Writing 200 Blog Post 16 - Trees, Part II

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? I used to think this was a rhetorical question, or at least an obvious one. Of course it does. The laws of nature don’t change when humans are watching. The air is just as capable of propagating sound waves, the tree just as sure to create them. Problem solved—a resounding yes. Now I’m not so sure. A strange confluence of factors has arisen in the past week to make me doubt what I once took to be self-evident. First, I watched a video about quantum entanglement and learned that my first premise—that the physical world doesn’t work differently under observation—is apparently false. Next, I started reading a new book, The World as Will and Representation. I haven’t gotten too far into it, but the first few pages have been dense. Among the points made so far is this puzzling statement: A subject (“that which knows all things and is known by none,” e.g. a human consciousness) and its object (“all that appears,” e.g. a tree falling) cannot exist independently of each other. This calls into question not only whether unobserved events happen predictably, but whether they happen at all. And finally—after this blog post began, actually—I started thinking about the word “sound.” I originally thought of it as a purely physical phenomenon, but is that really what the word means? Or is “sound” intrinsically meshed together with “hearing?” To ask the question the opposite way, can hearing exist without sound? If not, why be so sure of the converse? This gets at an equally sticky philosophical question that I’ve encountered specifically in the work of Sartre: does unrealized potential—like the potential of a sound to be heard or the potential of an ear to hear—truly exist? I really don’t know how valid my doubt based on quantum entanglement is, since a 20-minute video didn’t make me an expert, but the latter two seem to be well-established and unresolved metaphysical questions. Had I thought to visit the question’s Wikipedia page before today, I would have seen the first one listed. There’s no resolution to this post. In fact, the resolution came first. I was smugly happy to be so sure of my answer before today, and now my world is shattering. Even the premise of the question is unclear. Can a tree fall in the forest when no one’s around? Does the forest exist? Do I exist? I still want to say yes. But why? If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to give it a name, is it a tree?

WRIT 200 Blog Post 15 - Grammar

What do you think? What role should the instruction of grammar play in the writing classroom? Does the type of writing classroom influence whether—and to what degree—writing should be taught?

Formal education in grammar is a fond but distant memory for me.  Diagramming sentences, absentmindedly humming Schoolhouse Rock, and knowing what a preposition is are behind me now. But reading about grammar education this week brought those memories back, and along with them came thoughts on whether that education benefited me in the long run. I can't know, of course, how life would have been different without grammar instruction. Would I have spent more time writing? Would I have picked up on the rules on my own? It's impossible to say. However, I do think understanding the concepts of grammar has helped me.

Primarily, I believe I'm a better editor for having learned grammar in a classroom setting. Those who picked up on it naturally may be just as able to see something that feels grammatically wrong in a paper or other text, but understanding why it's wrong allows me to communicate that to the author in others' writing, and to more swiftly address it in my own. 

This self-correcting impulse may also help me write more correctly in a first draft, though sometimes that takes the form of unproductive editing that interrupts my writing to address minor errors that would easily be fixed later on. 

Based on how I see my grammar education at play in my writing today, here's my attempt at a middle ground on the debate: Teachers should focus on allowing time for composition over memorizing parts of speech and grammar rules, but should give personalized feedback that addresses errors in students' work with explanations of why they're wrong. Teachers could even give personalized quizzes on a student's common mistakes to check their conceptual progress throughout the year.

This may be less practicable in a classroom with many students, but catering grammar education to those areas a student isn't picking up naturally would minimize the time it takes away from composition and maximize the benefit for each student. 

Writing 200 Blog Post 14 - Trees

The tree is rotting. 

Where we used to place our hands for support, the wood has grown soft and crumbled, each brush of a hand eroding deeper and deeper. The branches are looking ever more fragile. Leaves are growing sparse, fewer returning each spring.

It's a paradox, how as things grow older they grow closer to death, and yet we take their existence so much for granted. When we built that treehouse in the limb that fell last summer, it wasn't supposed to be temporal. Or at the least, it was supposed to become a memento, its weathered planks growing to match its host in dignity. But the three winters it saw weren't even enough to grey the wood. 

Yes, all trees will die eventually, but not this one in particular. Not so soon. It must have been hundreds of years, since before the roads and houses were there to be escaped. Back when this damp, green quietude was expected. When other giants loomed in the canopy above.

No one was here to see it be born. And if they had been, would they have noticed? It was just another shoot back then, like the dozens around its roots now. How many of those will grow to stand so tall and broad, with the rest of the forest keeping a respectful distance? How many will even grow tall enough to climb?

The tree is rotting.

How long will passers-by see the spectacle of death just now beginning? It can't last forever, but it must be years at least before the mass of its body can be absorbed. The two of us together can hardly stretch our arms around it, after all. How long until those final rings in its center, the ones that have been hidden away for centuries, finally see the air in a last dying moment?

The corpses of its relatives are lying around us. Slowly reentering the ground, but for now out in the open. Not empty shells to be hidden away, but meaningful, beautiful things passing on to another stage of being.

They will leave no skeletons.

Writing 200 Blog Post 13 - Gender

Consider the essays you’ve read this week about the potential influence of something like gender on writing. Does your gender in any way influence what you write? In what ways?

I've never given much thought to how gender affects my writing. Maybe that's due to being a man in a society that still largely treats masculinity as the default. But as I'm looking back, I can see a few threads that might be enlightening to tease out.

First is the fact that I have never been ideally masculine. Not in the sense that I've actively rejected it. But as a small, weak, underdeveloped, socially anxious teenager, I hit very few criteria for what a boy should be. This stage in my life coincided with my initial attempts at writing, and also my initial infatuation with it. And when I look at these early attempts—stories of violence with tough, unfeeling male protagonists; poems that are almost always impersonal, describing concepts I hadn't encountered with words I borrowed from others; essays that lack any hint of emotion—I think that they're ways I distanced myself from my emotions (or even from my own thoughts) in order to make myself more acceptable.

When I was younger, I believed I would never amount to much in a physical way. I was gangly, slow, uncoordinated, and generally not physically capable. I don't remember caring much about my appearance at the time, but I was also short, and small, wore glasses that were occasionally taped because of how often I broke them, and had braces that looked like they were hanging on for their lives as my teeth leaped out of my mouth in fifty different directions. So there were two ideals of masculinity I was clearly not going to meet: physical ability and appearance.

Thus I took refuge in what I thought to be an alternative way to lay claim to social capital and masculinity: intelligence and academia. This was what I was already good at. I was used to getting praise from teachers, being the first to answer questions in class, and spending my free time in the library. So I think I convinced myself that writing was going to be my ticket to being something, to being a kind of man, in the world. As I've discussed before on this blog, I embedded this idea so firmly that even as I lapsed in actual writing, I considered myself a writer.

But things changed for me in the last two years of high school. To utterly disregard Lad Tobin's bemoaning of the "conventional male narrative," sports were in fact a transformative part of my life. I'd run cross country since fifth grade but never been any good. Now I was succeeding, and finding in the process that people looked up to me. Others respected me, not for being smart and getting A's, but for something I had done physically. And it felt good.

Since then, my self-image has become much more balanced. I still strive to achieve my best in school, and I'm still a bit of a nerd. But through coming to accept my body and my physical abilities as an integral part of myself, not a lesser thing to be discarded in search of academic validation, my writing has also improved. It's become less pretentious, more emotional, more involved with who I am, not just what I think about. I'm not a brain in a jar, but a person with a brain. Paradoxically, as I've come to be more traditionally "masculine," my writing has become less so—more vulnerable and emotional. Because once I accept that I am a man, I'm free to explore what that means beyond stereotypes. Instead of trying to grasp at something to fix a deficiency in myself, I recognize that I was never deficient. Only my view of myself was.

Writing 200 Blog Post 12 - Suffering

Why are humans so quick to avoid any type of suffering ourselves, yet so drawn to it as entertainment? Especially as modern literary audiences, we want conflict within our protagonists. We want them to go through difficult and painful things. Often we even want them to inflict suffering on others, whether by accident—in the more traditional sense of a hero—or intentionally, as in an antihero or a villain as the protagonist. This fascination doesn't stay within the boundaries of fiction; we seek out true crime like we need it to survive.

So what is it about suffering—and violence—that makes us so enthralled by it, whether openly or in guilty indulgence? Suffering is interesting because we’re intrinsically optimistic. We see bad things as a deviation from the norm. And so, of course, they’re more interesting. It's like abnormal psychology: few people want to know the mundane facts of everyday brain function, but a lot want to know what makes a serial killer. 

I don't mean that everyone is an optimist in the sense of cheerily expecting the best. I wouldn't put myself in that category, to be sure—if anything, I expect the worst too often. But underneath every one of my deepest anxieties, there's also brash confidence that I'll be okay. When I worry about the big problems of life—starvation, murder, natural disaster, climate change, et cetera—they're nearly always framed as things that happen to other people. I think most people, however pessimistic they are generally, have a similar sense of indestructibility. 

Violence and suffering mess with this invulnerability. We're engaged because it makes us think for a moment, "What if that was me?" Most of us have ideas of what our lives would be like if they involved less suffering—that can be nice to think about, but it's less interesting because it's more common.

Writing 200 Blog Post 11 - Influence

Write about one person who has influenced your writing (in positive or negative ways). Be specific about the ways that person has provided influence; provide specific examples, if necessary.

One person who shaped the way I write in a negative way was my English teacher in 5th grade. I honestly don't remember anything about her, but I remember the curriculum I went through. I was part of a homeschool co-op called Paisley Distance Learning, and we used this organization's materials to learn how to write. One thing that stands out in my memory is the long list of synonyms for common words such as "happy," "said," and "ran." I particularly remember having a fondness for the word "fetid." 

The result was that for most of middle school I crammed my writing full of all the vocab words I could find. I became fond of thesauruses. I especially avoided using the word "said," becoming the opposite of Stephen King's advice to only use "said" except in rare circumstances. 

I only weaned myself off this tendency a couple years into high school, and I still find myself using words that are too complex or just inappropriate for the situation. I do enjoy using less common words when they're more accurate for what I'm trying to say, but there are times when it just isn't necessary, and I think I've come off as pretentious at times because of it.

This wasn't necessarily the teacher's fault, but I think it was an overzealous curriculum. Fifth graders may not be full-fledged writers yet, but they're old enough to be given some nuance and told when simple words can be appropriate. Not introducing that nuance hindered me in my writing journey in a way that I've never fully left behind.