JGB's ENG 104

I had my tea now and grieved about the exam. Leaving a whole essay question unanswered! How could I expect to get better than a C?

This passage gives a peek into the mind of the narrator, and it shows that she has been suppressing her mourning by creating an almost obsessive normality. As you read, she discloses the death of her parents, as if the fact were trivial and had no more importance than her exam or her cup of tea. The simplicities of her life bury her as though she is the one who is deceased. This is most likely her coping mechanism that she subconsciously uses to create a bubble of normalcy around her.

This character resonates with me for she also ignores her feelings to take care of things of seemingly more importance. Schoolwork takes up enough time just to keep her from rehashing painful memories though some do manage to slip through. She believes she is already past her mourning but all she’s doing is pushing it deep down for another time. Essentially, she is like many people in our society. We don’t have the time, energy, or patience to deal with our feelings on a daily basis. We prefer to focus on the tasks we can handle quickly, moving on to the next task at hand without much thought about our happiness.

But he didn’t give me my first tattoo till a year later, the day after we were married: a little butterfly pooled in the small of my back. Five years later, he began referring to it as his “early work,” even though he’d been tattooing for twenty-five years before he met me.

Lois narrates the story of her and Tiny’s love. The story is a love letter to Tiny just as her tattoos are a love letter from Tiny to her. Similar to how their love grows more complicated and intricate as time progresses, the tattoos that Tiny embeds on her skin become more intricate and require more skill. Even after Tiny’s death, all Lois has to do is look down in order to be reminded of Tiny and the love that they shared.  No one else can look at her without seeing the scars of a never-ceasing relationship. Despite the fact that Tiny dies, his art and his memory live on in her skin, so much so that Lois even receives calls from another tattoo artist requesting her picture so he can show the world what kind of artist Tiny was. Lois refuses because a picture of her body will not show the essence of his work; the essence of his work is their love.

She put one of the smaller pumpkins on Clark’s long lap. “Now, nothing surreal,” she told him. “Carve just a regular face, these are for kids.”

This line from “Yours” by Mary Robison is more then just about a jack-o-lantern carving. It is an indirect dying request to a loved one. Alison, the narrator, request is for her husband to stay strong, to be happy, and in general, to keep living as if she were still alive. We as the readers can come to this conclusion by seeing how hard Alison tries to keep up her charade of having a normal life. She does everything in her power to keep their social life normal.

“I used to drive out to the site of the accident all the time — a willow tree on Route 987. The last time I went the tree was still healing. The farmlands were a grim powdery blond in the white sun, and the earth was still ragged from winter. I sat there in my tiny Vega on the broken crumbly shoulder. The great tree and the land around — flat as a griddle for miles and miles — didn’t seem as fitting as I had once thought, not such a poetic place for two good lives to had stopped.”

In this passage, the narrator is talking about the death of her parents. Throughout the story, she is struggling with the will to live after her parents’ death. The narrator still visits the site of  the accident, two and a half years later. The willow tree on Route 987 reminds her that she is now alone in the world. The woman wants to move on with her life, but she finds it difficult to even live after her parents’ death.

 In the confessional the priest asked me if I practiced self-pollution. The words were formal, unfamiliar, but I knew what he meant. So, I thought, kneeling there in the dark, crushed with shame, there’s a name for it. I looked at the shadowy grill, looked toward the source of the soothing voice of absolution, the voice of forgiveness and hope, and I lied. ‘No,’ I whispered (108).

This story hints at a central theme that is, simply, sexuality is a sin. The main character struggles internally with his developing feelings that his religion condemns. As a twelve-year-old boy, he has an idea what “self-pollution” is and he feels ashamed that he has been doing something that is deemed dirty or self-harming. With the arrival of the bird, things turn sexual. Suddenly, “seedy” men are standing in the streets and the protagonist becomes antsy and wants to be part of the action.

I glanced up and saw my father in the back of the crowd, standing close to Mrs. Schlecta and whispering something in her ear. Her lips were wet. I didn’t know where my mother was. At the far end of the lot a girl in a college sweater was leaning against the fender of a convertible while her boyfriend pressed himself against her as if he wanted to dance (107).

Looking at the bird, which is symbolism for the lust the main character might have for a girl, the town and even his father seem overcome with desire. This passage also hints that his father is having an affair with Mrs. Schlecta due to his mother being nowhere in sight and his father being so close to the woman. Even the mention of her wet lips draws one’s attention to how much this story seems to be drenched in sexual innuendo. This is a coming of age story where the main character is being pushed into the confusing and strange adult world. Not only is he being told what is happening to him is unnatural, he is also trying to develop his own feelings on what is right and wrong. Looking at the bird, he is drawn closer and closer to the wonder of it; the amazement it fills him with. But he also scared of this thing that the adults tell him is wrong even as they themselves indulge in it. Going back to the fire and hanging out in the abandoned house, he is stuck between letting go of his inhibitions and staying away from what the church deems as “pollution”. In the end, he views the wound of the bird; the “raw”, “red”, and “wet” element between its legs. The fear overtakes him and pushes him to deny the feelings as he “threw the first stone” (109).

In an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school.

In “The First Day” by Edward P. Jones, what stood out to me most was the first sentence – specifically the phrase “long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother.” This, in particular, struck me as interesting because of  the perspective childrem have of their parents when they are younger in comparion to the view they have as adults. I remember looking at my own mother when I was five and thinking that she did not have a single flaw. As I got older I found this to be not only unrealistic but also untrue.  In the story, the reader sees the mother through the child’s eyes. We witness the childs dificulity with grasping something that is potentially embarrassing for both herself and her mother: the mothers inability to read. I would assume that this is the first flaw that the young girl is seeing in her mother, and that it is the start of other flaws coming to light down the road. While the narrator does display some shame for her mother, there is also a sense of pride for her. To see her mother handling a dificuilty with such fierceness can do nothing but create pride for her. You can tell that the daughter loves her mother even more for the experience.

My mother is now diseased, according to the girl’s eyes, and until the moment her mother takes her and the form to the front of the auditorium, the girl never stops looking at my mother. (351)

In this passage, the mother of the narrator is forced to admit her illiteracy to the mother of a little girl they encounter when attempting to register for school. The little girl’s mother does not seem to place any judgement on the narrator’s mother, except she seems to become “happier and, so much more satisfied with everything.” On the other hand, the little girl does not stop staring at the narrator’s mother until she is passed over to her new teacher.  As a reader, I found this passage most powerful because many people have felt as the narrator and her mother do in this story: inferior. Some come from families that can only provide what they need, while they work for any of their wants, and they get looked at as less than the people around them. When their peers realize that they do not come from money or have everything handed to them, most feel as if their peers look at their family just as the little girl at the narrator’s school looks at the narrator’s mother.

The speaker and the crowd first react to the bird in amazement; it draws a crowd of all ages and genders and, for a brief moment, there is no commotion from everyday life. The bird, described as being from a time before human industrialization, relates to the desire of the boy to visit the abandoned house.

The house breathed death and freedom. I went there whenever I could. I heaved my interdicted knife end-over-end at the lintels and peeling cupboards. I lit cigarettes and hung them from my lower lip, I studied scraps of pornographic magazines with a fever beating through my body.

The house is the boy’s escape into solitude, hidden from the judgmental eyes of his father and the church, as he discovers his blooming sexuality. He feels no shame looking at the pornographic  magazines alone, but when looking at the sexualized playing cards of Wayne’s, he feels a stinging of guilt.

The presence of the bird causes him to dance through the crowd with an excitement similar to the fever he felt looking at the magazines. Once the wind picks up and reveals the wound on the bird, it too represents death and freedom just as the house did. He sees the impact he has on the bird, which causes its stillness.

I threw the first stone.

Throughout the story, I can sense the mother’s hope that her daughter will have the life she hasn’t had. At first, it’s not clear why she wants her daughter to have a better life other than the fact that the girl is her daughter and mothers always want what’s best for their children.

The story takes place during the 1950s or 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement is happening, and African Americans have gained the opportunity to go to school with white students. This change explains why the mother did not get an education, but her daughter will be able to get one. The mother is taking a leap of faith, hoping that her daughter will succeed in ways that she had not been able to.

‘This form. Would you mind helping me fill it out?’ The woman still seems not to understand. ‘I can’t read it. I don’t know how to read or write, and I’m asking you to help me.’

When the mother asks the woman, whom she did not know, if she will help her fill out the form because she can’t read, the reader can sense the embarrassment that the mother feels. “‘I see,’ my mother says, looking about the room.” I feel like the mother whispers because she is embarrassed. The mother doesn’t want people to know that she can’t read or write, maybe because she thinks they will think less of her daughter.

All throughout the text, we can see examples of the mother’s pride — her pride in her dreams of getting her daughter into this school, her pride in her daughter’s appearance. Even more, we see hints that she is proud of herself. As the story progresses, we can see how her pride starts to break. We can pinpoint in the following passage the exact time those cracks start to form:

My mother is not convinced and for several more minutes she questions the woman about why I cannot attend Seaton. For as many Sundays as I can remember, perhaps even Sundays when I was in her womb, my mother has pointed across I Street to Seaton as we come and go to Mt. Carmel. “You gonna go there and learn about the whole world.” But one of the guardians of that place is saying no, and no again. I am learning this about my mother: The higher up on the scale of  respectability a person is — and teachers are rather high up in her eyes — the less she is liable to let them push her around. But finally, I see in her eyes the closing gate, and she takes my hand and we leave the building.

The first cracks appear when one of the few things she can offer to her child is taken away simply because of where they live. Immediately after this encounter, we see that she is still determined to provide for her child, but her pride is wounded. It is wounded again as she admits she cannot read and once again when she relents to the fact that this is the reality she lives in and that she cannot keep the one promise she made to her child. As she exits the new school without having played the game she and her daughter made up long ago, before the teacher takes her daughter from the auditorium, we are left with the impression that her pride is wounded, if not entirely shattered.

So, I thought, kneeling there in the dark, crushed with shame, there’s a name for it. I looked at the shadowy grill, looked toward the source of soothing absolution, the voice of forgiveness and hope, and I lied. “No,” I whispered… I threw the first stone.

I found “Rara Avis” to be surprisingly powerful for its length. T.C. Boyle is able to suggest the narrator’s emerging understanding of sexuality through blatant representations such as pornographic magazines and Wayne’s deck of smutty playing cards and, indirectly, through the symbol of the bird. In the beginning of the story, the narrator views the bird as “a woman or girl… long legs naked beneath a skirt of jagged feathers…” and then, later in the story, he sees the bird’s wound as something “secret, raw, red, and wet… just above the juncture of the legs…” In the passage quoted above, and from that point on, the story directly addresses the narrator’s struggle with sexuality.

Twice in the story the narrator denies himself salvation: once when lying to the priest about masturbation and again, in the story’s final scene, when throwing the first stone at the bird (a reference to a biblical line used in response to an accusation of adultery). I interpret this as a rather violent denial of himself and of his emerging sexuality and, from a conservative Christian point of view, his own sins.

In an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my very first day of school. I am wearing a checkeredlike blue-and-green cotton dress, scattered about these colors are bits of yellow and white and brown.

These two sentences of “The First Day” by Edward P. Jones reminded me of how my mother was on my first day of school. The narrator was dressed by her mother in colorful clothes, but the tone of these sentences does not match the brightness of the clothes. When I read this story, I started to see how much work the narrator’s mother has put into the girl’s appearance. It shows the love the mother feels for her daughter, and it shows how the daughter feels later in life about her mother. I believe the daughter, later in life, writes this story in memory of her mother.

Perched there at the lip of the roof, its feet clutching the drainpipe as if welded to it, the bird was a coil of possibility, a muscle relaxed against the moment of tension. (109)

When I read this sentence of the story, I immediately see the bird as a metaphor for the child.  The phrase “its feet clutching the drainpipe as if welded to it” (109) can be seen as a visual representation of how the boy must feel inside. Rigid, tense, unsure, and scared. However, the the bird’s symbolic meaning in the story is mysterious not only to the reader, but also to the narrator, a young, adolescent boy who fascinated by sex. Will it fly? Will it stay? What could be its reason for staying perched on the roof? The suspense of not knowing what is going to happen to this bird feeds the child’s own disheartened view of himself. Due to the boy’s religious background, he feels ashamed that he is experiencing such desire for all things related to sex. Yet, somehow he is captivated by the possibility of what the bird might do, so he stays. At the end of the story, the bird raises its wings only to expose the damage underneath its seemingly unmarked body. The “secret, raw, red, and wet” (109) wound on the bird can be interpreted as a metaphor for the boy’s own secrets.

After the class discussion, I see how the boy feels shame for his thoughts and actions throughout the story. At first, it didn’t occur to me that the boy’s shame stems from his emerging awareness of sexuality. Now, I can pick up on all of the clues that hint towards this central idea. The bird might not only be a symbol or metaphor that represents the boy, but it can also a metaphor for how the boy begins to think and feel about girls. In the first sentence of the story, the bird is compared to a woman with “long legs naked and exposed underneath a skirt of jagged feathers.” (106) The boy views sex as something mysterious and secret to him, “I glanced up and saw my father in the back of the crowd, standing close to Mrs. Schlecta and whispering something in her ear. Her lips were wet. I didn’t know where my mother was.” (107) The story represents the shame a child feels growing up in a society where curiosity about sexual matters is discouraged.

In an otherwise unremarkable September morning, long before I learned to be ashamed of my mother, she takes my hand and we set off down New Jersey Avenue to begin my first day of school. (349)

The first line of Jones’ “The First Day” informs the reader that the narrator is telling a story about the appreciation and love she feels for her mother, who has passed away before the telling of the story. The narrator is an adult who reflects back to a time when she is a child. The narrator of this story writes in present tense from the first person perspective so that the reader is able to experience the situation as if he/she is there with the narrator.

The narrator takes the reader through events that suggest she and her mother live during a time of racial discrimination and injustice. She describes a situation in which she has been turned away from a school that is “out of her league,” and has to attend a less qualified school in order to show the injustices that have been shown towards the girl and her mother, possibly because they are a minority. In the end, the narrator states, “I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all.” which indicates how important the girl’s mother is to her. The narrator holds her mother’s love higher than the opinions of others.

Her shoes make loud sounds in the hall. She passes through the doors and I can still hear the loud sounds of her shoes.

The narrator’s mother’s footsteps are a metaphor for the life lessons her mother has taught her. The narrator still thinks of her mother, and even after she has passed away, the narrator still holds her mother higher in respect to all others.

I lied. “No,” I whispered. And then there was the bird.

The narrator’s decision to lie turns him away from the things the priest offers him: absolution, forgiveness, and hope. Then the bird appears, the embodiment of strength and vulnerability. The bird appears, quite literally, when the boy needs him most. Without a male figure to look up to, the boy has to rely on outside sources to figure out who he wants to be, and despite the fact that his admiration of the bird is unintentional, he looks up to it. One of the bird’s symbolic representations is manhood, and the boy, struggling with puberty, sees the bird as an object to be conquered. When the narrator sees the wound of the bird, he lashes out in anger by throwing the first stone. This act represents his anger towards his inevitable manhood and the despair he feels internally.

“Rara Avis” by T Coraghessan Boyle uses a lot of symbolism. It is through this symbolism the reader gets a greater understanding of what “Rara Avis” is about. However out of all the lines in the text I find the last line the most powerful sentence. It truly captures  the narrator’s thoughts and  feelings, bring the symbols and events of the story to a singular point of understanding.

I threw the first stone.(109)

This five word sentence conveys so much meaning; not only does this line have a very biblical reference, it is the narrator’s direct response to John 8:7 “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

In religious ed I was taught the exact rules of what is considered a sin. Yes, it seems silly, as to most a sin is anything that is of wrong doing or braking a commandment. However, a sin is not only doing a wrong deed. A sin is recognizing an action is wrong, yet still choosing to do that deed or not feeling remorse for that action. By throwing the first stone the narrator is the first to condemned himself. He has recognized his masculinity or “self-pollution”(108) as something wrong. The action of throwing the stone is a physical symbol that he is taking his “self-pollution” as a sin that he feels can not be forgiven.

” Her loud shoes in the hall. She passes through the doors and i can still hear the loud  sounds of her shoes .And even when the teachers turn med toward the classrooms and I hear what must be the  singing and talking of all the children in the world, i can still hear my mothers footsteps above it all.”

Edward P. Jones’ “The First Day” is centered around the relationship of the main character and her mother. Their relationship as we read in the first sentence:

“In an otherwise unremarkable September morning long before I learn to be ashamed of my mother…” ,

was never as strong as it was during and before the events of this story.   The change in their relationship is brought about due to her mother refusing to join her in a game that she normally plays with her. After refusing, her mother departs and all the main character hears is her footsteps. At that moment the main character is encountered with the thought that her mother may not always be by her side.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

— Donald Justice

I remember when, years ago, I would read Donald Justice’s poem “Men at Forty” with a kind of anticipatory nostalgia, imagining the sweet melancholy I would feel when I left my thirties behind and joined the legions of men who must, as Justice puts it, “learn to close softly / The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to.” I imagined what it would be like to stand before a bathroom mirror and encounter my own image in precisely the manner that the poem describes –

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices trying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather

– past and present merging in the very features of my face, a face that would have become more like my father’s than that of the child I had once been. “They are more fathers than sons themselves now,” Justice declares with a kind of forlorn certainty, the scale of time finally tipped from one side to the other, and I imagined that this would of course be true.

It was not true for me, though, when I turned forty. I continued to feel then more son than father, though my father had already died. Now that I am fifty – past fifty, having turned fifty-one – it does indeed seem true, indisputably and inconsolably true. Any childhood photograph of me looks a great deal more like my son than like me, this son who now at seventeen looks more like a man than a boy. And I am startled from time to time when I look in the mirror and feel that I have caught a glimpse, brief and unsettling and spectral, of my father’s weathered face, my startled expression become his, as if he too is surprised to have stumbled upon me in such an otherwise insignificant moment.

As for the photos I have of my father, they have begun to look – not more like me than him, not that, but more of me, as if they were taken as sly predictions or gentle warnings (to which I was, of course, always much too young to attend) that this is what I would become, the expression I would bear, the lines and folds that I would wear as though they were etched there, as indeed they were in a way, in some act of ritual scarification.

“Something is filling them,” filling these men, Justice goes on to write at his poem’s conclusion,

something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgage houses.

And I used to snicker a little, way back when, at the sweet sad irony of that final line, of the mundane earthly debts and responsibilities – the mortgaged house and all that comes with it: the slope behind it with its inevitably disappointing lawn and the gray mulched flower beds and the scattering of sticks and snake holes and dried leaves – so many inconsequential annoyances and obligations intruding upon that immense and somber and crepuscular sound, the universe’s holy shimmering that the man who has turned forty has just begun to detect.

I don’t snicker any more. I don’t snicker because I know what I didn’t know at thirty or even forty, what even Donald Justice may not have known when he wrote this poem. He was, after all, only just past forty himself when the poem appeared in his 1967 collection Night Light, and so perhaps he was still caught in the sweet pleasures of its sad embrace. I know now, a man at fifty, that even our mundane earthly debts acquire, as time passes, as the scale dips further down, their own spectral grace. We begin to sense that these too – and not just our mortgaged house but the spindly trees we planted, the weedy beds to which we seasonally attend, the dry leaves spilling from the woods’ edge, the sputtering car with its cracked windshield, the flat-tired wheelbarrow, the unwieldy unreliable rake, the vines creeping around porch rails and above doorways, the wasp-infested birdhouse, the nest spilling twigs and cloth from its perch, the carpenter bees’ tunnels of mud and spit, the aching joints, the calloused hands, the cloudy eyes, the stacks of bills in their leather folder, the empty bottles and cans in the kitchen cupboard, the unsprung mousetraps and garbage bags and dryer sheets and wicker baskets and clothes yet to be ironed and nearly spent candles and loose change on the counter – all of this, every bit, are merely the notes composing the grand elegiac hymn, a million and a million more droning voices. They are all, all of them, that twilight sound I hear. It is immense, unceasing, terrifying, as haunting and beautiful a sound as anyone would ever hope to hear.

And I know this, too, I guess, or suspect it – that at sixty I will finally understand that at fifty I had not yet heard the half of it, did not have a clue of the great, magnificent sounds the earth could make, the giant crash of thunder or an axe raised high against the darkening sky to again and again split the wood.

(This post is reprinted from the blog The Admonishing Song.)

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly…

— Ted Hughes, “Wind”

This poem is full of remarkable metaphors: a house “far out at sea all night,” the woods “crashing through darkness,” the “skyline a grimace,” the house ringing “like some fine green goblet in the note / That any second would shatter it.” My favorite image from this poem, though, is in the two lines above, a “black- / Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly.” The exaggerated alliteration of the b sound combined with the staccato rhythm of the short syllables seems to conjure the brutal strength of the wind, a tension that is released in the very different sound of slowly. Every time I read this poem I feel as though I can see the gull straining and straining against the storm’s winds, its wings extended, and then, when its strength is finally gone, its form slowly bending before it is swept away.

Here’s the complete poem:

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

— Ted Hughes