A blog is read in an odd way, where you read the last installment before the penultimate and that one before the first. In the previous installment I began with a critique of someone's teaching and meditated on my own. I will say that I enjoyed my education courses - I took them so I could be a librarian at this military school. But actually teaching, that was difficult. I got better. I certainly understood the philosophy and styles of teaching better. I think I wanted to see myself as a "great books" style teacher - like I was going to lead my class in some mass recitation of Whitman. But I'm not that, and my students weren't that either.
I felt that I failed as a teacher. I could not convey my love of art history and art to my students - nor a love of learning things for their own sake. Since most of them thought they were going into the military, I wasn't faced with the question of how this would prepare them for a career. You might think they would ask how this would prepare them for combat or logistics (they all think they're going to be SEALS or fighter pilots - no one thinks they're going into logistics or that they'll be driving a truck). Instead I found it difficult to maintain discipline. Later, speaking with my therapist, she told me that my failure had more to do with the environment, that in a liberal arts college I'd have experienced more the classroom I'd wanted to set up: an atmosphere of delight in art and history.
That was kind of her. The way I learned art was somewhat unconventional. My teacher in high school placed me in a studio course - all self directed. Aside from a ceramics class I never took an intro. I learned basic skills on my own, as if they were inherent. And I was successful as far as it went. I went to Governor's Honors here in Georgia, received some honors and scholarships. Then off to college, where things seemed promising.
To describe what happened is difficult for me. I've discarded odd journals from that time. Suffice it that I faced a crisis - probably a narcissistic crisis of some kind, a crisis of ego formation. I floundered around for three years, before I tied my resolve together and went to UGA. I had to make up a lot: science, literature, language - it was a year before I took another art class. The funny thing is that I only had to take a quarter or two of art classes and I had my BFA. I'm still not certain how I did that. I enjoyed taking the core for a year.
I decided to get an MFA at Georgia. Why not just stay? There were several professors I'd not had the chance to take. Just stay in a place where I'd begun to feel at home.The MFA went by too fast. Before I knew it my show was up on the wall in that barrel-vaulted gallery we had in the [now] old building on Jackson St. After having resolve and drive for a few years I was again without a next step. I never plan a next step. I just assume I'll find something.
For some reason I had it fixed in my head that I had to stay in Athens and take a job at the library. I just wanted to catalog books and paint and hang out with friends in bars and coffee shops. I don't think I'm alone in that aspiration. Eventually I did all that - but not without difficulty. I paid a price - a long wait, frustration, surrounding myself with people who couldn't make sense of me. That last phrase is telling. Because they couldn't make sense of me (at this church I was involved in: and that shows how you have to be careful of these things), I assumed that something was wrong with me. Lacan writes that the ego is not just a defense but a frustration - since it is constructed for an other. When I think of my ego, I do realize this, that it is not "for me" but "for you." When "you" don't accept this thing I've constructed (this thing I call Me, my I) anger resentment frustration ensue. Why is this? It may be that a strong ego (and Freud says that the Ego's problem is that it is too strong [see Inhibition Symptom Anxiety] that the ego needs flexibility], being constructed for an other, meeting rejection, is out of touch with the subject's desire. That is, the demands of the ego are exactly where you (or I) give ground relative to desire - since the subject is Desire. The unconscious is a producer of desire - but we can't hear it.
Suffice that my journey to library school at UNC CH began a long odyssey. All the while I'm drawing and painting, even in class. I'm making art the whole time. You'd think I'd take this hint from my unconscious. But the ego, the need to have this supreme creation affirmed, trumped that insight.Again I surround myself with people who don't get me. Let this be a lesson for you, reader: don't settle for people who seem friendly - If they make you feel that something is wrong with you. Think how deeply invested your ego construction is in their opinion. If possible develop flexibility in that ego, and try to understand what unconscious is telling you about your desire. That's a tall order. But when our ego is too very strong and inflexible, the chances that we've surrendered our own agency (as witnessed by depression anger frustration) are high.
And suffice it that I feel like I'm on the other side of a long journey. Jung critiques our early life that often we don't know how to live, that we confuse living with dying; and that as we near life's end, we don't know how to die. That is to recognize that death is a process too. Not a crisis.
At 52 all my gifts are still with me. I'm better as a person and an artist. I'm that thinker I fancied myself as. Still plenty to work on, but I feel that I'm going in the right direction.
How do you teach that? I doubt it is the kind of thing any college or accrediting agency would endorse. Being human is not something that can be measured. It is not wielding logic or doctrine or ideology or emotional panaceas like a weapon. Humanness is measure in kindness. An ability to hear an other but also to hear yourself. To achieve that flexibility of ego that is able to let go of its demands, its need for affirmation.
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