Notes and Reflections

While I judged six rounds of I.E. events, and one round of Finals, and because we’re studying “Electracy,” it occurred to me that the tournament offered an excellent arena for reflection (Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania)

A young woman asked “Can blasphemy be beautiful?” Drawing from N. Hornby “Speaking with The Angel“, a young, twenty-something, presented an interesting and provocative discussion of beauty and art, value and policy (obscenity and censorship), and the medium used to  present it: What goes here–art, or science?

As I entered the second-floor classroom, located the window, and took my seat beneath it, I wondered how Ulmer would interpret the rhetorical situation embodied by the eager, inspirational speakers. As we took our seats: the judges sat in the last row of desks lining, single-file, against the wall; the audience sat in the desks in front of them, and I took a seat next to the half-opened window–the crisp, arctic breeze was invigorating, refreshing, a welcomed change from the drowsy, muddled heads staring at the vacant podium poised in front of the chalkboard, as a clock hung above it reminded me of the setting sun.

From my desk, and through the window, I could see a kind of double-vision: on the window’s glass, I could see the next speaker assume the podium. The truth is, no podium is used during these events; it wasn’t really there–in the window, anymore than the reflection held in the window. Beyond the window’s reflection of the classroom, I could see the snow-speckled, turf-green football field: the billboards advertising Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, and the local insurance company; the score-board, the cement-grey seats, the goal posts, and the coal-colored and embroidered orange-yellow letters of jerseys worn, and warming, the soccer players who displayed them. Like the paper-ballots used to evaluate a speakers’ performance, the page, no–the screen, upon which success and failure was to be measured, a woman began speaking about an-image-of-Christ-composed-of-the-breasts-of-women, a mosaic emerged.

Inside the room, listener’s began squirming in their chairs, shifting their weight from left-to-right, from right-to-left; heads nodded in agreement with such an offensive, obscene even, theological description of the Son of God, a muriel: piece-by-piece, shard of colored glass, a transparent reflection or, perhaps, refraction, of God, and Son; each shaerd–a “woman’s breast,” and “a nipple.” In the room, each woman nodded in agreement: censorship-yes! –a nodding head: first, the chin; then, the furrowed brow; first, the floor; then, the ceiling, each woman in the audience, an audience of twenty-five women and two men, concurred with the speaker. I turned my head to the right: the setting sun, the gray-white, grey-blue melange of blackened clouds swept their shadows over the snow-capped mountains above me. I thought, “There. There…, Oh!” As the soccer ball passed over his head and into the yellow net that blocked its passage–censorship; the only other male in the room turned his eyes toward his chin, as if resting his head on the desk’s surface beneath it–”There.”

“There it was.” I thought. I was reminded of The Tunnel (by William H. Gass) and The Naked Citadel (by Susan Faludi). Yes, there it was: shame-induced consciousness (Faludi); here, in the crowded room, civilization in-micro, a microcosm of competing minds; in the “farther room” beyond the window (Gass)–there, another community; here, another. Over-head, high above the clouds, beyond the snow-capped, mountain wrapped in pine trees and, the occasional flash of a porch light, a flash-flicker of another light–perhaps, a living-room, or dining-room–”There!” Another house; another room–perhaps, the clash of colliding dishes in the kitchen sink, and only the t-h-u-m-p and t-h-u-d of the passing train along the river cradled below the pines and between the fading lights of field, of porch and home, of classrooms–sterile, vacant, emptied of body, and filled with shards of glass.

“Here.” Censorship or vacancy; body–or, Body…of whom? of “what,” perhaps art? perhaps science?