MeHD

By Casey Alexander

Amy sighed. What did she have in common with a lightly salted cashew? What qualities did the two of them share? She’d found common ground with a horse blanket, wet cement, and the flagpole outside of the bank, but in this case nothing was coming to mind. The assignment was wearing on her. Not that she doubted its merit.

The idea behind the course, “You, the Obscure: Analogy as a Lightbulb” was that the self was a singular being and therefore defied description; illumination came through comparison to the known. So far she’d learned that she was bigger than a cabbage but smaller than a fig tree, like a filibuster in that they both wasted time.

Amy put the worksheet aside and took a tape measure out of the desk. She still needed the circumference of her head and the distance from elbow to wrist. Assignments for her other course, “Welcome, Stranger: A Guided Survey of Self”, were a lot more straightforward. The course was devoted to fact finding. Before addressing the why, they had to establish the what: physical dimensions, style, preferences of all kinds. Patterns of thought, patterns of sock selection.

All told, the MeHD program was proving more rigorous than she’d imagined, but the rewards would be infinite. A year ago she was at the non-profit, ordering tablecloths for the gala. She’d planned a few other black-tie dinners; had made a great many spreadsheets of who had donated what. At most, she’d maintained the status quo—a level of service that was quickly overwhelmed by the need.

Day to day, she was satisfied with the work, but not as happy as she should be (a healthy person, she knew, should live on a wave of elation). She was dismayed by the number of people she wouldn’t be able to help, by the overflowing waiting room at the medical clinic. Dismayed, for that matter, by the state of the world—by how rarely the rivers froze, how one crisis bled into another.

A friend had explained why her happiness fell short of delirium: these were merely distractions. If she knew, loved and were committed to herself, she wouldn’t be phased by these things. At present she was avoiding the forest fire within her, the warring factions that lived in her mind.

The more Amy heard of this theory, the more appealing it was. Maybe the resolution of self was a precursor to living, the only task that deserved her attention. If she knew herself fully, all restlessness would cease. It would be the end of distress, the end of all confusion. Most of all, an end to the clumsy improvisation that she had always relied on. In its place, choreography for all situations, certainty in every step. A great relief this would be.

She’d considered the Master of Me Studies (MMe) program, but felt it would be insufficient: she wanted a full explanation, not an overview of the subject. The MeHD was sure to provide this, along with the opportunity to table all other concerns.

She finished the measurements and made a few notes beside “Skin, quality of”. There was still the cashew to deal with. Amy thought hard. “We’re both rare and thus valuable,” she wrote, figuring this was a start.

In class the following morning, Professor Holmes warned against self-deception. There was no sense claiming that they never sat down or that they spent their evenings with Mozart. This would only lead to distortion.

“You’ll wind up with a picture of somebody else,” she said. “Which will be a dead end.” She asked how their surveys were coming along. Slow progress, most of them said. Which was to be expected; the survey was an exhaustive one. Professor Holmes advised patience: getting to know a person took time, and they’d only been seeing themselves for a month.

She encouraged them to dress nicely, to work on the survey at restaurants. Get to know themselves in an agreeable setting. (With luck, a love would develop; at the very least, a solid companionship.) Relationships with others were largely out of the question; for the time being, they’d work on romancing themselves.

To that end, Amy took herself to the movies, made elaborate dinners, wrote a few poems on the theme of her eyes. It was less stressful than seeing either of the boyfriends she’d had (her lack of self-knowledge, she understood now, had made one of them dull and the other a gambler). She was forthcoming with the basic facts of the matter: only child, twenty-eight, sociology major in college. Native Bostonian with the waterproof wardrobe to prove it. The relationship was coming along, but there was so much to learn! Some of the questions were easy: What was her inseam? How many teeth did she have? Was her head in proportion to the rest of her body? Others required more thought. What reactions did she inspire? Primarily indifference, it seemed; mild annoyance at times. She monitored her classmates for signs of joy or frustration.

There was a fairly long hypothetical section, which she completed by candlelight. What would she do if she were offered half a motorcycle but no helmet, asked to rate a toupee, selected best friend by a local pariah? In addition to this, inquiries into her past that approached national intelligence standards.

The data would be critical in the new year as Amy continued her coursework. The spring course, “Why Me? The Cause of It All” dealt with making connections. How did a bad knee inform a love of musical theater? Did a hot temper cause baldness, or was it the other way around? Crucial to this was the conversational archive—a write-up of every exchange she had ever been in, every comment made in her presence. With analysis to follow: how had she felt, how had she not felt, how did she think she should feel?

According to one entry, a classmate yelled “Amy, you’re it!” during a game of tag. Had she felt objectified by this statement, or was she an entity sought—the “it” girl of the hour? There was a lot that she didn’t remember about this incident and others; this was worth studying in itself.

In the workshops, she’d trace her answers back to the source. Her fear of tigers, her love of chamomile tea. Why the aversion to things that might kill her, why the preference for comfort and ease?

#

“He made a derogatory remark concerning my paper route,” her classmate Alan was saying. “Could that be why my hair’s so dry?” The group discussed the idea and felt it was reasonable: this particular sorrow might be trapped in his hair. (His relationship with himself was a fiery, tumultuous one: in the midst of an argument, he’d punched himself in the nose. The next day he sent himself flowers and French cologne by way of apology.) With the professor’s guidance, the MeHD students interpreted their personal data, putting forth theories along these lines. Amy wondered why she wasn’t more stable on ice; another girl sought to explain her resistance to yardwork.

One student long haunted by acne reexamined its causes. It had appeared, it seemed, in high school, around the time he was determining his musical future. He saw himself as a solo performer and wanted to go on the road—an idea received with universal horror. His anger at this reaction had merged with musical fervor; it was an energy he couldn’t contain. Denied a proper outlet, the passion had tried to escape through his face. Viewed from this perspective, it was not an affliction, but a monument to his devotion. (This realization would lead to his prize winning thesis, “Breaking Out: A Bassoonist Channels His Fury”.)

The professor said that lousy traits were part genetic misfortune, part parental missteps. The latter played a starring role in practically every story. Knowing this, Amy spoke with her parents at length, interviewing them on several occasions. They’d shown grace in the interrogations, explaining why they chose certain gifts, pets and bedsheets for her as far as they could remember.

As the spring wore on, the elements coalesced. When pulling their stories together, most MeHD students started with groups (united by a sense of unrecognized greatness, or shared views on the role of the onion), but this was only a phase. Commonality had its limits. Yes, they were Methodists (say), but not all of them bowled; how many bowlers were also short-waisted, and drank Ovaltine in the morning? When the Venn diagram was complete, the scholar was alone in the center. Amy took this lesson to heart. She was not one tile in a mosaic, as she had once believed, but a work of art in her own right.

#

In year two, there were no courses; the time was set aside for independent study. Amy could meet with professors if needed, but the point was to reflect by herself. Ideally, a student would spend most of their time alone, sitting with the subject in question. To this end, Amy left her roommates and rented a place on her own.

She was acquainted with Amy the Roommate, but who was Amy, Lone Tenant? The situation could generate a host of new insights. Would she order a cuckoo clock now that she had her own mantle? Would she cover the kitchen table and if so, with what?

She spent much of this year on the floor, lying like a star on the carpet. Listening to her mind, waiting for revelations. She studied her hands in different attitudes, at various points in the day: in lighting harsh and forgiving, curved around faucet or doorknob, manipulating the dish sponge. Like Monet’s haystacks, they surrendered new secrets as the ambience changed.

She read and reread the survey, trying to draw out an answer. She made storyboards, timelines, a relief map of her face. She recorded her voice for thirty-six hours, listening for pet phrases and signs of unease. The project was an absorbing one.

Desire for company was to be overcome. A healthy person would feel no longing for fruit that she couldn’t produce; her orchard should be self-sufficient. That said, here and there an encounter with others was beneficial: they served as mirrors, shadows, tweezers that could help to extract one’s essence. They were secondary sources, yes, but still useful to a certain extent.

With this in mind, Amy met her friend Rose for luncheon. The outing felt like a drag, but it promised interesting data: how she responded to vinyl seat, metal spoon, the music that played in the background. What she said, how she moved, with what frequency she sipped her tea.

She was dimly aware that Rose was telling a story. She was speaking about her father, it seemed. He’d had his appendix out and was slow to recover. Pre-MeHD, Amy had been in this quagmire, cluttering her mind with externals. She tried to reorient things, make her friend see herself in the situation.

Surely there was a lesson to learn here, something about removing dead weight from her being. Alternatively, she said, Rose could put herself in the appendix’s place—be willing to scram once she was no longer needed somewhere.

Amy strove to make use of the conversation, uninteresting as it was. What did her friend’s plight reveal about her own nature? She made a note of her patience during this interval, of her ability to endure a story she didn’t appear in.

“So what’s new with you?” Rose asked, shifting in her seat.

Amy presented her findings, the latest revelations. Her tendency to choose unflattering earrings, the origin of her waffle fixation. There was quite a lot of material, but she couldn’t boil it down; the details were too important.

Rose hoped she wouldn’t bring up her teenage hairdo again. She still didn’t know what the side part meant (marginalization at school? An imbalance of some kind?) There were always new questions, new facets of her to delve into. She didn’t see what all of this added up to. What was the big mystery, and what would she get if she solved it?

She longed for the end of this phase. She remembered laughing with Amy, making jokes that weren’t dissected. Before everything they said was symbolic, educational, revelatory; before Amy decided that they both needed work, but only she was putting the time in.

“It’s clear that I have a tendency to run from anything that needs to be peeled,” Amy was saying. “Now it’s just a question of finding out why.”

“Right,” Rose said, doing her best to finish the soup.

#

The spring was speeding by. It was pleasant to wander aimlessly through her psyche, but there was work to be done. By June, she had to submit a concise definition of self. A few words, at most a few lines. First up, finding the right part of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb. Was she substance or movement, or did she modify one of these? Actually, she decided, she was more like a preposition, either “above” or “beyond”.

More importantly, her thesis was on the horizon: an original contribution to the field of Amy Scott scholarship. The good news was that precious little had been written on the subject already; the terrain was peculiarly unexplored. This, however, was a problem in itself: the options were overwhelming. She felt like an explorer at the edge of the Amazon forest. Which flower or fruit could convey the entirety? What lone image could illustrate, decode, help celebrate the beautiful vastness?

First she would need to select an advisor, a person whose function, more than anything else, was to read and approve. There was the legendary Thomas Howe, founder of the program and author of Learning Howe. Most likely she wouldn’t be able to find him; his dedication to the subject was such that no one had seen him in decades. Professor Holmes was the natural choice. The woman was well-versed in Me studies methodology; she’d investigated herself down to the molecular level. Though no expert, she knew what Amy was in a general sense: a stately and proud edifice, like the Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna. (One scarcely knew which was the greatest marvel: the structure, its contents, or the story of how it came into being.)

She could write a tale of ruination—a treatise on what went wrong and who should be pilloried for it. (On the whole, the school operated within the hole-in-the-head paradigm, encouraging students to consider their pasts in pathological terms. Only by identifying where it all went wrong could they ever hope to move forward.) True, she was functional at first glance, but starting from the assumption that she could have been a world leader, a heralded poet, the inspiration for statues, she had clearly fallen some distance. Over the summer, she’d participated in the Living Autopsy program, a seminar dealing with the death of the optimal self and posthumous attempts to go on. Genius was the default destination; why had she failed to arrive? Certainly she had been thwarted by someone or something, but no cause of death was apparent: just mild allergies, a few cross words, a friend who had fallen out of a tree. (Alan had really thrived in the program. His dissertation, entitled “Alan Gumm: What Went Wrong?” was nearly a thousand pages already.)

Some students focused on the shedding of impositions (the wearing of clothes, the drinking of liquids and so on). One girl wrote her entire thesis in a language of her invention, to be known as Hooray. She spoke it exclusively during her defense meeting, offering no translation. The exclamation “Eee! Eee!” appeared frequently in her responses. Her readers were baffled but knew better than to challenge the premise; instead, they remarked on the language’s beauty and the poise of the speaker.

It was hard to concentrate on only one aspect of her. She was complex, like a pomegranate—a thousand pearls therein. There wasn’t a single outstanding feature that clarified everything else. She wasn’t half Texan like Ryan or dyspeptic like Turtle Anne. Instead, what emerged was a certain austerity; she was not excessive in any direction.

Whatever claim she made, she’d need evidence to support it. Amy wasn’t a fan of pictures (at best, she came out looking deranged), so this wasn’t much of a resource. “Return to the word, let it guide you,” she heard her professor say. In her case, this consisted of a few report cards and a dozen journals molding in her parents’ garage.

The former didn’t do much to reveal her. The teachers were in agreement: she was a passable student and a pleasure to have in class. As for the journals, the early years didn’t yield much: mostly cartoons and the command “Keep out! This means you!” The later books were more substantive though most of the entries were brief: chronicles of movies seen, homework done, some grievance against a classmate. A good deal of space was dedicated to her appearance: the anguish of misaligned teeth, the lengthy ordeal of braces.

She tended to start sentences with the verb: “Have that test on Friday…Don’t want to do anything.” Was this a subtle negation of self, a threat to her personhood? Beyond that, the word choice reflected a certain fatalism: “Got an 83 on the math quiz…the weather was crummy all day.” She spoke of what came to her, not of what she created.

Amy sighed. Neither theme seemed meaty enough to build a whole thesis around. She lay in the grass in her parents’ backyard, staring into the sky.

Her eye settled on a shining line: the three stars of Orion’s Belt. Three points, evenly spaced; where had she seen this before? Suddenly, a recollection: her thoughts in purple ink with the constellation between them. Amy sat up with a jolt. The ellipses! Of course! They were the constant in every volume, a flourish the reader came to expect. A manifestation of Amy, consistent over the years.

The stars had shown her the way. This shouldn’t be a surprise: her professor said that if she looked to the heavens, she would discover herself (in fact, if she focused correctly, she’d see herself in all things). How far the starlight had travelled in order to remind her: that what she saw—what she knew, who she was at this moment—had all been formed in the past.

Her advisor approved the idea (it was something about her, and thus met the requirements) and Amy dove into the project. She selected a passage to focus her energies on: volume 7, verse 38, an entry from mid-November:

I don’t want to go to Elizabeth’s party…Mrs. DeMato gives way too much homework…Blah. 

Amy spent a month just reading the segment out loud. She had to re-enter the relevant mindset, recreate the mood that had inspired the lines (a mixture of boredom and unfounded angst, as far as she could remember). It was important to provide context, to analyze the whole passage before looking at the ellipses.

Its banality was an illusion. Scott 7:38 was deeply symbolic and illuminating, an overlooked verse containing essential truths. “Home” represented her person; “work” was the task of coming to terms with its contents. “Elizabeth” was the architect of all things, the author of social conventions—the system, if you will. “Mrs. DeMato” stood for the human condition. As for the “party”, analysis of this was pretty straightforward: life itself was a party she was hesitant to attend. (Only now was she prepared to embrace things, to take her swing at the piñata.)

She spent a month and a half on “blah”. Was it a code of some kind, an acronym perhaps (“beyond love and hate”?) Could it be a command, and if so, at whom was it aimed? Was it an internal memo, a message from one department (as it were) to another? Or was it a simply a sigh, a common exhale of disgust?

The ellipses themselves were equally enigmatic. Was she making a statement, and if so, what was it? Were they a form of censorship? Was she masking a firebrand who’d rage against all things? One felt that the writer was unequal to the rigors of living. With this in mind, the ellipses could be seen as deep breaths, as pauses to gather her strength.

Why the silence? Where was she? In the emptiness, a sort of defiance—a refusal to fill every moment, to speak because speech was expected, to adhere to societal timelines. More than anything, they were a commitment to do what she wanted, to punctuate as she saw fit. Furthermore, she had every right to be scattered. Orienting the reader wasn’t her job; she was under no obligation to please.

There were multiple possibilities, none of which she could prove. She tried connecting the dots, but the results were underwhelming. One thing was undeniable: the ellipses were there. In the end, Amy too was there, characterized by her presence. Finally, a conclusion: in employing ellipses, she was making space for herself, affirming her right to exist (lest this meet with any objection). Within this space, she’d transform as her nature commanded, like a flowering tree.

Over the next eighteen months, she developed the argument, rarely leaving the house. Slowly, the thesis took shape: “A Scholar in Space: Ellipsis as Self-Affirmation in the Prose of Amy L. Scott”. The text itself ended with an ellipsis (what better way for the subject to sign it?) and the excitement of this conclusion: that whatever she was, there was more of her to come.

As she wrote, Amy thought about what to do once she had her degree. She could file for statehood as a classmate had done: declare that she was a nation with a distinctive culture and customs. The logistics of this rather put her off the idea. Running the embassies would be costly, and she didn’t have much of a tax base.

There was always the option of teaching, but it seemed an impossible task. No one could fully appreciate the Amy Scott experience without having lived the whole thing; even she, who had done so, had an incomplete grasp of the matter. How could she convey this complexity to the masses in only an hour a week? It would be an echo of an echo at best. Anyway there was nothing to worry about; once her MeHD was in hand, everything would fall into place. Her thesis defense was approaching. The anticipation reached a crescendo that Amy could barely stand; she felt like a child on Christmas Eve.

#

When the day came, Amy was surprised by the setting. For this august occasion, she’d pictured an auditorium, or the college’s theater. Instead, the cramped office of Reader Two, a professor she’d never met.

“So how has the experience of writing your thesis been?” Professor Holmes began. The question was just filler, like the offer of coffee, but Amy approached it with vigor. The experience, she said, was grueling but glorious: the hardest she’d ever worked, the most delighted she’d ever been.

“Great,” her advisor said blandly. “That’s what we like to hear.”

The casual tone surprised her. Amy couldn’t help feeling that something was lacking: a certain breathlessness, some respect for the gravity of the occasion. In a word, suspense: What insights would be revealed? Would her work measure up?

The scene was some distance from what she’d imagined: a long table, a panel of skeptics, her small and alone on one side. Having combed through the research, they would present their objections: inconsistencies, omissions, drab language that should have sparkled. She might or might not persuade them that scholarship had occurred. If not, she would be cast out, the whole of the effort for nothing. (Self-knowledge was its own prize, but confirmation would bolster her faith that it was there.)

“Well, you’ve certainly put a lot of time into this,” the man said, flipping through the pages. “An interesting choice to look at the pauses. Of course, you probably didn’t have much material to draw from. I was lucky to have my blog.”

Professor Holmes braced herself for the tribute. Miles and miles of type, dating back some twenty-five years, it had been invaluable in his research and was mentioned on a regular basis.

Anyway, he said, he had never used an ellipsis; he wrote boldly, expressing all opinions in full.

“Really?” Professor Holmes said rhetorically. “My communication style is more subtle, more nuanced. It took a long time to find my voice, what with the adenoids and all.”

“Not me,” he said. “I’ve been verbose from day one.”

In the days since, discovery and celebration. He went through some of the highlights: the path he had travelled, the weeds he had removed. Professor Holmes wove her own triumphs into the lecture, jumping in when he coughed or drank coffee. The two of them seized upon the chance to enlighten, to introduce a critical figure.

“I once ate a pumpkin in its entirety,” he said.

“I learned how to swim in my thirties,” she countered.

In the crossfire of anecdotes, Amy sat bewildered. She was surprised that having gotten the gist of her, they felt no need to read on. On the other hand, she admired their singular focus, their ability to tune out distractions.

They were enjoying themselves and briefly forgot she was there. Reading these reports once a year kept them in crackers and hats, and allowed them to focus on the matter at hand: mining themselves for gold. In fact all three of them sheltered within the arrangement (in study, in the guidance of study). It gave them a task and an address; it exempted them from less desirable things.

“Nice title,” the man said, noticing Amy at last. “And a comprehensive look at the subject.” Everything seemed to be there. She’d found evidence and expanded upon it; her title included a colon. She’d written a hundred pages and turned up for the meeting. “As to the actual content, we will of course defer to the expert,” he said, gesturing in Amy’s direction. The girl had cited herself correctly and reached some kind of conclusion; little more was required.

“Well,” he said, flipping through the pages again. “Do you have any questions for us?” Amy wanted to discuss the particulars, but she decided to take the approval and run. Handshakes were exchanged, and good wishes for future endeavors. “Let’s hope we get some sun this weekend!” Professor Holmes said as she gathered her things.

Amy was rather startled to find herself out of doors. She drifted toward the park across the street, where a vacant bench caught her eye. It was appropriate to sit as the show was about to begin. Now that she’d solved the riddle of Amy, everything else would make sense: out of the chaos of old, a coherent and beautiful story. Her part would come effortlessly. Each gesture an extension of self, involuntary as breath; each line from the script within her.

She waited for the veil to be lifted. A plastic lid, abandoned on the grass; two women fussing over a dog. A man in shiny pants, winding down from a run and an assortment of pigeons. Amy blinked. What did it all mean? She still saw disparate elements, loose threads instead of a quilt. She still had a certain longing, like an unanswered question. Most alarmingly, she didn’t know what to do next.

Panic was brewing within her. Lost, depleted, adrift—what was she supposed to do now? None of the people around her could shed any light on this. True, they breathed the same air, but they were worlds apart. After several dispiriting minutes, her racing mind found a comforting thought: her knowledge must be incomplete. If she knew herself thoroughly, the next step would be evident to her. There was a school of thought that said the search for self was eternal: preparatory, and yet the work of a lifetime.

Her studies would have to continue.

The moment called for new lighting, new lenses, new extras to activate unseen parts of her being. She could find a new place of reflection, possibly in Nepal. She’d locate a monastery, offer to mop their floors in exchange for hanging around. Reflected in mop water, her face would tell a new tale.

There were her loans to consider; she was in debt to the tune of seventy thousand dollars. She could defer them indefinitely as long as she was a student. A postdoc on location: all arrows pointed to this. Surely the monks would allow her to join them for as long as it took. Anyway there was no rush: the journey to truth could only be measured in light years.