His Radiance

My teacher taught me mounds about writing. "Class," he would say, his hands crisply snapping his suspenders, "A proficiency in wielding the mighty pencil bifurcates the trough-feeding jube-jabbers from the port-sipping Rockefellers. Money slips through our fingers like grain, loves float about in the wind like decapitated dandelions, but the wound of lead, ahh, my learners, festers long after the corpse has decomposed."

Before I enrolled in the class, my writings meandered like stoners in the supermarket. I could not see a mountain for what it was; I had to see it as big, or august, or tree-like. I had to describe its stern mountain parents and impish little mountain brothers. But my teacher straightened my wayward tendencies, placed me on the straight and hoary path towards that oft-scrambled-for majestic yet simple goal of conciseness. Today, my writing flies like a decorated arrow to its target, no longer flitting about and drinking tea and nectar, as my old hummingbird-like prose was wont to do.

"Making your writing a cornucopia of concision, a symphony of succinctness, and to the point," my teacher would say, "spills over like an over-full coffee cup into the daily grind of your well-worn existence." I must admit that early in the semester, when my writing still hummingbirded, I doubted his words. I saw them dribbling from his mouth like spit-up from a toddler. But then I sat down for the class midterm, and read the question: "Tenderfoot tyros of mine: The coruscating thinker Noam Chomsky once said, 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.' Apply this quotation to the existences that you plod daily."

The more I stared at the sentences, the more the sentences stared back at me. But then the innate brilliance of the question jumped out of the page and slapped me in the face with the furor of a woman scorned, and I hurriedly licked the tip of my pencil to wet it, than emptied on to the page all of my thoughts on the subject. Sparing neither green nor colorless, I waxed mellifluous on how the furiously sleeping ideas influenced and were interspersed throughout my life, but I did so as our superlative teacher desired, concisely.

The next day, I received an e-mail. "Mr. Starfish. I would like to discuss with you in person your salubrious essay. Can you come to my place in which professional activities are conducted tomorrow at three hours past 1:30?" I responded in the positive affirmative, and twenty-seven hours later, found myself sitting on a stool in front of his desk.

"Mr. Starfish," he began. "Your essay captures the malevolently drowsing state of achromatic viridian utterances in daily life accurately. But to pigeonhole this concept's state into a reflection of your existence, you must pithily concize your mass of words into one sharply honed sentence, just like a pastry chef fills each delicious donut with the white sugar and the flour. You can't make a donut without flour, but you can't make it without sugar, either. But too much sugar obscures the flour."

His words ran through my head like boars tromping over a desolate field. They chomped up the weeds and sweet prose blossoms bloomed in their boorish trotter-marks. I finally understood the importance of concisiosity. My writing now suffers not from the bitter cold of bareness, nor the stifling heat of swaddled bundles of clothing. Rather, like Aristotle, it skips giddily down the middle path. In other words, oh my brothers and only friends, I was cured, all right!