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.”