Self-Portrait

My favorite class to teach at Champlain is our Aesthetic Expression class that is in the second year. Like all Champlain classes it is interdisciplinary, and is a great fit for me because it focuses on art and literature and music, and is thus pretty clearly in my wheel house (or at least my perceived wheel house) - at the very least I really enjoy teaching it. The students are supposed to learn about the Western aesthetic, but also their own aesthetic. It is also designed to teach them how to interpret art. As Epictetus reminds us, "Making a statue requires skill, and viewing a statue aright requires skill also." A key component in the class is the creation of a student self-portrait. Some of my colleagues don't seem to like the project and complain that they get lousy results. I have been more fortunate, but that might relate to the fact that I really focus on it and encourage/prod/pound my students into giving me a quality product. My basic rule, which every one of my students can repeat (usually with a shutter) is "no collages" - well, actually, it is a little more graphic than that. The reason why I don't allow collages is that they're stupid, at least at any point past the 7th grade. More importantly, it is very difficult for them to convey any sense of uniqueness. OK, it is series of photo-shopped (or, old school, cut and pasted, and not computer cut and pasted) pictures of your mom and friends and hobbies. Well, I have a mom and friends (even me) and hobbies, so this tells me nothing. To simplify things I press them to think of the one thing that sets them apart from everyone who has ever existed, and it can be a painful process. Last summer a quarter of my students broke down in tears when presenting, which means they dug down a little more deeply than I was intending, but rather that than the alternative. Having said all this, the thing that I hope to do someday is take part in the experiment and create my own self-portrait. We look at a lot of famous and obscure self-portraits and take them apart, and I talk about what I would put in my own self-portrait, but I have never actually created my own. For some time I've been thinking about taking a drawing or painting class, not only for my own enjoyment/enrichment, but also so that I would know more to share with the students. Maybe this is a first step. Here's a picture I took of myself in a sultan's mausoleum next to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. You can just make me out. I was merrily snapping away at the beautiful tiles when I realized that I could see an outline of myself, and thus the experiment began. Maybe I like it because I am "lost" in the history, which probably speaks a lot about me. There is the old belief that psychologists go into their field to try and figure out why they're so crazy. In a similar way my friend Eric Usatch told me that people go into communication to figure out why they can't communicate. I've often thought that the reason why I like history so much is that it allows me to replace my own history with someone else's: a history more interesting or meaningful or important. So, I'm still there, you just have to work to find me. I've always been much more comfortable listening to other folks talk about themselves than talking about myself. Many people consider me to be a very good listener, and that may relate to the fact that I find other people's stories more interesting than my own - or it could just be a defense mechanism. Reveal more of your own history to me, while I hide my own.