Pictures: “Cain - Lovis Corinth 1917”
“Martyr on a circus ring - Fyodor Bronnikov 1869”
Passage: Genesis 4
Today we only had Charlie, Obi, and Fern. Fern remained silent but seemed closer to talking than I’ve ever seen him here. Throughout the discussion there were moments when he was physically acting along with various statements made by Charlie. Throughout the time I was sure to ask him specifically, “Fern, do you notice anything.” Each time he shrugged and said nothing. I had hoped today might be the day he spoke. He speaks at Boy-Scouts with Obi there and others who would overreact to sudden talking were absent today. His mother has suggested asking questions he can’t answer yes or no to. During the BTS section I asked him specifically what word stood out to him. Nothing. Finally, at the end we played an improv game in which we needed a suggestion for a single piece of food (Obi had left the room for the game). “Alright, Fern,” I said, “this is it. I need you to give me a kind of food.” Nothing. I watched him carefully and controlled my tone carefully. My goal was to force him to utter a single word but make it clear that I loved him and respected him either way. It occurred to me that I had to be willing to back down if he was persistent but I took him all the way up to the edge. After we spent the better half of a minute waiting for an answer, Charlie suggested “Kool Aid.” Fern had a Kool Aid shirt on. I told him, “No, I want to hear what Fern has to say.” Nothing. At last I said, “Alright, if you are choosing not to speak then you may point to a food in this room.” He quickly gestured to a bag of chips in our snack bin and that was the end of it. It is so strange to me that he doesn’t speak with us. I don’t understand it and I really don’t want to handle this incorrectly. Today, when he and his mom arrived I heard him talking to her. He didn’t know I was there but as soon as he saw me he stopped talking. He talks to teachers at school, friends at Boy-Scouts, why he does not feel comfortable speaking at church is unexplained and I will likely never know the answer.
Because of Fern’s silence, today’s conversation consisted of just the two highschool students and felt more direct than sometimes. Not always fully serious, but direct. Obi began with the claim: “velociraptors.” As usual, I humored the joke and asked what made him think of velociraptors. He indicated that the large flying creatures were ambiguous enough, they could very well be dinosaurs. I listened, hesitated, then said: “you keep saying velociraptors, I wonder if you might be thinking of pterodactyls?” I couldn’t resist; velociraptors don’t have wings. They all laughed. “I didn’t even notice when he said it,” chuckled Charlie.
Charlie then explored the action of the scene. “There’s a person on the right who seems to be holding a stone, and the person on the left seems to be buried in stones, it’s almost like the man forcibly put the stones on him to end his life.” Charlie may have been imitating the way I talk when I summarize; he’s learning. I asked him why he thought it was a rock in the man’s hand. While he was explaining how it looked like a rock, Obi suddenly exclaimed “I think there’s a person under all those rocks! Look, those are arms and a leg.” Charlie seemed a tad indignant to be interrupted with this detail he had evidently seen from the start (presumably, Obi was too busy attending to the velociraptors). I summarized Charlie's idea about the rocks being “forcibly placed” on the man but said it clearly: “Maybe he piled the rocks on him.” At this, both Charlie and Obi seemed to realize that the man with the stone could conceivably be taking rocks off of someone who had perished in an accident or avalanche. They said so and we entertained this thought for a moment before the flying creatures were brought up again. Were they crows? “Their beaks are too long to be crows,” stated Obi. “No,” said Charlie firmly, “I reject that! Their beaks are fine. If you had said their wings were too big I would agree but especially because it’s so messy…” This led to our first discussion about the technique of a painting we’ve had so far (to be fair this is probably the most abstract painting we’ve looked at - I must begin to include more abstract work to see how their reactions change.). Their estimation seemed closer to “bad on purpose” than “abstract art.” But when I asked them what made it seem sloppy, Charlie was distracted by the fact that he suddenly noticed more birds in the background and we never got back to the question of technique.
One other observation hinged on the impressionistic style. Obi said, “He doesn’t have a torso.” This was his way of addressing the feathered brushwork that left his back blurry with no clear form. They went on to suggest that maybe he was being sucked into a black hole or that the velociraptors had stolen it. By the end, the boys were interpreting every brushstroke. “That shape is either a messy splatter or a dead mouse hanging off his sleeve,” and “There’s a statue in the background!” To me, both seemed to obviously be the loose brushwork of a more impressionist style with no significance to the piece. Interestingly, this links back to the stages of aesthetic development - the early tendency to find shapes and meaning in abstract forms rather than consider the artist's intent or any emotional significance.
The second discussion also began with a joke, as Obi called the animal in the picture a “tigger.” This one was a little harder to humor and we moved on without discussing it much. Charlie’s first comment was that there was blood on the ground, “or grape juice, I can’t tell which.” It makes me wonder, it seems they almost always begin with a joke. Is this means of breaking the ice a precaution to avoid giving a wrong answer? Whoever goes first, after all, could be expected to hone in on the most important thing. What if you highlight something you think is important and it isn’t? Highlighting your funniest thought first avoids this potential judgment. When I asked Charlie why he thought blood or grape juice the focus was on the red liquid staining the ground. Still, he maintained that it could be grape juice and following this dilemma led to a delightful imagining of two possible scenes. Either (a) a man has been mauled by the tiger, dragged about, and is now lying over there dead, or (b) a man fell into a vat of wine, passed out drunk, but was rescued and dragged over to where he now lies while they wait for him to revive. Either way a man is lying over there and either way he has left a trail of red liquid staining the ground on the way over.
The next focus was one of the most interesting VTS moments I’ve had so far. Thus far, none of the pieces I’ve shown have had any reason to affirm gender ambiguity. With paintings all made before the 1950s (all but one, another indication that I need more modern art), and as we are within a conservative church environment, I have not called into question assumptions of gender (though I have used the VTS language of “figure” as often as I can). If we see a male figure why ask the kids to explain why they think it’s a man? Here, however, we had a figure that was truly androgynous, it could go either way. When talking about it, Charlie addressed this “it could be a man or a woman.” I asked what about the figure seemed male and what seemed female. They noted the bare feet, the white “dress” and the long hair. “Female traits?” I probed. Indeed. “What makes it seem male?” This was harder. The angle of their face, the size of their nose. I clarified, “angle of the face” was evidently Charlie’s way of saying jawline. They also noted that their hands (and arms) were big compared to the feet. Most importantly, they noted the scale. If this was a woman it was a giant woman. If the tiger was a full sized tiger, they were simply giant in general. Assuming it was a small tiger, the person was the size of a tall man, but too big to be a normal woman. In the end, Charlie seems to decide on male for the figure as he called it “he” later.
Another interesting turn of this conversation was another comment that referred to the work of the artist. Again, for the first time that I can remember, they referred to something done by the artist from a fully painterly perspective and did not try to assimilate it into the story of the painting. Obi had pointed out the “Colosseum crowd” and drawn everyone’s attention to the background. During this exploration, Obi pointed out that there was a transparent piece of wall, a place where the lines of the wall continue over the gap of the gate. “It almost looks like they painted the wall and then painted the gate over it and you can still see the original.” I decided to highlight Obi’s unique observation. “So, you’re explaining this detail not in terms of the story but in terms of the artist. You think he painted the wall at first and then covered it up later?”
After we had examined it, Charlie asked for the piece’s title so I told them.
Our Bible discussion consisted of my new and improved BTS method and it seemed to go well (though not without a hitch and not so well as it would have with a larger group). My new strategy is to ask “what word stood out to you?” followed by “what does that make you think of in this context?” and then “what other connections can we find?” Our passage was the story of Cain and Abel (the world’s first murder). As we listened, Charlie was engaged and already asking important questions. Cain is worried people will want to kill him because he’s a murderer - “who, your parents?” Cain seems to have a wife out of nowhere - “where did that wife come from? Maybe there were other people who were affected by the fall and…” I told him to wait until the reading was done, this seemed to let the oxygen out of his tank a bit. Indeed, these kinds of questions did not lend themselves to my BTS questions and I really wanted to try my new method.
The word that stood out to Obi was “the word that came before relations,” - sexual. In true VTS fashion, I went with it. “What does it make you think of…” It was at this exact moment I decided to include the phrase “in this context” in the question. He had little to say beyond noting that Adam and Eve had sex but I pushed a little farther. “What do we know about how Adam and Eve were created?” They were made from dust by God. “So it’s pretty significant that God didn’t just keep making humans from the dust, they’re making them the way normal people do.” Charlie made a joke about velociraptors dropping the baby off on their doorstep.
Charlie noted Cain’s wife, who seems to come from nowhere, as well as the fact that Lamech had two wives. He did not quite stick to a single word, but I wish I had remembered to ask “what does wife make you think of in this context?” Instead, I charged ahead and pointed out that God had given Adam a wife as a helper because it wasn’t good for man to be alone. Now, Lamech was presuming to take two of what God had only given once. During the reading, Charlie had also commented on Lamech’s presumption that God would avenge him 77 times if he was murdered. I mentioned that this is another instance of Lamech being presumptuous.
When Fern didn’t have an answer the conversation began to dwindle. Obi mentioned cultivated and again I jumped in. “What did God command Adam and Eve to do in the garden?” Not eat the fruit. “He made them to be fruitful and multiply (they did that) and to care for the animals. Abel was a shepherd, he did that. But why did the ground need cultivating?” Because they were kicked out of the garden. “Exactly, isn’t it interesting that the one who chose to sin was the one whose job was a result of sin?”
I asked Charlie to give us one more word. He seemed really tired, bored of the conversation, and done participating. He grumply noted the phrase “son of” which was repeated in the listed genealogies. This was a great word but I rebuked him for having such a bad attitude all of a sudden. Looking back, I wish I had encouraged his questions a little more. They were great points and we did talk about them, just not before he got so burnt out. In the end the conversation petered out and ended feeling very unsatisfactory. It was, however, an inspiring start to BTS because it seemed to fix a problem I’ve been facing - namely, a lack of specificity in the summaries given by the students.
If I could start again (and it isn’t too late since I plan to keep going even once this research project is done), I would work through Genesis in order. Each week, I would make a list of the words student’s noticed on the whiteboard and each subsequent week I would ask if they noticed any connections to the past week’s words. Today they noticed cultivate. Looking for that, how might they respond differently to Noah’s vineyard four chapters later? After Genesis, we could then pick one or two key themes and jump around to other texts related to them for subsequent lessons. The Bible is, after all, “the world’s first hyperlinked document.”
It’s worth noting that this week gave me the clearest recollection I’ve had in weeks and it occurred when I made a specific comment about choosing not to record the lesson.