by Deborah Emin
It’s rewarding to be at the top of the classes.
In contrast to the rows of seats we sat in at Niles North, here at the College, we sit around large wooden tables. Each classroom is set up that way. There are only 12 students per class. I like not talking to the backs of other students’ heads when I answer a question. We can look at each other and discuss the work rather than only respond to the professor’s questions.
However, as always, there are those anomalies. Need I say who? As always—Dr. Fish and Prof. Calderon.
Dr. Fish’s poetry class is the most disturbing one. His comments in class always make me feel inferior. He never deviates at all from his theory that women aren’t qualified to read poetry let alone write it.
When I walk out of his classroom, I am convinced that this will be my one and only term here. It takes hours of work for me to trust that I can pass his course and be true to myself in the work. If nothing else, I have mastered new skills as a student to make my work for the odious old fuck face presentable.
While working on my papers for his class, I want to suggest to him that I could be a writer. I want to suggest to him that I could make a living as a writer. Plainly, his course, I would tell him, has taught me that already.
I feel foolish describing what goes on in his class in my diary. I waste my own time here just as he does. Listening to Dr. Fish repeating often his belief that women can’t write poetry and shouldn’t be allowed in discussions of it, I know my blood rushes straight to my face, neck and hands. Being a red head creates some dangerous problems. People are aware, sometimes before I am, how angry I am. I know he has observed my red face response in reaction to his stupid ideas.
In his class, by the way, we don’t sit around the table. There is no table. He has a podium at the front of the room. He appears at some point right when he thinks he should show up, places his books onto the podium and stares at them. He looks like a walrus. He dresses in the same standard issue clothing each day—brown corduroy jacket, knit tie, checkered shirt, grey trousers and saddle shoes. He makes harumphing walrus sounds as if he prepares to start the class. He looks around, surprised that no one has left. Then he plows ahead with his prepared remarks and ignores any raised hands until he has completed what he has decided to say to us that day.
He jettisoned some of the assignments that were on his original syllabus to make room for Coleridge’s Conversation Poems. I don’t mind as I like them and I’m going to write my term paper on one of them. There’s a rumor that the reason he changed the syllabus is he’s writing an article about these poems and needs the class to help with his article.
Even though he has that academic side to him, there are those days, like today, when we come to class prepared to work but he stops what he is lecturing about to become weird.
Today, Dr. Fish stopped talking about Coleridge in mid-sentence and counted all the women in the room.
He closed his book, stepped away from the podium, and said, “No woman sitting in this room should take it into her head to become a poet. It is not possible, not physically or mentally possible for a woman to write poetry of any kind.”
I don’t know why he says those things but the room goes still when he does.
His lectures are brilliant but the room goes so still when he behaves like that. No one feels comfortable sitting there.
When he stopped talking about the inability of women to write poetry, he then told us about a conversation he had with Coleridge last night. It’s truly a bizarre experience to listen to him recite these stories. We’ve heard them before because whenever he veers off from his lecture, he tells us these exact stories, every time.
Collectively, we know he is both brilliant and a nut case. On top of that he is a misogynist.
I told Neal, who sits next to me in the class that I call Dr. Fish “Old Fuck Face.” He told me that was a perfect description and then proceeded to tell others in the class of my renaming of Dr. Fish. Everyone whispers “Old Fuck Face” as we leave his classroom. Someone will say, “Did you hear Old Fuck Face say that he talks to Coleridge at night?” We hold our breaths, afraid that Old Fuck Face heard us. Once we are out of earshot, we laugh to expel the horrible tension he stirs up in us.
I know if I could make myself sit down to read ‘A Room of One’s Own’ I will feel better. Eileen assures me I will. I don’t know why I’m afraid to pick up that book and see what Woolf has to say about men like Dr. Fish. Tonight, I must crack it open or I stole that damn book for no reason.
While I am explaining the differences in my classes, I should mention that my pottery class is also completely different from the academic classes. First of all, it isn’t a class I can study for. Not in the classical sense of study.
Prof. Calderon talks so much about beauty and how beauty is found, who creates it, and why. You listen to her say that word, beauty, and it’s now a new language that I am learning. Very different from what I had thought this class was going to be. (I should go and thank Prof. Keating for making me take this class. He would probably be pleased to know how much I like it.)
Not unlike how my Aunt Money charges up a room with her perfume, Prof. Calderon makes a room fire up with her excitement for throwing pots.
She talks about the art and science of clay and of beauty. She embodies that too. The one thing I see in my mind whenever I think of her class is how she took her fingers along the side of a small pot and showed that curve, the roundness of it, the way a woman might touch her own swollen belly when pregnant.
I blurted out that thought. She didn’t know who said it. She whirled around looking at the room and asked who had uttered those words?
I raised my hand. She stared at me for a few seconds before saying, “Excellent comment Scags. Making that direct connection to the power of clay to show fecundity is essential to understanding its purpose.”
She smiled right at me. “I expect you to continue letting us hear your insights.”
I must have blushed and turned completely red because she said, “Don’t worry, Scags. We’ll all help you find that power here. That’s why we structure the class this way.”
Then she returned to holding the pots and showing us things about them that I couldn’t pay any attention to. I had become too self-conscious. Looking around the room to help me divert my thoughts, I noticed that the entire room was filled with women. Not one man had signed up for the class. Maybe beauty is a frightening topic for a man to discuss.
I was granted one easy class. That’s the Phys. Ed class. I don’t worry about it or even think about it. I get up and run with the team every morning. I feel so lucky to have this gorgeous woodland to float through. The colors are more robust than any I have ever seen in the Fall. Though I was told that once the leaves are gone, this is also a bleak landscape. We shall see.
The sounds of the leaves underfoot make me feel like I am getting things done. It’s as if I were going places and seeing things I never saw before even when I run pretty much the same course every day.
Alex paired me with Douglas. We run side by side every day. He’s not new here but he can’t believe how beautiful the woods are too. We gobble up the sights of it and compare what we have seen from day to day. Soon the woods will look different and there will be much less light. I don’t care about that at all.
I like running in the mountains rather than on flat land. Yes, it is more rigorous than running in Skokie. I even had the shit scared out of me when one morning, a huge owl hovered over me. I saw its enormous talons hanging near my head and wondered what it would be like to be scooped up by and dragged off to its nest. The wingspan was about 10 feet. I mean it. It felt mythic or maybe even like a dinosaur had returned to find its way into the modern world. Douglas told me that they can scoop up baby calves. Or dogs. Once, they saw a bear out on the trails. You definitely have to be careful.
Date: Tuesday, 9/23/69
I stole Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” back into the library so I could read it tonight during a break in my studies. That was a huge mistake. Reading that book took over my whole night. It is now one of the books that changed my life. I became so involved in the book, they had to kick me out of the library.
I put my stolen book back into my book bag and walked into the cold, night air. I fell in love with her sentences. They’re like drugs that alter how I perceive sentences, how I can describe my thinking and the differences between men and women.
I didn’t want to return to my room as I walked out of the library. Coming back up here would have seemed too normal for the thoughts that were tumbling around inside my head. I had nowhere to go. The Commons lights were on but it looked too bright and festive in there. I needed quiet and the dark.
I walked around outside in the dark. I threw my head back to look at the stars. They were so numerous it was as if I had thrown fistfuls of jacks into the night air with all my might. Each one glowed back at me as if their tips had been set on fire. I reached out to them, asking them to follow me. Waving my arms at them, they ricocheted all over the black bowl above my head. The entire expanse was mine. I owned it. In large circles as they bounced against the sides of that huge bowl, they responded to every move I directed them to make.
I wanted to see the whole sky all at once. But that made me dizzy. Both the wonder of that huge sky with its dazzling lights as well as my attempts to see it all made me feel that if I didn’t come upstairs and write down what is happening to me, I would never be able to capture so much magic again. It was like a challenge that my life makes now—experience everything but don’t forget to write it down too.
I’m glad Sylvie was out for the night.
First, I want to copy into this book some of what I read tonight. By writing it in my own handwriting, it will be more mine. The feel of my pen along the paper does something to me too. It opens a writing door and makes me peek inside. These sentences aren’t mine but I am communing with them when I do this simple exercise. I watch them exist in a different place than the book page.
Thought—to
call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into
the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the
reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it
until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at
the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the
careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how
insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good
fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one
day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought
now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the
course of what I am going to say.
I ran my eyes over the words before copying them into this diary. I hope to fall asleep tonight and see them dancing across a black bowl, like my stars, as I drift off.
Each word, as I wrote it down, reverberated in me. So many ideas came bounding into my mind like numerous telegraphs leading to places inside me I hadn’t known existed. I can’t stop them from poking at me and urging me to pay attention to them.
One thing is clear: Before I read her essay, my life had the form of a series of distinct points on a line—events, things happened, one after the other, in the manner of this happened and then that happened. I did this. I did that. I haven’t done this but will do it. Everything neatly arranged. Life appeared to be a line that led somewhere, taking me somewhere based on what I did. Or didn’t do.
But reading her description of thought opened up something else. Now like huge church bells tolling inside my head and knocking all that order out of order, making me far more aware of how necessary real change must be.
This is difficult to believe, but even more powerfully than Mr. Lowell’s poems, her prose description of thought as a fish pulled out of the water before it had grown to its full size hit me hard. More than Mr. Lowell’s poem making me realize how essential the personal is to poetry, her essay is making me feel that here, at College, I am that fish caught too soon. What I am and what I know are not yet mature.
Now I must go slowly through her entire book. If ever I felt a book spoke its entire message to me and to me alone, this is it.
Tuesday night has almost ended I see. What a glorious way to spend the time. Do I care that my work will suffer tomorrow? Do I care that I may not run well? That I may fail the trials for the first race?
In my psych class we have begun to read Freud and his interpretation of Oedipus Rex. There we discuss an Oedipal complex as it relates to men. In my philosophy class we have begun reading Plato, the Symposium, his dialog about love. But the love is among men, no women are mentioned.
What a life of the mind I am being ushered into. Woolf is helping me to see that these are men’s ideas and not necessarily applicable to how women think, feel or perceive the lives they live.
With her warning about taking all of this male erudition too seriously, I am like a young child. I want to become the person who is influencing me the most.
While I don’t know where this will lead me, I am eager to let it rumble around and see how it might change me. Maybe I will dream about Woolf. Maybe she’ll send me a message in my dreams about how I should use her ideas in my life.
That would certainly cut down my worry that I’ll never live up to her standards.
Date: Thursday, 9/25/69
Harvest Moon time here in Vermont. I miss Mama and Pops and our ritual celebration of that oversized moon. I now have to celebrate the Harvest Moon alone.
There’s no one to make the ritual come alive with me. It’s really just a Morgenstern celebration. Who else would do what we do- parade in circles, watching the moon rise above us, inviting us to fly to it? Of course we always turned down her invitation. But she never revokes it.
I saw the Harvest Moon rise this evening as I walked from Commons after dinner on my way to the library. The people here are too sophisticated to dance with me singing made up songs to the moon. I’d be afraid to invite them to join me.
We Morgensterns are aware of what people think of us. We’re the crazies on the block. In all of Skokie, we were seen as the craziest in the entire suburb.
Pops made the rising of the Harvest Moon a holiday for us because the moon frightened me. There was no way to explain that to our neighbors. Each fall as we made a feast night of it, the looks we got from our neighbors, even the Arthurs, made it clear that our moon worship antagonized them.
Pops soaped the word “awe” that night on our living room window. In large letters he put it out there for people to contemplate, as he put it. He also drew the big moon, in all her redness, on our front window. He didn’t see the difference between Halloween decorations and our hailing of the rising of the Harvest Moon.
I miss our family’s inventiveness. I must remember to carry on that tradition here. In my own way of course and with my own events to celebrate.
Date: Wednesday, 10/1/69
Suddenly, I want to possess Charles. The more I see him, the more I want to possess him. Who would have thought that was even possible? I mean, how the hell long have I known him? I become annoyed when what I want to do and what he wants don’t coincide. Can you believe that? I mean, who is this girl, Scags, and where did she learn to behave this way?
I watch myself now with Charles. He and the rest of the College were all lit up today because of the celebrations in honor of the release of the new Beatles album—Abbey Road.
Do I care? No. Must I? Perhaps. That has now become my new conundrum. How to make room inside me for what Charles wants as w
ell as taking care of my needs too. Now more of my needs seem to be dependent on him.
Reading Virginia Woolf and becoming involved with my first boyfriend at the same time have definitely raised serious questions in my own mind about who I am and what it is I am supposed to be doing here.
Charles wanted his friends at his apartment. As usual, they got stoned and listened to the new album all night long.
What was I supposed to say when this wasn’t how I wanted to spend my Wednesday night?
A part of me woke up to how angry this makes me feel because I feel shut out. This isn’t how I want to spend my time with him or with his friends. The truth is, I didn’t want to spend time with any of these other people at all.
I don’t have lots of free time. When I am not studying or running, I want to be with Charles and be right next to him. I do mean right next to him, cuddling on the couch, watching television or in bed.
I’ve told Charles that is what people do who have just started loving each other. They hang onto each other for dear life. He finds that idea very funny.
“You make it sound like falling in love is like drowning in a swimming pool.”
“Do I? Well, that isn’t exactly the image I would use.”
“You wouldn’t?” he asks and throws himself on the couch and yells for me to come save him.
I don’t. I throw pillows at him and accuse him of not taking me seriously.
These semi-quarrels are fun. But they haven’t helped me climb out of the rut I am in with him. He never excludes me from anything and yet, if he didn’t spend as much time with his friends, he could reasonably spend more time with me.
“You can have all of me,” he laughs and he runs into the bedroom to bring me a present. He always has some trinket that is truly very lovely and thoughtful to hand me as we fight over these silly things. I own a beautiful hand-stitched wallet. A silver bracelet and a matching pin.