Educated Overmastery

[Anne Bradstreet]

Kinda like Ishmael trying to grasp the (is it ineffable or unphathemable
mysterypf fantom of a white whale or the sea or the mystery that is You or a
tattoo'd skin. A whaling ship his Harvard, his Yale. Not a bad education for
a kingly common, that! Andrew Jackson lifted from the pebbles, Buyban in
prison, Brown, Anatomy of Mellons and Colonies and fast and loose fish.

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 8:22 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>wrote:

> Educated Overmastery
> October 28, 2008 · No Comments
> Periodical: Lapham's Quarterly, Fall 2008
> Exhibition: Light Seeking Light, Western Bridge
> Literature: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
>
>
> The fall edition of Lapham's Quarterly examines various understandings
> of learning.  William Deresiewicz's opening essay in "The Hypothesis"
> section (originally published in The Disadvantages of an Elite
> Education) briefly dissects the American Ivy League educational
> system.  Deresiewucz describes the instance of being unable to make
> small talk with (none other than) his plumber at age 35 as the
> catalyst for his realization that the education he experienced at Yale
> and Columbia was lacking:
>
> "It's not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of
> my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach
> you is its own inadequacy.  As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia
> have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to
> flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do
> for them." (Lapham's Quarterly Fall 2008, 23)
>
> Having only attended state universities, I cannot support or deny this
> statement, but it brought to mind the title of Western Bridge's
> current exhibition Light Seeking Light.  Referencing the famous
> anti-academic words from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, somewhere
> between Deresiewucz's essay and the exhibition is the element of
> overmastery.  The easiest piece in the exhibition to overmaster is
> Mary Temple's Raise.  Upon first glance, the brain assumes the art is
> made of paper cutouts, strung along the windows in an unseen location.
>  Few would fail to notice the perceptual inconsistencies of an
> immobile shadow upon closer inspection, but in an age when the general
> public has been found to spend an average of 3 seconds or less with
> works of art in a museum, overmastery is natural: we like something or
> do not like it.  We momentarily engage or do not engage at all.  Like
> the student who has lost the desire be challenged, the viewer who
> overmasters an image will not realize what is being missed.
>
> Thomas Pynchon's Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 demonstrates the
> problems of overmastery of the image as she seeks the meaning behind
> the W.A.S.T.E. symbol throughout the novel:
>
> "Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to
> end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues,
> announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which
> must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which
> must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly,
> leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back."
> (Pynchon 76)
>
> The W.A.S.T.E. symbol is not understood through Maas's relentless
> research (or possibly at all).  In The Crying of Lot 49, the
> traditional end result is not necessarily significant; seeking it
> vehemently may lead to obscure understandings.  While the same is not
> always true in art, it is worth considering the looking process before
> beginning to step away from a work and before the moment is dismissed.
>
> http://peripheralvisionblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/educated-overmastery/
>
>
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