Humiliation can save us from a practice that is highly disposable in the light of critical thinking. I used to oppose that thought until it saved me when I was in college. I was studying English then, and my interest for literature paid me a great deal of embarrassment.
Saturday mornings were always a start of head shaking discussions. The second class was about literature. And Corazon, our instructor, was the character behind my fiasco. So, her class was indeed remarkable. She on the other hand does not possess anything special in her physique but, I found her random shifts of facial expressions rather zany. Her intellect was amusing. We were poseurs and she was our protegee.
She taught with excitement, we loved her dazzled reactions whenever she sees we're levelled with the discussion. But we knew she was more than that. She could be fearsome and could give rude comments to our unwittingly vague interpretation of her assigned readings. Since then, we were scrupulous in our actions, comments and interpretations. And, that was the whole test.
Poetics by Aristotle: a great neat classic that clouded my fate with Corazon. I never got the chance to speak about Aristotle- or the Poetics. Because I didn't read the actual text. Instead, I got the chance to speak about someone whom I could no longer remember because he wasn't even part of the "Classics Club". I've spoken somebody else's tongue about the Poetics and Aristotle. I've spoken about the commentary. And honestly, that fucked me up. Whoever he was, he didn't help me and it wasn't his fault.
I could no longer remember the words of disgust that came out of her mouth but her animosity was certain. I couldn't make out the faces of my classmates and I wasn't even sure if they were looking at me. I didn't want to look at them either. I thought I did something smart but then it was just a complete dimwitted attempt to make myself feel good because I thought was doing something smart. Shame on me.
I didn't draw out any emotions about her. She was in the first place, absolutely right! I was just too stupid to look on her perspective. And what I did was just a recursion of someone else's work. Not fresh. Not original and definitely unreliable.
And from that day on....I have always read actual texts.
Fascinating read. Anyways you cannot be completely faulted with the whole thing since only a limited number of people does have a copy of the 'actual' text of Aristotle's Poetics, what is available is its English translation which has already been interpreted by someone else for us so that we could make sense of it in English (as the very act of translation itself is already an act of interpretation). But in the truest sense of an actual text that is access to a copy of the Poetics' Greek manuscript...God knows who has access to it...but definitely that person wasn't you during that time :-)
ReplyDelete