For English, we produced Listener Lyrics, which are essays that are meant to be more poetic and perhaps more sentimental than a traditional essay. Mine is, at least. I wrote my essay about guilt and morality.

My essay

7 Years Old and Stupid

“When I look back, I was so mean…I think kids are mean because they’re idiots.”

When I was a kid, and I was mean, mean, mean. Almost all of my childhood memories are of the mean things I did, but it is that fact that gives me hope. Hope that I am now honest and humble, and that all the idiot kids I know will grow into better people.

In second grade, I had a bit of an incident. That morning, my dad was driving me to school. When he is lost in thought, he swears at himself, and I guess he just forgot I was in the car with him, and, can I swear here? He dropped a fat F-bomb, and, in the face of a new word, I asked him how to spell it, but he just told me not to repeat it. 

In my English class, one of my classmates, who I will leave unnamed because we all know him, was being superbly obnoxious. I vaguely remember using a red stamp in my writing notebook. I was very focused–I did not talk to my tablemates or daydream like I usually did. The entirety of my focus was on this kid. 

“Foo! Foo! Foo! What does Foo mean?” he yelled, as he ran around the classroom. This continued for an unbearably long time, and my patience ran a bit too thin. 

I called him over to my table and I whispered in his ear, “Foo means [redacted] in Chinese.” It was genius. I am Chinese, so he would trust me, even though I couldn’t speak Chinese at all, and he would stop running around and yelling because [redacted] was a bad word. And we shouldn’t repeat bad words.

As with most plans a child makes, it backfired. He gasped and his eyes lit up. He exclaimed, “Now I can say a bad word without anybody knowing!” After a bit more yelling, Ms. Cheng pulled him to her desk and had a very quiet, menacing-looking chat with him. 

The bell rang, and we all went to lunch. I had just gotten my hot meal from the cafeteria when a girl from my class went up to me and told me that Ms. Cheng wanted to talk to me. 

I walked into the classroom. It smelled sickly, like strawberries over thick chlorine. It was dark; the only light in the room filtered through the window by Ms. Cheng’s desk, through which I could see my friends playing in the sun. 

“[Unnamed] told me that you said a bad word to him. Is that true?”

I swallowed. I had to avoid a citation at all costs. I used all of my knowledge of lying (which was just that when people lied, they looked left) and I looked up, pretending to rack my brain for the answer to her question. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ms. Cheng stared at me for a moment, almost knowingly, and let me back outside to eat lunch with my friends. 

The next day, I learned that [unnamed] had gotten a citation. I could say that I got off scot-free, but the knowledge I had slithered my way out of punishment and that the repercussions that were meant for me landed on him stained the back of my mind. After that day, I couldn’t bear to talk to him. I couldn’t bear to look his mom in the eyes either, lest she could somehow read my mind and find out what I did. When he and his friends confronted me about it in art class, I clammed up and brushed it off. Even now, it’s impossible for me to keep my mind from that incident for too long, and whenever I see him at school, I mutter a small “sorry” in my head.

The ink bleeds. 

The sharp tip scars 

our paper. You stumble 

Through the alphabet. 

The nib trips 

On the grooves of the paper. 

It will be so long before you know the right ink, the right touch, 

The right words, 

For your elegant scrawl.

Bibliography

Ng, Nick. Personal interview. 9 November 2020.

This was not a formal interview by any means. I was talking to Nick during the small group discussions in English class, and the subject of our discussion drifted towards our childhoods and the stupid and mean things we did as kids, as well as the bad things that happened to us.

I think that Nick always has interesting insights. Most of the time, his insights are just funny, but usually, they all have some deeper meaning. Nick’s talent is saying things in a simple, innocent, and joyful way, and that makes him not just funny, but also really nice to be around.

Talking with Nick about this showed me that my experience, being that most of my childhood memories were negative, was not exclusive to me. Saumeya, who read my rough draft, also commented on how she related to the fact that most of my memories were of the mean things I’d done or were done to me. This is the insight that I think is fundamental to my essay, and I’m glad that Nick could put it into such a good sentence.

Cohen, Taya R., et al. “Guilt Proneness and Moral Character.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 21, no. 5, 2012, pp. 355–359. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44318608. Accessed 19 Nov. 2020.

This article describes the Guilt and Shame Proneness scale (GASP), how it is tested, and the correlation between guilt and other aspects of personality. The studies mentioned in this article conclude that people who are more guilt-prone are more likely to be honest and humble. Those who are less guilt-prone are more likely to break rules in general.

This article provides a detailed, analytical perspective on what sort of already makes sense: the idea that people who are more prone to feeling guilty are more likely to behave ethically. What might be surprising, though, is that high guilt-proneness actually makes a person less likely to have bad mental health. 

The data in this text confirmed to me that guilt is not necessarily a bad emotion, even if it may feel uncomfortable. It confirms that guilt can help drive somebody to behave morally and ethically, and that maybe guilt is something that people want to avoid, but it is also a tool that helps people grow.

Perry, Lauren. “How to Solve Calligraphy Problems Caused by Bad Paper.” Lauren Perry Studio, Lauren Perry Studio, 11 Sept. 2019, laurenperrystudio.com/how-to-solve-calligraphy-problems-caused-by-bad-paper/. 

This blog post describes a lot of the common problems that beginner calligraphers come across and how to solve them. 

These ink and paper issues are so common that the advice in this blog post is very helpful. Perry explains the solutions but also why these issues occur, so it gives the reader a good insight into how to tackle their own calligraphing problems in the future.

I used this as a reference to make sure my ending poem made sense. From reading this, I included how the calligraphy nib might rip the paper a little bit, if too much ink is used, and how the nib will skip and catch onto the paper if it isn’t smooth. Because I have tried calligraphy before, I had a sense of what I wanted to put in the poem, but reading this helped confirm to me that the problems I had were in fact common, so it would make sense for me to include it in the poem.

My production

I made a ASMR calligraphy video featuring scratchy nib sounds because of my calligraphy metaphor in my lyrical essay.

Process

I used a DSLR camera to film the video, and After Effects to cut and edit the video. That was basically it. For the calligraphy, I sketched the shape I wanted to make with the writing on another sheet of paper and I just did my thing in the video.

Reflection

I learned that I should flip the display on the camera around so I can see myself when filming. I had to crop my video because my head was kind of in the way the whole time.

Lyrical Essayist Study

For the Honors class, we wrote an essay analyzing the book Citizen by Claudia Rankine, which uses lyrical essays to talk about everyday racism. My essay is in response to a review of the book by Dan Chiasson.

Almost Invisible
In his review, Dan Chiasson celebrates Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, calling it artful, disabusing, and brilliant. He compares some of the poetry in Citizen to Walt Whitman, especially his poem “Song of Myself.” He comments on the form of the lyrical essays, noting the second person perspective used to string the reader along startling events and the block justification of the text that gives the book a confessional tone. Chiasson notes the importance of the words “you” and “I”: “You” recount the events as they are and “I” analyze the event for what they really mean. Rankine turns “memory into metaphor.” Chiasson defines a lot of the book’s content as injustices that happen during the so-called “post-racial” America. Off of this, Chiasson also brings up Rankine’s love of tennis, where stars like Serena Williams is a black woman playing a traditionally white man’s game, and the trauma that comes with being different and on the top. Chiasson concludes by saying that Citizen points out the ironies in the racist things that happen and how in order to survive, you have to “move on” from the memory and their meanings, even if you can never truly leave them behind. I agree that Rankine shows injustice through the illusion of justice in her writing, but I disagree that the second person and first person represent memories and their metaphors.
Instead of representing metaphors drawn from memories, I think that the first person represents strength, whereas the second person is weak. Chiasson probably got his idea from the sentence, “Sometimes ‘I’ is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it” (71). From this, it sounds like Rankine is describing a deeper meaning coming from a memory. However, I think that he overlooked the next couple of sentences, “This makes the first person a symbol for something. / The pronoun barely holding the person together” (71). With that last sentence, the meaning of the first person changes from drawing metaphors from memories to the sense of identity. A couple pages later, Rankine describes the first person again, writing, “Listen, you, I was creating a life study of a monumental first person, a Brahmin first person…Don’t lean against the wallpaper; sit down and pull together” (73). This is one of the few times in the book that Rankine uses “I” in the narrator’s voice. Unlike most of the book, on this page, the narrator is very direct and tells the reader (or “you”) what to do, and that supports a feeling of strength coming from the narrator, or the “I” character. Rankine describes the first person as monumental and a Brahmin, which further enforces the idea that the first person is strong and powerful. Throughout the book, there are lots of memories and meanings drawn from those memories, but “you” and “I” are used for a different purpose: showing weakness and strength.
Most of the book Citizen highlights different instances of racism that probably would not have been recognized immediately as racism. Chiasson called this “the kinds of injustice that thrive when the illusion of justice is perfected.” I agree that Rankine emphasizes the illusion of justice by showing the invisibility of black people. In the script for the Situation video titled “Hurricane Katrina,” Rankine writes from the perspective of a witness, probably white, during Hurricane Katrina: “What I’m hearing, she said, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. / He gave me the flashlight, she said, I didn’t want to turn it on. It was all black. I didn’t want to shine a light on that” (84). In this quote, Rankine makes it clear how the speakers are masking the injustice using innocence and ignorance. In the first sentence, the witness says that all of the black people who were stuck in the middle of the hurricane wanted to be there, which is clearly untrue. In reality, there was a large injustice because the people helping with the emergency had forgotten about them. The second part of the quote says the same thing, that the assumed white character did not want to see the injustice or “shine a light” on it, even if they had the flashlight or the information to do so. An illusion of justice is created when the perpetrators refuse to see the injustice. Continuing the theme of water, Rankine ends the book with the painting The Slave Ship by Joseph Mallord William Turner. First looking at the painting, viewers’ eyes are drawn to the sun and the ship, both bright and beautiful. Rankine then zooms in on the bottom right corner, where a disembodied limb of a slave is floating in the water, blending in with the fishes, and almost unnoticed. Again, the injustice against black people is minimized, creating a illusion of a post-racial society. Claudia Rankine dives past the illusion and exposes the ugly truth.
In conclusion, I agree with Dan Chiasson’s review except for the part about what the pronouns “you” and “I” symbolize, because I think those pronouns more closely represent strength and identity than making metaphors from memories. Like Chiasson, though, I think that Rankine’s book exposes injustices against black people that may have previously been invisible, in a very artful way.