Picasso and 9/11

     In September 2001 I was teaching gifted students in a public residential school in the Chicagoland area. That morning I wasn't teaching one of my own classes but observing the work of a new teacher. (My overload assignment was to evaluate the pedagogic work of others.)  I sat near the back of the room.  As the class ended, students were leaving and entering.  Fragments of conversation floated to my ear. "An explosion at the Trade Center in NYC, . . . people leaving the tower, . . . everyone frightened."  These kids must be working on a history project paper about the car bomb in '93, I said to myself as I left.  Walking to the English office, I saw a colleague, a veteran English teacher like myself.  He was standing outside the doorway, alone.  As I approached, he said, "A plane flew into one of the towers. in New York."  A couple of other teachers joined us. We drifted into my office.  Word quickly reached us that a second plane had struck the south tower.  So then of course we knew.  This was no freak accident.  This was an attack.

     The principal came on over the P.A. system.  As the morning wore on, he informed us of the unfolding horror.  A plane crashed into the pentagon.  Another seemed to have plowed into the earth in Pennsylvania.  An auditorium that had a big screen and a TV connection was opened up.  Teachers were told to meet with their students and it was our decision to hold class or not.  Because this was a residential school, we did not have to deal with the logistics of transporting students to other places.  We were unencumbered.  But what we did that day was less like teaching and more like ministering.  Students and adults were bewildered, uncomprehending and fearful.  However the adults were called upon to maintain a sense of calm in the storm, to show that as bad as this was, it was not the end of world (not yet.)

     I remember walking to view the TV hookup and encountering students who asked me,  "Mr. Casey, are we a target?  Our school, everyone in our building?"  For an instant, I thought they were trying to make a joke and I stifled a chuckle.  But when I saw the distraught look on their faces, I assured them that terrorists did not have us in their sights.

     The small auditorium was filled with people, many staring at the smoke and fire on the screen, others in motion, arriving, leaving, looking for friends.  The principal and others on his staff were in and out, walkie-talkies in constant use.  By this time the fear that the towers might crumble was being voiced.  The thought proved father to the fact.  The south tower first, the north tower shortly after, both collapsed from the top down.  Gasps and stifled cries throughout the room.

     How do you go into a class, understood to be an oasis of reflection and inquiry, when the world outside has been devastated?  The idea that came to me was French director Henri-Georges Clouzot's film, "The Mystery of Picasso." (sample follows)

 Produced in the 1950s, it depicts the artist in front of a transparent canvas with a camera on the other side.  As Picasso worked, you had a unique view of his composition.  Of course it was no ordinary drawing.  He would draw a fish and then with a few strokes turn it into a chicken, which, after adding swath and detail, would take the shape of a women, and then move into other transformations.  Some representational, some not.  The film affords an unparalleled entree into the creative process.

     Picasso creates 15-20 striking images in about a half an hour.  In order to do that--to move from one image or shape to the next--it was sometimes necessary to "destroy" a good part of what had been made before.  On my syllabus for the class was Graham Greene's story, "The Destructors," about a gang of boys in England who destroy a Christopher Wren house from the inside.  At one point in the narrative, the authorial voice states: "Destruction, after all, is a form of creation." I wanted them to think about these powers. 
     I lead a discussion of the film.  Why did the director and the artist want us to see this?  What did it show us about the making and unmaking of art?  The inner and outer eye of the artist?  We sought to deepen our understand of creativity.
     At the beginning of class we had updated and informed ourselves about the tragedy that had occurred in the world outside.  But we did not spend a lot of time reacting to it.  After a bit I simply said, "I want you to see something and then, we'll talk about it."  In the discussion I made no application to the unfolding events of the day.  Nor did they.  It was a subtext too close at hand.  More than enough concentration was required to plumb the force of artistic creation and how it forms what the eye beholds.  I hoped that they would make their own connections later.  And many told me they did.