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Date Posted: 20:07:24 06/07/08 Sat
Author: SS
Subject: *********************RESPONSEESSAY#4******************

Noah Eaton
May 31st, 2008
English 490

Applying A Personal Touch To Transcendent Experience


“To write, I have decided, is to be insane. In ordinary life you look sane, act sane ---just as sane as any mother of five children. But once you start to write, you are moonstruck, out of your senses. As you stare hard inward, following behind your eyes the images of invisible places, of people, of events, and listening hard inward to silent voices and unspoken conversations---as you are seeing the story, hearing it, feeling it---your very skin becomes permeable, not a boundary, and you enter the place of your writing and live inside the people who live there………when this happens, you often learn something, understand something, that can transcend the words on the paper.”
- Molly Gloss


I believe Fan Shen’s poignant “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition” provides an excellent illustration of that staring hard inward and achieving an enhanced understanding of ones self through the process of cultural diffusion, as well as through ones social background, where identity is ultimately found, where both his “ideological identity” (the system of values he acquired through his social and cultural background) and his “logical identity” (the natural way he organizes and expresses his thoughts in writing) have been re-shaped by English composition rules.
He mentions that the first rule he recognized in English composition was to, simply, be yourself, which wasn’t clear to him immediately because he explains the meaning of the word “I” varies in context between Anglo-American culture and Chinese culture, where in China, he explains, “’I’ is always subordinated to “We”---be it the working class, the Party, the country, or some other collective body.” (460) and goes on to add that the word “individualism” is considered a synonym of selfishness in China, thus leaving him believing that the words “self” and “individualism” have negative connotations for many years, where not appealing to Marxist figures was seen as “forgery” in his experience.
From there, he goes on to recognize that, to further redefine himself, it also meant redefining the word “I”, and goes on to gradually abandon the ideology of collectivism and embrace a Western sense of ideology or “accept the way a Westerner sees himself in relation to the universe and society.” (461) which he says he “had to imagine that I was looking at a world with my head upside down” (462) in order to do so, and ultimate succeeded, when he played a “game” that helped him create his own “English Self” through comparing and contrasting the features of writing between his Chinese and English identities.
Finally, Shen explains he had to re-think how to go about getting to the heart of the topic in any work of literature, as well as shift from the Chinese critical approach known as “yijing” (or process of creating a pictorial environment while reading a work of literature) to a verbal form of logic that is ideal by Western standards. He concludes, in his experience, that “learning to write in English is in fact a process of creating and defining a new identity and balancing it out with the old identity.” (466)
Shen’s insights fascinate me, because who I consider to be the one who first galvanized my interest in writing, my sophomore-year high school English teacher Philippe Ernewein, had a very similar experience, adjusting into a whole other culture. Back in 2000, he openly shared a copy of his personal narrative with me, titled Talkin’ Tonto Deconstruction Blues, which documents this fascinating transition thoroughly.
Throughout this six-part narrative, he describes his early life, from his first memory when he was fourteen months old visiting the family of a grandfather he never knew (he died when his father was three years old) to when, eerily, his father passed away when he was three, also, and growing up as a child in Belgium speaking Flemish and coping with life without a fatherly figure, to first moving to America when he was eight, struggling to learn and speak English and sitting with the severely physically and mentally handicapped children on a small school bus to and from school each and every day, to picking up his first ever three-figure paycheck and his own 1980 baby blue Ford Fairmont with red and yellow and green flames painted above the bald front tires when he was seventeen, to finally finding his calling in teaching and beat poetry after visiting Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, where he temporarily worked as an interpretive park ranger for six months.
But what’s especially remarkable about his narrative, I found, was how he parallels each chapter of his life to his fascination with cowboys and Indians growing up. The following is an excerpt from the first of six chapters, titled A Pale Moon, when Philippe is visiting Doon Village; a cross between a museum and an outdoor memorial built to honor both the pioneers and the people of The League of the Iroquois, specifically the Mohawks, while visiting the family of his grandfather in Ontario, and stands beside the Iroquois warrior Pale Moon:

“I felt like I was part of the League of the Iroquois for a moment. I was one of the Mohawks, the People of the Flint, standing next to Pale Moon. Of course at fourteen months old all I really knew was that I wasn’t standing next to my father, mother, or Moeke.

Who was I standing next to? What was his history? What might I have been thinking? What was I feeling standing next to this old and barely clad man with feathers on his head? What did I see in his eyes? I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. I do know that my encounter with him left a deep impression on me. The first of a series of events that led me to America looking for Tonto.” (Ernewein 2).


He goes on to express his memories watching “The Lone Ranger” on television in Belgium growing up, to his step-father promising him he’d “see cowboys and Indians from the window in my new bedroom in Virginia.” (Ernewein 5) to feeling discouraged wondering where all the Tontos and Kemosabes were for years after growing up in America, to finally realizing the following at the end of his narrative:

“Most of the journals of the surveyors, photographers, and frontiers men discounted the stories the natives told. There was no scientific evidence, no proof of the giant spider woman who created that mesa, no evidence that this is a turtle's back we are living on, no eyewitness accounts that the coyote put on human clothes and signed that treaty, no way of really knowing that ‘The ladder is the way through the smoke hole‘.

These were just considered to be tall tales by the non-natives. The stories were truth for the Ancestral Puebloans - only told around the campfire, the sun well on her way to the winter solstice position, and the daily work finished. I had to suspend my Western way of thinking. I had to kill my image of Tonto and re-educate the Lone Ranger.

I was patrolling a back country trail in late July when the ghost of my grandfather appeared on the edge of Chacra Mesa. He looked at me, and we both know our part. Pale Moon was a reminder. Papie was Tonto. Brian was my first student. The short bus was compassion. Ginsberg was my sage. Chaco was salvation. Teaching is my calling. The classroom is my home.” (Ernewein 26).


I understood his style of writing, a sort of writing by intuitive experience, and this is where I’m in profound agreement with something Charlotte hastily writes on the boat landing in Skamokawa on a Saturday night in Molly Gloss‘s Wild Life, where she ruminates: “It is a mild paradox, I suppose, that plots taken from real life often are the harder to believe.” (Gloss 65).
In my own experience, I find that, when I try to summarize and explain my life story orally and plainly, I always stumble and am at a loss of words. I find myself retrograding also to what Philip K. Dick argues of insanity: having to “construct a picture of one’s life, by making inquiries of others.” (Dick 206). I’ve found pieces of myself could only be explained to things I allude to, and I’ve found that indeed I’m often exhibiting a variety of identities when I’m writing, and I obtain a greater sense of myself when I’m able to characterize them, thus also maturing as a writer in the process, all because I wasn’t intimidated about staring hard inward behind my eyes, where much of the greatest truth of any individual can be found.

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