DAYWALKING

24 September 2021, 16:47

I broke up a fight today. Welcome to Brooklyn. I broke up a boy beating a girl. Beating her into lockers, beating her arms, and beating her face. I broke it up by wrapping my arms around the boy and turning him into my empty classroom. I let go of him, and he sat in the chair behind my desk.

“This is why I don’t come to school!”

I spoke to him calmly and told him to breathe. I asked if he could maybe tell me what happened. He didn’t say much. His friend walked in.

“Are you Gucci?” asked the friend.

“Yeah, I’m Gucci. Man, this is why I don’t come to school.”

I wanted to get in his face. I wanted to run away. I wanted to shout profanity, and I wanted to be silent. Then he left my room and paced away as if nothing had happened. The girl had been wrenched into another classroom by security. She was shouting. She was injured, and the other staff called for a nurse.

Welcome to Brooklyn. Funny smells and garbage everywhere. Lots of people who don’t look like me. Lots of people who don’t speak like me. Two hurricanes in my first two weeks being here. I arrived on 15 August, so it has been over a month now. Don’t stop. Don’t edit. Just keep moving forward. This is a linear exercise. You don’t need to think to write. Just move your fingers. Just move your fingers until something comes out. Hey, you’re stopping. No, just read and write and write and read and listen to the jazz—the trumpet and the drums and the piano. FREEWRITE until things start to make sense and the garbage in your head is safely on the page where it cannot infect your head.

I am experiencing stress. So much to do. So many emails and PowerPoint slides and papers and things to take care of. No resolution or time to breathe. Barely time to eat lunch. I am behind, and the school is remembering how to do things in person. It is a slow process, one for which I am trying to give myself grace. Act like you know what you’re doing. Act like it’s acting school, and you are your own coach. (I’ve never been to acting school.) Keep acting and step into the fight when…

“Well, we can’t let them kill each other. But if you get hurt by intervening, then the union is next in line to ask questions.”

Welcome to Donne’s world of canonizations, songs about impossible tasks like catching stars and impregnating mandrake roots, and of triple fools. Welcome to your first class at the prestigious New York University, a class on poetics and the landscape of literary theory. Emphasis on the theory; more of a side note, really, on the poems. Remind me—what are the theories worth studying? Which are in vogue? Is it Formalism or New Criticism? Not the former, but remnants are doing the latter. Is it structuralism or post-structuralism? Aporia (eureka!)—he’s a skeptic, wanting counsel and questioning everything. Burning the system and waiting until the last second to exit the flaming vehicle of deconstruction. Is there anything valuable about this way of thinking? If one never bothers to rebuild, does it not, soon after, devolve into chaos and anarchic interpretations?