Capstone

Capstone Project Table of Contents

Underlined headings are hyperlinks

1. Project Abstract
2. Capstone Project Essay
3. Capstone Presentation
4. Capstone Proposal
5. Literature Review

Reflective Essay – Looking Back On Liminality

          As we near the end, I am sure that the most difficult part of my senior capstone was the beginning. In our first few classes, we discussed exigency. The senior capstone is often considered our last chance to vindicate our academic careers as undergraduates and as the products of the time and effort of professors we can only hope to make proud someday. I believe I speak for my peers when I say there is a lot of pressure every step of the capstone progress. I believe we truly are the sum of our choices and making the right decision is one we take for granted. Though I often loathe the obscure and vulgar American poet Charles Bukowski, this particular musing struck a chord with me:

 “If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

             Every step of the way, the hardest decision was committing to putting pen to paper. I believed that anything less than perfection would be a disservice not only to my own work but everyone who has taken the time to mentor me and inspire me. My primary passion and dream is to be a writer, specifically an author someday. Perhaps the greatest lesson of this capstone was having the courage and confidence in myself as an individual.

            The courage to write comes and goes. Desperate for inspiration, it seems writers often succumb to the classical Faustian myth and turn to demons, often in the form of various pills and potions, when they feel they are at a loss for their better angels. In my own experience, I admit having been tempted to experiment and dance with the devil. In the last year, the support of my professors would put Virgil to shame as guides through Hell and back. Today, I have a project that is the product of my own soul uncorrupted by the demons that are so romanticized by the subject of my research, Jack Kerouac.

            I found the courage and inspiration to write this capstone writing poetry with my professors, the serendipitous encounter with my theoretical framework during an art conference in Roanoke, and the crossed-rifles across my heart and hope to die that made me view this capstone as honestly nothing short of a midlife crisis that would be an enduring artifact of my existence. Within the framework of Turner’s liminality, I identify as being in an intentionally marginal liminality. The exigency and inspiration to write this paper were in my own liminal experience as an outsider, at various levels of my identity, eventually transcending into and accepting marginality in the spirit of Kerouac, the rest of the Beat writers, as well as every other advocate of alternative discourse. The liminal lens is the theory through which I not only better understand the novel On the Road, but also confront my own construction of my identity and philosophy towards life. All is flux, time waits for no one, nothing stays the same, or everything is changing but no matter how you choose to say it the point is nothing lasts and our microscopic lives are simply the space between birth and death on a world in a universe existing in the space between genesis and apocalypse, big bang and inevitable all consuming entropy. In liminal space, therein lays the truth of our existence in my opinion.

          This Senior Capstone Project has meant so much more to me than I could ever have imagined. The last few years, the senior projects have been made by the upperclassmen I have looked up to my entire cadetship. They were my cadre, tutors, and even closest friends and often times their senior capstone projects were the last time I would see some of the most influential men and women in my life before they graduated. Fast forward to the beginning of this semester, I am a first classman now at the Virginia Military Institute and a certain sleepless night I was walking around the first stoop of barracks thinking about how much I wanted my cadetship to be over and done with. Staring up at all the stoops, I finally realized how far I have come. My first room was on the fifth stoop, the very top of the concrete castle on a hill we call barracks. Even though each year I was one floor closer to the ground, my head was always in the clouds daydreaming about being a first class cadet and now that I was here I did not want it to end. This is not the end. This capstone is not the period at the end of a memoir about my time as an English major it is an ellipsis that marks the transition into the next chapter of my life. This project is a flower in the crack of the street amongst the ashes of all the sleepless nights at the smokers post, the beating heart of my rat David Jones, and Sisyphus himself starting again. This is my capstone project.

Works Cited