It is 1972. The seers of the World Maritime Empire have been swallowed by
the fog. No buoys mark the locations of their ports. They were not voted out.
They were utterly destroyed. 12,000 years have passed, and yet these guardians
have not gone anywhere at all. Their eyes are wide. They watch. The
intersection of one dimension with another is not subject to the tyranny of the
calendar. One thing happens, then another. The wheel that connects them can
only be seen when one has left it.
There are charts that we left spread out on our tables, stars that beg us
to return them to their signs, loaves of bread that we left half-eaten,
technologies that no amount of blood can reconstruct. Some people we happen to
know. Others we were scheduled to meet. There are teachers who remind us that
our house is not our home. No, I was not born at Fort Devens, in Shirley,
Massachusetts. I did not live at 43 Richards Street. My biography was in no way
the whole of my identity. I was only the small shadow of myself.
Oddly, there
was nothing supernatural about the persona of my teacher, Sue Castigliano,
quite the opposite in fact. She was a middle-aged woman from Ohio, 42 years-old,
the wife of an Episcopal priest, in no way unusual in appearance. She confessed
that she found it difficult to lose weight from her hips and thighs. A few
varicose veins were visible. The birth of two of her three children had been
difficult, resulting in a number of health problems. To me she was quite a
beautiful, and even glamorous, figure. Her imperfections removed her—almost—from
the realm of mythological fantasy. They made her real.
Few suspected
how old my teacher really was, how many centuries she had spent preparing for
her role. Her eyes were publicly accessible. How else could she teach in a
public school? These eyes were not the only set I saw, nor could one read her
persona without some knowledge of Cretan pictographs. Few noticed the live
snakes that she wore instead of bracelets.
I am tempted
to say that Sue’s method was that of direct communication between one human and
another. To some extent this was true. One might note in passing the
resemblance of her approach to the “logical consequences” theory of Dreiker, the “self-awareness” model of Meichenbaum, the “reality therapy” of Glasser, and the “teacher effectiveness training” of Gordon. In retrospect, I am
surprised to see to what extent her actions were informed by developmental
theory. When she interacted with her students, no abstractions were allowed to
show.
As she spoke
to the class as a whole, I often had the sense that she was speaking directly
to me. I suspect, of course, that many other students also felt the same. As
she tuned in to each student physically present in that space, she also spoke
to the student hidden in the student. By the end of a class, a student might
feel that he knew less instead of more, that her sense of who lived in her skin
was slightly off the mark. A reflex had been tested. A memory had been
activated. A chink had been opened, into which real knowledge might flow.
Continue reading: https://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/2024/mar-2024/0324/briangeorge0324.html
My first book of essays,
Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through
Untimely Books and Amazon: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/
Image: Victor Brauner, Prelude to Civilization, 1946
