--He sat in his tiny room, a mere nook with a door, not much larger than the full size mattress lying on the floor. Books, magazines, dirty clothes, and trash cover the remaining few square feet of floor space. His friends joke. They call the place D-Block, as most prison cells are larger than the room he has occupied since August. Admittedly, it isn’t the ideal environment for his charge, “The best paper you’ve ever written.” His creative writing teacher always said something, the best advice, something about the A.C.Ts of writing. Ass Chair Type, sit and write.--
--Daunting. Probably the only adjective worthy of describing this project, his capstone paper, “the SENIOR THESIS” as the outside world likes to call it. To the layperson the senior thesis or capstone project brings closure to several years study. In theory, it combines the collective knowledge derived in all things college. After hundreds of hours of class, lectures, group projects, and library study sessions, the senior thesis provides justification, for both the student and the facilitative higher powers, that money was traded for learning, fair and square. The senior thesis, the capstone, the end.--
--A smirk draws across his face as he touch types on the keyboard and the letters appear as if by magic in the word processing program on the screen. He learned something very early in the course of the class requiring this paper. “In my end is my beginning” (Eliot, East Coker, ln. 209). He decides that words like “senior thesis” and “capstone” do not belong in this paper.--
I do not consider it a crisis of faith, but as the “real word” rapidly approaches, I find myself wondering about my path to here, my room, writing “the best paper you’ve ever written.” I wonder what skills I acquired during the four years I spent in the MSU English Department. Please do not mistake this wonder for worry. I have never once been worried by my choice in studies. I happily devoted my life to the words, interpretation, symbols, Norton Anthologies, papers, and a Mac PowerBook G4, keys nearly letter-less from ware. I guess as this semester prepares to spit me out into the big, wide, economically recessed world, I want something concrete in all of the abstract thinking I’ve done. I’m selfish; I want something practical. I spent four years interpreting the work of others, now I need to interpret myself.
But something stands in my way. “The best paper you’ve ever written.” Those words create a discomfort quite similar to a muscle cramp or a rolled ankle, nothing debilitating, just pesky and lingering. How do I know? What is the best paper I’ve ever written? How does it look? I decided to take a look at some old papers saved on the hard drive of the same PowerBook with the worn key I have used since my first year. Honestly most stunk, mindless jabbering about bugs (BIO 106 Insects and Human Society), Whirling disease (College Writing II), or walking on the wild side (Architecture 121). But some stunk less. Some smelled of provolone rather than Limburger. I wrote the following in a paper on Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist:
the heart acts as a powerful instrument of man and we must, “Listen to [our] heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.” The heart can lead us to love or away from danger…The power of the heart is almost infinite and therefore so is the power of man which is a very humanist view; yet Coelho also writes “And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.” Although humans maintain almost infinite power in their hearts, the heart maintains a connection with God.
--He remembers the paper when he reads it. He wrote it as a Freshman in the fall of 2005. It was about religious humanism. He laughs about his wonderful allegorical interpretation of the text; his US 101 teacher must have been impressed. He also remembers how he felt writing the paper, technically a Mechanical Engineering student, his own heart wasn’t interested in engineering. He needed to listen --
This semester introduced words like inscape, action, sacred duty and epiphany, all terms for enlightenment and the discovery of Self in the a cosmic puzzle. The trick became digging the Self out. While hashing out my theory on the practicality in the epiphany over the last few weeks, I retained a nagging feeling that my attempt to find the practical in this excavation fell slightly short. I felt I missed a key step, perhaps the first step. Epiphany begins with a decision or a choice. We choose our own inscape, our sacred duty. It is something inherent but hidden. Something based on a choice lounging in the subconscious. I switched to English shortly after I wrote the paper on The Alchemist. Exactly why remains a mystery to me. I made a choice. In the Bhagavad-Gita, we tend to pity Arjuna because we think he had no choice in his predicament. He was thrown into battle with his teachers against his will. However, Arjuna chose to become a warrior. He created his situation. Similarly, Hamlet chose to seek revenge, “Haste me to know’t that I, with wings as swift/ As meditation or the thoughts of love,/ May sweep to my revenge” (1.5.35-7). He promised immediate action yet he failed to deliver because of his conscience. His inner struggle caused by his inaction result from his choice of swift revenge. Even Lily Briscoe chooses to return to the beach house and complete her masterpiece though with much trepidation feeling “nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all” upon her return (Woolf 145). A distinction must be made. A gaping hole exists between choosing sacred duty or inscape and actually finding sacred duty, a hole that can only be filled by action.
“No one exists for even an instant/ without performing action; however unwilling, every being is forced/ to act by the qualities of nature” (Gita, 3rd Teaching, stz. 5). After choice, comes action, inevitability brought on by our choices. Before I read Hamlet or the Gita, I found a quote in To The Lighthouse. After Lily chooses her sacred duty and returns to the beach house she struggles to act. She wonders, “Where to begin?—that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made” (Woolf 157). It seems one of the most simple of tasks, acting yet as Lily discovers, action requires risk, it exposes one to the world. Her consciousness interferes as it does with Hamlet. He fears he will become the villain, cause unrest in Denmark, and his conscience dissuades him. Lily too, falters in action even after “she made her first quick decisive stroke” (Woolf 158). Lily acts but then worries that her painting “would be hung in the servants’ bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it then” (Woolf 158-9). The Gita calls these frustrations “the fruits of action.” In order to discover personal inscape and to realize the reason for choice, one must “Be intent on action,/ not on the fruits of action;/ avoid attraction to the fruits/ and attachment to inaction” (Gita 2nd Teaching Stz. 47). “Nothing is better for a warrior/ than a battle of sacred duty” like nothing better exists for a painter except painting (Gita, 2nd teaching, stz. 31). Every person is a unique combination of warrior, like Arjuna, and a painter, like Lily. Thus people must pursue their unique combination of battling and painting. This unique combination of doing leads to the realization of the Self, the sacred duty, and the personal inscape. We must pursue right action. However, our lives, “distracted from distraction by distraction/ filled with fancies empty of meaning” (Eliot, Burnt Norton III. 101-2) rarely unfold as a linear pattern of unique action, rarely do we act without attachment to the fruits of our action because humans are “born of craving and attachment” which “binds the embodied self with attachment to action” (Gita, 14th teaching, stz. 7). In short, we find great difficulty in realizing our sacred duty; life is hard.
--He remembers his own struggles with choice in action. He remembers his own questions, “I am an English major, now what? What does one do with an English major?” The practical world told him to pursue a well-respected profession with great benefits, a high school English teacher perhaps. “Sure!” he thought as he signed up for classes in his new life like “In-School Experience,” “Drug Issues in Education,” and “Lifespan of Human Development,” they all sound so practical and so very distant from the engineering department. So he sat for an entire unhappy year through lectures about the practical concepts of teaching, below average interest, below average grades. Yes, a few classes sparked his interest; most had the ENG prefix before the course number (in the old course numbering system). But overall, he suffers from disinterest and apathy. Fifteen straight years in the educational system, he considered himself burnt out. He doesn’t bother signing up for his junior year classes instead picks up the classifieds and begins circling, bartender, landscaper, and anything that doesn’t remind him of school.--
During class discussion we talked about how separately the Gita and Hamlet fail to create the effect of the two works together. The Gita lays down clear guidelines, “Each one achieves success/ by focusing on his own action…By his own action a man finds success,/ worshiping the source/ of all creatures’ activity,/ the presence pervading all that is/ Better to do one’s own duty imperfectly/ than another man’s well” (Gita 18th Teaching Stz. 45-47). In the ideal world, a teacher like Krishna holds our hand while walking us through the proper actions that follow his guidelines. In the real world, and often times in the literary one, this is not the case.
All good literature deals with this issue of guidance and action. Hamlet questions, “ I do not know/ Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do’” just as every person questions. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ answer says we must instress our inscape. To find our answer, we must decipher our personal uniqueness instilled in us by God. We must strip ourselves down to our very selfness. I am not Kevin the English Major or Kevin the skier or Kevin the son of Robert, I am simply Kevin the Kevin. Coming from a slightly more secular opinion, we must remember our choice of sacred duty; I must remember what it means to be Kevin the Kevin.
--He remembers how he thought he knew the answer. Europe, travel, skiing, beer, Scandinavian women. He would find it, he thought, his purpose. So he worked, first as a bartender, then as a landscaper. And he remembers the weight of the world lifting when he bought that ticket.--
This proves difficult because the choice may be subtle, hidden in subconscious “moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,/ Fruition, fulfillment, security or affection,/ Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination” (Eliot, Dry Salvages II 90-2). These moments “when a man finds delight/ within himself and feels inner joy/ and pure contentment in himself,” skip by us in the day to day (Gita 3rd teaching stz. 17). Often times, “we had the experience but missed the meaning” (Eliot, Dry Salvages 93). While made in the maker’s image, humans fall far short of perfection. A person forgets the important moments, the defining moments, and the epiphanies in life.
When asked to define epiphany most people describe it as a moment of clarity, a shiver down the spine, or the light bulb going off. Rarely does a person describe an epiphany as, “the feeling I had when I realized I wanted to be a _______(insert profession)” because between some past epiphany and the present, the person probably wanted to be a million and one other things besides a ________ because ________ makes the person unhappy. This especially holds true when on an even rarer occasion than epiphany itself, the person remembers the epiphany so vividly, the memory “restores the experience/ In a different form, beyond any meaning/ We can assign to happiness” (Eliot, Dry Salvages 94-6). Memories of epiphanies bypassed prod the soul not because they themselves make one unhappy, but because they offer an intimate look into a life out of joint.
This reaction provides the basis for the dark epiphany of possibility unrealized or perhaps sacred duty unrealized. Suffering finds root in this dark epiphany “of all that you have done, and been; the shame/ of motives late revealed, and the awareness/ of things ill done and done to others harm/ Which once you took for exercise of virtue” (Eliot, Little Gidding, 139-42). As an imperfect species, humans must endure dark epiphanies and pain. Pain and suffering exist in man’s nature, a blemish passed down from man’s mythological fall. Perhaps this explains why Eliot cautions us against “the wisdom of old men” and praises “their folly,/ their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,/ Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God./ The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless” (Eliot, East Coker 94-98). Though humans are not perfect and prone to folly, we are the most intuitive of the earth’s creatures. Our only viable coping mechanism, accepting dark epiphanies with humility. With humility we can find purpose (or inscape) in dark epiphanies and pain. By finding purpose in dark epiphanies, we return to the path of sacred duty.
--He remembers his own dark epiphany. He loved landscaping, a real salt of the earth feeling. Tilling the land is one of the earth’s oldest professions he thought, one of the most noble. He remembers the money and his swelling bank account. He saw his trip to Europe in every scoop from his shovel, future stories and the shenanigans. He fell in love with the idea of the wayward ski bum lost forever in the European Alps, dig dirt, traverse the earth. The other laborer in his landscaping crew jarred him from of his daydream with words that stick to him to this day, a much more graphic version of the following, “You’d get your ass kicked in prison.” He remembers the rotted meth teeth looked especially gnarled and corrupt as his co-worker laughed, mouth agape, at his own joke. He remembers it to be one of the last times he felt the salt of the earth. The comment had cracked his daydream and his action like salt cracked the earth. It was mid October, the first snow couldn’t come fast enough.--
The question shifts to the cause of dark epiphanies. According to the spiritual guidance of the Gita, “brooding about sensuous objects/ makes attachment to them grow; from attachment desire arises,/ from desire anger is born./ From anger comes confusion;/ from confusion memory lapses;/ from broken memory understanding is lost;/ from loss of understanding, he is ruined” (Gita 2nd teaching, stz. 62-63). One can read these maxims and accept them as true. The logic is sound, A leads to B, B leads to C, etc. But a practical person needs proof. A practical man needs experience. The practical man needs to read To the Lighthouse.
Lily struggles with this exact problem as she paints her portrait of Mrs. Ramsey. After a rush of painting in which the figure of Mrs. Ramsey begins to emerge, Lily’s paintbrush begins to slacken because “against her will she had come to the surface, and found herself half out of the picture, looking, a little dazedly, as if at unreal things” (Woolf 178). Lily experiences a common feeling, a daze and uncertainty, the discomfort of a bad day. She hurriedly attempts to reignite her brush and force action but “the urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up: the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension” (178). Lily feels lost and empty. She becomes fixated on her goal and her actions fill with desire, “to want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart” (Woolf 178). By nature desire is near unattainable and on the rare occasion one realizes desire, a worse conditions results, feelings unfulfilled, emptiness.
Her dark epiphany manifests from her desire. In her desire Lily tries to force her thoughts of Mrs. Ramsey because “it had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night…then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus…the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a center of complete emptiness” (178-9). Lily wraps herself in the fruits of action only to find nothingness, a hollow center, the empty hole of a donut. Lily realizes the futility in her desire. She realizes a Danish, a holeless pastry, tastes much better than a donut. However, a lesser man with a sweet tooth may settle for the donut, succumb to desire. A lesser man wakes up in twenty years with a mouth full of cavities, a stomach ulcer, and diabetes. The body decays with sacred duty and “whenever sacred duty decays…chaos prevails” (Gita 4th teaching stz. 7). Desire for praise, desire to please, desire to avoid criticism all rot the Self, leaving a painful leprous shell of duty unrealized.
In every (I hesitate to say “every” but I will stick with it) major religion and worldview, a common thread unravels itself. Humans will suffer as a part of our nature. Most people however mistake the gift of suffering as a curse. Suffering and pain remind us we have veered from our choice, our sacred duty or inscape. Perhaps this accounts for the screams Annie Dillard heard while watching the solar eclipse, suffering in its most lucid form, agony. These screams reminded her that “the sun was going, and the world was wrong” (Dillard 16). Nothing causes more personal introspection than agony. Suffering and pain do not need to be so pronounced. Sometimes the greatest pain is miniscule, almost unnoticeable. As Dillard writes, “we live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless…until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in the form that people can use” (Dillard 22-3) Suffering provides the most intimate knowledge as to when we settled for the donut rather than the entire Danish. In fact, the little things and little sufferings, and conversely, little joys, do more work to remind us of our sacred duties, our inscape, our selfness than the most intense feeling of pain or euphoria. Little things or little “hints and guesses,/ Hints followed by guesses; and the rest/ Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action./ The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation” (Eliot, Dry Salvages, 212-5), duty’s incarnation.
--He remembers one of his little hints: A journal entry he wrote in Europe, bathed in unseasonable February sun, the only journal entry he ever titled. He remembers how clever he thought his title was. Rereading his entry his jaw drops. As he thought about including this part no more than two minutes prior to these words, he had intended on mocking his silly scribbled entry. But the words, the words mean so much as he rereads them, maybe not to you or to the professor or anyone else for that matter, the words mean so much to his self, his inscape.--
-- From Journal entry Feb 11th 2008, St. Anton, Austria, 3:30PM, entitled “Achieving Mental Clarity While Sunning in St. Anton:”--
--“Listening to Marley, sipping beer and tanning in the middle of February. I’ve never been more relaxed. I tend to worry about my future and course in life however I must admit, at this stage and in this moment I have ZERO worries. I’ve found my calling. I am a mountain person and I will dedicate the rest of my life to the mountains in one capacity or another. I will forever remember this moment as the epiphany. My realization of the purpose in life. And I am sure I will be all right. That speaks especially true because I’m listening to Marley and I generally think Marley is overrated and cliché. In this moment he is perfect.”--
--His body tenses and that familiar chill runs down his spine, the very chill he tried to describe the very first week in class. The chill he got standing on the mountain overlooking “God’s Grandeur” in the cheesy picture on his blog site is only equaled by the chill he gets rereading his equally cheesy journal entry. He realizes it was a moment of “Midwinter spring…Sempiternal through sodden towards sundown,/ Suspended in time, between pole and tropic./ When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire… between melting and freezing/ The soul’s sap quivers” (Eliot, Little Gidding 1-15). In this moment revisited, his perceptions feel completely warped as the mountains he lived and skied two years prior, mountains he gave little thought besides their inherent beauty, become Literal, Allegorical, Moral, and Anagogical in his memory. He feels embarrassed to admit this, he is crying.--
What happens next after the choice, the dark epiphanies, the suffering, the hints? How does the practical person know which right action leads to sacred duty? Lily Briscoe asks and answers these same questions, “what was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something that evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs. Ramsay; it evaded her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said” (193). Lily realizes, just as we all must realize, that right action is elusive. Our choice in sacred duty does not fall in the lap. Finding our inscape requires that we contemplate things that evoke “beautiful pictures,” “beautiful phrases,” and beautiful thoughts. Things we simply enjoy are not enough to catch our elusive selves, our choice in sacred duty. In a more modern, practical, Hollywood terms, the clues to this mystery are not pastimes but things for which we would die, things we gladly do even “if it be/ now, tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be/ now; if it be not now, yet it will come.” (Hamlet V.2.234-6). We must be Hamlet; we must willingly enter the rigged fencing match. For these things, these actions, while not our sacred duty, allow us to “start afresh” with a new mind. A new mind is clear of what the Krishna calls desires, the fruits of action, and dark inertia. A man with a new mind is “Faithful, intent, his senses/ subdued, he gains knowledge; gaining knowledge,/ he soon finds perfect peace” (Gita, 4th teaching stz. 39). A man with a new and clear mind becomes infinitely perceptive seeing “a World in a Grain of Sand,/ and a Heaven in a wild flower” (Blake, Auguries of Innocence). A man with a new mind grasps what matters, everthing.
--He remembers returning to Montana State, after all of the battling with the Registrar and Financial Aid, he felt calmer, more prepared, refreshed, like he knew something that he failed to previously understand. He reads Don Quixote, something clicks. He finds countless “beautiful pictures” and “beautiful phrases,” some of which begin to appear in his own writing. In a paper for Literary Criticism in the Fall of 2008, he writes, “Like Don Quixote, English students “know” the benefits of studying poetry while outsiders remain ignorant to the knowledge an English student may impart. We English students need no explanation of the inherent worth of the study of poetry because we already “know.” We see value in every passage written in Don Quixote just as Don Quixote sees a daring adventure around every corner. An English student pursues knowledge just as Don Quixote pursues knight errantry.” He realizes, when he returns to classes that fall, that while he may not fully understand his choice, his sacred duty, or his destination, he had found his path. For the first time he knew, his windmill became the giant.--
Perhaps the most practical of knowledge one can take from this class, this college, this English department, and even this paper, is the existence of the grand epiphany, the realization of the sacred duty. No matter whether one is “a scholarly and dignified priest,/ a cow, and elephant, a dog/ and even an outcaste scavenger,” sacred duty exists (Gita 5th teaching, stz. 18). As Hamlet says as he willfully goes to his death knowing he will fulfill his duty, “The readiness is all” (Hamlet V.2.237). We must be ready. Someday the stars will align, you will get the exact right amount of sleep, roll out of bed a the exact right time, and eat the exact right amount of Cheerios. You will stare down into your bowl and the answer will smack you in the face. After a lifetime of right action, devotion, and sacrifice, you will become completely detached from action and you will read the words of the floating breakfast cereal, “ooooooo,” and it will be followed by a triumphant “Awe!” along with the realization, “What I do is me: for that I came” (Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, 8). Striped of all the masks, stereotypes, and perceptions, you will play the only part ever written for you in the cosmic theater production of the world…yourself, your inscape. On that day when right action, detachment, the self, the inscape and the choice meet, “all shall be well and/ all manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in-folded/ Into the crowned knot of fire/ and the fire and the rose are one” (Eliot, Little Gidding, 255-259).
----------------------------------Hmmmm!--------------------------------he rereads his work-----------
--He remembers beginning this paper with expectations, grand ones at that. Practical Practical Practical. He intended this paper to answer questions. “What is an epiphany?” “How does one get epiphanies?” and most importantly…”What the hell is the point?” He isn’t quite convinced he answered any of these questions but in the process he did something important. He had it correct from the beginning. He was selfish. This paper has little to do with The Bhagavad-Gita, Hamlet, Lily Briscoe, Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Alchemist, self, inscape, choice, or any number of other words he’s used throughout. He rereads his words and finds nothing practical but everything beyond practical. He remembers how class discovered that great characters of literature, Arjuna, Hamlet, and Lily Briscoe are merely actors. The true hero is the poet that creates them. He realizes perhaps the most practical knowledge of all; as both the actor and the poet, he controls the only story that ever mattered, his own story. All it took was a class, a college, an experience, and a choice. His paper made him remember—“the use of memory: For Liberation” (Eliot, Little Gidding 156-7). In his memory, all of the actions that had little consequence to him in the past, resurrect themselves in a form more potent, poetic, and most importantly, practical than ever imagined. He reflects, one more time, the convoluted, heart wrenching path that presently places him here, where he began, in a cramped room surrounded by books, magazines, dirty clothes, and trash and he makes a pact:
I will not cease from exploration
And the end of all my exploring
Will be to arrive where I started
And know the place for the first time.
This is the end that started with a beginning, perhaps a paper, written in the fall of 2005, that told him, “the heart can lead us to love or away from danger…The power of the heart is almost infinite and therefore so is the power of man.” He knew his choice all along. It just took a few years to remember.
In my end is my beginning. Here’s to beginnings.
Thoroughly enjoyed your paper, Kevin. Illuminating.
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