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| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence# |
Just like my physics professor predicted, a lot of students quit his class after a brief introduction to the upcoming semester's coursework, an experience that was duplicated for me at RISD, too, without the intentional bait-and-switch routine necessary for a savvier New York student body that uses English as a first language. I had signed up for a class I thought was "Science Fiction Illustration" that was a catalog misprint of the actual class called "Scientific Illustration". A bunch of us (mostly guys) groaned, got up from the studio tables, and immediately asked for a signature to drop the class.
The teacher was not pleased; profs lived and died at schools based on class attendance and their lectures, and as much as I liked botanical art, I really didn't need a class in it. I had a mom for a botanist. I grew up drawing plants, trees, and flowers in vast pictorial landscapes. This was no place for me to draw the big beautiful trees of my native Hudson River valley. I could do that at home, on my own. She gave me a nasty look as I opted out of her class, a feeling I felt she might have carried over into the next class of hers that I took, which is every high-achieving student's greatest fear: retaliation and blacklisting based on their agenda as a working artist and not mine as a paid-in-full student.
Both of those fears came to fruition, and by the time I had sussed out the art school game, neither retaliatory actions counted against my post-graduation successes. In fact, that particular prof asked for one of my pieces I had made based on organic forms for the RISD Museum's permanent student collection, which bolstered me enough to tolerate her scathing criticisms of any work of mine that she found derivative, which was accurate for me. I can achieve stunning originality, but with an entire course load devoted solely to labor-intensive studio-work, occasionally I had to phone in a piece between my three part-time jobs.
Our physics professor knew better flagging spirits and intellectual tiredness. He looked haunted by his experience and subsequent failures at the famed S.E.T.I. project that proposed highly intelligent beings would respond to something as trite as a radio signal blasted into space. So what? I'm not channeling anything or anyone alien to earth right now as I sit writing to this to you while listening to my playlist (Dizzy Gillespie's live version of "Swing Low" set in Paris). It was kind of a dubious quest to begin with, and I think that's what did it in for him: the absence of faith in his original artificial construct.
But, he should have quickly recovered. After all, that's what science and experimentation is about: a series of failures that eliminate choices through an inquiry process, leading you to the correct solution that will hold up under scrutiny for its tried-and-true testing. After a class that found me and my boys sitting closer to him in the classroom, we decided to pull back to the higher seats in the lecture hall. Something about his haggard expression and deep-set undereye bags disturbed us up close, like it was unnatural. You have to be pretty bad off to screw up star-filled nights shining brightly in the crisp, clear, cold mountain air we lived in, as a place very close to nature.
He seemed to be pleading at us, as students sitting in the second row of the classroom, with his foot propped up on a pull-down seat's armrest, looking down at us like we didn't know what was up. "I mean, there's nothing out there!" He said to us, in exasperation. "NOTHING!" He acted blown away by it, like a space alien or lifeform that can traverse time and space through wormholes would give a fuck about his petty ego problems, which is what my man DutchBoy basically said to him. "Yeah, but didn't you know that when you set up the experiment? That it could fail? I mean, science isn't about foregone conclusions." Right! Like, adapt and problem-solve, dude. Let's build a spaceship instead! It should've closed down one avenue for him to explore another, but he was stuck on it as a theory, which is a bad place for any scientist (or student) to be. Time to move on, bro.
It revealed to me just how limiting my education could be at Oneonta, which helped motivate me to undergo one of the hardest experiences of my life that is the Rhode Island School of Design's admittance process. If I remained on "Easy Street", I risked limiting myself to the intellectual capabilities of someone who mistakenly thought that the key to enlightenment with an eternal deity was to simply blast his BabyBoomer songs into the galaxy like some kind of intergalactic space jam. Someone tapped the "red hair bud" going around campus too hard this winter, bro. Word. And like that, I was ready to tackle the bigger questions of the universe, like: how do I get my snow dog with lots of fur into a spacesuit and decompression stasis chamber? Still need help on that one, NASA. Any day now, right?
