MATISSE: The Cut Outs

Now Playing: Essay for history class
Topic: Wonder Years - College




WRITING 1 [earthwulf]
1-11-90 MARS GREENING

MATISSE: The Cut Outs

“Is that a dog on the ceiling?”

This was my roommate, deep in the throes of slumber, asking what to him was probably a logical question.

“What has been your experience as a writer?”

This was my writing prof, wide awake and abounding with energy, asking to her what was probably a logical question.

There you have two seemingly unrelated incidents, yet, when put together they tend to have a blatantly obvious connection, and it’s not that you can lead a gift horse to water, but you can’t look it in the mouth. At least I don’t think it is.

I would venture to guess that the connection is that when dealing with anything, a lot depends on perspective. Where you see a tree, I am going to see a rock. Who’s to say who is correct? And on that note, I’ll launch right into my not-quite doctoral dissertation on My Experience As A Writer, or, Why The Earth Is Round But The Stars Are Flat.

It began when I was young. As a child, I was surprised and delighted to learn that certain things had the ability to leave makrs on certain other things. Even more exciting – once I got past the stage where lipstick on the face (or wall, or cat) was the highest form of written thought I could express – was the fact that “Hey! I can make shapes like they have in the books Mom Reads to me! And I can read them!” Shakespeare had nothin’ on this 4 year old. I was ready to go, and the cat could come out of hiding.

Turned out, it wasn’t as easy as all that. Turned out that I had the desire, but let’s just say that my vocabulary wouldn’t have filled the Oxford English Dictionary. So it was off to school I went.

You know, I think they try to keep kids from thinking that writing is fun. Hell, they start us off with pencils the size of tree trunks, erasers made out of granite, and paper that tears if you even look at it the wrong way. Somehow I managed to get past that stage, and I wasn’t ready to stop.

I went through junior high; that’s when it happened. Sitting down and writing was no longer fun. It became work. With a capital “W”. I was still good at it, but I no longer enjoyed it. What is that thing called the “five-paragraph-essay”; what are the monstrosities of having to write about another person’s work in an abhorred creature known as the “book-report”?!?

If this was the way writers had to do it, I wanted no part of it. I started reading the first and last chapters of assigned books, then writing the reports the night before. As for history papers – what are encyclopedias and thesauruses (thesauri?) made for? I felt that if I wasn’t allowed to use my imagination, well, I’d do it anyway. In a 350 page book, after reading only two chapters (plus the jacked description, of course), you had to use imagination to get an “A”. At least that made it somewhat more exciting.

Then in 10th grade, something happened. My English teacher happened.

“Bullshit,” she said. “That’s what this is. Granted, it’s some of the best I’ve seen, but bullshit by any other name still smells just as sweet. Or sour. Rewrite it, and do a good job.”

After the initial shock of hearing a teacher – a 57 year old teacher at that – use such language, I realizes that she meant it. I was in a journalism class; in journalism, you can’t afford to play around with bovine fecal matter.

And so I began again. This time, to my surprise, it was fun. Still, it was work, something I detested and tried to avoid at all costs. I would’ve rather been playing volleyball, reading, spelunking, or in an underwater paperweight throwing contest than to have been caught working. I guess you could say that my work ethic left something to be desired.

This was going to be a serious problem. I still had the rest of the year with this woman, this creature of ill-conceived editorial thought (at least from my bullshitting point of view), with no way of getting out. I had to find a way of escaping this ‘work” thing, while still getting an “A”.

I had a plan.

I began writing in my free time. Not a lot at first, but enough to make it easier. The more I wrote, the more I had to write. It was a disease of sorts, one which I was using to my advantage. Was I pulling the wool over her eyes, or what? She didn’t suspect a thing: she actually thought I was working hard and not b.s.ing, when, in truth, I was just having fun.

Chalk it up to being in high school, but the irony didn’t hit me untila year later.



What actually separates the written word from reality? Where does the truth stop and fiction begin? I’ve never been too sure, so when I write, I write to mix the two if absolutely necessary.

I was finding that I had no real experience from which to draw upon. It was clear that a past life of mine wasn’t going to suddenly jump into my consciousness giving me an extra pi-are-squared number of years to my life. Imagination was back in.

“[Wulf], [Earth Wulf]. Agent 003.5, not-quite-licensed-to-kill-but-still-able-to-insult-really-well, at your service. Drink? Yes, a Dr Pepper, stirred, not shaken.”

“Oklahoma [Wulf] and the temple of the hare Krishnas”

“Super[wulf]! Able to… well, we haven’t quite got it figured out yet, but he’s able to do something. We think.”

There was something lacking in my concepts, though I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was.They were original ideas, until they were stolen from me. Shocked, I tell you! I was shocked when I walked into theaters and saw my concepts on the big screen. I had o recourse, except to bury my outrage and keep writing.

I managed to get through high school with no major scars on my psyche, which is a miracle in today’s world. Then the strangest thing happened after graduation.

Tunisia.

“What is that,” an acquaintance of mine asked, “and is it contagious?”

What it is is the northernmost country in Africa, between Libya and Algeria (the boot of Italy points towards it). A few answers to much asked questions: no, I did not meet Nelson Mandela. It’s nowhere near South Africa. No, all of the cities are not nomadic, moving every month. As far s I know, no actual cities are. And no, they don’t cut off your hands if you are caught stealing (imagine what they’d do to flashers)

A year of my life was spent in this incredible country, giving me the beginnings of what I lacked in high school: esperience.

I lived with an Arabic speaking family in a third world country; I spent a weekend with a nomadic Berber family in the Sahara desert; I picked dates in an oasis; I tooka shower in a waterfall. I used the toiled with no paper, or toilet, for that matter. I did one hell of a lot.

Tunisia opened my eyes to the world. What had once been a two-dimensional, flat world found only in black and white became three dimensional Technicolor. Names of places actually meant something, and I made friends from countries I can’t even pronounce.

I also became aware that experience isn’t always something exciting or exotic. I had been fooling myself in high school, envying characters in books and movies, wanting their lifestyles, their adventures. Tunisia made me realize that living is experience. You may think “Yeah, sure, we all know that,” but od you actually realize it? Most people don’t, I think.

Look, a time when I was six and burned my knee on a go-cart exhaust pipe was experience. Going to work 9-to-5 five days a week is experience. Getting in bed is experience. I couldn’t see that before my trip, couldn’t see that in the 9-to-5 job, something different happens every day – every second – and the problem for me was being able to grasp that, twist it into words, then setting it down on paper. I had the problem of thinking that life is boring, and when life is boring, you can’t get excited, and when you can’t get excited life is boring, and…

Something else happened that I found strange. I stopped writing. I had written in Tunisia – in a journal, letters, short-stories, whatever – yet, when I got back, I stopped. No reason, no thoughts. I just stopped. Period.

I found myself looking at things more closely, trying to examine daily life in detail. I started thinking a lot, about life, the universe, and everything, about why 42, about whether or not amoebas really do slide shows. I thought too much, spending the entire summer in contemplation (and in work).

Hamlet who?



UCSC hit me fast & furious, the old saying about not being ready for it (or rather it not being ready for me) about living one day at a time and that quarter was the longest day of my life and how did Just and I become Grand Central Station parties oh and school of course then lust came along to compensate for true love and before that skinny dipping in the Pacific one march night and living with more living

It was hectic, and it was worth it. My writing, though, slipped back into bullshit-mode since I was being dragged kicking and screaming through the core course, as well as an ungodly number of science courses. You see, I had this idea of becoming a geneticist when I got here, splicing genes and playing God, then something happened. No, I wasn’t brought to my senses by a swift boot to the head, nor did they cure my insanity. They told me to write.. In a standardized format. A scientific five paragraph essay. No questions asked, no differentiation, do not pass Go, go directly to Jail.

It became notfun and verywork. I found that if you know big words and a little science, you can bullshit rather well. That wasn’t what I wanted.

So I went to France.

Or, rather, UCSC kicked me out of the country, and I no place else to go, not to mention the pack of Tunisian nomads on my tail for taking one of their women. But that is, as they say, another tale for another day.







Notes: Obviously, a paper for Mars Greening's writing class. a) Moving cities? Burning Man, anyone? Black Rock City… well, I guess that’s more of a yearly temporary one… b) To be fair, Tunisia is a developing country with many western amenities. Nothing like countries I’ve lived in since. Also, the Tunisian family I lived with spoke French, too. c) the “Core Courses” at UCSC are (or maybe were) a part of each separate college at UCSC, each one focusing on something different, designed to introduce incoming college students to the rigors of college writing & reading. d) my son is 5 & ¾ and has wanted to be a geneticist since he was 4 and learned that was the only way to bring back dinosaurs. I don’t have the heart to tell him how boring I found the science courses.- earthwulf