Moot Thoughts & Musings

I am in the process of doing some polishing on the Hildegard paper for the conference this weekend. I had gotten it worked up as best I could, reworking it a fair amount since its initial incarnation as a term paper for the bane of my life Medieval Latin class last spring. In fact, I was starting to feel a little proud of how good I was getting at rewriting my own work--until I asked a professor to read it through for me.

Somehow I can't seem to get over the initial shock of seeing my work come back to me in pieces. ("Oh, my poor baby, let me coddle your shattered shards!") But in the end, it is always so much better. I am also realizing that this isn't necessarily a reflection of the worth of my work (or me, though I do my best to keep the two distinguished).

The background for such sensitivity towards my writing is based on my days as a deluded lower-classman in college. One day I woke up in my fourth (of five) year and realized that all this time I didn't really know what a thesis was! For nearly the majority of my college career I had been fooling myself into thinking that I knew how to write until the day I realized that, well, quite simply, that I didn't.

Writing is a craft. It is not something that is learned like one's multiplication tables, existing in defined parameters which one need only master. Writing is like building a ship. (Bear with me, now, we're on a Horatio Hornblower kick.) We start out learning how to build a raft--the 5 Paragraph Essay. Eventually we may move on to the row boat--perhaps the SIP. To think that we can jump from a row boat to a frigate is simply unrealistic. And as the boats become bigger, the boat-builder enlists more help. The wood tempers over time, and so do our words.

Because I have launched a row-boat, I think I can write, as if I have reached a moment of arrival, and perhaps it is not inappropriate to think of it as arriving, but only at a landmark along a long path.

I hope I never outgrow the sense of needing another's eyes to remeasure my planks. Learning how to write is an unfolding that I have barely begun to grasp. It is more than subjects and verbs and direct objects placed neatly in a row, rather it is conversation that exists along various stages of completion but always in a state of incompletion, for I will never have the final word.