This
Journal

November
1999

I've been hanging out, waiting for something to bite [Fishing Metaphor]. And, sure enough, things are happening but they're not yet ready for writing. These things [Inexact Term] are busily becoming something else so quickly [Classical Allusion] that I just have to let them become. To try pinning them down [Insect Metaphor] while they're changing is just a foolishness beyond even my own most foolish projects. So we let life live for a while [Comforting Generalization].

Pardon the self-indulgence, but today is a writing day and even my most forlorn freshman knows that on Writing Day the only thing you gotta do is write. Just write. So I wrote.

Writing has an edge like a rough slice of metal under your desk that could rip your finger open. Writing is like that. You never know what might open - when you might start bleeding. You dance like a ballerina for a while - everything is easy - but then you lose the pavement, find yourself on a rough old gravel ditch of a road and it hurts. Your cute little ballerina shoes are all in shreds and your feet are bloody now. So you stop. You sit. And from out of the cornfield over there a small animal trembles. You've got nothing to do but watch it now - now that you've given up dancing. And you are happy to have lost yourself.

We were listening to Ennui all period, busily scribbling away while Andreux mourns, "Words...don't mean anything..." Well, it's blatantly false; of course words mean something. (You might as well say "Most persons do not see the sun.") But the way we use words can trip and tangle, hobble and numb our truer parts, muffle our fears. [Yes, these words too.]

But each class had its Moment today. Sometimes the Moment is longer than others, but it's usually a short period when everyone is quiet and focussed on his or her own page. The music hangs over the room but we're not hearing it directly. We're being taken by the voice in our heads (or its echo from the page) to another place - deeper down the well. We stay there for a little while and then jump back when somebody giggles or yawns or mumbles something rude about the music. Then the Moment goes away. I exchange Ennui for some Art Tatum piano solos.

We're still writing. I don't know what they are thinking. I'll only know part of it when I read their work. I love to watch them write. Write a lot, kids. Work those words - push 'em around. You've got to produce a lot of crap before you get the good stuff. We call this an exercise in Fluency. But we're shooting for a final product, a perfect paper, by next Tuesday. When I say, "This should be ready for publication," what do they hear? Just that it should be typed?

Now and then during the last period they stop writing and whisper. Their sound breaks the surface like a leaping fish and vanishes just as quickly.

Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.
Proverbs 17:28