The Spectrum Of Longing

Girls, romanticize yourselves. You are a queen. You are a warrior. You are an enchantress. You are a mermaid. You are a goddess. You are all of these things and more, you are the stuff of fairytales. 

ITS MARCH YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

can’t stop smiling in inappropriate situations

did you know they say calculus is the language of God. did you know they tried to hold math up to infinity like a candle to the void. did you know statisticians plunged into the vastness of random chance and picked out patterns and equations and eight hundred ways to tell you how big your inevitable errors are and how far off those guesses at errors might be. math haters I can't sit with you anymore. human innovation is cradled in these ancient, methodical, desperate attempts at understanding what we are not designed to understand

these are my 16 kids, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, and rook

(teacher walks into class with a cup of coffee in his hand) me internally: "macha one sip da, one sip you give no ONE SIP"

the love when you say you are full but your mom serves a little bit more food on your plate, the love when you compliment a classmate that you don't interact with much and their eyes light up, the love when someone has drawn you or written you some poems but are too shy to show them to you, the love when you wake up too early and everything's quite and only the birds have begun to sing, the love when a loved one hugs you and doesn't let go, the love when someone says that they're proud of you, the love when you accidentally brush the arm of that special someone and both of you blush, the love when you give a stranger a smile on the bus, on the train, on the subway, and they smile back, the love when you remember a cherished but long forgotten memory, the love when someone buys you a leather-back copy to write in because they remembered you are a poet, the love when you feed a street dog once and then they wag their tail every time they see you, the love when you give some food or money to a homeless person and their eyes say nothing but gratitude. that kind of love? the world really depends on it.

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond - and his response is magnificent: “Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Nimbus Publishing and Vagrant Press Goose Lane Editions Breakwater Books Ltd. The Acorn Press Bouton d'or Acadie Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des arts du Canada