Friday's Writing Essentials: Senior Block Class

My senior year at Mercer Island High School was spent cavorting with the intelligentsia of seventeen and eighteen year-old wannabe's in what was fondly termed, “The Block.”  Our mentor and visionary, who led a motley group of upper middle class philosophers at M.I, happened to earn national honors for the best teacher in the U.S. during the year I took part in this ground-breaking program.  He formerly taught philosophy at the college level, but became tired of the listless looks of his students who took his classes as a means to an end.  Thus, he took a salary cut and came to our high school to set up this controversial tutorial which admitted a select group of about twenty seniors into a program which had no other curricula other than to read the classical philosophers and sit around and gab about their books.   We started with Plato and read right through, chronologically, BC to AD.  Read and discussed.  Acted.  Debated.  Most often, we were cornered by Mr. Wichtermann in the untenable morass of our own misdirected arguments and assumptions.

One thing Mr. W did was question everything.  At seventeen, having just returned from three months bicycling throughout Europe, hair springing out in every direction, fresh off of an existential spate of extracurricular reading (Heidegger intrigued me) … I thought I had it all figured out.  One day, while arguing Kant’s moral imperative to my Block peers, Mr. Wichtermann stopped me, cold, in front of my fellow comrades.

 “Nudelzmann!”  he said, quite loudly.  I paused, looked up, and saw him marching toward me at breakneck pace.  “Nudelzmann!”  He was now upon me, and with his nose not two inches from mine, and said it yet a third time.  “Nudelzman!”   However, this third annunciation was now accompanied by a curious flicking of his fingers from his right hand across my shoulder.  This was the dreaded Wichtermann “flicker,” which I had only heard about, never actually seen, and always considered mythology.  Again, he violently shook his hand on one shoulder, the strangest of actions, but somehow it commanded attention.  Because it was Mr. Wichtermann.  Because it meant something momentous was about to spring from his lips. Every student’s eye was transfixed on the scene.  Finally he spoke.

Nudelzmann!  You made your point in the first minute or so.  And a splendid point it was.  I was tingling with exhilaration.  You got Kant.  You got it.  In one paragraph you let me see that.  Oh, if only you’d stopped after that first paragraph.  You see, everything else was tripe.  Pure, unadulterated, unmitigated, and unadorned pig intestine.  So please, take your seat, and learn the art of brevity and conciseness.  We, here, your colleagues, will be the richer for it.

Now this is paraphrased, but you get the idea.  I learned (or hope I learned) an invaluable lesson from Mr. W.  I did work on it, and I think I came a long way through his mentorship.   Some of my fascination with Haiku and short-form poetry do doubt comes from a desire to express things in their elemental case, or at least packed in the economics of word selection and syntax.  Mr. Wichtermann, through his demonstrative modeling of passion and excellence in writing, as well as critical understanding, was a key element in my early literary development.  I think about him often, especially when I start waxing eloquent (for instance, now!), and look over my shoulder just to be sure.

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Written by Edward Nudelman, who is also a Books Correspondent for Gather:  POETRY CENTRAL

Keep up with Ed’s other posting and Gather activity by joining his Gather network-just click here and select the orange “Connect” button on the left-hand side of the page.  If you are interested in my background or qualifications, I invite you to read my profile which has information concerning my published writings.