Something I wrote

Preambling

So you might remember way back in November I was committed to writing some 50000 words. You may have even read the first 10000 or so of those words. And I'm sure that, had you read them, you couldn't wait until you saw the next 40000 in some handsome, if a bit thin, leather-bound book at your local "Good Books Only Store". Seriously, though, I didn't finish it, and I don't have many good excuses. Work was "picking up" around then, and on days when I wasn't "mentally exhausted" from work I found that I'd rather work on programming projects I had going than work on the book, as I guess that was the "mind state" I was in.

But that's no good. And I really tried harder to think of why exactly I didn't ever really seem eager to work on it. What it boiled down to was this: there were just too many things I felt like I had to include that I didn't actually want to write. Since I was writing what I figured would be a "family epic", I felt like I needed to have all of the family doing things from the very beginning. This was a mistake, and a pretty massive misinterpretation on my part about what I like about the genre anyways. The other problem this caused is that I placed importance on characterization over plot when I should have realized that my characters or writing could not really stand on its own without an engrossing plot.

To rectify this, I made some major changes and redid everything. I switched from "writing in scenes" to "writing in episodes", a kind of nonsensical division but a definite new way for me to think about writing it that really allowed me to be flexible. I also made it way less chronological, again mainly just to give me flexibility, but I'm not sure how far I'll take the idea. Ideally it will be structured something like Catch-22. I tried to make the plot more interesting by foreshadowing events and making events mysterious, not characters.

I might write more later about my thoughts on how I changed it and such but for now I'll just post it.

The Fanclub

It was late in my freshman year that I joined the group that I would later call the Arc on something between a lark and a whim. At the time it was simply known as the Dr Amos Lowell Official Fan Club, and it met weekly in a disused basement classroom. Dr Amos Lowell was infamous across campus but exceptionally unfamous outside of it - compared to the rest of the faculty, that is. I had enrolled in one of his classes to be with the girl, and I followed her from there to the DALOFC. These were the times when I'd follow her anywhere.

The Dedicated Amos Lowell was passionate about his position as professor, which was a notable quality in our school of scholars merely putting in hours to justify their research position. His passion for teaching infuriated some of the other more indifferent professors, who felt he acted this way just to mock them– there couldn't be any other explanation for his undignified behavior. Whether this was true or not is impossible to know, but I for one doubt it. To me, he was genuine above all else, every day, practically chiseling the idea of eccentricity into our minds. He would chisel it on his tombstone if he could. He acted like he was a character in a movie.

The DALOFC acted like he was a character in a movie. The current administration had nominated the year's major project to be the documentation and archival of every appearance of the good professor on film. It started with real stuff: videos of him at conferences, jumping around on stage; old films from his college era, mostly dreary self-produced stuff with vague existential qualities – the sort of tripe he dismissed in the classroom daily, the hypocrisy did not escape the clubs senior members; amateur footage at faculty parties and graduations and such; etc; etc. The joke was born when the club's vice president noticed a white-haired extra in the back of some romantic comedy he was watching for reasons not fully understood. He presented a screen shot of the man circled and tapped at it with a pointer at the next meeting. We all understood. Our search spread, and every suspicious looking man out of focus in crowd shots then became the Deceptive Amos Lowell.

It was good fun. We'd wheel out an old projector and throw whatever the night's movie was on the rattiest of old screens just for effect. The unacknowledged fact that the creation of the Amos Lowell film omnibus was a lot more exciting in theory than in the tedious execution and that the club's president, who at this point was waning on the DALOFC in general, figured running down the clock on the last few weeks by watching movies was in order. We sat in a semi-circle on the floor, I think there was six of us at the time, passing popcorn and occasionally jumping up and pointing out Dr Amos Lowell. “There he is in a wig!” shouted James Hovel, pointing at a black man and frantically trying to evolve the dying joke. “There he is!” shouted the girl, pointing at a potted plant, and we knew it had gone as far as it could and there was little more to say about the man at his own fan club for the rest of the term. It was vaguely sad, I felt like I was witnessing this ancient culture wither around me, I even felt like it was somehow my fault. It was this decaying state of the fan club that I kept in my heart when I became the president; my primary motivation to avoid ever letting the DALOFC stray from that mission.

“All of you are familiar with Dr Amos Lowell. He is the sort of man who's reputation saturates the very air of this campus.” This is how my introduction to new members began when I was president. I personally delivered it, but I didn't come up with the line about his reputation saturating the air. I can't remember who did.

“Many of you have probably attended one of his lectures and walked away in disbelief. I imagine those that had heard stories of him before attending probably walked away thinking 'That's exactly what they described, but I wouldn't have believed it hadn't I seen it.' Those that went in ignorant probably walked away thinking 'That was the sort of experience that I know must actually occur somewhere, but the idea of it occurring to me seems completely incomprehensible.'” These quotes I would deliver in a campy faux-accent, primarily to remind the inductees that the club was still just for fun and play, and at the time it was.

“The point is that no amount of knowledge can prepare you for the experience itself, and no amount of reflection afterward can change what the experience was for you. Countless people hold the memory of their first Lowell lecture in their mind, pristine from the day it was born, crystalline and immaculate.” My favorite part followed this: I would wistfully recall my first Lowell lecture, but with a changing fake story: he dissected a pig carcass until he saw the reaction he wanted in his audience, then innocently asked if this wasn't biology 204 after all; he danced masterfully about the classroom in the style of early-century soft shoe for the length of the lecture, refused to acknowledge that he was doing so even after his hair began to flop sweat on the front row seats and his heavy breathing rendered him nearly incomprehensible; he sent in a small child dressed like him with a white wig to teach in his place; he was asleep, etc. These stories were true for all I knew.

“Many people will carry out this memory as a permanent lump of coal in their minds, a stain on their experience at the school. Isn't that hard to believe? Many people even drop his classes, even though his disdain for quizzes and exams is well known. Aren't they crazy? But some small subset of lucky few will understand. It has always been a small subset that understand anything, at first. Those gifted few stand at the spear-tip of enlightenment as it drives into the rearing beast of ignorance! Those few will reign over the new world! Those few will be gods of Lowellian creation! Those enlightened few, who have heard” - at this point, I would be staring up at the ceiling with my hands outstretched for full effect, and would bring them down and out to indicate the new members seated around me - “The Calling!”. Thunderous applause, cheering, laughter, etc, followed.

The real calling at the time was just an inside joke taken far too far. It was all started by two girls that were two years ahead of the president I first knew, Jason Shen, who in turn was two years ahead of me, putting the start of the club as far back as the Arc of Peace, which I guess makes sense. The girls had – merely as a joke, remind you - taken to calling themselves the Amos Lowell Fan Club. They printed t-shirts with pictures of him in a heart on the front and sold them by the student center. It didn't go much anywhere until one of the girls up and disappeared. It was one of those mysteries that rolled across the nation like thunder and petered away with equal effect, except for our campus, where one could say the lightening struck. Investigation yielded the t-shirts, the t-shirts yielded all sorts of further questions where the only answers baffled all outsiders. The campus at large really stood up for Lowell, though; even if opinions were mixed on his style of teaching, everyone agreed that he had no involvement in the disappearance and shouldn't be subject of any sort of harassing investigation or suspicion. As an added show of support for all innocent parties – the missing girl and the innocent man she admired – they all joined the fan club she created. The other girl, overwhelmed by the new responsibilities being shoved at her and generally freaked out by the whole disappearance of her best friend, handed off the presidency to the first willing recipient: eager freshman Shen, who was instructed by his parents to be as involved as possible in campus life.

I cannot imagine eager freshman Jason Shen. I cannot remember or imagine if I ever knew the names of the two girls who kicked off the whole thing. I cannot picture those early meetings under the ruling of Shen, when the club was a popular fad, cannot picture what they did. I cannot imagine how anyone would have reacted at the time if they knew the reason for the girl's disappearance was actually Delightful Amos Lowell, Of Course. I cannot even imagine how I would react were I given the news in any other way than the way I was given it, that is, by the girl herself, and I know myself pretty well most of the time.

I am able to remember how I felt about a lot of things back then, though, even if I can't extrapolate how I would have felt about other things. The memory of my first Lowell lecture is vivid and crystalline and all that too, even though it was nowhere near as radical as the stories I made up during my welcoming duties. The class was “In Introduction to Subtext in Visual Art”: even the title carried some level of the man's distinctive humor. Without any sort of preamble or introduction, he wheeled in a portrait of a young woman, traditional in the style of mid-romantic periods I think. It was framed nicely and appeared to have been pulled straight from the wall of some art gallery.

“I got this painting from the art gallery up on Kings this morning.” he said, apparently as an explanation. He leaned on his desk and looked at all of us, beaming, then turned his head to the painting, attempting to focus us on that and not to look at the lecturing professor, as most students assume they should. It was a difficult task for him: first class, row upon row of new faces, his far from the least interesting of them: youthful features and excited eyes framed by a tumble of almost anachronistically out of place white hair. He wore khaki slacks and a gray t-shirt. People often remarked about how, in the most intense parts of his lectures, they found themselves inexplicably visually entranced by his face, but just his face, with the rest of the body seeming almost out of focus. I believed this to be entirely engineered with deliberation by Lowell. His entire teaching style revolved around the moment, the concept at that immediate second, and bringing all of the attention of all of the students to just that point. The point of that now: the painting. We had all internalized it in seconds, we figured, but he gave us minutes, and made it as clear as possible that he was giving us minutes, not seconds, to look at the painting.

The question he raised to break the silence was met with a flurry of hands; we had all predicted the predictable. His smile widened further as he pointed to a vigorous arm-waver in the front row.

“The painting represents the traditional form objectified, not a representation of the form but an amalgamation of all portraits, or perhaps more a portrait of portraits, made to evaluate the form form a modern - I mean form from a modern viewpoint wherein the uh.” He took his first breath here, the overeager and determined to impress slightly chubby bespectacled boy I would know later as James Hovel, and was ready to continue for god knows how long when Lowell silenced him with a raised palm.

“Interesting, but no.” Lowell said smiling, and murmurs echoed what we thought was the professor's way of being dismissive: “Was he for real?”, “Where did he pull that from?”, etc.

Next called upon was a “mousy” girl who stuttered through a loose and rambling attempt at a connection to feminism that petered off when she became preemptively self-conscious about the tirade she seemed to threaten launching into – she dropped the class within a few weeks.

“Nope.”

An Asian kid then doubled nearly every word of his piddling response with apologies and seemed to phrase everything as a question or at least a statement requiring approval – basically he attacked the question with the amount of confidence we really ought to have had. I can't remember what the thrust of his analysis was, but it was wrong.

These achiever types that strained their arms was cleared out by a few more textbookish suggestions of postmodernism-nostalgia, classical-primitive, reverse-dadaism, concret-beauty; the strategy seemed to take one slightly appropriate term and pair it with a totally inappropriate term – the

“twist” that made it worthy of discussion. These were all dismissed, and then the next round of hands slowly began to emerge, these of the shy types, or the slacker types, or the joker types, and their answers were fittingly sub-aural, lazy or jokes. Then the first eager group began to take a second stab. A white guy breached the gap of racial commentary, calling the painting “A Portrait of the Majority” and listing things it decried. A black girl loudly claimed said culturally sensitive white guy was making eyes at her during his explanation and she took offense to the idea that his misguided activism and drummed up controversy would impress her in some way. This was not the last of such tangents, all of which Lowell seemed to enjoy passively allowing to flare up and off and out as they did on the sun itself.

It went on for an hour or more. The shy ones spoke up again, now slightly louder. The slackers attempted a re-elaboration and gave up. The jokes became more strained. Nearly everyone had spoken at least once, and most of them had been up more than once. Lowell's dismissals diminished to the soft shaking of his head. In the beginning of the whole exercise he had to entice us into answering - “Anyone else”s breaking silences at key intervals – but soon it became apparent that he would say no more until the mystery was unlocked.

After all this, some small subgroup of us, dwindling but still a presence, still managed to keep silent. We were the authoritative cool kids that were above such charades. Or we were the desperately cool kids terrified of being wrong. Or we were the mute kids. I can't speak for everyone. At the time, I knew I would not speak until the girl, sitting immediate my left, did. I also knew that among all that hadn't spoken, and probably among many who had, there was psychic war unfolding. Among all of us was the single trump card of No Subtext, of the reversal, of the ultimate trick question. Those eager children repeating textbook-type explanations probably could feel its presence, or at least conceived of its concept as the essential wrong, but dismissed it or maybe hoped they could overcome its reality with some unexpected brilliance. The second tier of activity probably recognized the likelihood that No Answer was The Answer, but couldn't be bothered to articulate it.

This final option was thus left to we few silent heroes, standing with our fingers all on the button, wondering who would breach it, who would challenge God and, if right, kill Him. We knew that failure or success of the gambit would lead to the end of the discussion. We knew that success would make us a hero in the eyes of all relevant, failure would lead to a permanent stain on our valuable reputation. The nihilistic and cynical nature of it scared us. It was distrusting. Lowell hemmed with appreciation at the painting and then turned to us smiling: he was aware that the cards left in our hands were few, and he knew what ghastly idea remained. There was silence longer than any we had known since the opening of the floor.

“Could it be that there is no subtext to this painting?” said a older-looking man with vague eastern European intensity, half standing, without being called on, his one hand raised simultaneously as some sort of concurrent waving of necessary permission. I was envious of him.

Another silence. Then Lowell nodded. An hour-long breath was exhaled by us, followed by more murmuring on the general reality of the situation, which was becoming more necessary to confirm. When this quieted down, the professor spoke:

“Most of you are here because you already enjoy the idea of subtext. You enjoy the idea of your understanding being more complete and more evolved than others. You are those that instead of creating have settled for being creative in their understanding of the creativity of another. You have enrolled in this class not to learn anything but to find more people to impress with your ability to decipher subtext, having exhausted your friends and family. It is the desperate cry of a withering ego.”

He had stopped smiling, his head was bowed and his eyes were closed. The room was deadly tense. Breaths were dumped in chunks from dropped jaws. I know a pin fell.

“In short, you are scum.”

His eyes open. His head up. Mouth expressionless. Some of the more eager children appeared to be made of painted hollow ice.

“But I am here to make you not scum.”

A smile now. The room's temperature increases by a few degrees.

“Analysis of metainformation about a piece of art - historical data and other such context – reinforced with creative interpretation and a willingness to fully argue and articulate theories can yield a much richer appreciation of that piece of art. However, trying to eke out subtext in absence of such things is playing a stick as a flute. Nothing comes out but hot air. My first goal will be to put a muzzle on some of you. Only after that will I tell you whom to bite and when.”

At this there was more murmuring of disbelief.

“Some of you may feel I have no right to muzzle anyone after spending over an hour encouraging you to give me exactly what I seemed to want, practically tossing in the meat and working the jaws, as it were. However, I feel like since what people said were directed at no more than a simple portrait, they would probably have been said at some point sooner than later about some other thing, probably with just as much accuracy, whether I condemned the idea beforehand or not. It was in my best interest to get this desire out of you all and out of the way as quickly as possible. If you cannot accept this explanation, then you can simply proceed with the knowledge that your professor is a hypocrite and perhaps notice with some amazement that it doesn't make a bit of difference.”

The lecture proceeded more or less “properly” for the rest of the class, but it didn't matter – I was already wholly enamored. Those were the words I used when talking to the girl on the way out of the room: I am wholly enamored. She agreed that he really was something. I remember the exact words; even then I knew that they would be significant, even if I didn't know their significance.

Other things from that year I remember very clearly even though I didn't detect their significance or even that they were significant at the time. Like then-president Shen's face on the first day of the new term, the first day he attended Lowell's “Art of Philosophy” class: upon it was splattered an unformed and directionless disappointment: a context-less subjective emotion that he couldn't understand let alone express. We asked how it was, and he said “Alright.”, and that was the beginning of Shen's end. I know now that the Art of Philosophy course was a carryover from the Arc of Hope, I know understand how jarring it must have been to Shen, who had only known Lowell's Arc of Peace. At the time his vague dismissals of our questions about the notoriously mysterious class only enticed my subconscious, or perhaps the subconscious of a few others, and there I kept it like evidence for anticipated knowledge. Consciously we were all busy with the film archive.

I hesitate to call it a coincidence when something later proven to be significant turns out to have been occupying some serious amounts of subconscious long-term memory because it simply seems to happen all the time. I cannot tell you what I had eaten for breakfast this morning, but I am sure that if I later learned it would be somehow my last, the crunch of the cereal would resonate in my ear again, or the sweetness of the jam would spring forth from my tongue anew, or the exact bitterness to sweetness ratio of the coffee, or c. Are all my memories sitting in the subconscious ether, waiting to be jostled by something traumatic enough to convince my brain that they are worthy of being re-rendered into my conscious? And when incidents I wish to recall fail to come to mind, is this some conflict between my desires and the part of my brain governing such things? Does the fact that the number eleven forever cause my recalling the bright red maple leaf that caught my attention, stuck to the window past the upper shoulder of my mother, who was explaining the numbers past ten – even going as far as recalling the exact disappointment I felt when the unpredictable uniqueness of the first twelve switched to a dull pattern, this decades-old emotion now conflicting with my respect for order in all? The idea disturbs me; my mind is going the way of my hobby-programs and aspiring pro-paintings: half-forgotten ideas disjointed and collaged: non-linear vividness.

As watching those old tapes featuring Dr. Lowell, finger poised on fast-forward, pause and play, eager to freeze on his appearance and breeze through his absences: Amos cut out of each page. Notebook and pen on my left side; bottle of cola or thermos of coffee on the right; bathing in CRT glow; ritualistic. It used to be a group activity, but it became solo first in the interests of shift-efficiency and then, in those darkest days, because only I, and sometimes Hovel on weekends, had any interest in continuing. My devotion to the project surprised me. It had always been, in my mind, more on the sardonic side of the club's perspective, a tongue-in-cheek, gratuitously creepy worship that undermined the legitimate respect that I felt needed to be the club's core. But by the end I was a convert. I was solving a puzzle of him piece by piece in my mind. There were very few pieces remaining.

Hovel and I cracked open a cardboard box full of mini-VHS tapes - VHS-C they're technically called, but there's another trademarked name for them that's more popular – that was rescued from a campus dumpster by Graham Wolf, Jason Shen's vice-president, some number of years ago. That was the story he told, at least. There was no evidence that our dear professor would appear on any of them aside from the box being found kind of near his office, and at first we were disappointed, Hovel yawning as we watched pair after pair of drama students jitter their hands like fiends on a shoddy classroom stage over the whine of fast-forwarded tape. Then he emerged from behind the camera, nodding and rubbing his hands. I jumped at the rewind, Hovel scrambled to put pen to paper and transcribe the words he said: words that would take vague significance as soon as tomorrow but would linger in my brain, waiting to be nurtured, for years to come.

On the video tape, Dr Amos Lowell walks up to two presenting students on the stage, each of them wearing odd t-shirts, blank white except for a thick black parabola stretching from the hem to the vertex in line with their armpits and directly below their necks. They have finished presenting some sort of dialogue, just as the rest of their class has been tasked to do. They look exceedingly pleased with Dr. Lowell's reaction. Their faces practically flush with joy as he says: “I was unsure about the idea at first, but you two have done an excellent job. This will surely be informative to people wanting to know about The Arc.” Some applause and general cheers for support follow as the students blush and grin.

I turned to Hovel in giddy amazement not dissimilar from the students on the screen. He mirrored me. Only in tired moments of my most feverent Lowell research did I find myself on the same page as Hovel, but my mere awareness of that fact was often enough to cool me. He jabbed a pudgy arm at the screen: “R-rewind it! See what those kids said!”

I was curious too, but being the reasonable one around Hovel was important. “It's late,” I yawned, “and those kids were on there for like ten minutes in fast-forward. We'll show the rest of them tomorrow.” He shrugged in agreement and stood up.

Of course, the tapes were gone the next day. They disappeared without mention, aside from Hovel asking for unnecessary confirmation that yes, they were gone. As soon as I knew that the full knowledge would be forever lost, what I did know – the squeaking voices of the students and their blurred gestures and cryptic t-shirts, Lowell's praise for their explanation of the Arc – came back with tantalizing clarity. We continued identifying the extras of Hollywood movies as our controversial doctor of art history that acted as if he had just walked out of a movie for awhile before his name settled unspoken into the ashes of his fan club.