#3
My main focus in life, even before puberty, was sex even though I didn’t realize it until later. (There is no doubt in my mind that Freud was right about pre-pubescent sexuality.) As an undergraduate at Cornell my interests expanded into psychedelics. I understood at some level that one had to make a so-called “living” but I deferred thinking about it while my father supported my basic needs. I could make a little extra here and there, there were a lot of other kids with money, I had a knack for frugality, and it was the 1960s: The whole concept of making a living was being assaulted by the hippies (with whom I did not totally identify).
I was not academically inclined at the time. All the hip kids (not necessarily hippies) were focused on psychology, given what was going on in our own minds, but I was prevented from majoring in it because of low grades. The only subject for which I qualified was anthropology: In one introductory course taught by Robert Ascher, I experienced detailed if not total recall of the lectures, and I got an “A” without really trying (which is how I was approaching all my courses, having suffered burn-out in high school). No special connection developed with Prof. Ascher, and the experience of recall didn’t happen again in college (at least with respect to academics). I majored in anthropology because it was the only subject in which I qualified, and graduated a semester late, after my advisor noticed that my grades predictably plummeted in spring (due to what can fairly be called biological reasons) thereby moving me to take leave in the spring of my junior year so I could string two fall semesters together and complete my requirements. And although I majored in anthropology, I knew little about the subject and understood less when I finished. (I tell students today that going to a good school and getting a good education are two different things.)
During the next five years I continued to “explore life” on my own. This is ordinarily taken to be a purely good thing (not unlike wealth, fame and guruship); there being, however, two sides to everything, there were also explorations into thoughtlessness and recklessness. One particular exploration that I wish everyone could make was being and feeling free to do nothing. Due to the almost limitless liberties my father allowed, and which I took (my mother died when I was a boy and he never remarried) I was willing and able to utterly indulge myself in Brazil—in Rio de Janeiro, no less—where my father worked for months at a time, out of which a salient memory of mine is lying on my bed one afternoon and banging my head against the wall—not hard enough to injure myself but enough to express my frustration and impress on myself the need for structure in my life. I needed to work.
I had worked at various jobs, in advertising, finance, car rentals, art auctions, journalism and sales in a store, office, on the street, out of a truck, and in an open (“flea”) market (not in that order)—all at low levels but nonetheless enough to know that I was not good at, nor did I enjoy “business.” (I put the word in quotes because it basically means the act of being busy, although it has come to mean acts specifically in pursuit of profit, which I find to be a socially alienating experience, the principle of profit being predatory from the start.)
The default solution in such situations is to go back to school to learn a profession. It was my assessment that, besides sex, I liked to read and write and talk about ideas, and I liked summers off, so school itself seemed like the right place. I would study to become a teacher. And high school seemed like the right level because it is intellectually mature yet not highly specialized and therefore free from what I considered the oppression of ambition.
I needed a Master’s degree in education, so I headed for the University of Nevada in Reno because, for one, I knew I could work the “graveyard” shift at a casino at night and go to class during the day. Also—and I say this with some love—the school was not highly selective in admissions. Relevant courses for the degree included anthropology, so I started there, to make it easier on myself after so long.
To cut to the chase, as it is said, I so immersed myself in study that I never got a grade below A again, earned a Master’s degree in anthropology (the school did not offer the Ph.D.), and was accepted at doctoral programs in several highly rated schools. I used to joke (self-effacingly) about Nevada’s modest status in the academic world, but I learned there what I did not learn at Cornell. Enough said.
My academic ardor was intense. One Friday night I was sitting at a little table in a corner of a storage room that I used for studying. I might have acted slightly annoyed when a fellow student stopped by to sigh and tell me how much he longed for a rest, having gone straight into graduate school. I knew he didn’t know about my situation and I didn’t try to explain: I just told him I was staying late and watched him walk away shaking his head. When I left, as usual, in the wee hours of Saturday morning, I walked home past the casinos in downtown Reno, where the action was peaking with the games and the shows and the honky-tonking, which were all appearing increasingly alien to me. I was still indulging myself, but now it was in “work.”
The teaching too began at Nevada. After my first two courses in anthropology the faculty offered me a teaching assistantship if I could conduct the laboratory sessions in an introductory course in human evolution, which would also mean I could quit the casino. I had studied only cultural, never physical anthropology, which is more akin to biology (and I had failed biology at Cornell because the labs were too early in the morning). But of course I took the deal: Each weekend I studied what I would be teaching the following week, an experience in which I learned the subject and learned that sharing the learning process with students is a very effective but very rare event in education.
In the lab was a human skeleton that was used for demonstration. It fascinated me that this was the remains of a real person. That having been said, one of the lessons I taught was how to “sex” a skeleton, to find out whether it’s male or female. The test involves inserting one’s fingers into the pubic arch, which is located where you might think it is: If three fingers slide in easily, it’s female; if only two fingers, it’s male. Now, one pedagogical challenge here is to perform this act in front of a class while keeping a straight face. The problem here is that knowing one shouldn’t laugh (or even smile) deepens the temptation to do just that. Also, one must avoid eye contact with anyone because it’s obviously too suggestive. What this does, I discovered, is to free the teacher to imagine who the audience/class is. As misguided as that might sound, the reality, I believe, is that it is impossible for anyone to really know anyone else (it’s enough to know oneself). Teachers are pummeled with the ideal of understanding their students; I contend that what is more important is how the teacher envisions the students being addressed. (It should go without saying that this vision should be consistent with a knowledge of the external reality.) And besides what one imagines any other individual to be, the teacher must, cognitively speaking, create some more or less concise image of the class as a whole, at whom or which the teacher directs the lesson.
So I learned that acting (and sometimes “acting out”) is a large part of teaching, and that there is or can be a sexual component—sexuality here not (necessarily) meaning physical contact. Merely the sharing of an awareness of sex, being as it is such a deep instinct—provides a common connection or bridge to the students’ personal realities.
No Guru 