On Debate - A Review

My doubled steps out of the terminal transported me mysteriously into the bubbled vacuum of northern queens.

Soon, I'm pressed hard against a brick wall, sipping Jasmine tea, staring down the road.

Then I'm sitting there. In the mostly dark. Counting my breaths and making sure they're deep and inaudible.

Later. I'm in a hole in the wall. Sweating as we sift through my idealism and prod the ideology that I called central.

Ben said that "debate exposes doubt," and while he's not wrong. He's not that right either. I found no doubt on that Saturday afternoon. Just an intense desire to let you believe in me, but without my intervention.

I didn't want to change your opinion. I didn't want you to think anything of it. The only thing I wanted you to know is that I truly believed in this.

But you quickly found me unsubstantiated and my argument disappeared in the trends you clearly pronounced.

Then, shockingly, you let me go on believing all the same. You let me keep my indefensible idea. My unbelievable opinion. My hope.

There was true beauty in that. An acknowledged validity in what felt like failure. Some people call that safety, I think. I’ve never known it by name.

I’m used to scrutiny. I was paid for it at one point. Now I’m paid to receive it.

From my experience, there’s a lot of expectations in a “review.” The biggest is outcomes. If you explain how someone is wrong, both parties are meant to “expect” a change. And I’m all about denying expectations.

There’s a poem I love called “Those Winter Sundays.” In it, the speaker discusses his relationship with his father. The language is terse. Rigged. The images are punctuated by harsh plosives like ckuh and tuh until the poem’s volta. Where they suddenly become unadorned and plain and the tone becomes heavy with guilt.

In too many ways I relate with this poem. These three stanzas have moved me more than any piece of literature I’ve ever touched. They’ve interrogated me. Broken me. Reformed me. And reminded me of what it all means and what it all can mean and what all this can be for.

Hayden, the author, plays with expectation in this poem to the nth degree. He levies it on the speaker’s expectations for the father, the father’s perceived expectations for the speaker, but most uniquely, the expectations of the reader on both the father and the speaker.

The poem mandates an instant second reading because Hayden manipulates the sounds and “stresses” that your mind forms as you wade through his spliced syntax. He hits you with harsh sounds and then treats you to beautiful words with dissonant meanings. Words like austere and lonely, both juxtaposed between the familiarity of love and the coldness of an office.

This relation causes disalignment. The father is assocated with harsh sounds, but is doing only good. We are expected to find the “angry house,” but we just find someone doing all he can.

This poem was the first thing I taught in New York. It was a lesson I chose to model for an interview and one that I chose to use on a day we had extra time in class. There, I sat, with those who would come to relate to the same kind of paternalistic pull that exists as a singularity in so few words.

All the lesson’s I’ve learned in the world started here. In the moments I found my way out of anticipation and expectation. And, whether guided or not, I found myself unambiguously doubtless.

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

-Connor