— for Mas’ud Zavarzadeh
I buried it outside the Hall of Languages, at the top of the hill. Took a shovel, dug a hole in the pristine lawn at the end of the walkway and buried it. No one seemed bothered by it: not the campus police nor the associate prof looking for tenure. No one seemed to care.
That was forty years ago.
I had just walked out of my thesis defense, an hour-long exercise of pure hell dancing the tight string explaining the post-modern imagination to one W.D. Snodgrass, who looked like a landlocked sailor. In my youthful arrogance, I had no understanding why I had to explain my thinking to anyone, so I had snuck into the conference room an hour before my appointed execution and taped Xerox images of my face to the four walls surrounding the chairs ringing the table.
Now, there was the sailor looking at me with vague curiosity and posted behind him my blank, unwavering stare aimed at the back of his head. Aside from my advisor, Professor Snodgrass was the only one from the English department who bothered to make it, the only one to care. The head of the English Department cared, true, but only that the taped Xeroxes faces might damage the walls.
My thesis was sixty pages of intellectual damage to the idea of post-modern expression, a comprehensive survey complete with a four and a third blank page tribute to John Cage. I never knew if Snodgrass had made it that far in the opus, but he offered sympathetically probing questions through a bemused smile. Was this all necessary, the poet wondered.
Sweating, I kept my right hand resting on the thesis—the biblical summary of my four years of schooling—those papers resting comfortably in its shoebox coffin, patiently waiting. All the while I was wondering aloud if I knew what I was talking about.
Snodgrass smiled, shook his head, shook my hand.
Afterwards, nearly invisible standing at the top of the walkway to the Hall of Languages, I buried the shoebox coffined thesis. Well, almost. See, on a student’s income, having spent all my monies to Xerox my face for the thesis walls, I couldn’t actually afford to copy my thesis. So the box contained more than four and a third blank pages. In deep truth, all the pages were blank.
Over the forty years, I’ve often regretted that I hadn’t robbed a 7-11 or begged with an empty coffee cup to raise the funds for just one copy of my seminal work on post-modern expression. But filled now with knowing I know so little, I understand that it is better that the pages are blank, some forty years later.