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AC_Wright 58F
83 posts
9/14/2014 3:30 pm
For a Certain "S" Again. Orginally posted as a response to her blog-entry


Oh, I still remember the feeling. It’s odd. I’ve seen it in others.

I once worked in an office and became all chummy and flirtatious with the security guards in the lobby of the building. One day, one of them wrote a note. It was only a few lines long, but it was still larded with spelling and agreement errors. I clearly remember having to keep from making the face I’d seen others make when I showed them what I wrote: it was the same face you would expect someone to make in the presence of someone who’d farted explosively in their presence and then simply gone on as if nothing had happened.

For me, the most important things about learning my native language have always been matters of motivation and the will to power. I detest Nietzsche’s philosophy but the phrase makes sense here. There as a time in my life when I could not have written a basic sentence. The feelings were there and so was the need. The thoughts were there, as were the ability to appreciate good works (the things I saw), but the tools needed to make sentences happen were absent. Looking back on it, I can only see it as a form of real helplessness. 

I couldn’t write an application letter, or a resume. I couldn’t write stories. I could read poems but not understand the parts that went into them that made the good ones miracles. I could never sell my soul and write advertising copy.

I remember reading Paul Fussel’s, “The Great War and Modern Memory” just for myself. I read Wilfred Owen’s, “Dulce et Decorum Est” and, later, T.S. Eliot’s, “The Wasteland” and Blake’s ridiculous and sublime, “The Tiger” and the things that made them work were impenetrable secrets.

English was a question of power and the way it had been taught to me made me feel as if it was a power with which no one was willing to entrust me—as if the system, of which the teacher herself was the immediate manifestation—chose instead to drown me in bewildering rules and terminology with no end in sight, creating a world in which there was no light at the end of any tunnels and no pot of gold at the end of any rainbows.

The tunnels were just dark places and the rainbows terminated in lifeless fields of sucking mud.

Aspects of my life were a joke: I finally learned the perfect tenses in English through the formal study of German’s grammar. Ha, ha, ha.

In the end, I realized that English and the ability to use it formed a power. I don’t know who taught this to me, which particular writer. It could have been Michael Herr in Dispatches whom you cannot read ten pages of without having your sentence rhythms change to become his rhythms. It could have been Eliot in the Wasteland after Fussel’s pointing out that the voices in the opening passage are the voices of the dead. It might have been M. Duras in The Lover who wrote a book that could make you read, languorously and one-handed, that contained not a single passage of dialog; that held not one word enclosed in quotation marks.

Maybe it was the historian, Tom Holland in Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic where he wrote whole paragraphs of sentences with an internal subordinate clause tacked to the front—simple, declarative sentences are for the weak…

It was all those things. All those things were my freedom and my salvation. They were the kernel of the thing that drove me; that made me want to learn English and to learn to write and to spend what has turned out to be a surprise of a long life learning to ride on English’s back.

If you have the time, you should check out Stiglitz and Michael Lewis’s, “The Big Short.”

Lewis is said to have lifted some of his analysis from a horrible overachieving Harvard undergrad who made sense of the how the instruments worked (nasty, spider-legged statistical analysis of how bad mortgages were to fail causing the instruments based on them to lose worth, precipitating the collapse that required the baillout) but that doesn’t matter. If you read it, you will come to a new and powerful understanding *and* you will be very, very angry.

Schrille Schlampen aller Länder, vereinigt euch! Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren als euren Kontakt mit Versagern!



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