Patrick England
Looking at the title of this year’s Acacia conference, about the only thing I can reject in my life is my neighbor with the super annoying habit of overusing his leaf blower. Yes, it’s one of those gas-powered, hellishly loud monsters that seems to demand short walks around a few houses in our neighborhood while its owner robotically blows dirt and leaves up and down sidewalks, street gutters and even some driveways.
But this presentation isn’t about him. It’s about linking the title theme of this panel, “The effects of Family, Community, and Identity in Promoting Change” with my on-going Treehouse of Language project that started around 2020, some of which I’m using for my MA project. In a way, it is about him since he is a part of my neighborhood and therefore my community. But the literal treehouse building project started fifteen years ago or so and has had many stops and starts, so to identify a clear, definite starting point is too difficult. What’s easier is the ending part. It will never end, at least for as long as I’m still living. It requires maintenance and improvements, so I do what I can, with the help of built in stairs and ladders, to tweak parts here and there.
To be a little more accurate, or in ladder terms, to narrow the focus the way my feet and hands must stay within the sixteen-inch space between ladder rails, I really like the Embracing Change part of the title of this conference’s title. I’m a big believer and practitioner of adapting and adjusting, which I have been doing as I’ve expanded a lot of new material having to do with ladders in relation to the treehouse and the influences with the treehouse.
The beginning of the ladder section emerged a few months ago after my wife and I bought a small place up in Cambria. Since then, we have needed to do different odd jobs that required my extension ladders. During one drive up to Cambria, I worried that the ladder was sticking out too far from the back of my truck, so I left very early in the morning to avoid the CHP. This quixotic mission excited me about my heroic task of climbing a very tall ladder to the side and the back of the house to repair a roof gutter and to clean out some leaves, pine needles, dirt, feathers and other accumulated materials. Doing this work made me feel, absurdly enough, like a hero. It was and is dangerous work, and rather than shy away from the dangers, I have approached various tasks with greater care and caution. And simply put, I was doing something useful, something that has actual, tangible evidence of improvement, or at least efforts toward improvement. This work involves tasks for my wife and me (my family), tasks that require my ladders. I was able to help a neighbor refill his owl box with wood chips he says will attract owls back to the box. I also helped some new friends hang a new sign outside their shop’s window.
And at night while relishing in my day’s deeds, I was rereading Virginia Woolf’s, To the Lighthouse, when I found a passage that caught my attention. Near the beginning of Chapter 12, Mrs. Ramsey recalls that “There was a ladder against the greenhouse, and little lumps of putty stuck about, for they were beginning to mend the greenhouse” (101). Now I know the greenhouse in her life was very different from mine, but the curious coincidence created a mini-epiphany for me. It wasn’t fully clear yet, but I felt confident some of the details from Woolf’s novel were inspiring and reviving me.
Inside the house, I demolished an odd space that required a ladder to access, a loft at the top of a hallway, a space my wife hated and I felt growing on me, or at least the space-building/ expanding part of me. But then I skimmed the top of my head going down the stair way, hitting the front part of the loft and concluded that anyone over six feet tall would have problems going down stairs, so I deconstructed the loft. I thought how some professors might get excited by the “deconstructive” potential of this work, but so far I haven’t written that much about it in these terms. And then it occurred to me: my treehouse project would have been impossible without ladders. How could this useful tool, this ingenious extension of human potential be so ubiquitous yet so overlooked?
In the original parts of the Treehouse of Language poems, I focus on a lot of interesting elements, spaces and materials, but after re-starting the project with a renewed focus on ladders, I have expanded the range of its potential. I’ve reinforced the bridging effects of ladders, especially in the figurative sense that with language we can get over obstacles and problems. As different kinds and sizes of metaphors, literary ladders allow me to access areas that otherwise would be out of my reach. I’m grateful for the opportunities to change and improve my relationships with the students I tutor, my peers and professors I work with here, and my family and friends. I’m also pretty excited about where my literal and literary ladders are taking me.
Because there are too many literary ladders to discuss at this presentation, for now, I’ll just focus on one, Helene Cixous, whose work challenges me in many ways to keep embracing ladders.
In her book, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Cixous does a lot of what I want to do: extend writing and reading, and really all interactions with language into active and dynamic spaces. Early in her book she plays with the letter H, associating it with writing. She writes, “This is how I figure it: the ladder is neither immobile nor empty. It is animated. It incorporates the movement it arouses and inscribes…” (4). And we all know how this works. A great writer expresses something spot on that excites us as readers so much that sometimes we get carried away. This is how I figure it: Cixous is provocative. She wants me to respond, “Oh please, a ladder is a ladder, you know those functional wood, metal or fiberglass stepping structures that enable us to climb up and reach things…” which seems pretty obvious until you realize she’s already at the top of the ladder grinning. Yes, it is animated, and I would add that it animates me.
She later states that, “Writing originates in … what is often inadmissible, contrary, terribly dangerous, and risks turning into complacency-- which is the worst of all crimes: …” (13). And to prove that I’m not a criminal, I have to thank Cixous and a lot of other writers and influences then ask, in the spirit of animated challenges to complacency, “Could you help me move this ladder? We need to set it up on the front of the treehouse where a bamboo screen has blown loose.” To which I look back at my literary friends who have disappeared into some literal shadows. Really? I ask them. A little help, please?”
Thanks for your help. It’s a lot easier to move a ladder with a friend. What’s that? Your back is bugging you? No worries; I can move my ladder by myself. In fact, I prefer working alone and I know, I know, no man is an island, so if you’d like to take the top of the ladder as I tilt it down, that would be great. Here it comes, I’ll lay it flat so you can grab it. Just let me know if it’s too heavy because I really don’t want to hear any whining.
Other theoretical influences include Gaston Bachelard’s the Poetics of Space, and Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, but these other influences are for a longer presentation.
A few words on identity. Even though I am an older student, don’t be fooled: there’s a youthful treehouse building guy behind this mask. I feel excited about being a part of at least two literal communities: those in Fullerton and those in Cambria, as well as the many communities within those communities. Of course, there are countless literary or imaginary communities whose writers and characters keep encouraging me to write on. They excite me about the role of communication within those communities, especially the ways we can be more creative with gaining access to hard-to -reach areas, whether literary or literal. All of this brings me back to my nemesis with the leaf-blower.
Yes, my nemesis. My robot neighbor with the demonic leaf-blower cannot see what I can see from my treehouse. Maybe, like me, he’s got his head so far up his a.. that he needs to climb down a ladder into himself and make peace with the impulses to control every spec of life that invades what he perceives to be his space or the proper cleanliness of public spaces like streets, gutters and sidewalks in front of his neighbors’ properties. For now, I can imagine telling him that from the elevated position of my tree house, I can see the leaves on his roof and a lot of other junk in his rain gutters.
Biography
Patrick started and stopped MS and MA programs, but plans to end/finish his MA in English in the Spring of 2022. Patrick has worked as a private English and writing tutor for almost 30 years.