April 8, 2010

I remember this one time, you really won’t believe this. Where I got into a fight with 3 other boys over Franz Kafka. Not shitting you. Dead serious over Franz fucking Kafka. That’s not the normal things you fight over in high school. That’s the first clue that something is wrong with me. Well maybe not the first but I think it is an important one. Girls, sports teams, well really just girls mostly I think, but never the like quality of an author let alone someone as weird and marginal as Kafka. But sure enough it happened. We were at my friend’s party. There wasn’t any alcohol involved. Yes this all happened whilst we were all totally sober. We were outside on this little porch of his but I don’t remember it being all that pleasant. It was sort of an overcast day and there was this dingy little stream that ran through the dead brown field behind his house. I remember it looked like the water was really struggling just to get through all the mud and over growth. Everyone was standing around outside in spite of all this and as I remember there were too many people for the number of chairs that we had so everyone decided politely but frustratingly to just all stand around the table behind the chairs. Many had put their hand on the back of a chair as if to reserve should we ever actually choose to sit. We were talking as people do at parties about things that didn’t really mean anything and in which none of us really believed. I had been having a really awful day, something about my girlfriend or school, I don’t know. At some point the conversation turned towards Kafka and one of my friends went on this long rant about how he was literally the worst most ignorant and talentless author to have ever lived. At the end of this rant I offered up that I quite enjoyed his work. There was a slight pause to see if anyone would support me and when a sufficient time had passed they knew I was free game. I didn’t take long for me to be fed up of their jests and snide remarks, as I mentioned I had been having a bad day. But there was a moment where something just tipped over. I had no more patience to give. I abruptly said I would be leaving, gave my friend my drink and actually got in my car and left. Much to everyone’s amazement.

Things would’ve ended peacefully had they just left it there. I drove to an old basketball court near my house. Old in the sense that I’m not sure it was ever new. I don’t believe I ever saw anyone use it other than myself but it felt like it had been there since before time. Chronically cracked and net-less, it was tucked away behind a small grove in a field opposite a cemetery. I had developed a habit of going there shooting free throws to help me make big decisions. Should I ask Jenny to the prom, swish! Yes! Should I try and kiss her in the car after? Clang. A resounding no. On this occasion I didn’t so many questions on my mind, just a profound desire to be alone. They had been trying to call me from sometime. I let the first 5 calls go to voice mail and only picked up when I recognized Jenny’s number. I told her, in what I thought was confidence, where I was and that I was fine just tired and frustrated. Another 20 minutes later just as I was getting ready to leave I saw my friends van come screeching into the parking lot and he and two of my larger friends come rolling out of it. They apparently had decided to return me to the party even if it were by force. A legendary scuffle ensued where in I knocked the wind out of the tallest boy with a basketball thrown into his chest, wrestled with another until he had no more energy, and was eventually pinned to a try by the largest and strongest of the trio. All of us were a bloody mess returning to the party. My shirt was torn in so many places it looked like had caught fire. The basketball had been completely lost and was never replaced. The rest of the party went pretty well and all present agreed they were quite happy to see me.

Epiphanies in Isolation

Today I got some of what should have been the best news of my short life. I have been accepted to be a member of a wonderful medical school's class for next fall. When I saw the email however I didn't feel anyone of the things I thought I would. Absent were elation, relief, and pride instead I found myself feeling wholly unmoved. My first reaction was to blame it on the rather uninspiring email that it came in. No school seal or congratulatory special fonts. Just a normal email saying that I had to pay some money to keep my seat. But it quickly became obvious that my stoicism was sourced from something much deeper within me.

My first instinct was to celebrate and share the news with all my friends. Immediately following that instinct came the blunt realization that I had by and large burned all the bridges with anyone with whom I might be able to share this. In the process of arriving at my goal I had lost ties to most of the people whom could have shared in my happiness. I wouldn't get a high five from a best friend. There would be no congratulatory bar rush. No kiss on the cheek and sparkle in the eye of a loved one. There was just me and this banal email. All of a sudden I felt the full distance of the social environment I had created. 

The next problem arose from the reaction of acquaintances and really how I had come to frame the situation myself. "Of course you got in" was a popular phrase. I know this is meant as a compliment but it undermines all my hard work that has gotten me to this point. In some ways this is a bastardization of the fundamental attribution error. People seeing in me some kind of inherent genius or ability that has predestined my success. While flattering it not only diminishes the weight of my efforts but also places unduly high expectations on everything I do. "Of course you got in" echoes in my ears as "when are you going to do something really great?" The more things that become expected of me, the less things I can do to prove myself and less fulfilling everything I do becomes. This problem is more alarming because it is reflected in how I have grown to see things myself.

I know this sounds extremely whinny so let me take a moment to thank and acknowledge the loving support I have received. I got a card and some chocolate from two angels which meant more to me than they could ever know. Despite everything I've down to isolate myself from everyone there are still lose people that dare to reach beyond my walls.

This epiphany has left me with a lot of unanswered questions about my future. I absolutely still want to be a doctor. I want it more than ever. The question now is how I'm going to frame it within all the more important and larger questions that have come to interrupt my singular focus of becoming a doctor. There will no joy in being the world's greatest doctor if I go home to an empty house and am constantly devaluing my own accomplishments because of unreasonably high expectations.

The Recitation

Where do you find angels now-a-days? I know friends and family that have been looking for them for ages and never found them. This weekend however I meet two. God knows I wasn't looking for them.

The first was on Teaneck Road by a closed dairy queen at about 12:45 am. It was raining so hard and I had been walking alone for so long that neither my clothes nor my glasses were serving their purpose. I was drenched and not quite blind. I was also dreadfully cold. The divine meeting happened quickly and without any procession. I saw the angel sitting about the peak of the dairy queen roof. He/she greeted me with a wave and leaped, his/her great wings slowing his/her decent, to the dead leaf strewn side walk in front of me. A tentacle of light emerged from the angel's navel and enraptured my head. I struggled desperately but as soon as I began struggling I realized I was no longer in Teaneck. Well that is not quite true. More correctly to say I was no longer only in Teaneck. I was in three places at once. I was in Teaneck but also in a great desert and a quite isolated Caribbean beach. The bright scorching of the day melted into the raining misery of Teaneck and the tranquil star lite night of the beach. Like three oil painting whose canvases turned to water and began to flow and mingle with one another without losing any distinction, I was seeing all and each. In the desert I saw great migrations of people with their whole lives on their backs pressing west buffeted by sun and sand. In the beach I saw a single woman bathing in the star light. The waves rolling over carelessly, unappreciative of the beauty they held. It lasted perhaps a second, likely less. Then it was over. All that remained was the dairy queen and the dirty wet sidewalk. I was exhausted. I fell over and vomited. With 40 mins of walking behind me alone in the dark and rain and another 40 mins ahead of me I concurred with my body that it was time for a break.

I might the second angel while listening to Dvorak in a middle school concert hall. With two free tickets to the Bergen County Philharmonic and with no one to go with me I sat quietly suspended between a state of complacency and melancholy as they orchestra rounded out the fourth movement of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. The tarantella rhythms carrying all the weight of their poisonous origins. Then a girl took the stage. Younger than I and still engaged in her education at Julliard she seated herself and her cello at center stage with a gaze of otherworldly focus. It was time for Dvorak's concerto and she was to be the soloist. The first stroke of her bow was deep and resounded in my chest awakening the depths of my soul, unbinding the chains that I'd so meticulously placed. Elation and freedom followed the vibrations of her strings and the caresses of her hands on the cello's neck. Her music was like calligraphy written in the air painting the auditorium with chords of intent and grace. I had no hallucinations or visions or what have you but I was equally as transported as I was the night before. Carried on waves of music to wonders that lasted only moments at a time. The music of the spheres was opening around us.

It was a good weekend for Angels, but I do enjoy the company of some much more than others.

Some more (hopefully not awful) poetry

Suits

Mine;
Ruffled about my elbows,
Still creased to previous owner’s shoulders,
Mother-tailored, thread not quite matching,
Loose in the waist, old belt over draw
Ballooning out the legs.
Only $50 dollars at the thrift store.

Across the cold and dark table,
Theirs;
Slim, fitting, immaculate.
Made in Italy, Genoa, France, Singapore,
Anywhere but here.
Pressed and Dry-Cleaned.
They begin:
“So what are your qualifications?”

AJM

Some (hopefully not awful) Poetry

The World’s Great Scab

Cutting itself deep
world’s blood drawn
land blackened, hard
Never healing

Moans, grunting
flakes tear at one another
Wails, shrieking pink flesh
bared raw

Congealing bleeding hardening bleeding again
tirelessly, the great scab claws at its self
starving, depleting the world
Never healing

Blessings gifts, regretted
Stars’ tears boil
on backs of the scab
it roams spreads virulent

Billion legged, toothed, fisted beast
self mutilating, plaguing all the earth
Were that God never spoke its name,
Adam.

Karaoke Night

Ice cubes dance in brown and clear liquors
Beneath faces shadowed by overdrawn collars.
Deafening off key lyrics reflecting
shimmering like broken glass,
Fist clenched she bellows a eulogy
To the may haves and never were.
Wrung out melodies unmasked by the dim lighting.
Wraiths, shadows of memory, dance on the walls
Jubilations reserved exclusively for these
Beings of the past,
Mocking the living statues cemented to the bar
A final wail beneath the decrescendo
The music dies.
The absence of applause.


A moment of silence for the departed.

Seven Deadly Sins? Nay, Shakespeare Needs Only One: Jealousy, Iago’s Poison and its Abstract Implications

The immense and hadean world of literary villains is rife with irresistible personalities full of complexities and unanswered questions; however, there is no villain that has so captured the imagination of the world as Iago. Iago shows himself to be a heavily nuanced Machiavellian protégée whose schemes so are encompassing that even the audience falls victim to his wit and guile and whose motivations are so cast in shadow so as to only further damn his nature. However, possibly the most compelling aspect of this luridly deceitful man is just how he causes all that he does, how he causes the death of four people, the wounding of three others, the complete destruction of a man’s soul, and his own descent into madness. One might think that to engineer such a disturbing and varied set of results there would need to be a multidimensional and equally varied scheme; however this is not the case. Iago masterfully engages a single human emotion to bring about all of his ends, but he is only able to do so because of the raging agony of which that same emotion has caused within himself. Like drawing water from a poisoned well, Iago’s uses his own caustic jealousy to envenom nearly every character in the play; consequently, “Othello” and Iago specifically is an exploration of the corrosive nature of jealousy at the self, interpersonal, and communal levels which reveal Iago to not only symbolize jealousy but rather to embody it, prompting implications for an abstractive reading of the play. In order to properly engage these arenas, it is best to begin with the outmost and move towards the personal in much the same way one might trace the epidemiology of a disease.

The first analysis of jealousy working through and in Iago on the communal level comes in his exchange with Barbantio. At first glance this interaction may not seem to be any different than any of Iago’s exchanges, but when analyzed carefully it becomes obvious that Iago’s ploys go beyond that of a single person against another person but rather of a community against an individual. In act I, scene I, lines 108 – 110 Iago says “you’ll have your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans” taking the insinuation to a level beyond the immediate family and into a larger perspectives. Again then in the same scene only a few lines down in line 115 in response to being called a villain Iago throws Barbantio’s attention back to his place in society saying “You are a senator.” In each of these cases Iago is crafting Barbantio’s fury not in relation to the moor’s association to his daughter but in the context of a community in which he will be seen in a relation to a moor and the jealousy that is engaged by Iago in Barbantio of Othello’s having robbed him of his rightful place in society, a place that his peers will occupy without his company.  This theme is further carried through in act I, scene III, where it is settled in front of gubernatorial body, a prefecture of community. Iago is most silent during this scene, which if one accepts him to be a symbol of jealous is a demonstration of the omnipresent but hidden jealous present within society and communities. In the next arena of jealous, it is obvious to see Iago playing a more active role.

The most familiar theater of jealousy is interpersonally. This is also the most evident throughout the play, being most obvious and fully developed in Iago’s interaction with Othello, but also taking place with Iago’s interactions with Cassio, Rodrigo, and Emilia. Prime examples of Iago functioning as the interpersonal symbol and agent of jealous occur in act III, scene III, lines 93 when Iago prompts “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, know of your love?”, again in line 208 of the same scene recalling Desdemona’s initial deceit of her father, and in such prevalence throughout nearly every seen that it would be tiresome to note them all, rather it is better to note the conditions of each. In every instance of these interpersonal encounters with Iago, he always is pitting the gains or supposed gains of one against the reciprocal loss of another. In the case of Othello it becomes less about the loss of Desdemona as it does about her being taken by another man, the same is true for Iago, even Emilia is jealous of losing Iago’s attention and it being displaced elsewhere despite her knowing where or why. In this way Iago embodies jealous as a sort of universal scale to which all the characters are bound and by which the weigh their own value. This leads inevitably to a question of how could the same emotion, jealousy, function entirely within one’s self where there is no counter weight to judge by. For the answer again one returns to Iago.

When taken in isolation Iago is at the very least a mysterious if not entirely obfuscated figure. The plays offers flimsy and conflicting motives for Iago’s jealousy, both of which are only presented by Iago himself and neither of which would elicit the degree of malice that he unleashes in a rationale human. Iago jeopardizes his career, life, and reputation in order to achieve his revenge. Even in this extreme and maniacal internal strife Iago fulfills his symbolism and embodiment of jealousy. Jealousy, when taken in isolation, is not rationale, it is extreme, and its origins are often unclear and contradictory. Jealousy takes no account of anything except its satisfaction. In all these ways Iago mirrors jealousy exactly. This close relation and near perfect embodiment of jealous at every metaphysical level leads to abstract conclusions that begin with asking the question, could the play progress as it did without Iago.

If one considers, given the near perfect embodiment of jealousy that Iago has generated, that Iago does not embody jealousy, but rather in fact is jealousy, the abstract implications begin to unfold and the evidence for such begins to become clear. If Iago were not a physical character in the play but rather the abstraction of jealousy present in the community, interpersonal relationships, and selves of all the other characters in the play and they all were to fall victim to their own jealous inclinations, just as they do to Iago’s lures, then the play could progress as it does without fail. For isn’t it true that the desperate conclusions to which all the characters attend are drawn to by themselves and their own mental steering or in Iago’s own words in act II scene III, “and what’s he then that says I play the villain, When this advice is free I give and honest, probal to thinking.” Another avenue of evidence for this abstraction of Iago is his long addresses to the audience, which implies his ability to function both within the play and outside its boundaries, something no other character can do.

A critical review of “Othello” allows for the discernment of the depth of interconnectivity between Iago and jealousy. It becomes clear that Iago is a character composed of, driven by, representing, embodying, and possibly even abstractly existing as jealousy in the communal, interpersonal, and personal levels as a hidden omnipresent force, universal scale of worth, and mysterious incorrigible innate emotion. It is a testament to the ability of Shakespeare to so masterfully compose a character that absolutely embodies a single emotion without explicitly stating it and confining it entirely within the human experience.

My Struggle with Personal Statements

The personal statement is one of the strangest writing assignments that can be thrust upon someone. With almost no direction you are asked, in a 1000 words or less, to tell your story. This is ludacris. It is founded on several outlandish assumptions.

First the idea that I have idea what my story is or that it has any degree of a reasonable progression or plot that I can easily understand is wishful thinking at the best. My "story" is a series of impulsive decisions made moment by moment by former versions of myself that are as unrecognizable to me now as a stranger form halfway across the world. To hold me not only responsible to these former version of my self but to expect me to be able to justify them and assemble them in some compact linear form is simply asking the impossible. 

Secondly to expect me to be able to convey my entire essence of being in a form of prose limited to 1000 words is like asking Da Vinci to invent a helicopter with only lead as a base material. Prose is fine for stories, narrative, and essay but what in God's name makes you think that my heart and soul is most readily conveyed in any of those forms? And on top of that you impose a word limit! Oh tyranny! What if Dickens was limited to only 1000 words in writing David Cooperfield? Imagine the beauty of growth, the ebbies of conflict, the shades of morality that would have been forsaken for no other purpose than convenience! If you wish for convenience then please do not be so brazen as to ask me to lay bear my soul! 

Finally, and probably most idiotically, is the assumption that you or anyone is capable of assessing this rendition of my being. That you can somehow judge the quality of how someone chooses to present their "story". Were I too send you a black and white picture of Nietzsche or a Walt Whitman poem who are you to say that this some how lessens my potential contribution to the world? These things may hold unknowable value for which you could not possibly begin to understand and I certainly couldn't describe in prose in 1000 words. Ah but for convenience, for convenience and clarity it is that we must apply these assumptions and constraints. I only warn that these constraints for convenience will not end with application and paper processes that these constraints become a state of thinking and soon, if something is not convenient it is simply not worth doing.