Flaming Magic

I’m back in school and so am again dragged away from my own thoughts and dreams into a institution of thought that escapes my understanding. Here is an example of my continuing frustration with academia and its’ current ideology. I arrived at my eight o’clock class this morning after a wonderful walk up to school on this, a crisp morning, the second of autumn. The big tree in Laurel Park, my favorite tree in the whole city and a friend, was just this morning, in his peak splendor with a green coat of leaves bursting at the tips in flames of red and orange! Never again will he look as he did this morning and that to me is Awesome, that is why he is my friend. And so there I am in class an overgrown man/boy squished into a tiny desk in a tiny classroom on the first day of a new term at University. Everyone shifted awkwardly and silently in their seats and, if everyone is like me, tried to guess the internal dialogue going on in the mind of the person sitting next to them. The instructor comes in and breaks the silence to the relief of all: a new person to read or submit to. This is all very routine of course. But to my great joy and astonishment a man and women walked in; the woman carrying a peculiar sort of computer-machine. The instructor asked about the machine and we all found out what it was: one of those transcription machines one would find in a courtroom. It turns out, the man was hearing impaired and she was there to type out the lecture for him to read on a laptop in his lap. I was absolutely taken by the machine and how it worked. As the professor spoke, the woman would kneed the keys causing (I suppose) the words to appear in full chunks on the man’s screen. There were no symbols or characters on any of the keys which made it all the more magical. I read more of the professors lecture than I did listen to it. It wasn’t even much of a lecture really, just her talking about her qualifications as a professor and the works she had published. Again, routine first day procedure. But what happened next was what really got me. The eyes are such a wonderful gift and I don’t know what I’d do without them, especially when entire cultural maxims float into my visual frame at once conveying the absurd or the beautiful. I guess what happened next was auditory as well, but I was hearing visually.

The professor put in a CD of a transgender author’s reading from one of his profound works. The instructor labeled him as transgender not me. And he probably labels himself as transgender which seems to me sad, people formulating self identity by such an insignificant detail. “She” told a sad tale about her struggles with culture’s acceptance of her desires to wear women’s clothing. (Hey, wear what you want. If I had it my way we would be wearing capes and Greek robes.) The author told about his 12 year old cousin and how he was also starting to wear women’s clothes. He used the word fagot a lot and told about a friend of his who has enormous breasts which he’s nick-named the Tyrannosaurus Racks.

While She was reading in a deep manly voice, I couldn’t help but watch as the transcribist typed on her curious machine. What did she think of this class, I wondered? How did that machine work, I pondered again? And so, I looked back and forth from the woman, with an incredible skill, to the mental image of a burly man in drag, reading about his confused twelve year old cousin. My mind can’t grasp how an arts department at a university can ignore technological marvels, the magic flames in every tree--in every molecule of the world--the silence amongst strangers on the first day of class, and focuses instead on the inner turmoil of quirky people.