What I mean is all of that gave you something you couldn’t just take off
Stephanie Leone, Eugene Lang College and Parsons School of Design ’15, remembers her time at Lang.
It was dark even for winter the night I sat alone in the Courtyard, huddled into a jacket and writing into a notebook. No jacket could protect from that torturous cold, a temperature I associated with the unyielding intensity necessary for art, the endurance of which would make you deserving enough. I hoped I looked deserving enough, like I was risking something there, shivering and writing into a notebook. It was all mine then the trees the good reading spot the fading letters spelling no justice no peace in chalk on the building walls, end-of-semester anxiety still in my bones. I’d never belonged anywhere and I was just realizing it then and there in the Courtyard, too changed to board the train to my childhood home for the break and not wonder if it had all been a dream. What I mean is the readings or the things you wrote or the people you’d gotten used to seeing every Tuesday and Thursday at ten in the morning not at an office but around a table waiting to see what would happen next. What I mean is all of that gave you something you couldn’t just take off like a hat to be polite for the old friends and family who might have difficulty with you now. Even in the freezing cold, even in the rain, the Courtyard between classes. Because the Courtyard was between the city itself, a secret you could live in. And live you did, there in the Village dissecting Faulkner or Proust or the work of a friend who is maybe famous now, who also sat in the shade of the tree or leaned against the upside down metal mushroom seat looking up at that little square of sky wondering if her future self would dare to be so engrossed in the world as she was then. Being there felt important — you were charged, very I Am Doing This, very ready. Or it was as if you’d stepped too far outside of yourself examining brain or body, scared you weren’t discovering yourself correctly (good enough smart enough read enough watched enough cultured just or cool enough). You thought it speaking up in seminars. You were trying to connect all the dots. Your eyes ran marathons across lines of words, directing them to stand at attention in your brain like little marching armies. Had 1985 Lang felt like this like a looped movie scene, the one where the protagonist has a moment of ultimate expansion but seems so sad about it. Sad as in melancholic, not unhappy, for finding sanctuary in the used Strand bookcarts or O Cafe coffee or deli bagels or the zigzag West Village streets on the way to the reading at Dia or the walk from the East Village to Chinatown to the Manhattan Bridge to Gowanus or the tiny beach strip underneath the Brooklyn Bridge you snuck down onto were tiny comforts that still appear to you, years and years later. Did you and your Intermediate Poetry classmates run like kids through the rain after hearing Ariana Reines read, shouting out lines together hoping together being something together. Yes it was real. You liked getting your head cracked open like an egg every class. You listened deeper and harder, your ear canal a tunnel with cars speeding through. How was so much brilliance here. Once a classmate remarked that everything was a moment for me. He did it in front of the whole class so I felt wounded, unsure if it was negative and he was right. Do you ever think about the church with the black gate because I still get a lurch if I approach it, remembering my walks from East to West usually sleepless, usually thinking about printing and stapling an essay, usually hoping I’d retain Pedagogy of The Oppressed enough for class participation. The church meant almost there and then the block from 5th Avenue to 6th Avenue on 11th or 12th was a departure and an entering. Outside the entrances people stood alone or together smoking reading laughing and inside things came into focus, faces familiar and safe. I felt so validated by that essay we read last night, someone said to you climbing the stairs to the second floor and you felt relief that you were not alone with all this astonishment. And your professors, how you admired them, how you clung to every word and scrawled them into your Moleskine like they were small prayers. How exceptional was that corner classroom with its windows looking out onto a street in a city where so much had happened. So much can happen I thought that dark night in the Courtyard. Your work and so much more is possible. Do you hope it never fades. I do. I hope we never stop missing it.
If you miss Lang, too, stop by our annual Lang Alumni Holiday Party Celebration. RSVP, bring a friend, and come reminisce with faculty and friends.
