I went to see The Imaginary Invalid on Thursday night and watched the entire play. It was interestingly interpreted, and not at all what I expected. (Actually, on first hearing of the play, I thought it was going to be a modern interpretation of the Oscar Wilde play, The Importance of Being Ernest, because of the name, but even after that when it was just a play by Moliere...)

To be honest, about ten minutes in, my teeth were on edge. After the dancers pranced around in the audience for several minutes, and then Micah Buckley (Argan) spent several minutes performing a monologue in an extremely grating voice, between grotesque coughing noises. Near the end of his solo opening scene, I was practically twitching.

ENTER Rossanna Mercedes, stage left, with an even more over-the-top voice.
At first, I was like, oh brother, but then … they grew on me. Everyone was over-the-top, gaudily dressed, and sitting in neon-rooms, and had a booming and ridiculously accented voice, which, once I got over my initial irritation with, because part of the productions Narmy-charm.

While most of the productions laughs come from over-the-top antics, (Tara and Micah get into a sword-fight with a cane and umbrella as she wards off a spanking) and voices, I can easily see this play toned down and transposed onto a more subdued canvas: it does deal with themes of love; romantic love, faked love, and familial love.

The Imaginary Invalid utilized plenty of TV tropes, fake death, the wicked stepmother, true love and star crossed lovers, arranged marriage, ultimatums, the gold-digger new-model wife, the charming love interest winning the girl’s heart over the big dumb brute (a la Beauty and the Beast), among a ton of others. Most of the play’s charm came from the interpretation of these tropes, it’s giddy silliness covering up serious themes, and dancing “gypsies” and harlequin “paintings” mocking the situations, winking at the audience, letting us know that everyone is in on the joke.

Dear Professor Corrigan:

Working on the old schedule, because it hadn’t run out yet, and I hadn’t realized that you had updated it, I didn’t realized that Monday’s post was a prompted one, on blogging in your class. Please allow me to switch the order of this Monday and Wednesday.

Everything about this class is about experiencing literature on a deeper level, seeing it in three dimensions, tasting it, touching it, and understanding it. After reading out loud a poem about an onion that meant so much more, you chopped one up in the middle of class. We saw they papery skin pulled from it, heard its crinkle, as we thought about what it meant in context with the poem, all of us coming with different histories and grasps on words and nuances, and all of us coming to different conclusions, if similar ones.

Blogging about literature has forced us to connect with it, read until we could find something to say. Some nights I cannot wait to get tapping at a keyboard, excited. Some nights I grasp at straws, with no earthly idea what I want to say; feeling unresponsive to a story, or poem, or essay and I reread it and reread it until I feel like I’d do anything to be done with it. And anything, of course, means churn out a blog entry.

I named my blog synesthetic lit because I knew that this is what it would come down to. Synesthesia is an organization of the mind that mixes senses. A synesthete has two or more senses “tied to” each other; Wassily Kandinsky, a famous Russian painter, “saw” sounds, (Golden-yellow, he said, was the sound of a piano’s middle C.) and painted as a way for the rest of the world to see what he saw.

This class and blogging have both been about bringing literature off the page, and into our hands, our minds, our senses, our conversations; to read Whitman in a graveyard and tell everyone else what we’ve felt.

On Thursday night I recited the words of a slam-poet named Anis Mojgani, in the dark. I used my whole body, because I don't know how else to talk; how else to think but through three dimensional gestures.

I am, by nature, terrified.

Of life, of growing up, of speaking in public.

I love stories, and the telling of them; it's the telling-with-an-audience that gets me.

I hadn't expected to read, not really. I'd wanted to go and hear, but never read. When I sat down, Jennica was doing a mic check, reading another of Anis' works Shake the Dust, and I immediately thought I was off the hook because surely she'd do his most amazing poem and I'd be spared the peer pressure of any friend that showed up.

Corrigan was there, too, and I didn't want to make a fool of myself in front of him. And then Mrs. Cotton happened, the resident peer-pressure expert, and Jennica (clearly, she hates me) resolutely failed to perform Sock Hop.

It was nerve-wracking and terrified, and even though I've never had a seizure before, I kept thinking ... there's always a first time. And being on stage, it certainly seemed to be a good time for one. After I got started, though, thoroughly surprising myself by knowing all of the words (at one point I took a deep breath during a dramatic pause, and thought, well, whatever comes out of my mouth next will hopefully be words that are actually in this poem, but no matter, I’m pretty sure I know how it ends, so hopefully I can weave it into the ending, and surprised myself by not having to improve.) ... it was sort of ... fun.

I preformed it again to my mirror that night. It was easier, but it didn't make my heart pump the same way; didn't make my legs turn into useless quivering jelly, either.

I spent an hour at a cemetery, rereading poems about a dead president, like something straight out of The Catcher. Once I got past the surrealism, it was an incredibly interesting experience.

I spent most of my time just wandering through the yard, reading names and dates. I kept wondering about their stories: everyone has one. Everyone. Lots of people's lives are cut short, infants and teenagers and middle aged men: people in love and people still grieving the loss of others.

Since the cemetery is so old, there were so many people that were clearly involved in any of the wars of the past few centuries, but that didn't strike me until the third time I passed a seventeen or eighteen year old man's grave, beside his widow, who'd outlived him by a good forty years.

Walt Whitman, in another poem dedicated to Lincoln, wrote that "This dust was once a man," and it just kept bringing me back to their stories. What kind of men were they? What kind of women did they love? Were the family people?

As soon as we stop remembering that everyone exists -- with the same complexity we imagine in ourselves -- we lose our reverence, both for the dead and for the living others. For the living, we forget to treat everyone the way the deserve, the way Jesus would have treated them, and for the dead, we bury them away, and only think about them when we superstitiously hold our breath when we drive past.

Maybe this is how it should be – let the dead bury their dead – but shouldn’t the living also remember the dead? In what is arguably Whitman’s most famous poem, Song of Myself, Whitman described his lineage in a short line.

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same.

We come from such rich history, and now we exist, holding the current spot in time like the marker in a relay race, and someday we will have passed it on, and our descendents will tell our stories to their children or we may not leave any worth telling, and they will pass our cemeteries, holding their breath for superstitions sake.

Walt Whitman moves mountains with his words. I love not man less, but nature more... every atom that belongs to me as good as belongs to you... and your very flesh shall be a great poem... behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, when I give, I give myself... Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself -- I am large, I contain multitudes.

The problem is, no one talks like that anymore. It's cool to say OMG and dude, and English teachers write lists of non-acceptable filler words for High School seniors who still can't find a better adjective than "cool."

I don't understand, because I'm blown away by his gems, and articulation. I want to get back to an age where our celebrities are people like Oscar Wilde, famed for his wit and nuanced, double layered speech – people having him for dinner weren’t sure if they were being insulted or not, but they sure knew he was clever.

Mr. Swirsky, high school English teacher of my heart, used to say, “everything’s a cycle,” and I can’t help but think it’s time to cycle back for another Renaissance. Technology has never been so openly available as it is now, so why is it not an age where we’re all impressively well-rounded? Instead, technology has done the opposite for us. Our memories have atrophied under the help and ease of which we can reach information. We don’t have to store any facts, because they’re always a click or text or google away.

I wrote my essay to get in here primarily about Whitman (with some cameos from my spiritual life and the ocean and Mr. Swirsky) because when I was fourteen years old I fell in love with with a man who could say what he needed to say, and say it so beautifully that we are still talking about it, two hundred years later; one of whose main themes was nearly always empathy and feeling the pain and joy and sorrows of another, desperately in love with a country who was still a screaming infant with a just-cut umbilical cord at the time.

We neuter God.

Earlier in this class we talked about the idea of something verses the reality of the same something; how we build up ideas of something in our minds the second we are out of sight of that thing, or person, and the moment we reconnect with them again, it sort of breaks down all that we've built them up to be. C. S. Lewis described that in A Grief Observed. He called being in love with the warped idea of something "incestuous".

I think we do that to God: we build up our favorite parts of him; his mercy, his love, and his compassion, but we completely blot out his wrath and his anger and the fact that sometimes, due to human iniquity or inexplicable divine reasoning, hides his face from us. That sometimes he pours out his wrath.

In the Old Testament, God told his armies in several instances to lay waste, or “destroy” a certain group of people. In one, he told them not even to have mercy on the women and children. Not to let a single goat, or infant survive. This picture of God breaks my heart, and I still don’t fully understand it, but I know that this is also the same God that said that he would spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there were only a few righteous men.

This "New Testament God" can become an idol, I think. If you worship a wrong idea of God, can you still call that an idol? As I understand it, Muslims believe in what, on the surface, appears to be the same God, but I believe they worship an idol. ("Who can know another man's spirit?" though) We do the same.

We do believe in a God of mercy overflowing, but in the early years of AD, God didn't have a personality makeover. God is timeless, which would make it ridiculous to believe that over a short time, he became a radically different deity. He does express himself differently after Jesus fulfills the law ... but the character of God doesn't change. I believe in a God of justice, and sometimes that includes his wrath.

The Things We Carry

This story was so interesting, and seemed to say a whole lot, and then a whole lot more by not saying things. The Things They Carried described both the contents of the bags of these soldiers and the contents of their hearts. They carried Uzis. They carried memories. They carried rations. They carried ghosts.

Some of the things they "carried" seemed to conflict: how do you carry love and hate, tenderness for your fellow man and the ability to scoff at his death, terror and courage? But that's what they had to do, so they learned to cope.

Much of this story seemed to be about hiding. Hiding from feelings. Hiding from grief. Hiding from the tenderest emotions. Hiding from the enemy. Hiding from their own ghosts and from whispers in the dark. One way of hiding from the invisible is to compensate with the tangible. Instead of thinking about their ghosts, they make jokes and take fingers and smoke the dead man's pot. They keep pictures and memories to keep the loneliness they carry at bay, like haunted conflicted contradictions. Their heavy, burdensome minesweeper doesn't make them feel safe, but helps them pretend they believe it. His girlfriend doesn't love him, and he knows it from the beginning, but he pretends, getting lost in her letters and a memory of a tweed-covered knee.

Getting lost in her memory leaves him distracted and inefficient, though, and when a man gets killed because of this, once again, Lt. Cross has to put down the intangible band-aid meant to ease hi invisible wounds, stop carrying all that, to pick up his men. In the end, he decides, they'll start carrying every real thing: no more cutting corners, no dropping rations and ammo to make their loads lighter. His job isn't to be loved; it's to keep him men alive.

The minesweeper and the big guns are heavy, but the heaviest burdens are the invisible ones, the lives and ghosts and responsibility of keeping the two separate.