In the last installment I said that Jesus reminds me of Socrates, and it was in part just a way to tranzish to my next entry. If you have not figured this out I am involving you in my schoolwork for my master's program. I graduated from college twenty-one years ago, and while I did okay, grade-wise, I always felt as if I had not put as much effort in as I could have and did not learn as much as I wanted to. Since I work at a HUGE library, I decided to make IT my grad school for a long time. It's great - I read tons of books about psychoanalysis, religion, addiction, everything Augusten Burroughs has ever written, labor-management relations, everything Camille Paglia has written. For a long time my favorite genre was what I call "true therapy." Some people love true crime, but for me, I can't get enough of reading case studies by psychotherapists, and in particular those of a depth psychological or psychoanalytic orientation. Irving Yalom is my favorite, but I love to read Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott, Harold Searles, Joyce MacDougal, and a few years ago I read, for months on end, book after book of therapist-treating-incest-survivor case studies.. The frustrating thing about reading these heavy books is that they invariably refer to those Great Books that all educated people were supposed to have read until sometime in the 1970s & 1980s when I was growing up. So, for the past two years I have been doing some catch-up going through an actual master's program that has me reading Greek plays, Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, etc.
I have learned that I still have a huge aversion to writing papers of any kind. It makes me so anxious I feel like throwing up. I procrastinate. I taught myself how to make a
music video last weekend on iMovies, for example. I hate the idea of being alone, staring at that piece of paper, trying to decide, as sands slip through the hourglass, whether it would be a good idea to reread the book (hint: it never hurts to reread the book). I hate the idea of trying to come up with something intelligent to say about somebody else's work. Who cares what I think? Why is it necessary to analyze everything all to bits?I feel so pretentious. But I think that's partly due to bad habits I picked up in college. I went to a pretentious school and wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to fit in academically. In the process I learned how to write a completely useless, dishonest, contorted paper. No wonder I hate it so much.
I am just realizing that I probably would be doing better in my current program if I had gone in straight from high school, where I had loved learning and discussing books. One of my biggest problems in school and in life is that, whenever I am working on a sustained project that does not come to fruition all at once, I panic that whatever part of it that I am working on at the moment is the Wrong One. All that does is keep me from devoting my attention to that particular component, because half my brain is anxiously focused on the amount of time I have left to finish and worrying that maybe I am looking for a needle in a haystack. I start to doubt that whatever book I am writing about that has been cherished and revered for centuries and has changed the face of history, actually has anything of any value to say to me. Maybe I should change my paper topic, write on a different book altogether, work on an assignment for a different class for awhile, clean all this shit up that's lying around, take a nap, exercise. I usually rebel and do something that is instantly gratifying. Unfortunately, next to surfing the internet, the thing I turn to most often is food."Maybe I'm just wasting my time. I think I'll go see what's in the refrigerator for the fourteenth time." In some ways I have not changed at all since I was nineteen. But I am more humble, more willing to accept that I'm not the sharpest pencil in the box and that I often do things more slowly than others and need to seek help. I'm taking Ancient Greek, and it is incredibly difficult. It is painful for me to acknowledge this, but I am probably the worst student in the class. I spend hours and hours trying to figure this stuff out, and invariably, when my turn comes to read my translation there is always something wrong with it. I may be the slowest student, but I did hang in there, whereas a few people have dropped out along the way. It is interesting, and I do not at all regret taking it. After I went on sabbatical from playing music, I made myself be quiet inside, and asked myself what I would regret not having done if I were to die tomorrow, and I realized that it was reading these books, and studying Ancient Greek.
So, this weekend I have to write a paper on the Meno, one of Plato's dialogues. When I said in my last post that Jesus reminds me of Socrates, I was only partly using it as an abrupt transition. Both men were unconventional and said and did things that people found annoying at best, dangerous at worst. Both had a small group of devoted followers, some of whom lived to write accounts of their teachings. Both were tried under strange circumstances and charged with ill defined crimes. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth, making the weaker argument the stronger (?) and worshipping gods other than the ones the city worshipped (he attributed any orginal ideas or wisdom of his to his daimon, a sort of personal deity or deva. People didn't like that). Both were tried, neither one put up much of fight, and both were put to death, Socrates by government sponsored self-poisoning and Jesus by torture and crucifixion. While Socrates never claimed to be God, and Jesus by several witnesses' accounts did, it is hard to determine whether Socrates believed in any sort of deity or not. Another similarity is that neither of them wrote anything down, and so everything we know about them both is from other peoples' accounts. Jesus' life was recorded by a number of witnesses, while Socrates' life was recorded primarily by Plato, although Aristophanes mentions him and Xenophon wrote his own account of the trial of Socrates.
posted by Lisa #
6:39 PM |
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