Final Essay

Aesun Kim

John Lovas

Ewrit 1C (H)

June 24, 2004

A Bag of Belongings

            After a certain amount of time, a certain amount of lessons and perhaps even a certain number of risks taken, I find myself imbued with a new purpose, a new perspective, and newly established goals. But more importantly, with this feeling comes a need for me to preserve my experiences and my stories. Basically, this indescribable yearning for me to hold onto these experiences, lessons, and stories gives me the drive to sometimes sit down and make a record of it. To make these things tangible. Preserved in a physical form. What I find, looking back on the majority of works we've covered this quarter is the need for preservation on a variety of different levels.

            On my recently written Magnum Opus document, The Suitcase, I had described a walk through the Santa Clara County morgue,

The spacious room looks like a warehouse garage. Beige walls. Bare walls. The stench is intense and makes my stomach roil. I feel a headache coming. Two rows of metal gurneys, one on each side of the room, with white tarp covering the remains of what once was full of breath. Blood that has seeped through the cloth has now dried to a cloudy red. I can’t tell whether I’m getting chills from the lifeless air or from the lowered temperature of the room. Still, this place has a frightening feel to it. Some have paper bags of "belongings" placed over their bodies. Dead people have belongings here... It's an unusual feeling; breathing. We're all decomposing. Rotting

It was unusual to see a brown paper bag labeled with a thick permanent marker, "Belongings," over the dead person's body. After all, what do the belongings of a person who is no longer around useful to? Where does the meaning and the stories behind them go? I remember wondering to myself what contents could possibly be within that paper bag. Perhaps they were things that would make this dead person permanently remembered in society.

            Dave Egger's describes in his novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,  how we are all like shedding snakes,

"These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see...He leaves it where he molts. Hours days or months later, we come across a snake's long-shed skin and we know something of the snake...The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it." (216)

To Eggers, the preservation of our experiences and lessons don't need to be hidden from the rest of the world. Although this was difficult for me to accept at first, it made sense that the things that occurred to me of the past do not reflect the changed person I am today. After all, everyone's constantly changing perspectives, learning new things, deviating into unpaved roads.

            Similarly, in Art Spiegelman's comic Maus, the author finds himself trying to preserve the historical events and personal troubles his parents went through during the Holocaust. Throughout interviews with his father, he is able to collect the necessary details, facts, and emotions that would make his tragic memories live on -- still carry meaning many years later. At one point, Artie mentions, "But Pop, it's great material. It makes everything more real -- more human" (23). To the author, by holding onto all the artifacts -- physical, emotional, and those in memory -- need to be preserved; made tangible to be looked back on. This is one of the main reasons Artie was furious after learning his father had burned all the diaries of their mother who had killed herself a few years after the Holocaust. He writings, her voice, and her character were instantly disintegrated by a match lit by grief -- no longer preserved for people and family members to observe, remember, and cherish.

            Likewise, in Homer's Odyssey, the whole epic was known to originally be orally presented or even in tune by the Muse. The character of the Muse seemed to be of the utmost importance during that period of time because all the traditions, customs, travels, battles, and tragedies were retold to generations and generations after -- preserved for the benefit of the whole culture. Even the great Odysseus realizes the significance they have in the preservation of values and customs, as Homer describes:

"At once alert Odysseus carved a strip of loin,

rich and crisp with fat, from the white-tusked boar

that still had much meat, left, and called the herald over

"Here, herald, take this choice cut to Demodocus

so he can eat his fill -- with warm regards from a man who knows what suffering is...

From all who walk the earth our bards deserve

esteem and awe, for the Muse herself has taught them

paths of song."    (Book VIII, lines 532-540)

It is through the preservation of the heroic tales, such as The Odyssey, that we, many years later can look back on their experiences, their customs, and their lives at that specific moment in time.

            In the two dramatic literatures we encountered this quarter, A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare and Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, this theme of the usefulness of preservations and the lack thereof are also apparent. In Stoppard's Arcadia, the historians of the 20th century have been each trying to uncover any preserved artifacts of Lord Byron's life in the 19th century. There is a lack of preserved remains for them to look upon -- a lack of molted skin shed by the snake for them to develop conclusive results. In Shakespeare's drama, however, there is no preservation of personal stories, experiences -- things that would make a person, one-of-a-kind. Maybe that's why I wasn't able to relate to any of the Shakespearean characters as I could have done -- even remotely to characters of the previously mentioned literary works.

            Within our poetry section this quarter, particularly in the Jane Hirshfield anthology, Women in Praise of the Sacred, I found a few lines that could stand on their own from Rab'a's poem that struck me because I was that way as well:

I am fully qualified to work as a doorkeeper, and for this reason:
What is inside me, I don't let out;

What is outside me, I don't let in.      (43)

Although the rest of the poem seems to lead up to a portrayal of romance, the first three lines reflect how I was in the beginning of the quarter as well as how I've been the past 18-years. In terms of writing, I was really good at writing objectively with no emotion or personal reflections. Even now, I'm still working on developing my creative writing. I found myself faced with a challenge when I walked into Ewrit 1C, having to write expressive papers that would not only bring out my own personal voice, but also be graded upon the creativity and risk in writing. It was a big step away from the dull, analytical aspect that I've grown accustomed to. Even so, I'm very glad that I was able to take on such a challenge. Through my last expressive paper, I was able to explore the personal meanings I got from one of my favorite poems, T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I tried a more playful introduction and what I was really seeing in this poem rather than the interpretations I am floored with when I go on the web.

            What I confronted this quarter was "how difficult it is to give a true picture of yourself." Sometimes it feels as if words aren't enough to convey the true meaning, the true emotion and thoughts -- this was commonly felt during the whole Magnum Opus process. Still, I've realized that that is exactly the challenge of all good writers. It takes editing and more editing before one can finally be satisfied with one descriptive phrase, at times. But therein lies the value, I believe. Perhaps as I continue to develop my creative and expressive writing techniques the process will become easier. On another note, I also learned that "expressive writing requires that you express facets of yourself onto paper without fear that it is good or bad, happy or painful, enlightening or dull." One of the main reasons I feel so foreign to the task of writing personal documents is the notion that my work will be available for critique. But now that I look back on it, how else will one improve and develop? The whole Magnum Opus process was very enlightening for me. I usually don't find myself with an overwhelming amount of information that I have to write creatively and expressively, but I'm planning on doing more of it. Perhaps not ten-pages at a time, but paragraph by paragraph -- to build my expressive skills.

            I was pretty surprised this morning to have the image of the dead man's bag of belongings when I was thinking of the final essay we'd be writing today. The idea that we want to preserve the unique happenings in our life seems natural, because most of us value them and the meaning they carry. Reflecting upon what my bag of belongings would include after my quarter-length life as a Ewrit1C student (not to say that this quarter led me to some metaphorical death), I think I'd find a magnifying glass or even a microscope. This class was more of a personal English class than all the past English classes I've taken. Whether its through the Magnum Opus document or the individual expressive papers and student-led discussions, I'll remember this as the beginning of my new writing experiences to preserve and look back on.