Thursday, August 28, 2003 23:16

One day, back in high school in Poland, my Polish language teacher, Mrs. Magda Tomalak, told me that people like me never graduate from universities. So far she has been right. Back then, however, I did not know it was because of the teachers that taught like her.

At this point I would like to pay my respect to my another teacher from Poland, Mrs. Maria Szura, an elementary school biology teacher and to my East-Asian Anthropology teacher, Dr. Janice Turner-Sacherer, from University of Maryland. Both shared a passion for their respective fields and for the teaching. Both inspired me for life. I only hope to see each one again, although I would be ashamed since I did not amount to accomplish much in my life, not a least by our society standards.






Sunday, August 24, 2003 08:36

Phaedrus, a ghost of Robert M. Pirsing's character in the book "Zen and the Motorcycle Maintenance", chapter nineteen, considers the Quality as the separate from either subjective and objective, and as the third identity, an event.
What he fails to notice is that a subjective opinion of an individual, the personal view, frequently overlaps with those of other people, especially in the same culture, where the sets of values are being uniformly indoctrinated. That common sense of the quality expressed by sufficient many becomes the objective quality.

The objective quality is in fact the result of the indoctrination and to a certain point of the internal "wiring" of our senses. Because of that, it can be said that it represents the classical mindset as the author calls it. If, somehow, it would be possible to subtract all the objective sense of the quality, what would be left will be the subjective sense of what he calls romantic mind. My intuition tells me there is not much of it. Only in the few moments of true self-soul-searching we find those minute differences, and express them in some form of abstract painting, sculpture or a poem that nobody else can understand, or, more often, in a scream, or roar, that comes out of our chest when we reached the metaphoric peak of the mountain we have been climbing.