I remember writing a paper about the possibility of a blank page in a freshmen writing course at the University of Minnesota. The instructor prompted us to write about writing. I remember turning in a poetic tirade about the beauty of infinite space. About how each blank page represented the opportunity to create something new.
This was in 1998. I wrote the paper in a computer lab. Tapping away at keys in front of a big monitor. This classroom was in Appleby Hall. I was admitted to General College at the University of Minnesota because my grades in high school weren’t good enough to get me into the College of Liberal Arts. The other remedial students and I spent much of our time in Appleby Hall that fall. I’d transfer out of General College in the spring of 1999 and, in so doing, try to convince the world (and myself) I wasn’t remedial.
I printed my rant about blank pages on blank pages of printer paper and turned the short essay into the instructor at the end of class. In 1998 we still used paper to turn in papers. No artificial intelligence involved at all. The instructor returned the paper during the next class. It was littered with notes. Not so blank anymore. Her feedback was glowing and helped to convince me that I wasn’t a remedial writer.
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And now it is 2024. The memory of writing a paper about papers came to me this morning. I have many memories and that come and go. I’m sure you do too.
After remembering the paper about blank pages, I remembered reading about memory in a college course on the British Romantics. I took that English class during the fall of 2001. We read Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I don’t remember the specific essay by Coleridge, and a brief Google Search came up empty, but one afternoon our class discussed an excerpt from in which Coleridge likened memory to a palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript or piece of writing on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Words layered on each other, complicating what came before with what came next. The legible becomes less legible. The complexity becomes more complex. Things make less sense. Taylor described this in relationship to how the imagination works.
I liked reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, even if I struggled to make sense of Victorian literature. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner blew my away when I was 21, even if I didn’t know why. The albatross. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Now, as I write this little blog, the poem reminds me of the song House Carpenter. I’m reminded of the version by Bob Dylan. I don’t know why that song came to me just as I don’t know why the memory of writing a paper about blank pages came to me. Memory and imagination are complicated. They are stacked sheets of papyrus paper that are littered with words. Just like this sheet of blog paper I’m filling up. Littered with words now.
And the more signs and symbols that fill the page, the more difficult it is to make sense of them.
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I still love a blank page. I love a blank stage, too. Anything might happen. Maybe that is what attracts me to writing, drama, and improv – the infinite possibility for something new.
Things that are alive are always becoming new. Always changing and evolving. So it goes with us things that are alive. Writing and improvising are, for me, one way to embrace the ongoing differentness that is always being produced around us and through us. Here’s an example of using writing to embrace difference. Better to embrace difference, I think, than to try to freeze ourselves in time. There’s no going back once the page isn’t blank. But there are always more blank pages to look forward to. New chances to try again. What comes next is always inspired by what came before. It is also true that what comes next is always an opportunity to make something different or new. That’s a principle I’ve spent years practicing in improv. Maybe in writing too.
Who knows what will come next? Maybe that’s the point.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 