Grad School Application Narrative

I’ve just now published a thorough narrative about my graduate school application process. Find it here:

http://gradschools.pbwiki.com/Grad+School+Application+Narratives

I’ve published it as part of the GVSU/Ander Monson-run index of graduate school application information. Check it out, if that is of your persuasion. It helped me.

Regret

This entry is partially in reply to Jamie Grefe’s excellent piece at The Eyeslit-Crypt, “Cioran + Morita + Crowley,” and partially in reply to thoughts and experiences that have been kicking around in my head for a while. I’ll begin replying directly to his entry.

Jamie begins with an aphorism from E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born:

To think is to undermine—to undermine oneself. Action involves fewer risks, for it fills the interval between things and ourselves, whereas reflection dangerously widens it.
. . . So long as I give myself up to physical exercise, manual labor, I am happy, fulfilled; once I stop, I am seized by dizziness, and I can think of nothing but giving up for good. (192)

Cioran often goes to extremes, yet this departure to extremes maintains a link with direct philosophical address. I have experienced this dangerous chasm between things and myself: when the balance in my life leans too heavily on reflection rather than action, not only does life become unpleasant, but it is entirely seized by force of giving up on action. This force is not manifest in direct thought—extreme thoughts of suicide or other dramatic gestures like what Cioran might suggest in other aphorisms—but in exactly what he mentions here: dizziness. While in his piece, Jamie does not explicitly lead to this, a quotation he mentions from Alastair Crowley’s The Book of Lies leads me to this dizziness:

Practice a thousand times, and it becomes difficult; a thousand thousand, and it becomes easy; a thousand thousand times a thousand thousand, and it is no longer Thou that doeth it, but It that doeth itself through thee. Not until then is that which is done well done. Thus spoke FRATER PERDURABO as he leapt from rock to rock of the moraine without ever casting his eyes upon the ground (74).

Jamie uses this quotation in, I think, a positive way, related to action, but I want to reverse it. I think when Crowley refers to practice, this can also point to practice of inaction, and this must be what Cioran means regarding dizziness in thought.

Other than breaths, heartbeats, or maybe eyeblinks, footsteps, watersips, or teethgnashes of food, inaction is one of the only things that I can mention as having practiced thousands and thousands and thousands of times in my life. I like to think that I haven’t yet practiced inaction a thousand times a thousand thousand times, but the thoughts here regarding practice are strong and direct: the intense practice of inaction breeds itself. It has sent me into this dizziness before, and it was a frightening dizziness that induces the thought of nothing but its continuation. When engaged fully in inaction, inaction is the only action I wish to perform. It takes an intense leap to emerge from this swarming swirl. Inaction has performed itself through me, and in order to stop this I’ve needed to break through this demon. It’s happened before; certainly I’ve broken through this demon. I’ve turned off the blank TV many times, left my house and computer and the constant checking of news and emails and facebook in favor of work many times, and rose when sleep was still an indulgent option many times. Regardless, the bond remains strong; clearly I need to continue my practice of overcoming inaction with action.

Jamie comes to this same positive, action-oriented conclusion in his piece:

Perhaps Cioran is calling us to approach that Blank state of minding the world, that Nothingness that rejoins us to the Earth and to the higher levels of existence simultaneously, that state that fills one’s very being when melded to action: the action of doing or non-doing. (The Eyeslit-Crypt)

This is what I, too, take from Cioran’s aphorism. I strive to use thought and reflection wisely to maximize spending time performing actions instead of perpetuating that thought, or general inaction, itself.

There have been many times, though, when I have failed in this—when I have actively given in to failure—and this has meant living with active regret. I realize that most people conceive of regret as something passive, but I find it unhelpful to conceive of anything passive taking over myself. I often use this conception in my thought: even in this post I mentioned inaction in a passive way, suggesting that it was something that has taken over me, even characterizing it as a kind of demon.

Regardless, this conception is entirely unhelpful. It’s unproductive if I say that something is completely preventing me from doing what I want to do. Even if something is doing this to me, acknowledging this is unproductive, as making excuses to myself means nothing. Regardless of any justification I can make to myself, making an excuse doesn’t mean that the action I’ve excused myself from still takes place. If I want something to take place, I must make it be so.

There have been times, though, in which I’ve known I’ve needed to do something and I’ve resisted doing it. There have been times when I’ve known I’ve needed to do work, or I’ve needed to perform some errand, or when I’ve been living quite inactively and I’ve known that, at least, I need to start being active, but I’ve looked at this, knowing I would later regret inaction, and still refrained from that action. While I acknowledge the passivity inherent in this—the demon I mentioned earlier—it remains quite active. Choosing to fail from action is still active, regardless of any acknowledgments otherwise.

This active regret—the process of regretting things that we know we will do or that we will do in the present moment—is widespread. I’m thankful that I mostly just go through this in brief instances, but I notice other people acting with this future regret in mind toward more major things. I’ve noticed a few people limiting themselves from doing what they would want to do with their lives because achieving this is too difficult or they otherwise don’t think they will, so they act with this future regret in mind.

I’ve written about moving through past regrets that continue and perpetuate into the future; I’ve been working on a story discussing that regarding regrets over a lost love for a while, but that’s almost done. I’d like to continue writing about regret, though, as this is a new look at it. I’d not realized this aspect of regret towards the future before. In particular, this comes to mind because of some personal thoughts from someone I hung out with this weekend. She was telling me a story of how she lives with an abusive father and that she stays in that situation in order to watch over her younger brother. Because of this situation, as much as she expresses a desire to go to school and to leave that broken home, she regrets everything she goes into. She hates her job and feels diminished in general about everything: about her sense of self. I suggested she report her father to the police, but she says that she loves her father and her mother feels the same way: neither of them is willing to take charge and put the father in a lower position in their lives. Even realizing that she puts the father ahead of the others in her life (ahead of her mother and her younger brother), her claim is that she loves her father.

Since watching the film Dogville and perhaps before, I’ve developed a destructive approach to writing: not only do I want to put the characters within my writing into strange situations, but I want to evoke disgust in my readers. If possible, I want to destroy my readers. I’ve made this my goal because this destruction was the best thing I’ve had happen to me: I fell madly in love with someone and poured everything into that love with little left over for anything else; eventually, though, that love destroyed me, backfired against me, abandoned me. It was painful, of course, but I came through it with a stronger sense of self and much better ideas of what I wanted to do with my life. Instead of wanting nothing but to pour myself into someone else, I developed goals for myself.

Because this destruction helped me, I’ve decided I want to share that with readers. I haven’t succeeded with it, yet, but I think that once I move on from that piece regarding regretted love, I’d like to move on to a piece regarding this idea of future regret, using that girl’s story to some extent.

If I had the courage and conviction in these beliefs, I would’ve hounded this girl even further than she’s gone with the situation until she completely broke down and realized for herself what she wanted—if I listened to the narrator of the story I’m working on now, that’s what I ought to do. I can’t do that, though. Not only am I not that imposing of a person, but I’m not entirely convinced of how helpful that would be. It seems incredibly arrogant and hurtful.

This destruction feels right in my writing. I think people will be more responsive to it in writing, and, regardless of how arrogant it may still be, any hurt it causes would be beneficial. If I can disgust readers in their realization that they also act through this future regret, I will feel successful.

Michael Cisco’s “The Traitor”

Narration sometimes babbles together in such strings that each particular clause loses all meaning and focus, sometimes hiding any emotional response to something that with other phrasing could be emphatic and powerful, powerful and emphatic, but instead drones and continues, continues and drones, unwilling to please the reader in any way even if he or she strives to be pleased by its sentences, and this is Michael Cisco’s “The Traitor.” Being accustomed to sentences like those gaudy ones in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” guttuggingly human ones like in “Lolita,” those flowing like Ursula LeGuin’s or even just smooth and precise like Gene Wolfe’s, these of “The Traitor” drag, but this dragging impresses toward a novel thoroughly pulled together.

The book has moments of beauty, like when the narrator “stood in the wind on the roof and watched the fires come up, poking up like little flowers here and there, each fire came up like a little rip in my soul, in my chest, torn a little hole and smooched the little tear with firey lips, don’t argue with me I’m telling you how it felt I watched the fires come up and was whipped by cold rain and wind [...]” (143), but its overall style is that of a lengthy monologue from a bitter old man. Its non-character is a blank, and the extent to which this is true is what impresses. He often refers to the story as his own, particularly when it seems that someone else’s story might be taking over: “You’ll get none of their stories from me, this is my story, I won’t presume to speak for them, I won’t profane them by presuming to speak for them, if you want to know who they were from me, I will tell you who they were for me, that’s all anyone can say about anyone else or has any business saying” (134). While it’s true that the story is entirely his own, his motivations are not: he’s only ever pushed by others. His primary motivation is the destruction of the world, and while this disposition comes from his upbringing as a blank–a person who has no feeling or thought or motivation of his own–and thus some drive to make others like him, this motivation itself prevents him from motivation. However, because his primary feature is his blankness, he’s infinitely swayed by others. When two of these others come in direct conflict, he vacillates between them like an infant.

This is the most convincing portion of the novel: his infantile vacillation between two loves. He immediately clings to Wite, a man who destroys others and eats their souls for his own sustenance, sustenance which thrives only to destroy more and more with no particular end goal but destruction itself–Wite, a soul burner, the narrator’s god. Just as immediately, though, he clings to Tzedze, Wite’s sister. He loves both, and because he lacks discretion, he obeys both. Because they are in direct conflict, he tangibly loses both. This response to conflict brings the novel together. The narrator is a blank, and every subtle technique throughout the novel follows this premise.

I find little technique in the book I can use for myself. I read it twice, hoping I could gather something from it to use for myself, but its only motivation is to show me I could potentially go further with characters in science fiction work than I might have thought: science fiction premises can easily permeate throughout a character’s entire being.

Regardless of whether or not I’ve gained much from the book, it does use a few noteworthy techniques. Its premise is that the main character is (and, actually, all the characters he surrounds himself with are) blank, and the limited use of dialogue contributes to this. Direct dialogue is rare, mostly only in moments of extreme stress, and I find this generally distances me from the characters. The book’s premise is to show characters which are as inhuman as they can be, and keeping me from their interactions adds to this. There were times when I’d been reading a lengthy passage of narration ending with a small piece of dialogue, and this dialogue would jump out at me and jar me slightly. That was the only indication that the characters had been talking throughout this narration: apparently, though, the narrator found the particularities of the discussion to be so banal as to not need be mentioned. This distance from the characters induces a kind of need or wanting in my reading, making anything I’m told more believable. Thus, when I’m told again and again that the narrator is blank, because I have little evidence to the contrary, I believe it stronger.

I may be stretching things too thin and departing too far from the text in this next statement, but it follows that in this reading process, I become blank. When I say that I’m devoid of the characters’ interactions with each other and thus am wanting for something from the text, that puts me in the same place as the narrator. I end up clinging to each direct, propaganda-laced statement as a blank.

I doubt that’s something I would use in my own writing, but it’s an impressive technique. It shows an intense dedication to a strict premise.

Let them know, and leave them nothing. Throw them down. A full stop to everyday business, the ruination of the city, that is the only completion that can be hoped for, or that should be hoped for. It’s the only hope that isn’t an obscene hope. A ruined city is the only sort of city I could live in. I could walk to and fro, one place looking much the same as any other, just piles of rubble, and I could meet people int he street and in the ruins, and feel at home with them, when it didn’t matter any more who they were supposed to be. Who we are would also be in ruins, and our language would be ruined and just barely intelligible. They wouldn’t be anybody, that’s how I would resemble them. We would all be at the mercy of the elements, all the same–that’s what I want to bring to every city in the world, I want to see every city in the world ruined like that, every abominable family, church, army, hanging in rags, all those abominable groupings of people smashed to pieces, leaving only the handful of permanently stupefied survivors and debris as far as the eye can see. (118-119)

Perhaps, to some extent, the narration does this. It certainly hasn’t left any resonating effect on me, but within my reading process, I wasn’t anyone–I was at the mercy of the random narration, stupefied and waiting to be told what to do and what to believe.