Passing Along the Splinters

During an arts festival in Clifden, Ireland, an erudite if not pompous genteman introduced Seamus Heaney and awarded him a prize in poetry. Dr. Heaney said during his acceptance speech that what one needed to write was the right place to put his lever to turn the world. Subsequently, he said that he was luck enough to have Ireland as his fulcrum. Lucky bastard. Suffice it to say, my fulcrum is nothing like Ireland. In my attempts to find such a place as Heaney implied existed for all good writers, I experienced what can only be described as utter failure. Failure, that is, until I learned how to use the lever's splinters and let others turn the world for me.
At first I had hoped to be as lucky as Dr. Heaney to have Ireland as my fulcrum, the beautifully green and sometimes drearily wet country in which I had so dearly fallen in love. This love prompted a writing dry-spell for nearly my entire stay--save several academically required essays, which felt horrendously beneath my talent. Love, it would appear, can inspire and diminish the writer.
But in my attempts to write, I discovered Ireland was the place I was to craft my lever. Ideas and theories were plentiful in Ireland. Equipped with a somewhat dull axe and weak arms, I scoured the land for a powerful tree from which I could craft this lever. Three months of searching led to my discovery, a great and powerful tree, bark too thick for my axe and branches too high for my arms. A druid's tree. I swung my axe wildly, desperately. Sweat ran into my eyes, my arms grew numb, and my axe's handle began to splinter. Greatness lay before me, but I was ill-equipped to manage such a tremendous task. Instead, I picked up a dried-out branch, which had broken off long ago either from storm or creature, and made my way home.
Having accomplished my first goal, attaining a lever--even if it had been less than a success--I returned to America. Now that I had my lever, I hoped to find my fulcrum. St. John's University of Collegeville was the first fulcrum I tried. I used my lever to write essays, poetry, short stories, reports, anything. The leer was brittle and nearly broke several times, but it managed to survive a year and a half of overexerted force. The world, however, did not turn with my lever as Dr. Heaney said it could. Even with teh assistance of some of the most capable and intelligent people I have ever met, the world did not turn. Failure gained another vistory.
Dismayed and depressed, I graduated. I attained work and moved to Moorhead, MN, the Red River Valley. Even if I had not lost the motivation to write, the vast emptiness that is Moorhead would have provided few places to put a lever. I could look to the horizon and see the back of my own head. Periodically, I still took up the old lever, which continued to dry and by then seemed nearly rotten, and attempted half-heartedly to gain leverage over the world. My writings were fiew and of little depth. At times I wondered if I had ever had talent or insight, or perhaps all was due only to asture assistance attributable to greater minds than my own. I set aside my lever and began the arduous task of learning not to write.
Soon I rarely wrote, opting to tutor others in the art I had foresaken, or had foresaken me. I taught students to utilize outlines, create theses, draft and redraft, revise and revise and revise. I taught students about adjectives and their differences from adverbs. Few of these students would write outside of college and so learning to write a paper was less important to them. But I tried to explain that the purpose of learning how to write is not to write but to develop a way to see the world, a way of thinking. Some learned; some did not. I decided, however, to count even the near-misses as successes.
And so it was a very small piece of the world moved. A very small piece. It did not move far but it moved. So long I had tried to turn the world with all the force I had, and suddenly, it had just moved. Anger struck through me when I first realized it. How dare the world move so easily! How dare it do so when all I wanted was to do my job! But it was then I realized my eariler error. I could never turn the world by writing to turn the world. And neither could Dr. Heaney. Instead, we write to teach, to show a way of seeing the world, to show how we see it.
I dug out that old, dried-out, rotting branch, broken from a druid's tree. I had hidden it away out of shame and disgust, but now I knew where and how to use it. Taking out my old dull axe, I struck the branch until it cracked and splintered into many pieces. Now when I tutor a student, talk to a friend or a stranger, or, yes, write an essay, I give a splinter, hoping others will make levers of their own and turn the world when I could not.
Still, the writer's desire never totally left me, and though one of my levers is shattered out of necessity, I have begun to craft new ones. They are made of lesser trees, but they may yet show their worth. I read as much as I can to sharpen my axe and write as often to strenthen my arms. Someday, perhaps when I think the axe is sharp enough and my arms strong enough I'll search out that druidic tree and craft the lever I had first sought out to make. Until then, I'll just pass along the spinters.