Today again I have sought my hero purposefully...here, I want to drag back the limp body of Authority and seek to understand the life it has and has not.
They say that every diary or journal is written for an audience, even if it is only the time-lagged audience of the one who wrote it. This of course is true - even more so of the blogosphere - and I have confessed to several people that I am an upstanding citizen of Blogostan. Nonetheless, I am shy at the thought of being watched, read, seen. Or rather, I blog-blush when I find that I have been read and commented upon.
Rogers has hauled me into his own little blogosphere again - along with some significant others: spurious and ITHOM - for examination, commented on my previous posts, and spoken about my leaving, my flight in some way from him as a teacher. I see that in the 10 years in which we have known each other - primarily in this role - I have grown, and I am at a natural juncture in my life now when I am moving on from various parts of an old life into new places, personally and professionally. (Saturn return, sweetie.) Yet I feel as if he will always be my mentor in some way. Even as we are working on equal terms, side by side, I still naturally defer to what I perceive to be his greater authority.
And this - as Olga would say - is a complicated thing. It is partly because I am so very used to Rogers knowing more, understanding more clearly, articulating more eloquently, that I wonder if I will ever experience myself as equal (even as we are of course different). And it is partly to do with my constant awareness of That Which I Don't Know, the things I Am Not, that awareness that is part of my personality and that makes me tend towards deference.
When I met Rogers, he gave me some utterly flippant advice, advice that Posh has since criticised as being rather unprofessional (although we'll leave commentary on Posh's position for a different day...!). At any rate...I was young and wet behind the ears, and he sat there in a position of authority, getting away with this flippantry. And then for months I sat with my fellow pupils and listened to what he had to tell us, not questioning a word as far as I remember. I believed him. Utterly. And somehow he taught me to think. And now - ten years on and because of him - I am where he was then, with the same responsibilities, and still some part of me refuses to accept that he had at that time any of the same failings I have now. I don't believe him to be perfect, of course not. But since he has not remained static either (as no-one does), he still seems bigger than me, and even that image I have of the historical Rogers will always be bigger than I will ever perceive myself, because the image I have of him at any present moment is bigger.
And this is what I understand to be a kind of Authority. That structure is deeply etched now into the way I interact with Rogers. To think that he could learn anything of worth from me is not impossible, as I understand that I have started to travel a different intellectual path, and we will always be able to teach each other as we meet at intellectual service stations along the way. But he will always be my mentor and, for me, he will always have Authority. It seems that Authority has managed to sustain itself in some cunning and devious way, grown its roots deep not to be pulled up, clawed its way into the mortar like ivy. This is not such a bad thing, I don't suppose, but I guess I have to start somehow to understand that I too can inhabit a position of Authority without guilt.
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1 comment:
Shucks - another blog-blush moment. I'm touched at your words, and utterly honoured to have found this relationship.
I guess I didn't mean authority in any negative sense, just the idea that someone speaks from a position of knowing, with the support of probably-already-being-right, even if that's only constructed or implicit: not authority to wield like power or dominion, but a certain intellectual sureness, if that makes sense.
I think it is not just that our relationship is framed in this way. It seems to me to speak more broadly of our general paths in the world alongside our colleagues. It is precisely the dual role that attracted me to the job: the idea of being able to continue learning while also teaching...for me, it's my Geminian split personality again: I would never be able to do just one thing! But I think it's that double function that we chose for ourselves by entering this profession that allows for the strangeness.
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