Imagine going to a college reunion, as I would have done this year, had they had such a thing at GC&SU (Milledgeville), and seeing all the people from your class, now 10 years older, with kids, failed dreams, or not, money, or not, and mostly with 30 pounds more or a half a head less. And there, betwixt conversation and speeches, wondering where the time went and how much had changed, there is the almost necessary singing of the Alma Mater, with the words printed on some programming sheet. And as it is sung, out of tune, with soggy nostalgia, would you wonder, for what are we missing? What makes the college years so utterly miserable, and yet so strongly yearned for? The days that I had my own apartment, going for my Masters degree, were the happiest days of my life, and yet, I was highly depressed. I went to Applebees every day to eat away my sorrow, and to run up my charge card.
It's amazing, the small, sensual details that reminds me of college. The things that make me yearn for the days when I was wondering about the campus from class to class. I thought about those, this morning, and thought I'd share the memories I had.
***
There's a certain way the college smells, in the early dawn, when Milledgeville is just waking up (well, save the students, cause they sleep till noon). But I was a morning person, and always woke up at 6 to get to the early classes, eat breakfast, go over to the computer lab (when I didn't have a computer)...etc... Squirrels there didn't seem to mind the students at all, and only ran away if you chased after them. But there were times that you sincerely wished for a good soaking rain, to wipe away the scent of living. Much as I remember playing outside after a thunderstorm in Oklahoma. It's remarkable how smells can link themselves over years of time, instantly triggering emotions of memories. For instance, I always loved walking by the Health building over near Music on my way to Clarinet Practice. They had an indoor pool, and the windows at the top of the building were open. On cold, winter evenings, the chlorinated warmth of the pool would filter out to the walkways, bringing memories of the YMCA in Bethany, with warmth that blankets your body and brings a glow to your skin, much as a cup of hot chocolate would. There is nothing so sensual as that smell.
***
Anyone who has been to college would immediately complain about the cafeteria food. Certainly, on the weekends, the food was barely edible. But the old Southern ladies that worked the back kitchen could fix the most wonderful Chicken Parmeshan with Noodles, and the Wok fixture made the best Caesar Salads I have ever tasted. I have spent years trying to imitate those salads. Down the street from SAGA (called that because of the company that owned the kitchen some 30 years ago, and the name just stuck even after the company moved out.), was a great restaurant called Brewers. It was a coffee shop that had soups, salads, sandwiches, and some sinfully wonderful cheesecakes. But the true divine food was served on Monday nights, when the soup of the day was Tomato Bisque. I have never tasted a liquid so golden or smooth, with flavors so wonderful. I have never equaled it, although I have tried many times. The restaurant is now out of business, and the secret of the soup gone forever.
***
Milledgeville is filled with old buildings, with Corinthian pillars of Neo-Greek architecture. Being in the RHA club (Residential Housing Association), I got to go inside the old Psychology building, the one that hadn't been used in years, where parts of the roof was gone, and the old, crickety stairs led up and up to places of dead knowledge. With rooms of desks and outdated psychological tools and tests, old 5" floppy disks, folders with who knows what inside. What grand design were these old towers of wisdom, now left to disintegrate. It always left me with such reverence and nostalgia for the past, even as the new computer labs left me with hope for the future, that knowledge could still exist in a world of reality TV shows and endless nights of inebriation.
***
But the highlight of being at college is definitely that feeling right after I walked out of the classrooms in the Arts & Sciences building feeling as if I had slewn (slayed, slewed??) killed a dragon. When the tests given were slaughtered and sliced and diced and an "A" was a certainty. Because the knowledge was there, the learning, was in my head and I had met my professors expectations. There is no greater feeling than this. And it's the feeling that I most long for now. I have talked about before, on another blog ( http://denzilpugh.blogspot.com/2008/01/faust-picard-and-pursuit-of-knowledge.html) how much I yearn for the continuing education that we seem never to get anymore. After work, it's the mindless electronic stimulation, eating of food, and then going to bed. We never learn anything anymore. I bring this up because I had a dream last night about being at something like a college, where music, sports, intellectual conversations, etc... was happening, and I want to look at the dream further and see how it could be implemented in real life. But that will take more than just being buried at the bottom of this blog. So I will end this here and start a new one, after I have set my brain on mix and cogitate.
Showing posts with label knowledge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label knowledge. Show all posts
Friday, December 11, 2009
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Grocery Store Tabula Rasa. (or, "History is Bunk.")
So I go to Ingles to get groceries (cause we're out of cookies and chips, and no snack food is analogous to chimps not having bananas, or most teenagers not having their ipods glued to their thighs. Anyway...) so I get up to the check-out counter, and it all rings up as $14.92. To which I reply... "that was a good year."
I get a blank look, as if she didn't understand why I would say such a thing. "What?"
"1492, that was a good year."
Blank look...
"If you were Columbus."
"Oh, didn't he discover the world, or something that year?"
(sigh)
Makes me wonder if its all worth worrying about. Why should I, like Bernard, worry about beauty and justice and what's write in this world when the masses are craving entertainment and their latest dosage of Soma, in whatever form. If the public school system's true aim is to produce mindless, credit card carrying zombies that are fit for consumation and pleasure, then no child will be left behind. As for me, Iceland sounds like a great place to live. (See Huxley's Brave New World for references.)
***
I was thinking about this post this morning (I had put this on Facebook just as a small note yesterday), and thought about what the critics would say. "Well, he's just an intellectual elitist. The public school system is doing the best they can." And to some extent, they'd be somewhat right. But, see, it's a frame of mind, when children are allowed to float through the first 18 years of their lives and not learn the very basics of history, grammar, literature, math, science...etc... Everyone should be smarter than a 5th grader. The date 1492, or 1776, should mean something. You should be able to say 'Romeo" and have people think about Shakespeare, and not a hip/hop artist.
And to indict the public school system for not doing enough to raise the basic intelligence level of American children, to say teachers aren't doing enough, it's partly true. Teachers should be battling against the frame of mind that creates the difficulties they face everyday, from discipline to apathy. Why should students care about even the very basics of education when it's not necessary to know these things in the real world? All it is necessary to do is to work, spend money, enhance the consumer base that keeps the American economy working. American culture dictates that pleasure is the inevitable by-product of our times. (Monkees, from Head.) All else is bunk, as the great Ford would say (Huxley).
(As an aside, the more I think about the Monkees movie, it ceases to be a box office failure and the end of a phenomenon, and more a biting commentary on the very culture that created it in the first place, which is why it failed. With all the ambiguity and drug-induced scenes of nonsense, there was a highly relevant message that reverberates even today. A masterpiece that has wasted away as part of what people simply think of as a 60's pop band.)
The problem is, even as i say the teachers must fight to keep the American mind from closing (Bloom), I know it's a battle that cannot be won, at least, not in this day in time. Because the desire for knowledge, to know and to perceive the world as something more than a fish bowl to be happy and entertain ourselves in, is rapidly becoming a dying cry, lost in the sounds of reality TV shows, blocked from ears sporting ipod buds, drowning in useless news and manipulated surveys, until only something like Jeopardy! is there to remind us that there might be something more out there.
It strikes me as ironic that Bradbury was wrong in his novel Fahrenheit 451, that books would be burned as thought of as illegal. Instead, he was absolutely correct in his short story "The Pedestrian," that the pursuit of knowledge would be seen as aberrant behavior and worthy of mental restructuring. Books aren't simply to be burned, they are to suffer a fate 10 times worse. They are to be ignored.
I get a blank look, as if she didn't understand why I would say such a thing. "What?"
"1492, that was a good year."
Blank look...
"If you were Columbus."
"Oh, didn't he discover the world, or something that year?"
(sigh)
Makes me wonder if its all worth worrying about. Why should I, like Bernard, worry about beauty and justice and what's write in this world when the masses are craving entertainment and their latest dosage of Soma, in whatever form. If the public school system's true aim is to produce mindless, credit card carrying zombies that are fit for consumation and pleasure, then no child will be left behind. As for me, Iceland sounds like a great place to live. (See Huxley's Brave New World for references.)
***
I was thinking about this post this morning (I had put this on Facebook just as a small note yesterday), and thought about what the critics would say. "Well, he's just an intellectual elitist. The public school system is doing the best they can." And to some extent, they'd be somewhat right. But, see, it's a frame of mind, when children are allowed to float through the first 18 years of their lives and not learn the very basics of history, grammar, literature, math, science...etc... Everyone should be smarter than a 5th grader. The date 1492, or 1776, should mean something. You should be able to say 'Romeo" and have people think about Shakespeare, and not a hip/hop artist.
And to indict the public school system for not doing enough to raise the basic intelligence level of American children, to say teachers aren't doing enough, it's partly true. Teachers should be battling against the frame of mind that creates the difficulties they face everyday, from discipline to apathy. Why should students care about even the very basics of education when it's not necessary to know these things in the real world? All it is necessary to do is to work, spend money, enhance the consumer base that keeps the American economy working. American culture dictates that pleasure is the inevitable by-product of our times. (Monkees, from Head.) All else is bunk, as the great Ford would say (Huxley).
(As an aside, the more I think about the Monkees movie, it ceases to be a box office failure and the end of a phenomenon, and more a biting commentary on the very culture that created it in the first place, which is why it failed. With all the ambiguity and drug-induced scenes of nonsense, there was a highly relevant message that reverberates even today. A masterpiece that has wasted away as part of what people simply think of as a 60's pop band.)
The problem is, even as i say the teachers must fight to keep the American mind from closing (Bloom), I know it's a battle that cannot be won, at least, not in this day in time. Because the desire for knowledge, to know and to perceive the world as something more than a fish bowl to be happy and entertain ourselves in, is rapidly becoming a dying cry, lost in the sounds of reality TV shows, blocked from ears sporting ipod buds, drowning in useless news and manipulated surveys, until only something like Jeopardy! is there to remind us that there might be something more out there.
It strikes me as ironic that Bradbury was wrong in his novel Fahrenheit 451, that books would be burned as thought of as illegal. Instead, he was absolutely correct in his short story "The Pedestrian," that the pursuit of knowledge would be seen as aberrant behavior and worthy of mental restructuring. Books aren't simply to be burned, they are to suffer a fate 10 times worse. They are to be ignored.
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