On Oxford (part x: Taking a Break)

A week ago, I was at the peak of Snowdon, the tallest mountain in Wales. The group of us semester abroad students had arrived the night before and to make this Spring Break trip a true vacation (or holiday, as those Brits prefer) there was nothing scheduled the first full day so that we could relax. Of course, how did I respond to this? I accompanied two other brave (or crazy) students, Blair and Mia, and set out to climb a mountain.

Most of the way, the ascent wasn't that bad, a long winding path through the beautiful hill country. It was a bit easier than the last serious hiking I did in the Smokies. All that changed at around 850 meters above sea level. It's not that the trail got more difficult. Rather, it disappeared. We hit the snow line, which happened to be at cloud level too, so that suddenly we were immersed in an utterly white world. At around 900 meters, Mia had to fall back because her shoe were not cut out for the conditions. That left Blair and I to finish the ascent. It was a strange world at the peak. Black rocks clawed their way out of the snow and the wind felt like it was going to pick you up and carry you away, but we had made it, and we celebrated with handfuls of chocolate covered peanuts.

From that point on, my trip could only get more relaxing, especially since that evening set the precedent of reading, playing games, or watching movies to unwind each night. The next day was Sunday, and we got to go to a dual language service in English and Welsh. That was very cool, especially since it was my first time hearing Welsh. It is a beautiful language. After that we visited our first castle, Caernarfon, which is pronounced nothing like you would think. It was an incredible castle, easily the strongest in Wales, and had never been taken. It is also the site where the British heir apparent's title of Prince of Wales originated when Edward the First's son was born there.

The next day we visited another castle in Conwy. This one was filled with all sorts of passages and towers close together. Someone commented afterwords that we were all like prairie dogs popping up in the towers around the walls. After exploring the castle for a while we went on a hike. After the Snowdon experience, this hike was a piece of cake. As we got closer to the top I was running and bounding up rocks. I think part of it was that it was a much clearer day and there was a gorgeous view. You could look out one direction and see the rolling hills and Welsh countryside, then you could look down on the city of Conwy with the castle poking out of the middle, and then you could look out onto the sea coast. It was astounding, and it enlivened me. I kept wanting to clamber up the next pile of rocks and see farther. That was probably my favourite moment of the trip.

And it would prove to be my last hike, for although there was a big hike planned the next day to the dual peaks of Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr, I was mysteriously struck by some kind of 24 hour bug that had me vomiting the night before. So, I got my one full unscheduled day of relaxation after all and stayed back with a few other people who weren't keen on spending hours climbing big rocks. It was a very pleasant change. I got to do lots of reading, went on a short walk to a waterfall, and composed the poem in my previous post. All things considered, it was a pretty good day, and I got to finish it off going with the whole group to a delightful Welsh restaurant.

Our final day was mostly spent in the minibus heading home, but along the way we got to stop at one more castle: Harlech. This was the smallest castle we visited, but it had lots of character. It was the sort of castle that every child draws with a mote and a gate house and a central keep. This castle also was the most ruinous, not having been nearly as successful as Caernarfon. The crumbling stones were beautiful. I just love ruins and seeing how decay can still be beautiful. It was great.

Since then, we have begun the second portion of our studies since the traditional Oxford full term has ended. The rest of our studies are organized by the program and will be focusing on the history of Britain and writing long essays in conjunction with a seminar. It is sort of tough after a week off to go back to the rigour of studying, but I'm getting there.

On Stones

I wrote this poem after my first visit to a medieval castle while visiting Wales. More on the trip soon.

Caernarfon*

These stones rest like an old soldier,

watching his visitors come and go.

They'll sit with him, but never long

enough to wake him from his slumber.

These strangers wander through, staring

at the stones staring back. Empty

rooms delight them; they ask, "Who lived

here? Who was born within these walls?"

The ought to ask who died. The old

soldier shudders at the memory

of friend and foe; their final gasps

echoing still in his stony heart.

There are no more voices to speak

from these towers, no more fires to light

these walls and drive away the dark.

There is life, at times, but no living.

*in Welsh, f's are pronounced like v's.

On Discipline (addendum)

I have not written a poem in three days. I am not planning to write one tonight either. I don't know when I will write another poem. This thrills me and terrifies me.

In August of 2008, I conceived an idea of writing a poem every day to try to improve my poetry. I was fairly consistent, usually only missing one or two days a month and sometimes writing more than one in a day. For a long time, it was very rewarding.

I do push-ups every morning. This is something I have done for years. It is also the one of the only work-outs I have ever done with any consistency. I don't remember why I started. Perhaps I wanted big arms to conform to the masculine ideal. Perhaps I wanted to be healthy. Perhaps it was basic self-improvement. That is why I still do it. I believe there is a great deal of merit to discipline. This is something that seems to have fallen out of our culture. I believe in repetition. You may not understand something the first time. You may not understand something the tenth time. Perhaps the hundredth time you will. Perhaps it will mean something because you've done it one hundred times.

The Laban technique used by actors and dancers is based on the repetition of certain movements. These often seem pointless, mechanical, and downright odd. The point is to build muscle memory. It is the "wax on, wax off" mentality. An expressive movement needs to be instinctive, reflexive. As an actor or a dancer, movements must come naturally, so having them already prepped in your body allows them to come without thinking, the same way that an actor repeats lines so that they are prepped and can come without thinking.

There are certain things that develop in babies at around nineteen months. For instance, as language skills develop, their vocabulary grows a great deal. There is a beginning of independence, asserting their own wills. But one of the most interesting is that at around this age, they begin to be able to tell when something is wrong, when something is missing, or when there or inconsistencies in what they expect and what actually is.

Over the past months, more and more of my poems have notes jotted at the end. I will finish writing, look at what I have, and jot a note on it as a reminder.

This could say more

Needs work

With revision, could be better

More?

Good idea, should expand

This could be something

Needs more

Weak ending

Needs developing

One of the most interesting parts of being in England is how old it is. I can walk around and see buildings that have stood since before America was a country, before it was colonized, and even before it was discovered by Europeans. As cool as this is, there are some shortcomings. For instance, there are a lot of things still around that have long ceased to serve any purpose, but they don't remove them. They just take up space.

There are no endings. Not really. What was continues on whether we are aware of it or not. There are consequences, reactions, resonances. Even when something new has begun, what has just ended is still with us.

There are points on a line.

There are points in a circle.

I used to do sit-ups with my morning push-ups. But when I hit my last growth spurt, I had some twisting in my spine. My sit-ups were compounding this. I was hurting myself, so I stopped.

At some point, my poetry stopped being work. It stopped working. I got very good at "spontaneous overflow[s] of powerful feeling," but it was never in reflection, never seen clearly, never structured. To be frank, my technique, if I have any, is negligible. My poetry needs work. If I am just vomiting some words on a page every night before I go to bed having forgotten or having been to busy to write earlier in the day, I'm probably not going to develop as a writer. That is the stuff of sincere emotion, but it has stopped being the stuff of good poetry for me.

I am not giving up writing poems, but I am changing the way I do it. I need to learn. I will probably go back to some of those poems with notes at the bottom and see if I can make anything of them. I will probably do a lot of reflection. I will certainly do a lot of reading. I'm sure it won't be that long before I write another poem. It is too cathartic for me to abstain for too long, but when I do write one, I am going to work at it. I expect it to be hard, the way that writing a poem every day used to be hard for me. I expect I will write some bad poems. That happens. Mostly, I plan to learn.

On Oxford (part ix: Discoveries in Learning)

“if . . . you cannot heare the Plannet-like Musick of Poetrie, if you haue so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift it selfe vp to looke to the sky of Poetry . . . thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all Poets, that while you liue, you liue in loue, and neuer get fauour for lacking skill of a Sonnet, and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an Epitaph.”

Sidney, Sir Phillip. Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie. Ed. J. Churchton Collins. London, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1955. pp. 62. Print.

Sir Phillip certainly knew how to curse people back in the 16th centry. And to think: I am assigned such wonderful reading as this. Oxford is great.

On Oxford (part viii: Culture)

This weekend, I managed to do far less homework than I ought to have done. However, I avoided my homework by being very cultured. Something like that anyway.

Saturday, Oxford hosted its International Festival. All sorts of different societies for international students set up booths where they have different foods, and arrange different live performances such as music, dance, and even fight choreography. My friends Carl, Kate, and I decided to check it out. For one thing, it was packed. It was hard to even walk around let alone see the booths, but that gave it a very energetic atmosphere. I got a felafel from the Israel society and some mutton kebabs and rice from the Caribbean society. Both were delicious. We also discovered some fascinating honey jasmine tea jelly (keep in mind that when they say "jelly" in England, they are referring to "jell-o"). It sounds bizarre, but it was so good. Once we had eaten our fill and enjoyed some performances we headed out.

We then went to Frewin Court (the central offices for our program which also has a common room for students) and watched the movie Moon. This isn't quite on the cultural breadth of experience that the International Festival, but there is something to be said for embracing one's own culture. Anyway, Moon is a fantastic sci-fi movie which draws no attention to the fact that it is sci-fi. It is more interested in telling a story. The film is about Sam Rockwell's character who is the sole operator of a solar power plant on the moon coming to the end of his three year shift. Of course, things are not quite as they appear (as is usually the case with such movies) and the story dives into some profound questions about identity and the value of life. Definitely wort seeing.

The day ended with dinner at the Tick-Tock Cafe where Kate and I were accompanied by our friend Hannah. There were lots of clocks. Also, there were chicken pesto mozarella paninis. So good.

The next day, I finally managed to get to the Ashmolean Museum (the first museum in the world). Kate had two friends visiting Oxford while on a European tour and the four of us went out to explore history and culture. First off, the museum is astounding. Secondly, it is huge. We spent three hours there and did not even get through the medieval period. That, of course, just means I have an excuse to go back. I did see plenty of Egyption and Greco-Roman artifacts though, including massive statues of Zeus and Apollo.

All in all, a splendid weekend. In the midst of all of this cultural exploration, I also managed to read The Picture of Dorian Gray, so the weekend was not completely unproductive. However, I am now in the position of having two and a half days to write to essays: one of which I have not yet researched...This will be fun.

On Oxford (part vii: Foodgroup)

So, a tidbit of life here at Oxford that I have yet to mention is foodgroup. Foodgroup is easily one of my favourite parts of living here so far. It is essentially a group of people who cook for one another and eat together. You see, buying food for dinner and cooking it every night can be both tedious and expensive. What is more, thirty people in a house trying to use the same kitchen, even if it is spread out over a couple of hours, is bad news. This is why you form foodgroups.

My foodgroup has ten people in it and we have dinner together five times a week. We cook in pairs, and one person from each pair is the "head chef" who picks the meal, pays for it, and leads prayer, while the other person helps out. This way, everyone only cooks once out of those five days, and there are only expensive dinner groceries every other week. Brilliant.

On the whole, my foodgroup rock. Every meal has been delicious, and so far, everyone has also been very creative too. The closest we have come to a repeat was delivery pizza compared to homemade pizza. It is also a good communal aspect. We aren't all there every night, and sometimes people are late, but it is still very much a family time. We pray holding hands and serve one another. Most everyone pitches in to do dishes. It has a very distinct family feel which is nice being so far away from my own family.

The reason I have chosen to write on this now is in celebration of a particularly successful meal this week. My buddy Eric and I cook on Tuesdays. This week was my turn to serve as head chef, and I was feeling ambitious, so I decided to imitate one of my favourite dishes from one of my favourite restaurants: The Cheesecake Factory's "Bang Bang Chicken and Shrimp." It is a sort of Thai dish where the meat is covered in a curry-coconut sauce with peas and chopped carrots and zuchinnis. It is also served with a mound of rice covered in this delious peanut-soy sauce and sprinkled with peanuts. It is astounding. I also decided to go for the visual presentation that night and ended up with something like this:


I have never been more pleased with something I have cooked.

On Oxford (part vi: Self-Awareness)

In the months of looking forward to studying at Oxford, I naturally expected that it would challenge me more academically than I have ever been challenged before. So, I don't know why I was so surprised to find myself feeling somewhat insufficient.

For one thing, owing to my broad interests and the broad style of the liberal arts education to which I am accustomed, I have developed fairly good skills and fairly good understanding in many areas, but I have mastered none. Now I am here in an extremely focused program that emphasizes particularization of study. Basically, Oxford expects a broad understanding of a narrow focus rather than the narrow understanding of the breadth of foci I have developed. That has been a challenging adjustment.

Then there are the tutorials. Most of my time here is spent reading. I have to read at least one volume every week for my Victorian Lit. tutorial. Most of these have been hefty Victorian novels, though the last couple of weeks have been poetry, which has been quite rewarding. When I'm not reading such primary texts, I am reading secondary sources, critical books and essays. There are some days where I will spend several hours in multiple libraries pouring over books. By the time I finish all of these, it is time to write an essay. I write 1,500 words a week, at a minimum. That's not a terrible lot of words, but when it has to be packed full of critical analysis, it gets daunting.

After all this work, I come out with what I consider to be a solid and well-reasoned understanding of the assigned material only to arrive at my tutorial and have the tutor ask me a question that I had not even considered. Suddenly, the essay I just turned in feels insufficient to me. It was not thorough enough--my argument will not hold up--I could have done better. This happens pretty much weekly, and it got pretty discouraging after a while. It took until after my most recent round of tutorials this week for me to realize that this is what is supposed to happen. That is what the tutors are for. If all they did was tell me everything I had figured out for myself, what good would they serve? I felt very foolish at this point.

However, even more discouraging than this, I have been feeling insufficient in my art. It is amazing how simply being exposed to a new writer or a fresh perspective can completely shatter a conception of good writing. In my readings, in my lectures, and by recommendations of some friends I have made here, I have come across some truly fantastic poetry that has made me completely reassess my standards of poetry. This has been furthered by reading some of the poetry written by these friends. It is better than mine. If nothing else, it is good in a way completely different from what I normally write, and it has made me see how I have limited myself in style, method, and perspective.

It was good to learn.

All of this has made me sound rather prideful. Perhaps I have been. Perhaps I have been happy with what I had and forgot what I lacked. Why did I ever let myself get so complacent in my efforts?

On a happier note: I'm going to Wales in three weeks.

On Expressing Love

Every now and then, it can be fun to write some poetry that I don't take to seriously. I think I take myself too seriously on a consistent basis, but this can be especially true about my poetry. Tonight, in honour of Saint Valentine, we had a party including tea and biscuits, a movie, and a bad poetry contest. I love such endeavours, and I took it upon myself to contribute to the festivities.
Here is the award winning fruit of my labour:

Is there a way that I can show my love
To you and prove that you alone can make
My soul ascend beyond the stars above
And then return to greet you when you wake?
No, I'm unable to declare in word
The true intensity of all that I
Have felt for you, since no one yet has heard
A phrase that can articulate my sigh.
If I desre that you shoule ever know
How fully I'm devoted to your name,
I'll tell you not with speech but with a show
Of faith and sacrifice unto your fame.
This Valentine's, I'll give my heart to you
Still beating, like the pagans used to do.