Spiritual Forces

The end of Writing 121 culminated in an experience both enlightening and discouraging. My final essay, a synthesis of four writings by Martin Luther King, was to be the ultimate flexing of literate muscle. Encompassed by elegant prose, my essay would ripple with sinuous grammar anchored to an unassailable structure. In the end, I felt that, after attempting those Olympian feats, I strained, ripped, or dislocated every part of that essay's body.

Throughout the process of writing my essay I came to know and respect the sampling of King's writing I had read. Later I found, within Powell's Books, two cinder block sized volumes containing more of his writings; sermons, a map of the holy land drawn by hand from memory, and early college papers. That was when I grasped the size of King's body of work, enormous as leviathan, a Schwarzenegger to my Charles Atlas beach wimp.

I tried again and again to turn a phrase as King did. A good example of King's phrasing is in the essay The World House. King wrote how technology, the means by which man rose from the stone age to the nuclear age, had surpassed man's moral development to the point where the world contained "guided missiles and misguided men." It looks easy, but the rhythms and words have to be in a precise synchronization, and the work must build to that phrase, placing it at the right moment, otherwise the writer comes across as a cheap knock off.

The best lesson came while reading King's beliefs on non violent resistance. My beliefs were about the same; I was on the right track. King learned non violent resistance from Ghandi, and, over a long time, developed how it applied to fighting oppression in the United States. King's detractors never raised an effective argument against him.

I wanted to make clear that violence, in the context of the civil rights movement, would not work. I wanted to make clear that a bullet will stop a man, but not the idea he died for. Such an ideology cannot be fought with fists, but with spirit. King personifies this by fighting oppression with the greater ideology of justice. This transcendent idea spreads like fire, uniting all people of good will from different races and religions in the fight against oppression.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

-King, I Have a dream

I haven't seen my essay since I turned it in. The professor told me in an email that I can pick it up Wednesday. She discected it, like a coroner, leaving comments upon its body. I'll be interested to see how I fared.