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Sandro Chia, Untitled, 2000
What a gift to have been expelled from Saint Peter’s at the end of my
sophomore year. They were in such a rush to get rid of me they didn’t
bother to tell my family. I saw no reason to tell them either. Until her
death in 2019, at the age of 88, my mother never did find out. How
well behaved my friends and I were. How impermeable were our
cloaks of invisibility. How lucky it was that Nixon bombed Cambodia
exactly when he did. I had no choice but to protest, which led to my
expulsion. How mysteriously things fit together, as if according to a
script. Worcester had just changed the rules that had kept me trapped
in my neighborhood—a student could transfer to a school that offered
a course that wasn’t offered anywhere else. I found a course—Cultural
and Intellectual History of Europe—that was only offered at Doherty
High.
The school was by far the best in Worcester. It was located in an
affluent part of the city, with some of the most challenging courses and
the most demanding teachers. Even the students, children of lawyers,
professors, and factory owners, were more articulate than the teachers
I was used to. Until my junior year at Doherty, I am not sure that I had
ever encountered a good teacher, not one, at least, that made me sit up
and take notice. In sophomore English class at Saint Peter’s, we had
studied Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” In Mrs. Goldman’s junior English class
at Doherty, we analyzed T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” I preferred the
later poem. It was at Doherty that I began to recover from my
childhood. I had known that my world was small, but I had not
realized just how small it was.
It was there that I met the gruff but not especially lovable Mr. Sleeper,
my Cultural and Intellectual History of Europe teacher, who
confronted me with the large holes in my knowledge, who introduced
me to Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, which
had the effect of a depth-charge. It was there that I met Sue Castigliano
, a teacher who intervened at a crucial turning-point in my
development, who was present in a way that no previous teacher had
been present. It was there also that I met Mr. Trippi, my senior-year
art teacher, the enforcer of technique and the enemy of vision, who
was demanding in a way of which I was not prepared to take advantage
. To learn to create art, he believed, was no different from learning the
elements of Euclidean geometry. There were principles, to memorize,
and procedures, to perform. Like many would-be geniuses, I believed
that such doglike obedience was for others.
Mr. Trippi was short, aggressive in his occupation of space, very
plainly spoken, with wide, intense eyes. He had many of the traits that
I associated with the first-generation descendants of immigrants from
Europe, in his case Italy, of whom there were many in Worcester at the
time. This was back when the American Dream—whatever the
limitations of the concept—was something more than a myth, when a
whole extended family could go from poor to affluent in a matter of
two decades, so long as they believed, so long as they defined their
goals in the image of this dream. To judge by his body language, you
would think that Mr. Trippi had missed his calling as a bricklayer, until
you noticed the flash of intelligence in the eyes or picked up on the
scholarly references when he spoke.
Max Ernst, Revolution by Night, 1923
Mr. Trippi was proud to be an American, at a time when I was against
the war in Vietnam. He was eager to continue to ascend through the
ranks of the middle class, to display his success, to prove what he was
worth. I did not see him as a person like myself, nor did I recognize
that we acted from a similar urge to prove what we could do. I was by
turns arrogant and withdrawn, contemptuous and scared. That I might
be almost wholly uninformed about a subject was not enough to
prevent me from passing the most absolute of judgments. Mr. Trippi
was unwilling to admit that a student even had a right to an opinion.
When he talked, Mr. Trippi would stand about a foot in front of you,
and stare, unblinking, into your eyes. I would always end up looking at
the floor, at the wall, at the ceiling, or out the window. He did not seem
to notice or to care that nothing of what he said was getting through.
He took my disengagement as an invitation to stare even more directly,
to be even more insistent in the proving of his points, to stand a few
inches closer.
In this period, I had great hopes for myself without knowing much of
anything, without being able to do more than gesture towards my
spiritual and creative goals. I preferred a more oblique approach to
self-discovery. Let us call this the method of “actively visualized self
-deception.” By imagining a larger space than the one in which I lived,
I was, by fits and starts, able to gain some partial access to it. If this
method was, to some extent, successful, I was not in any way prepared
to prove myself to someone as militantly sure of his principles as Mr.
Trippi. I would often stay up late, listening to crickets chirp in the field
across the street from my house. The night was my idea of a good
teacher. She did not bore me. She did not make me feel more limited
than I knew myself to be, and I suspected that even her most absurd
demands would prove more useful than yet another lecture about
Raphael. Yes, I knew that he could draw. I also knew that Shakespeare
was important.
Adolph Gottlieb, Black Enigma, 1946
In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico della Mirandola had said,
We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor
endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place,
whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select,
these same you may have and possess through your own
judgement and decision…We have made you a creature neither of
heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you
may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion
yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to
descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able,
through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders
whose life is divine.
“Five centuries after his death,” I thought, “how many of us have really
come to terms with Pico’s words? Other thinkers have said similar
things, perhaps, but who has said them in so personal a manner, in a
tone that both accuses and invites? I can hear his voice. As Pico says, I
am a creature with no place to call my own. I will shape myself. I will
test the rungs of Jacob’s Ladder. My alienation is a role; it is not a
disadvantage. Can I write a perfect college-level essay? Can I draw a
good self-portrait? No. Many students at Doherty can, but what is that
to me? I will burn with the Seraphim. I will challenge the Thrones. I
will not be content to see out of two eyes. I will somehow find the
talents that I need.”
Pico also said,
For a certainty I shall speak out (though in a manner which is
neither modest in itself nor conformable to my character), I shall
speak out because those who envy me and detract me force me to
speak out. I have wanted to make clear in disputation not only that
I know a great many things, but also that I know a great many
things which others do not know.
Yes. Like Pico, I would speak. I would demand to express my mode of
vision, however half-formed it might be. I loved the matter-of-fact
nature of Pico’s arrogance. Unlike Pico, I was not a prodigy. I was a
child of the working class, who, in spite of several years of far-flung
reading, had only just begun to come into his own. There were times
when I experienced my stupidity as an almost physical weight, as a
slowly constricting boa, as a virus that had begun to eat into my brain. I
had said to Sue Castigliano, “I feel that I am getting stupider by the day
.” She answered, “Why should you be any different?” Against all
available evidence, however, I did feel that I knew certain things that
others did not know.
Then, at 2:00 AM one night, with no warning that anything unusual
might occur, I experienced an outpouring of creative energy, as
explosive as a pyroclastic flow. To say that this outpouring was
explosive is to only speak of its force. The quality of the outpouring—or
near total lack thereof—must be seen as a separate issue. (Nothing to
see here, Reader. You are getting very sleepy. When you wake, you will
forgive the author for his teenage grandiosity. You will forgive his
crimes against late 19th century Symbolism. You will see that he has
set aside his ego. When you come to a sentence that begins “two things
,” you will obey without remembering a word of these commands.)
Two things came from this life-altering experience. These were a 16
-page personal epic and a series of labyrinthine, hieroglyphic drawings
, unlike anything I had previously done. If these pieces were not good,
they were maybe just good enough. An energetic vortex had popped
open.
Brian George, Ships on a Violent Ocean, 2004
The space that I had entered, or rather, that had entered me, felt
pregnant with both danger and the shadow of true vision. To what end
should I stuff facts into my head when it could, at any moment, be cut
off? I told my mother that I was ill, and I did not return to school for
several days.
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