My Medusa

I wanted you
to know, Medusa, that I had nothing
against you, or your attempts at love and
conversation. I never meant to
look into your eyes in the first place,
or promise myself to you, because we
never should have worked out from the start.
Is that what they said would happen? What was
it they said that our love was supposed to be,
Medusa, my twofaced, snake-charming sweetheart?
Did they say it would be like us, like this,
our wounds still bleeding from our last battle?
Or did they just simply forget to give
me my mirrored shield, my rite of passage
as a man, so that I would have to
look at your screaming face and let my heart
turn to stone like this, against you?
You were beautiful once, too, my Medusa,
beautiful without love, without my sword
piercing your body, but now you’re headless,
your hair misses your body, and I am stone.
I wasn’t prepared to protect myself against you
and I destroyed you in the process.

God of the In-Between

This post will reveal things of a personal nature I have not yet shared openly with most people. Be forewarned, I'm not going to spare words:

I have to write. I have to write it all down. How else am I going to remember? To be able to look back at this time and understand myself and my journey, who I am? And who am I? I oft feel like I’m not a “me,” but a “him,” as if either this confusion, or my attempt at being objective about this confusion, has caused me to completely “other” myself into some disconnected third person. That can’t be healthy. Is that a sign of something? I’ve found myself asking that question more often. Too often. I’m looking for signs everywhere – I don’t know which way to go. As the ghost in one of my dreams the other night asked me … “which way?” That scares me – that even my dreams are echoing my confusion. Ghosts. Rooms. Doors. Three main occurrences in my mind at night, as of late. Tormented, trapped, wondering which way to go, which way to God, literally. Does God sanction both paths, both choices I have? Half the world says “yes”; Half the world says “no,” and here am I, caught in the middle. In between two worlds. Am I schizotypal for thinking it all rests on me? But it does, in my mind, doesn’t it? If I deny my own homosexuality, say it’s unnatural, aren’t I condemning massive hordes of people? And if I embrace it, aren’t I saying that everything I was taught, the world in which I grew, was wrong? One half of me is wrong, one half of me is right. And what’s interesting is, in the choosing, in the in-between space, no one is wrong. In the liminal space, no one goes to hell. All are loved by God. Isn’t that right? Believing in someone’s condemnation is the same as their being condemned, am I right? If I believe someone to be going to hell, hypothetically, then I know they are going there, and in some way, am in control of their fate – in my eyes, only, of course. But in my perception of my faith, my eyes equal God’s. We can’t deny that. As Descartes (a Christian) said himself, that’s really all we have to go by, isn’t it? Of course, there’s a God outside my mind, but I also have to take into consideration that I must use my limited mind to contemplate and make my own judgments about God. That’s what makes religion and philosophy so debateable. How could no one else see that? The arguments arise because we see ourselves as right, so then we are right. But with so many view points, whose right is “right”? Isn’t the act of agreeing with someone the act of taking some other’s view for our own? How do we reconcile that? How do we commune with God on our own, without outer interference? Without people saying “no, that’s wrong”; outside of the noise, what is God saying? God, who is a god of the in-between, holding the Universe together. The moderation of it! The balance of it! The beauty, the beauty! He is the glue, Wordsworth’s Universal, Coleridge’s Incomprehensible, Poe’s non-matter (that, if not scientific, I believe to be aesthetically accurate). We know that there is space between every single atom that is holding us together – so how do we not fall apart? Because of God – the God of the in-between! The God of Unity! Or by natural laws, some say – but that, too, is God! Science is God – what else could it be? How do people not see that? Our God is both gray, and black-and-white, because He is all things. We come to Him differently, each of us, because we are different, each of us, but He is unchanging, as Science is unchanging! He and Science are both was, and is, and is to come, because He is unchanging! Of course, granted, God is so much more than just “Science.” He’s in-between Science. “In the beginning was logos (logic, reason, order), and logos was with God, and logos was God” (John 1:1).

Father, have you ever killed someone and
felt them suffocate, their life flowing out?
Maybe you may have seen the death, the dead,
as you pry hopes and unfulfilments out from
their rigomotised grasp,
or maybe you were the one that
prayed the eulogy over the lowered body
addressing the tears of a congregation
with your own reverent stoicism,
or perhaps still, you might have used your deadly
name and made the call, to give the order,
letting us know it was time to pull out the
tubes and let another go -
but could you yourself ever, actually,
after all of that,
be the one to pull the plug?

Poetry 2/10

You closed off your microcosm -
who said that you or I or we
were not a sum of parts but a whole? -
and your part, your minor part to mine,
is closed and will remain until you choose
to open that wall to me or to yourself.

We could claim irreconciliable
or we could admit that walls prove
the worst to talk through - each of us
having built around our own microcosm;
and we are not irreconciliable, but rather
indifferent, and if I chose a different
path, it would be because you closed a door
and I chose not to find a window -
we'd prove to be separate then, in macrocosm -
it's said that you and I and we
are not a whole but only a sum of
separate parts.

Sigma Tau Delta

Well, it's been crazy. Half of my inter-library loan books are already late (I'm going to have a hefty fine to pay, and I'm sure Tamie Willis will be mad at me for not getting the ILLs back in on time), and I certainly haven't done near enough research to turn them back in. It sucks.

So, my college search is narrowing, and I think I have the six schools to which I will apply:

University of Wisconsin - Madison
Rice University (Houston)
Washington University, St. Louis
OU
OSU
Abilene Christian University

I'm still debating on OSU, because their program isn't very theory-heavy, except in "Screen Studies," and I'm not sure I want to get a degree in film, however interesting it may be.
I might add University of Minnesota to the list, or I might run across something else.

In any case, some of the deadlines (UW, for instance) are early December, so I really need to get on the ball with this. I'm a little nervous about my writing sample being good enough for UW or Rice, but I'm not nervous about not going to grad school, because I'm certain that, no matter what, Abilene will probably take me in :), which is certainly not a bad thing.

Anyway, auditions are underway for our 10-minute plays, and I've been given my own play to direct. It's exciting watching people audition and compete for MY play in an audition - it's fascinating to watch your text come to life in front of you. I love directing!!

Finally, I mailed out my submissions for Sigma Tau Delta's Louisville conference yesterday. I submitted both poetry, and an analytical paper, and I'd love it if both of them made it again this year, like last year. I hope we get a good crowd going to conference, too!!!

Grad School search continues...

Last week I was lucky enough to be able to tour two graduate colleges - those at OU and OSU. Unfortunately, I didn't truly understand how to handle a college visit until after the first one, so my experience was better prepared for at OSU than OU, and I had more questions answered. But now I'm in what I would like to refer to as a "cesspool": a nice, large, foul-smelling dilemma.

Upon visiting OSU's campus, and getting to know several of their students (which I was not lucky enough to do at OU, aside from the fabulous Kristina... whom I of course already knew), I had the opportunity to pay a visit to the theatre department. This was not something I was lucky enough to do at OU, since I was distracted by the IMPRESSIONIST PAINTINGS in the ART MUSEUM ON CAMPUS (words capitalized for emphasis and ecstasy). When I walked into the theatre office, completely impromptu, they told me they were re-printing promotional materials for the grad program, and didn't have any new ones - but lo and behold, a grad advisor walks in at that very moment!

Only a few minutes later, and I find out that, coincidentally, this grad advisor is also the head theoretician of the department (my main interest in theatre studies) and that (insert drum roll here), she and I went to the same high school... in Richmond, Virginia. That was probably the craziest moment of this semester, if not the year. Talk about a coincidence.

Needless to say, after talking to her and about bridging the gap between the theatre and English programs, I'm much more interested in making sure the school I apply to offers an M.A. in Theatre, with classes I'll be able to take to supplement my graduate studies in Literature (the school also needs to have a strong program in critical theory). This ruled out more schools, and now I'm having to format a completely new list.

Some potential schools I may add to my list:

University of Wisconsin in Madison
University of Minnesota in Twin Cities
University of Missouri in Columbia
OSU (why not?)

Schools that (I think) remain on my list:

Rice University in Houston (though it's a terminal PhD program)
OU
Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Abilene Christian

Of course, if I didn't care where I went, I'd be applying to Cornell, and to Berkeley, or Duke, or Notre-Dame... but I'd like to stay within the midwest (and I certainly don't know if I'd be accepted into those prestigious schools with any sort of Assistantship or Fellowship).

Bah.

Living word.

For the first time I realize these words
are cognizant of their own corporeality
These words know they are spoken
they know they transmit meaning
and they lift themselves from the page
and dance silently, boldly through the air
into my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth
and I taste their power
and smell their reverberations -
Commanding, unseeming
An open book becomes a heavy stone
a weapon, to be hurled
to be absorbed
to be defended.
A book that knows itself
and knows that I will soon
digest it.