On the way back to my dorm room today, returning from a meeting across a lawn steeped in darkness, I had to remind myself of the conclusion I’d come to in one of my recent WNB entries, namely that we can miss so much, and lose so much, if we go around so submerged in habitual thoughts and mental to-do lists that we fail to see what our actually-present surroundings may be telling us, which could well be something we greatly need to hear. And what I found was that, even with such a short duration of the walk left, something still came through to me.

I was passing by the trees on the lawn by the business building, their leafy portions distinguished from their surroundings more as great clouds of denser darkness than for any actually visible features, and heard from within them the familiar buzzes and hums of cicadas, whose chirrups rank alongside those of crickets in comprising the timeless soundtrack of summer. Though we may have seen or heard something a million times, to the point where, like a cliché, it no longer conveys meaning, it is always possible to find a way to view it anew. As I heard the cicadas chirruping for possibly the thousandth time in my life, I noticed how the sounds that rose to the fore of their general background hum seemed to take turns, alternate – cheepcheep; chepcheep. That coupled with the veritable black hole of darkness the treetops seemed to have been dipped in made me think of each of those calls as a beacon, as each cicada saying “I’m here – is there anyone out there?”. For though they might have some bug senses I’m not aware of, in such opaque darkness I reflected they could be mere feet away from another tree, or even inches away from their fellow-creatures, and have no way of seeing that this was so. But when they make their sounds, when they sing – now they are extending themselves beyond whatever location they happen to be in, beyond their one lonely point in the darkness of their tree universe. And when they do, that entire, echoing response, so resonant that there could be hundreds of them in there, is what makes its way back. I imagine it continuing like this all night long: “I’m here – is anyone else out there?” and each response reverberating its way back across that empty expanse affirming yes, yes.

Though it seems crazy that I’d turn this into a writing analogy, that was the next thing that came to mind. Because aren’t we all, in a sense, like that? We all live for the most part mired in our own tasks, habitual thoughts, worries and routines. And these revolve around the things that are generally thought to be ‘important’ practical matters in life. But then there are these times when we wonder, when we can’t figure something out, when we feel emotions so deeply we fear we might split at the seams trying to contain them all. And during those times, we think: Is it just me? Am I the only one who wonders and fears and thinks like this? Or is there anyone else out there who experiences the world like this too? In a world of the practical, the instant, and the superficial, many times it may certainly seem that way. But when we write – and more specifically, when we share our writing – we go out on a limb just like that first cicada does, and launch our doubts and hopes and all of who we are out there into the night sky. And then we hear others share, hear the words which paper the walls of their souls begin to flow, and the answer echoes back, resounding yes, yes.

Explication:

The genesis of this piece is expressed at the beginning of the piece itself, where I wrote about my thoughts as I was crossing a lawn at night on the way back to my dorm room. I often make it a point to cross the large, open fields that seem vast at nighttime rather than take the paths, but it’s so easy to become enmeshed in phone-related concerns that I have to make it a point to do so or will simply remain unconscious throughout most of the walk.

In terms of the process, my journal-style pieces don’t undergo the same type of intensive, repeated revision that my poems do, simply because of the fact that they are usually stream-of-consciousness writings whose purpose is served by the very fact that they get thoughts out and help clarify them. Yet this by no means implies that this single-draft writing occurs in isolation: instead, a previous piece I wrote (which is also directly mentioned in this) played a huge role in preparing the way for this, even ensuring that it could occur in the fist place, since the earlier piece prompted me to start going out of my way to take greater note of my surroundings. Then, it in turn served as a sort of planning ground for future pieces.  Its focus on our state of mind when under we’re pressure and solely focused on trivial tasks really contributed to “The Life of a Week” poem, and the specific descriptions of the trees, specifically stating that they were “distinguished… more as great clouds of denser darkness than for any actually visible features” was a direct precursor to the trees being pictured as “featureless containers” in the Rosedale Glow poem.  So perhaps this piece could be thought of as a part of revision on a grander scale of a set of ideas being refined and developed over the course of multiple pieces.  Returning to the context of this piece alone, some revision was still necessary.  While the bulk of the piece remained the same, I realized that the rhetorical questions I had initially written towards the end, the ones that hopefully contribute to the potential impact of its end, were phrased in the opposite way that I had intended them to be, in which the comforting answer would be ‘no’ rather than the ‘yes’ that the piece closes with.

This piece rests on an analogy between the cicadas chirruping in the darkness to writers who may at times feel isolated sharing their work with one another and receiving an ‘echo’ back that someone else is having that experience, too. The majority of the figurative language I use in this piece revolves around the description of the trees, including the aforementioned metaphor “clouds of denser darkness” , and the cicadas.  The cicadas are personified, with their sounds pictured as asserting their own existence, conveying “I’m here”, and as feeling comfort from the echo that greets their query.  I use a simile to compare the experience of having seen a sight so many times that it no longer has an impact on you to a written or spoken cliché, and use humor with the aside that the cicadas may have “some bug senses I am not aware of”.  The line “the veritable black hole of darkness the treetops seemed to have been dipped in” uses humor with the inclusion of ‘veritable’, metaphor in asserting that the trees have been dipped into this, and is a hyperbole since it’s a comparison that goes a bit over the top, also contributing to a humorous effect.

In the classroom, I could use this piece to, first of all, point out to students that surprising insights can come to mind if they take even a very brief walk outside or, for just a few minutes, make it a point to be fully aware of their surroundings and try to see these, however familiar, in a different way. I could also use this as an introduction to our first session of sharing writing pieces with one another. Considering the trepidation and insecurity that students will very likely be feeling before the first sharing session, as well as doubts about the value and validity and thinking that, it could be so helpful for them to know that not only are they not the only ones who feel this, but also that the struggle with writing is one experienced by all, too.