What happens when you take a creative writing class

I write so much for AP and CW, there is no time for blogs.
I have material, I just always put it in the old tow-class journal now.
I don't much mid it, I like scribbling, or polishing pieces to make short stories.
but still, that wonderful clicking of lightening fast keys, the seductive blog template, the risk of having your work open to all eyes, the rush of clicking "publish"!
ahhh, I miss blogging!

Septimus

I worry about Septimus. Poor Septimus. What’s to become of him? Does Sir William think he can just send Septimus off, to some remote barn, and he will be healed in two weeks time? Surely Sir William is not as dense as to think that his proportion will be righted only after a short stint away from familial pressures (or whatever it is that seems to trigger these moments of “madness” as it were). It seems that Dr. Holmes, a conventional simple doctor, did not know of PTSD, and while the psychiatrist (is he a psychiatrist?) Sir William may not acknowledge it blatantly, he does have some inkling of its existence. But this is precisely why I am worried; He knows of the grave seriousness of Septimus’ condition and he does not know how to treat it with any other method than complete isolation.
Poor Lucrezia, too, I worry about. She didn’t know how bad it was, she still doesn’t. She thinks her dear Septimus has gone mad. In a sense he has, but it all comes back to Heart of Darkness. Septimus can see the darkness that others are incapable of, or refuse to see, and so he is plagued by it. He is plagued by his own worthlessness, the worthlessness of everyone else and the sickening human nature that tries to force him to forget that evil. Septimus hates himself for being cold and feelingless. Even when the things of the most despair are brought upon him (his wife expressing in such clear anguish that they will never have children, the thought of Evans dying) he feels nothing. He feels no sorrow, no guilt or pity. He acknowledges surrender. He surrenders to the human race, but what does that mean? He is surrendering to its evil, to its curious purpose (if there is a purpose, he wonders). And Lucrezia is there all the while. She was quite unwillingly strung into all of this despair- as was Septimus might I add, though his was a connection more obvious. There is no turning back for the two of them. The War, what Septimus has seen and lived, has destroyed them. No amount of solitude will heal his psychological wounds.
And, even if he does return a renewed man, we know he is not truly healed. Years, decades, after the War, I have heard, men still awake in cold sweats, screaming through tears. Men, grown men- now elderly, awake in the dead of night seeing the face of the man they shot, the bodies they burned, the bombs they saw go off. And the noise. The voices of the dead are deafening.

The War has caused Septimus to question everything he once believed to be happy. He wonders, and so does the reader, did he ever love Lucrezia? He hates himself for dragging her into the mess of depression, but he has no way out. He does not kill himself- not because he doesn’t want to- but because there is no suitable way. He has pondered it, yes, in great detail, but he has reasoned he himself is too weak to complete the task. What an odd thought, of killing one's self and then the thought of being too weak to do it. I was always told suicide was the weak thing to do, but to him, here, in this most depressing world, it becomes the most difficult way to escape. He cannot seem to escape his mind and the reality of what he’s done- the crimes he has committed. The crimes that no one else sees as crimes. Only those that pulled the trigger, only those that saw the life seep into the wet earth, know.
Septimus. If he had known what he was getting into, do you think he would have done it? Fought, I mean. I know it’s the honorable thing to do, to serve, but do you think he would have done it, knowing what he knows now? I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

How Much for a Mind?

I've been doing a project for art on Vincent van Gogh, and it made me wonder, perhaps all geniuses are a little bit crazy. In his case, he was quite off his rocker, but perhaps all geniuses are in some way a little off. And then I thought, many people who are considered geniuses die at young ages, or are at the very least misunderstood and ignored. It's hard to say if they are geniuses because they were outcasts or they were casted out because they were geniuses.

In van Gogh's case, his illness (undiagnosed to this day, though many think he was bipolar and a raging alcoholic, on top of possibly being epileptic (seizures could have been induced by his excessive drinking of absinthe)) was drastically exacerbated by the time period and his surroundings; 19th century France hardly had the knowledge, let alone capabilities to diagnose bipolar disorder, or medicate it. So they locked him up, because he had a few lose screws. True, what else could they have done? Let him run amok and possibly injure himself and/or others?

But it is tragic, his life story. He failed out of school so many times and lost so many jobs that all he had left were his paints. And he didn't even mean to be an artist! Then, they committed him to a mental hospital with one tiny barred window (I've seen pictures of it) and tried to take his paints from him. It's no wonder he cut off his own ear; unable to name the pain he felt, he must have wanted to be able to pinpoint some kind pain. I think he cut himself because he wanted to know what hurt so he'd be able to stop it. But, of course, it didn't work. Not too long after that Vincent went out into the hospital courtyard and shot himself in the chest. You want to know the worst part? It took him two days to die. Two whole days until he succumbed to blood loss and infection. He couldn't even die painlessly.

Earlier this year we talked about what makes a tragedy. His story is tragic because he didn't start out so screwed up- he just wanted to be normal. He tried his whole life to be somebody to someone but in the end, he was left alone in a cold cement cell. It's tragic because such a gem, such an artistic genius, was ignored and cast out until he finally was unable to bear the pain any longer. His suicide made people finally pay attention, and that worth he had searched for all his life was just a little too late. He never got to see how famous and how loved he became.

It is a common misconception that van Gogh's talent was ignored during his lifetime. Yes, true recognition didn't come until later- the recognition he was searching for didn't come until he had already pulled the trigger- but during his brief and troubled lifetime, some of his paintings did do quite well. It was just that van Gogh was too crazy and too seemingly scary for people to buy his work and admit his genius. That probably had to kill: knowing that his work was liked but that no one would admit it.

And there are other geniuses too that people wanted to ignore. Take Einstein for example; in his lifetime he did gain recognition, but initially he was pegged as a problem child, an idiot, a common, lazy adolescent. And Stephen Hawking has made sacrifices for his genius mind, too. Perhaps it is insensitive of me to say that, to suggest that he has ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a motor neuron disease) because he is a genius. That's not really what I'm saying though. I'm saying perhaps he has the disease because he was given a great gift, the gift of the mind, and that comes with a price. I don't know, who know the reasons for these things, if there is a reason. It just makes you think, is all. It makes you think.

The Horror

Even now, after finishing Heart of Darkness, and discussing it a bit in class, I am unable to believe Conrad is saying mankind is by nature dark and evil. Yes, Marlow (the character he created) is spiteful towards all the ignorant Europeans when he returns, and he likens their lives to a futile game, a worthless jounrey with eyes fixed on a non-existant prize, but I must believe he leaves it up to the reader to peg a word on life. He explores the darkness humans have inside, and the darkness brought out by them into the world, but he never says all people are evil. He says some people fall into the pit and can never get out. He does imply that the darkness is in all of us, but he doesn't insist we are all dark. Is this making any sense? Just because we are capable of these atrocities, doesn't mean we all will commit them. This book is a tool for thought. It is meant to make people see what we are capable, not what we will all become.

In the beginning of the book I was immediately reminded on the Holocaust. Conrad descibred the natives as angles, and as soon as this was referrenced in class I thought of how the Nazis starved the Jews so that they would look less human. I read somewhere that they did it on purpose, so that they wouldn't feel as bad murdering them; if they weren't human, these Jews, if they were creatures to be exterminated, they could be killed without remorse. In this book, the natives are kept looking bony and inhuman- and of course, their differing skin color could not have helped them look European. It is sick, really, how people can come to trick themselves into murder. And, the book was written before the Holocaust. I wish someone had read it, seen the Holocaust coming and stopped it. But perhaps there was no other way, no other way to make people see.

It's horrible the things that have to happen to make people see sometimes.

Heart of Darkness

I’ve not written about how I perceived the end of the book; I took ample notes, yes, but haven’t really put anything together concretely. This wasn’t because I didn’t have anything so say, but rather I wasn’t sure how to say it. I’ve decided that informal would probably be better. Sometimes an “RTL” like piece is too contrived and is just appropriate.

Throughout the reading of this short novel I have tracked Conrad’s use of the words “dark” and “black”. Of course that in turn allowed me to take special note of his uses of the words “light” and “white/ivory” but mostly I looked at the first two. I was especially taken by his description of the “intended”, as Conrad wrote,

“She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk…The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, the pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me” (160).

I was confused by his description of her as he seemed, at one moment, to be describing the angel of death, and the next, a poor helpless girl. When he later describes her pain and the ‘darkness’ of death that has taken her beloved, and her, he writes,

“The sound of her low voice…the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of eternal darkness…but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before the great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her- from which I could not even defend myself” (Conrad, 162)

Conrad makes a point in both of these pieces to pay special attention to the light and dark aspects of her face, the room, and the metaphorical darkness, symbolizing sadness and pain. I could pluck countless more uses of these words throughout the novel, but the point has already been made: shadows and the absence of light lead us to immediately picture mysterious danger and death, and Conrad has used this to, quite effectively, set his scene.

Another thing I found interesting about this book was how in the beginning, Conrad initially calls the natives shades, shadows, acute angles, and phantoms, but later calls them human. In similar form, he starts by calling the Europeans human, but by the end, he describes perhaps the two most quintessential Europeans (Kurtz and his Intended) as a phantom and a shadow. Perhaps this was an inadvertent switch but I really think he was trying to show what the darkness of mankind had done to them. It had turned them into nothing, just as the natives had been viewed as nothing. They became inhuman because the darkness took all their good-intentioned vibrancy. Well, perhaps Kurtz wasn’t originally good intentioned in terms of wanting to civilize people just because he found them uncivilized, but I feel the goal was initially meant to be noble. Many people argue after reading this book (classmates of mine I mean) that Conrad is saying all civilization is bad. I disagree. He is showing the battle, the fine line, between the good of civilization and the bad. He is showing how power and corruption and humans’ innate desire to own has brought the darkness out from within. Conrad shows the struggle Marlow has with condemning Kurtz because he sees the man behind the mask, the man who came to Africa to help the people. In the end, Marlow, and arguably Conrad, find sympathy for the man who lost himself along the way. Yes, he committed numerous atrocities (those heads on stakes outside his hut...etc....) but isn't it worse to lose yourself? No matter what he did to everyone else, he hurt himself the most and this is why Marlow so pities him and his fiance.

In the end, Marlow spares the intended from the truth, almost as an attempt to smother the darkness within her. He knew if he told her the depressing truth, she would be unable to recover, and would be completely and utterly succumbed by the darkness of mankind for the rest of her days. In this way, he gave her light and life in his lying. The reader is left with a feeling of sadness, remembering Kurtz’s depressingly lonely and ‘horrifying’ death. But the reader is also left with a flicker of hope, knowing Marlow has been able to save at least one person.