geometry

[the first therapeutic exercise, as revised from the original version.]

We are incongruous in this room. The curve of every human figure meets only with angles: The stripes on Professor Christiansë’s blouse, the table, the door, the shelves and, more than anything, the countless books that line them. Only mankind can be blamed for all these rectangles, for the geometry that estranges and separates self and world, even here –– especially here. This is where we learn to create.

I wish the place itself were less a creation of man. Man draws too many sharp, simple angles into his work, whereas God has more complex, beautiful formulas for His design; somehow, the structural integrity of life holds, even in the face of curves and cords and fluidity.

This Macbook, I recently learned, was designed by man to mimic a shape used often by God: The golden rectangle. Arrange an infinite number of Macbooks just so, and you could create a perfect helix. My Mac is a friendly place to compose and create, owing perhaps to this small touch of nature coursing through the CPU.

When I visited this campus in April, I sought out quads where dandelions managed to grow. If I had not found dandelions, I would have come here. In April I learned: Parts of this campus breathe. They are the parts where creation of man has given way to the nature of the earth, where feet and ice and time itself have worn away at the quarried stone and reclaimed it. These are the places where creative writing classes should be taught.

I can hear the earth sigh outside the window, beneath the too-tight belt of Nassau Street, at the passage of every car. She breathes in pleasure and in pain, almost in love; she would have to love us, I guess, to put up with us hurting her like we do. She is so much a mother: understanding, accommodating, even as we fail to understand and accommodate her, even as we forget her completely because we imagine ourselves grown and ready to live our own lives.

How little we know.

Somewhere in this room, Thoreau must be concealed in a little rectangle of a book. I found Eliot earlier, no better, hiding out with other writers deemed worthy of these shelves. Even we, who fancy ourselves creative, write in boxes: college-ruled paper, Macbook keyboards, the old typewriters and diaries that I can hardly conceive of now.

The composer of this piece –– a duet of cello and violin? I can’t be certain –– wrote in a key signature, in bars and notes of set length, all angles, following a standard chord progression. . . until he strayed. Do you hear the sharps, the flats, the naturals that do not belong, the half-step rebellions? They are why I listen to music. They are dandelions growing on the score, up through cracks in the movement.

And this is what I meant when I told you that the author must find where her fiction fits: Cracks. Where there is empty space, something beautiful and shocking and fulfilling can grow. The nature of man’s creation, however initially impenetrable, is to fall apart. What fiction is, what knowledge has been, what I am; these all undergo a secret, divinely controlled demolition. The additions and renovations that follow may come at the pen of the architect or the hand of God; ironically, that’s mostly up to you and me.