Wednesday, September 26, 2018 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 // The Statement 
5B

Mark Schlissel gave me writer’s block

by Matt Gallatin, Statement Correspondent

U

niversity of Michigan Presi-
dent Mark Schlissel appar-
ently lives in a beautiful 
white house on South Uni-

versity Avenue and I was going to see it. 
I was going to see it because I emailed 
a professor that I needed a building 
to write about, and of the hundreds in 
Ann Arbor, not a single one felt curious 
enough for a story.

“Break into Mark Schlissel’s house!” 

he wrote.

“Will I be arrested?” I wondered.
“I’m just an Idea Guy!” he replied.
It was an idea, and one I needed, 

because I signed on to write about build-
ings for The Daily’s Statement maga-
zine this semester: To turn immobile 
structures into however many thousand 
romantically-tainted words on a semi-
regular basis. When I applied, I felt I had 
a lot to say on the subject, and I wanted to 
force myself to write.

The weather was awful the day I first 

set out to see the President’s House. I left 
around noon and faced the September 
mix of warm humidity and cold wind that 
begs both for shorts and a flannel, and 
doesn’t blink an eye at the contradiction. 
I wore neither, and downed a Claritin 
instead as September not only gifts split 
personality weather but also searing and 
persistent allergies.

My goal for this visit to Schlissel’s 

white picket fence home was to spark 

some initial inspiration that I could 
hopefully run with, as I had an arti-
cle due within a few days. I would give 
myself those days to complete research 
and finalize the writing.

I was hoping the visit would spark 

my inspiration because truthfully, I was 

lacking motivation. I was too preoccu-
pied with the book I was reading, the boy 
I was seeing, the baffling strangeness of 
weather in September.

But by the time I reached the back-

side of the Hatcher Graduate Library and 
came upon the austere home, I had com-
pletely forgotten my intentions. Glanc-
ing through the cracks of the fence into 
the prim backyard with its proper glass 
porches stirred nothing in me. I merely 
checked my phone twice for texts as I 
passed, wondered why there were none, 
and wondered if it was something I said. 

I 

failed before I began, but I refused 
to believe it. I would not let my 
emptied-headedness preclude me 

from finishing such important work. I 
had an article to write, and like any sea-
soned professional college journalist, I 
turned to the sources: Wikipedia, Google, 

three Advil and a large glass of wine.

The President’s House is the oldest 

remaining building on the University’s 
campus. It was constructed to be a facul-
ty residence when the University moved 
from Detroit to Ann Arbor in 1837, and 
construction was completed in 1840. The 
first president to move into the home was 
Henry Phillip Tappan in 1852, who was 
also the first official President of the Uni-
versity.

The house has undergone extensive 

renovations over the last two centu-
ries, some of the grandest of which are 
described in the nomination for the 
home’s entry into the National Register 
of Historic Places.

“In the 1860s the central mass assumed 

its present appearance. The half story 
became a full third story; the roof was 
altered to a truncated hipped roof; dou-
ble brackets were added; the cupola was 
replaced by a balustrade; and the house 
took on an Italianate cast. Later, some-
time after 1875, the artificial mortar 
courses were filled in. The house’s four 
chimneys and seven fire-places are origi-
nal as well as the flat roofed Greek reviv-
al portico.”

Renovations continued on the home 

well into the 1980s. Some are document-
ed by Anne Duderstadt, wife of James J. 
Duderstadt, who became University Pres-
ident in 1988. In a photographic essay, 
Anne Duderstadt describes her odyssey 
with the home:

“The toilet from the first floor bath-

room (to be the handicapped bathroom) 
was on the dining porch. The front yard 

was totally dug up, and the side porch 
was gone. Cigarette butts were scat-
tered all over the floors by the workmen. 
The University decorators were walking 
through the house with carpet salesman 
deciding what THEY were going to do 
with the house. Suddenly, the house was 
not as ‘beautiful’ as I had remembered.”

When I went back to the President’s 

House later that evening and looked at 
the many Italianate windows fronting the 
home, peered again at the large wooden 
fence surrounding the porch and looked 
between the pickets, I could not think 
much of Anne Duderstadt and her domes-
tic horror. I simply could not see it: There 
were no toilets on the porch, no cigarette 
butts on the floors scattered by workmen 
and no University decorators with unsat-
isfactory ideas of their own.

I saw only how strange it was for a 

22-room home to not have a single light 
on; felt only that it is a bit of a waste for 
a home so extensively and expensively 
renovated to sit alone, emptied, unoccu-
pied, surrounded by a tall fence and cut 
off from the world. Mostly, the image of 
the lonesome home under the moonlight 
made me tired, nostalgic and wishful of 
my own apartment. It made me want to 
go home.
T

his is the heart of the problem. 
This is the reason I have not 
been capable of being the sort of 

writer I have wanted to be. I am incapable 
of reading about a 22-room home without 
thinking about my own single bedroom; 
incapable of counting the windows of the 
President’s House without waiting for 
my phone to ring; incapable of listing the 
date of the President’s House’s construc-
tion without thinking about the first time 
someone held my hand in public and I 
didn’t flinch. I am always distracted.

In my sophomore year, I misread a 

question on a history midterm and gave 
an incorrect response. In a flowing email 
to my professor, I apologized profusely 
and asked if it was at all possible to take it 
again, and if not, if there might be a way 
to make it up to him.

He responded “Focus, my boy, Focus!” 

and allowed me to redo the question. I 
have tried hard since to heed his warn-
ing. I have only ever been less successful.

Writing, at least for me, is one of those 

specific forms of masochism that asks for 
regularity but demands ingenious spon-
taneity. I mean writing happens only at 
one time of day, when the whole day has 

been exhausted, probably nursing a head-
ache, and when there is absolutely noth-
ing else to do. There are no other options. 
It’s when I remember, for a minute, for an 
hour, for an evening, that things just don’t 
make any sense. At least, they don’t make 
sense like I’d like them to. Nothing is left 
but to try and explain this to myself.

I am always explaining to myself, never 

to anyone else, no matter how often I try 
otherwise.

The reason this has always struck me 

as a bad thing, and the reason I say it pro-
hibits me from being the kind of writer 
I have wanted to be, is because I have 
created, for right or for wrong, an ideal 
in my mind of the kind of person that my 
distractedness disallows me from being. 
This ideal me would not walk by Schlis-
sel’s house and check their phone twice 
instead of taking notes on the number of 
windows and the year it was built. This 
ideal would not veer direly off the topic 
of their assignment. This ideal wouldn’t 
turn Schlissel’s house into a metaphor.

This ideal is an abstraction, and a vague 

one. I am unsure if anyone exists who 
truly manifests it. But I have been led to 
believe someone does — even many some-
ones — and it is that belief that has made 
the difference. When I walk down the 
street, I see not a hundred students with 
their own anxieties running to class, but 
a mass of people who have it figured out 
and do not worry about things like empty 
houses and phones that don’t ring — peo-
ple who do not try to explain themselves.

It is absurd to believe that, of course. 

Everyone experiences fears and doubts 
and worries, I am well aware of this. That 
doesn’t mean it’s not easy to fall into such 

a simplification when you lack the con-
text of each person you pass.

Simply, it is impossible to know the 

anxieties behind every blank face, and so 
it is difficult to imagine those anxieties 
exist at all: I did not see the girl in a yel-
low sundress who I just passed on State 
Street crying in the bathroom stall 20 
minutes before, then wiping her mascara 
slowly in the mirror. Perhaps, with some 
imagination, I can picture her crying. 
But I cannot in a way that would make it 
tangible, make it real; not in a way that 
would make me feel it quite like I would 
if I actually saw her wiping her makeup.

These abstractions of worriless people 

exist only in a present moment. They 
have never had pasts and they have never 
had futures. They are the cool-looking 

guy in the corner of the party who hasn’t 
spoken a word, and because he hasn’t 
spoken a word, you assume that he has 
it all figured out. In all likelihood, he 
doesn’t know what the hell is going on, or 
he’s just way too high to be at this party. 
It doesn’t matter though. I have imparted 
a coolness on him anyway, and already 
feel inferior. That cool-looking guy has 
always been at the party, and he will 
never leave it.

So writing is very uncool, because 

writing is trying like mad to explain 
yourself, and in explaining yourself, you 
are admitting you don’t know it all, and it 
bothers not to know it all; whereas “cool” 
is the appearance of a) not having a care 
in the world and b) having it all figured 
out. I have never met someone who liked 
to write who wasn’t at least a bit neurot-
ic, or who had much at all figured out.

I have only ever felt uncool when writ-

ing, and thus embarrassed. I have only 
ever felt like I wished I hadn’t said what I 
finally ended up saying.
A

bout two years ago, I wrote 
a piece for The Daily during 
which I came to terms with 

the fact that I was gay. The next day, it 
was colder than usual, and I had on the 
same red sweater I’d worn nearly every 
day that month. I waited for the eleva-
tor to my class in Angell Hall. It arrived, 
I entered and right as the door began to 
close, my professor stuck in his hand, 
and the elevator doors opened again to 
let him in. It was the same professor who 
told me “Focus, my boy, Focus!”

He looked at me. He was silent a 

moment, and then began to say, in a 
hushed, matter-of-fact tone, that he had 

read my article, and, well, that he did not 
understand what exactly I had meant 
by it. I told him matter-of-factly that I 
did not know what I meant by it either, 
except that it was melodramatic and best 
not to be taken seriously.

It would have been much harder to take 

myself seriously. I felt, at least, very seri-
ous when I had written it. But I had con-
vinced myself almost immediately that I 
did not deserve to be taken seriously, and 
so I joked about how dramatic I had been, 
and I made fun of myself for it. To ask to 
be taken seriously would have been to ask 
to be empathized with, and in quite plain 
terms, I did not believe I deserved it.

Later that week, I saw a photo of myself 

in the red sweater I’d worn so often, and 
was taken aback. I had thought it fit quite 

well and I liked it a lot. But when I looked 
at myself in the photo, it looked all wrong. 
The sleeves were too large. My head was 
bloated when framed in the shade of red 
and the collar style. I threw the sweater 
out that evening. I would never be able to 
wear it again.

Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette comes to 

mind here. When she explains how she 
used jokes to cope with her coming out 
story, I felt it as if she stood there in the 
room, scolding me like a loving older sib-
ling:

“I froze an incredibly formative expe-

rience at its trauma point and I sealed it 
off into jokes. And that story became a 
routine, and through repetition, that joke 
version fused with my actual memory of 
what happened.”

Months ago, I emailed The Daily and 

asked them to scratch my name from that 
article my professor in the elevator had 
not understood. I understood completely 
what I had said in it. I only wished I had 
not said it. Nothing in the article was 
untrue. I had had those feelings. I only 
no longer felt that way, that it was such 
a big deal to be gay — perhaps no longer 
felt it by the time the article was even 
published; and to read something writ-
ten by someone who was me, yet terribly 
and completely no longer was me, was 
painful, disturbing and sad. It was see-
ing a photo of yourself with a bad hair-
cut years before, a haircut you loved for 
so long, and finally realizing that you 
should have just cut off the mane. Above 
all, it was embarrassing.

The future version of myself did not 

believe the prior one deserved empa-
thy. In a more stable and assured place, 
I looked down upon a version of myself 
that was more unsure. I wanted only to 
erase his existence entirely, and create a 
“me” that had only existed in the present, 
like that cool-looking boy at the party: 
always there, never leaving.

My article was physical evidence that 

not only had I been late to the party, but 

that I would surely leave it soon enough.

But we cannot delete the person we 

were before we arrived. We cannot ask 
the kind editors at The Daily to scratch 
away their existence. What we are say-
ing — what I was saying — when I tried 
to erase the existence of that past version 
of myself is that he did not deserve to be 
empathized with. When we preclude a 
prior version of ourselves from empathy, 
and when we know that our present will 
never last, we say, in short, that we have 
never and will never deserve it. And I 
can’t believe that’s true. 
I 

tried to go to the President’s House 
again. This time more than ever I 
was hell-bent on writing the arti-

cle I was supposed to. Whatever I’d find 
was more necessary, I knew — I thought 
— than whatever I’d been ranting about 
in my head: perhaps an in-depth history 
of its renovations, a telling of the process 
of installing its complex indoor and out-
door watering system, commentary on 
the time the Duderstadts spent $70,000 
replacing a turquoise carpet.

It was cloudy outside, the wind was 

blowing, and for the first time I realized 
fall really was coming, global warming 
hadn’t created the eternal summer I’d 
always asked for, and there was nothing 
I could do about it. The trees around the 
President’s House swayed dangerously, 
and two passing students with large 
black backpacks, matching Michigan 
t-shirts and weary eyes appeared to wake 
up from their trance to give me an odd 
look; I standing in front of the building, 
still and starry eyed.

It didn’t look like anyone was home. I 

wondered if a story would appear to me if 
I walked up to the house, unannounced, 
and asked a few questions. The driveway 
is short. It took only a few moments to 
reach the door. But when I got to there 
and looked inside, again, it looked only 
emptied, and I could not for the life of me 
bring myself to knock.
Prashanth Panicker/Daily 

A student passes in front of President Mark Schlissel’s house on South University.

Prashanth Panicker/Daily 

The house of President Mark Schlissel on South University.
“I had an article to write, and like 
any seasoned professional college 
journalist I turned to the sources: 

Wikipedia, Google, three Advil 

and a large glass of wine.”

“About two years ago, I wrote a piece 
for The Daily during which I came to 
terms with the fact that I was gay.”

