[IR] Controlled Creativity (Talk About an Oxymoron)

Tara and I are reading Never Let Me Go for this quarter's reading groups, and honestly I'm surprised how little I know about the purpose and people in this story based on how far I am into the book.  I mean, 60 pages should be enough to give you at LEAST a basic understanding of what the story is supposed to feel like, but I'm having a hard time even gleaning a sense of mood from it all.  The only word I can use to describe it is "eerie," but it's not a strong emotion that I feel when reading by any means and I primarily took that from the knowledge I took from the book's description on Amazon.  BUT BUT BUT I'm not even close to giving up on it; I've been dying to read more science fiction since I read The Transall Saga by Gary Paulsen in 5th grade and it changed my life.  

Just for some background, this book follows the lives of a group of children who attend a boarding school in the English countryside called Hailsham.  All we know is that the kids at Hailsham are very special (still not sure why) and they are treated as such. The first section starts to hint at why these kids might be so special; One of the children (Tommy) has been shunned by fellow students for months, which we find out is almost a direct result of the fact that Tommy has not put any of his art on display recently. This seems like such an odd reason for bullying to commence, but it goes even deeper when Tommy proposes the idea of "not being creative," a concept that makes the main character/narrator very very uncomfortable.  Therefore, I'm thinking these children are set apart from others due to their creative capabilities.  

This concept immediately takes me back to last year's AP Lang exam, which included an essay asking the writer to convince a school board whether creativity classes would be a good idea to implement into school a curriculum.  Honestly, I think that essay has got to have been one of the best essays I've ever written, timed or otherwise.  I was so strongly opposed to the concept that I had more reasons to speak against it than I could fit on a page.  It would needlessly drain precious funding, favor one type of child over another, and ultimately not be successful in nurturing highly creative children.  After all, what teacher can be trusted with the responsibility of telling a child that his or her creations are not "creative enough."  So much potential for damage.

Perhaps we will see these exact conflicts arising in Never Let Me Go more than they already have.  I mean, if a lack of displayed artwork is enough to evoke merciless bullying on a young child and cause even the teachers to say "he was asking for it with that lack of creativity," who knows what kind of chaos could emerge from such a strange value system.

[PR] We Disinfect the Crime

When we did the pretest in AP Lit at the beginning of the school year I found myself terribly distracted whilst doing my poetry analysis.  One of the poems that we were being asked to dissect caught my attention and I haven't forgotten it since.  As soon as I got home, I recalled a line from the poem and allowed Google to whisk me off into enlightenment.  The poem was an unnamed sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, of whom my mother had heard but I had not.  Below is the sonnet in that pretest:

Read history: so learn your place in Time;

And go to sleep: all this was done before;

We do it better, fouling every shore;

We disinfect, we do not probe, the crime.

Our engines plunge into the seas, they climb

Above our atmosphere: we grow not more

Profound as we approach the ocean's floor;

Our flight is lofty, it is not sublime.

Yet long ago this Earth by struggling men

Was scuffed, was scraped by mouths that bubbled mud;

And will be so again, and yet again;

Until we trace our poison to its bud

And root, and there uproot it: until then,

Earth will be warmed each winter by man's blood.

First of all, Thomas C. Foster can suck it because this sonnet looks like the saddest square on the planet and that whole chapter was bull feces.  I see myself often tending to gravitate towards sonnets when deciding that I appreciate a poem.  They're fun to write and force a certain level of accountability with their dense structure, so it hard to find sonnets that are just lazy word vomit.

I think what stands out the most for me is Millay's word choice; "probe," "plunge," "sublime," etc.  The juxtaposition of "scuffed" and "scraped" with "bubbled mud" just gets me every time I read that line. Ugh.  I also feel like Millay is writing directly to the human soul with this poem.  She is obviously blaming humans for focusing on the wrong measures of success, but she does so with the "we" perspective (which makes it feel a bit less omnipotent because she's admitting that she's a member of the guilty party).  The line that really got me to feel that guilt was "Until we trace our poison to its bud"; With that phrase, I imagined veins swollen with poison that we haven't necessarily injected ourselves, but just kind of stare at idly as it courses through us.  The image made me feel kind of gross and she honestly got her point across.

When I mentioned the poem to other people in our class I didn't get as passionate of a response as I was anticipating, so I doubt this poem has as big of an impact on others as it does on me.  But hey, some people like Emily Dickinson.  I don't understand it, but whatever, man, you do you.