Honing The Talent
B Pascal
Chapter 9
Frameworks And The Museum Tour
It took a moment to get myself oriented, but I found my way back to the dorm. Larry was still snoring, face down on his bed, so I grabbed a towel and a change of clothes and went off to the showers. I brushed my teeth and changed into clean clothes and went back to the room. I put the old clothes in the hamper, lay back on my bed and closed my eyes.
“What do you think you’re doing coming in at this hour, young man!”
“Very funny, Larry. I’m tired.”
“So let’s hear it. What happened?”
“Uh-uh, I’m not a kiss and tell kind of guy.”
“So you did do it! I knew it! She looked hot. Lucky bastard.”
“Larry, go have breakfast, let me sleep.”
“Oh, you’re going to tell me, Carter, just you wait.”
But he did eventually put on some clothes and go off to find food. I slept for a couple of hours and woke feeling better. There were some dreams, I think, and boobs featured prominently, but the details were fuzzy.
I got up and went to the food factory for a sandwich. I brought the abnormal psychology book with me to read while I ate. Afterwards, I wondered if I should go to the library for more research, but in the end I thought I should make sure I was up to date on my class work.
From his bed, Larry, who was also reading a textbook, looked up at me periodically to appraise me.
And so the week repeated itself beginning on Monday. I was careful to keep up with the reading, and to review my class notes, in order to keep this material structured in my head. Each of these classes had a framework onto which the topics discussed in class were overlaid.
If we kept that organization intact, the exams would be easy. If we lost the framework or never built it in the first place, then the material became just a collection of random facts to be memorized. It was hard to do the exams without a matrix in which to understand the material.
And it was only by virtue of being able to “see” into a teacher’s epicenter that I knew about these frameworks.
I wondered why no one had tried to diagram these and present them to students in class. It would have made retention and understanding of the material much easier. Then I thought, it might be that instructors don’t recognize that there is a framework, that it is constructed by the mind unwittingly as we try to collate the facts that comprise a subject and see the relationships among them. Hmmm, that might be worth following up on. I put it in the back of my mind.
In fact, I really couldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my “independent research projects”, because I was finding the course material was getting a bit more detailed and complex. So far I was keeping up okay, but I was seeing some panicked looks on other student faces. I had an advantage, of course, but these were seriously smart people to have been admitted here, and if they were starting to worry, it would behoove me to worry a bit, too.
So I focused on my classes, trying to get a jump on the reading and exercises, and going back periodically to review what I’d already learned. I’d have midterms creeping up on me before I knew it, so no slacking. On Wednesday I got back to my room and found a note taped to my door.
Someone had taken a call from Gail, who left a message with the name and author of the art history survey she recommended. It was nice of her to remember. I’d take it out from the library.
Larry was doing his best, but his study discipline left something to be desired. I would help him with his math every so often, and he seemed to be able to pick it up, but didn’t much like it.
I’d finally convinced him that he did not have a genetic abnormality that prevented him from doing math. It was a chore for him, but he was slogging through it. But I wasn’t sure how he was coping with the rest of his classes.
The following Monday when I stopped by the campus post office I found a letter in my box From California. I felt my heart jump as I saw it. I wanted to rip it open right there and read it, but I was two minutes away from the start of English class and I forced myself to put it in my bag. I was distracted all through class knowing that it was there, calling out to me.
As soon as the bell rang, I was out of there like a shot. I went to the cafeteria and got coffee and found a table. I could almost feel her excitement as she told me about the campus, her classes, what she was reading, her roommates (she had two), what clubs she had joined, and so on. The overall theme I picked up was her intoxication by the exposure to ideas that she found everywhere on campus.
People there, students and teachers, were excited about new ideas, discussing them, thinking about them, inventing them, discarding them. She found it stimulating and was caught up in it. She talked very little about the social aspects of her campus life, and I wondered whether she hadn’t yet had time for it, or if she was avoiding talking about it. That was my paranoia poking its head out, sure that she would find some smarter, more handsome guy who would take my place. I had to fight it down.
She asked some questions about my classes, and I started composing my letter to her in my head. I hated how long it took for letters to get back and forth, and I really wanted to hear her voice, but cross-country phone calls then were still really expensive, and there was no guarantee that she would be near the phone when I called. Assuming I was able to afford to call. I forced myself to put the letter away and to get my head back in study mode, as psychology class was due to start soon.
I answered her letter that evening, and mailed it the next morning. In it, at the end, I lamented how long it took to get her reply and how much it frustrated me.
We were couple of weeks into the term, and the instructors in English and European History had already assigned research papers that would be due in a couple of weeks, so that was added on to my existing work. We’d already had some quizzes on the most recent lectures, but no large tests yet. Those would come soon enough. I’d done pretty well on the quizzes.
After dinner, I spent some time reading the art history book Gail had recommended, which I’d gotten from the library the previous weekend. I liked the paintings well enough and could see why they were memorable, but was struggling to try to classify the artists, to put them in some sort of hierarchy where I could see how each was influenced, and where styles started to diverge.
This was exactly where I’d noticed that students had trouble learning because they could not see the overall structure or framework that linked the concepts. I’d be able to understand this better if I took a class on it and could peek into the instructor’s epicenter and assimilate the framework of art knowledge they had built for themselves through years of study. Without that, I would have to struggle.
Maybe it would help to get a tutor. I thought about that for a couple of minutes, then went out to the pay phone in the hall and called Gail. She was surprised to hear from me. I told her I’d been swamped with schoolwork, but I had taken her advice and gotten the art history book she told me to and was reading it.
Now I thought it might be helpful to get a guided tour so I could ask questions. She sounded genuinely pleased that I was learning about this. I told her I had Fridays off and wondered whether she might have time to be my guide through the local art museum for a couple of hours.
“I could do that. I always like going to the museum anyway. I’ve got class in the morning but maybe sometime after two o’clock might work. You want to meet me there?”
“Sure. I’ll wait out front.”
“Right. And Carter? There will be a quiz at the end of the tour, so pay attention.“
I promised that I would.
Nothing much else happened for the rest of the week, classes, club meetings, meals and sleep.
Except for the Thursday meeting of the psych club. Today’s speaker was a guy called Thornton from a university in a nearby city. His interest was memory: How it works, how we store them, how we recall them, why we forget them, and so on.
Part of his research was in the normal psychological study approach, trying to classify the different types of memories and how they’re processed, but he was also interested in the chemical or biological facets of memory, perhaps with the idea of enhancing memory retention and retrieval, but also to understand the chemical basis of memory storage in the brain.
I found myself surprisingly interested. He began with a discussion about memory techniques, like the memory palace, sometimes called the Method of Loci, dating back to Cicero and further, to ancient Greece.
He talked about short- and long-term memory, of explicit and implicit memory, declarative and procedural memory. Then he discussed the types of memory encoding, acoustic, semantic, visual, and so on.
Finally, he talked about what happens on the molecular and chemical level and what was understood at present about how memories are saved at a molecular level.
I hadn’t realized it until later because I was so wrapped up in his discussion, but I had been taking notes while he talked. When he finished, there were a number of questions from the group, and I asked a couple, too. This was fascinating stuff. It might be worth looking into further. I made a note of his name and university affiliation.
It was late enough when we got through that I went straight to the chuck wagon (Larry’s name for it had rubbed off on me) and got dinner. While I ate I thought about memory. I went back to the dorm and read art history until I went to sleep.
I was able to sleep later because I had no Friday classes, so after breakfast I did some assigned reading and a problem set for Real Analysis, and sketched out some ideas for the two research papers. Around one I got a sandwich and a slice of cake at the mess tent, then headed over to the art museum. I was a few minutes early, but it was a nice day and I people-watched till I saw her coming up the steps.
Yup. Still gorgeous. She smiled when she saw me and gave a little wave.
“Right on time. That’ll look good on your class record, Carter.”
“Well, I’m trying to get on the teacher’s good side. So, do you have a plan for my education?”
“You know there’s a lot of art history, right? So I thought we’d start with some of the classic painters and talk about how style and technique changed over the years. Not too much detail, just enough to give you an overview. Is that what you’re looking for?“
“It would be way more than I have now, so whatever you can pass on would be a step up.”
“Okay, let’s get started.”
We went in and I paid the small admission fee for the both of us. She took my arm and led me off to one wing. Clearly she knew the layout here.
“Okay, a reasonable starting place is medieval art. There’s other stuff before that, but we can come back to it.”
She pulled me into a room filled with religious icons, triptychs and mosaics, and started talking about art and its connection to the Holy Roman Empire and its use of art as moral inspiration. It was clear that this stuff excited her and she was trying to communicate her enthusiasm. As she talked, I peeked into her epicenter and looked for the framework for her art history knowledge that I was sure was there.
It was as if I knew the structure existed but it was hidden behind something else so I couldn’t see it clearly. I wondered why that might be, since she had to have one, if she were making this her professional life. Eventually I was able to make it out.
I thought that it might have been hidden since she did not have a structure for her talk. She was ad-libbing, deciding on the fly what might be important to understand without trying to overburden me. A college lecturer, on the other hand, would have planned out their syllabus beforehand, discarding that which was unimportant or irrelevant, and thus the framework would be well-defined and visible.
I imported what I could discern of the framework and saw how the things she was discussing fit in and, more importantly, how they were related. She hadn’t talked about it directly, but she understood it and thus I could see it, too. God, I loved this part of my abilities!
I could see she was rushing through this part of it because it was not the main focus of her interest and she thought there were more interesting things later. Particularly in the way that the representation of the human form became more natural and less stylized, with proportions looking more “normal”. She also pointed out how the themes in medieval art made their way into what became know as Romanesque architecture over the centuries, with arches and heavy walls. By the time the twelfth century came around, architecture had progressed to the Gothic but artistic development had stagnated.
She grabbed my arm. “Okay, Carter. That’s the fly-over, so you can understand why what came next was so amazing! The term Dark Ages wasn’t just referring to the suppression of knowledge, in my opinion. It also referred to the way art looked, dark, forbidding, demons lurking around every corner. There was little representation of the joy of life, the beauty around us. You get to see that next!”
She was having fun now. She took my hand and led me down the hall until she reached a gallery and stood back triumphantly. “This! This is where it starts to get exciting, where the power of art hits you full in the face. This is the Renaissance, starting roughly around the late 14th Century in Italy.”
Her exuberance was catching. She was really excited about this, and I admired someone who was so wrapped up in something that they love. She started with some guy named Ghiberti, who designed the doors to a cathedral, and showed why that was significant, how it differed so much from what came before.
Then the Medicis in 15th Century Florence became patrons of the arts and new art flourished.
And that traveled to Rome, where da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo changed the face of art. As she talked I could see in my mind’s eye the progression, the changes in style. I thought she’d be a good teacher if she ever found herself in that position.
She went on, excited, pulling me from one exhibit to another, talking non-stop, wanting me to see what made her love this so much. I started asking some questions, because I could see the framework now and how things were related, and her face lit up when she saw that I understood and she grabbed my arm.
“Exactly, Carter! That’s where that came from! You passed your quiz!”
I laughed, and she stopped to catch her breath.
“Sorry, I just realized that I’m a little hoarse from talking so much. Let’s sit for a minute.”
We found a bench, and I complimented her on the lucidity of her presentation. I said that I thought I saw the evolution of the style and what drove it, and I could appreciate it more now that I understood it better. She beamed.
“Were you always this excited about art?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think so. It was always my favorite thing in elementary and high school, and the times that it wasn’t offered I would do art on my own, and read about it.”
“I sort of understand your conundrum, not studying something that might help you earn a living because you are so enamored of this. But I also think that a person who truly loves something shows that passion, that excitement, and the people who can help you get into the field will see that. That’s why they got into the field themselves.”
“Oh, I really hope so. I’d love to do something with art and be paid for it.”
“I think you’re going to be fine. You probably won’t get rich, but you’ll be doing something you’re excited about. What’s that saying? ’Do what you love and the money will follow’.”
“This is me here, with fingers crossed. Tom, we’re nowhere near done with what I wanted to cover, but my throat’s really kind of raw now from talking so much. I think I have to stop, or at least take a break.”
“Gail, that’s fine. I’ve learned way more than I thought I was going to, so stop whenever you want. We can pick this up another time.”
“Maybe a cup of tea would help. There’s a little snack bar on the first floor.”
“Sure, let’s do that.”
So off to the snack bar, where an artsy looking young woman was tending the counter. Probably a former art history major. I got Gail tea, and I got coffee and a stale Danish. It looked like it might date from the late Renaissance.
We talked about a variety of things as we sipped our drinks, and I thought for a moment about how a passion about a subject transformed a person’s appearance, made them more beautiful. I’d seen that in Karen the first time we talked about the things that excited her when we’d gone on a school field trip and heard a presentation on artificial intelligence, one of the things that fired her up.
Now I was seeing it again in Gail. She radiated excitement, happiness, when she talked about this, and it really did make her even more beautiful. She made me catch my breath. I mentioned in passing how inspiring she was when she tried to communicate her commitment. She looked like she was going to cry.
“Thank you, Tom. That means a lot. Sometimes people make fun of me because I’m so passionate about this, and I hate that, it’s like they’re willfully blind and won’t acknowledge that someone can have such fervor about something others might not be interested in.”
“Hold on to that passion, Gail. It’ll keep you afloat. And it’ll inspire others.”
“You’re a good soul, Carter, thanks. You want to go back for round two? They don’t close for another hour or so.”
“If you’re hoarse, then maybe we shouldn’t push it. I’m happy to put round two off till another day. I learned a lot today and perhaps I’ll assimilate it better if I let it percolate for awhile.”
“Okay, that’s fine. You have plans?”
“For today? No, not really. I’ve got to start thinking about a research paper, two, actually, but they’re not due for a couple of weeks. I’m mostly caught up with everything else.”
“I didn’t have lunch, ’cause of my morning class which runs till one. So I’m probably going to get some soup or something. Want to join me?”
“I wish you’d said something about your schedule. I didn’t want you to have to skip a meal on account of me.”
“It really wasn’t on account of you, Carter. Don’t get too full of yourself. I’m always excited to go to the museum so that’s why I skipped lunch. But now I’m hungry.”
“Fine. Sure, I’ll join you. Got something in mind?”
“Nah. I’ll think of something when we get outside.”
So we picked up our things and left. She paused on the steps, deep in thought. “You like Middle-Eastern food? There’s a small place that serves a good falafel and baba ghanoush. Wanna try that?”
I’d never really had it, but I said sure, let’s go.
It was a ten minute walk. The place was a bit overheated, but smelled good and we found a small table big enough for two. We ordered from the counter. She got the baba ghanoush and stuffed grape leaves and I got the falafel, and we shared a plate of pita bread with hummus. While we ate she chatted about her classes, her roommates, and art, and I noticed that her leg was pressed up against mine under the table.
Okay, so a peek into her epicenter where, in addition to what she was talking about, I found a surprising level of arousal. I noticed that she was perceiving that her skin was sensitive, her nipples hard, and there were flashes of what I assumed were certain images of the night we’d spent together.
I was a little puzzled, because I hadn’t thought that the feelings I channeled would last so long. Maybe it wasn’t that at all, but rather her own memories that were stimulating her arousal.
Regardless, it seemed that she had a possible agenda in mind.
When we were nearly done, she said, “Your first time with food from the Middle East?”
“Well, I’ve had kebabs before, but that almost doesn’t count because it’s been so Americanized.
But I liked the falafel, and the hummus and pita is kinda addictive. So definitely worth a return trip.”
“Y’know what’s good for dessert?” she whispered. “A joint. You in?”
“That sounds really good. Okay.”
We got our jackets, and I took the last piece of pita from the plate when she wasn’t looking.
It’s bad manners, but it was good with the last of the hummus.