Okay with the Gray
By: Dave Woehrle
While visiting my brother at the University of Missouri in Columbia when I was seventeen, I overheard a semi-drunken conversation concerning the color spectrum.
One student, Student A, said, “When you think about it, all colors are actually gray.”
Another student, Student B, asked, very stonerly, the eternal stoner question: “What?”
Student A said: “Well, when you look at the rainbow, you know, like ROY G BIV, you’re seeing the truest or most pure color in each color’s spectrum. Light refracts those colors identically every time.”
Student B, slightly more buzzed and argumentative in his poncho and green headband, said, “Who’s to say what the true colors are anyway…man? And how does fucking light refraction have anything to do with everything being gray?”
Student A sighed and said, “I’m talking about the calibrated spectrum here. The colors you see in the rainbow each have equal degrees of shades in either direction. For example, there are both darker reds and lighter reds than the one found in a rainbow. Likewise, true gray is the midpoint between white and black. I just think the truest sense of each hue is one balanced in shade, the centermost. The best gray is most vibrant.”
The other student swigged his beer and thoughtfully replied, “Fuck.” He fidgeted with his green head band, softly snapping it to his greasy hair, before taking it off and saying, “Well, this green is nicer than any gray, though. I mean, right? Am I right?” He attempted a high five, which was not reciprocated, and then walked to the kitchen for more beer.
I was still in high school at his point. I sat on a smelly brown couch, a little buzzed myself, trying to look cool and old-for-my-age as to appear sexy to the cute, hippie college girls. Although I didn't get laid or even looked at, I liked my first taste of academic life: drug abuse, neat conversations about colors, and people who liked sweaters and obscure bands.
Now, as I graduate from college myself, I think of this conversation about the middle gray as a metaphor for open minds, ones which can dim and darken mutually in thought and life. It's beneficial to understand both sides of the arguments, to flip the coin of our thinking. But sometimes ideas are more like dodecagons than coins. And this is where thinking gets tricky.
***
I initially attended a community college because I simply didn't apply anywhere else. I craved nothing from the world after high school because I was an eighteen year-old boy who was having sex fairly often. What else could possibly matter at that age? Sure, I hated President Bush and was idealistic, but I found it was easier to buy bumper stickers and get high in forests than it was to march or enroll in political science classes.
My experience at the community college was similar to high school: the English and History teachers loved me because I actually asked questions in class. It wasn't that I was, or ever will be, a good student; it's that my peers were such intellectual sloths that I looked like fucking Einstein in contrast. I got all A's and B's and was lucky enough to meet visiting authors, which was invaluable as a young writer. These authors signed their poetry chapbooks for me and discussed the challenges of writing. Poet Tim Seibles offered the best advice I ever received: "Keep writing from your bones, Dave."
I also learned how to "close read" a text, to underline and write ideas down in margins, to lick stories, poems, and essays clean for tasty meaning. I wrote an eight page paper on the theme of sin in Chekhov's “The Lady with the Dog” and felt like a Harvard scholar. Once again, I wasn't the best in this style of writing, but the competition was scarce.
I found one class particularly enlightening in terms of how one goes about interpreting literature. A Non-Traditional student in my introductory Shakespeare class had an interesting interpretation of a Shakespeare sonnet. She was the kind of woman who, in lieu of being like all the other students – i.e. young – started nearly every sentence with, “Well, I have kids, and…” somehow convinced her ability to produce and raise offspring warranted any inane statement she was about to make concerning Elizabethan literature. She was working on a "novel," as all recently divorcees seemingly are, a novel that will no doubt include pain, metaphors about wild horses, and an unconventional, Richard Gere-looking man arriving at a ho-hum town to show the locals how to live again.
Anyway, when our professor asked the class what we thought of “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day,” she promptly raised her hand and said, “I…I think it’s about menopause.”
Our professor, being kind and open-minded, said, “Okay. Okay, why do you think that? What about the text gives you that idea?”
She explained, “You know, like, flowers?”
The professor was suddenly in a difficult position. He could either A) do what any logical person would do, which is point and laugh, or B) Try to create a positive, constructive discussion out of an aging woman’s post-menstrual woes, perhaps even discuss other Shakespeare subjects, such as the mind-bending Queen Mab speech being an analogy for hot flashes. I laughed off her interpretation as a one time thing; no one could so blatantly inject themselves into texts, could they?
***
I transferred to Coe College and majored in English and Creative Writing. In hindsight, these majors were a clever, intelligent way to say that I've never been good at doing actual, tangible things, like cooking or building stuff out of wood.
But I wanted to be a literary intellectual. I wanted this for two reasons:
1. I love the written word and always had since I was 13 when read the anonymous line, "My life is blue leaves." The power of image, however ambiguous, was intoxicating.
2. Not being an athlete, the "artist" thing was a means to get laid and rationalize personal morbidity and various drug habits.
Some male writers may claim other motives, which may be valid, but Reason #2 has universality with much supporting evidence in male literary history.
I wanted an open mind, as if such a kaleidoscopic term came in the form of a diploma. Liberal Arts colleges claim they teach students to think, to train them for nothing, but to prepare them for everything. But one could easily argue students leave college untrained, wishy-washy, way too into journaling, organic foods, and The Decemberists. In other words, there's a sameness in the open-mindedness students attain, but I didn't know that at the time. I thought my individualism unparalleled. My professors and peers at Coe would surely gasp upon hearing me speak and write, offering book deals and virgins. I found out that I wasn't the first smart ass, undergraduate stoner to attend a liberal arts school in the Midwest. In fact, I was the norm.
My first course was called "Current Literature." I read T.C. Boyle, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palanhiuk, and Haruki Murakami, all authors I had not previously read, a wake up call to my self-perceived well-read-ness. These contemporaries opened my eyes to what fiction could be and do.
The poetry section of this course was a bit shakier, as it consisted of reading wild, verbose stanzas by Black Mountain School poets in class, then sitting in silence, then our professor saying, "Yeah…yeah, that's seriously good. Damn."
My first attempts in this class with reading literary criticism ended fruitlessly, setting up a downward spiral for my attitude towards reading writing that's about others' writing. As most poetry anthologies do, each poet has a brief introductory essay by a distinguished English professor. These essays often say less about the poet and more about the professor and their ego-stroking admiration for the said poet. These essays are – let's face it – a sad attempt to ride the glorious coattails of literary giants. I was reading along until one such professor claimed Robert Creeley's poetry had a certain "anti-referential sensuousness." Really? As a reader, was I suppose to say, "Oh. Of course. Creeley is all about sensual details. And yet he's against referring to things"? Such masturbatory, semiotic phrases were utterly soul-sucking, as I had thought words were meant to communicate ideas clearly rather than cloud them with thesaurus-humping adjectives. So I did what every red-blooded American college student does when his or her textbooks become too unrelated and detached from real life: I threw the poetry anthology at my sleeping roommate, bought a sixer, and watched some Family Guy, a show that has sensory details and refers to things.
***
In the fall of 2007, I took a required Literary Analysis class for my English degree. The first class consisted of reading a syllabus that contained an excerpt from a letter written by John Keats: “…several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me; what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
This was written in 1817, a time when soft-focus, blemish-free portraits of white men sitting at lecterns were all the rage, as was randomly capitalizing words to signify the essential THE-ness of a given subject. This is no love, just Love, no mystery but Mystery. Language became essence-driven and individualized.
This was the Age of Enlightenment, where secular rationality grew with both scientific and artistic discoveries. Questions bloomed about God, free will, government; the nature of the individual vs. society, stuff spoken about in Parisian coffee shops and salons amongst artsy Men Who Had Great Hair and Dark Inner Lives.
But back to Keats. We can say the “Negative Capability” is being comfortable with ambiguity. In other words, Keats suggests those interested in the written word to be okay with the gray. I think Okay with the Gray is a far catchier, more succinct way of putting it, a simple slogan for the many confused English majors sadly wandering America’s campuses. And why “sadly”? Let’s face it: English majors are not a happy crew. You don't get into locking yourself in your room with hundreds of books because people like you. English majors don't have journals full of statements like, "This is great. I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow.” English majors question the black and white and subsequently become depressed and wordy about the wonders of ambiguity.
Our self-perceived misery, no matter how solipsistic and shallow, is self-fulfilling as a literary bonus, as great books are about bad things occurring and how people deal with it. Literature has to be that way. Smooth, easy lives are boring and difficult to relate to. The mere fact that we are cognitive, self-aware, mortal creatures is just really, really painful. Literature is questions about humanity, why we feel what we feel, and why we seem to fuck things up so often. The answers are never black and white. Hence, we need to be Okay with the Gray, which is hard because one has to be in a constant state of maybe-ism. That “irritable reaching after fact or reason” is kind of what sets apart from the animals, right? How does one stop “reaching” for logical answers?
The class started with such questions and an airing of grievances, the only thing thicker than the bewilderment in our brows being the notes in the margins our literary criticism anthologies. Being more linguistically crude than many of my peers, my notes included questions like, "What the fuck is antifoundationalism?" The vulgarity, I believe, is apt, considering the verbose definitions of such abstract terms: "In its extreme forms, the poststructural claim is that the workings of language inescapably undermine meanings in the very process of making such meanings possible, or else that every mode of discourse "constructs," or constitutes, the very facts or truths or knowledge that it claims to discover." Crystal fucking clear. This definition is from the dryer-than-Sahara-Desert book A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams, a text in which I yellow-highlighted random paragraphs so, in class, when I had my book open, I looked like I had done something.
One question we had in class was blunt and perfect. We had been discussing the role of the author’s background in analyzing literature, if an author really “knows” what he or she writes in the context of their place and time. The question: “Does any writer really say what he or she really means?” A sentence was given as an example: “The boy chased the ball across the street. How many ways can such a straightforward message be construed?" I saw this as my opportunity to bullshit. And, oh, can I bullshit.
I used my first law of English-Professor-Speak (EPS): start every sentence with the word “Essentially.” Such a word denotes, of course, the essentials of a given subject while at the same time making the speaker exempt from enumerating the specifics, some of which may conflict with the speaker’s view of the Essential – capital “E.” Another aspect of EPS I implemented: adding the word "socio" to other words, since such a prefix can be used in any discussion when one is describing a situation in which a person or persons interact.
So I answered thusly about the boy chasing the ball across the street: “Essentially, the statement concerns a picaresque vignette, if you will. The ball, clearly a yonic symbol, denotes a Freudian envy of motherhood by oppressed boys due to the binding patriarchal society in which they grew up. The street symbolizes oncoming adulthood, plagued with the dangers of alienating modernity, personified by the traffic. The other side of the street is the great unknown: life, love, death, and the existential dread of knowing one's self in the context of the larger socio-political schema."
I looked about the classroom, hoping for laughs. When none came, I realized how diseased we all were, how blindly trapped we had become in over-digging the meaning out of everything, like the drunk who goes around at the end of the parties sucking on the near-empties. We want the last drops of analogies, and if they aren't there, lord knows we can shoulder in our own with vague jargon.
After all our questions concerning literary theory were answered with other questions, or simply the word "interesting," we'd discuss specific Emily Dickinson poems, looking for images, metaphors, and repetition. Again, these discussions were more like a series of questions:
"What do you think the snake symbolizes? Nature? Death?"
"Then there's the boy looking at the snake. Is this poem about a loss of innocence?"
"Is the bog image, like, um, an opposition to the grass image?"
"There's grass in bogs."
"Not really."
"What about swamps?"
"There aren't any swamps in this poem."
"But swamps have grass. And swamps are boggy, right?"
"But nature doesn't have those boundaries, those terms of 'bog' or 'swamp' or 'field.'"
"Maybe that's what she's getting at."
"She's always getting at that. Interconnectedness, one-ness and shit."
"Count the syllables. She's doing some emphasizing on adjectives pertaining to the bog."
"Yeah. I think I read somewhere that Dickinson lived near a swamp. Or a field."
"Right! Maybe this is some psychological stuff from childhood, how nature replaced religion."
We were never told as students whether we were right or wrong, for that would be too black and white for teachers. This was frustrating at first. It all felt random and forced.
I said, “So you’re saying this poem could mean this, or it could mean that, and if it doesn’t mean either of those, it could mean something completely different?”
"That's an interesting question, Dave."
"Thanks. Answer it."
“Dave, you’re getting caught up in the binaries.”
Though I knew the figurative meaning of this – that the easy right/wrong interpretation of literature doesn't exist – the statement conjured an image of zeros and ones tying me down and slicing up my eyes and ears with their sharp numerical edges.
“Yeah, but isn’t avoiding the binary its own binary, like binary vs. every else?”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t this just another brand of all-or-nothing thinking? Like of all-or-nothing vs. something else. Isn't the vastness of I'm-not-sure-ism its own convenient cop-out?"
"Interesting. So you're kind of a deconstructionist, Dave."
"I am?" I asked as if I had been accused of being an anti-Semite. A deconstructionist sounded like someone who methodically blew up buildings. I later read some work by one of the founders of deconstructionism: Jacques Derrida. He claimed words did not have a firm foundation or structure for interpretation, that the linguistic system lacked ubiquitous 'signifiers' that applied to both logocentric and phonocentric realms. A deconstructionist, then, is someone who looks to invert normal societal binaries in a text. This means two things: 1) Europeans must have a lot of time on their hands. 2.) Black and white is difficult to ascertain in the jumbled continuum of denotation and connotation, especially with the backdrop of a society, with ever-fluctuating values, in which the literature is written.
I wondered: If a text is so difficult to interpret, then why communicate with these sad, malleable words? And shouldn't there be other theories on how to read literary theories. I mean, these theorists and critics are using the same subjective terms as the writers they're interpreting, right? Maybe that's just the deconstructionist in me.
It’s no secret that English teachers and students have science envy. Words lack the solidity of numbers, the chartable method of experiments. We’d love to have spreadsheets and pie charts to quantify the nuances of meanings and symbols. To finally say, "the answer is this and not that because I carried the one, and there is no remainder." If nothing else, such quantitative charts would make budget rationing easier, as it's rare that academic administrators want to dish out dough to a clan of overly-well-read, aging hipsters in Tevas, pondering the rhyme schemes of John Donne. The market for literary smart asses may be at its all time low, but I lack the line graph on that presumption.
***
My Literary Analysis class morphed into a pseudo-philosophy class; our worldviews – feminist theory, multiculturalism, and the like – influenced our readings, like the woman who wanted menopause literature from Shakespeare. We finished the semester knick-picking the stanzas, developing into full-fledged word nerds, passionate about what we thought that particular tree metaphor meant. I guess you can't spell 'analysis' without 'anal'.
But we learned to laugh at our frustrations, and to despise Emily Dickinson, even though it wasn't her fault that mystery pervades all fine art. As writers, we learned how to defend our arguments for what a poem meant, refining and rethinking our theses. Now who would ever read such theses is beyond me.
Harper's magazine published an article by Chris Offutt titled "Words Into Hype." His definitions of Literary Essay and Academic Essay are accurate. Offutt claims a Literary Essay is "Akin to the personal essay, only with bigger words and more profound content intended to demonstrate that the essayist is smarter than all readers, writers, teachers, and Europeans." An Academic Essay is simply "an unread form required for tenure." Offutt cuts to the chase, something I thought writing was suppose to do until my deeper literary theory texts told me the "chase" was too ambiguous to even cut to. But author George Saunders can still get down to brass tacks. He wrote, "Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others)." No gray area there, which leads me to believe there's some truth to it.
***
Literary theory discussion always reminds me of football announcers. The game itself is three hours, but the announcers can speak for six hours pre and post game, over-interpreting fairly simple actions. You have the structuralist, usually someone like Mike Ditka, saying, "If the Raiders wanna win today, Gene, they're gonna hafta move the ball down the field and score some points against the opposing team." Makes sense. Then there's the new historicist announcer: "But the Lions have good shot at winning today. The Raiders are 0-7 when playing in the second week of October when it’s under 20 degrees. Just something to think about in cold Detriot today.” Others look at the biography of the player (writer) to extract meaning from the game (poem, novel, etc.): "Linebacker James Carlson is returning to his hometown of Detroit for the first time since his crime-plagued youth. This could have a socio-emotional effect on his play today, guys." Obviously, the analogy ends when the binary of win/lose comes into play, although critics and best-seller lists can indicate success. It could also be argued a literary piece being included the modern canon is the victory, the defeat being tossed into the shameful sea of pulp fiction.
The main similarity is the throwing out of data that neither player nor writer is aware of. They (writers and players), as the Nike slogan tells us, Just Do It, as the critics and theorists sit with Why Did They Do It That Way? At best, it's an intelligent guess. Read the book, watch the game, apply meaning, and repeat. It's all a way to mitigate the gray of actions, and a writer's actions are his or her words. At least ESPN has the certainty of stats. English majors just have Harold Bloom.
My hands-on experience with criticism was working on the Coe Review, our college's literary magazine. I quickly learned a few things, like how all aspiring young freshman poets really dig snide poems about relationships, lengthy poems about autumn, or any poems about cancer and hospitals. I argued with them weekly over their tastes, how poetry was suppose to surprise and punch us as readers rather than extract pity via tired images and language. I knew I had my own biases. I drifted towards poems about food and nighttime.
I also came up with something I call the CCPP theory, which is any piece of writing, no matter how well-written or enjoyable, can be discarded if one claims the writing is either Contrite, Conceited, Preachy, or Pretentious. These adjectives negate argument because the arguer is quickly accused of being one of the CCPPs. It's a handy tool.
Speaking of hands, I learned another EPS technique in my later literature courses. I call it simply, Hand Things (HT). When one is speaking about two or more conflicting concepts, the hands must reflect these concepts in a juggling-like fashion, as if one is weighing two heavily sagging breasts. One must furrow one's brow to convey conceptual tension. Academics use the following words when doing this Hand Thing: "dualism," "dichotomy," "paradoxical transgression," or "bi-conceptual existence." Example sentence: “Essentially, we must consider Cordelia's internal struggle with the dualism (HT here) of being both daughter to King Lear but husband to the King of France, which brings about questions of socio-political loyalty.”
The converse Hand Thing concerns the coming together of the hands, with interlocked fingers, to express harmony or commonality. This is often supplemented with a slightly scrunched up face, one of contorted concern, a look not dissimilar to Woody Allen squeezing out a fart. Words to use with this HT: "interconnectedness," "interdependence," "diverse implications," or "binding characteristics." Side note: "Interconnectedness" and "diversity" are liberal arts professors' favorite two words of all time. This I can prove with a pie chart.
I’ve spent most of college career wondering what professors would do if they had to wear mittens or strait-jackets in class. Or how a one-armed teacher would enhance their teachings of "dualistic" concepts. Perhaps he or she would just cup his or her stump and squint thoughtfully upwards.
I learned my glasses provided yet another useful prop in my blossoming EPS techniques. It is Essential to remove one’s glasses at the apex of literary discussion to denote worldly thoughtfulness. Brief nibbling on the frame is a bonus, for now the mental tension appears too extreme to remain inside, so it is externalized in the form of a mental-dental dance.
I spent so much time picking up on mannerisms and jargon; it's a miracle I even graduated. My personal relationships with the professors helped. I knew two soft spots, easy topics of digression, all English professors have: jazz and Coen Brothers films.
***
College taught me most things worth knowing cannot be taught. In Herman Hesse’s Siddharta, a loose retelling of the story of Buddha, the protagonist explains: “In every truth the opposite is equally true. Truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.” Though "half the truth" suggests a clean-cut 50/50, these concrete fractions scatter in the realms of truth when applied to human experience.
None of my life-affirming moments in literature have come from those who write about literature. Czech author Milan Kundera summed up the human condition perfectly: "We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." Exactly. Indecisiveness is painfully logical. But in the same page, he writes, "If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all." That’s the spirit! Did I mention English majors are unhappy? Our intellectual gray often overlaps with our emotional gray. Those dealing in art often kill themselves. Essentially (that's right, it's Essential), we studier of words are just a big sad cloud.
The opposite of this often-morbid Okay with the Gray – which, I know, is whole other binary – is the Ignorance is Bliss thinking. Could you live a happy life without reading literature? Probably. I’ve met many joyful people who simply don’t read. However, they strike me as limited creatures, like scatter-brained tadpoles unable to sprout legs to hop on the dense land of meta-cognition. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "The limits of my language stand for the limits of my world." Non-readers don’t even know to ask questions because they don’t see the Gray, their limited scope conveniently so black and white.
It just never crossed my mind to not read and think about what I’ve read. So many writers have so accurately described all this, and I'd be a fool not to read them, to consider as many perspectives on this Mystery as I can. But the beauty of writing lies not in its categorical theories, the jockeying for higher standing in academia. It lies in the brevity of refined language applied honestly to life.
But no matter how open-minded you are, your mind is always in your mind, a place thick with biases and irrationality. Note that Keats said those having Negative Capability did not look for "fact or reason" to berid themselves of the Mystery, that a "Man of Achievement" must not have an "irritable reaching" towards fact or reason. That's the problem. It’s hard to believe we can’t answer everything with fact or reason. But all that is unknown is such fertile ground for imaginative writing.
Life reflects art and vice versa, so we must remember to live and then write that down. And if literature – all that has been written down – is sometimes beautiful but mysterious, it's because life is beautiful but mysterious. The two are symbiotic. Between the binary of life/death lies the most beautiful gray we could imagine.
Maybe the artsy, rainbow girl at that party so many years back was onto something: “The best gray is most vibrant.”
But so was the green headband stoner when he said, "Fuck."
Look around you. Fuck.
