Every sacrifice has its doubts sewn into the fabric of its moment even when those doubts are kept under wraps. Knitted on the insides of every golden collar there’s a pentagram with the face of Milton’s Lucifer at its center, grinning like hell, like he lost his confidence again — but who was ever going to catch him after the Fall? — and he’s still trying to pretend.
Too far back for us to know exactly who did write it — was it Cædmon? was it Cynewulf? old english scholars are still conflicted on the subject at least according to wikipedia.org — it was written that even the cross itself, two boards nailed together, complained out loud, lamented even, about how it was to be the cross of all crosses (what a terrible fate!), that would be used to crucify Christ. Why couldn’t it have been any other? It is a bad draw of straws to be a voiceless executioner without no matter the context, but especially within the context that your chosen subject for annihilation is supposedly God himself come down to earth in a package of hippie flesh, bone, and hair. I’m not a religious person by any means but even I know Jesus was likely a good hang. Such is also the plight of Pontius Pilate, who has always seemed to me more like a middlemanager annoyed he that he wasn’t allowed to leave the office on a weekend, than he was a cruel despot. Nevertheless we’re saddled with the losses that abound inside us, and outside us, small islands floating among the currents of these odd sorts of puddles of opaque life/death situations. If we’re swimming through these waters and our bodies are our given boats, the depth below us is a mystery and there’s always a curiosity as to what happens when we stop. But we push on all the same, past the messy mediations, past the maladies. We push our doubts down wishing wells. Drown em. On our merry way anyway. Anything except stick around and think about whether we ourselves are at fault. But it has to be done if one wants to grow as a person. Growing as a person is messy and takes time.
Knowledge (and happiness, I suppose) is not a direct process and it’s more of an interplay between knower and known, between ourselves and reality that results in us growing into who we are. Mediation, unfortunately, is essential, no matter what hand of cards we were granted. Walks are more than nice; and in this regard they might be essential. When I feel myself drowning in my own silly, stupid plights and overthinkings, my instincts take me to my feet and out the door to the road’s side, to look at trees and sky and birds and hear people talking, minor characters who I can reflect on without ever experiencing the pressure of being known by them. No headphones, no phone, just myself and the soles of my shoes stepping, and the world. You can settle for yourself. You can walk it out... Taking stock is the only way of taking care… And what else is there to live for if not to take care?
Even in dreams I find myself walking around Madison, Wisconsin at sunrise or at sunset or in a secret third thing we can call noon: the center of the day when the shadows become puddles. One time I was eating peaches in a dream, one by one out of a bag I had picked up from Pinkus McBride on the corner of Johnson, and walking down the street I came across a residential high school much like the one I attended in Columbus, Mississippi, except the dormitories here were brown brick instead of the terribly cheap, brutalist concrete constructions where I lived for two years when I was fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. I continued eating the peaches and realized how messy peaches were, making a fool of myself covered in peach juice but it was a Sunday morning and there was no one around to see me except the people walking strollers. These dorms, that only exist in my dream (but in a very real city), must have been built at the turn of the twentieth-century. The buildings blended in well with the urban-lite aesthetics along the isthmus with their rickety iron escape routes and antique dusty pane windows.
The dorms I stayed in during my high school years in Mississippi (at MSMS) had been similar to these I came across in Madison while eating peaches. It occured to me that within the dream I was conflating my high school with my college years. What might this encounter unlock? I remember the Mississippi School for Mathematics both clearly and in a sort of dream language: so… two options, for this post... Do I describe my time in the reality of it or in the dream that came to me the other night? Well since this here’s a blog about huffing glue with your friends, I suppose we ought to choose the more fun route…
I remember, during class, we would sit in the great grassy courtyard all in our own chair-desk contraptions, trying like hell to conceal our phones underneath the desks while the professors slapped their palms Smart Board remotes while they talked. During lunch and during exams, the individual desks would be replaced with long wooden tables that folded up in the shape of a taco shell but when laid out they made the courtyard look conspicuously like the great hall tables from the Harry Potter films. This, of course, was intentional. The movies had done so much for recruitment.
The courtyard was large and went back some ways passing a cherry tree and a rusted chain fence extended around its back perimeter. Near the back was an old oak with a tire swing only used by the freshmen. I’m writing this now in my apartment full of chairs, couches, stools. More stools than I could ever use in a week’s time even. I used to hate chairs and sitting in them. I remember the feeling of the grass underneath our desks and I remember thinking how much I would rather have laid out in it as the dew was evaporated by the sun. The wild world is something to discover for yourself more in-depth once you’ve graduated and realized that academic ambition was a sham that ultimately leads nowhere any more exciting than spreadsheets and loan repayment.
During meals, exams, and classes, we were told to ignore the things that registered as odd or strange; in a general sense, not to look up. There’s a time I can remember that we were busy with our heads down, running through a practice AP Euro exam. The whole class took a practice test every Friday on a different era in the long storied history of mildew-white men in elaborate dinnerwear and powdered wigs, all proctored by a short bald man with a white beard going down past his beer belly who claimed to have served in the US Navy during the cold war and that he had been stationed in a nuclear submarine with his finger on a great big round red button submerged somewhere off the coast of the republic of Karelia, ready to fire if the USSR ever got too frisky for the US’s strategic international interests to allow. Occasionally, during the practice exams, just to make sure we were immune from any and all distractions, he would embark on grand campaigns of distraction against us, his students, by bellowing out Martin Luther’s 99 theses until the bell rang or playing South Park clips on the Smart Board at top volume while we were just tryna finish our DBQs. For the WWI unit, I remember distinctly preparing for the worst during the exam only for my mental preparations to come completely flat against the small santa claus-ish man hacking at his podium to pieces with a bayonet which had, a hundred years prior, been used to gut an Austrian man in the trenches of Gorizia.
Well, there was another time I can think of when something beyond even his reach happened — and here was one of the instances that the school was trying to keep hush hush — when, during our weekly exam on the post-war period, a faded pastel locomotive train carrying crates and crates of coal the color of clouds floated across the blue sky. The only reason I looked up at all was because of the shadow it cast down over all of us; this great big thing slid silently across the sky as if it had been a .png of a train’s locomotive dragged across a .jpg of open sky by some invisible cursor. The locomotive, clearly, we all knew from our studies, in the style of the late nineteenth or, maybe, the very early twentieth century, performed a couple mid-air twirls and then rocketed, still silent, towards the horizon where it disappeared beyond the blue. This was not acknowledged by anyone, least of all myself.
Some other strange occurrences I noticed in my time at MSMS, taking classes in the courtyard:
(1) one time when I was trying to meditate underneath a willow tree, the sun became a concentrated beam singeing the grass and ants with no magnifying glass in the sky (or at least nothing visible)… Thankfully, I was protected by the willow tree (thank you to all you trees out there reading this);
(2) another day a massive statue of fleshy teeth, like a pair of dentures or a dentistry model, appeared on the courtyard for one afternoon, looking like it was ready to chomp a poor someone down into nothingness, and it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Without a word. As ghastly as doubts; disappearing under the duress of eyes, ears, and any consideration so given.
The school’s faculty kept their cool, for the most part. The school was founded on what the school declared as “Fid!” (focus, integrity, and discipline) and then, later, to a simple, unenthusiastic “Fid” (to the tune of a sigh) after the embarrassingly unsuccessful presidential campaign “Jeb!” Bush ran in the run-up to the 2016 election. The principle of the school began to worry about all of these strange, unattributable occurrences happening on campus. Were they supernatural? Extraterrestrial? The word around campus was apparently he spent most of every day burying his head in his hands in his office on the third floor. It seemed like every other day he had to call up the custodian staff at the greater University to clean up an absurdly large handkerchief that had fallen on top of the gazebo behind the male dormitories or to mop up mounds and mounds of mashed potatoes that seemed to accumulate on patches of the sidewalk outside the library. The principle took to biting his nails. But he worried less where these were coming from and more of what they might result in, in the end, namely unenrollment.
To be fair to him, it’s not uncommon to find a middle-aged principle of a private school biting their nails over impending financial collapse. What worried him more was the disappearances of younger students. Surely the parents knew. They were big stories. And parents did pull their kids out. All the more baffling to the president, though, was that the parents almost always cited financial reasons.
The cracks in the president’s psyche began appearing more and more to the student body over the two years I spent at the school. One night, at a commencement dinner, the students all up and down the yard, sitting at Hogwarts-ish plastic tables watched as he climbed to the podium like a slightly greyed, blonde and beardless Dumbledore with remarkable veneers that sparkled in the evening sun. He said the usual things that a president might say, the students have showcased that Mississippi has some spark left to it, test scores were looking good, and so on and so forth, but the pauses began to increase until, finally, he broached the subject with a “how are your parents doing?”
The crowd of teenagers sat silent. Crickets.
He tried again, after a pause. Leaning a bit more into the podium. “Why’re your parents not worried about the… um… you know…”
Nothing. Crickets. A whole lot of blank looks.
He clarified, “the um disappearances?”, voice crackling into the microphone while the teachers and dormitory staff began to break out into small sweats behind him. The PE instructor’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull.
For some reason, in this strange dream that is, of course, not the reality of my time there but rather a figment of the reality of my time there, I only knew one of the students who supposedly disappeared. I remember getting out of class together and walking to the bathroom because I had to poop so terribly and she needed to piss. My classmate L— identified as female but with this being Mississippi and all she was forced into the male bathrooms because, you know, any school in Mississippi is bound down somewhat to a top-down fire-and-brimstone rhetoric around something as trivial as social identity based on a book written close to two millenia ago.
She used the stall. I used the stall. She got out first and was washing her hands in the sink and I heard a soft sound like a hiccup from outside the stall and when I left the stall she was gone and the water was still running where she had been standing.
L— was never seen again. We all knew to not ask too many questions.
The last part of the dream came after the anxieties passed gradually. Life went on. The mystery was never resolved. One night after lights out there was a pair of eyes in the dark, bright multicolored irises surrounding retinas as dark as the surrounding nothingness. The eyes looked every student up and down in their bunks. All were sound asleep. And in any case, the students had been told to ignore any strange things like this and had been reassured that none of it could affect them in any way — it was only after their mind — but this time it was different. The multicolored eyes seemed to have selected two or three students, and unlike with the prior disappearances, the three students selected did not go silently, or in a pop. They kicked and screamed and yeah… I would have done the same.
One grabbed the doorsill on the way out and held his own there for a good long while while whatever it was with the eyes pulled on his legs. They say the students are now floating around some prison camp in latin america but I wouldn’t be pressed to know which. One of many, probably. Hopefully they knew spanish. And somehow, even after this fiasco and the economy doing even worse than it had before, parents still sent their kids to the school. The outside world must be doing terribly, reasoned the Principle of the school privately to himself, if they would continue to send their kids here where all this stuff happens in the sky and sometimes in the dirt and the water, where sometimes students disappear in a gust. What a freakshow. What a nightmare.
Fresh out of the dream now, I’m reminded of the doubts that were beginning to develop for me at MSMS, a place where I felt eerily like a racehorse losing faith in the track, those which became more and more real during my time in Madison and my feeling estranged from almost every one of my classes at the University of Wisconsin, be that because of the pandemic or because of my growing apathy to the university system.
Some people never leave high school. It’s easy to feel unsure if we can as it’s the last gasp of a social space we might experience in our lives. The reactionary vision of Hogwarts captured us too young, I think — me particularly when I was small — and YA is too big an industry to let us go too easy. High school is worshipped in American culture to a nauseating degree. Why? The yearbook keeps going around hands year after year, and for some reason we keep signing off. Finding things to believe in is difficult; sometimes it’s easier to believe in the past and its dreams. I’m lucky, in a quiet sort of way, that I never quite belonged at MSMS and I never quite belonged at UW. Lacking a sense of acceptance I had to figure things out within myself and now here I am, some strange conflation of organs we might call a person.
It’s important, I think, to keep in mind that the main goal is to find and maintain a maturity that’s entirely your own. I can’t tell you what that is exactly but you can certainly feel it eventually if you look long enough, and sometimes to look for something you need to retrace your steps, walk around the block once or twice, paying attention. You’re going to have to settle at some point and get comfortable somewhere. The silver lining here is that you can settle for yourself.
That was extremely entertaining and I very much resonate with the whole, figuring yourself out outside of the institutions everyone else seems to become themselves through, bit at the end.