The Handsome Dunce of Camden College Fame: The Fall of 1985 First Page

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Commons Lawn

"'Such, such were the joys
When we all -- girls and boys --
In our youth-time were seen
On the echoing green.'
Till the little ones, weary,
No more can be merry:
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end…
On the darkening green."


William Blake
The Echoing Green


On his first day in the fall of 1985 The Hippie Figure drove his purple Bug through the front gate of Camden College and up the winding drive about a mile and then made a left at the looming Visual and Performing Arts building and, after beeping and watching the security gate rise, drove down the first lane among the dorms and onto the commons lawn, that is like an erased football field between clusters of dorms, and made a few markings, that he later said were attempts at communication with students who had passed before their time, and then sped out and turned until he fishtailed and then skidded his vehicle flush against the stone wall at the Edge of the World. At the end of commons lawn this stone wall is the only border before the dropoff that appears to be bottomless, though while staring down some have claimed to see just that, a bottom, the bottom of a mythic freshman girl who jumped in frustration at not finding a man, or who found one who then disappeared for a refill at the keg in Booth House and forgot to return. Only Rodin’s thinker is more intensely focused, albeit in a different pose. Those who have seen it said the bottom is huge and a turn on. "Only its inaccessibility is a turn-off," one drama major said to an atheist Kierkegaardian late one term when a bonfire rose high along its edge.


This Edge of the World is really an illusion that works only if one is standing in the middle or further back on commons lawns. In the green mountains beyond it has been wishfully theorized that there is a Xanadu built by William Blake and Martha Graham, and maybe Kubla Khan, where students who fear graduation end up upon graduation to study world literature, philosophy and to practice the arts forever along with professors who put this clause that they end up there, too, into their contract before the new president arrived; whatever the case that Xanadu is nothing compared to the one that was Camden college in the Fall of 1985, the fall just one year after 1984, the year made famous by George Orwell, but not related. The Fall of 1985 is more like the fall of man, and then the woman, and the rising and falling within that leads to the afterglow and then nothingness, or the afterglow and a short procedure and a blank page according to The Easton Author, and if not the first two choices on this multiple choice sentence, then it leads, what does?, I’ve lost track, who are you?, I’m the Handsome Dunce of Camden College fame, who are you?, I’m you, too, I just got confused by the way this sentence is working out, Get out!, Out?, I can’t get out, I’m you, OK, I’m out, good, my apologies for whoever that was, it’s The Moi Guy I guess, he keeps coming at me; as I was saying, this sentence is about the rising and falling within, that leads to the afterglow and has lead to the next generation: Generation Why?