A 'windmill' (n.) is a machine which converts the energy of wind into rotational motion by means of adjustable vanes called sails. The main use is for a grinding mill powered by the wind, reducing a solid or coarse substance into pulp or minute grains, by crushing, grinding, or pressing. Windmills are common in Holland. If you want, you can purchase a 20 foot Aeration Windmill System on Amazon.com for $1,957.95.
Beyond these facts, the windmill has fabulous literary connotations. Perhaps you've heard of the English idiom "tilting at windmills." This expression is derived from an episode in Migues de Cervantes' seminal novel Don Quijote. In common parlance, "tilting at windmills" means attacking imaginary enemies, or fighting futile battles.
I chose to title my blog "Tilting at Windmills" for two reasons: (1) because the idea of 'fighting futile battles' (or the noble quest toward that which cannot ultimately be attained) seems to be telling of the human condition and (2) because Carleton College--the institution where I got my undergraduate degree--is partially powered by a windmill. (Technically I think it's a wind turbine, but it's the same principle really.)
Of course I've graduated from college now, and I no longer can observe the steady whomping of a windmill slicing the sky. But I still think that it's beautiful (and noble) to attempt impossible tasks, to reach beyond yourself, to express that which evades language. Although I often feel like the process of chasing the impossible crushes me into minute grains, I think it means something.
So, although I'm no longer in the wind-ridden Flat Place, perhaps the metaphor still stands.
9.16.2010
9.07.2010
Yesterday waiting to buy movie tickets--
Me: I can't get a student ticket anymore!! Weird... Dad, I'm unemployed!
Dad: No, you're not unemployed.
Me: What? I mean, my summer job is over. I don't have a job.
Dad: Yes, but in order to be unemployed you have to be actively seeking a job.
Me: Oh. What am I then, if I'm not unemployed?
Dad: A weasel.
Dad: No, you're not unemployed.
Me: What? I mean, my summer job is over. I don't have a job.
Dad: Yes, but in order to be unemployed you have to be actively seeking a job.
Me: Oh. What am I then, if I'm not unemployed?
Dad: A weasel.
8.02.2010
August
The last session of summer camp has begun. I locked my counselors-in-training into a freezer yesterday and told them to escape, and soon we'll go hiking, and then river rafting, and then I'll be northward bound into an indeterminate future. Since the solstice my morning runs have become much grayer. The mosquito swarm that has kept me company in my sleeping area all summer is diminishing, and I've noticed that the vacant half-moon has been looking a lot like a question mark. I've also been wondering about inspiration. Muses, you know, and the desire to change the world.
This post doesn't have an explicit purpose, but I thought I'd ramble a bit since I haven't in a while. In the spirit of musing, I'll put up a poem by William Stafford that I absolutely love:
"When I Met My Muse"
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there tok a new grip
on whatever they touched."I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.
This post doesn't have an explicit purpose, but I thought I'd ramble a bit since I haven't in a while. In the spirit of musing, I'll put up a poem by William Stafford that I absolutely love:
"When I Met My Muse"
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off--they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there tok a new grip
on whatever they touched."I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.
7.20.2010
Why I love kids:
Nolly, 7 years (gesturing at empty bowl): Touch the cheese Caitlin!!!!!!
Me: But Nolly, there isn't any cheese there.
Nolly: It's imaginary cheese! Ewwwww! Play my game!
Me: What is the game called?
Nolly (with exasperated look): It's called Touch the Cheese. Duh.
Me: But Nolly, there isn't any cheese there.
Nolly: It's imaginary cheese! Ewwwww! Play my game!
Me: What is the game called?
Nolly (with exasperated look): It's called Touch the Cheese. Duh.
6.22.2010
A Brief Note on Mountains and Their Affiliated Poems
I like these mountains quite a lot. They are purple, green, and brown, and their proddings into heaven are very brave. I marveled at them as another solstice ticked by, and at the white rushing mountain rivers that clearly embody the spirit of the West. I think I have the spirit of the West too. I have fallen for these mountains and their coursing white-water capillaries.
In California, at this altitude, I identify with the beat-writer Gary Snyder. After learning about Zen in a monastery in Japan, Snyder returned to the U.S. to work on trail crews in the Sierras. Snyder also fell for these mountains, and he saw his labor on their flanks to be a realization of Nirvana. I've wondered whether my hoeing and painting and walking and planning are realizations of Nirvana. Of course I can't be sure, but it's been damn beautiful, and the mountains don't ask many questions about Nirvana. They just sit--perched on the earth, nudging the sky.
In California, at this altitude, I identify with the beat-writer Gary Snyder. After learning about Zen in a monastery in Japan, Snyder returned to the U.S. to work on trail crews in the Sierras. Snyder also fell for these mountains, and he saw his labor on their flanks to be a realization of Nirvana. I've wondered whether my hoeing and painting and walking and planning are realizations of Nirvana. Of course I can't be sure, but it's been damn beautiful, and the mountains don't ask many questions about Nirvana. They just sit--perched on the earth, nudging the sky.
6.14.2010
So I'm done with college.
I've written all my essays, taken my exams, and painted the interior of the college chapel in excruciating detail. I spent a week jumping into the river and reveling in the general glory of Minnesota springtime, and then I walked across a stage wearing a funny black frock and the president of my college gave me a folder with a piece of paper inside. I bid tearful farewells to a community that has defined my universe for four years, and packed up all of my worldly possessions into check-able airplane parcels. And now I'm done. When I fill out forms that ask for my occupation, I can no longer write "student." (Actually, this is an appropriate time to revisit a post I wrote back at the beginning of my Junior year: "When I was a student...")
As I write this, I'm sitting in a small airport in Bakersfield, CA, munching on brie cheese and trying to wrap my head around this incalculable turning point. I'm about to start my summer job working with teenagers in the foothills of the Sierras, but a large part of me still feels stuck somewhere in the Midwest, in the place where I poured my essence into books and people and questions and preposterously beautiful clouds. I'm excited that the f-bomb ("future") is falling with spectacular mystery and vividness, but I'm also kind of heartbroken. As much as I was challenged at Carleton, I loved it there. And now that imminent, formative section of my life is over in a way that makes me want to capitalize the word "Ending."
Bakersfield is an odd city. An incongruous, man-made oasis, it floats flat, shiny and hot like a mirage in a brown desert. I'm leaving soon to go to camp, where I will be up close to the sky in fragrant dusty evergreen forests. Hopefully I'll manage to learn something from the young ones, and, if I'm really lucky, teach.
And so life keeps turning, vividly and inexplicably. Fear not, however--I may be done with school for the moment, but I have every intention of keeping up with this blog. My plans for this falling f-bomb of a future are amorphous at best, but, whatever happens, it makes sense for me to write about it.
Cheers.
As I write this, I'm sitting in a small airport in Bakersfield, CA, munching on brie cheese and trying to wrap my head around this incalculable turning point. I'm about to start my summer job working with teenagers in the foothills of the Sierras, but a large part of me still feels stuck somewhere in the Midwest, in the place where I poured my essence into books and people and questions and preposterously beautiful clouds. I'm excited that the f-bomb ("future") is falling with spectacular mystery and vividness, but I'm also kind of heartbroken. As much as I was challenged at Carleton, I loved it there. And now that imminent, formative section of my life is over in a way that makes me want to capitalize the word "Ending."
Bakersfield is an odd city. An incongruous, man-made oasis, it floats flat, shiny and hot like a mirage in a brown desert. I'm leaving soon to go to camp, where I will be up close to the sky in fragrant dusty evergreen forests. Hopefully I'll manage to learn something from the young ones, and, if I'm really lucky, teach.
And so life keeps turning, vividly and inexplicably. Fear not, however--I may be done with school for the moment, but I have every intention of keeping up with this blog. My plans for this falling f-bomb of a future are amorphous at best, but, whatever happens, it makes sense for me to write about it.
Cheers.
6.01.2010
Valediction Sprint
This spring I took a class called "The Art of Oral Presentation," and today was our last meeting. Our final assignment was to write and deliver a valediction, or farewell. During class we raced through 11 speeches, and it was interesting to hear my classmates' various perspectives. The following is what I wrote for the class: a farewell to the thesis driven essay, as representative of my career as a student.
"I vividly remember the moment when I understood what it meant to write a thesis-driven argument. I was in tenth grade, and Mr. Wood was my English teacher. He taught me how to collect my ideas into organized points and state them with painstaking clarity, and I felt like he was stealing my soul. I thought bullet points were bullshit and found absolutely no poetry in paper-writing.
"For seven years after this moment of realization, I have waged war against the thesis. In high school I struggled to spin strange arguments about Plato’s philosophy the motivations of Hamlet, and here at Carleton my struggles became battles as I wrote about big things that should be capitalized like Consciousness and Beauty and Truth. With every crisp articulation of an argument I felt more acutely the failure of my words to express what I was trying to say.
"I’ve never had a child, but, by the end of my senior year of college, I’ve come to figuratively conceive of the paper-writing process as a sort of birthing. After waiting until the last possible instant to start writing, I agonizingly construct some sort of thesis, and then cling with some doubt to my argument as words painfully come forth. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sat in a Sayles classroom into the nether-hours with grim determination and a rapidly cooling cup of coffee, and I sold my soul to the second floor of the library when I decided to write my comps about that which cannot be defined. According to my calculations, I’ve written upwards of 500 pages during my undergraduate career, and it scares me to contemplate how many hours I spend laboring to bring forth this vast progeny of papers.
"But now I have one day of class left before I indefinitely end my career as a student, and my war against the thesis is over. I’m graduating from Carleton, and I’ve written all my papers. Never again will I purchase a large dark roast and disappear into the lonely recesses of my own confusion. Never again will my heart sink at the sight of a blank document and a blinking space bar. Never again will I laugh at the ironic fact that the universe cannot be crammed into a coherent, crisp unfolding of points.
"And, although my relationship with paper-writing has been tumultuous at best, I’m a little sad to see it go. I don’t know exactly when I began to see beautiful side of carefully rendered structure and syntax, but, strangely, I’ve come to appreciate the painful process.
"This is how I think about it: in Greek mythology there’s this guy named Sisyphus, a man who was doomed for all of eternity to push a boulder up a mountainside only for it to slide down again, and again, and again. The existentialist writer Albert Camus wrote that Sisyphys represents humanity, and that there is only hope for us if we can imagine Sisyphus to be happy with his fate. I like to think of the thesis-driven argument as my boulder, and, as per Camus’ advice, I’ve come to love it as much as I hate it. Over time I’ve managed to find something almost noble in the impossible task of writing life down in comprehensible terms, and now my frustrated engagement with that task is over.
"Since paper-writing has been such a staple of my education, in my mind the thesis is inevitably linked to my Carleton experience. I guess it’s natural then, that, as my college career draws to a close, I’m almost frantically grasping for some coherent binding statement to sum up my time in Minnesota. I want to lie out my college career in bullet points so that I can wrap my head around it and make it mean something.
"The thing I hated most about writing papers was the conclusion. For some reason, the last sentence is always the hardest."
"I vividly remember the moment when I understood what it meant to write a thesis-driven argument. I was in tenth grade, and Mr. Wood was my English teacher. He taught me how to collect my ideas into organized points and state them with painstaking clarity, and I felt like he was stealing my soul. I thought bullet points were bullshit and found absolutely no poetry in paper-writing.
"For seven years after this moment of realization, I have waged war against the thesis. In high school I struggled to spin strange arguments about Plato’s philosophy the motivations of Hamlet, and here at Carleton my struggles became battles as I wrote about big things that should be capitalized like Consciousness and Beauty and Truth. With every crisp articulation of an argument I felt more acutely the failure of my words to express what I was trying to say.
"I’ve never had a child, but, by the end of my senior year of college, I’ve come to figuratively conceive of the paper-writing process as a sort of birthing. After waiting until the last possible instant to start writing, I agonizingly construct some sort of thesis, and then cling with some doubt to my argument as words painfully come forth. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve sat in a Sayles classroom into the nether-hours with grim determination and a rapidly cooling cup of coffee, and I sold my soul to the second floor of the library when I decided to write my comps about that which cannot be defined. According to my calculations, I’ve written upwards of 500 pages during my undergraduate career, and it scares me to contemplate how many hours I spend laboring to bring forth this vast progeny of papers.
"But now I have one day of class left before I indefinitely end my career as a student, and my war against the thesis is over. I’m graduating from Carleton, and I’ve written all my papers. Never again will I purchase a large dark roast and disappear into the lonely recesses of my own confusion. Never again will my heart sink at the sight of a blank document and a blinking space bar. Never again will I laugh at the ironic fact that the universe cannot be crammed into a coherent, crisp unfolding of points.
"And, although my relationship with paper-writing has been tumultuous at best, I’m a little sad to see it go. I don’t know exactly when I began to see beautiful side of carefully rendered structure and syntax, but, strangely, I’ve come to appreciate the painful process.
"This is how I think about it: in Greek mythology there’s this guy named Sisyphus, a man who was doomed for all of eternity to push a boulder up a mountainside only for it to slide down again, and again, and again. The existentialist writer Albert Camus wrote that Sisyphys represents humanity, and that there is only hope for us if we can imagine Sisyphus to be happy with his fate. I like to think of the thesis-driven argument as my boulder, and, as per Camus’ advice, I’ve come to love it as much as I hate it. Over time I’ve managed to find something almost noble in the impossible task of writing life down in comprehensible terms, and now my frustrated engagement with that task is over.
"Since paper-writing has been such a staple of my education, in my mind the thesis is inevitably linked to my Carleton experience. I guess it’s natural then, that, as my college career draws to a close, I’m almost frantically grasping for some coherent binding statement to sum up my time in Minnesota. I want to lie out my college career in bullet points so that I can wrap my head around it and make it mean something.
"The thing I hated most about writing papers was the conclusion. For some reason, the last sentence is always the hardest."
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