5.11.2005

trying to teach how to think...blind leading the blind

One of my classes is a creative writing class. We’re doing a short unit right now on expanding the ability to think and create. I suspect people thought this would involve exercises like writing stories from a bowling ball’s point of view and things like that. Instead I’ve been trying to touch on the idea of shattering the way we think, to shake up the hard-wiring a bit. Squeegee the 3rd eye, as Bill Hicks used to say. The lesson is based from the examination of truth, the dissection of our own truths. Rejecting the things we’ve been taught as givens and deciding for ourselves what to think.

They’re bored out of their minds.

One of the complaints is that it doesn’t have anything to do with creative writing. That part was giving be a bit of trouble too. I knew there was a connection, but I couldn’t quite see it. I was just trusting that it was there. But, man there is nothing but nothing like people making you mad to get real clear real fast, is there?

It’s similar to this time in college I was taking a history of western art class and we got to modern art (Picasso, DuChamp, Magritte, Mondrian, Pollock, etc.), and this mouth-breathing, frat-guy vomits up the standard rant about “a six-year-old could draw that” it “doesn’t even look like anything” and “this art reminds me of my limited mental faculties, and my constant fear that others are mocking me without my realizing, therefore I will clobber all things I don’t understand.”

Wouldn’t that be great if he actually had said that last part?

So, I myself was having trouble understanding some of the concepts behind the art, but I really didn’t like this guy, so I launched into a lengthy speech that, seriously, was channeled by God or something because I sure as hell don’t know where it came from. It was a clear, complex and passionate explanation of modern art, it wasn’t just a hateful retort, code for “fuck you, troglodyte.” From that day, I have loved modern art. He’s probably long since forgotten it (and it isn’t like his eyes went wide and he said, ‘I see it now!’ at the time. I suspect he thought something more along the lines of, ‘fag.’), but I totally succeeded in convincing myself. Isn’t that weird? Not just because I love the sound of my own pontification, but because my irritation forced me to verbalize something that was slogging around the backwater slums of my brain.

Same thing in creative writing. I gave a short speech about the artist’s obligation to see life clearly – recognizing which things he sees because he’s been taught to, and to be able to recognize the filter that shapes his own perceptions. To recognize the things we’ve become blind to because they’re so commonplace we’ve come to regard them as simply the way things are. To identify truth, not as we all think it is, but as it is. Writers being the safeguards of human experience, protecting the experience against revision and manipulation. It was good stuff.

They were still bored out of their minds.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You know, Byron Maclymont, not all of your creative writing students are as blunt and as close minded as you may think.

6:38 PM  
Blogger MacLymont said...

Anonymous-

No, they're not. Actually, many of them are really impressive. Probably one of the best groups I've had, over all. There was an abundance of slack jaws and blank stares that day, though. But those who are invested in the class, I imagine, know deep-down of whom I vent.

9:38 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

you are wasted on that crowd.

on a complete tangent: on modern art... isn't part of the point about modern art that it's the theory driving it that makes it worth noting? i myself have found myself thinking that pollock looks strangely familiar (kindergarten, finger paints). it's not the artistic skill but the motivations that make it worth while, no?

1:47 AM  

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