“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
-Wallace Stevens

Why I Study What I Study

A lot of my friends and family have long been asking me why I am an English major, and on top of that, a Creative Writing major. For a while, I could come up with no real answer other than that I loved it for some reason. But in the process of declaring my major I had to write a short paragraph detailing the answer to that very question. It was, to say the least, a cathartic experience and I would like to share:

“It would be vain and conceited of me to say that I desire to study creative writing for some reason more special than any other soul who has come before me. That I, some nascent and innocent contributor and spectator to the body of all fiction, could claim the impact of literature on me to be singular and relegated especially to me is nothing but an unnecessary repetition of every other Creative Writing and Literature major’s own claims to the form. So, with that necessary digression out of the way, I must lay out my purposes for taking up this wild goose chase for truth and meaning we call studying English. Language, this ingenious construct invented by and solely for humankind, has an innate tension: it is both the basis for human understanding (for some semblance of inter-subjective truths to be proven or even exist, we must have language of some kind) and the singular obstacle to that very same comprehension. To be a philologist (as I want to be), or to claim to love words (as I do) can mean nothing more than trying as hard as humanly possible to bridge these antipodes together––to run our own word-particle accelerator and smash concepts together and gather the data. But how am I, as a student of this inbred tension between clarity and ambiguity, supposed to gather data? There are no labs focused on the sub-particle makeup of our language. This is true only if we blind ourselves from the connection between the creative process and its analysis to the scientific process of hypothesis, experimentation, and conclusion our intellectual cousins in Frazier Jelke live for. We have our own Gregor Mendel’s and our own Werner Heisenberg’s (only their names are something like John Milton and Jacques Derrida). As a philologist, a lover of words, I cannot stop at just studying words’ previous, chemically volatile interactions with each other. I must run my own experiments; I must carry on the torch of language’s innovative representation of its own inner tension. I cannot be anything other than a scientist for the whole English language, and that means studying not only literature but also creative writing.”

Writing this was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. The fact that I wrote it in less than an hour was powerful confirmation of its truth to me. I beg of everyone to try to do this with their own goals and desires in life. Write a mission statement; write a damn good one. Frame it, post it, flaunt it, and parade it. Write one you’re actually proud of, and don’t stop till you’ve found out how to say what you’ve been wanting to do for your life up till that moment. But don’t stop there. No, don’t ever stop there. Take it off the wall. Rip the frame from its edges. Make the paper bleed with your ever-changing revisions of your self. Then let it sit and coalesce in its juicy meaning for until you forget to remember it. Then remember it and do the whole thing over. When we can read our selfs (what particles of our minds we pour, we flood) on paper, smile, and then rip it apart, we’ve done something worthwhile.