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Date Posted: 01:18:48 05/13/08 Tue
Author: SS
Subject: ****************TUESDAYJOURNAL2**************

Noah Eaton
May 11, 2008
Writing 420

Every Mile Could Be Two In The Eternity Clutcher


Within the past week I decided to traverse William Stafford’s Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation, where one particular poem had me pause and introspect for a while, titled “The Trouble with Reading”.
The poem reads as follows on page 81 of the collection:

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning has to go find an author again.
But when we read, it’s just print --- deciphering,
like frost on a window: we learn the meaning
but lose what the frost is, and all that world
pressed so desperately behind.

So some time let’s discover how the ink
feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto
page after page. But maybe it is better not
to know; ignorance, that wide country,
rewards you just to accept it. You plunge;
it holds you. And you have become a rich darkness.


This is precisely why I believe it is asked repeatedly: “Why do we bother teaching writing?” and often the one delivered the question can’t keep a straight face or a leveled tone when answering the question. Because, especially under the guise of “modern literary theory”, many binaries have been drawn between what are termed as “poetics” in a text (namely imagery, figurative devices and wordplay as structure) and what’s termed as the “hermeneutics” in a text which, through what is termed the “hermeneutic circle”, the notion that one's understanding of any given text as a whole is established by referencing the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole which, in effect, accomplishes little in actually interpreting the text and rather wanders and welters for meaning within the text by scrutinizing its historical and social contexts.
Continuously reeling in this hermeneutic circle overlooks just that; understanding how the ink feels in Stafford’s words. When dogs are running in circles chasing their tails, under this logic, is it assumed they chase their tails because the tails, to them, are references to British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkin’s atheistic claim that, because the domestication of canines and litters of pups have been documented in recorded history before the time many creationist scholars believe the universe was created? Or that they are a contextual nod to the 14th day of the lunar cycle every November when the Hindu worship dogs by applying vermillon dots to their foreheads and tying incense pouches and marigold pedals around their collars?
That, to me, is the Egg Beater method in appreciating a text: where we disregard the yolk and its essential core abundance of soluble vitamins, and rather just settle with a “fortified” supplement of it, then add xantham gum and guar gum to make it real thick so it at least looks like a representation of what we’re appreciating. And, in my experience, that yolk to a work of literature consists heavily of this abundance of frost, that “world pressed so desperately behind”, these sentiments of the ink………..that dismissing it in its primitive form and rather indulging the work as one would an Egg Foo Yung prepared from an Egg Beater, with its emulsifier ingredient being the same additive used to thicken oil reserves in horizontal drilling (you just better hope you’re not allergic to xantham gum)…………the frost only gathers and clouds up our own minds until it is so thick no emulsifier could rival it or no windshield wiper could clear.
Now I feel I understand ever more now, for the first time in eight years, why my sophomore-year English teacher insisted that, during each individual writing workshop session that we always keep the tip of ones pen/pencil on the paper and never lift it from there. Carl Sandburg said himself that poetry “is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” Indeed I feel the poem is the moment in which our shadows are ricocheted out of us and, as George Herbert also says: “Every mile is two in winter.”
My sophomore year English teacher follows this mindset that the pen’s tip never leaves the paper because he KNEW all too well that even the moments where a letter isn’t being inscribed on the paper is just as relevant as the moments where something is, for the entire duration of time from the moment the pen first touches the paper to the moment the session closes and the pen leaves it is a journey though a blistering wilderness of visionary prisms, listening to these inaudible winters within us and seeking out these respiring thoughts that make the frost sparkle under the moonlight.
The French poet René Char wrote: “A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.” I’ve long sensed poetry as a form of anti-knowledge that nonetheless provides a different sort of immaculate knowing through searching all the same. In fearing to take that plunge into that rich darkness, you only doubt, even deny, your own primitive instincts, and thus are left breathing only stale air. Ultimately, it’s the simple act of getting there where rewards deeper than meaning are uncovered, and only those who listen can unlock…………and even when it is realized that locks are antonymous to the essence of poetry, the laugh-off that follows is what proves most synonymous, leaving traces upon the hoarfrost-blanketed braes of our souls.

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