Contributed by Gene Kelly, 2017
There is a long list of authors outright ostracized. The ancient Greeks used oyster shells as ballots, when voting on whom to kick out of town. So the word “ostraka”, Greek for oyster, morphed into “ostracize.” Many writers have avoided direct rejection, through phantom ghost arrangements or a multiplicity of pen names.
Members of past and present Scriblerus Clubs have a mix of comedic and tragic traits. Milton, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn were incarcerated. Dante, Ibsen and Swift went into exile, willing or not. Kierkegaard hid behind a series of pen names, until they were connected. It didn’t go well for him, when the gig was up. Kafka’s works were burned on German campuses, during National Socialism. Andre Malraux wrote a paradoxical Voices of Silence. J. D. Salinger surrounded himself with barbed wire and quit being a public personage altogether.
The ultimate ghost writer, God, was ostracized. So what within all that ouch would motivate this expose? Does misery actually take comfort in company? Yes, cathartic common company finds the middle ground, between those Greek comedy and tragedy masks. Employing the intrinsic Irish satirical trait liberates from ouch.
An incompetent, postured as a teacher, with probably fifteen years in front of a middle school classroom, taught me an unintentional lesson in writing. A first ever assignment employing creativity was given. With enthusiastic 12-year-old innocence I completed my theme. It never occurred to me that my work was any better or worse, than the work of my peers.
After grading our themes, the teacher dictated that the better papers be read by their authors, before the class. Mine was last. After reading my piece, I was publically told before my peers that the work was the best by far, but that it was the work of an adult. It was inferred that one of my parents had written the paper for me. My family was defamed, and I was made out to be a cheat and liar. I objected once and was told to sit down and be quiet. For the rest of the time I was in a public school, I warmed a chair. Displaying no more cognitive engagement than a sack of potatoes seemed to be the best course. My peers mercilessly ostracized me over the matter. I went silent on the subject for some twenty years.
For the remainder of the time I was within the walls of a school house, nobody directly asked me why I didn’t like school. The meme about finishing school as the formula for success and going anywhere in life was repeated, akin to the stuck phonograph needle.
Within a few years, Tolkien’s trilogy made it onto my reading list. His primordial belrock was emphatically told by Gandalf, “You shall not pass!” and plummeted into the bowels of the earth. I couldn’t care if I passed or failed in a classroom. Eventually, I jumped onto a freight train and went somewhere to get away from the repetitious, “You’ll go nowhere” proclamation. I kept going even after I circumnavigated the earth. Aristotle’s peripatetic model works now, just as it did for centuries, before the present classroom model. His teacher Plato’s Academy continued for 800 years, before it was closed by a Byzantine emperor.
Over forty years passed before I entered a public university with open enrollment. With no transcripts in hand from the private college I studied upper division courses in, I was made to take a competency test in writing. What an intersection with destiny was within the prompt. I was to write a letter to a school board, persuading them to implement programs to remedy juveniles dropping out of high school. The poignancy was a Grand Cooley Dam of writer’s block. Not a civil syllable would come out of me. School districts employ doctors of education now, unlike when I was a boy. And they need to hear from me, a refugee from high school about doing their jobs? I flunked the exam. It was insisted that in order to be admitted, I would attend a remedial writing class.
After writing an assigned, concise autobiography for the first session, including my fervent persuasion about the value of studying philology, the teacher asked me to stay after class. He asked, “What are you doing here?” After I explained the circumstance, he told me to go back and argue for full admittance, and invited me to share a bottle of scotch with him.
I went back to admissions and quoted Shakespeare, asked if my syntax was sensible and my grammar was correct. Still, the only way I was released from remedial writing requirements, was through the ruse of claiming I was incompetent at word processing. I agreed I would take a hand written exam instead, and was granted full admittance. I neglected to take the exam, so I effectively burglarized the bureaucracy.
Edmund Burke was right, “Education is the state manufacture of echoes.” I do so thoroughly understand the adage, “Look before you leap.” Regarding the pursuit of fame and fortune through writing, it can include getting rocks bounced off your ostracized head.