Remarks

[Written on the cusp of beginning to teach freshman writing]

Freshman writing led me into the humanities. I attended a STEM-centered high school known for its excellence in the sciences, and wanted to be a hacker, mathematician, physicist, or linguist. At home, however, I spent most of my time playing the cello, and was quite serious about becoming a professional musician. For now, I will minimize the tension I experienced in weighing these multiple pursuits to say that the separate fields had a certain unity. Both music and the sciences involved the terms “genius” and “virtuosic” skill. They had intellectual clout, beauty, and rigor. Music was about the convergence of technique and expression; computer language, similarly, was constructed language that worked with hardware to produce real effects, often beautiful (e.g., Jonathan Blow’s Braid), and mathematics of course, was the purest distillation of all that. Also, my parents thought both were cool.

I believe I’ve always had a pretty strong interest in language, implicit in my respect for music and the sciences—which are both more symbolically oriented than the physical or natural sciences. I admired them for their manipulation of symbols. My main engagement with the more every day sort of language went into my inheritance of the school’s arcane linguistic club from a far more precocious linguistics geek. When I read, it was mostly non-fiction, though fiction was sometimes there, albeit suppressed.

The best people were working on precise problems which rendered precise solutions, to my adolescent eyes. Beauty lay in precision and form. I saw mathematical theorems as beautiful, but rarely extended the same epithet to literary or philosophical writing. Such writing—by which I mean done in “natural language”—was messier to me, and failed to form part of an exact problem or solution space. Language was most effective when it was used by me. Not because I thought anyone else would value it, but because writing helped me work with myself. I wrote reflective essays, journals, private blogs, a few creative projects. I wrote a poetry chapbook called “My Corpulent Mass” for freshman English. These projects allowed me to learn something about my self and relationship with the world. They were not important as artifacts to be read, so much as records of processes. Reading was always secondary to writing. The extent of this can be seen in my relationship to the literary texts assigned to me in school.

My main memory of 10th grade English involved taking multiple choice reading questions on books I hardly bothered to read. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Homer’s Iliad, and Austen’s Sense and Sensibility were among the class titles. Reading narratives from the distant past was challenging, but the deeper issue was probably the fact that I had little feeling for the social and sexual dramas going on in the stories. It now strikes me as strange that high school students would be required to read texts from the beginnings of the English language and the beginnings of Modernity and the beginnings of Writing; why not start with something contemporary and work backwards? I couldn’t relate to the masculine blood-thirst and desire for honor in Homer, although I was somewhat interested in the intimacy between Achilles and Patroclus. I understood something of the gossipy nature of Austen and the ribald sexual humor of Chaucer; Shakespeare’s wordplay was clever, but the character of Macbeth, who could broadly be remembered as “incorrect,” mystified me. In every reading there was something to grasp, but I mostly read in fear of quizzes. Besides, the discussions in that class went nowhere; students were scared; quizzing was punitive; I had no motivation to learn, and little fear of a bad grade. That class was a low point in my literary education, and anecdotally the same year I first learned to code.

Things got better from there. I had an astoundingly good English class in eleventh grade. We read a Dickinson poem and its facsimile, asking questions about dashes and capitalization, which in their apparent triviality made the poem’s meaning only more urgent. It constituted the first true reading experience, because I had to consider every word. We had open-ended discussions on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, whose dark intensity I came to admire. But mostly, I remember the process of writing for that class. The teacher was a truly dedicated and experimental pedagogue, asking us respond to standardized test prompts with narrative fiction. So I wrote stories and personal reflections, even while doing timed essays, and continued my largely introspective projects. In my final high school literature class, the near opposite could be true. I distinctly remember Seamus Heaney on blackberries and Yeats on gyres—Wuthering Heights, Crime and Punishment, and Native Son on the side of prose—texts which actually felt moving enough to absorb my attention in a serious way, to take me beyond my own worries.

Whatever I wrote for critical purposes does not stand out in my memory. How could one do justice to a book well-read? The better the reading, the worse the writing; the better the writing, the worse the reading. Consider the books and stories I never wrote about at all: The Death of Ivan Ilyich, White Nights, The Kreutzer Sonata, Notes from the Underground, Waiting for Godot, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Kafka on the Shore, World as Will and Representation, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Demian. These provided a level of solace during my most emotionally tumultuous freshman year. I found them on a shelf at home. These books were mainly the stuff of ennui, depression, self-hatred, a pull into darkness that was as cathartic as vomiting, which lent a certain beauty to my bedtime tears, and helped me understand certain issues around language’s failure. The darkness of reading as an experience funneled into the content of what I wrote at the time, most habitually in my journal entries (which were fairly constant, if not manically monologic, and not well-written in the slightest). Maybe I didn’t care for literature as something to be written about because my books had their imprints written in me.

When I recall the processes of introspection that went on in class through writing, the pleasure of a literary education becomes far clearer. I’ll add to my astringent memories a funny marginal comment my teacher left on a rather frank reflection I wrote about gender roles and sexuality. To be honest I don’t remember what the comment was, but I think he asked me why I couldn’t imagine simply being a “masculine female.” I don’t remember how this topic came to light, but it brings to mind one specific discussion of Shakespeare’s probable bisexuality in that class, and the subsequent discovery that the teacher himself was gay, in the process of some kind of divorce. I began to see a bit of the humanity and care behind my teacher’s bitter façade. In eleventh grade, the year of greater demands on the scientific front, I wrote clinically and critically about myself as a person who suffered from impostor syndrome. I also wrote through my ambiguous feelings of erotic desire and admiration for certain talented classmates. The eleventh grade teacher was unique in that he had us write proposals for our own grades, which gave me plenty of additional time to practice self-critique and reflection.

As much as my attitude towards literature was correlated with negative emotions and moods, angst around the melancholic relation I had with gender and sex, it was almost always linked to some kind of positive attachment, some little emotional high, however fleeting. As a child, I had found many boys in school quite attractive, and used my writing to blason them—in other words, to describe and keep their beauty under wraps, for myself, and to thus domesticate and sublimate my inflamed feeling. The experience of having a crush went from being a typical experience of shame to a formative stage for inner drama. I was annoyed and shamed to reckon with the fact that I was attracted to so many boys, so many boys merely for how their noses were shaped or how fast they were able to run.

The arbitrary nature of taste or attraction was as painful as the arbitrary nature of my divergent orientation.¹ Writing allowed me to catalogue the exact similarities and differences between individuals, and it thus legitimized my attachments to some over others, narrowing the field of attraction to those who had more pronounced aesthetic qualities. It also took my attention away from desiring them and replaced this with the busy act of writing, of describing, of charting the vicissitudes of my emotions, of establishing the historicity of my enamorments. Years later, I would hear about the troubadors, and connect the dots with Shakespeare. Were they not doing the same, possessing their loves through poetry?

As I slowly but surely grew out of these randomized attachments and entered my first “real” relationships, I discovered the extent to which my words were able to create joy and hurt in others. The apotheosis of this came after I met someone through a summer music intensive in the Berkshires over a period of ten weeks and came away pretty much in love. And then we wrote emails to one another, for several years.

But this isn’t a linear journey from music to text. She and I met playing in a string trio together, but in the dorms at night, we would speak out Ginsberg, reading from some ebook I had downloaded online. On the weekends we would go to the one bookstore in town, and there I found a pink book called How to Be Gay, but because I was too shy about buying things, ended up downloading a PDF of a more soberly academic book by the same author from 1989. Somehow this historical book converged with an interest in Beat poetry, and in a kind of investigation of who was gay in the world of avant-garde composers—who was John Cage, who was Merce Cunningham… because that is how I was coming to identify, at last, and I was fascinated by everything that academics had said on the subject. The high prevalence of gay men “all of a sudden” in this music academy added to the intensity of this reading; there were older but still youthful professional singers giving the most sublime performances of Britten’s canticles. Beautiful men reciting poetry through their vocal chords in music, wearing pressed white clothes in a light wooden amphitheater, while green grasshoppers and dragonflies and odd horseflies bred outside, and my female friend who was mysterious, and who would listen to me, actually listen it seemed, to my rants and my investigations and my descriptions of boys I had been or currently found attractive; but what really qualified the experience was not the chatter but the luminous silence after the final sound left the open-air amphitheater, absorbed by thousands of leaves of grass, trees, soil, earthworm, flesh.

There’s something entirely unportable about those silences and those fades, the way a concert ends on a particular summer day. The best concerts would leave me in a kind of wondrous catatonia. I would still try to write, but not after a long walk home in the dark—thirty minutes of cricket chirping, hearing the breaths of my friend. I tend to become upset with people who began to chatter and critique too early, and often find the eagerness with which some people opine completely alienating. Maybe that tendency originates from the preciousness of those moments of listening. The listening intensified by the caesura. The listening always mattered more than the writing, and that conviction persists to this day. The review for me was mere homage, testament to beauty, a marker of an important event. On a more personal level, it was a way of being with someone you love and thinking of something else—a sweet deferral of the more explicit kinds of intimacy that often lead romance astray. The wet air and my love for minute insects combined themselves, and of course the thin, wooden, hollow nature of stringed instruments always reminds one of the great human skill but small material difference involved in transforming a felled tree into a valuable music-making instrument. I don’t know if book-lovers think of pages this way.

The divide between the musical and the verbal is clear, in that music is certainly a finer thing.

But if music is finer, then words are more portable. They can survive transcriptions and transformations and translations; they can be “adapted” into films or musical works. The blockiness of language is also its fineness, its source of precision, its fountain of constraints. Somebody once said that poems are shipping containers.² Somebody once said on Hacker News, writing poetry is like trying to sculpt with legos.³

The coarse nature of writing probably comes from the conventionality of words. I struggle now with the fact that each word carries a patina of historical precedent. Music is also ridden with its own history, but the feeling of dysphoria that envelopes a poorly performed musical work is quite distinct from that around a poorly written piece of writing. In one case, the failure is all your own, and is painfully close to the feeling that your body is ungainly. You fail to bow or finger a phrase properly, and along with this, you fear that your failure is inherent—a failure of talent. In the case of language, the pain is less physically obvious, but more socially insidious: you have a feeling that your words are not your own, that you are ventriloquizing a demon, that you lack education, that you are excluded from an elite, or that your writing just shows how plain normal you are. Not deformed or incompetent with your instrument, but normal.

I think the easiness of language on the body, relative to music—where the body is in many ways everything—or math, where cognitive capability is often seen as a resources which fades away after one turns thirty—makes it more forgiving, too. I was a person who loved to run and play soccer, but never dreamt of ever engaging in team sports past the age of twelve. I’d have to play for the “wrong team,” according to my birth sex. The idea of being a “female” in math or computer science amplified my impostor syndrome to a dizzying degree, even though I had grown up around a non-trivial number of extremely intelligent women. Similarly, the image of myself on stage was so repulsive to me that I could not play solo without my eyes closed; as if to block out the world in a solipsistic refusal.

Writing emails in a remote courtship was far better to me than even the most pleasurable tactile experience. I could hold within me the resounding cathedral of a poem, whose words vibrate best in the buttressed and enclosed space of the lyric. I found poetry at this time, on the cusp of my first sex; among my favorite lasting objects from that first relationship was a recording she sent, a whispered reading of a poem, coincidentally written on this date many years ago. Maybe I could say my best contribution to the relationship was a fourteen-minute recording of my own; an excerpt from Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

And then there were the silences came after, after Zwei Gefühle, after the strange harmonies of some Janaček string quartet, some Beethoven string quartet, some symphony by Mahler, some song cycle set to the text of Bök’s Eunoia, which we later found in the bookstore and together read. Writing back to a distant first love came after the silence of waiting, which is the period in which the other writes. I tried to become a music critic at that time, overwhelmed by the beautiful silence. It was in this experience that my first real interest in writing arose, an interest that was positive, that was in a sense not directed towards anyone in particular and not even exactly coming from the confines of my self, in the way that lyric poetry is sometimes thought to be. Soon, I gave up music criticism, because it was too quick. What use is the thought not left enough time to grow into its own truth? I didn’t want to be a commentator or a critic; I wanted to be a slow writer, a slow reader, in pursuit of some small and subtle reality.

“Freshman writing led me into the humanities.” I haven’t written a single word on freshman writing. I seem to lack ideas about this nominal core subject. A strong current has pulled me back into the murkiness of high school, when I hadn’t identified myself yet as someone interested in writing.

Is it so misleading to begin the essay and end under the banner of this lack? Perhaps it was all this conflict and passion that allowed for a somewhat automatic overflow of interest in Merzbow, later on.