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Victor Brauner, There, 1949
"Gnothi Seauton" or "Know Thyself"—attributed to Socrates
But also to Chilon of Sparta, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Solon of Athens,
and Thales of Miletus. Juvenal, in his 11th Satire, claimed that the
precept actually descended "de caelo"—directly out of heaven
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When I met Sue Castigliano, my speech teacher during senior year at
Doherty Memorial High School, it was not at first apparent that she
would one day change my life. I had never before had a teacher who
had any sense of who I was, of the hole in my heart or the blockage in
my psyche. She was from the Midwest, not obviously
countercultural—I would find out otherwise—and her most noticeable
virtues were such things as calmness, openness, acceptance, and
curiosity. She dressed simply. She wore very little jewelry. She was not
at all theatrical, and she certainly did not announce that our speech
class would be about so many things other than speech. Gently pushing
aside my defenses, she reached out and down through the soul to
touch me on the most elemental level. Even now, looking back from a
distance of more than 40 years, and far removed from the melodrama
of that period, it is hard for me to imagine who, what, or where I would
be if that meeting had never taken place. Again, I exhale a sigh of relief.
It is said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear.
Luckily, the teacher may also choose to appear when the student is not
at all ready. She drags him, if need be kicking and screaming, into a
new, more direct, but also more paradoxical relationship with the self.
Socrates injunction, "Gnothi Seauton" or "Know Thyself," which,
according to Pausanias, was inscribed on the forecourt of the Temple
of Apollo at Delphi, is far more demanding than it has any right to be.
It is a simple statement, composed of only two small words. The
injunction becomes more demanding, not less, as we attempt to
translate our all-too-often inflated insights into action. Who, exactly, is
doing the knowing? What is the nature of the self that presents itself to
be known? Perhaps what we see is the illuminated crescent at the edge
of an—almost—unimaginable sphere. As with the subtle but subversive
presence of the teacher, this crescent becomes more visible as we are
forced to grapple with the limits of our vision, until, quite suddenly
perhaps, we are led into the dark. To begin to grasp the "what" of what
we are, we must let go of the fixed version of the "who."
Is the ego the knower of the self, or is the self the knower of the ego?
Perhaps the soul is itself a mask, soon to morph into a different form
with the astronomical rotation of the fashion industry. Although, as a
matter of convenience, I use it here, I do not like the word "ego." Over
the past six years or so, I have tended to use it less and less. I have just
as little use for or patience with the all too popular term "seeker." I far
prefer Picasso's formulation. He states—somewhat arrogantly,
perhaps—"I do not seek; I find." The term "teacher" I like more, but
this term, if casually used, has problems of its own. Too many students
of famous gurus, for example, can't seem to wait to give away all of
their own intuitive authority to the teacher. It can be difficult for the
teacher to be idolized, either spiritually or intellectually, and many are
tempted to want to turn their students into small, submissive versions
of themselves. This can be as true in a PhD program in archeology as in
an ashram.
Roberto Matta, The Oppressors, 1983
Clearly, good teachers are needed to transmit information, to help
students to discover themselves, and to model certain skills. We cannot
do without them. Even the most abstract of knowledge is not abstract;
at least in the first stages, it must come attached to a living body. In this
essay, however, it is the more primal concept of "teacher"—the teacher
as spiritual catalyst—that I am attempting to explore. If such teachers
are, in a different way, essential, they may sometimes tend to hold
themselves to a lower standard than their students: They may stamp
the void with their brand; they may speak highly of their total
unimportance; in an energetic contest with Joe Average, they may
judge themselves the victor; they may take themselves as seriously as
their most obedient followers; they may believe that the light has more
to teach them than the darkness; they may take as much as they give;
they may have the power to catalytically intervene but be unwilling to
let go.
It is not that such teachers lack the knowledge that they claim; they
may very well possess it, but they do not give it freely. They do not
prefer to overflow. Rather, they choose to portion this knowledge out,
and, in the process, they can come to believe their own P.R. How easy
it is for the once enlightened teacher—accidentally on purpose—to be
sucked into the vortex of his own charisma! Power intoxicates, and the
gods do like to drink. The student may then become
sadomasochistically attached to his own childhood, to the deadness of
his feet and the blockage in his spine. He will not make of his heart a
meeting place or expect that his head will click open like an aperture.
He will see his mind as an electrochemical databank, as an empty
space to be filled up with the teacher's big ideas. He will not learn how
to leap from a great height, to move into and beyond death, or to hatch
the universe from an egg. He will not dare to trust that his energy is a
kind of self-existent vehicle.
I think that seekers often fixate on the "shattering of the ego" as a way
to prove to themselves that they actually do exist; if they do not possess
any breadth of cosmic vision, they are nonetheless experts in the role
from which they are trying to escape. It is far more problematic for the
seeker to accept that he is where he is supposed to be, even if he has no
memory at all of when this choice was made. This is not to say that he
should not speak truth to power, or take action against injustice, or
withhold his empathy from a person in a dead-end situation because
supposedly this person has "created his own reality"; no, I say only that
he should challenge himself to grasp the larger shape of his life-story,
to intuit how daimon and persona fit together. The real challenge is
not to be elsewhere; it is to be, more fully, here. And that, of course, is
the question: just what do we mean by here?
Fresco from the Temple of Isis, Pompei, 1st Century A.D.
Once, we lived in a city that we loved, a city in which humans mixed
freely with the gods. That city would seem to have long ago
disappeared, and yet it calls to us from the depths of the horizon. Our
hand rests on the doorknob of the house where we came of age. Driven
by implanted memories, the human genome dreams of a real voyage to
the stars.
It is 1971. And, as my hunt for occult wealth intensifies, I am
attempting to round up my predecessors. I would determine,
first of all, if there was ever anyone else like me who had existed on the
Earth. Arrogance and Insecurity, my twin ravens, have returned with a
few drops of mercury for my cup. I have set up Friedrich Nietzsche,
Arthur Rimbaud, and Giorgio de Chirico as my makeshift Holy Trinity.
At midnight, periodically, a black pyramid will descend to crush my
skull. This is less fun than it sounds.
In a manuscript from 1913, Giorgio de Chirico writes:
What is needed is great sensitivity: to look upon everything in the
world as enigma…to live in the world as in an immense museum of
strangeness, full of curious multi-colored toys which change their
appearance, which, like little children, we sometimes break to see how
they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.
As if to prove that my potential genius is a toy, and indifferent to the
scale of my embarrassment, not de Chirico but de Chirico's daimon
seems to reach inside my head, whose contents he then removes to
view them from odd angles. O infinite extension of the Argonaut! The daimon's arrogance is breathtaking. It is clear that he feels no
obligation to put the original contents back, so that de Chirico, the 1913
version, from his squalid studio in the rue Compagne-Premiere,
somehow stares out of my eyes. In the end, I can barely recognize my
mother, who begins to look suspiciously like a manikin, so that I jump
when she suddenly appears, with a plate of sardines, at my door.
"The first man must have seen auguries everywhere," writes
de Chirico, "He must have trembled at each step that he took." It is
1917. The end of the Vietnam War is at hand, and, disoriented that
Apollinaire survived a shrapnel wound to the head only to then be
promptly carried off by the flu—how often must we poor humans bow
to Fate the Ironist?—I am recovering from a bout of nervous
exhaustion in
Ferrara.
"Stone engineers, though silent," I shout, "please WASH UP ON THE
BEACH. Give praise to Hygenia, the Muse." Depositing treasures, a
wave lifts me, and I can hear my floorboards creak like tectonic plates.
It is 1971, the year of the industrial-strength slaughter at Verdun, and I
struggle to understand why I am hovering six feet above my body. My
head does not seem to be damaged, so why can't I get in? Luckily, the
luminous acorn of my genius is intact. Depositing treasures, a wave
lifts me, and I can hear my floorboards creak like tectonic plates. When
I turn, the door's frame is the only thing that stands.
Giorgio de Chirico, Metaphysical Interior with Factory, 1917
Between 1954, the year of my birth, and 1973, 4.6 million tons of
explosives are dropped on North Vietnam. Eggs of jellied fire do not
play favorites with the pawns of geopolitics. Napalm burns both actors
and observers to the bone, and then keeps on burning, in the souls of
US citizens as well. Agent Orange defoliates at least 11,969 square
miles of the land that is said to be "beloved by snakes." I am shocked by
the infinitely ballooning shadow of my country, and yet, and yet, this
shadow is familiar. At my feet, an abyss opens, and I stare into its
depths. "How noble are your objectives!" a voice calls from below.
"You have stamped your tiny foot against the Empire! You have raged
against the war machine!" My innocence sticks in my throat, and I find
that I cannot breathe.
Suitably chastened, I bit by bit withdraw my energies from the stage of
social justice to refocus them on a more pragmatic goal, on my
slapstick perfection of the role of poete maudit. My anger then
prompts the transvaluation of all values. Revolution by night cracks the
eggshell of the sky, which results in my omnipotence, that is, of a
hollow, toy-sized version thereof. The experience is nonetheless
somewhat satisfying. Following in the sacred footsteps of Rimbaud, I
do my best to practice the "systematic derangement of the senses"—as
though my senses had not so far been adequately deranged, as though I
had not lost some 98 percent of them at birth. I begin to wear a beret
and smoke a historically-accurate clay pipe. The grand rhetorical
gesture is supreme, as in this passage from A Season in Hell, in which
Rimbaud reminisces that "Disaster was my god. I called to my
executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. Spring
brought to me the idiot's terrifying laughter."
"Je est un autre, I is an other." As was specified by Breton, true beauty
should be convulsive. Nietzsche is a better friend than Jesus, who had
followers, who were Christians, who in their current versions are far
less likeable than when they had volunteered to be martyrs. What a
nerve to have chickened out on the Apocalypse, the one in 72 AD. An
experience of the "Eternal Return" is triggered by the turning pedals of
my bicycle. That dragonfly landing on a milkweed pod is clearly the
second coming of Parmenides. He will provide me with the keys to
perpetual motion! Yogic breathing exercises will yet give birth to a race
of wide-eyed Ubermenchen. Always, the entire visible world is about to
pass out of existence.
Victor Brauner, Disintegration of Subjectivity, 1951
If I, as "Brian George," now exist in more than one location, you must
place the blame squarely on the other one, this earlier Brian, who is
dead. Even now, I can hear the bird-chirps of the Underworld. I can
feel the hand of a goddess still resting on my shoulder.
The process of self-discovery is a paradoxical one, which for most
of us, at least at first, demands the steady hand of a guide, of a living
person who is scheduled to perform the role of the psychopomp. His
or her magnetic power draws us into the orbit of the self. The teacher
confronts us with an inexplicable presence, a presence which, as we
torture our minds to demystify its movements, we understand less and
less. There is no way to encircle the motives of such a presence in
advance. They cannot be grasped from the outside in, or as a matter of
theory. They are always more and other than they were. For each clear
purpose, there is always an unmediated shadow, within which a far
vaster purpose breathes.
Given the importance of this role—the fact that billions of bits of
information may not add up to real knowledge, and that knowledge,
left to its own devices, is no substitute for vision—it is shocking that
students can go from k-1 through grade 12 without ever meeting a
teacher who might serve in this capacity. But then again, a public
school is probably the last place that one should expect to find such
guidance, and the tarred and feathered psychopomp would most often
be run out of town on a rail.
What would have happened to me if I had not met this particular
teacher when I did, if she had travelled to some city other than
Worcester from Ohio, if she had made use of the more typical "one
-size-fits-all" approach, if the snakes from Minos had not wrapped
around her arms? I might have eventually become more or less who or
what I am—assuming that I did not slip and fall into psychosis—but I
would lack a sense of trust in the origin of things, a sense of confidence
equal to my desire for self-realization. As self-determined as I like to
believe myself to be, so much of what and who I am is the result of the
well-timed intervention of others, in this case Sue Castigliano, who so
generously gave what I could not provide for myself.
Through the years of adolescent angst, I had grown away from
childhood without making any progress towards adulthood. My
parents had divorced when I was four years old, and my mother never
quite recovered from the experience. From the time of their divorce
until the day he died, my mother spoke less than a hundred words to
my father. His name had gone into her black book of real and imagined
wrongs. She did not forgive. It would not be taken out. As though out of
nowhere, the happy nuclear family had exploded. I remember the
shock of being evicted from the garden, at whose gate a fiery sword
revolved. I remember how, in the short period before this, I would get
into fistfights for no particular reason, from a sheer excess of energy,
for the joy of it. I would wake up singing with the birds without even
being aware that I was singing. How I treasure those few early years as
an extrovert.
At the age of five, I had been unofficially appointed to serve as a kind
of surrogate parent for my mother. As though she and not I were in
need, I would sometimes rock her as she sobbed, uncontrollably, in my
arms. I had to pretend to be strong enough for both of us.
I was left with an unacknowledged sense of abandonment. Distantly
aware of being angry, perhaps a bit more aware of having lost my sense
of trust, of the ache in my heart, I knew these emotions only through
their symptoms.
I did not choose to confront my reflection in the mirror, for fear of
falling through. I no longer enjoyed getting into fistfights; it had
become a chore, not a pleasure. Instead, I got into arguments, in which
I would go to any lengths to prove the dolt-like nature of my
opponents. Somewhat later, starting in my senior year of high
school—at the same time, curiously, that I took my first literary baby
steps—I would often be hesitant to drift off into sleep, for fear that I
would not know who I was when I woke up, of not being sane. Planets
would taunt me with their superior musical ability. I could barely play
the recorder. I went through a long period of being terrified of
perspective. I saw distance as a threat. I would not allow my eyes to
drift down the converging lines of Main Street, for fear that I might be
sucked out of my skin, for fear that the horizon would eat me. I was
careful to focus only on signs and objects in the foreground.
Black magic had turned the too conscientious child into a headless
plastic doll. "What a stupid place the world is," it thought. "Let me
share my new-found freedom." Where the self should be, there were
atoms, clashing. There were voids inside of voids. Used to being
around adults, I could camouflage my thoughts in articulate form. On a
good day, I could pass for a responsible young revolutionary. In due
course, my comrades would overthrow the government. The industrial
age would spontaneously combust. Chants would levitate the Pentagon.
An urban gorilla at 17, I could strip and reassemble my attitude like an
AK 47. Bourgeois robots would creak and beg for oil on a forced march
to the amber fields of grain. A part of me was still very much a child,
hurt and confused, who had no desire to expose his vulnerabilities to
others. I wanted to disappear into the branches of my favorite apple
tree, to daydream for hours as the clouds changed shape, to feel the
Earth darken as the afternoon wore on. I would watch in secret as
smoke billowed from a factory, beneath whose stacks the ant-sized
workers crawled.
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Massimo Campigli, Woman in Green, 1960
I cannot say exactly how Sue Castigliano changed me. I can only say
that through and because of her a change took place. Stepping from the
cave-mouth of a dream, the Goddess of Active Listening took my hand.
By the end of the year, my concept of strength had been dissolved and
reconfigured. I was less afraid of fear. Without yet knowing how to
access what I knew, I had begun to see my wounds as so much raw
material, the dark matter with which an alchemist might one day
create wealth. It is as though my teacher had said, "What you see
before you is now yours for the asking. The world is no longer a vast
and anonymous space. It is a book that waits to be opened. Here, open
it, and read."
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