Kids have been reading about you for a long time now, nearly
four hundred shitty years, and throughout all of those years, they've basically
just been wishing you'd shut your god damn pie hole about the woe you brought
down around your own head all those years ago.
But today, in Ms. Kavinski's tenth grade English class,
something amazing will happen. A group
of students, fifteen of them to be precise, will read your story, the story
that dickhead Coleridge immortalized in verse so long ago, and they'll get
it. They'll really get it.
"So it's like, a confluence of nature and technology
clashing," one student will say.
"That's one reading," Ms. Kavinski will announce
to the class. "Does anyone else
have any ideas what this poem might be about?"
"Hubris!" a young woman will shout.
"The fear of the unknowable!" a young man will
chime in.
"The irrationality of prejudice!" the class
parakeet will squawk.
The cacophony of interpretive overtures will light upon your
spectral ears, drawing you into the classroom.
As your consciousness draws closer and closer to Ms. K's class, your
mind will begin to rebuild your body from memory. Bone will emerge from air, muscle will wrap
itself around bone and skin, moldy and loose but true none the less, will sheath
your frame. By the time you arrive,
you'll be wearing the same tattered rags you used to wear back in the 16th
century, when people were still thinking about you as a current cultural
figure.
When you materialize in the classroom the students will be
alarmed at first. Some of them will run
for the door which, now, will be locked.
The rest will simply applaud, a knee jerk reaction for whenever a
visitor comes to Ms. K's class. You'll
direct them all to sit, and begin your speech.
"Ages have separated us, but the words of my tail
reached you and you, with your insight and analysis, have freed me from this
plane." When you finish your
sentence you'll gesture expectantly, as if you'd hoped to vanish in a sudden
flash, but you'll remain woefully physical in front of the children until they
begin asking you questions, slowly but surely pushing you back into the realm
of insubstantiality by applying post-structural theory and reading strategies
to a poem written by a man who could not conceive of such things.
Congratulations Ancient Mariner!
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