Arteriosclerosis in Uptaught

            I remember writing a poem about arteriosclerosis in high school and showing it to a friend. He didn’t know what to make of it and neither did I. I had a little blue notebook in which I scribbled random thoughts and poetry. It’s somewhere else now. I hope no one finds it. I bet my name is written on the front page.

            If I read it now, I could see who I was then and compare him to me now. I didn’t know shit then, but I bet I wrote with more voice. I bet I didn’t think so much about repetition of the word “then” and its placement in a sentence. Whoever’s voice I’m writing with now is crippled.

            This is relevant. I’m following a thread and I feel it necessary to explicitly state that there is a thread. There is always a thread. The cardiovascular system is a network of threads, threads I can follow, threads keeping it all together.

            Maybe arteriosclerosis was a serious issue when Macrorie wrote Uptaught. I wonder how he died. If you want to know what I remember from the reading, it’s this: “You’re no damn good when your arteries get hard” (20), “Maybe he’s got hardening of the arteries or something” (106), “People’s emotions as well as their arteries harden with age, and they hide behind a wall of impenetrable insensitivity” (171). I wonder if my arteries are hard.

            Arteries carry blood away from the heart. I can’t empty my heart with hard arteries. I don’t know if it’s better to have a full heart or an empty one. I wrote a short story over break titled “The Emptying of His Heart.” It was about a lonely guy falling a tree alone in the remote wilderness who suffers anaphylactic shock after being stung by wasps from the tree he was trying to fall. I hear that emptying of the heart is one of the symptoms of anaphylactic shock. It’s called empty heart syndrome.

            I bet an empty heart produces dead writing. I bet a heart that can’t empty does too. Hard arteries slow the emptying of the heart. That’s why you’re no good with hard arteries. That’s why King Lear was no good. That’s why I feel like I’m no good.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

If I’ve learned anything from Ken Macrorie’s Uptaught, then I should write this reading response in an un-dead language—not un-dead in the sense that the language will rise from the dead, breaking soil with clawing fingers and dragging its corpse to the nearest source of life to leech its essence, but the kind of language that, well, isn’t dead. It seems I’m not entirely clear on what constitutes dead language and un-dead language. Maybe my language should leech the life from those who read it. Or maybe my language should just deviate from academic language. Alas, I am in an academic setting, so this is quite a conundrum I find myself in.

Macrorie says, “In the Third Way, which I stumbled onto, students operate with freedom and discipline. They are given real choices and encouraged to learn the way of experts” (27). In my reading, and maybe I wasn’t reading closely enough, I haven’t been able to uncover exactly what he means about the way of experts. He uses a ton of examples of student writing, but none of it is on par with the sort of expert writing we are accustomed expect throughout academics. I don’t see where free writing and expert writing intersect within his memoir, or whatever genre of writing Uptaught is.

 I can free-write all day, searching for my voice, but I don’t know how to put it into practice in all academia. It seems that what I’m doing at this very moment, blogging, is one of the only places where my un-dead writing can emerge unscathed by the demands of the academic setting. Continuing the un-dead metaphor, the soil through which my language must arise is loose and recently broken in the blog genre. Writing in other genres, a literary analytical essay for example, the soil has been much more akin to compact red clay. The language remains dead and the entire plot of land must be transplanted to transmit that dead and buried language. The whole process is a lot more work, and the product isn’t nearly as dazzling as a creeping mass of un-deadness leeching life. 

 It would be nice if I knew what kind of writing Macrorie is referring to. From the examples, I glean that he is focused on personal memoirs, short fiction, and creative non-fiction. These genres allow for a lot more freedom with language than do other genres. Maybe it’s more about restoring our authority as students, though. He parallels the academic setting at his time to slavery and civil rights, so it seems he wants to give back what has been wrongfully taken from us. I don’t know what has been taken, but if it’s out there and belongs to me, I want it now.

 I talk a lot about putting Macrorie’s ideals, as I understand them I mean, into practice, but then I puss out last minute and decide that I’ll edit out words like “puss.” Read closely, y’all, because it didn’t happen this time. I’m being uptaught, whatever that means. I think it means revolution, which will, by the way, NOT be televised. The revolution will be right here on your screen.