Thursday, March 19, 1998

Echoes

LAST COLUMN: While you still can, engage in camaraderie with fellows

"Goodbye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale."

-Joseph Conrad

I recall reading about a relatively harmless little ritual practiced by dormitory dwellers during finals week called "Midnight Yell." It takes its name from the fact that it involves yelling and that it happens at midnight.

I suppose the university's position on recreational midnight yelling is not unlike the position that many of us hold on the issue of noise generated by people other than ourselves.

For the record: At this university, yelling is a sanctioned activity. Yell your brains out at a proper sporting event, but don't yell from your dorm room window at midnight during finals week. If you are caught, you'll face the same penalty as those convicted of a first-offense armed robbery: 15 to 30 hours of community service.

It seems the real people who live in Westwood don't like Midnight Yell. I personally don't have a lot of sympathy for anyone who has chosen to live within yelling distance of a humongous university populated by hordes of wild-eyed debauchees and their students. But in fairness, we need to consider both sides of the argument.

On one hand, they have a legitimate gripe. Twelve times a year, during the hours traditionally allocated for beddy-bye and surfing porn sites on the web, the shroud of moneyed silence that envelopes their picturesque enclave (situated smack-dab in the middle of 12 million other people) is rudely pierced by something other than a med-evac helicopter or a spouse's duvet-shredding, chronic flatulence.

On the other hand: screw 'em.

Noise happens. Westwood's Puritan League, in all its wisdom, doesn't have any qualms about putting us through months of ear-melting daytime noise generated by legions of jack-hammerers employed for that oh-so-noble cause of colorizing the crosswalks. But don't yell at midnight, dammit. You might get in trouble.

Don't worry about it. When your RA finally blows the hinges off your door with a couple of 12-gauge slugs, tell her you weren't yelling, that it was ... uh ... your ventriloquist neighbor trying to be funny. Tell her you were practicing primal scream therapy for a psych final. Tell her URSA made you do it.

I'll admit, I haven't done much research on this issue. Perhaps by encouraging you to break a university rule, somebody will get mad at me and make me do community service for conspiring to commit a noise.

Fine, I'll do it. I'll mop every crosswalk in Westwood if that's what they want.

I argue here that the Midnight Yell serves the betterment of humanity: Community service is a good thing; ergo, doing something that very well might lead to community service is a good thing; ergo, participating in Midnight Yell is a good thing. In other words, by yelling (assuming you get caught) you're actually helping the community. Bully for you. Yell for the good of our UCLA community.

Yell your brains out. Come every midnight of finals week, turn the lights out, open the window, and scream till your uvula shatters. Yell now, while you still can. Because once it's over, it's over. You won't be yelling again for a long time, at least not until you have college-aged kids of your own.

I don't live within yelling distance of UCLA, so why should I care? I'll tell you why. Because today at noon, give or take a few minutes, I'll sit down for the final lecture of my undergraduate college career. For one hour and 40 minutes I'll sit there and think: "This can't be it. This can't be. I still don't know enough." And then I'll walk out of there and I'll go to my car and drive away and nothing will ever be the same again. The next time I feel like engaging in a little communal yelling with my neighbors, it won't be done in the spirit of camaraderie; it'll be about parking spaces or trash cans or something else equally insipid and depressing. Yell while the yelling's good.

And if you're at a loss for what to yell at midnight, I can't really help you. Well, maybe I can. Perhaps a page or two from "Little Gidding." (Eliot has a few germane reflections on the "hidden" voice.) But, "Four Quartets" is not your only choice; I'd be impressed as hell to hear you quote from Blake, who probably hollered as he wrote.

But I will tell you what I'd do if I were there with you, at midnight, in your room. I'd yell thanks for heaven's seeing fit my way through school. I'd yell a solemn oath to my own soul that I wouldn't ever let it all have been for nothing. And when my human version of a syrinx was toasty-warm with those, I'd let go my deepest and most holy gratitude, a padeuteria, for the professors at Rolfe Hall and elsewhere who have had such an immeasurable influence on my education, and by extension, my mind, and by extension, my very life. I'd yell out their names, one by one, and listen, then, assured, for the echo that would come back to me from nearby structures invisible in the night. And I will always listen, forever assured, for that same echo coming back to me in the far-away days and years that lay, nay - lie, ahead.

To them, and to you, dear reader, and to my friends, class-mates, and fellow Daily Bruin riffraff, I say: thank you and good-bye.