My Exile to Pratt

Many people have asked me about my experience at Pratt lately. Therefore, I've posted this account of my first days
there. Some of it is a bit exagerrated for emphasis. I say this because I want to resist the notion that a blog is
for disassociated people to catharticize to a hypothetical audience (usually a make-believe audience whose response
can be imagined and gagued by the catharticizer). Disclaimer: this is not a catharsis!


Begrudgingly, I went to New York for my first year of college, mostly because I was rejected from every school I applied to but one--a small bipolar art school with a well-respected architecture program. My parents and I, upon driving through the gates of the college, raised our brows and looked for euphemisms and encouraging sentiments that might stifle our first impressions. I had never seen the school. For that matter, I never anticipated on going.

I received my letter of admittance on a warm spring Thursday afternoon. On Thursdays in spring, I opened the windows to the backyard that teemed with young insects and cottonwood seeds in the mid-day sun, and let the breeze come in through the blossoms of the sugar maple by the kitchen, where I sat at the table drinking coffee. Andrew came the Thursday I got into college, and we talked about places we wanted to go. Without much conviction, I said that it would alright to go to New York, but not for long—certainly not for college, I imagined even then. The idea that I might become an East Coaster seemed the tragic consequence of leaving my world behind; the advent of a certain fatality. It’s not so easy to sit by a window with a sugar maple at its ledge in the middle of the city, now isn’t it? College in New York was always an abstraction to me, and since the concept was unreal we discussed things that were more important because it was a different world that we had to tend to.

Months later, far away from Thursday afternoons and windows to open, my parents and I stepped into my new cage of habitation. It was fairly large for a dorm room. There were two immense windows on the wall to open up to a courtyard outside and a wide ledge to place books upon or sit with one. An air-conditioning unit buzzed along the wall, spewing out air that smelled of dust and vinyl. Overall, my room had the charm of a socialist-era Scandinavian state mental health institute cell. The floors collected dust that traveled its way through the air ducts, and a pile of particle-board furniture (quite a bit of it) was waiting for distribution in the corner of the room. My father looked at me with his hands on his hips. This was a sign that he was trying to think of something optimistic to say. I was surprised when he spoke. “Patrick,” he said. “In all seriousness, it would be okay for you to come back to East Lansing with mumma and me.” I looked at my parents carefully. So few times have I been tempted by such course-of-life-altering offers—the ones with the magnitude to rewrite your doom to include squalor and puddles of urine in dark alleys or closets overflowing with empty long-necks and putrid winter coats of twenty-years past. My room was dismal, as was I, and I felt strangely warm to the idea of spiffying up the place by vomiting cornmeal and grapefruit juice over the furniture. The only time I had ever thrown up, though, was when I choked on the fluoride goop at the dentist in middle school.

It’s particularly easy for my mother to become disgusted. She cringed at the sterility of the room, a sort of inverted filth that made her brow furrow and her lips curl. What my mother lacks is the Protestant ethic of enduring hardship for the sake of convenience—usually, I expect my dad to be the pragmatist. But what she does have is a different kind of endurance, the kind that will take her and her family from a space that is little more than allocated for human habitation to one of great character and reliability. She didn’t object to my dad’s offer. She may have thought the same thing. When she knows that there are greater forces at work, however, such as resolving the idiosyncrasies of one’s course in life with confidence and foresight, she quickly becomes like a cheery girl scout troop leader and rearranges dilemmas into matters of two-penny wisdom—“eh,” she shrugs, “just enjoy your work and get out every once in a while. There’s a bed waiting for you when you’re done.” Somehow, she lost her ability to worry about peril. There was no are-you-sure?ing and no well—okay then, if you’re up for it. But that’s the last thing I wanted anyway. Sitting in the car after unloading everything, my mother had a moment of true hope, and said that it probably wouldn’t be as bad as we all thought it would be. Broken windows would be fixed, lobbies mopped and the tottery freaks walking by the car window would turn over stable people. In the coming autumn, leaves would fall, and in winter snow would coat the green. Spring would cause the somewhat stately trees of the green to blossom, and then summer would find my parents back at the foot of my hall with the trunk open and somewhere not too long away, a bed waiting for me when all was over.

It’s not that I’m weak. I had been away from home for periods beforehand. A summer in Rome, another in Annapolis, three summer camps and being alone at tennis tournaments, the downtowns of cities, and tracts in the wilderness. I had discovered who I was early and 'explored life' vigorously while I had the chance, unburdened by pragmatism. I studied in coffee shops and walked downtown to the library some afternoons. I found a way to go places I needed to go, and discovered other places to escape to. My room at home was stocked with meaningful things that meant my identity to me. An afternoon at Lake Michigan was not just an outing, but an inquiry into sunlight and the rocks beneath the waves, into different scents of the west wind and the shadows created by the summer light. This taught me about winter light and the light of afternoon and morning. Yeah--I know this all very hoaky, but what I'm trying to get at here is the fundamental idea of a consumptive experience. Synthesis made me strong. What made it difficult to be at my new school was the pain associated with perceiving nothing new. It seems that it was all snuffed out—brilliance, curiosity, beauty, oddity and faith. For me, it wasn’t a question of whether or not I could handle being away from my own little world, it was whether or not my own little world would fizzle away despite my best efforts to keep it close. And yet I wondered, why couldn’t I be Huck Finning it? Isn’t this what Elliot referred to as “the dance?” Ah yes—the dance; I think so. And I wondered how is it that such a place of newness could be so void of ordinary good. Whereas once the most meaningful things were the opening of windows and the coolness of a sugar maple or the sound of a coffee mug upon the table in a room hushed of anything but buzzing critters and birds, blah blah blah, now there was not even ordinariness; and how can anything or anyplace have character if it isn’t ordinary--rather, rudimentary--first?


Chanson du jour: Bob Dylan, Shelter from the Storm, appropriate title and a nod to my roomate at Pratt, my dawg Todd R.