Category Archives: Education
“A Savage Yawp” at Easy Bay Meeting House
“A Savage Yawp” happens to be the first poem I ever published (in the 2011 Poetry Matters anthology). After looking through old poems, I decided to rewrite it in my modern style, a more spoken-word-laden piece concerning the public education system and the notion that tests can determine futures. Listen to both versions and give your thoughts below.
I hope this offers some insight into particularly the philosophy of education expounded by South Carolina public schools.
The Case for “Drug Safety Education” Reform in Public Schools
{The statements expressed in this essay are the sole opinion of the author, Derek Berry, and do not necessarily reflect the philosophies of all of the harm reduction groups discussed}
In fifth grade, I won an essay contest for D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a program devoted to keeping kids from abusing drugs and alcohol. The essay, I read in front of my entire fifth grade class and their parents, probably making them deeply uncomfortable with righteous statements of abstaining from smoking cigarettes, forgoing the consumption of alcohol.
I do not believe I even mention “drugs” in the essay because the thought of abstaining from them never occurred to me: only homeless parasitic liberals used drugs, and I lived in South Carolina where I rarely encountered this breed. (To be fair, DARE has addressed my most serious concern of prescription drug use that I address below, and I have nothing against D.A.R.E., only wish to criticize its approach).
What strikes me about the program is how the officers and teachers attempting to divert us from a life of drug abuse: just say no. Nancy Reagan pioneered the “Just Say No” campaign in the 1980′s, becoming perhaps the most influential first ladies of her time. Not only is this approach slightly rude (Just Say NO THANK YOU), its notion that feeding horror stories to children about drug abuse will deter them from experimenting with drugs is deeply flawed. For more information on “Just Say No,” visit reaganfoundation.org.
Fact: Since 1990 a reported 20.5 million people have used marijuana in an average year.
(http://www.drugscience.org/Archive/bcr4/2Usage.html)
Statistic: 40% of Americans over the age of 12 have tried cannabis sativa (marijuana).
(http://www.soberlifeinc.net/js/modalbox/content/g.htm)
Now, this statistic is mighty misleading because cannabis, of course, might be considered a milder drug than many people actually consume, but it gives a good idea to how effective the “Just Say No” philosophy is. If a majority of American school children went through this D.A.R.E. program and still experimented with one of the drugs that were advised against, what other drugs might they try? Despite cannabis being relatively harmless, its use often help guide users into use and abuse of harder, more dangerous drugs.
What I would like to propose is certainly not an obliteration of drug awareness education but rather a more realistic approach to educating our kids about drugs. In many middle schools, groaning school children sit through Sex Ed classes, where the philosophy has shifted from “Abstinence-Only” education to “Protection” education. Teachers and administrators realize the reality of teenage sexuality, that many teens will not abstain from sex and without the proper knowledge, could end up impregnating each other and transferring potentially life-threatening STD’s.
Naturally, I am aware that sexual education also is lax, that despite efforts information is not always transmitted in the most effective means. What proponents of sexual education have done right, however, is take into account that a portion (even if not a majority) of teenagers will experiment sexually with more than one partner and without the know-how to protect themselves, they could end up in serious trouble. We need to admit to ourselves that American youths do indeed indulge in drugs and if we want to save them, we have to be honest with them. We have to educate them.
(http://ssdp.org/resources/facts-and-statistics/)
This approach has worked more effectively with alcohol education. The College of Charleston where I attend requires each student to complete an Alcohol Edu course online before attending for the semester because they have grown aware that students break the law, that students will drink alcohol whether the law permits them to or not. Many students approach drugs with the same mindset, but during the Alcohol Education class, the only drug mentioned was marijuana and only briefly. (It made some comment about knowing what ingredients are in the brownies you eat on campus).
There grows a serious problem here, one that we prefer to ignore. The more we delude ourselves that kids will not experiment with dangerous drugs, the larger chance we take. We’re metaphorically throwing two hormonal teenagers together in a room without a condom and telling them to “not do anything bad.”
We must equip the next generation with the knowledge they need if they do experiment with drugs because to not do so is the marginalize a great portion of the younger society, to basically say that while we care about helping prevent alcohol poisoning, we have no intention of preventing drug overdose.
A brief anecdote if you will permit:
I attended a party one night and had left my bag in my friend’s bedroom. When I entered the bedroom to retrieve the bag, I found a girl laying on the bed transfixed on the television.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded very slowly, and I approached her, asking again, “Are you okay?”
“Just a little high.”
“On what?”
She didn’t say anything, just shrugged, then pointed to her IPhone on which remained residue on a crushed-up white substance (it turned out to be molly, a drug growing in popularity among the alternative scene: pure MDMA, though it is often cut with things that are not MDMA including heroin, speed, or methamphetamine. To find out more about this drug, go here.)
“How much of that did you take?”
Another shrug.
“How much? Are you okay?” She certainly did not look alright and if then I had been informed as I am now I might have sought medical attention, but she exhibited no signs of overdose. Rather, someone had helped administer the drug, then left her alone while she experiencing a mood-altering drug for the first time.
“It’s okay. The guy who sold it to me said it was basically harmless. I wouldn’t overdose.”
Fin.
Let’s talk about some of the immensely major problems we encounter in this story. A young girl trying a drug for the first time did not know what drug she had tried, had not inquired what the drug might have been cut with, and she was unsure how much of the “basically harmless” drug she had snorted.
Here’s a good rule to keep in mind: you can’t trust what a dealer says. Even if he’s your friend, your uncle, or your pediatrician (we’ll get to prescription drugs as well), you should educate yourself on the drugs you’re taking. You and you alone are responsible for using a drug sensibly, if you choose to use a drug. After all, if McDonald’s isn’t willing to tell you what’s in your chicken nuggets, what makes you certain that someone you don’t know that well will be honest about what your ecstasy is cut with?
Because of the lack of drug education, many people don’t know what a lot of drugs even look like. They do not know what various drugs might DO to
them when snorted, injected, smoked, parachuted, huffed, or eaten. My personal theory is that many people experiment with various drugs to “experience what they feel like,” but if people knew more clearly their full effects and also the dangers posed by various drugs, they could avoid seriously harming themselves through experimentation.
While there is no single great resource completely backed by scientific research yet, there are still resources to educate yourself about drugs. Even if you do not personally experiment with drugs, you should be aware of the effects of drugs and what to do in the case of an overdose. It is also important to know what different drugs might do when taken together (an especially lethal idea, mind you).
My most-trusted resource is erowid.org, a website devoted to proliferating this knowledge to the general public. For each drug that exists is a page listing statistics, researched effects, and chemical properties. Be able to identify whether your friend or acquaintance might be experiencing an overdose or even a “bad trip” from psychoactive drugs.
Just as important as it is to know how to prevent these events is the knowledge to deal with them if they happen. Remember that everyone has a different body weight and build, meaning that different amounts of a particular drug will affect individuals differently. If more credible sources existed as to how one should take drugs safely and what to look for, we could avoid much of the grief surrounding drug addiction and overdose.
Another good resource is dancesafe.org. Dance Safe is an organization devoted to helping people take safer drugs. On their website, you can buy drug-testing kits with which one can delineate the contents of the pills one might be taking. For more information about what drugs might be cut with and how, visit their website.
I learned about this organization and much of this information through a school group SSDP (Students for Sensible Drug Policy) which each week helps educate students about safe drug use, the war on drugs, and progressive legislation in drug policy. We do not condone or condemn drug use, only hope that through spreading knowledge about how to use drugs safely, we can decrease the rate of overdose among our generation and generations to come. Our organization is also committed to end the War on Drugs, a subject about which I will elaborate on in future posts.
Fact: More American are arrested for marijuana each year than for all violent crimes combined.
(Students for Sensible Drug Policy)
There’s one more important piece of the puzzle that must addressed: legal pharmaceuticals.
When we do teach youth about drugs, we focus on drinking underage and the abuse of illegal drugs. In fifth grade, I often rolled my eyes when officers told us of scare stories of people addicted to meth or heroin. Today, naturally, I believe meth and heroin addiction are very serious, but at least this is viewed as a problem by the American population. What often escapes our notice is the widespread addiction to narcotics.
Another Fact: The most commonly abused drug among high school seniors are prescription and over-the-counter drugs.
(http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in-brief/prescription-drug-abuse)
Narcotics, opiates, and amphetamines all share addictive qualities, but because we receive prescriptions for them from doctors, we assume they are inherently safer to take than drugs that are illegal. Several pain-killers (such as Oxycodone and hydrocodone) prove to be as addictive as morphine, and because these drugs are seen as “legitimate,” patients tend to abuse them.
What’s just one more pill, right? You’ve just undergone surgery, so you begin taking more and more pills, building up a resistance to their effects. You take more. You try to stop taking them, but you feel so terrible without them (this is you going through withdrawal), so you renew your prescriptions. Doctor says to take two a day, but only two pills never works, so you take three, four, five. Your new prescription runs out, and you can’t renew it, so you start buying painkillers from a fifteen-year-old down the street. You’re just dealing with pain, with stress, right? You’re not actually addicted.
This is why pharmaceuticals become so widely abused. Because of the intense stigma on illegal “uppers,” many students snort Adderal recreationally. They pop a Vivance before a night of essay-writing as “a study enhancement.” Just take one more for the final exam, and then you’ll never do them again. But addiction sneaks up on you like that, dropping the trapdoor from under your feet before you get the chance to realize you’re standing on top of it.
In our drug awareness classes, we should address these problems. We cannot tell them “Do not do drugs or you will die.” They might try marijuana, then wonder, “What else did they lie about? How safe are drugs?” We need to educate youth on specific drugs, how to use them sensibly, what their effects are, and what drugs are potentially lethal, even pharmaceuticals. Too often as well, we find a kid who might be “too jumpy,” and we begin feeding him pills he could potentially abuse or even sell to his friends for them to abuse. And that sort of madness, that zombie mentality of “saying no” to certain illegal drugs, “saying of course” to legal pharmaceuticals, and never seeking information about the drugs we’re consuming– that leads to the overwhelming rates of overdose we experience.
While D.A.R.E. has addressed this and does at least offer some counsel about drug abuse, these resources should be more widely available and apparent to both youth and their caregivers.
I will conclude with a plea: begin treating drug abuse with the same amount of realism we apply to alcoholism. It can happen; it can happen to you; your friends might be addicted; your grandma might be addicted. If you’re a student at the College of Charleston or any other university, I encourage you to take the first step to help reforming drug safety education by perhaps visiting your local chapter of SSDP.
At CofC, we are currently petitioning to change the Good Samaritan Policy to apply not just to victims experiencing alcohol poisoning but drug overdose as well. To differentiate over who is important to save and who is not is a cruel determination forced upon us by the stigmas surrounding drug use that do not apply as evenly to alcohol consumption. The Good Samaritan Policy allows students on campus to call Public Safety for help if a friend is experiencing alcohol-related sickness, and neither the victim or Samaritan will face criminal charges; a member of SSDP is pioneering the change to this policy to include overdose victims as well.
For more information concerning the Good Samaritan Policy, refer to {http://studentaffairs.cofc.edu/policies/amnesty-policy.php} or contact me to sign the petition. For information, find me via Facebook or on campus. The SSDP meets at 6:30 on Wednesday on the second floor of Stern.
For more information on drug use and experience, check out erowid.org.
For more information about preventing drug abuse in raves, visit dancesafe.org.
Please consider my points carefully as we move forward in a world where drug chemistry is ever-changing; what one drug might do or might be made of can change within a week. Delineations of drugs crop up often, and we must stay ever vigilant and knowledgeable of what is out there to avoid future generations from experiencing the same overdose rates as we have.
Other Sources:
A New Prime Is Found!
Last Wednesday, a new prime number was discovered, that prime number being 257,885,161 – 1. That is, TWO raised to the 57, 885, 161 power minus one which uses the Marsenne method of locating primes.
This prime is about 17 million digits long and the longest known, which is pretty awesome. Why do I care? Why does Derek Berry care? Because I’m currently taking a class on “Appreciation of Math” which perhaps it has no exams, helps me appreciate mathematics. In the first few classes, we learned about how prime numbers relate to number theory and the idea of the search for an infinite number of primes. The fact that the largest known prime was found right now while I am learning about them is pretty awesome.
Imagine prime numbers are like atoms, what makes up the larger parts of the universe. Meaning that every number is the product of unique primes. Whoa, I know right. That means that to understand primes will help us understand the origins of math. Why prime numbers exist and what they are will help us calculate is immeasurably important, though most mathematicians believe number theory works like art. Finding prime numbers is an art that takes a long time as well.
For reference, the last prime number was found in 2008, which means we went almost five years before another person (an amateur) found it.
Also, Marsenne primes are easier than others to find, as the last fifteen largest primes have been Marsenne primes. While there are an infinite number of primes (proven by Euclid, yo), there may or may not be an infinite number of Marsenne primes which means finding a prime will grow exponentially harder as time passes.
Just filling you in with your related math news. Keep it real.
The Desk
Four weeks later, the “Happy Birthday” Mylar balloon survives, defying gravity as it levitates beside his bed. When he wakes, he usually startles, peering into the darkness and waiting for IT to attack in his clownish terror. But the boy does not lay in his bed, but instead hunches over the desk writing on index cards, his arms, the walls, and his mind– any sort of memorization trick he can think of.
Periodically, he reaches for his laptop, opens up Facebook, wastes fifteen minutes reading a bland twitter feed. When he looks up to see the books and papers and notebooks stacked around him like a fortress, he closes the laptop and returns to work.
The boy is me, naturally, too lazy to use first person because after studying this much, can you even be sure that you inhabit your own body anymore? You’re a robot, a clone, that strange alien double agent sent into a high school to infect the student body as well as the teacher, but there are a few resistant students who team up and fight against you. Either that, or everyone’s losing their minds.
Studying might not be the right word, though. More like boarding up a house in Florida before hurricane season or gathering your army for war. Washington, I have crossed the Delaware. I have faced the enemy, and he is no Fuhrer or vaguely-racist-depiction of Communism, but final exams.
As much as I would like to say that these exams are why I haven’t blogged in so long, I can’t say that. After all, the Mylar balloon has been there the whole time, egging me. Write, write write, and no doubt, I have been writing. Perhaps a little more than a week from now, when the waiting and preparing ends, I can write more. Also, I will be putting up videos of poetry performances in the next few days, so look out for those.
Jonathan S. Foer: Vegetarianism
“I am a hypocrite,” he announced, explaining why he wasn’t a vegan as well, but being a hypocrite was fine, as long as he did something good. It would easier, he stated, to live without opinions, but then you’d be taking the easy way out. You would simply not care. He acknowledges right off that no, everyone can’t be vegetarians. It would be an insurmountable challenge to convert the world. Then what is there to do?
Every person cares about animals—there is no one who thinks it is outright okay to kick a dog. But not everyone is willing to stop eating meat. And that’s the problem, Foer says, that there seems to be only one choice. Either you are a moral vegetarian who cares or an omnivore who does not. Eating vegetarian seems to apply an absolutist policy. He also touched on some friends who had sworn vegetarianism only to have “one bad night” and quit.
In his book Eating Animals, Foer leaves room for people like me, omnivores. The word “vegetarian” seems too all-inclusive. Everyone has “baseline decency, a minimal goodness,” so why not apply that as well as absolutist ideas? One could simply eat vegetarian meals rather than live vegetarian. If there is something you can’t live without eating, eat that, but just because you may like sushi, don’t eat a hamburger just because.
College of Charleston promotional poster
This struck me as his strongest point: there is a spectrum of what we can do to combat factory farming. We don’t all have to convert, only consider the ugly subject in a clear and honest way. Today, it’s easier than ever to live a little more ethically. Even gas stations sell “free range” eggs.
Foer went on to talk about Charleston and its remnants of slavery. We look back at slavery as this great evil, and those who didn’t try to be a solution, they were the problem. One day, he explains, we will view factory farming in those same terms.
Many questions he received accused him of the hypocrisy he admitted to in the first minute of his speech. He has eaten meat, yes, he admits, by accident. But it’s not just one choice to stop, but a series of choices. Each time we sit down to eat, we are confronted with the choice to eat animals or not eat them. The meat industry has simply betted that people find that desire to know the truth so unappetizing, they remain ignorant on purpose.
Foer supports rational thought and direct conversation about controversy. Caring is something we should do more as we grow older, not less; we need not grow complacent with what we have done, but can continue effective change that may make us proud to look back at our lives.
The speeches and the book gave me a remarkable impression and while I don’t intend to swear off meat like so many of my Charleston comrades have done, I intend to significantly cut my meat consumption. Even if you’re adverse to something like vegetarianism, ignorance should not be your reasoning to ignore the problem; read Eating Animals if ever you get the chance.
At one point, Foer told the anecdote of eating lamb after this book was published. While eating dinner at his agent’s house, he realized too late a dish she served contained chopped up bits of lamb. Just because of that experience, he couldn’t just give up—it was really okay that one that. The point, he stresses, is not that he tries to just stop eating meat. The point is for him to not choose to eat meat. That choice matters, and everyone time he makes the choice, it matters, as it can for us.
Jonathan S. Foer: Storytelling
Photo Credit by Maria Mansfield Richardson of the CofC Honors College
Because he had to talk at lengths about his ideas concerning vegetarianism in his final session, Foer allowed in the first forum a more general discussion of his ideas concerning fiction. Readers of his fiction work pounced upon this opportunity to question him concerning Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated.
He began by answering a girl’s question about Oscar, the protagonist of Extremely Loud, whether or not he based that character on himself or someone he knew. No, he said, not really. Characters have to be believable, but not in a journalistic sense. “If I wanted to write a book that accurately portrayed a nine year old, I would have interviewed a nine-year old.”
There is a difference, though, he contests, between journalistic and novelistic truth. We as readers may believe exaggerations and oddities through a story because it serves a greater truth. “Fiction isn’t about the facts,” Foer said, “just about what you know without someone telling you.” He made a point to emphasize that books that resonate the most with us simply “feel true.”
Next he told an anecdote about the first time he talked with a fan in public, over a radio broadcasting show. He sat wearing headphones, ready to discuss Illuminated, when the first caller phoned up. “Your story, that’s the story of my family, something that tells my story—” This man must be just like me, Foer thought: a young Jewish man, reaching back in time for his heritage. The man continued “—as a sixty year old black man from Trenton, I thought nobody would get it right.”
This illustrates the innate universalism of personal stories. Even emotions we think that we exclusively express, the feelings we believe alienate, those are the things that unite us to other people from a myriad of backgrounds. Books connect us in a beautiful way. Foer learned, we are not always closest to the people who look most like us, not just people with the same skin color or ideas, but instead with people who share similar stories.
“Does it get any easier?” asks the next spectator, a fledgling writer. Foer shook his head. It doesn’t get easier, never does. In fact, he asserted, it gets harder with each book he attempts to write. You have to choose a story you’re willing to stick with for a very long time. He put it quite simply: “People who continue to write become writers. The others just stop.”
He addressed also the critical analyses of his work, at first calling BS on the whole trope. But he admitted that once a book leaves an author’s desk, it’s no longer only his. Once a book goes out into the world, it gets better because each reader breathes life into it.
Foer sets up this contrast: either “interpretation of literature” is nonsense, authors subconsciously place info into stories, or maybe books are flexible. Maybe books can mean more than what they’re meant to mean. This was a fresh insight—that just because authors don’t intend a theme doesn’t mean the book can’t have it. Readers are people who like to be provoked, challenged—they make a story more full by comparing it to their own stories. They add in bits until the story sprawls and is out of the author’s control; this is not a bad thing.
Books, Foer explained, are not the party—they’re the invitation to the party. Where you go and what you do once you reach the party is the choice of the reader.
Jonathan S. Foer: A Campus Visit
During orientation for the College of Charleston, each Freshman received a copy of Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest nonfiction book about factory farming, meat consumerism, and cultural ideas surrounding meat. For most of the year, many of the lectures, documentary showings, and group involvement activities have centered around discussing the impact of farming animals and how we do and should feel about it.
Very often, we discussed these ideas in class and how we felt about them. In fact, scroll down and there is a picture of my BGS (Beyond George Street) class discussing the book in Rivers Green. (I’m the one in the plaid shirt).
During his first speech (which I attended at 2:00pm), he mentioned that his goal certainly was not to attempt to convert a generation to vegetarianism—something he deemed impossible. When I received the book back in June, however, that’s exactly what I felt like he meant to do. What a snot-nosed liberal policy-pusher, I thought, shoving his green-leaf ideology down our throats.
Only, it didn’t, not really. He leaves a lot of room for improvement—moral wiggle room. The attacks you expect him to make he never truly makes because he accosts not you—the omnivore—but the industry as a whole. Rather than approaching the subject with a mind to depress and horrify the reader, he attempts to uplift by sympathizing with the plight to better ourselves.
I, like many others I am sure, were reluctant to read the book out of fear he would impose moral superiority. In 
fact, the book is a shocking choice, considering College of Charleston’s various sponsors. Surely, they expected some flak from alumni contributors or local restaurants. During his final speech, made in the TD Arena before hundreds of students and citizens of the community, he took an early jab at an advertisement above his head.
“What’s this?” He looked up, indicating the Kickin’ Chicken banner above his head. He made the point that with sponsors like these for our stadium, reading the book might be questionable. He also inquired after the name, making vague connections to animal cruelty in the form of kicking chickens.
I arrived at these presentations with a pretense, ready to berating, but Foer proved more reasonable than he seemed. The day previous I attended a vegan potluck outside of the library, and I actually enjoyed this food. If it were an option in the cafeteria, surely I would choose it over half-cooked hamburgers on stale buns or suspiciously pink hot dogs. Why not listen to what he had to say?
Yesterday, Foer explained his position in his own words, and if you missed the presentations, I will write a recap of what was discussed.
With a newly grown beard, he looked more like James Franco than he did in his cover photo. He took the stage of the first forum, engaging the participants on a personal level. He explained his own college experiences and his experiences with college but seguing into a discussion about his work. In the next two posts, I will paraphrase things discussed both about vegetarianism and storytelling. Read both or read either, depending on what you’re interesting in, but do take his ideas in consideration.
{These essays, recording some of the interview questions asked, will be posted later this evening or early tomorrow morning.}
The Poetic Life: Say Yes
{Make sure to check out Parts I and II of the Poetic Life series as well as head over to Kendall Driscoll’s blog for another perspective on living poetically.}
Never deny yourself an experience. Whatever opportunity blow your way, hitch up your sails and ride that wind until it is beat. Do not, as Nancy Reagan might suggest, just say no—instead: say Yes.
Say yes to the experiences that could change you, that could shape you and shock you and delight you. Say yes especially to the things that scare you, those things you don’t want to do simply because they seem too big. Nothing is too big. Leap out a plane miles above the earth, travel to Africa, get a college degree, sing on the street at five in the morning, wake up your neighbors with “Yankee Doodle.”
A lot of classes and instructors of writing say, “Write what you know.” Write what you are passionate about—but sometimes what you may be passionate about does not align with what you know. It is probably a good time to learn, then. Experience those things so you can write about, and even if you absolutely can’t (sci-fi, fantasy writers out there), then write it anyways. You don’t have to be an expert, but when you do get a chance to learn something firsthand, wrestle that opportunity to the ground.
What scares you? Ever since childhood, I have avoided films concerning the paranormal, the horrific, grotesque acts of 
ghosts and monsters under the bed, of the boogeyman and of anything that goes bump in the night. Recently, however, I have more open to watching horror movies. It’s not the bloody, realistic ones that scare me either, only the ones with ridiculous plots and grouchy ghouls.
With Halloween fast approaching, I am even considering walking through those decorated haunted houses. In Charleston, the historic ambiance of murder gone by stinking the air, you know those could get pretty frightening. But I’ll brave for the sake of poetry, or at least for the sake of being afraid. What’s so bad about being afraid? It teaches us a lot about ourselves.
Therefore, we can strive to do anything we think we can’t, agree to all the opportunities handed to us.
Internship? Okay.
A trip to Florence, Italy? Sure, why not?
A nighttime ghost tour? Ah, well… okay, fine.
Living poetically means experiencing everything, analyzing everything, so why ever say no?
The Poetic Life: An Introduction
Is there something intrinsically different about the way a poet lives versus other people? Do they carry around magical golden powder they snort up their nostrils so their creative juices flow? Perhaps a Grimmorie inscribed in a foreign, forgotten language reminiscent of the clichéd hieroglyphs featured in The Mummy trilogy.
The poetic life, though it inspires poetry that we read and enjoy, does not exist under mystical circumstances but rather a set of principles with which to live according to. And not so much principles in the way of a stringent constitution—these ideas and methods have worked for me, so if they fail to work for anyone else, then that isn’t exactly because they don’t work. Ultimately, no one can really criticize or teach life or poetry or anything else because no one is an expert—we are allowed only an intimate case study from which to draw from.
Don’t look at this like some poorly-wrought constitution, but instead a personal manifesto, if anything only a written reminder to myself of how I should live. Not just in a moral sense, but in a poetic sense—is there such thing as a poetic life? These things I’ve been considering for many weeks, reading books on the idea including Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Rilke.
The philosophy of psychology and the psychology of philosophy come to very much the same conclusion: humans have an innate desire to understand themselves, their world, and how they interact with the world.
Each day, I will post something new, a short essay or explanation of a facet of the poetic life, something I think everyone should strive to understand. Because a poetic life does not only help the poet produce decent, sincere poetry, but it also allows a man to live a sincere life. He constantly thinks.
That’s the first challenge—to think. Not just in class or when in times of turmoil, but every day, all of the time, to the 
point that thoughts become exhausting. Concentrate on your life, on your actions. Do not act on impulse, but instead consider each action individually. Develop ideas from everyday experiences. Why can’t a trip to the bathroom or a morning shower or a walk downtown inspire?
We have familiarized ourselves with beauty and no longer recognize it’s beautiful. We fail to learn from aesthetics, as beauty too is a type of knowledge. Contemplate all things, every stray word, every gesture, as if the world is a narrative to deconstruct—but never say a shallow thing. Never read from the script of preconceived ideas, of things you repeat, you rehearse, you eject constantly.
For the next week, maybe two, I will contemplate these ideas and share my thoughts with you. If you have more to say on the subject, comment below. I would love to hear your thoughts. What does it mean to live a “poetic life?”
Htein Lin: Survival Art
{Last night, I had the good fortune of hearing distinguished artist Htein Lin speak about his work, life, and inspirations. Because I found it so profoundly moving, his story so incredibly interesting, I wrote up a brief summation of his lecture. If so inspired by future lectures, perhaps I will do the same to pass on some of the knowledge I have been learning at university. This post probably does no justice to the beauty this man espouses, but I have tried, in the plainest terms, to convey it.}
Born in Burma under a military regime, Htein Lin spent his life struggling as an artist suppressed by Burma’s government. He works in the mediums of painting, performance, and video, practicing what he calls “Survival Art,” which is to take the negative out of life and turn it into something positive. As Htein Lin put it, “making misery into art.”
He began his artistic career as a comedian while he studied law at the university. During this time, he joined an art organization that cultivated his artistic sensibilities but in the most conservative way possible. During his school term, he became involved in many protests which made him unpopular among the local regime. Because no social media existed in 1988, no Facebook or Twitter, the uprising that followed garnered little press coverage.
To fight for democracy, he needed to work outside of Burma, moving to India to work as an illustrator for a magazine. Soon after, he moved toward the border of China to join the “iunale.” These were peaceful rebels for democracy, carrying no guns, starting no conflict. The presence of guns would make them vulnerable to attack—they were safer without weapons, seeming to pose no real threat.
During his exile, he suffered many horrors, the least of which was nature. Each night, he taped his eyes shut in fear leeches would suckle his eyeballs just as they often latched onto his feet, arms, and back. After staying for a little while, the group split, one half accusing the other of being spies, including Htein Lin. They tortured the accused with freezing temperatures, by burning their skin, and by making incisions in their fingers.
15 of the accused escaped into China, only to be arrested again. This quickly blew over, though.
Htein Lin’s life as a captive truly began in 1998 when his name appeared on a circulating list of possible rebels. For this, he was sentenced to seven years in jail. According to Htein Lin, American and British prisons seemed like “a Bed and Breakfast.” He survived on a metal-mesh bed barely large enough to accommodate him while sitting cross-legged.
He continued, however, to work on his art. He used old prison uniforms on which to paint upon, paying off guards to smuggle in paints. For a brush, he used once a roller from a lighter, another time the tip of a hospital syringe. He became what he described as the “resident artist of the prison.” Despite being confined, his creativity bloomed.
After prison, he “fell in love with art,” marrying a British artist and moving to Britain.
He lived his life, transforming pain into beauty. When he broke his elbow in a car wreck, he used the plaster to create a sculpture. When
Source: http://saladtv.kr/?document_srl=104683
Depicted here is a Burmese prisoner who has cut off his fingers to avoid being sent to a labor camps.
tested for a deadly disease, he allowed the doctors to use a special micro-camera to snap pictures of his digestion system, swallowing the pill-like device. He used the images to create a video for Youtube, a living art piece.
Htein Lin’s art focuses on sampling simple things from his life to create sculptures or paintings or useful tools. He transformed his fears, his regrets into something others could learn from, something we could wonder at.
I encourage you to check out his artwork as well as research individually his remarkable biography (I have only given small details). Best of luck.
