Manifesto

For those of you who were at Swarthmore's Baccalaureate last week, this is old news: They read the Wendell Berry poem that inspired this blog's title.

A few months before Baccalaureate, on March 31, I had gone out to chalk the Manifesto on the sidewalk. I took my sidewalk chalk, a bottle of water, and my Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (selected, it should be noted, by the poet himself). I had forty-five minutes before a screening for class. I chalked right out in front of the building where the screening was, and when my classmates began streaming past me, I was only halfway done. So I was about forty-five minutes late for the screening. It was worth it.

As I wrote, everyone who passed by had something to say about the poem, or my endeavor to chalk it. Many of them picked up Selected Poems and read the Manifesto in its entirety. Myles put up a line from it on his Facebook. My film professor, in a final paper conference a week or so later said "Did you chalk that long poem outside of the cinema?"

I'm not sure what kind of blog this is going to be. Some blogs like to give advice-- "life hacking" and all that (one of my favorite advice-giving blogs: The Happiness Project). As I have said many times, I don't like to give advice, mostly because I don't like to take advice. To assume other people will take my advice is disingenuous when I usually have no intention of taking theirs. But here's some advice for you: If you live in any sort of populated area, buy some sidewalk chalk and chalk something long. Long enough that you run out of the chalk colors you like and you have to progress to the ones you don't like, in order to prevent your fingers from bleeding. Pin yourself down to a place for a little while and let people pass you by as you do something that does not compute.

As I was finishing my chalking, a student passed by. He read the last line. "Resurrection," he said "doesn't seem like something you can practice. You get it right once or you're screwed." I didn't feel like arguing, but if I had, I would've pointed out that "practice" has more meanings than "attempt repeatedly."

LIFE UPDATE
I have a banjo now.

Large Boat

I'm headed down to Swarthmore in a few hours to work alumni weekend. If you're going to be around, let me know. Meanwhile, ponder this exciting opportunity.

Bildungsroman

It was in an attempt to read the complete works of John Steinbeck that I ended up embroiled in an attempt to read the complete works of Michael Chabon. I don't know how I got from St to Ch, but I left the Swarthmore branch of the Delaware County Public Library system with "The Short Reign of Pippin IV" and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." Having already read "Kavalier and Clay," I moved on to "Gentlemen of the Road" and "The Final Solution," but it wasn't until two days after graduation that I finished Chabon's first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh." It's a bildungsroman, set during the summer after its protagonist's college graduation.

It was one day after graduation that "Pittsburgh" set me to wondering if I wasn't missing out on some important and formative adolescent angst. I was washing the furniture on the patio, preparing for my own graduation party when it hit me that, unlike the protagonist of almost every bildungsroman out there, I feel good about my life. The remorse that overtook me when I thought of what I was missing out on (transformative journeys, brief and ill-fated loves, deep psychological traumas, nostalgic walks through old neighborhoods) quickly became an angst of its own, thus paradoxically assuaging my fears. The kernel my autobiographical bildungsroman is there, in the lack of a kernel for my autobiographical bildungsroman, I thought. I laughed at my recursive post-(yet still eminently indicative of)-Swarthmore thinking. This dispelled the angst.

At the party, my various aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends all asked me some variation on this question "what's next?" My cousin Chris, just becoming a freshman at the same high school I attended, asked a very different question: "So, uh, Greg, what are you gonna be?" I was, at first, annoyed. Such a question begs a one-word answer, something out of a children's book or The Village People's costume department: Astronaut. Doctor. Firefighter. "Vagabond," I said.

I like Chris's question because I don't know the answer, and I am still in debate with myself over whether it is a question to which I can or should try to know the answer. In one sense, I'm gonna be the conglomerate of the answers to "what's next?". In another, sense, "what are you gonna be?" could give a framework for answering "what's next?"

Regardless, this moment before "next" is one that, today, feels like promise. As I lay in my hammock reading Chabon's early short fiction, I thought about what a time it was: A time to read complete works. A time to track down a banjo on the cheap. A time to decide to buy (or not buy) a car. A time like the time at the beginning of a bildungsroman.

FOR DISCUSSION:
What is the plural of bildungsroman? Bildungsromans? Bildungsromane? Bildungsromanen?
Do you have or know of anyone who has a cheap-yet-functional banjo and/or car with which you/they are willing to part?