if they were resentful about being left behind. Or could they have been ready to be forgotten? Did they appreciate the hush that fell over the hospital the day it became old? I closed my eyes and remembered them for a little while, just in case.

As I stood in the vacant hallway, breathing in the phantoms of the empty building, I realized how much of the essence of any place lies in its hospitals. We spend mere fractions of our frenzied lives in hospitals, but those moments so often represent the greatest joys and deepest sorrows of human existence. How many of us will, at some point in our lives, stand awestruck over a hospital bassinet and marvel at the impossibility of new life? How many of us will collapse on a hospital floor when a white sheet is drawn across an intimately known face? It is those moments that anchor us to our humanity.

Soon enough, the old hospital will become the University’s new building of something or other, and an updated name and fresh coat of paint will erase any traces of hospital smell and overgrown ivy. The new hospital will become just the hospital, and the old one will cease to exist in our words and in our memories. The ghosts will remain, but we, ever eager to move on, will forget.