The Educating Space: Questions and Answers

from The Chronicle | Spring 2022 | 125th Anniversary Edition

The Hungry Cat Gnaws on a Sliver of Mirror

artifaCt Phase ii

Graphite on paper

aPoloGy letter to the hearts i assume i ’ ve Broken

let’s start with a double negative. let’s start with i meant it. let me feed the cat as an apology, even though it’s your job (because you don’t hurt somebody even if you want something else). let’s start with there’s never not something that needs to be done, like making it all about me again. let’s try one more time. the cat falls off the bed clings on tight like we’ll still make it yet makes no effort to pull itself back up. and you watch, and you don’t help (because of course you wouldn’t). let’s have a storm today. let’s have something to cry over. the cat will never not land on its feet.

Tate Gee

[insert here a picture of your first love.] [insert here an outline of your guilty fingers after you first learned to pull enough heartstrings to break a heart completely.] [in this space, sloppily glue the pictures of your face taken after every time your cousins told you that you were a square-ass book jockey.] [here you should tape a picture of every tear you cried for reasons you couldn’t explain to anyone but yourself.] [here, insert a polaroid for every wave of insults your mother ever hurled ever at you. next to it, insert the grains of sand which once formed the rock that was your self-confidence.] [using duct tape, pine needles, and a stick of glue, attach the endless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches you made yourself when you had nothing else to eat.] [on the most obscure corner of the most obscure page, insert the photo you took of yourself when you were a skeleton that slept on bus station floors.] [on a far-away page, which you will rediscover in time, paste a yellow ribbon, so you remember your homecoming.] [on the back of your scrapbook, carefully pour several gallons of gasoline. light it with the dying coals of your teenage angst.]

[here, remember the time you burned books and watched a yellow stripe float into the night sky]

Houston Louis Keenan

CREATOR’S NOTE In “d.i.y. scrapbook for childhood traumas,” I attempt to challenge poetic form by using a scrapbook/D.I.Y. format, linking the poem’s structure to the domestic subject matter. This is intended to raise questions on how we are expected to cope with the traumas of the past, and what place they ought to play in our lives.

the hunGry Cat Gnaws on a sliver of mirror

Audrey Hunt

Silkscreen print

CREATOR’S NOTE This silkscreen print is a response to a poem titled The Wild Pear Tree by Kaveh Akbar. The image was created through a combination of photograph collage and digital drawing in Adobe Photoshop. The image was then separated into layers on a film positive and each one exposed to a light sensitive screen. The image was then hand printed in 4 layers, one each a different color of ink onto the paper. The imagery displays my response to Akbar’s poem which comes from a collection of poems discussing personal growth and addiction. The symbols I used reflected a feeling of longing, loss, and loneliness yet also becoming comfortable with oneself. The piece acts as separate from the poem, yet still concerning the same topics and my own sentiment with the content.

3 am imPressions should Be violently iGnored

don’t push your luck what if i want to push my luck, after a while? what if i want to feel the sun every day to lay in a bed of daisies watching chrysanthemums bloom in the distance? the random bits of gold, saxe, and lavender dancing in the outlying blurs what if i want to test the fates? nudge them a little in the direction of my choosing for once would it be such a bad thing? would it be such a bad thing to push my luck?

a Poem aBout nothinG

one of life’s cruelest ironies is the number of things that seem like love but aren’t;

things that seem permanent but remain subject to the cycles of change, things like psychedelics, like cheap beer, like long afternoons in the sun with someone you thought was the one. one of life’s greatest joys is learning to fall out of love, learning to dissociate from life; to be but to be empty, nothing but a mind of wind and bones; not to forget about the warmth of the soul but to maintain a slight distance from it so that you may consider the hot and the cold simultaneously. i was taught this lesson by birds, by scattered trees, sea anemones, my absent father, cycles of trauma, high school drama, but never by being free. the truth is there is balance in the comings and goings of the tide. remember that the most useful part of a vase is not the vase itself but the space inside it. allow yourself to be filled.

Houston Louis Keenan

CREATOR’S NOTE “a poem about nothing” explores the emptiness of worldly things, and how this emptiness can be a comfort and source of inspiration. It was inspired by the works of the recently deceased Zen master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh.

maliBu ’ s Coast

Sydney Lykins

Photography

the eduCatinG sPaCe: questions & answers

Because you mostly see me smiling and laughing, you don’t realize that I navigate the educating space with a cloud of negativity. My actions hide the true existence of the misrepresentations of My Words, My Actions, and My Motives. A kind-hearted smile and jubilant greeting that accompanies my presence in your presence conceals the negative correspondences – in writing and spoken (aloud and whispered – behind, before me) – all because I’m different.

Different – not because my quest isn’t the same as some, maybe all who seek knowledge and the socialization projected in words written about how the educating space should be, can be - in a space meant for education and educating. If you removed my skin or the color thereof, it wouldn’t change who I am or how I experience life – inside and outside the educating space. I ask questions … A LOT OF THEM!

My questions are: thought provoking, challenging, intimate, broad, narrow, correcting, connecting, convincing, convicting, repetitive, clarifiers, clarifying, time consuming, require - immediate responses, timely responses, post-moment responses – just responses. They are not purposed to express my dissatisfaction or to address the faults that they find in others or the organization that encompasses my scholarly identities.

Rather, they are about Me, the things I need to know, want to know… to grow, to learn, to live, to navigate the educating space that claims to aim to educate and elevate me and individuals like me – who can’t change their glamorous external features to make questions seem like natural aspects of socialization permissible to peers who navigate the same space with privileges not available to all. My questions are for me! They require action, attention, addressing … an answer!

Trying to silence my many questions and the ways I navigate my paths to success CAN’T, WON’T, WILL NOT, SHOULD NOT, WOULD NOT, COULD NOT, ever happen… unless I am gone or chose to silence them on my own. Each question opens my eyes and world to experience an injustice that exists, persists in a space where equals of my scholarly identities are meant to be socialized in the educating space where a wall exists that didn’t exist, and a wall persists that always persisted.

The educating space … where 30 years span my initial experience from my current existence, has witnessed an educator at my level, my color, my identity, decrease by one – when only one existed. A ponderance that awakens a new question that yearns to be answered with a timely response that is greater than a promise of tomorrow. It is a question of social justice. It is my question - one that requires action, attention, addressing … an answer!

Because the difference between decreased by one – when only one began, is NONE. And NONE - in the educating space - perpetuates problems with increasing educators of my likeness. Shouldn’t questions persist or exist to challenge the work, the efforts, the difference, the claims, and the aim of the educating space?

I now question… Can I be educated before and without those who are educating being educated on how to socialize and educate someone who is uniquely, differently like me?

I have special needs: I ask questions … A LOT OF THEM! And they require ACTION, ATTENTION, ADDRESSING … AN ANSWER!