For Seeing Out Loud

I gnash my teeth when I feel myself starting a blog entry with, “It was a crazy week…” because that just sounds like a big, silly, bourgeois excuse for not writing an entry earlier! In my head, I had started four different blog entries, and none came to pass. And not because it was a particularly crazy week. But I did go to the hospital. That part is actually among the more mild-mannered features of the week. I’ll get to it.

 

The big news this week is that it was the AP Test Day week. All year long, the countdown is on. From the first day of class, until the end of the 136^th class day, the sands in the proverbial watched hourglass move oh so quickly and quixotically . I usually sing the song from Mame, “It’s Today!” on the day of the test. I have learned from years and years that review should be done in the evenings and that learning, the building of momentum of something new and exciting, should continue up until about 48 hours before the test.

 

This year I wanted to try out a few new art works and see how they flew as we came up to the end of the course. I had more 21^st century art works than ever before, and they will get their own blog entries soon. But one piece that had more “bite” than I thought (pun intended, you’ll see why…) came from the above piece by Rene Magritte, the 20^th century Surrealist who is always a big hit. Later in his career, 50 years ago exactly, Magritte painted this piece he entitled, Son of Man. Take a look at it.

 

I had already taught a half dozen of Magritte’s works, oh, and they are always fun, and slick and a kick to try and figure out. As I taught this one for the first time this year, I asked the most obvious question one should ask about art: what do you see? Daniel, always a particularly observant young man, said, “I see this disquieting apple.” I asked why he thought it was disquieting, and he responded that that was what all the Surrealists wanted from their art. I asked the class about the title of the work, and Rami, ever quick to jump on symbols and names, said, “It should be about Jesus, since he is the Son of Man and the Son of God, or maybe Adam as the first Man. And there is the apple so I say Adam.”  I let them simmer and look at it a little longer, and finally, asked, “It isn’t as simple as the name suggests, right?” As they stared at this utterly simple and straightforward work, and yes, disquieting apple, I asked, “What do you want to do with the painting?”  Farouk, not my most vocal student, but reliable, and good, and hard-working, he said calmly, “I want to move the apple!” A couple people laughed, but more nodded, and Sara said, “Yes, I want to see who is there!” As they looked more at the same unchanging work, Ward finally said, “Even if we see the man, we can never know his true form.” The conversation continued from the classroom to their weekly journal sheets: “Surrealist art commonly encompasses the concept as seeing through the veil of illusion, and to be able to distinguish what is valid and what is a lie.  In, Magritte’s “Son of Man” a mystery man is concealed behind an apple which may lead many uneducated art historians to infer that man to be Adam or Jesus. Ward said “No!,” Magritte’s intent of the painting was to allow us to see beyond what we believe.”

In the next class, I began the same way. I wondered if anyone would have the same great Farouk-like visceral reaction. Sure enough, someone did. I asked, “What do you want to do with this painting?” The kind, sweet, and intellectually sharp Heidi, practically bared her claws as she answered, “You want to take the apple out of his face!”

Later in her journal sheet, Heidi wrote: “I look at it and I want to do everything in my power to get the apple away from the man's face. I saw it for the first time and was thinking, “Come on Magritte, you've got to be kidding.” Okay maybe not exactly that reaction, but after a couple seconds of staring at it I really wanted to see the man's face. I think that's what makes surrealism so interesting – it's kind of annoying and hits you right between the eyes in a way you really don't want it to. Even Meret Oppenheim's "Breakfast in Fur" is like this, very disquieting and weird and after awhile you want to keep looking at it and stop looking at it at the same time. But I really like how Magritte uses the disquieting nature of his art to make us think: did Adam only give us sin or did he give us curiosity too? Can there be good and bad in the same thing?

And there we have the comments that keep me in this business for years and years…instead of this just being a joke-y painting, Heidi wonders what the Son of Man bequeaths to us: is it the curiosity to want to move the apple??

Another student responded in writing in this way about the same work: “How could it be so simple? I thought that if an artwork could ever come to define humanity it would be grand, complex, and perhaps indecipherable, as Human Nature seems to be. We may not be so complex after all, or it may be our essential simplicity which makes us unique. I could not agree more with Rene Magritte, the essence of humanity is curiosity, as his Son of Man, 1964 implies. When I first saw the painting I was consigned to see the apple, I cannot move it, it’s a painting, the thought did not even cross my mind, maybe it did my unconscious mind. Ignorance, leading to conformity, could also be said to be part of what makes us human. After Farouk said his comment about wanting to move the apple, the realization flooded me. I did not desire to move the apple, for I may be afraid to see the reality of man….The fact that Mr. John told us that behind the apple is Magritte’s self-portrait, is an assumption I take to be true, yet question. It is almost as if learning in his class would be incomplete if he hadn’t, it is almost essential to have an assumption. I wonder if Magritte actually painted anything behind the apple and covered it, knowing he had unlocked humanity and had chosen to enclose its secret again while at the same time revealing its essence. I wonder if Magritte had to say that it was a self-portrait or some spectator would see the art work and be driven mad by the question.”

And yet another student writes about Heidi’s comment that “people want to take the apple away from his face.” An apple right in front of a face is more unnatural than on a hand, and the unusual makes the painting attractive and thought-provoking. As Adam is saddled with sin, what about this man in the suit? What is behind the apple, an ugly and evil face that is extremely non-human? People will get their own answers. When you first said that he could have simply painted the apple next to him, or even in his hand one name kept flashing in my mind like the lights of a car traveling down the highway in solitude at one am with no lights around it. The sirens rang in my mind like a huge fire truck announcing the emergency to the world. And as these two automobiles collided the small letters began to appear, and my mind focused on the letters lost in this scene of chaotic overturn. Have I build up the suspense? I think so, and so I will reveal the artist who has done just what we wanted, and what we willed Magritte to do, Gauguin. His face alike a Japanese painting looked lost in aukiyo-e a floating world. The red rages against his face, as a gold halo floats above him, crowning him with divinity. And yes, a lush apple he holds in his hand, whilst a snake lurks near by. The painting, as Magritte's screams Adam and Eve. I feel as though both paintings are trying to explore what sin is. After all Gauguin abandoned his family to live with several women in an unknown exotic part of Africa. What is sin? What is curiosity? Is it wrong to question authority? And although Milgrim surely thinks that in cases of violence authority must be questioned, according to the story of Adam and Eve authority should not be questioned, yet followed. I don't feel like Magritte is saying that we shouldn't follow authority and what rules they set, yet I believe he comments on the fact that we should question why they put those rules and to what extent get protect and help us. What I absolutely love about this piece is that it shows the continuity and transformation of perspective, all the way from Van Gogh and Cezanne who tried to paint all sides at once to Picasso and eventually to Magritte himself.

And I keep reading these intriguing journal sheets all coming out of this painting and class discussion. One student countered Heidi: “No, Heidi, we don't want to take the apple out! The apple is the essence of the painting. What we want to do is know what Magritte put the apple in there in the first place. In my belief we are all fruits, at first completely unripe and bitter with ignorance, and then we ripen we open ourselves to the light and gain the energy to truly live and be open to the world, and then somewhere in the middle of our lives we rot and are never quite the same again. What exactly makes us rot? Well society of course. As Mohammad Hawash once said in his declamation society is a hypocrite. It brings you up when it benefits from you and tosses you to the floor when it has finished using you. We conform to ideals that the majority believe in, we mirror other people's actions as to not feel or look out of place. As humans we adopt to the situations and change ourselves on the immediate assumption that we are he ones in the wrong when in reality everyone is in a dream stance too afraid to face reality, 'traum unt verchlichkeit' (if I spelt it right Freud's saying about dreams vs. reality). We shouldn't allow society to create faceless hollow people like Munch's painting of the street in Paris. Because we do not only become faceless, but we also begin to rot because as Michelangelo once said 'the brain rusts without use.” [Leonardo said that, but why quibble?!]

One student ended with, “What was Magritte’s aim here then? Is the world above us scared to see the reality below? Are they hiding away from reality also?”

Oh, yeah the crazy week and the hospital. Oh, that’s not a big deal—I had a stomach flu, kind of thing, colleagues were kind to me, I went to the hospital, had tests, and they sent me home. My diaphragm had expanded to twice its size. The really crazy thing of the week is that my students sat for a test this week that covered 5,000 years of art and history. And they loved it!

This morning I finished the long novel, The Goldfinch. SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS NOT A SPOILER ALERT.  Toward the end of the book there is this epiphany, and it tells you nothing about the plot, but it dovetails nicely with my students’ growing and yearning and my satisfaction as an educator:

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

Because—isn’t it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture—? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: “Be yourself. Follow your heart.”

Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—?

and finally at the end:

Because if our secrets define us, as opposed to the face we show the world: then the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am.

Maybe this little Magritte can help us know who we are.