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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007RuddLove, Death, and Composition Everywhere I went at CCCC in NYC this past week, I found I didn’t want to be there. Neither the Hilton for the first over-priced night ($300, one bed, and not enough floor space to do the half-moon yoga pose), nor the Milford, a much more affordable hotel a mile away from the conference for the remaining three evenings, allowed me to feel like “me.” Sometimes it took ten seconds to realize this, sometimes as long as ten hours—but the feeling in my skin, my brain, the space between my fingertips was the same: I was “other” in this room. “People are staring at me when I attend the conference sessions,” I told my friend. “That’s because you’re beautiful,” was John’s sweet response. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s it,” I mumbled under my breath. Was there something about me, I pondered, that made me not look like a compositionist? At this conference whose p.c. theme was “Representing Identities,” I was trying, at least, to dress the part of a comp. teacher: I purposely wore button-down shirts with conservative blazers that covered my rear since I refused to give up my signature stretch jeans. Granted, in the evenings I veered from this formula as my attire of camouflage knickers with high-heeled boots and a flowing Spanish scarf was best summed up by my good friend Kathleen: “This is how one dresses when they can’t stand the current fashions.” The first night in NYC, my buddy Jennifer and I veered outside of the hotel to find an Indian restaurant. Walking and talking go together pretty well, so I began to pose to Jennifer the problems of my life: the pyramid of worries over my three struggling-to-be-normal teenagers, the romantic mess I refer to as “The Case Against Love,” and the rigorous conference schedule I had set up for myself this spring (three more conferences in the next three weekends—no kidding!), and underneath this all: the syncopated, street-rhythm, “Rocking Horse Winner” subtext of “there must be more(time/energy/guts/vison/focus/research/reading/re-vision/guidance/ mentoring—whatever-it-takes) to actually progress in this no-woman’s land I call “the Desert of My Dissertation.” I uttered all of this in a whiny diatribe that may have sounded like the assigned lack-of-lines to the adults in the Peanuts comic strip: “Wha-wha, wawawa.” But Jennifer is a gifted listener—a by-product of her deep compassion. She was able to hear my words while also tuning into the pain kitty-corner across the intersection. She noticed a young man—maybe he was still a boy—of sixteen or so who was moaning on the street, clothed in nothing but a big black garbage bag, half-lying, half-leaning against a heap of garbage bags stacked on the curb. It was drizzling—and it was chilly—, and I’m sure this creature was also cold in a 40 degree New York City during rush hour. Crying. On a curb. Alone. In the span of a minute at this particular intersection on this particular day, I could venture a conservative guess that at least three hundred people are his witness—only no one is looking at him. Except for Jennifer. “Wow,” says Jennifer. “That’s intense. It looks like someone is having a very rough time of it.” And so I looked. And what I saw wouldn’t leave my retina. I no longer had the will to continue with my whining—nor the words to describe a world that would deny this being’s humanity. But deny is what I did. Oh, I marked the moment with a fitting minute of silence—like we do for the 9/11 victims or the death of a former, white male president. If the teenager had been white—and blonde—and female—wearing a trash bag blowing in the rain and wind, would someone have responded sooner? The skeptic in me, the part of me that made it easier to walk away without helping him, posed a cynical question: “What if his need for help was a charade?” Yes, what if . . . his wails, his garbage-bag tunic, and even the rain were rhetorical appeals to a pathos that would make us reach into our pocketbooks and pay to make the pain go away? In other words, what if he were a professional beggar and had figured out that wearing a trash bag in the rain means that he’ll make as much in an hour as he would in a whole day? Either way, the situation demonstrates a desperation that is difficult to look in the face. So I ducked into Café Spice. And Jennifer followed me. When we walked out, full and pampered, spoiled by the charming waiter, nearly two hours later, the man/boy/being was gone. No more caramel brown arms reaching out from a glistening black bag. And I was greatly relieved, as it temporarily reduced my responsibility. But the rest of what I saw in NYC retained the image of the boy in pain in the lower right corner of every tourist destination, every social landscape—kind of like the picture-in-picture function of a TV. Though I sat in beautiful hotel bars with $16 cosmopolitans and stood in Irish pubs with $6 beer on draft, surrounded by my funny, smart, dedicated and loving friends and colleagues, I never really wanted to be in any of these places. Even Central Park felt artificial and imported, the asphalt-to-green ratio too big for me to let down my guard or find some clean air to breathe. No matter which direction I walked, I felt boxed in by street barkers and sky scrapers, diesel fumes and honking taxis, and red hands flashing, flashing, flashing—telling me I shouldn’t cross the street. Of the thousands of people I spotted in the streets of New York this week, I zoomed in on several hundred, wondering if each and every one of them, too, felt stifled and prodded in this city, or if they felt fortunate to be walking its paradoxical streets: dirty and sophisticated, artsy and dumpy, energizing and exhausting—limited opportunity amidst an impossible standard of living. Yet most keep trying. Doing whatever it takes to survive. Even if that means donning a garbage bag and hitting the streets. Or perhaps I came to NYC determined not to enjoy the week (and certainly the gray, drizzly days didn’t help my S.A.D.) I arrived early for the conference, attending a workshop on E-Wave on Wednesday (E-Wave, by the way, stands for “Electronic, Written, Aural, Visual Expressions”). Since there were seven or so computers competing with each other for the participants’ attention and only one big screen in the room, one presenter, Joe Essid, chose to project his computer images on the wall of this Hilton ballroom, the wallpaper providing paisley yellow undertones to his presentation of the back roads of Virginia. At first I thought the images suffered from this, but then I began to enjoy the way the wallpaper seemed to add another layer to his story. And I knew, even from the first day, that every session I attended, every bar I squeezed into, every bite of pizza I stuffed myself with would be layered with the knowledge that my father might possibly be dying in a nursing home in Minnesota—and here I was in a place as far from the family farm culturally as any place in the United States could be. In the second workshop I attended on Wednesday, titled “Re-presenting a Pedagogy for Ebonics: Valuing African American Student Identity in the Composition Classroom,” we were given an assignment to discuss a question provided on the overhead with the people at our table, except . . . we could use only words that contained one or two syllables. It’s telling that I can’t remember the question we were to discuss among the five of us, but I certainly remember the resentment I felt . . . and my emotional withdrawal from the circle. I rarely spoke. But I did write, getting out my highlighters and taking notes in that ridiculous way I am accustomed to with Norwegian pines and lightning bolts and butterflies, drawing letters so big that only five can fit on a page, in this case, “WHY SHOULD I EVEN TRY????” The activity was effective, I believe, in trying to approximate the discomfort that students feel when they enter a classroom that doesn’t privilege their literacies. But even in this workshop highlighting “otherness,” I felt “other.” Which, I guess, if the theory of double negativity holds true, should have made me feel mainstream. Only it didn’t. Although I’m unsure whether I can make sense of my experiences at this year’s convention, I will try my best. Certainly I was not the only person at CCCC to be in the process of losing a parent. And if we expand parent to “someone you love,” well, just think of all the loss swirling in the background of each room like layer upon layer of pasted over wallpaper. If we go beyond the walls of the Hilton and include all the pain and loss in New York City—well, then, it’s no surprise that we might choose to spend most of our days in denial—that we might choose not to feel both our own pain and the pain of those around us—that we would toughen up as we head out of the house or the hotel, closing ourselves off to that which we fear might overwhelm us. And here’s where I feel slightly guilty—but I’m trying not to be too hard on myself. You see, I can’t really feel right now—I logically know that I love people, but I can’t quite feel it—like there’s a curtain (or in my case, more like a canned ham) between me and everything and everyone I love. I can’t really feel my body either, come to think of it, which is a bit of a dilemma as this interferes with my exercise routine, my food choices, my consumption of alcohol, my need for sleep. But I sense that I might be subconsciously choosing this as a defense mechanism—to protect myself from the waves and waves of pain that I know will hit me when I see my father and will be forced to face a life without him. No big deal, right? “She survived her mother’s death, so she’ll survive this,” is the logical advice. Only this time it seems to me more like a precipice. When I was a fourth-grader and my best friend Julie and I played the game, “Who can cry real tears the fastest?” (No pinching, biting, or kicking allowed.) I usually won, and since I’m not much of a crier in real life, Julie asked me how I did it. “Oh—it’s easy for me,” I said, “I just imagine my dad dying.” Whereas I fought with my mother most of my life, getting along, finally, only because I learned to keep my mouth shut about all the issues we disagreed upon, my father has forever been my anchor. “He is the reason I am who I am,” I muddled at Café Spice in a brief moment of vulnerability. “I would be nothing without him—not a teacher, not a writer, neither able to love nor to be loved.” And so maybe it makes sense that in the middle of this conference on identities, I seemed to have lost mine. I spoke little (for me), aside from old stories, and what I did say demonstrated a distinct disconnect from what I was really thinking or scrambling not to feel. I felt shy and mousy and not very bright, most of the time, so it’s no wonder that I couldn’t wait to catch my plane back to Texas. I shall end this piece, like many academic conference-goers, with one last dash through the exhibitor's section to see what's new, what's necessary, and what's free. In less than half an hour, I buy seven books—mostly for my dissertation, but one for me: Dying to Teach by Jeffrey Berman whose previous books I own. I want to read this book right now, but it’s from a small press, so I have to order it. The cover of the book is filled with his wife’s face, and the words inside chronicle the year of her death and his struggle to go on teaching. “This is why we write,” I remind myself, “this is why we read . . . so we can go on living.” Ray Bradbury says it this way: "So while art cannot, as we wish it could, "Writing is survival" . . . "Not to write, for many of us, is to die." "I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day -- Zen in the Art of Writing
Perhaps my greatest oversight while attending the conference in New York was not taking the time to write, something I usually do for at least an hour every day. It certainly is revealing that I've spent at least six hours writing today, my first full day away from the big city. Writing, braided with yoga and a sauna and a neighborhood walk are helping me feel like me again. And though it is past 2 a.m., and I must get up at 5 for my marathon Mondays culminating in a night class that ends at 9, I will read when I go to bed, for this is also deeply characteristic of the former "me" to whom I am presently clinging like a Koala bear to the furry back of her father. And in that perfectly synchronous way in which the universe occasionally works, my bedtime reading tonight is a book I picked up at CCCC: Writing as Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo. I open to the introduction which begins with Henry Miller’s words: "The more I wrote, the more I became a human being." But the words of a former student of DeSalvo’s, one who was persecuted in his native country and came to the U.S for refuge, say it most powerfully to me and for me and through me: "Through my work, I rejoin the world." By sharing my experience of this year’s CCCC in New York City, I feel—at least for the moment—less isolated. Like the runner’s high that might last just three minutes of a one-hour run, this might be enough to keep me conferencing for another year. If so, I’ll see you in New Orleans. Comments |