Thursday, December 10, 2009

We have an agreement, you and I, an unspoken blogging arrangement that doesn’t ask for much: you pay a visit to this site, and in return I give you my full attention. I’ve violated this covenant tonight, however, because I’m thinking about an entirely different piece of text right now. It’s a prayer I wrote for a college commencement in ’02. Not my own school, to be clear, where I flew as far beneath the radar as possible, but the university in my hometown.

I won’t burden you with much more context, so in brief I was a junior myself then, eager to tackle the challenge of shoehorning an inherently religious set of words into more ecumenical terms. I wrote a page, it was delivered, received well, and now, seven years later, I need to do it again. Initially I thought I could dust off the original model and borrow liberally from it, if not copy it wholesale.

But when I cracked open the prayer tonight, read it again, I cringed. It’s still mechanically sound, though the positives end there. In truth it’s ornate. Heavy and overwrought. I guess parallel structure must’ve been cool at the time, because there sure is a lot of it. Parts of it also seem vaguely unoriginal, as if I had gone on a wild plagiaristic binge at a local Hallmark. There’s cheese, too–literary cheese, perhaps the smelliest kind of all. Bottom line, it’s a commencement prayer that tries a little too hard to be a commencement prayer.

Circumstances were partly to blame, I think. When I originally wrote it, I was enamored with the idea of graduating, since I had yet to reach the milestone myself. Now here, on the other side of the river, I’d much prefer to paint the ivory tower as a pillar of carnies and horseshit. I’d like to address the graduating class and say–hey!–your professors are probably bored out of their minds right now, and God help you make the most of your investment in this wretched job market. That would be crass and selfish, of course, on a day that really belongs to students and their families.

We were supposed to chat about dogs tonight, but with the commencement fast approaching, we’ll need to postpone our discussion. I plan on writing the prayer this weekend. All I’ve got to do is lock onto a few feel-good ideas, let them percolate, then wrap it all in prose that is earnest and effortless–eloquent in economy, rather than excess. And it better have a hell of a lot less alliteration than what you just saw. Green eggs and fuckin’ ham, this is going to take some elbow grease.