* A rhetoric inspired by an administrator’s callousness to the physical and emotional stakes of domestic American war
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Don’t take away their obstinacy, or English departments are likely to dissolve.
I once took a class out in Denver at what was then basically a community college, Metro State, and the class was called something about “Mythology.” I forget why I decided to take it, but suffice it to say that given the choice, I never would have frequented a class having anything to do with “mythology” — I associated such artistic deviance with elephantine deformities, and men with wings and bodies of horses. Nothing of the kind interested me.
Then I took at look at the the list of books — does this guy know what he’s doing? The curriculum was all over the place, spanning, along with the obvious ancient Greece, Jung, some Renaissance guy named Dante and other stuff I can’t remember now, but anyway it wasn’t even all within the same discipline, let alone time period! I’m paying money for this?
The professor for that class made a strong impression on me though — he struck me as someone who had dug deeply for meaning in life, and found none, to the point where he looked to “mythology,” which is basically the widespread, collective societal belief in a lie, as the closest thing to “truth.”
Let me shift gears here, briefly, and bring in Dead Poets Society. Lately, I’ve met more people who “hate” this movie than like it (though none vocal about this since the main character player’s death). Upon watching it again, I must say, I’m dumb as to why anyone would dislike it, provided the viewer had some appreciation for words.
It’s a complex issue, though, because any sharp person, who isn’t overly sheltered, realizes at about age 16, or earlier (in my case I think I was a year late) that life basically IS war, and one furnishable idea is that language was actually invented FOR war. Life itself isn’t necessarily rigid and defined; depending on the state of mind, objects and feelings, if objects include people, can be mistaken for one another within any given moment or time, and oftentimes the source of a feeling can remain unknown in the mind of the holder, as the feeling pervades, dominates and dictates permanently throughout the day.
This is a thought I had while watching Dead Poets Society: is Robin Williams really just breathing through a clogged straw? What is the value of words, at the end of the day, and isn’t there something purer onto which we should all be able to grasp? Also to the movie’s discredit, I think the foremost instance of “bad acting” comes from the player who shows the most enthusiasm for what could be called the film’s nuclear “cause” — propagating the omnipotence of words, of poetry. I forget his name offhand, but the guy who ends up acting in the Shakespeare play against his dad’s orders — I look at this guy sometimes and he seems paralyzed in forced semantic deliberation. I’m bored by the fact that he isn’t bored. Give the movie credit though for portraying one of the guys who doesn’t care about poetry, Knox Overstreet, who’s in love with the girl, as badass — having guts, and telling simple truths, knowing himself, knowing his role, elating in the fact that “What matters is… she was thinking about me.”
When I was 17, I wanted to join the Air Force, but my dad wouldn’t let me, so I chose the next most integral thing: the war of words. I made the decision to be well-read, and in this way, every day, to do battle — do battle with those who would pigeonhole me, disrespect me, underestimate me, or just ignore me. Literature is always moving, it’s always a force. But more and more, I find sentiment in “men of words,” in “English departments,” of forced superiority, which would explain the very absurd propagation of this flaccid, inertiatic amoeba called “post-modernism,” which we’re led to believe spawned in the early ’80’s, during the rise of Michael Jackson, Madonna and MTV, just when everyone was dying to pick up a book, you know. Why not study Madonna, Michael Jackson and MTV, and fully suffuse them into our little better-read-than-though, kindle-equipped Mac Book Pros?
We’ve all been hurt. Especially English majors. We’ve been confronted with zeitgeists in life, be they physical, spiritual, social, what have you, to which, we’ve found, we just don’t measure up. So we search for the un-truth, we search for fallibility. But we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Once we find that everything is fallible, and that the most righteous man is the misanthrope who flees humanity for the cognitive clarity of a place called Walden Pond, we cannot all of a sudden decide that infallibility has blossomed, because he still is a mortal man, and plenty of other young men had coal mine dust to breathe in, had yankee bayonets to greet them in the mid-morning sun, had a hundred-mile walk to the nearest “pond.” THIS is the unheard voice in American literature, and I can tell it kills these stuffy suited snobs occupying third-floor offices that the whole thing might be interdisciplinary after all.