| For our english final, we were given an assignment with 2 parts. The first was to pick a word that aligned with themes we had found throughout the course. She gave us a list with words like - writer, reader, identity. I picked one off the list: home. We were to connect our chosen word to the texts we had discussed (in my case, I discuss "The House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros. The second part was to pick our "text of great importance" (I picked Alice in Wonderland and the writings of Edgar Allen Poe) and how it connects to us. There were a lot of guidelines, rules, and regulations. It was supposed to be two separate essays. But after multiple discussions with her, I turned the duel essay assignment into a collection of journal entries, with the two essays topics mushed into one. Everything I wrote is truly how I feel. They're not bullshit answers made up for an A. It's all things that needed to be said. (While still connecting to the actual assignment itself.) Note: I fed off one of my previous entries, so if it seems familiar, it is! Enjoy. Leave me comments with your impressions! Please excuse the font and color problems. I can't figure out how to work this thing and it keeps screwing up. Bear with me. Or check my myspace! It's posted as a blog there. April 21st, 2008 I guess it sounds cliché, but sometimes I feel like I’m tumbling down the rabbit hole. I’ve lost control. Or then I feel I have control and I accidentally hurt the ones I care about. Consequentially, I find myself back in this pit of darkness. I look up at the light above, and I see safety. Security. Comfort. All good things – but then I look down and I see unexplored territory. Any sane person would choose the easy way out: sacrificing trivial selfish wants (curiosity) for comfort. And for the majority of my life, I did. I would grab hold of the tree roots and propel myself upward back onto level ground. And there I see Alice, daydreaming in the tree making daisy chains, as her tutor reads to her words that mean nothing. I see Alice and again I languish why I picked up, the predictable route. I’d wonder what made Frost so special – why could he pick the “road less traveled by?” Where is my courage? So in fear and terror of the unexplained, I, like Poe, accepted my new fate of being crazy. I can’t be Alice any longer! I’ve climbed back in and pencil dropped. At least I did until halfway down I started clawing at the sides for my descent to cease. Panting I wonder, do I really want to do this? You’ll be lonely you know. Dirt and blood are lodged under my fingernails from the double guessing. And here I am, halfway again. But maybe its inevitable: this rabbit hole is home. April 24th, 2008 I picked up my Poe book again today. Read the “Tell-tale Heart.” The one where the old man’s glazed-over-blind-eye drives him crazy so he decides to kill the old man. I remembered how much I loved this narrative, and decided to read it as “story time” to my sister. Unfamiliar with the writings of Poe, my sister exclaimed “he did what?!” when I got to my favorite paragraph: “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.” (*Enter exclamation of my sister’s disgust*) “I then took up three planks from the floorings of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye – not even his – could have detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash out –no stain of any kind – any blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all – ha! Ha!” (Poe, 97) I laughed at every ill, horrified face Steph made as we continued the journey of the telltale heart. I could tell she hated the crazy narrator for killing an innocent old man, whom the writer claimed to “love,” (Poe, 93) for he, the old man, “had never wronged [him], never given [him] insult.” (Poe, 93) When the police finally arrive at the door asking to search the house (for neighbors had called in domestic disturbance,) Stephs’ eyes lit up, screaming to me “at last - vengeance!” But then the end came. The part where the narrator hears the old man’s beating heart under the floor boards, beating louder and more vibrantly, until his madness drives him into a screaming confession to the police. “’Villains!’ [He] shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed!-tear up the plants!-here, here!- it is the beating of his hideous heart!’” (Poe, 99) I closed the book, sighed, and looked up at my sister, whose jaw and dropped. “That’s it? He confessed? But why would he do that! He had gotten away with it, the police were just leaving… I don’t understand.” My first response was that of any person’s obvious first conceptions: “he’s just crazy Steph,” But I couldn’t help thinking over her question as I lay in bed that night. April 28th, 2008 He’s not crazy. Ok, well, granted he killed his master, cut him up, placed the dismemberments under the floorboards of his own home, and then wrote about how proud he was of his “work,” solely because a blind eye freaked him out. But regardless, he says he hears the beating of the old man’s heart from under the floorboards. This beating, as it becomes louder and louder, and reverberates through the narrators brain, is the reasoning behind the confession. I don’t think he’s schizophrenic, nor do I think the beating actually occurred, like in a magical realism story. I think the beating he hears is his own guilt, his own heart’s disgust for the thoughts he’s fantasized and the crimes he’s committed. April 29th I wrote a poem today. For multiple reasons. There, the once beautiful lay broken winged. The Angel, unable to fly high, sank deeper into the swamp. The Innocent – shot down sat alone, bloody, crying… Leading down a path she wished not to take. The words above just flowed out onto the paper. Like when a river is gushing over its’ banks from storms the night before. There was little control, the words had simply chosen themselves. I’ve come to understand why I love that particular story of Poe’s. It’s not just the beautifully graphic, enticing writing, or the raw cinematography the story line places in one’s mind. It’s the idea of guilt and home. I feel guilt because I, Alice, choose up over down, lie to myself about making the right decisions, and still hurt the ones I love. Poe’s narrator from “The Tell-tale heart” has guilt of the mind and heart. His home is his mind – and with all the consuming guilt, he cannot function. And then I thought about everything I’ve learned this year: my last year of high school. I realized “home,” not just as the rabbit hole or the mind, has been a subterranean theme and image throughout. After those Socratic seminars (and a few outside discussions) we held in Pratt’s English class about “The House on Mango Street,” I decided I never really liked Cisneros’s writing style. Her imagery and wording, though posed as a twelve year olds view of the world and events surrounding her, are a pathetic attempt to mimic a true child’s inner workings. But why then, was I so attracted to the book? Was it the underlying, grotesque, story line? Could it have been those chapters like “There Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn’t Know What to Do” when Angel Vargas “learned to fly and dropped from the sky like a sugar donut, just like a falling star, and exploded down to earth without even an ‘oh’”, (Cisneros, 30) or like “What Sally Said,” when we discover the horrifying extent to which Sally is beaten by her father, that kept me intrigued? Partially. What really drug me into the text were the inner conflicts Esperanza battled regarding her “home” on Mango Street. Though Mango Street will always (un-wantingly) play a large part of her past, present, and future, she never understood her place there. She felt as if she didn’t belong. She…me. My parents, their divorce, my two “homes”… So now, not only am I a guilt ridden Alice, but a dislodged, white, middle class version of Esperanza. April 30th Sometimes I wonder if in building, maintaining, and losing relationships, we're all just pawns in our own and each other's games of life. Do you ever feel that each of these games we engage in is part of someone else’s or your own life’s' movie/series? But on some days you're the viewer, on some you're the actor/actress, on some you're the scriptwriter, or the director, and on others you're a combination of the lot? Like that each decision we make, even ones that may seem inconsequential, are just little chapters that make up this grand scheme of an existence? These past few days I’ve been playing Alice, trying to be best director possible, trying to make selfless decisions. But the scriptwriter is fucking with me. So now what am I? I guess I’ll just have to follow the white rabbit and see. |
