Under the Vent in Winter

At my last grade school, I remember that we used to have to go outside during recess. You could not go to the library, or some common room for 15 minutes, or an hour, you had to go outside. The fenced-in school yard was hal concrete and half grassy hill. Right smack in the back wall of the school there was a heating duct, I guess we can call it, with a grill on it, which was the exit for the school's ventialtion system. All of the air that had circulated through the school was expelled here in a constant rush of air. It stuck out of the wall about 2 or 3 feet or so, and blew all the air downwards so that in almost any weather, the cement directly underneath was dry. In the rainy spring and fall, and in the cold of winter, I would sit there alone waiting to go back in. I never understood why no one else ever seemed to be interested in that spot after I "discovered" it. Or why no one else faught with me for a little warm solitude there. I would watch the others running or playng and wanted no part on days like this. These were days for sitting still and watching the world go on without you.


I used to have a bedroom with no windows. There was always darkness for sleep. I never slep while there was light in the sky. I ceased to be diurnal. I lived at night. My mother's boyfriend called me the vampire living in the basement. I can't remember if he was the one who turned out to be a rapist or the one was was only verbally abusive. In the middle of the night, light was forbidden in that room by the commands of the mother-on-high: the computer screen flickering went on without notice most days. She needed only to fool herself into thinking I was sleeping, the rest didn't matter. Like a bear in a cave, I awoke one day to find that it was spring and I had missed a whole season.


I play video games, I read many books. I carry music in a portable format. Headphones protect my ears from the world. Opaque paper is a screen saving me from other beings. I always break eye contact first. Video games ensnare me and keep me isolated hours at a time, blissfully hibernating away the coldness of being, the terror of existence. I sit in public, unseen. I would pawn my savings for an ocean to cross, a country to explore, but I am always mysteriously broke. In my mind, I would conquer. But I never leave, never start. I am always finishing and refinishing the minutiae of my life in new and unexpected ways. When I finally go to war, my sword will reflect so much light from polish that I will have effectively blinded myself.


The imagination is free to dream up worlds as we would like to have them, as opposed to the one we have. Northrop Frye says that people who talk in prose are very rare. Prose is a literary conception - we recognize things which are laid out in prose as literary, as connected to literature, a world with it's own standards and realities. Ironically, literature tells us more about the nature of literature than the real world. People seem baffled by that. Even the most die-hard scholar of literature admits to an escapist urge in its study. Why does it not tell us as much about life? Life speaks in english; books speak in English. There is a difference. one deals with communicating on a superficial level - at the grocery store, at the nak, on the phone. Aother deals with forming mental concepts, such as theories inn physics and for the contruction of workable models we use to describe the world. The level of literature seeks to form a bond with and a control of, one's environment. It seeks to turn an objective, unfeeling environment into a home: we shape our lives into narratives because that allows us to relate events, elements, ourselves and other people to one another to forge the limits of our "world." It allows us to identify withthe world I suppose. Maybe I'll get into Northrop Frye's theories some other time. This is enough: literature speaks the language of myth and meaning, and like ancient magic, seeks to give us a feeling that, in some small way, we control the outcome.

Some want to run away and join the circus. I want to run away and join literature. But I am afraid to write myself in, to live on the page like everybody else. If we are to have the courage to live, we must see ourselves as the main characters of a book we are writing, to belive we can produce a life which makes for good reading and of which we are ultimately the masters.

But I just sit under the vent in winter, my claustrophobic world, until it's time to come inside.