Here!

This is an essay I originally wrote for my AP Junior English class instead of simply raising my hand during attendance. I found it while looking through a creative writing portfolio in search of something I could share during the Story Time group I occasionally visit and think it worth revisiting. Expect a revised and deconstructed edition within the next few weeks.

Danny Canham

AP Junior English

Jan. 30, 2007

An Essay

I am here to announce my presence, for it is my presence here that makes me not there, and it is the thereness of the not here that differentiates the place from where I am present from the place or places where I am not present. Here is a place usually designated as the location in space referred to in conversation between two or more persons, or in short, one’s surroundings. In this case, however, here is an exclamation declaring myself not absent so that I am not marked as such in the attendance book, such as insert name of person missing from room, who is gone today. I, unlike repeat name, am not missing, but am at school, hopefully by now learning or having learned something from the teachers whose job it is to instruct me and the other students enrolled in their classes in their given subject. It is for my sixth period AP Junior English teacher, Miss Fulton (soon-to-be Mrs. Waller) that I write this essay, describing hereness, thereness, and how I must be in a state of one and not so much the other for this essay to make sense, for if I was there and this essay declared I was here, I would not be turning it in to declare myself here, as is the intent.

As implied above, hereness involves and requires a now, a present time and space. It designates both though only describes location, but since space and time are connected (read some contemporary books on physics or ask Brian Svoboda for more on this), here actually can describe both, though it is a limited and perspective description that would be better understood were it to have its place in relation to another place described as well (this time ask him to explain relativity). Usually when used in conversation, here is accompanied by a gesture of pointing down, as “come here” and “right here.”

There is a far more vague concept than here to understand when giving location, simply because it can include any place that is not here when unspecified. There is the polar opposite of here, despite only differing in spelling by one letter. That letter is T. In meaning, there indicates a past or present somewhere else from here.

Important as it is to be here in the moment, from any other person’s point of view, you are there. The only time more than one person can be here or qualified as here by another is when they are being counted as part of a group. “He/She/IT is here” is really “here (with us).” Just as I am here as a part of the class. It is being here and not there that makes me not absent. Yet at the same time, in other classrooms and pretty much anywhere in the world except this classroom, I would have to be considered there. Even here though I am there. I am there on the other side of the room and there in that chair. It is a mild difference, but a difference all the same.

So remember, Here is me and mine, there is everything and everyone else, and of course, I am here today in class.