Shields

“Son of Mr Green Jeans,” was a very cool piece to read. It was a good example of several different things that were discussed in the Hermit Crab Structure article. The use of form as a sort of shield to talk about difficult material was very present. While reading Mr Green Jeans, it was clear that we were encountering tough topics. Very sensitive, and intense material from the author, but the structure of the essay allowed us as readers to stay distanced from it and handle it accordingly, as it probably did for the author as well. It was also an example of how the ending is left up to the reader for interpretation. The last line, “Sometime, though, I still wonder what it might have been like,” is not a declarative statement. It’s not some “tell all” sentence that is meant to reveal to the reader what it “all means.” Instead, it’s an unfinished thought left for us to finish. It’s left up to us to find the meaning in the essay.

            I thought the whole piece was great, but the ending was particularly great, and just for that reason. The idea of an unfinished thought as the last sentence, or just a “wondering” of what it might have been like to have a different father, speaks directly to the piece as a whole, or an idea. With the employ of collage, the separate scenes, or images, broken up by white space, we get a whole series of unfinished thoughts that all relate to that last idea: what would it be like to have a different father? Or no father at all, like Tim Allen, or poor Zappa, who for a brief while might have thought he found his father. Or, like the author, who just as well could have not had a father. I imagine all of these scenes, arranged A-Z, as thoughts that the author has had at one point or another throughout his life that have plagued his mind, just any old thing that would trigger this idea of his, and the power of fatherhood, or the absence of it. I loved the contrasting scenes of the fathers of the animal kingdom. As if the best examples of fathers aren’t found in the human species, though, that idea also dethroned by the example of the Guppies eating their own young, expressing the complexity of the job entirely.

            The Hermit Crab Structure was very encouraging, and wanted to make me write. Seeing it put to exemplary use in Mr Green Jeans helped even more. As writers, at least for me in particularly, there is sensitive material that I avoid writing about because of not wanting to come off as preachy, or cliché, or sappy, or soft, or weak. Material that I know I will write about, but hesitate to approach because of its power to consume. However, the idea of presenting that material in a structured form is interesting, and might help to get me started.