Nine years ago I met Dr. Mary
Brown. And I thought she was the most self-rightous bitch. You
know the professor who thinks that her class is the only one you’re taking? The
work load for Creative Writing, a simple 200–level class, was overwhelming. I
was an athlete. I worked, I paid rent. I had other things to do.
At
mid-terms of that particular class, Mary and I had a sit-down meeting. I had
missed over half of the class periods up to that point. I told her that I was
sorry and that I would do better, and I mostly meant it. I was also dealing
with a defeating case of post-breakup depression, a pretty consuming party
schedule, life as a year-round college athlete. In my mind, I had a lot going
on. A 200-level writing class wasn’t particularly meaningful in the scheme of
my priorities.
In
fairness to my immature self, I only
had so many hours in the day. I decided that I was more interested in what I would
learn from a class than what grade I would receive, so any level of “jumping
through hoops” (including participation/attendance grades, which I summarily
dismissed at the time) I just rejected. This wasn’t necessarily all-out belligerence,
although that cropped up at times. Really it was a decision that experience and
learning trumped feedback and grades. I still mostly stand by this value, but at the time I misunderstood the
relationship of feedback to learning. Still, I lived according to a certain degree of individual value judgment.
Mary
Brown, however, would not fall in line with my assessment of academic life. And it drove me
crazy. She was this uptight, rule-driven taskmaster who insisted that doing
things properly was better than doing them well. She insisted that class
attendance was importance, which reeked of ego. Oh, yes, Mary, I must be in
your class, to gorge on your endless wisdom?
Life
has, as it does, continued its onward march. Nearly a decade of it, and I’ve
grown up a little bit. Even by the time I graduated, I had learned that Mary
was more or less the opposite of all I had assumed: her approach to writing and
teaching was humble, and yet ambitious. She encouraged readers and writers to
dare, to buck the rules and to create great works rather than good assignments.
She rapidly became one of my favorite professors, and her faith, her approach
to work, her belief in the power of literature is one of the prevailing
theologies, ontologies, foundations of life that I hold to. It is mystical and
spiritual and hard to peg down, but it’s so very real, and so very foundational
to how I approach the written word.
Mary Brown did not care that I was there to hear her lectures. She cared
that I was there to engage in the sacred art of literature. Writers cannot
exist without readers, and readers cannot exist without writers, and a class
setting cannot operate without both in ample supply. I believe that what she
was interested in was not blind obedience, was not simply the rules of
attendance, but rather steeping students in the two-way, multi-dimensional
act of creation.
I have
come to believe that a work of art is not complete when it is finished. A
written piece is not complete unless it is presented to a reader, who continues
the creative work through interpretation. A work of art is presented by an
artist and interpreted through viewing, reading, engaging. What creates a work
of art is not simply what the artist brings, but what the viewer brings as
well; these two things fuse in a mystery not unlike marriage, or sex: two
become one, amplified. What makes an enduring work, a classic, an eternal gesture,
is a piece that resonates with readers, with consumers, infinitely. Thus, it never stops creating, which is a sacred act. We are still moved by Shakespeare’s characters, or the enduring, ancient struggles of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, talked about the necessity of
tackling enduring themes rather than topical situations. It is these themes
that continue to resonate throughout humanity, throughout time, throughout the
experience of interaction and interpretation that round out what a piece of art
can and ought to be: infinitely creative, infinitely holy.
Mary
Brown understood this. She understood that creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
She understood and taught me—not aggressively, but through the seeds of her
convictions, that took years to bloom—that art is a collaborative effort.
That art is a mystical experience, that art builds on the history of those who
have come before and weaves into the creative work of a creative god, that art requires
us to live in community, to both engage and shed our loneliness, our
disparate value judgments, and instead live the vulnerable and terrifying life
of an artist: a life that is lived wide open on the page, that cannot exist
without some great and mysterious other
reading, viewing, engaging, and creating alongside us. This is eternity: the endless rhythm and rhyme of creation mating with creation to offer something
new and beautiful to the world, something that, at its best, resonates across
space and time and continues to create long after the work of the artist is
done.
