A Cornering

Here I am in my little spot. It’s on the corner of a sprawling-acred, many tree(d), green grass growing, yellow bricked mansion--estate. This estate is also a Looney bin--something the landlord’s maintenance man left out during the initial walk through.

This corner is a coveted angle: people come from near and far (a radius of three blocks) to sit here and download songs, check email and Facebook stalk. This corner is well known for its free wi-fi: a fringe benefit of the whole purple-elephant Loony bin reality (which stands in direct contrast to the “down keep” of the surrounding homes--homes of the hood).

When I moved here, you couldn’t tell me this was the hood. Coming from Philly, this hood (Wilkinsburg) was low on the tough scale in my book. A fellow MFA’er asked me with a scrunched face and confused horror, “what are you doing there?” Annoyed, I peeled off an edible answer.

But I get it too. As discussed last week, we come to a new place with our personalized realities, fears and lusts. And so it is, I come to this corner excited to “sit long enough…that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to me,” as Ashton quotes Thoreau.

Between the Looney bin (from here forward, the “yellow house” for ethical obviousness) and my apartment building (a three story Victorian beyond its Victorian heyday) is an abandoned street, where blades of glass shoot through uncared-for macadam and direct my brain to an associative thought, a verse from the Talmud:

                Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers “grow, grow.”

This verse seems to align with the underlying reason I chose to take this course. I’d like to, need to, acknowledge/understand/thank the Angel (whoever she/he is) who has hoped and bent over me beckoning me to grow, grow. I can already feel the cells in my brain moving in shaking in a dance of regeneration.

And I realize this keeps coming back to me. But doesn’t all writing? Even nature writing-- where there is no human in sight (traditionally, or at one end of the spectrum)--  is concocted and studied through the filter of the human brain.

I am excited in knowing that denying/avoiding/shunning the human element of nature writing does not need to be common practice, at least it doesn't have to be during our semester as evidenced in the open-minded selected reading/class discussion. Nature writing is more inclusive (as seen through Clifton’s poem) than I imagined, and perhaps I’ve found a place where before I would’ve/could’ve sworn, I’d never fit in (nor did I want to fit in). You don’t know something, til’ you try it, right?

From here I can just make out the tail end of the sidewalk, the sidewalk which from the day I was told, I conjured a lifeless body upon. The landlord’s maintenance man also left out the murder. And as if these two events can be fairly related (like the tree which represents  leisure for some, and ancestral homicide for others) the toughness of the neighborhood was recalculated in my small perception.

 Recalculating perception (which is growth) compliments the understanding -- whatever the understanding is at that moment in time-- of nature. And as my new found girl Pattiann Rogers might agree, is in and of itself anyway.

Respect.