Author: Sue

I had made my first traverse through the Matthaei Botanical gardens. I picked up some chamomile on the way and rubbed it in my palms until it was just dust, tiny specks that fell away on the ground as I walked, but as they left, they generously left their scent for memory’s sake. A kaleidoscope was situated in an open area, pointed at a handsome pot of purple velvet plants, whose name now escapes me. The apparatus had been set up to spin (to accommodate to our visual necessity for constant stimuli change – if our eyes don’t move, the nerves get exhausted – bored of sending their chemical signals and it disappears from our mental projections.) Not one moment had been preceded by the last – every second a fresh burst of novelty, of colors and geometry sliding in for a brief second to visit, and then conceding to the next image waiting in the wings.

I ended up leaving to go sit by a bank of a small river, wrote as I listened to the trickling of water around fallen branches that were still connected to their trunks connected to the ground. They were leaning into the water, fallen almost too dramatically, too tragically into the swirling cold. But the ebb of water desires to follow its own path (traveling south, that is, behind me relative to how I was situated); they collided into the fallen natural debris and then, realizing they had been struck, rushed around corners and rocks. Their rippling was initially almost undetectable, but as more time passed, the louder, the more excited the sound grew – I could almost see it quivering. The sound grew as organic and natural as a spear of grass piercing out of the earth.

Spring is here, and I urge you all to take a walk through some brambles, breathe in some clean air, and feel the reanimation of a million lives from slumber.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Scent may have the closest tie to memory because of the logistics – the olfactory bulb is a part of the brain’s limbic system; they have the advantage of proximity – but speaking from personal experience, I have found my memories bound more faithfully to sound than any other sensory modality.

At times while chipping away at my daily assignments, my iTunes player shuffles and slyly pulls out a song that has been buried under gigabyte after gigabyte of music collected over the years. A distinct trail of melody, a certain maneuvering of fingers across the strings of guitar to produce a particularly telling riff, might draw forth memories of my freshman year in high school at precisely 6:45 am when my bus would pull up to the corner, and like an ominous yellow portal, beckon me within. Upon hearing this song five years later, I still recall looking out the window at the array of houses, twins, triplets, and quadruplets, all virtually the same, and the feel of the crackly brown upholstery of the seats beneath me. All the while, my playlist circled through and I’d rest my eyes for moments and look at the back of the bus driver and anticipate the sun the break the chilly sky and the rest of the day to fall into place. Although I sit in my dormitory at a utterly different segment of my life staring at abstract concepts lectured to me hours before, songs on that playlist still are able to awaken dusty pathways where impulses once traversed habitually. In turn, they roused visual memories to awaken, fibers containing tactile information that they had secretly stored without my conscious permission reignite and I feel the tips of my fingers remembering.

Other playlists jog other memories – songs that I associate with writing my term paper senior year, songs that relate to driving around, cradled in the warmth of the sun in the summer of 2007, songs connected with my trip to Costa Rica, songs attributed to my first boyfriend – and the list grows.

Sometimes I organize my iTunes library by ‘Date Added’ and steadily scroll through its entirety, amusing myself with some of the older songs that I would be embarrassed to have others see. But I find fine lines that divide my life into chapters, the music I listen to now is even different from the music I had indulged in my previous year in college. My current playlist consists of a lot of Yeasayer, Ratatat, and Beach House, their patterns of air compressions and decompressions causing movements in my brain to thread them to the image of this room, this blue plastic chair that it came furnished with, the brisk and bold coldness of our Michigan weather. The beat, the bass, all intermingled, consolidated in the hippocampus (which, incidentally has the shape in cross section of a sea horse) and dispersed to the various cortexes of the brain to one day, perhaps be fished out by the whimsical shuffle feature on my music player.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

Writing is not an easy task, unless you are of the 0.01% of the population for whom words simply descend from the Heavens and pour into your lap into perfectly constructed, syntactically adventurous, yet tasteful units. Unfortunately, I must confess that I belong to the other group, papers and hair askew from the daily frustrations of trying to lay something worthwhile onto a sheet of seemingly innocuous paper.

I hope that one day my thoughts will grasp the empty, beckoning lines vigorously – sensing it and exploring it – discerning its every crevice, every minute thread of fabric to better understand the medium unto which my consciousness is reflected. One day, I hope fail to shrug and sit complacently like they do latent in this fickle specimen that is called a “mind”. To write with alarming alacrity, to write so vibrantly in the subtleties, to abate the appetite of allowing time to sift like sand, idle and tired through my fingers. I hope that these commodities are not purely congenital. I hope that in part that it can be acquired, much like the refined and beautiful tastes tapering out of every ethnicity. I want to write because to pantomime for half a century will not suffice; I do not want to be Possibility Girl and bask in the adulation of my potential.

And what does Lady Caroline, say about all this? She would say, shrilly:

“…and pray tell her from me, that she cannot expect to excel if she does not practice a good deal.”

Although I claim to enjoy writing a great deal, it is still a common struggle that I confront with nearly every day to commit myself to sit down and produce something of my own, fresh and original. The ideas, so pristine, so perfect – how could I ever lay them down in risk of tarnishing them with the wrong words that misguided intuition sometimes selects from my internal lexicon? Many writers like myself, are trapped in this guilty paradox of yearning to write but finding ourselves making excuse after (albeit, creative) excuse not to write today because of reason X. Replace X with anything from actually desperately needing to study for that biochemistry exam looming like hawk around the corner of the weekend, to feeling inexplicably compelled to making sure that the entirety of the iTunes library has the correct album art and meta-data. Yet, that elated feeling that one gets when a sentence is successfully wrestled onto paper, that sense that it has been perfectly grafted from the mind to a language that can be conveyed onto others – that’s what keeps the craft of writing alive for the vast majority of us all.

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

— Ray Bradbury

This is the reason I had signed up for an English workshop class this semester; the pressure to produce something that would be halfway decent for another human being to read keeps the words coming. It’s an entirely nervous ordeal at times, to present these words and ideas that are lovingly yours to a group of (mostly) strangers for them to scrutinize and turn over in their hands. And yet, despite the anxiety, I could not be more thankful for this same group of people, whom inspire me to write and take the time to thoughtfully write suggestions in the margins. If you don’t belong to that other 0.01% of writers in the world, I highly recommend taking a writing class if you are truly interested in the field. Writing prompt websites like Write One Leaf, are quite useful as well.

Here’s to a week of words!

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

I collect quotes like one collects stamps or stones. I do it in a compulsive manner, and they’re everyone: rewritten in margins, four notebooks, in my phone as texts to myself. I feel that as if I were to write down every inspirational quote that I find in my paper-strewn path, that they might lend me some of their own prowess. And perhaps, as a result of dutifully compiling quotes, I could feel what it might be like to write something so profound, so powerful in a single paragraph, a single phrase (or less) myself – to feel the words as they fall from the fingertips and imagine what that must feel like. Like little vignettes in themselves, these quotes are the cruxes, the essence of contexts vast and mysterious, and before the authors of these quotes utter them into existence, one would not be able to believe they could be articulated. They are observations of the truth captured in a beautifully concise, linguistic format. And they are readily available to be admired by you and I. Personally, I believe that writing tiny kernels of wisdom requires a sort of genius – a genius to distill the convoluted down to a manageable essence while not compromising the initial intricacies, the serpentine coils and twists of life… they say so much without being overstated and gaudy.

Here are some of my favorite quotes that I’ve written down in dire haste within a wide array of note pages and such. I hope that they instill in you some feeling of grandeur as they have done for me.

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand … hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.
— Sylvia Plath

Emerson, for instance, left his sick wife, Lidian, and their young children in Thoreau’s care to go to Europe in 1847, writing coldly to Lidian, ‘I foresee plainly that the trick of solitariness never can leave me.’
— from the preface to The Journal of Henry David Thoreau 1837-1861

A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.
— John Galt

Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamor of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
— Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man.
— Henry Brooks Adams

You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.
— The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches of creation?
— Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

What are some of your favorite quotes?

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

This is a Petoskey stone.

It is Michigan’s state stone and in the scientific community it is referred to as Hexagonaria percarinata. “It is from the Devonian period, the era of the Fishes,” I say with a flourish, “about 400 million years ago.” Essentially, what they take away is that this is fossilized coral. And coral use to be around Michigan.

That is about as long as second-grade attention span can last. (Fossilized coral is not particularly enthralling for this group.) And then we are off to see Tyrannosaurus Rex’s skull once again, to inspect his six-inch teeth, to notice how his eyes are positioned facing the front and not at the side like Anchiceratops’ (for hunting rather than hiding).

No, Anchiceratops is not Triceratops, but you can think of Anchiceratops as Triceratops’ cousin.

“Oh.”

But, back to Tyrannosaurs Rex. Little hands and noses pressed up against the glass. “His mouth is as big as…. as big as… me!” someone exclaims excitedly. I nod, exchanging a laughing glance with a chaperone.

This is the Natural History Museum on a typical Tuesday – a field-trip day. The museum is cluttered with little people, some bored, some wide-eyed, all being led around in clusters of ten or so to inspect and touch fossils. Art students sit by the Allosaurus to sketch its fascinating, beautiful anatomy and I lead my group on by, about to burst into a run to get to the gift shop. Working as a docent in the museum, one can really see what remarkable institutions museums are. It is surreptitious, unconscious learning, operating at a level so subtle that children, whom are resistant to the idea of actually acquiring information, are unawares of our hidden itinerary. Some days, I feel like I am tricking the kids. I show them the half-fossilized Mastodon tooth, let them touch the mountainous grooves, and allow them guess whether or not they were meat eaters or friendly vegetarians. Meanwhile, I sneak in a little fact about how fossilization occurs, and they’re all mesmerized, listening. It’s trickery, I say, but all in the name of education – for shaping future paleontologists, or at least curious people whom are eager to ask questions about the things the world presents for them to see.

As for myself, I am fascinated with the museum because I have an age-inappropriate obsession with dinosaurs, and I love learning and retaining information about prehistoric life. Why? Because the human presence on the geological time-scale is naught but a nondescript blip. We’ve barely been around and who hasn’t heard of the (human) age-old proverb of respecting one’s elders? That’s what I’m in the business for (although working at the store and selling astronaut ice cream to extremely excited seven-year-olds is a thrill too).

If you haven’t been to the museum yet (circa 1956), grab a friend and go! Admission on a donation basis, and for frugal college students, this translates to a free weekend activity. There are four floors to meander through, and planetarium shows during the weekend. (Check out their website for details.)

If you do decide to embark on this expedition, do say hi to the Edmontosaurus for me.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.

These are my shoes. Today, perhaps after the fact of writing a Shakespeare paper into the dawn of the early morning, to the point that the chemical balance in my brain had fallen out of equilibrium, I got eerily close to deciding to wash my sneakers. Keds commandments tell me no, my Mom tells me yes, and my mind is ambivalent. Cleanliness isn’t my concern; I recall feeling irrationally yet utterly self conscious the first month — having them blaringly untarnished and the whites of them leering at me. Once immaculately and uniformly black, replete with a sense of emptiness, their eclectic earthly smears are now landing it somewhere between dinge and dank. It’d be washing away everything. The shoes have lifted and carried me everywhere in the past eleven months; the past eleven months when life has been jolted with a resemblance of a life well lived.

I never even meant to buy them; the kind sir I contacted about the job let me know I had been hired and I was to report to work the following morning. I needed black shoes. It was ten o’clock in the evening. I went to the virtually non-existent clothing department in the 24-hour grocery store.

My Keds were laced up pretty tightly the first weeks; it saw ten-hour shifts of a dozen happy unions – wedding cake being the first foreign contaminant it was acquainted with. The precariously tipped over wine glass in the bride’s hand as she danced with her betrothed dribbled champagne into the litter of petals on the wood floor and on to my shoes. These sneakers greeted my first room-mate, saw me through late nights of academic pursuits, escorted me to the nearest coffee vendor, ushered me to house parties, and waded me through streams of cheap beer leaked from kegs. They sat beneath me against the dewy grass during sunrise and while I read string theory on the hill; they forgave me when, during a lapse of poor judgment, I had opted for trying a new short-cut and had sunk them in an alarmingly viscous and inconspicuous pool of mud. They’ve run through rain puddles dashing water in cinematic glory; the only emission of sound save for the rainfall was the splashing of these sneakers against the concrete, each decibel cutting into the late-night as thunderous as each vein of lightning that shredded the sky. We stood at very front of the concerts we’d go to and they’d support the tips of my toes while deafening music pulsed through its fibers, sweat waxed to the floor. They’ve ran with me through the subway system in New York City, hopping over incompliant gates in disgusting weather. They kept their modest dignity when met with the loafers of urban bourgeois. We strode around cities. We spun the sky. On summer days, they flirted with the pavement but settled on the grass; even in times of mundanity, they’d comply with my desultory, absentminded ankle-flexing under tables. There’s something satisfying seeing their soles worn thin, knowing it’s partly due to getting lost in the most enriched and fascinating realms of ideas and potential enlightenment — glorious libraries and science museums. They’ve walked my head into a place I didn’t mind being and they’ve helped me wander my mind to living on my own in Ann Arbor.

We’ve stomped out potential forest fires and we’ve discovered glorious fields through muddy passageways. Each splatter of mud means something; every moment is a spot of dirt, collectively creating an idiosyncratic batch of eccentricities. I remember how they maneuvered me around the puddles and I remember emerging from a narrow path to the field and letting them rest on the table, to get off the ground for a bit.

We’ll be together, sockless and laces loose, to sit through exams next week. And we’ll be together finding our way back to couches inlaid in forests. We’ll be together until we can’t be together anymore.

The shoes seem mistakenly too emphasized for a single size eight Keds, but they’re hauntingly not. I ended up hand washing them tonight, and with each layer removed, I made room for another one.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.