"My Teacher Has Corrupted Me"

I had the privilege of accompanying over 30 teen artists to an air-conditioned space. Lucky for us, that space was the Art Institute of Chicago. During our hours wandering the galleries, I made the impromptu decision to record the casual conversations sprouting in front of artwork. There were sassy voices, thoughtful voices, and brave whispered voices barely trickling into the microphone of my iphone. This collage of conversations has been whittled down to 9 minutes from almost 2 hours of chatting. Each conversation in the video is accompanied by the original artwork we were looking at when we were talking. Just like any good teacher, in order to really listen to the students, you have to lean in close and stay there.  So turn up the volume on your computer and lean in.

50 yards from Crazy

At the end of May, I rented a yurt in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This was to be a business trip to work on things. I left on a Monday morning, grabbing antihistamine and one last iced coffee in Skokie before getting on the highway. After hours with my thoughts driving across what would be Governor Walker's Wisconsin, I found myself at the edge of Lake Superior in a remote old growth forest where the signs are amazingly still in English. I found no one around except a man and his dog several hundred yards away at another campsite.

This would be my home for 3 nights: a round wooden frame hut with a canvas skin. Inside were bunk beds and a table and chairs. The yurt had plastic windows looking out from a tangle of branches at Lake Superior's shore.  I stayed there by myself with no electricity, sleeping with heat from a woodstove (it got into the 30s at night), and all the food I would need packed in tupperware. I made instant coffee on a miniature propane camping stove. My diet consisted mostly of bananas,  pre-cooked pasta, rice and beans, a jar and half of peanut butter, and an enormous bar of dark chocolate.

 In the stillness that was my circular hut above the waves,  I watched the energy of the peanut butter turn directly into lines on paper and rocks. Peanut butter turns almost directly into words here with little interference from myself. I tried letting art happen like freckles. The yurt started working its winding spell turning around my thoughts. With no other people or any electronic source of sound to drown me out, I belted out fake opera singing all day long at the little table and chair. At one point, I could have sworn I achieved throat singing. Perhaps this two toned sound in my throat is only possible when no one is in earshot of it circulating round and round in my corner-less yurt universe.  I've decided that all of these uninhibited aural and visual experiences I had should be attributed to the intoxication that can only come from isolation.

No one told me that I've been 50 yards from crazy all this time. Just put at least a 50 yard radius between me and any other human and I dip down into my own universe. I can't think of a time in my life I've been at least 50 yards away from other humans, strangers or not, for an extended amount of time.  It became completely dark around 10pm each night but I continued to work on the floor next to the woodstove, a modest heat source that was occasionally fueled by bad-drawing-kindling. The flies would flitter and dart around the plastic walls of the Eveready 6 volt battery lantern making it look like a candlelit room. Spiders and other things with legs would meander across my drawings.
With no electricity to recharge devices, I used 3 different cameras until they ran out of power. I worked at documenting everything as if I were a spy on myself. In between naps and long hikes, I found a distinctive slab of rock about a quarter mile away from my yurt at the shore of the lake. I ended up embedding my endless pages of torn up handwriting onto this rock...as you do.  I worked all afternoon on my second day adhering the paper to the rock. I made several trips back to observe this installation I'm calling "Rock Written." On the day I left the yurt, I took one last walk to my writing on the rock. While looking closely at how the paper was holding up to the wind and the waves, I noticed fresh cigarette ash resting in a crevice next to the paper. Was I being watched from the trees? Who was here?!?! Does someone know I was singing all day? Did someone have a moment with my writing this morning before I came back? Did they sit inside the paper circle? Were they just passing by and flicked their ashes on my rock? Did it blow in from some mysterious ship sailing by? I left the writing on the rock to decompose and drove home to Chicago that Thursday afternoon.  Since then, I've been staring at these photos on my computer trying to decide if what I made was remarkable or not. I've also been wondering about the choice and act of being alone and the feeling of being alone. Was I really in isolation for 4 days and is that rock still holding my words?

Turtles and Dutch People are Awesome...and other scary tales of learning Spanish

I've been trying to complete a little sculpture about fear and learning. The sculpture began taking form on my trip in Mexico. As much of my thinking happens, it is taking shape by writing about it, tearing up the writing, and then gluing it back together. After my time in Latin America, I have thought a lot about what it means to be foreign, in every sense of the word, and to be different and try to learn.
Prior to this trip, I had spent two years of grad school thinking and practicing to be an art teacher-straddling the worlds of "teacher" and "student" and thinking about power and privilege and access to information. Going to Mexico put me firmly back in the role of student, in an unknown territory, with many privileges voluntarily stripped from me. I lived the paradox of having the means and privilege to travel across borders but to also be totally paralyzed and infantilized by the newness around me and a language I didn't speak. How do I wash my clothes? How do I ask for medicine at the drug store? How do I explain who I am and what I'm doing there? To be a learner is to be a foreigner and it requires courage, patience, the ability to be alone for a long time, and self-love.
My goal -to learn Spanish- was met largely through one-one-one intensive courses with tutors who only spoke Spanish with me.  As I've recounted before, learning a new language can be magical: the new sounds coming out of my mouth, the strangers who became friends in a new language with me, or hearing a new common phrase click in my head as I walked down the road. But learning, of course, can be excruciatingly painful and lonely. I recall towards the end of my trip, I was really trying to blast through the Intermediate Spanish plateau that so many learners struggle to surpass. So much information was coming at me during one class and instead of seeing it as a fault of the teacher, or for speaking up for myself or asking to change course, I started blaming myself. That abyss between student knowledge and teacher understanding of their student is amplified in a language learning setting. An easy example: The teacher explains in Spanish what homework I should do, then I go and do something else and return with the wrong assignment. I really thought I understood. How many times do we think someone is not listening to us when really it was just interpreted differently? During one class, I felt so upset with myself that I hadn't figured out a conjugation and, according to my own goals, I was way behind. I fought back tears while the teacher talked even more loudly at me trying to shout the pronunciations and concepts into my skull. (Increased volume does not increase clarity and understanding, just my adrenaline.) Despite being an adult who chose to be in that room and was paying for it, I felt like a 13 year old who wanted to cuss him out and leave the room. I felt this strange hostility bubbling up when he asked me questions I couldn't answer. Stop exposing my ignorance, maestro! In that moment, I learned to be a more compassionate teacher and swore to never forget that feeling of being lost and isolated. I try to imagine that feeling when the power reverses and someone else "just isn't getting it" when I explain something seventeen times over. That's the feeling of being lost at sea without touching and seeing the bottom of the ocean but laughing at the turtle under your belly....that is the feeling I'm trying to  squeeze into the little boxes of my sculpture so I never forget.

I say all this not because I want you to know how brave I am or how well I can take money out of an ATM machine in a foreign country. I say this because it has become more and more clear to me that we live in a culture of fear and taking a step out of our country, our comfort zones, our language, our circles, our expected "career paths" is a radical counter-action to fear. It is an attempt at love and imagination. When I think about my unplanned trip to Mexico with no return ticket, the word trust keeps coming up...and imagination. I couldn't have done this trip without imagination. I joked with others, "Am I crazy for doing this?" because intense use of your imagination feels unsound, unreasonable. It was unreasonable because I didn't need reason; I needed imagination. And curiosity. And trust. There was no reason to trust the taxi driver who made the sign of the cross and kissed his hand before accelerating wildly out of the airport and into the tangle of Mexico City. There was no reason to trust the chef on the street and follow him home on the subway. (Okay, that was a little crazy.) There was no reason to trust my naive, Anglo-brain, riding into the mountains without proper footwear and not nearly enough Dramamine. There was no reason to trust that my backpack stowed under the bus would be there in the morning. There was no reason that I should jump out of a boat in the ocean, a mile off shore with a turtle and a man I met on the beach. (I did trust the advice of a few Dutch people about which building to stamp my passport at the Guatemalan border. Now that was reasonable.) To leave the familiar and to move somewhere by yourself requires imagination...which is why I think artists are always traveling. We tend to imagine another way and another world. It's a feminist act as well. When men or women go outside of our usual network, our usually defenses, I believe we're actually respecting our hardy individual strengths and trusting our intuitive feminist selves.
So many people have asked me, "Weren't you scared traveling alone?" They usually are referencing sensational crime stories they hear on the news or have distorted notions of foreigners as all being dangerous criminals preying on young American women. I also think what they're really saying is "I'm afraid of doing that myself." I try to respond: Life is just as scary when you stay in one place, in one confined box, and don't use your imagination. Or I make a less eloquent response exaggerating the crime rates in Rogers Park. Whatever you take away from this, turtles and Dutch people are awesome and Rogers Park is a perfectly fine place to live.

Learning to see the subjunctive.

Back in a Virginia cemetery in...2008, was it?

 In the words of my former Spanish classmate: "The cemetery is a great place to learn the subjunctive." "May you rest eternally in peace...We desire that you go with God... May you fly on wings to heaven where I would one day meet you..."  I was pretty psyched to improve my Spanish in the cemetery, particularly the elusive Spanish subjunctive, because we all know how much I already love the cemetery. You might recall the great road trip to Virginia with my dear friends, Natasha and Stacie. We played a few tunes in front of the Stanley Brothers graves...oh, and don't forget that I made a whole calendar of Famous Chicago Graves. Oh, the memories...See them all at my now obsolete-"gathering-cyberdust"-blog here: http://jeanfitz.wordpress.com/category/cemeteries/
OK, back to Mexico.
I did, indeed, dip my toe into the subjunctive while browsing the rows of graves in the local cemetery here in Oaxaca. For the extra curious, you can gawk at my largely out-of-focus photos on Facebook, capturing some of the great parades, festivals, and art everywhere you look this time of year.

What I really want to talk about though is learning a language and how getting sick abroad is HARD.
It might not be "getting pepper sprayed in the face" hard but...it's hard. Just when I thought I was getting over the epic Guatemalan adventure with bugs and feeling normal, I started to feel crumby again. My same eye started to itch and get puffy again, too. My Spanish teacher recommended that I try an ointment that was supposed to work wonders. I took her advice and went to the corner store. I immediately applied the cream, Terramicina, onto my eye as directed by the sweet lady behind the counter who is probably not a pharmacist. After a shallow internet search later that day, I learned that in the U.S., Terramicina was only approved for cats and dogs by the FDA. In California, you need a prescription to give it to your pet.
In Mexico, you just need 80 pesos.

Essentials

In the next couple of days, I woke up with the tell-tale signs of pink eye. I did not rationally conclude: “I have pink eye.” Rather, I assumed that the mythical bot fly had burrowed its way behind my eye and began eating away at the part of my brain reserved for conjugating verbs in the Spanish subjunctive. Either way, I resolved to seek legitimate medical attention. I went with my proverbial tail between my legs and my actual doggie eyeball cream regretfully in tow to help describe my saga. So you know how it can be difficult to communicate how you feel to a doctor in your first language? Well this doctor visit in a foreign language, my friends, is when all of my Spanish was put to the test. These were no longer pronoun exercises and small talks on your favorite movie stars in Spanish class. This was a "What are these drugs going to do to my body and why?" kind of chat. I think we communicated the essentials. Whether this second ailment had any connection to the bugbites in Guatemala remains unclear.

So I got the drugs and returned home. From there, I passed the time reading about international pharmaceuticals and video taping lizards crawling across my ceiling. I also brushed up on my tenses and began comparing English and Spanish tenses from an evolutionary standpoint. Did the future perfect continuous become necessary for our survival as a species?
- I will have been eating that dead wooly mammoth when the lions try to eat our children. -for example, is a rather complex but perhaps vital statement to communicate. You don’t want your fellow tribe member to assume your action of eating has finished and you are in any shape to protect your offspring or do the next important survival skill...like the Spanish subjunctive.

What I do know is that thousands of years later, this lady called Saint Lucy became your go-to gal for all your eye problems. I just learned about her in the museum the other day. Maybe if you put a few pesos in the hole carved out of her chest, she'll make sure your eyeball problems get better. Man, I wish I had known about her BEFORE I bought the doggie eye cream or got bit in Guatemala. Here's looking at you, Santa Lucia! I'm thankful I still have my eyesight!!!

Just a couple of eyeballs on a plate belonging to Santa Lucia, patron saint of eyeballs.