I teach sculpture to college students. More specifically, I am a graduate student in the United States teaching “Introduction to Sculpture” to undergraduates at a state university. On my resume it reads “Graduate Teaching Associate,” although this is a misleading title as there is no oversight. Nor do I have any collaborative association with the school outside of the facilities that I use for the class and a total budget of ten dollars per student for the entire semester. I often joke that I could be teaching child sacrifice down in the sculpture studio and nobody would notice as long as grades were submitted on time.
The pay for this position is hourly —$1.40 above state minimum wage, to be exact. As is often said, I didn’t get into education for the money and I have certainly worked for less (and more), but, to place things in context, I could get a full-time job on the janitorial staff at the same university for about a fifteen percent hourly increase with paid time off, health insurance, worker’s comp, sick leave, and disability benefits. And with that job I could make more money for no other reason than I could get more hours. Nobody is above cleaning toilets, for sure, and to avoid the racketeering that is the student loan industry I have been working full-time as a construction manager while also in school and teaching. I do this in order to help support my education and my family of four without foreclosing on our financial future. It has been hard work, but I have to believe that it is worth it.
As a sculpture instructor, moreover, I’m not simply grading papers. Paper-grading has its headaches and difficulties, but at the end of the day none of the students risk bodily injury in writing their papers, and they can do so unsupervised. Conversely, each day in class I, and many others like me in adjacent fields, have upwards of twenty students at a given moment operating heavy machinery and power tools. We weld and melt steel with torches. We mill and cut wood with blades that make no consideration for the skill-level of the user. Technically, an acetylene tank set at the wrong pressure could take down the entire building just as much as a simple razor blade can swiftly relieve a student of a misplaced thumb.
The number of students that enter my classroom without any knowledge of how to operate any tool, let alone some of the more sophisticated and dangerous ones that we use in sculpture, is so significant that it has become central to how I must teach the class. No prior knowledge can be taken for granted. And I have no assistant. Watching a particularly inept student operate a cordless drill or a hammer is often like watching someone wearing oven mitts try to thread a needle. Their hands are severely uncoordinated and sometimes altogether inert. And their minds don’t hang on to instructions. A process that was described and demonstrated maybe seven or eight times in a single day seems to fade away each time like smoke in the wind.
I say all of this not to garner sympathy, or to disparage the institution or my students. Institutions are nearly impossible to change in meaningful ways on timescales that are meaningful to individuals. Students will always come to education as they are, even if that state of being resembles the blankest of slates. And ultimately none of this is about me or my students or the institutions themselves—it is about us and our culture. I describe these things to illustrate how such things are, unvarnished, even in such a privileged country. Perhaps made stark in the light of such privilege. And to be clear, truly, I do love this job, teaching. The empowerment I witness in a young student’s face when she welds together two pieces of steel for the first time is well worth the price of entry on most days. But it is amid the complexities of this context that I often ask myself, what are we doing here? What are we doing here when an employer undervalues employees working at the most challenging level under constant threat of insurmountable financial burdens? What are we doing here when young people interact with the material world as if they are encountering it for the first time in their early twenties? What are we doing here when, as a fellow educator once put it to me, “the survival of the institutional mission depends on the unnoticed generosity of those transient few working at the lowest level?”
What are we doing here? Stated as such it is an ambiguous question. It only gains meaning from its context. Looking at the world from my level it has, as of late, been gaining some real existential gravity. One particular occasion left me feeling both empty and full; empty of spirit but full of accountability. A strange feeling for sure, and one that has moved me to make this question, here, a little less rhetorical by exploring some of the ambiguities that surround it.
This semester my class is on Fridays. It is a lucky opportunity to have a class that takes place on a single day: they are usually broken up over two days which destroys in-class momentum, and momentum is hard to generate. A one-day-a-week class is a single, unbroken workday where demonstrations can be done early and students can proceed with projects more-or-less individually. This is crucial because the school provides no open lab opportunities outside of class-time for students to put in additional work on their projects. I, like many other adjunct faculty, lecturers, and graduate students, support these work opportunities independently and without pay on a weekly basis, because without these hours the students and their projects would be unfinished or at least short-changed.
But Friday is also an unfortunate day to hold class, as students generally feel disinclined to attend. Attendance is usually at about fifty percent until an hour or so into our allotted time, at which point I have finished my lecture or demonstration. I don’t have to extrapolate to conclude that this is happening throughout academia. I hear it from colleagues across various disciplines. Perhaps more disconcerting, I often have students ask me questions such as “is it important that I come to class next week?” Frankly, I don’t even understand questions like this, although it gives me insight into the level of distortion occurring as they look out upon the world and their lives.
To complicate this, my school has a toothless attendance policy which ensures I cannot easily fail someone for not showing up repeatedly. Short of completely disappearing, a student can only really “fail” in the eyes of administrators if they haven’t turned assignments in at all. This makes even less sense than the student view of things and it is unfair to everyone for reasons that are obvious. But here we are, even if it appears that nobody knows why, or even stops to consider how we got here, and if we want to continue on in this manner.
Anyway, it was on a Thursday before the group critique of the “Line in Space project” – in which they are given lengths of steel bar to be bent, cut, and welded so as to communicate some sculptural idea: simple line drawing come to life, in three dimensions—that I found myself helping one of my best and most motivated students finish the project outside of class time. She and I had an hour that overlapped in our schedules, so I decided to set up the shop and help her out. It was a small but intricate work with tight curves, and an asymmetrical composition with a lovely organic quality. Its form connoted so many things, like words on the tip of your tongue, but it eschewed a specificity that would make it explicit and therefore denotative. I could see it in place in my mind while we stood with it silently, still hot on the table, in the sculpture studio.
“Nice work!” I shouted with genuine excitement. “All it needs now is some paint.” Applying a simple finish to the raw steel is part of the assignment, as this usually signifies to me that the student has considered how the surface and color will relate to the site where it is to be installed. But to my surprise, she replied: “I think I’ll just have to turn this in late.” “What are you talking about?” I barked reflexively. “You’re basically done. You worked so hard, and outside of class… Nope! Finish it.” I was aghast. Meekly, she responded: “But I have to finish an essay.” “Seriously?” I asked as I stepped back. “You’re this close and you’re quitting? No. Get it done and do your essay. You deserve a good grade on this, and you owe it to yourself and your classmates to finish it for critique. We need to talk about this one as a group.” I felt like I was putting my shoulder to the leg of an elephant, urging it out into the spotlight of a circus performance. She looked at me blankly for a moment, whispered “ok” and retreated up the stairs and out of the studio with the sculpture in hand.
I stood there, rooted, for several minutes staring at the studio, a mess with little splatters of slag from the welder and iron filings from the angle grinder scattered across the worktables and concrete floor. Tools were dropped in places where work had happened, and the air was infused with the inside-of-an-engine-compartment smell that I have come to love over the years working with metal. The room tasted like a handful of loose change.
As I forcefully absorbed the interaction, I couldn’t think what to make of it. I knew that I had responded honestly but I just couldn’t make sense of the student’s perspective. There was something missing. The only word that I could think to describe the missing element was “chutzpah”. The student had no “chutzpah”. Yiddish is good that way: so many evocative words that balance precariously and humorously in conceptual space as if teetering on a fence between meaning and nonsense. My mind repeated “chutzpah… no chutzpah”. Even though she always showed up on time if not early, had great ideas, communicated clearly, maintained a calendar, came prepared, and so on, there was no audacity, no boldness, no discernible sense in her that this enterprise warranted effort, let alone extra effort. She seemed to have no understanding that she could shift gears as the terrain of responsibility changed around her—no recognition that if the car runs out of gas with the finish line in sight, you get out and push while you still have some momentum. What are we doing here if not finishing what we have started? Particularly in the arts. Nobody is going to finish our dreams for us.
As a studio artist, there is no industry waiting for you and no clear professional path if you don’t get academia to subsidize your artistic practice. Unless you come from a wealthy and connected family, or you circumstantially find yourself in the right time and place with the chutzpah to seize the opportunity, your “career” is simply an abstraction nestled in the darkness of your own imagination. Creativity itself is an abstraction. That is why nobody, including artists, knows what it is or how to describe it in any way that isn’t circumferential. It is either too meaningful or too meaningless to be defined, like “God” or “spirit”. It’s anybody’s guess.
If creativity can be said to be like anything, it’s like energy, or light. A particle and a wave at the same time. An event. A non-thing. A happening. It is impossible to see in the round when in its midst, but you know that it has taken place after the fact, because it leaves a residue that we call “art”. But getting over the finish line, however you define it, is essential. If it doesn’t happen, then we don’t even get to debate over what is and is not “creative”. The sun is always shining, which means that rainbows are always there, they just need a refractive substrate to reveal themselves. The sun will shine, rain will fall, rainbows will come and go, and heat will burn you, but your art will never exist if you don’t have the chutzpah to see it through. You are the substrate. You are an abstraction, invisible. The art is the record, the rainbow, the dream. It’s the hot steel still creaking as it cools on the table in front of you. What are we doing here if not teaching this?
CYPRES (pronounced Cypress) stands for Cybernetic Parachute Release System. It’s essentially a mechanism that can be programmed in order to release a reserve parachute at a specific altitude in the event that a skydiver fails to open their main parachute. The proper deployment of a reserve parachute vis-à-vis a CYPRES represents the narrowest of margins between the best day and the worst (last) day of your life. When I was in the Navy, CYPRES was the make and model we used to this affect (there are others) just in case such an occasion presented itself. The members of my SEAL platoon had each of ours set to about twelve hundred feet in the late summer of 2012.
Jumping out of aircraft safely involves a lot of checking and re-checking of equipment. It’s like scheduled OCD. And the last check you do is actually for the benefit of the man standing in front of you. One of the things you look for is if the CYPRES is programmed correctly. With the tailgate open in an aircraft you cannot really hear anything so after confirming that in fact it is, you shove your fist over that man’s shoulder and give him a thumbs-up. If all else fails, the technology will come good, and the reserve should open.
On one particular Friday that summer, at the end of week three of a month of jumping out of various aircraft, I went through all of the necessary obsessive-compulsive choreography. I am not by nature a particularly meticulous person and I really didn’t care for “jumping,” so the procedural compulsion helped me stay focused. And as I shoved a thumbs-up over the shoulder of the man in front of me, so too did the one from behind to me. We were packed tightly in single file, so-called “nut-to-butt”. The idea was that as you ran out in this fashion, you, along with the jumpers in front of you and behind you, would be naturally and rapidly separated by a great distance due to the tremendous airspeed of the aircraft. In fact, getting closer as you jumped was actually a way to reduce this natural separation in order to make it easier to congregate in-line and under canopy while in transit to the target area, the intent being that you all land roughly in the same spot, one by one, staggered naturally through altitude by way of a tightly timed but independent deployment of each jumper’s main parachute. Each jumper just needs to make sure, for the sake of everyone in front of and behind him, that he is on the appropriate heading and pulls at the right altitude.
By the time my “stick” of ten jumpers shuffled toward the tailgate, I had noticed three things that day. First, that everyone was tired. Second, that we were traveling at a much slower airspeed than is common when jumping in this manner. And third, as my toes broke contact with the aluminum ramp behind me, that the guy falling toward the earth in front of me was both belly-up and pointed in the wrong direction. I immediately turned to fly away from him in the three seconds before I had to pull my ripcord. But despite my effort, a few seconds later the jumper who had been backwards and below me was suddenly above and headed toward me as both of our canopies were opening. There wasn’t any time to react. Ordinarily this situation, given enough time, would dictate a specific emergency procedure. But unable to implement it, we collided, and instantly our parachutes became entangled.
The handful of seconds that followed suddenly became very important to both of us. We were physically and existentially connected, and slowly spinning like a human bola that an Argentinian gaucho might use to snare the legs of a steer in full gallop. We were also falling fast and therefore rapidly approaching CYPRES altitude. The lines of parachute cord extended outward from around my shoulders and became a tangled mess of flaccid fabric and string partially shrouding the jumper above me. The silk snapped loudly against a rotating backdrop. Blue sky, mountain peak, sky and desert horizon, mountain face, less sky above with more desert below and so on all smeared together around us as we corkscrewed downward. I shouted, “Untangle it!” He, immediately: “I can’t!” I looked down at the ground and at the altimeter on my wrist. Three thousand feet. “Try again!” Two thousand six hundred. “Can’t!” “Two thousand two hundred. “I’ll cut away!” I shouted, and I did. I breathed deeply and took in the view as I did.
I was roughly face-down and there was a lake underneath us. The shoreline was obscured by tall wind-beaten grass, low shrubs, and bramble. The silver glint of small ripples caught my momentary curiosity like the flash of a quarter reflecting a snap of sunlight against the matte black of a grocery store parking lot. There was a boat. Someone was fishing.
Then a surprisingly gentle tug out past my ears arrested my attention and I felt the nylon harness pull itself taught around my thighs. I was alive under a brilliant white reserve parachute. I made a hard, J-shaped turn to the left toward the drop zone in order to miss the shoreline. The landing couldn’t have happened more than five or ten seconds after the reserve fully opened. I kneeled quietly facing west with the warmth of the afternoon sun on my face. I looked over my shoulder to see the other jumper touch down safely.
There were no words that came to mind at that moment, but “what are we still doing here” would not have been inappropriate. As I gathered my faithful reserve and walked toward the portion of my platoon that was not looking for two dead bodies plastered on the nearby highway (where our now released main parachutes had landed), I knew that there was one thing left to do before the workday was over: jump again. It is protocol not to end a day jumping with a cutaway. It is bad for the mind. End on a positive note, as they say. And we did, without incident.
I often think about that day. It was probably not the closest I have ever come to death. I’ve been shot at, mortared, in vehicular accidents, asphyxiated, nearly drowned; both hypothermic and hit in the head more times than I can count; and mentally, physically, and emotionally stripped down to nothing but an abstraction of what I presumed myself to be. And not all of this happened in the military. But I know many more human beings who have been through much more difficult trials than I have. And I know that there are even more, whom I will never know, who did and do live in circumstances that I would find unimaginable. Still, this particular experience remains in my consciousness like a filter for anything attempting to come in. Thoughts like “should I go to class today?”, “can I finish this assignment?”, “should I pay this bill?” or “can I handle this?” just don’t occur to me in real time.
I think this experience has been cognitively sticky for a number reasons. It happened lucidly and over enough time that I could embrace its fullness in the moment, like observing a gap in time as if it were an object in the round. It had a unique fullness that set it apart from one period of my life ending and another beginning. And I had agency in that moment—and I exercised it. Interestingly, in a bizarre revelation during the accident debrief with the jumpmaster, he noted that if we had not made the decisions in the manner that we had and at the respective moments that we did, a CYPRES activation would have likely further entangled our reserves, killing us both.
Due to these unique characteristics, it didn’t have the quality of a near miss or a commonplace accident. We were able to make several crucial decisions that precipitated in the timeline in which I now live, and that created the opportunity to observe the aforementioned “gap” before that timeline started. And with that gap, a brief opportunity for reflection.
In a way, the reflection never stopped, and it influenced many more crucial decisions that slowly angled me toward the strange environment I inhabit now, where the individual stakes are so low but the cultural consequences seem so high. I inhabit this space asking myself “what are we doing here?” and confused as to how I belong or where specifically to apply my effort and experience and exercise what little agency I have.
Teaching in academia necessitates the authorship of a “teaching philosophy”. It is an institutional requirement, yes, but more importantly it is an essential exercise in intellectual and ethical introspection. At least that’s how I’ve interpreted the task. There is no standard template, though I have read a great many of the grandiose and formulaic statements—so formulaic (and bland) that I can hardly distinguish between them, let alone get any parenthetical sense of the person that wrote them. What I do get is a sense of what that person thinks the institution wants to hear.
I have never been able to get much substantive feedback on mine, but the strange consistency of the feedback that I have gotten has been intriguing and bizarre. “It’s too philosophical,” has been the resounding criticism. Followed by “you need to provide some nuts and bolts about your coursework and class time,” something I’ve always thought was more appropriately addressed by a syllabus. It is especially strange to me because to say that a philosophy statement is too “philosophical” is a little like using the word you are trying to define in the very definition meant to define it. And what is a teaching philosophy if not a framework for being, regardless of the shifting circumstances around you?
More significant than its excessively “philosophical” nature, I think, is how I frame the educational enterprise as a whole. I view education as a civic duty. By pursuing education, we seek to improve ourselves and everyone around us, and in doing so we help our society flourish. I frame education in this way not to subordinate the student to the polis, but to exalt the virtues of each student in support of the collective good. In the statement I insist to the reader that this is an exhilarating proposition and that we should approach this duty with as much humility and awe as we would like to inspire in those who follow in our footsteps.
I have found this sentiment to be completely out of step with the contemporary educational atmosphere, which seems to me infused with a strange mixture of narcissism and nihilism. My primary mistake was what I chose as my central philosophical tent poll: duty—a muddy non-sequitur at best in contemporary American “intellectual” life and an anathema in academia, either too meaningful or too meaningless to be taken seriously by people who are, on paper, serious thinkers. It’s a little like the word “patriot,” the definition of which, depending on the political valence of your worldview, can oscillate wildly between “fascist” and “hero”.
I’m given this impression for several reasons. First is the silence with which the concept of duty has been greeted among those interlocutors from whom I have sought feedback and counsel. I thought that that I would be pushing at the edges of something conceptually important by using what I knew would be honest but provocative language within the academic context. I had never once encountered it in statements of this kind. And I said as much in real time during discussions of the document, minimal as they were. But to my surprise it was always met with a shrug or silence. I was truly at a loss.
If it means anything, the idea of duty implies sacrifice—in the context of my teaching philosophy, sacrifice for a noble purpose and with an optimistic spirit, in pursuit of a positive vision of the future. It implies humility in the face of historical reflection. Duty is what we feel while preserving, protecting, and refining something. For this reason, it axiomatically places “we” before “me”. This is definitionally out of register with the curricula that I have experienced in the arts. If I were more naïve, the curricula I have experienced would leave me with the impression that the world is largely a dreary mess of zero-sum conflicts between good and evil, in which we are individually and historically (to varying degrees) implicated as part of the problematic nature of human progress. The culture war is real (yawn) and this dynamic is its center of gravity.
I find it boring because it makes writing for class and discussions in class less like opportunities for growth and more like filling out sheet after sheet of Mad Libs. If you know what and who the bad things and people are, the agreed upon consequences of those things, and can name those who have subsequently suffered in light of this causal chain, then you know all the answers before the “discourse” begins. Figure out the formula and you can plug in the appropriate parts of speech between the relevant nouns of any new academic domain. It’s easy. Easy and insufferable, because of its smothering condescension to the intellect, which in my experience is slowly atrophying a generation of brains supposedly at the top of their fields. Have we been trained to see a fill-in-the-blank world, or have we become more fill-in-the-blank as a result of refusing to parse a complicated world more carefully? Figuring that out, now that’s an intellectual duty worth showing up to class for.
I have tested this Mad Libs theory of academic reasoning repeatedly. I have done so by countless times intentionally not reading the assigned theoretical material until after I have written the essay in response to that material. I have a record of straight A’s in this regard. To be fair, my undergraduate education in the arts gave me a tremendous foundation in this lexicon of nonsense. I uploaded the appropriate algorithm of sorts to my mental toolkit before arriving at graduate school: I read Marx, Gramsci, everyone in the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Derrida, Butler and so on. But crucially, I didn’t read anyone that was not them. What I mean by this is that these thinkers and many others like them were and are presented as if they represent the totality of worldviews that encompass the intellectual interests of contemporary artists and thinkers alike. In reality, if any of it could be considered real, in the way that wood or steel is real, this literature strikes me as a collection of case studies in how to change the meanings of words in order to prove one’s own point, no matter what the situation. In practice, this is what it looks like to present a single field of study and a single ideological orientation as the whole show. I have met multiple tenured faculty, one with an Ivy League pedigree, who didn’t know who John Stuart Mill was. One even asked me to stop mid-sentence and repeat the name so that it could be written down in their notes.
And so, the frustration, tedium, contradiction, and condescension finally got to me. At the end of my last semester of compulsory classes like these, I asked the professor, a PhD in these sorts of things, “what else is there? Who are the thinkers outside of this canon?” Is there anybody who has important things to say about these big ideas (beauty, aesthetics, culture) who does not think this way? Where is the counterpoint?
To be very clear, I had never contested any idea in any class on any grounds other than concrete ones. If something asserted in a discussion was logically asinine, for example, then I usually confined my criticism of it to logical considerations and asked for clarification or respectfully pointed out obvious contradictions. The classroom is a space for teasing through complicated ideas, so ridicule isn’t really appropriate or productive. But I had come to a rhetorical dead-end. It felt as though we had become completely decoupled from reality. Substantive critique felt impossible. Like trying to communicate in Japanese by speaking in perfect Swedish.
So, to underscore my meaning and describe what I was seeing all around me I reached for an analogy when I asked my professor for sources of thought outside of the hermetically sealed container in which we had hitherto been buried. I referred a cocktail party. People get invited to cocktail parties, I said in an email, based on their sameness, not their differences. People enjoy each other at a cocktail party because everyone can agree about who would never be invited. But all of the thinkers whom we had discussed in this course, and all of the other courses like it that I had taken in the last six years, would have been invited to the same cocktail party. Where are the other ones, and why do we only get invited to this one?
My professor’s platitudinous reply still boggles my mind. In a couple of saccharine sentences I was told that it was a big university and that I should feel free to seek out other perspectives. That was it. And this, more than any of the other reflections above, clearly illustrated what I had inferred regarding the meaninglessness of duty in graduate education and the punishing self-referential nature of the curricula. Here I was, asking a real question. I was not asking for the appropriate word choice, or the proper next move in a game, or presenting a hypothetical variation within the boundaries of the received wisdom. I was asking a genuinely perplexing question that scratched at the veneer covering the entire intellectual scene, in keeping with what I thought was the institutional mission of higher education. Gently, but clearly and confidently, I was asking this serious thinker to think seriously about the philosophical underpinnings of the intellectual enterprise in which we were both entangled. I was doing my duty as a student. What were we doing here?
In the context of real-time and in-the-round interpersonal communication, the distinction between a translator and an interpreter is a simple one. It boils down to the difference between high and low competence. You’re either good at your job or you’re not. But this reality can be obscured by the nomenclature. Like the distinction between rectangles and squares: every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square. On paper it might say that this person standing in front of you is an “interpreter,” but lurking inside him is nothing more than a translator. These are non-standard usages of these titles, but this gets at the distinction that I am trying to illustrate.
The second time I was deployed to Iraq, on paper I worked with three primary “interpreters”. In reality, only one of them was an interpreter. The other two were barely translators. It was 2011. And I was in the final weeks of what would be a nearly ten-month deployment. Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, President Obama had announced that all the troops in Iraq would be home by the holidays, and to me the “mission” felt excruciatingly pointless. Nevertheless, we carried on. Night after night we struck targets largely related to individuals and supply chains that had either directly launched rockets or facilitated the launching of rockets at our small joint special operations base on the edge of town. The impacts would start around dinner time, just after sunset. Sometimes you would hear the rocket first, usually of the 107mm variety. It would either hit a concrete “T-wall”, or one of our housing or storage trailers, or it would sail overhead and land in the desert behind our makeshift gym. They were being shot at an extremely low angle in order to defeat the safety parameters of our radar-based automated defense system intended to shoot them down. Other times you would hear the warning alarm and have just enough time to start running to a nearby bunker only to hear the impacts while you were in route and most vulnerable.
The whole time I had a very clear sense that nothing we were doing was worth a single life of anybody in my platoon, let alone anybody on base or in town. But I also had an equally clear sense that I could never express this out loud as it was a philosophical point that served no practical purpose. The existential dynamic of our situation resembled so many intractable and ridiculous philosophical riddles. If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? What came first, the chicken or the egg? What is the sound of one hand clapping? It was all so serious and consequential yet so silly and insignificant at the same time. Our species has these dynamics to thank for the delicious fatalism that is gallows humor.
Amidst all of this we still had the somewhat reasonable job of training partner forces, misleadingly called Foreign Internal Defense (FID). I say misleading, because most days the relationship felt a lot like the relationship a hand has with a sock puppet. The sock facilitates the fantasy, but without the hand the illusion is destroyed. Either way, the partner force that fell under the purview of my responsibility was the SWAT team of the local police department. As partner forces go, they weren’t half bad. Once a week I and four or five members of the platoon met with the SWAT team on our base in order to train them on several core competencies needed to function well together as a unit in combat. The bulk of our efforts were focused on safe weapons-handling and close-quarters tactics, as we wanted to reduce, as much as possible, the likelihood of getting shot by one of our Iraqi brothers in blue, particularly while on target, a time when things can quickly become confusing even for more experienced operators.
Our interpreter never attended these training sessions. We saved him for our missions at night and for important key leader engagements during the day. As a true interpreter, he not only knew the language but also the local customs, interpersonal subtleties, family dynamics, and had a physical presence and confidence that commanded authority in a highly patriarchal country. So much of what a great interpreter does falls outside of language. Around the words and on the margins; between speech and body language, gesture and custom, idiom and description. On target I would say to him “tell me what’s going on” when in the midst of a chaotic family argument, whereas with one of our two “translators” I would say “tell me exactly what she just said.” The translators were moving beans from one pile to another, but the interpreter was making a stew and managing a kitchen all while continuously engaged in bilingual customer service in the front and back of the house. This can definitely go off the rails, so one can never let one’s guard down, but overall, the nature of the relationship can expand and contract as specificity and clarity are required.
One afternoon I was supervising the SWAT training as I had many times before, when a warrant officer from that team approached me with one of my translators. The warrant officer’s face was drawn and serious, and the translator was visibly uncomfortable; an awkward grimace distorted his mouth apologetically as he trailed a couple steps behind the man. My translator’s first words as they closed the distance were “Sir, I’m sorry…”.
“Why? What’s up?” I replied. “He’s asking crazy things,” he sputtered while the warrant officer streamed ceaselessly in Arabic, gripping the translator’s shoulder. “OK, hey, both of you stop,” I insisted. “Now, tell him to calm down and then ask him to clearly describe what he wants me to know.” They spoke briefly, having taken the energy and volume down several registers. “He want’s your help.” “OK, with what?” “He wants you to help his family.” There was another torrent of Arabic as the translator waved his hand at the officer. “Help his family with what?” I asked, now nervous as the tension bordering on desperation was audible in the officer’s voice, even across the language barrier. “Getting out of the country,” he replied.
I stepped back. “What? Really?” The officer nodded, my reaction not requiring an intermediary. He stepped closer, again speaking rapidly. “He’s asking about visas. He has a wife and six children. When the Americans leave, they will be killed… This is what he is saying, sir.” I told them both to stop talking for a second. I needed to think.
Even though I knew that the idea of me, at the lowest level in the overall chain of command, somehow garnering safe passage for this man and his family out of Iraq was preposterous, I could see that it was not preposterous to him. Accordingly, I needed a moment to address this man’s humanity—not the specifics of his (very real, for him) proposition. And I couldn’t dismiss him. After all, we had been out on missions together and we had developed a good professional and personal rapport over many months as teammates—which was, presumably, the reason he came to me and not someone else. This man, an authority figure in his own right, looked at me as though I had power. This belief, exuded through his speech, his body language, and his plea only served to underscore the excruciating falsehood contained in the perception that reinforced it. I was only a man, naked and useless inside of my uniform, just like him.
A good interpreter might have filtered this out. The concern may have never even made it to me because of the obvious practical absurdity of the request, taken for granted by those of us living on the American side of the wire. Culturally, moreover, it made me look weak and the officer, desperate. In other words, a good interpreter might have protected our respective dignity and thus saved us some face, not to mention saving me from an uncomfortable if not impossible conversation. But I think I would have been denied something important in the process. An opportunity for honesty and empathy, however impotent, amid a completely futile situation.
There was a long silence as I measured my words and composed my demeanor. Then I spoke. “I can’t do anything for you. I’m sorry. But I’m happy to talk.” His neck stiffened as his eyes drifted downward toward the dirt, which was covered in expended brass from the shooting range. Sporadic gunshots from the firing line were the only sounds to break the silence. He was holding back tears. He looked up at me, his eyes raw and red but still dry, as he asked me a question. “What can I do? he said.” In that moment my body was a flood of different emotions. I was simultaneously saddened and furious. I felt helpless in the face of his hopelessness. I was embarrassed and exposed, ashamed and vulnerable, but strangely with my own sense of integrity intact. Accountable, perhaps, but not necessarily responsible. Yet the intensity of his stare did not diminish, and my poker face was weakening. So, I did what has always come naturally to me: I leveled with him.
I looked at the translator and told him to speak my words as exactly as Arabic would allow. I proceeded to tell the Iraqi officer that nothing is fair, and nothing makes sense in this situation. We were, by sheer chance, born in two different countries. I said that I was lucky to be born in a country where I do not have to live in fear of my family being killed, and that even though I had come to know and respect him I could never really understand how it felt to him living in such conditions. But, I added, he had to decide for himself and his family whether or not his country was worth defending, with or without us. I told him the truth as I saw it. Which included the fact that I agreed with his assessment: the security condition in his country would likely disintegrate and that, as outside interests gained influence in our absence, people like him would probably be targeted. And the only thing to do in light of this, short of somehow escaping the country, was to organize resources, plan for the worst, and fight if it came to that. Sensing his despair, I added that if I were him I would do just that.
He looked at me quizzically and then at the translator and again back at me. He was expressing some confusion and queried the translator, who then piped up with: “He says you are going to stay here and fight?” Oh Jesus, I thought, but said just as much with my face. “No. I said that’s what I’d do if I were him.” I started to lose my cool. “Do you think all this makes any more sense to me?” I snapped in frustration. The translator was unraveling, and so was the conversation. “Listen, we can’t get you out of Iraq, but we’ll train you and your team the best we can before we have to leave, ok? That’s all we can do!” And with that I placed my hand on my heart and told him to get back on the firing line because it was getting dark, and we didn’t have much more ammunition for training that day.
That evening, as the dust from the SWAT vehicles trailed off toward the front gate, I felt sick to my stomach. I was angry and had no words to unpack or make sense of what had happened. And even if I had, there was nowhere to put them. It was a rare night with nothing on the docket, so I got blackout drunk by myself on hooch stashed under my bed. I had brewed it in a five-gallon bucket with a platoon-mate using some expired champagne yeast, refined sugar, and pineapple juice. It looked like cloudy urine, so I had to be careful to distinguish it from the bottle I used to piss in when I woke up in the middle of my daytime sleep cycle.
In the dimness of my stupor I knew that I had done my best, but still I felt like a total failure. I had been in over my head, completely. I had never trained for such a conversation, but I tried to navigate it with honesty and clarity. “What are we doing here?” was definitely a sentiment on my mind. Sometimes I wonder if that warrant officer and his family are still alive after everything that has transpired since we left.
Critique is the single most important part of an artist’s education. In plain English, you gather together, usually with other members in your field or discipline, to look at and discuss your work and the work of others. Therefore, it is as much an opportunity for generosity as it is for self-improvement. For the uninitiated, these sessions can be squirmy events that are uncomfortable to watch, becoming heated debates, enthusiastic celebrations, or paralyzed by silence. Tears are not uncommon, but they are almost always unnecessary. All of this largely depends on the personalities and the enthusiasms of those in attendance. But regardless of what they turn into, without these encounters an artist is likely to stay stuck in their own head, unable to see aspects of their own work and overall practice that are literally right in front of them.
To underscore the importance of this to my students I borrow an illustrative finding from the field of cognitive science. “Inattention blindness” is the inability to see something clearly present in your visual field when one has no concrete visual impairment. It seems to function vis-à-vis a narrowness rather than a lack of attention, and it can be instigated through a simple experimental protocol. An archetypal example is the so-called “gorilla” experiment with which many are now familiar. There are numerous videos of this online. Spoiler alert: many experimental subjects fail to see a person in a gorilla costume dancing across the screen in front of them because they have been told to keep track of a basketball being passed back and forth around that “gorilla”. I use this example analogically, to show how fixated we can get on certain details in our environment and in our lives at the expense of a broader view that allows space for novel information to enter our consciousness. On the day of the critique for the Line in Space project, I expected everyone to be surprised by aspects of their and others’ work that they had hitherto failed to notice.
That morning, on my drive to campus, I was listening to an audiobook. I was taken aback by an anachronistic reading of a Civil War-era letter written by a soldier on the eve of the battle of Bull Run. It was playing as I pulled into the parking lot, but, riveted, I remained in my parked car listening intently as it continued. It was addressed to his wife and newborn son. In sum, it was heart-wrenching — particularly when it was revealed afterward by the narrator that the soldier died in battle the next day. In the moments before this devastating detail, however, I was most struck by the poetic clarity and fluency with which this soldier wrote. As his words flowed through the speakers I could see and feel the yellow and dimpled paper in my mind, brittled by time, perhaps held in the Library of Congress. The page was surely threaded through with the effortless and elegant fluidity of his cursive handwriting; the pressure of the author’s fingertips must have infused the magically black India ink with a ribbon-like physicality. I reflected on the likelihood that this man most certainly had less education and opportunity than anyone I would encounter on campus today. Who among us could write like this? Let alone at a time like that, under candlelight and with opposing forces hidden in the heavy July mist of a hot Virginia evening, carnage impending. None of us, I concluded, as I somberly walked away from my vehicle.
Entering the classroom early, I was surprised and pleased to see that a few students were already there. “Wow! Hey, great! Glad to see you’re here already” I exclaimed, still shaking off the sobriety of my private moment in the car. “Well, then, get to it. Set these things up and we’ll start the critique in twenty minutes.” Fifteen minutes later my attention was arrested by the student I had helped the previous day. She ran into class uncharacteristically late with her sculpture in-hand. “Hey, you made it! And you’re sculpture’s finished!” I said. “And did you finish your essay?” “Yeah,” she replied breathlessly. “Nice job!” “But I didn’t have much time to proofread it.” she replied with dismay, looking down solemnly at an empty table in front of her. Sensing a lull in the room, everyone in attendance seeming focused on our conversation, I reached for a humorous and topical anecdote. “Well, I’m glad that you wrote it, at least…not ChatGPT.”
There was an immediate silence across the space. It was only by way of the surprise induced in me by that silence that I noticed how many of the students had in fact not been listening to the conversation — but now they were, intently. For all the talk of dog whistles in our culture, I never thought I’d feel as though I actually blew one. I hesitated for a moment as I scanned their faces. “Wait, have any of you used it?” Without hesitation, another student slouched in a chair nearby raised his hand. “Yeah, I have,” he said blankly. “I’m actually in her class.” pointing to the student with whom I had been talking. “I just used it on that essay,” he added without any expression of contrition. In turn, she looked at me as if to say, “no, we’re not together.” “Interesting” I mused aloud. “Is there any policy surrounding this?” The response was faint, but from what I could gather, there was no policy. I wondered if ChatGPT could have written that letter I heard in the car — would I want it to?
Another student, in a palpable mood of anger and disgust, snapped, “Aren’t you concerned about plagiarism?” “Naaa…” he said casually. “After I use ChatGPT I run it through some paraphrasing software and then I send it to my tutor. They said it looked good so I’m fine.” The interlocutor guffawed in disbelief. I interjected: “Wait, I’m sorry, how does this work?” I had never used ChatGPT. I had only heard and read about it. The instructive reply: “I ask it the questions from the prompt, then I take those answers and they become my paragraphs. Then I use the paraphrasing thing afterward to…” “So the questions you’re asking it,’ I interrupted, “they’re not your questions?” “Not really, they’re from the prompt or I find them in the syllabus.” I had a final question: “Just to make sure I have this right: you take what is explicit in the prompt or in the learning objectives from the syllabus, rewrite those into a series of questions, and then you then run those questions first through Artificial Intelligence, then a paraphrasing algorithm, then an actual human being? Is that correct?” “Yeah, well…” He was cut short by someone across the room, “No, two human beings. You forgot the professor.” “Right. My apologies. Two human beings,” I edited in response. “Yeah, I guess that’s right” he said finally with a shrug.
The room was emotionally tense but mixed in terms of legible expressions of incrimination. Their faces were pallid in the frigid glow of fluorescent lights overhead. Even so, I wasn’t looking for offenders. I was genuinely curious. With so much culturally ambient talk of AI, I had begun to hear it as white noise. But this got my attention. With that, I exhaled forcefully, smiled, and clapped my hands together with a loud snap, and proclaimed: “Never have I been so thankful that my student’s assignments are written in steel. Let’s go look at some sculptures.”
It was this experience that acted as the catalyst for what I have written here. In general, my life has made me skeptical, even distrustful, of words. They can veil the world from us in so many ways; the direct and immediate world; the phenomenological world of light and form and haptic sensation. All of the big ten-dollar words happen afterward. They are curated and composed like rose bushes in the Queen’s garden. But even so, I have always believed that their saving grace was their capacity to give us glimpses of what is unseeable and thus unknowable, in the world of direct experience: the minds of others.
Now it appears that we cultivate in students and in ourselves an inability, an anti-skill. We do so by means of low or non-existent expectations, confused or diffuse priorities, or simple neglect. Whatever the reason, it is being reinforced by ad-hoc technological scaffolding built by and in the image of futurists and their respective dreamscapes. I hear noises from these people in the news proclaiming a future of high school students with personal assistants in the form of AGI; a future in which we all outsource the mundane woes of our lives to an endless catalogue of algorithms, thereby freeing ourselves up for the “important” and “creative” endeavors of life. What do these massively influential and highly productive technologists think an adolescent human being will do with a personal assistant and no chores? (Look around. It’s happening.)
And what are we evaluating in a student exactly if they don’t really have to show up to class and nearly everything that they do can be done indistinguishably by some artificial version of who they are? Are we underestimating them in some foundational way, and thereby undermining their creative potential before it has a chance to develop within the boundary of their own skin? My exceedingly non-virtual experiences have left me skeptical, clearly. Surely the everyday investigation into the minds of others is impossible without the flickering light that we provide when blazing that darkened trail on our own. The so-called “Black Box AI” is aptly named.
Black boxes. When I look around at young people I see mostly looks of vacancy and distraction. I get the impression that somebody’s definitely home, but the lights are off and the shades are drawn. I wonder if they are becoming black boxes unto themselves without the skills and the resources to light the torch of inner exploration on their own. This is the self that you cannot escape while you are living out the “mundane” parts of your life.
I ponder this during and after the classroom critique, which was situated between the flicker of unexpected discovery that the students see in each other’s work, and their own; between pointing out the surprises expressed by steel that has been cut, bent, and shaped by human hands and with many tools that are the descendants of those developed hundreds of thousands of years ago, in the impenetrable darkness of our species. When class was over, I walked back to my car and drove across town to pick up my children from daycare. I drove in silence. I had a lot on my mind.
After safely buckling them into their car seats, one facing forward, the other rearward, we drove together on the highway listening to the local jazz station play Anita O’Day and Dizzy Gillespie. Along the highway is a reservoir. In the past couple of years an encampment of blue tarps, makeshift shelters, and piles of trash has grown along its banks. A man paces in circles wearing only pants, shouting and swinging a stick at something I cannot see. I catch a glimpse of a young boy, not much bigger than my oldest, watching cars fly by along the chain link fence between him and the emergency lane. I lower the shade to shield my eyes from the red-orange sun sitting low as we traveled westward, and use my indicator light to change lanes, taking the next exit toward our home.