Echoes of the ardent voice

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    Abstract

    ![CDATA[I met Jan Zwicky in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in a class­room, in the fall, I think, of 1995. I was a student, a very poor student (in both senses, I recall) attempting to qualify for an MA program, and she was a contract employee teaching, I believe, a course on literary theory - a most unusual course for the time, organized around a reading of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. The closest thing to literature in the course was a sequence of terrible short poems, or terrible translations at any rate, that frame Nietzsche's Gay Science. Come to think of it, there wasn't much theory on the syllabus either, although there was a great deal of philosophy - a distinction, I suspect, that Jan would still insist upon to this day. I remember, one morning, Jan trying to explain for a group of English undergraduate students the difference between rationalism and empiricism. What, she asked the class, would you know for certain, if you were suspended in a completely blackened room, deprived of all sensory experience. Arrogant little bastard that I was, I instantly replied: "It's dark." Jan was the only person to laugh. I am fairly sure that Jan and I became friends at that moment, probably because she immediately conjured up the lyric possibilities of a sensuous darkness, or a pitched knowledge, or an oblique intuition, or something far more profound than could have been intended by my wilful, pointless effort to attract attention. A friendship, then, based on an ignorant comment, or on my own public ignorance, and Jan's wisdom. Or maybe the other way around (with the exception of the wisdom part), although I say this with some trepidation, hoping that it will be understood. For Jan soon became the supervisor of my MA, which was presented, with the enthusiasm and conviction that invariably renders youth embarrassing as it mercifully fades, as a criticism of Derrida, about whom Jan at the time readily admitted that she knew very little, almost nothing. How, then, can a teacher teach something about which they know almost nothing? How can a teacher instruct another in her or his own ignorance? We all know what it means to teach what we do know - to formalize a topic, assemble lessons according to stages of difficulty, arrange a process of measured explication, examine at regular intervals to ensure that information has been absorbed. But what does it mean to teach what we don't know, or what cannot be organized according to the strictures of knowledge and the pedantry of lessons? More to the point, what does it mean to teach, not our accumulated knowledge, but our unique attitude towards thought, which is a condition rather than a function of language, which typically remains si­lent within us, and which, like the daimon of Greek mythology, seems to look over our shoulder at the world from behind our back, thus visible to others but never to ourselves?]]
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationLyric Ecology : an Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky
    EditorsMark Dickinson, Tim Quick, Clare Goulet
    Place of PublicationCanada
    PublisherCormorant Books
    Pages248-253
    Number of pages6
    ISBN (Print)9781897151778
    Publication statusPublished - 2009

    Keywords

    • Zwicky
    • Jan
    • 1955-

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