Est A Thesis for the Year 1819

by Claire Dunnington

Honorable Mention, Casey Shearer Awards for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction, 2005 Happy New Year In 1819 I was negative one hundred and sixty-four years old. Highways were approaching thirty, steamboats were exiting adolescence, and railroads had entered their mid-teens. Whatever growing pains the nation's transportational systems may have been experiencing, their creaks and groans spoke to adventure and progress, not conservatism and propriety. The machines siphoned most stirrings of forward movement away from human society, which remained steady and modest in one arena in particular: courtship. While most contemporary commercial ships were in the nascent stages of existence, courtship was as old as the rivers that held the new boats. Old, and unbending, at least on the surface, like a historically preserved battleship meant for viewing but not touching. Callas Maria Callas was born in 1923. In the year 1819 she was negative one hundred and four, sixty years older than I was. She had only failed relationships. There was no room for love in her life. Instead, she was the best soprano of her time, possibly the greatest operatic soprano ever. She had best so she did not need the superlative in any other area of her life, and she almost had ever which is also a superlative. There are very few people who have that best. Instead, most find the essential st, st, st, of their lives in a different word: first. When I decided not to grow up I missed out on first, but I didn't realize it until the chance had already passed. This is why, during the summer after I graduate high school, I fall hard for Todd Small, the short man with the mullet. He is my last hope. Small is an unfortunate last name for someone who stands 5'2", but he is brilliant, and handsome, and innocent. Etiology I was seven when I made the decision to not grow up. Putting on my socks before school in the morning, I suddenly realized that there was no tangible point to life. I would put on my socks, go to school, come home, go to sleep, put on my socks, go to school, come home, graduate, go to college, graduate, get a job, put on my socks, retire, and die. All actions were geared toward one purpose: the ability to exist-but what was the purpose of that ability? At that time I decided to run away from my thoughts. Within minutes I had convinced myself that there was a point: to have fun. To ride roller coasters. To dance in the kitchen. I finished putting on my socks and shut the drawer on my thoughts and was able to turn away from them until I was fifteen. The next week, age seven, I began my attempts to regress. Every year I wished it was the year before and the idea of "milestones" caused panic in my chest. Every time my stomach ached during fourth grade I thought I was getting my period and begged God to keep it away. I was also convinced that I had breast cancer, cervical cancer, and AIDS. I pretended to believe in Santa Claus. Eliot This is why we need technological progress: so we can say "no one has ever written about this before", because they won't have had the chance. I want to be the first to want to protect T.S. Eliot, but he's been dead long enough that I'm sure I'm not. I may be the first person to want to protect him while riding in the backseat of a car in South Florida thinking the landfills are hills. Spinning I When I was in preschool my favorite activity was making myself dizzy when I was in preschool spinning around the floor wide-flung arms sometimes staring at the ceiling or at the wide-flung arms in a tilt in preschool whipping by spinning objects and people whipping hair across face watching wide-flung people in all corners of the gymnasium making myself dizzy staring at the ceiling whipping by people faces and the floor rising in a tilt spinning around all corners of my favorite activity in preschool the gymnasium and loving the crash to the ground. The world made more sense to me when it made no sense, and I hadn't started to worry about losing control, about the ground rushing up to stop me. Moments Freshman year Leah and I have an amaryllis plant that we name Pamela. It produces clusters of silky white flowers, three or four gathered around a sturdy green stalk. Every morning I wake to find a new change. Where there was only dirt there are suddenly slender stems. Buds open overnight. I am entranced; the moments of change are so clearly visible. I never understood moments before: I have difficulty figuring out exactly when I am enjoying something-at what point that enjoyment arrives. This especially bothers me during eating, riding roller-coasters, listening to songs. It's hard to enjoy something you know will end so shortly; how do we enjoy anything at all that isn't a constant? Even if I had the capacity to play a song over and over and over on loop I could find some smaller moment, some chord, some vocal turn to be enamored by, until all that was left would be a muscle spasm. Life reduced to a twitch.I can't count on moments. No: there has to be something forever, something in an area of extreme importance. Unless one is as superlatively talented as a Maria Callas or a T.S. Eliot, the only arena accessible to all is the mutual first love, that very beginning. Because we can't rely on most (whatever is current will likely be deemed most, which reduces its value and also doesn't account for the possibility that the next will trump it with a bigger most) and lastnever lasts forever (who can say where things end? there could well be a next-last cannot be counted as truly last until death, which strips the ability to comprehend that kind of meaning) it has to be first that forms that necessary superlative. The middle is transient; the ends are fixed. But the final end is not capped until the end of life, so it can't help. It has to be first. It's the only permanent superlative; it's the only chance for a constant to repair life's inability to hold on to moments. Crux The opposite of the superlative is the typical, but the thing that saves most people is the typical superlative. The mutual first love. While other people were having that first sweetness, the 10,000 Maniacs vision of never before and never since, I promise, I was still praying to stave off my period. Age thirteen, wishing I was eleven. Age sixteen, wanting reversion to fourteen. I did not worry about never having a fake husband in elementary school, a boy with whom I could be "going out" in middle school, a high school romance. I have explanations for this: A definitive postulate for why I have been alone: Extrinsically: 1. Population (small school district) 2. Compatibility (small, suburban, Midwestern school district) 3. Time Constraints (participation in every activity ever created) Intrinsically: 1. Perfectionism (I can't date anyone unless it is exactly right) 2. Plagiarism (fear of being stolen by another or inadvertently stealing from another) 3. Poor Gender Relations (no brothers, no male friends after age seven). It didn't bother me that I was alone through high school; I expected it would change drastically in college. It didn't bother me until I realized that everyone else had already had their never before and never since, and in whatever form mine would have existed it had slipped quietly past while I wasn't paying attention. That was why Todd Small, having to learn to kiss to play Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, suave and yet completely untouched, like me, became so important. Definitions Est: Latin; she is. Est: the superlative ending form of most adjectives. Est: the backwards initials of T.S. Eliot. 1819: a different era; a time when this problem could not have existed. The years I was 18 and 19 years old. Maria: from Mary; bitter. The virgin. Racing Somewhere along the way I dropped the ball. I missed something but did not realize until it had already tornadoed through, sweeping up everyone else, leaving me behind though I had started off in the same place. If life is a relay composed of four legs, it was the runner of my first leg (perhaps "personal identity development") who decided she could run the entire race on her own. She kept running frenetically and never passed the baton to the second runner ("first relationship development"). Dropping the baton is not the same as dropping the ball, but when you are clutching a baton you have no free hands; this is why I have dropped the ball so many times. A chart of my life looks like a clothesline, slack at one end with bunched pins in a row. I am weighted in a single direction, while the absence in the rest of my life flaps sickly through the air, empty. Spinning II In bed flipping over and over. The feeling of being in a pool somersaulting unendingly while remaining motionless in bed. Closing eyes and imagining a world rotating faster and faster with the feeling. This ability to increase intensity and speed only by closing eyes. Floating in timeless space and wondering if everyone has this ability. Over and over in tightening concentric circles always floating. If I found myself thinking about someday I will die and about Nietzsche while trying to fall asleep at night during middle school, I spun instead. Box of Marbles Freshman year hearing "hooked up with him…" "just hooking up…" "one-time thing…" makes me feel excessively small and curled inward. Often, lying with limbs flattened on the floor and staring at the ceiling, miming (and half-enthralled by) the role of One Who Is Shocked, I imagine I am tethered to the ground by invisible bonds more and more each time another spontaneous union of two people is relayed to me. I don't want to judge. I don't think it at all wrong. I only want some people to be left like me so that I can be part of something important, something first. I repeat to myself that the things which are most unsettling are those you haven't yet captured in your own understanding. By the end of the year, although I haven't had those experiences myself (I hadn't, in fact, ever kissed anyone then), I have somehow driven away the clench in my stomach. It is an extreme effort to imagine the situation, the why, the appropriateness, the non-threat. With as much comprehension of the this is okay of the combustible college romantic culture as I can gather, but still a separation from actual involvement, loneliness replaces unease. It isn't being different that bothers me; it's the idea that no one will be left for me, the same as me, in the future. In some way I begin to cling to the exclusion like a badge of true freakness. It takes me a long time to acclimate to these new rules, to finally stop quaking inside when hearing about people colliding in the night like marbles flung against walls and each other inside a giant shaking box. I accept but do not join. I begin to state that I need to go back to the Victorian era, where I belong and where I could have a first. Spinning III the reason that people kiss sloppily when drunk and at parties is that when you are drunk all you really feel like doing is spinning but it's too much for your body when there are things making it dizzy already and so you need another person to hold onto and you begin to spin and spin with them but one dizzy plus one dizzy does not make a non-dizzy it only makes two dizzies spinning closer to one another even when each is already holding on to each so their mouths stumble in the air but accuracy is less important than contact in this dance and that's Seeing before understanding An empirical deconstructionist postmodernist artist gave the newborn girl an abstract painting of "house" before she had ever seen an actual house and she did not know what to make of any of it. Positive, Comparative Never, most, first, last, least. We've used up all of the adjectives and there are none left for you. You can take the positive; you can be good, nice, precocious, talented, smart. You can take the comparative: you can be better, nicer, more precocious, more talented, smarter. You can take the positive and comparative and so can anyone else. There are no limits on how many possess those. You can be one of. You can't have only. If you wanted a superlative, you should have thought of that before. Critics Maria: She had the deepest comprehension of the Classical Italian style, the most musical instincts and the mostintelligent approach Thomas Stearns: …the greatest long poem of the twentieth century… …the greatest poet of the twentieth century… Ornamental I think about the fact that my wisdom teeth are still growing in. It saves me from stagnation just as watching Pamela in the act of blooming; it marks that I haven't reached full formation yet and so can't start declining. I look in the mirror and see that I am nineteen and in perfect health yet completely ineffective, a decorative vase with no ability to function. My toe has been getting progressively number. This means something has decided my body is useless and not fulfilling its purpose, and now it is being reclaimed. Marriage To many marriage signifies most important, and most equals superlative, and that's what people need to feel completed in life. But marriage is often an expression of a person's place in time and stage of development, not their relation to the other person. With first, you know that there is importance; with anything in-between you always will wonder because there are no markers. Marriage: do you want to be simply the point at which the dial stops, an arbitrary spin? First: a conscious choice. Some may say first happens also because of a state of development, having little to do with the person. But having that first to look back on makes the difference, while the experience of marriage, in it possibly being the last, is not looked back upon because it is generally experienced until the end of one's life, and if not, something went wrong, preventing it from having the ability to be looked back on. What I mean to say is that while neither first or last is necessarily most because most is murky, last is only a settling point and everything in-between is transient. First, at least, is fixed, is forever. In 1819 the first relationship was often the first marriage. This had its own problems, but at least everyone had the superlative of only. Disillusionment I have always considered sex to be some far off experience without real relevance to the immediate future, like the decision on the location of the next Olympics eight years before the event. Yet there comes a point when I decide that if I do fall in love and the other person also happens to be a virgin, I will have sex. This could guarantee that I be remembered forever as the first, in something enormous, in something important. If I fall in love with a non-virgin, I will continue to view sex as a distant museum piece, interesting to look at but inapplicable to me. While teaching at piano camp in South Florida one summer when I am eighteen, I begin to discover affairs among faculty members, long-hidden secrets, my own inability to trust anyone. My boss tells me about Callas and the grief that killed her after Aristotle Onassis strayed. The she tells me about her affair with Frans in Austria when she was twenty-two and even then had no regard for marriage. That summer I become disillusioned completely; I decide that I will only have sex with T.S. Eliot. The implications of this are clear. Victoria My friend's father is a history teacher, so I ask him. "1819-is that within the Victorian era?" "That's pre-Victorian," he replies. "The Victorian era isn't really marked until-oh, really the latter half the century. Technically, 1839, when her reign started, but when people refer to it they usually mean the 1870's, 1880's." I nod at the table, thoughts of Disraeli and Gladstone and happy new year 1819 suddenly thrust apart from one another where I had held them curled up together in my mind. I have been saying I want to go back to Victoria for such a long time. My catch-phrase is suddenly obsolete. Pre-Victoria. It doesn't have the same weight at all; simply a prefix and reference to another time. I wonder how much leeway one is allowed in naming a year as part of an era. Twenty years off-that isn't such a large transgression. He rambles on about politics and customs while I stare at the silverware and silently curse whatever regent preceded Victoria for not possessing a more memorable name. A Way Out I would like to know if I wrote a poem about circles as so many have done before and you read that poem and it was the first circle poem you had ever seen if that would make everything right. But there isn't anyone left who hasn't read a poem about circles. There are millions of poems about circles. There are few books written about the year 1819. It was not a significant one: no wars, no political overthrows, no major discoveries of new land. Instead of presenting itself on the covers of texts, in slogans, in dates-to-be-remembered, it hides amongst the pages, quietly living under the pseudonym of "early nineteenth century", barely glancing out behind the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812. 1819 fits with me; with me, nothing happens. Renaissance The reason that all of these grad students and twenty-five year old men seem to want me is because they are simply part of a larger and greater structure which is hell-bent on my not finding that firstness. I flit amongst them like a Lolita without the sex. They can sense that I possess that newness and they want that vehicle for their own revitalization. I don't want to be the catalyst for a Renaissance. I want to be someone's inventing of the wheel; I want to be Prometheus's fire. I wanted Todd Small that entire summer before college, but he wanted my friend Emily, the Beatrice to his Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. She had a boyfriend of three years, who was her first, for whom she was first, and it seemed entirely unfair to me that Todd didn't realize how perfect the two of us would have been. Emily already had her mutual first; why should she also get to be the first for another? Etiology II I think about etiologizing myself: at what point did this person choose deprivation as a method for staying the narrator or as a way to remain most cast aside? I'm keeping it so that I'm always the most alone, the last in any new thing, thereby granting myself superlatives, yet still stagnating. Since moments don't matter, there must be a constant to cling to. At least (least) most alone is a constant, as long as I remain that way. Last is a constant as long as I cling to it. The ability to have this problem, this missing out, this grieving over not having a first, becomes far more important than correcting that absence of superlative. Suddenly, sophomore year, I stumble into one, or what could be one. Thomas is my first boyfriend; I am his first real girlfriend; we are both new at the same time; this is what I was supposed to have lost; I do not know what to do. When it ends abruptly and traumatically after less than two months, I feel a double negative space. It wasn't long enough, it wasn't real enough to constitute first. He has a new girlfriend five days later and she must be the real first. I was only a stutter step, a prelude. But somehow my former complete lack of a first, my ability to grieve over that problem which has become my fixation, my specialty, seems diminished as well. I have lost what was probably my only chance for first, and I have lost my unique deprivation as well. Last I continued to trudge in place, intent on preserving the oddity of my newness, my only-been-kissed after twenty years of living, my observer's role on the side of the road. I still keep myself as the last, the bizarre, the oddity, but I see this identity freezing my life in a clutch of non-movement. A constancy of newness is difficult to uphold. Newness by definition requires change, not the static stillness that can last indefinitely. A constant is what I thought I needed, something steady among the fleeting moments. But the necessity of moments is their disruption of constancy, their ability to provide the twang that will set the whole clothesline spinning, continuing to ripple even after the moment has passed. I don't trust the typical superlative anymore. It brushed past me once, almost whisking me along with it, but left only a slight breeze and a sting in its wake, leaving me still and struck and silent, a player without her lines. Notes: Information about nineteenth-century transportation development from http://www.geocities.com/jjsweetie1123/invention.htm. 10,000 Maniacs lyric is from the song "These are the Days". In the section titled "Critics", "the deepest comprehension of the Classical Italian style, the most musical instincts and the most intelligent approach" is from a review by Scott Eric Smith at http://www.serendipity.li/callas.html. The review of Eliot's The Waste Land as "the greatest long poem of the twentieth century" is from http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/ display/poet111.html; "the greatest poet of the twentieth century", though an opinion shared by many, is quoted here as found at http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/ fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/617.