When Slate Takes in Epidermis with Dust
I read aloud a word for the first time in a classroom with Ms. Prather, a short woman with red glasses. I remember watching her hand tracing the letters; the skin of her knuckles bulged each time a finger stretched to edge up the consonants and the vowels. We read in thin paperbacks, and we wrote on green chalkboards. At recess, I would play in a massive sandbox. I would look for ant hills and fall in love with girls. My books were always messy. I was messy. Into the pages I would smudge mustard from the cold cooked hotdog my mom packed me for a snack. From the chalk slate, I would smudge fingerprints of dust onto my dinosaur t-shirts. Marked for marking, a little of me onto text and a little of text onto me. I learned to write as I learned to read.
Years after, I read aloud my own poetry for the first time in a classroom with Ms. Ladinig. She was also short; also glasses. As fierce as she was generous. We read thick paperbacks and emulated The New York Times. Correct diction and syntax. Proper use of lay and lie. Precision in pronouns and point of view. Ladinig’s red-inked comments were devastating, and when we slipped and wrote an assumptive “You” or left in a vague “It,” she went beyond the page, instructing us to write these words on large sheets of paper to be worn on our chests until the end of the day.
It. You. Marked for marking.
To be clear, Ladinig wasn’t mean. Once she saved me from real, small town outrage after three friends and I played a shitty punk rock version of the “Star Spangled Banner” to open our senior Bachelorette. Ladinig negotiated our pennants by volunteering me to read the full text of Keys’ poem properly at graduation. She made me practice. Everyday. With a pencil in my mouth. Held all the way back by my molars, Ladinig’s pencil trained me to form up the consonants and the vowels. Perfect pronouncement while performing what I read.
I understand why some feel reading is an agony. Some things you read may liberate you while some things you read seek to erase you, brutalize you, standardize you. Even worse, to do reading—to do writing—requires separation. It’s difficult to read when others want your presence, pursuing you in your space, breathing your air, giving you their attention. It’s even more difficult to write this way. We often read for the chance to be with other human minds and hearts, but to actually focus, to actually immerse, we have to willfully cut ourselves away from the living, persistent presence of those things.
I am drawn to writers who lean into heterodoxy, who string along my hope for “you”s and “it”s placed with purpose; for paragraphs that begin and end with “and,” and “and,” and “and”; for phrases that slide and slam into the next. When you write without topic sentences you make your reader choose their own. That brings a reader into the text to make their meaning. You take the pencil out of your mouth, and you slide it into theirs. This is Brecht’s epic theater that shocks the audience into remembering that they are being an audience. This is Benjamin’s contemplation in distraction. Iser’s ideation. McLuan’s message. You create as you consume. You author as you audience. You shape writing, and the writing shapes you back. You do a kind of writing every time you read.
I think this is how it works. At least, this feels right to me, especially when I teach. I choose to be a little author in my students’ texts. I teach in their writing. I see their “You”s and “It”s not as summative artifacts of inadequate expression but as evidence of coming-into or, expression becoming. In this way, I teach how I was taught and I don’t. I do teach them to strive for precision and to emulate the immaculate voices they discover in the cannons they choose to read. And I teach them to resist those things, asserting they have rights to their own languages while pushing them to wrestle their products back into process where their decision-making is still alive, where language and ideas and structures are still theirs to shape.
In reality, though, my students and I enter these beautiful exchanges of content for comments in a state of desperation. We may actually want to live there in process and affirmation, but for reals, we don’t have the time. There is too much content. We wake to content dinging or singing. We relax to content playing or scrolling. At work, we generate content. At meals, we select from content. When we do escape content to take a walk or to talk with a friend, that electric buzz in our pockets or from the table is content that needles our legs or becomes a mosquito in our ear. We live in content. Always consuming. Always producing. We love what we read. We fear what we read. We buy what we read. We eat what we read. We vote what we read. It is not the case that our attention spans have shrunk due to some generational decline. No. Our attention is being crushed between the shrinking spans of endlessly bookended content. Diffused. Disparate. Constant. So we skim. We scroll. We lean-back listen. We skip. We binge. We stream. We like. We share. We auto-correct. We auto-complete. We auto-generate. We speed-grade. None of this is inauthentic. None of this is cheating. All of this is writing like we read.
I, listen…I’ve been doing some mid-life crises stuff, lately. Seeing metal and punk rock shows again. Eating more broccoli. Silencing content. My three kids are adults now. One lives two thousand six hundred and eight miles away in Pupukea, Hawaii. Another lives eight thousand and sixteen miles away in Mae Sai, Chang Rai in Thailand. The youngest still lives at home. There’s both liberation and loneliness that comes with emptynesting. I think this is why I seek mosh pits: the one affords a break from the other.
When I see a metal show, I always show up early. I like to feel the anticipation and savor the, “this is about to happen!” jitters before I lose myself in the music. Couple weeks ago, I grabbed the only stool open in the pub near the venue where the show would start in an hour and ordered a beer. I was surrounded by metal fans. All of us wearing black. Some tattooed, some pierced; beards, boots, and steeled brows. I think we were all trying to look terrifying? But as I look around, everyone feels familiar. Strangers to me now, and after, but soon, we will be moving together: striking the air, screaming out lyrics, and helping up those who fall. Everything will merge in the dark through the thunder of each bands’ setlist. This is the break offered by live music. The artists responding to our energy as a crowd will collapse the difference between author, audience, and text. We will become an altogether unique, unified, unleashed thing: escaping the formats of content before we ourselves become content: the stories and videos we will share afterwards. I sat at the bar, sipping beer, my attention focused by these possibilities to come. Until. My phone. Buzzes. In my pocket.
My kids are texting each other. One. Then the next. Then the youngest. No punctuation. No capital letters. They’re teasing each other. I laugh as my oldest daughter becomes outraged. I don’t respond. Just listen. Just read. Just like when we’re all at home around the table. Them teasing. Me listening. This is not content. This is not memory. This is presence across distance bridged by live writing. This is living while you read.
Then it’s over. No more floating dots. No more buzzes. And by my scrolling up to relive the laughter, by rereading again their exchanges only seconds past, the verve of their hearts and electricity of their relationships cure into content.
You can’t help it. You can’t stop it. You can take breaks. You can try. But you cannot escape the draw of the separation and the need to bridge it. You will always find your fingers returning to keys. And you will read.
You will read. You will read. You will read.
This isn’t all aloneness. It is still possible to find something when you mark the text and the text marks you back. When you leave a fingerprint on a photograph. When chalkboard slate takes in epidermis with dust. When iMessage takes in a brother’s jokes and a sisters’ longing for sibling friendship. When stapled papers take in a student’s desperate, blue-inked scratches over a teacher’s red-inked instruction. When a poet’s lungs take in a bit of your breath while you listen, while you breathe. We can still reach for each other when we read.