An Ah-Ha Moment
I’ve been recently immersing myself in my studies.
I don’t mean in a bookworm, stay at home and read on a Friday night kinda way (though it does happen sometimes…) but rather I mean I am living through my studies, they have changed and are changing the way I live and think.
I say living ‘through’ because If I were to be simply just ‘living’ them, I would have to be writing conversational poetry in the style of Coleridge, or at a Chicano political rally, or maybe even making history, rather than learning about it.
Maybe one day, I will be able to do one of these things. More likely I will do something completely different, but I’ll be doing something. But for now, I want to know more. I want to ‘get’ it.
All of it.
Today, I feel like I made a tiny but profound step in that direction. Today, many of the disconnected parts floating around in my brain—taking up space and time; always pursued separately and for different reasons—snapped into place like the tiniest section of self made jigsaw puzzle, in which you have to build the pieces from scratch before you can put them together.
I was in a lecture about Voice in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’, and had been reading Howard Zinn’s ‘A People History of The United States’ as well as ‘Nilda’ and ‘And There Earth Did Not Devour Him’ (among a plethora of other things). My professor described the long walks Wordsworth and Coleridge would take, and the conversations they’d have, about the voices they wanted to portray—the people who never made it into poetry, the simple powerful things said everyday; a conversation about conversations and the people having them. And suddenly…
AH-HA!
It all clicked. And the lighting raced down the bundled vines of neurons, tagging all the ideas in all these different fields of thought and making them aware of one another.
Voice. The word never held so much meaning or spawned so much deep thought than the walk to gym after class. I was so engrossed that I stepped off the stairs of Berky Hall and picked up head up 20 minutes later, with no memory of the walk; Only wonder and lighting and Voice. I was reorganizing how I think, how I act; updating all the ‘should’s and ‘could’s and ‘can’s.
The muddy feeling in my brain was gone. All the hours of self exposure and class material that felt like it only added the the messy room in my head, finally found a spot on the shelf. I felt so clear, so sure of my thoughts, the picture was less abstract and full of empty jargon buzzwords and useless facts. It was a picture, and I could see it—and even better, with a little time, I can understand it/coherently explain it/write about it/reference it/teach it—to a degree, live it.
I realized that I can do it. I can ‘get’ it. Maybe not all of it, but more—more than I was starting to think was possible for me. Maybe my dream isn’t so far fetched after all… at least not enough to where I should abandon it for being just that: a dream.
I have alot more to do if I want to put any of this to good use. However, right now, I’m proud of my little corner of the puzzle, my little neat space titled ‘Voice’.
(I know it must be irritating that I am not expanding on what exactly the connections I made were, but that’s for another post. Tonight, It’s just about getting back into the whole sharing my thoughts and writing thing. Another night I will clearly explain to all 2 of you who are even aware of this blogs semi-existence just what conclusions I came to. Hopefully it will blow your mind. Most likely it won’t, but it can’t hurt to hope heh.)
