Sometimes I'm not sure what I like more -- hearing my old writing with new ears, or holding forth on its numberless merits, spinning myself by way of long yarns into a dervish-like poetic ecstasy.

I've wanted to write about this one professor for a while now -- she Made an Impression on me.

By then, I think -- I was 32 at the time, -- I had attained some "fusion," or "crystallization," as Gurdjieff would say, if perhaps on incompletely solid foundations, which "wrong, incomplete crystallization," I can assure you, preventing as it did "further development," entailed my being "melted down again," by the usual means of "terrible suffering." For "conscience is the fire which alone can fuse all the powders in the glass retort... and create the unity which a man lacks in that state in which he begins to study himself."

And -- lemme tell you, I later (as before) spent many long hours roasting in the fires of conscience.

Anyway, look at me there, lapsing into academic citation; maybe I need more terrible suffering and the heat of an uneasy conscience to evaporate the last little drops of that dirty dye discoloring my otherwise pellucid prose.

Back on track.

What I'm saying is, this professor made an impression on me, but not in the sense of re-routing my intellectual development or inspiring me to follow new lines of thought; that train had left the station long ago. In that sense, she wasn't gonna un-make who I was.

By contrast, I'd look at the other students in the two classes I took with this professor (Chaucer and Medieval Literature), most of whom were more than 10 years younger than me, and see their starry eyes and fresh faces: they were as impressionable as soft wax.

No, as I said elsewhere, by then -- in fact, by several years before, -- I was already "a thorn, or a stinging fly, or an indigestible little motivating factor for the engendering of sore tummies and poor sleep" to any professor with slack in their act.

Of course, this professor wasn't a hypocrite or complacent, so I didn't have any reason to really upset her digestion; although, one time, I went to talk with her in her office and caught her eating lunch. It was some mess in a Tupperware bowl, slathered in mayonnaise. That upset my digestion.

No; actually, she had a lot going for her.

I'm guessing she was 10 or 12 years older than me, and quite pretty, with a fresh face and big, beautiful, soft brown eyes.

She was very intelligent, very scholarly, very intuitive, was an excellent writer, and -- when she really got going, could be eloquent, even charismatic. You could tell: she loved what she taught, and she loved teaching it.

That's what made an impression on me: the aesthetic enjoyment of who she was, as a woman and a person, and the academic enjoyment of following the direction and instruction of a righteous, inspired, more-or-less-challenging professor.

To a point.

I said I had crystallized to some degree by that point.

The thing is, by then, even, I wasn't having the... shall we say, "Critical Theory" that had infected the academic body.

To be honest, I had no definite sense of what that even was then, and I probably couldn't articulate my understanding of it that intelligently now.

And, the thing is, I don't need to; my intuition was spot-on, as it always is, and that doesn't need citations to justify its claims -- it just reflects what is.

So, academically, this professor always seemed to bring things back to Foucault, gender studies, and transgenderism.

Then, as now, I was like -- what exactly does this have to do with what we're studying?

So -- it was on that count that I decided, I'm gonna keep this lady on her heels and spinning in circles.

Actually, what I thought was, I'm gonna make her eye twitch by the end of the semester.

When I finally did -- this was the day I saw her eating that mayo-mess, -- I felt sad.

Don't you feel sad; I actually liked her a lot, she liked me a lot, and we even stayed in touch a bit years after the classes were over. No hurt feelings.

I'm kind of like one of those monkeys in Asia that steal tourists' stuff: kind of amusing, kind of annoying, but ultimately pretty harmless.

Now that I've given you a lovely frame, here's the picture.

Part of what we did in those classes was "message board" posts. We met in person, of course, but every week the professor would pose and post some question (relevant to the lectures and readings) on the message board, which all the students would post a short answer to. This was, I suppose, beyond operant conditioning to move us online in a post-Covid world to come, a way to help us all get to know each other and to develop both our skill as writers and our ideas for the more formal essays that were central to the classes.

Anyway, I always went off the rails on those posts, much as I do here, although less charmingly so then, I must say.

At the end of the Medieval Literature course (whose theme was Love), we read Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress."

If you don't know that one, go look it up; what follows below will read way, way better if you do.

The thing is, I'd read that in high school, too, under the tutelage of that other English teacher who really made an impression on me.

Then, I read it again as a balding 20-something in community college. At that point, I wrote a parodic reply to it -- from the perspective of the woman being pursued by the suitor.

I have to say -- it was brilliant.

When I read it to that class, they kind of just -- blinked and stared.

When the professor in the Medieval Literature class read it (aloud, to everyone, to my surprise), there was a pause of perfect silence after she finished, as the last words echoed into the depths of the listeners' inner worlds.

Then -- a roaring round of applause. I mean, I didn't expect that, either, but -- these were also real Literature Kids, so they appreciated aesthetics.

Anyway, so that's what I'm sharing below.

In the original "forum post," it was prefaced by the text you see -- well, prefacing the poem here.

I was going for "early 19th-century" in that introduction (and humor, of course).

08 April 2022