Learn to fly...

I have an irrational distrust of teachers. I look around at all the fair to catastrophic human output and think teachers must be partially accountable for the bad art, the ugly architecture, the soulless business, the tepid political action, the crappy food, the useless medical system, and so on... They inspired, promoted, or at least allowed these things to happen and continue happening. They are society's permission givers.

Now of course it's true that we can give ourselves permission without a teacher, and when that works, when an individual has enough critical faculty and crazy intuition to chart an original course from void to thing, well that's the best. For those who give themselves permission because their ego insists upon it, well maybe that's where a lot of the shit goes down.

I wouldn't want the world to be perfect, I don't know if I'd even want it any better; bad examples are teachers in and of themselves. But I do (selfishly) want to find those rare teachers who help enable all the excellent things that do manage to make it through to this reality. I suspect that many of them aren't lurking in the hollow halls and Cartesian compromises of academia.

Photo by Bjorn Moerman