March 11, 2010

Ms. Katherine Smith
1850 Soldiers Field Road
Brighton MA‎ 02135

Dear Katherine:

Let me begin by saying that with all my heart, I long for the best for you, the very best in all things. In the next three years of your life, I know that you will discard the final trappings of your girlhood: the last vestiges of acne, the hint of the stutter you’ve carried since grade school, the way you slouch alongside the hors d’oeuvre table at parties hoping that no one will notice you, yet at the same time you are desperately crying out to be noticed. These deficits will, without a doubt, be replaced by the fruits of mature womanhood: an erect carriage, tighter blouses, a smile that is shy yet inviting. And though you will not be spending these next three years in our MFA program in Writing, here at Central Wisconsin State University, studying the art, or the craft, of writing fiction, that should not in any way diminish the seriousness and sincerity you must attribute to my remarks.

I know you may be surprised by the tone of this communique. If that is the case, then I hope you will forgive me for taking such liberties. Please feel free to read only as much of this letter as you feel is necessary for your own elucidation. For instance, you could stop reading now, at this very moment. But what then, of the life unlived, of the possibilities untrammeled? However, on the chance that you are so inclined, I here present you with what might be, in those circumstances, the most salient piece of information: You have not been admitted to the MFA fiction writing program at CWSU. (I considered highlighting this sentence, so that you could, if necessary, extract this information near-instantaneously, but have since discarded the idea as gauche.) You have not been placed on our waiting list, or into any type of holding file, or negative zone, or stasis of any sort. You have, in no uncertain terms, been rejected. I will not apologize or offer you my condolences for this fact because, as I will continue to explain at some length, I believe this arrangement to be, if not actively leading us onwards into the best of all possible worlds, at the very least an unavoidable circumstance.

You see, Katherine, at the time when your application packet arrived on my desk (a battered, oak monstrosity that fills most of my half of room 213 in Altamont Hall) I was, quite literally, deep in contemplation of what was to me the rather novel idea of setting fire to the entire building. In my mind, I was estimating the fatalities that would result from various sizes and speeds of conflagration; what proportion of the casualties would be faculty, students, and support staff depending on the date and time I chose; what kind of explosion might be necessary to quickly turn the building into something like the Towering Inferno. That exact moment was when your application arrived, not physically arrived but rather arrived in my consciousness, emerging from its spot where it had been wedged about two thirds of the way down my stack of seventy five odd applications.

We are a small school, Katherine. The three faculty members of the admissions committee have, during the past two years, the entirety of my tenure at CWSU, managed to handle the admissions stack with aplomb. This year, however, we were blanketed by applications, really snowed under, and I was dreading the slow, agonizing process of the reading. Unless you have tried it yourself, tried to crawl through the bleak and remorseless tunnel built of hundreds upon hundreds of application packets, creeping out of every square inch of the desk like the endless splinters of a deadly, unfinished jungle gym. Unless you have sampled this despair that tastes of 20 lb. copy stock and toner, well. My colleague Michael called it once the “Bataan Death March of American Literature,” but he is a Poet of Very Little Brain, so we will forgive him solecisms.

But returning to my consideration of your packet. That morning, you see, my wife had made me breakfast. This is not, let me inform you, a normal occurrence. My wife, Adelaide, is a busy woman. She works part time, for two different firms, as a technical translator from Chinese to English, and vice versa. She is extremely busy with this workload, beginning at five thirty in the morning and not letting up till seven or eight at night. She could telecommute, I imagine, but instead she doggedly sticks out her plain old physico-commute, driving two hours one way and three hours back. Needless to say, she does not often make me breakfast! So this was a curious event, at the very least from that perspective. What made it yet more curious, I would have to say, was the fact that she had managed to badly burn the eggs. Not out of neglect, or drowsiness; I watched her cook them, and she was fully attentive for the entire cooking process. I suppose she doesn’t cook eggs often. Since my wife wakes up so early, I do not actually know what she typically eats for breakfast. The kitchen is spotless when I wake at nine and make my coffee. The burning of eggs, that bare possibility, was not something I had ever considered. I have never burned eggs, not once in my adult life.

I ask you, Katherine, have you ever burnt your eggs? I know many people have trouble starting their combustion in the mornings, but I have never had that kind of trouble. And neither has Adelaide. In her case, burning the eggs was not malicious, as far as I can say. I remind you, the eggs on her own plate were burnt as well. They were scrambled eggs, and when burnt they took on a severely rubbery quality. They were chewy as a steak that you must cut with a sharp knife and really sink your teeth into, tear at, chewing for a good long while. My wife and I sat cross from one another at the breakfast table, each cutting our own personal burnt eggs with our own personal knife, saying nothing to each other. Adelaide cleaned her plate completely, which perhaps meant that she enjoyed her eggs fully. I think she did, as she ran her finger along its surface to pick up the brownish excess crumbs.

I assumed then that this was bad omen for the day.

So this was my state of mind at the time when I first set eyes upon your application packet, Katherine. Burnt eggs, jungles of death. So you should forgive what I then did, naturally, which was to put your application aside, in a drawer from which it would not emerge until several days later.

On the day I actually first read your application, things were quite different. My socks were still wet from walking through a deceptive puddle in the parking lot, and the water had soaked into the fabric starting my toes at a dreadful itching. I couldn’t take my shoes off, though, because Michael, with whom I share my office, cannot stand the smell of exposed socks, which smell is only magnified by wetness. So I tried my damnedest to scratch my toes without taking off my shoes first, but that was a pretty hopeless affair. My toes remained itchy. After a while I gave up trying to scratch, but the itch was still there, a feeling like tiny spiders walking over my toes, maddening. It was at just that moment that I picked up your application packet, and began to read.

Katherine, I’m sorry, I must now interrupt my narrative for a moment. I feel that some of what I am saying may seem to be expressing an excuse for my poor response to your paper, a mea culpa for why I did not recommend you for admission. Let me assure you, this is not the case. I would have had the same response as I did to your stories entirely regardless of the setting. Were I on the beach in Málaga, sunning my pasty shins, or in Yosemite watching the moose go about their joyful mating, I would have had almost precisely the same response to your creative work. I could not, would never, under any circumstance, endorse your submission as qualifying you for matriculation. But that is not really the point of this letter.

It might help if, at this point, you were to envision a jellyfish, floating dozens of feet below the surface of the Pacific. It is moved by the current, with almost no will of its own. At best it can pulse its mesoglea, quiver a little, to get some forward momentum, but that’s almost nothing compared to the muscular currents that shove at its gelatinous body. Primarily it drifts, hoping that, as it does so, enough plankton and nutritive detritus will drift into its tentacles.

But perhaps a jellyfish isn’t the appropriate metaphor. Perhaps an octopus? Or one of the many aquatic iguanas native to the the Galapagos? No, I think a jellyfish was correct after all.

Now imagine that I am the jellyfish, and you are some a sea bass, or bluefin tuna. Or a halibut. Yes, lets pretend you are a halibut. A huge, powerful fish, prowling the ocean’s reach, feeding on whatever you desire. You have a respectable place in the food chain. Your scales coruscate with the transient rays of light that filter down from the distant surface. You are swimming valiantly one day, quickly, chasing some wimpy anchovy, looking straight forward, keeping your eyes on the prize, when BAM, right into your eyeball, this jellyfish, stinging tentacles hitting your most sensitive spot. Because, that’s the thing about the jellyfish, it’s completely translucent, it’s barely even present. You can’t see it, not until you’re swimming right into the thing. So inert you almost pass through it, almost dissolve it into scattered proteins and water, but suddenly it’s all around you, grasping and sucking with tendrils and all its fragile power, but what it has to give you is pain, like a bee-sting, the departing echo of its own demise.

Maybe now you’re finally starting to understand me.

And so we come naturally to the discussion of your sample. I have developed a very specific method, when I am reading applications. Some might call it peculiar, but to me it feels completely natural. I will explain this to you, my method. (You will notice I will attempt, at this point, to completely abandon metaphors involving fish. Or marine life of any kind. I feel that these have grown increasingly strained.)

I begin by reading the applicant’s first story. I let that story fill me, I absorb it through my gills. (See that? That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid.) I must, in that moment, be nowhere but the place in which that story fully exists. Then, as I finish the story, I take out the applicant’s Statement of Purpose and place it on the desk in front of me. I do not read it, not yet, but the sight of it allows the feeling of the story to start to relax, and begin to depart from my body. I then sit very still, and try to take note of the feeling that first enters into me, to replace the departing story. What is that feeling? If my first feeling is one of hunger, that is very important. A really great application, a really good story, will give me a hunger for red meat, heavy dense meat, delicate and rare. Once, and only once, I read a story so brilliant, so profound, that I ran out of my office at that moment to try to find a steakhouse. And I swear to you, there was drool coursing down my chin.

But your first story, it left me feeling nothing. Not a single bit peckish. I waited long, keeping still: not anything. It was like swimming through a pool of distilled water, my eyes wide open, expecting the pain of chlorine, the burning, but instead there’s nothing. No pain, no loss, no agony, no discomfort. Just: nothing. It was as if I had passed through you entirely, like a fog-bank that looks like a solid wall from far away, but once you approach it: nothing.

This is not to say this is the same way I feel after reading a bad story. On the contrary, after reading a poor story, I will suddenly have an incredible urge to urinate. As I rush to the restroom, my mind will be consumed with the badness of that story, its hackneyed turns of phrase, its transparent characters, its grammar errors and its purple-prosed conclusion. Standing in front of the urinal, unzipping my slacks, I am so filled with rage at the story’s existence that I will sometimes scream. The secretary in the Religious Studies Department has complained about it, several times. As I finish screaming, and complete my elimination, all these turgid thoughts of the offending story will have vanished. I flush them away, and can return to read the next story in my pile.

So your story provoked neither of these common responses. That is a strange thing, and it is followed by things even stranger. For instance: I know I have read both the stories you included in your sample, as well as your Statement of Purpose, but I could not for the life of me tell you what any of them were about. When I try to recollect, my mind drifts away, to stock car racing, or helium balloons. So this unaccountable vacancy was my central problem. I tried to think: who could have written such a story? Could it, in fact, have been written by a real person? You could have been some sort of phantasm, a supra-dimensional being whom I am aware of only as dimly as the jellyfish knows the halibut. You could be the product of some host of networked computers, a spontaneous singularity. All that I could say for certain was that there was a slight burning feeling left on half of my skin, specifically the left side of my body. I thought about an astronaut without his spacesuit: I always imagined that he would be divided down the middle, the one side of him facing the sun being burned and the side facing away being frozen. That would be the price of touching the vacuum. But what I felt instead was the gentlest pressure of a breeze on my right side, and the absence of such a breeze on my left, the slightest touch of anisotropy possible on this Earth. What with all my confusion, all this feeling and not-feeling, I pushed your stories aside, somewhere on my very disorganized desk.

Still I could not stop thinking about your work, or at least about the unfillable void left in my mind by your work. The more I thought about your work, the more I tried to think about you. I wanted desperately to attach something to the story, to you, because as days passed I was beginning to ache with the un-knowing, the lack of presence. Anything. A house, a time of day, a collection of collectible bubble gum wrappers.

So finally I went back and searched for your packet, but could not find it. I looked up and down through the pile, across the desk, in the wastepaper basket, several times, but I could not find it. It was as though your stories had dissolved back into the æther.

All I could recover and hold on to was a name: Katherine Smith. That might get you somewhere, I suppose, with the internet nowadays. But therein was the problem: I did not have your Statement, or an address, phone number, or email. Just “Katherine Smith.” The internet (always helpful!) did inform me that there are 2,515,000 Smiths in the United States. Half of those, 1,257,500, are women, of whom about 3.1% are named Katherine, which means you could reasonably expect to find 3,898.25 Katherine Smiths in the country! Where to start? Clearly I could not start paging through some collection of phone books, looking for the right one out of those 3,898.25, especially because I imagined you would be an elusive, if not invisible quarry.

I imagined you as I went into the rest of my day. I thought of you as I left my office at 5 PM sharp, saying my goodbye to Greg the departmental secretary, who ignored me as he usually does. I thought about the possible colors of your hair, finding reasons to doubt each one, as I sorted the mail and read an article in a popular magazine (sent to us in a fit of pique by Adelaide’s mother as a gift subscription) about the health benefits of kangaroo meat. I thought about you, the smell of your skin, the way if I were around you I might start to feel aroused without the slightest bit of prompting. I thought of what brands of shoes you might wear, while cutting the onions for a risotto and feeling the burn of the onion in my eyes that, again, reminded me of you, and also of your absence.

You may here be wondering why, if your story, or the void left by your story’s departure, provoked such a reaction in me, why I can say that I can in no way recommend you for admission? In all honesty, I can no more reject you than I can reject the wind, or the space between two automatic sliding doors at a convenience store. You are the unknowable given the form of a girl, a girl whose teeth, bra size, acne, and posture I can only speculate on.

It might interest you to know that in the last two weeks I have taken up the practice of Transcendental Mediation. I have just begun, and can tell you little about the Vedic methods or the proper breathing of the mantras, but it has already brought me this one, tangible benefit: I have remembered the first sentence of your story. At least, that is what I hope, and fervently believe, the sentence to be. Clearly I cannot place what I cannot remember, but it has a rightness of feeling to it. It seems like a first sentence and, since I cannot locate it in any other works I have read, it seems precisely like your first sentence. It came to me as I practiced on the kitchen floor, my legs spread as best I can with my old hip injury, my fingers assuming whatever mudrā I could approximate. The sentence that appeared in my mind was “She reached for the book on the shelf while outside a sparrow was sharply singing.”

I have meditated on this sentence a number of times since. It moves, uninterrupted by punctuation, with all the energy of stagnant air. What can one say about such a sentence? Perhaps I could write a thesis on that word, “sharply,” that rises at the end, adding a hint of poetry with its consonance and possibly adianoeta. But the whole reminds me of nothing more than the exercises one performs in elementary school when diagramming sentences. “Which book did she reach for? The book on the shelf!” “How did the sparrow sing? It sang sharply!” And yet its simplicity also carries so much weight, Perhaps, with further effort on my part, the rest of your stories will reveal themselves to me, sentence by sentence, or word by word, in the form of new mantras rising in the hum of my mind’s activity.

Please do not think that I did not consider admitting you, despite everything. I thought of so many things: of protecting you, pinning you between polystyrene and cling wrap like a pound of hamburger. Of keeping you in a jar, pickled and airtight. Anything to keep you from contamination by anything less pure and perfect than you. But I think, at this point in my stages of discovery, that your perfection lies in your complete absence. That’s the best that I have been able to determine, at any rate.

I do know that the observer inevitably influences the observed. In even writing you this letter, I am doing that! I hope you will understand this sin, if it is a sin, and accept me for my own state of tangled confusion. Perhaps you will not read this. That, upon consideration, is actually my most fervent hope: that you will choose not to read this letter at all, keeping yourself fully unspoiled. That is what I want, and yet I also feel that I owe you this explanation, and, selfishly perhaps, want to explain myself to you. Do you understand now the problem I am facing? Unless of course you are not reading any longer, in which case these explanations are rhetorical.

Let me conclude by telling you a story. It is a short one, I promise.

Once, in a simpler time, the world consisted only of a tiger, an eggplant, and a glass vase half filled with water. This didn’t last for long. Things quickly got more complicated, in ways too complicated to explain. At some point the tiger became hungry, so he ate the eggplant. Later, the tiger became thirsty, so he drank from the vase of water. In doing so, he spilled some of the water on the ground, since tigers do not have opposable thumbs. As the tiger lapped up the last of the water from the vase, a shape appeared before him. It was the ghost of the eggplant he had eaten. The tiger asked it, “Are you angry at me for eating you?”, to which the eggplant replied, “No, to take what you can is in the nature of the tiger. I am only angry at you for spilling so much of the water on the ground.” The tiger was about to reply that this was completely unfair, and rather arbitrary, since spilling water was also certainly in the nature of the tiger, and no matter what his own aspirations were he certainly couldn’t help that. Before he could speak, however, the vision of the eggplant disappeared in a puff of purple smoke, and the tiger began to feel the rumblings of indigestion in his belly.

Does that mean anything to you? Does the jellyfish feel the halibut, like a German zeppelin feels the strafing fire of a Vickers’ machine gun piercing its belly, like the Earth feels as the arrows of the sun strike her? And do those arrows feel, as they plunge blindly through her heart?

Sincerely,
Samuel P. Langston
Assistant Professor
Central Wisconsin State University

Ed: All apologies, where appropriate, to Haruki Murakami and William Styron.