Portrait of a tripartite soul as a young man

Some Cheese Week silliness, if you ask me

Monkey watches Irène Jacob in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red (1994). Something I staged for a photography class my senior year of high school. Incidentally it illustrates the polarity of the passions surprisingly well.

I’m working on that follow-up to the thymos–epithymia article from two weeks ago that I keep promising — but hey, it’s Cheese Week, the last week before Lent, and I gotsta do something carnivalesque. I just gots to. It’s canon law.

A couple weeks ago, I had to go through some old boxes of stuff, mostly baseball cards. Baseball cards are a curse. Since there’s value in them, you can’t throw them away, but the time and dedication (and money) you need to put into extracting their value never seems quite worth it. Anyways, it turns out there was more than just baseball cards in these old boxes. There were things from high school the existence of which I had long ago forgotten. I’m not a nostalgic guy, generally speaking, and my memory can be really spotty.

There were writings in there that I basically do not at all remember writing. I do remember the creative writing course I took fall semester senior year of high school. I was seventeen and had just moved with my mom to a new school in a new state, having previously lived in one place my whole life. I remember we had regular homework assignments in this class called “free writes”: we had just to sit down and write without stopping, stream-of-consciousness if necessary, for a page. I remember none of the results. But apparently I saved them. Last week here in the Journal I had cause to mention how when growing up I learned to compose essays on WordPerfect using nonlinear editing and how that wired my brain differently. Here, contrarily, are some parallel examples of straightforward, linear, pen-to-paper writing.

I select here three pieces to share, and arrange them in a portrait of my tripartite soul at that time. If you’re still with me, here goes nothing…

1. Logos

See if you can identify my state of mind when I wrote this one. Read it very carefully. It reminds me of how undisciplined and strung out I was at this age.

Chef’s kiss. That is art, young me. Pure musicality. Notice the use of inclusio at the beginning and end, framing the waves of chaos in the suggestion of an ordered narrative. It’s as if to say, “There is an end to this.” It also reminds me of how Jackson Pollock studiously holds back from the edges of his canvas when splattering paint. “Warm pillow turn cold pillow”? So relatable. Yet with “unaware oblivious incognizant” I could hardly have composed a more accurate self-portrait of my spiritual state. Now let’s take a peek at what happens to the lower passions when the logos lies dormant.

2. Epithymia

Evidently in these exercises “The Protagonist” was a recurring character, a device to use when needing to jump-start my creativity. In this next one I take a few lines to warm up, and don’t get going until the Protagonist appears. If revisions were allowed, such vamping (when I’ve got nothing) wouldn’t survive. While my pen would stop and start for single words here or there, it was the nature of the free writes just to record my thoughts regardless of value or correctness.

The raw, unrequited yearning for connection amid heartbreak and loneliness — I don’t remember writing this, but I sure remember that feeling dominating my every moment. That’s the weeping, the longing; as for the gnashing of teeth? The repulsion? Well…

3. Thymos

Yeah... No I don’t remember writing this, but yeah, that sounds like me. Sorry? You’re welcome? …I don’t know. I recall that I was reading Richard Brautigan and Franz Kafka around this time, in case that helps anyone cope with having just read that. I know, I know — it’s not an excuse.

But do you notice anything about my concluding sentence? “I don’t like this story.” The pen strokes look different for that line, as if I added it after some moments of reflection or before turning it in. I never felt at home with rage, though my dad sure let me know what it was. My father, before he left, threw the wickedest tantrums, while my mother was sullen and sad. I was raised by weeping and gnashing of teeth. But I never wanted to kill them. Poor Mrs. McKenzie was “speechless!!” What could she say? A year after these writings, on my own at college, I’d walk into an Orthodox church for the first time.

Have a good Lent, everyone, and please forgive me for all my sins against you, in word, thought, or deed.