"In the beginning God created...." These words are a fitting introduction to the Bible for in a sense, this is the closest the Bibles comes to a definition of the Judeo-Christian God. God was the power of creation and His people worshipped Him for this power and its brother, destruction.
Now we come to Dr. Rockwood's approach to composition and this course, EH 301. The main point that has been stressed throughout this quarter has been creativity and the resulting profundity of content that should be the essential characteristic of good expository prose. This required that the writer be a bona fide creator. So, in a way, the writer becomes a god and the essay or story his creation, his universe populated with his ideas.
WHAT IS THIS??!! BLASPHEMY!! To the stake! Imagine, daring to make man equal to a god!
But wait. A glimmer... a glimmer of light and an echo of words - "...in his own image...." Oh, the words have gone now but the image remains. Fully to realize one's power of creation would be what it means to find God, to find one's own personal God, to find the path to God. If man was indeed created in the image of God, this power and function must be the link. Maybe when we all find it the earth will become the promsed land or even heaven itself.
So my instructor, Dr. Rockwood, can be seen as the devil's disciple or God's messenger to Earth. I'm not prepared to pass judgment on this, but even it he is the devil's disciple, I'm thankful for having the opportunity to meet him and his work.
I doubt that I am expected to make decisions concerning the path to God (if there is one), so assuming all man's wisdom is not folly and all man's creations are not Towers of Babel, I'll pass judgment on how and to what extent I have been benefitted by Dr. Rockwood's unusual approach to composition.
Perhaps I can best do this by providing an example of how this course has helped me in an outside course. In my Humanities course, CHN 253, I was required to do two of the traditional cultural event papers. The normal student does the normal thing. Deciding on a cultural event, searching memory files for a relationship it has to some idea or concept in the Humanities course or discovered in a book outside the course. The student then writes about a relationsip between the idea and the event. It is to a large degree a matter of secondary writing and associative knowledge. This was the way I went about my first cultural event paper.
For my second cultural event I went to see the Architecture Faculty art exhibit that was on display recently. I discovered that upon looking at some of the exhibits that had certain similarities of style, I was struck by the predominant use of concrete and a seemingly unyielding quality—so much so that I felt depressed and somewhat isolated. I took this intuition and I drew some conclusions as to what concept of beauty this was and where and why it had developed.
I used as an example one of Ricci's large apartment buildings in Rome. It was almost completely concrete and practically all white. When I wrote the first sentence to describe it, an image of a sphinx crawling out of the desert came to mind, and I knew I had found why I had these feelings toward this apartment house. It looked as if the desert winds had spawned it. It looked lifeless, unyielding, and never-changing like the desert. Hence, my reaction was a feeling of isolation. The sadness came from the realization that people lived in it and it was a symbol of our entire society, or should I say a symptom of a society that is sick spiritually. One doesn't die in a building like that, not as one could imagine a death in a log cabin. One just wears down and is replaced—like a grain of sand.
When I finished this paper I felt I had accomplished something. I had got insight out of a routine school assignment. Before I had applied Dr. Rockwood's method, I considered the cultural event paper a farce. But through this method that art exhibit had not only been brought to life, it had given life in return.
I had applied Dr. Rockwood's procedure to the letter, taking my intuition and feelings seriously and then systematically analyzing them to find out what it was that put them there. As has been pointed out so often class, the unconscious is often sharper than the conscious mind and by correctly interpreting its symbols, in my example the sphinx crawling out of the desert, one can arrive at truly creative and probing conclusions.
I have come to value my creativity a great deal. I feel I have found a new source of creativity and I want to thank Dr. Rockwood for helping me in the endeavor. Whle I may not be a god, at least I'm convinced that I'm human and, after all, being human isn't so bad after all.
© Copyright 2002 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.