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Victor Brauner, Prelude to Civilization, 1946
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.
A prerequisite for the guide is a mastery of what Buddhists call
“skillful means.” The good teacher disrupts. He or she has a killer
instinct for the best way to subvert the status quo. After interfering, the
true catalyst allows nature to take its course. Speech class took the
form of a circular discussion group, in which every voice could be
heard. Sue would subtly steer but not dominate the conversation. She
would set an idea in motion, she would set up a scenario, then she
would sit back to see what might develop.
One morning, for no apparent reason, I decided to attack a girl who
had transferred from St. Peter's High, the school from which I had
been terminated, with extreme prejudice, two years before. I was
outraged by her wholesomeness, and I finished a nonsensical diatribe
by saying, “Did you leave your fuzzy pink bunny slippers at home? You
should wear them to school. They would complement your outfit.”The
girl launched herself across the room at me, swung once with her book
bag, and then yanked with the intoxicated fury of a maenad at my hair.
Its one-and-a-half-foot length allowed her to wrap it securely around
her hands. When she had almost succeeded in removing it from my
scalp, my psychopomp said, “Enough.”Another teacher might have put
a stop to things before they went that far. She later asked, “What do
you think you said that made her so upset? Were you really angry with
her, or were you angry about something else?”
Sue’s catalytic technique did not always involve giving girls permission
to hit me. She might choose to observe from a distance; she might
choose to directly intervene. More often, though, as in Aikido, she
would slip strategically sideways. She would grok half-formed intent
and angle of movement and center of gravity. Then, she had only to
push or pull.
Victor Brauner, Fire and Water of Love, 1945
I remember Sue’s response when I informed her that I felt I was
growing stupider every day. I could not imagine what was wrong with
me. My mind felt numb, and passively chaotic. My sentences self
-destructed. My tongue was an alien artifact. It no longer fit in my
mouth. Words flew across the horizon, to drift like litter through the
streets of empty cities, to lose themselves on the other side of the
globe. Could I really have become stupid? Was this a thing that
humans did? An irrational fear, perhaps, yet there was no mistaking
the symptoms. I could feel the active force of petrifaction, like a boa
constrictor, coiling, each day a bit tighter, to squeeze the life-force
from my neocortex. Pretty soon I would be too stupid to even bother to
complain. My teacher did not argue, or offer to help, or in any way
attempt to talk me out of the experience. Practicing a bit of reality
therapy, she said:
“Why do you think that your stupidity is so unique? You do realize
there are stupid people all around you, and that one of them is
speaking at this moment?
“I’ve been searching all week for an image for the end of the poem that
I'm working on. It is right on the tip of my tongue, but it refuses to
come out. You probably wouldn’t like the poem. It doesn’t have any
exclamation points. It's about slowly getting up each day to change one
small part of the world.
“I often feel as though I’m moving under water. Everything seems too
difficult. This morning I reached for a box of cereal on the top shelf of
the pantry. My fingers were not long enough. I look at myself in the
mirror. I am not young. The years just disappear. At times it doesn’t
seem possible that the girl I used to be is gone. Who is this middle
-aged woman looking back at me from the mirror?
“And then I think that I was able to reach the cereal box after all. The
image that I’m searching for will probably arrive tomorrow, or perhaps
it will be waiting for me to notice it in a dream. My husband is a good
man. I love being a teacher.”
It may seem odd that such a confession should have a liberating effect.
The reason is not complicated. My teacher gave me permission to be
human, to begin from where I was. It was wonderful to know that the
goddess too had doubts. She also said, “Why don't you keep a notebook
to write down everything that comes to mind, stupid or not?”
I already had a few notebooks. I bought a half-dozen more. Shortly
thereafter, at 2:00 AM one morning, I wrote a 16-page personal epic.
The writing was so illegible that it might as well have been Sanskrit. It
was a good thing that I copied it soon after. Gore Vidal once said about
Kerouac’s On the Road, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” How lucky I
was to have no problem of this sort. I didn’t own a typewriter. As if I
had the time to try to figure out how to type. Then again, the hands of
my alarm clock didn’t seem to move. How primordial were my
energies! How flowing was my vision! How spotless was my Will! How
numerous were my adjectives! How free and generous was my use of
the exclamation point! I missed few chances to insert them. Unseen by
the world, I traded secrets with the night. The applause of the crickets
rose and fell in waves.
If memory serves, the poem was not especially good, or really any good
at all, as Mr. Sleeper, my Cultural and Intellectual History of Europe
teacher, would soon enough inform me. Ok, the piece was bad, but that
is not the point. I had experienced a glitch in the faux-solidity of my
ego, which was also a glitch in the faux-solidity of the world. One night,
it had occurred to me suddenly and with violence, “You have the
power to create.”
***
Giorgio de Chirico, The Bride’s Secret, 1971
A teacher at a public school is not meant to be a psychopomp, and the
student is presumed to be alive. A teacher should offer information
and perhaps a bit of emotional support. I was never sure of whether
Sue had devised an occult plan or whether she simply allowed some
form of guidance to work through her. How many people was she?
Should her age be measured in decades or millennia? Would the
Doherty High administration have given her methods a thumbs up? I
could not guess the answers to these questions. There was no pressing
need to do so. This was the heyday of the counterculture. Boundaries
were fluid. We would sometimes talk through the afternoon on the
back porch of her house, sipping lemonade from tall plastic glasses and
discussing the merits of peyote versus psilocybin, as the shadows
projected from a distant war lengthened slowly across the grass.
Black pajamas from a Viet Minh girl would follow her burnt scent,
flapping, turning this way and that in the crosswinds of the Pacific.
With the banging of a door, the girl’s pain would slip into the wide
heart of the goddess, there to find a home, there perhaps to find some
tiny bit of rest. We could hear the blasts from the 30-foot mountain
horns, along with the struck gongs, which together were like the sound
of tectonic plates scraping. We could hear the interdimensional
elephants trumpeting, with the blood of gods on their tusks. We could
hear the Paleolithic bird-squeaks, growing louder, as the Nagas
climbed from their atonal graves.
Troops would reenact on a cloud the opening games of the Mahabharata. Suddenly, we might note that the sun had vanished
from the sky. Revolving on one spot, which just happened to be the
spot where we were seated, the wheel of time would appear almost
motionless as it flew. It was not 1972, the year we met. It was not 3102
BC, the year of the war at Kurukshetra. It was not 9600 BC, the year of
the last major rearrangement of Earth’s coasts. We could hear the
seers of the World Maritime Empire breathing slowly in and out, each
in-breath one-half of a Mahakalpa, each out-breath one-half of a
Mahakalpa. Their eyes were wide. They had not ceased to watch. To
them each passing wave, however empty, was important.
Who knew that silence could be just as loud as speech? Well placed
speech could also steer you back towards silence. “Have you read
Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Lotus in a Sea of Fire?” Sue once said. “In
luminous prose, he explains the reasons that monks burn themselves.
According to Hanh, it is not correct to call this suicide, as most
Western reporters do. It is not really even protest. Can you imagine
how much love it takes to set yourself on fire? He says, ‘In Buddhist
belief, life is not confined to a period of 60 or 80 or 100 years: life is
eternal. Life is not confined to the body: life is universal.’ By burning
himself, the monk shows that he is willing to suffer any pain for others,
not only to call attention to the suffering of the oppressed but also to
touch and open the hearts of their oppressors. Hanh’s language is
simple enough, but it has the force of great poetry.”
A kind of natural hallucinogen was produced by the mere proximity of
the beloved. A storm would make the oak leaves rustle. The scent of
lilacs would overwhelm the senses. Rooting itself in the moment, the
self moved deeper into incarnation.
***
Again, my teacher has moved into a dream that powers the perpetual
beginning of the world, whose initiates will at length restore the
transparency of space.
The beloved now becomes anonymous.
It is of no importance who or what she was, but only that she play each
role that memory invents.
Falling as though from a distant planet, the shadow of Sue Castigiliano
opens like a door. The footprints of a prehistoric goddess lead straight
across a tiny but quite terrifying ocean.
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