Whisper
In the last 4 years at UC Davis, I have probably written close to 200 essays, not to mention a few short stories, countless journal entries/article response papers, and one really awful attempt at a poem that no one, not even the professor who assigned the poem assignment, cared to read. I would put this page count at an easy eight or nine hundred pages, and I am not a long-winded writer. If the assignment asks for five pages, I usually have to cheat to make my four pages stretch into a fifth, and if the assignment asks for more than five pages, I always end up with a “B” because I am constitutionally incapable of spewing my bullshit for more than 2000 or so words. I always write five pages. Or less, if I can get away with it.
My classes are chock full of tree-hugging, Anna Karenina-reading, bullshit-spewing English-double-major students that sneeze at my five pages of crap and call my bluff with their own eight-to-ten page masterpieces that the professor only half reads. If each of those students has written 200 or so essays in their college careers, we are talking about a FUCK TON OF PAGES. Pages upon pages of analysis, prose, God-awful poetry and sometimes, if you’re really lucky and in the right class, rants about the degeneration of American politics. I once wrote a rant about the degeneration of American politics. It was about my general dislike of Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin and pretty much every other American vice president in history.
That paper was four pages, thank you very much.
If we took all of these pages and lined them up, read them all, and then let our brains leak out of our ears, we would realize very quickly that there is not one original thought among them. There is nothing more than hundreds of thousands of pages of bull shit wrapped up in ribbon and shiny language. Some people are really good at it, and their ideas almost seem original, thoughtful and intelligent. And then you realize that they are just trying to get an “A” on this paper and have done nothing but parrot back what their professor lectured on. Because these professors, overworked and underpaid, only half read these papers and they like to see their own ideas rehashed on paper. It makes them feel good. Wouldn’t it make you feel good to see your words, printed on a page as evidence of human evolution? You would be the reason this paper was written, and that is fucking awesome.
So my question is this: is there such a thing as originality? Can we avoid cliches in our writing? Can a blog about my life really invent language or words or concepts that have not already been relayed for centuries? Can a picture actually be edgy and revolutionary? Does art ever capture a new emotion, or even an old emotion in a totally different way? Does Flannery O’ Conner’s narrative about obsession with a wooden leg translate into something new and original? Or is the most we can hope for that O’ Conner has given us a non-cliche, above the daily grind of tired phrases such as “eyes so green they sparkled like emeralds?” Does one war photo hit us harder than another?
Does my account of my life reshape the way the world sees twenty-something college students? Or am I just another voice int the crowd, throwing my three-to-five page long bullshit essays into the din in the hopes that it gets read and understood and turned into a cliche?
I should be so lucky. I would be honored to write in cliches, and I would be tickled pink to create new ones. I hope that my rather unoriginal (yet rather interesting) voice is heard, if not as a roar than as a whisper.