Diary, it’s Tuesday, May 24th.  We’ve already been to lots of places and have done bunches of stuff so far that I won’t list.  The one thing everything had in common were the cameras.  Hoards of people were snapping pictures with an almost mindless “I’ve been here” abandon.  They looked like Borgs from Startrek, each with a protruding mechanical eye.   You know, this trip I decided to do something “untouristy.”  I didn’t take all that many shots.  It was exhilarating. I was actually seeing and listening so much more.  I felt released from point-and-shoot social obligations.  In fact, one person in our group asked me why I wasn’t taking any pictures.  “Is this boring to you?”  The question had the tone of accusing condemnation as if I had committed the sin of violating the eleventh commandment:  thou shalt take a picture.  In contrast to all this shutter-bugging, I noticed a person, at the Forbidden City, a single person, sitting on a collapsible stool, a sketch pad on his lap, a piece of charcoal in his hand, his head bobbing up and down, concentrating, studying, and drawing.

It came to me.  To schedule exactly where you’re headed, to be there just for the sake of being there, to cover for the sake of covering,  may be the best way to go astray. You know, diary,  not all those who loiter are lost.  Most don’t miss the enticing unexpected as much as those looking straight forward through the lens or at the schedule.  While they think they’re preserving something in the picture, they’re really letting it get away from them.  Most people seem to assume that taking a picture automatically assures them of having paid attention.  It is the ritual rite of the tourist.  It has become a substitute more often than a supplement to active and engaged conscious engagement.  There’s no searching for the complexity, no spur of the moment, no penetrating the minutest parts, no noticing of different elements, no posing of questions, no slow reflection.  Just point and click and run, point and click and run, point and click and run to meet a jam-packed schedule.  Like the hare in Alice in Wonderland, no time to take your time.  Arousal of the sublime is confounded.  Little is allowed to develop; so little is empowered to inspire; so much is haphazard.  Sharpness gives way to blur.  We become little more than shallow picture takers.  Certainly not penetrating artists.

We’re deluded into thinking that just being there to take a picture is enough for us while we let the camera do all the work.  Yet, the camera decides matters for us.  It is no longer a tool in our service.  We don’t put it aside to alter or expand  the attraction.  It’s almost as if we have slavishly surrendered to the camera to decide for us our sense of place.  So, we overlook certain places because nothing has prompted us to set down the camera to just quietly appreciate.  If we did, we might ask questions in our quest to understand and value where we are; we might stop merely looking at and start seeing.  Instead, the camera blurs the distinction between looking and seeing, hearing and listening, passing by and noticing.  In fact, we close our eyes–one eye literally–to the extent we open the shutter.  We’re deadened to the smallest features of the visual and audio worlds.  We don’t notice the details.  That’s why I hate being a tourist.  That why I shudder at being merely a shutter bug.  That’s why there is always a why to whatever picture I take.  That’s why I’m always lagging behind and wondering.  That’s why I’m always being hurried up.  The tour, with its deadlines, a slave to the clock, is like driving on a super highway–or lecturing to a superclass.  It’s efficient.  It gets us quickly from place to place, but in speeding past everything, everything become less distinct, the soft and subtle–and, at times, meaningful–are gone..  So, the tour tends to blind and deafen its members to the true sound and appearance–and meaning–of things.  It takes us into the shallows at best, but not to the depths.  The hurried tourists look at so much, but don’t notice much, and so much is missed.  Most haven’t learned to see or listen to.  It’s that “beauty deprived” I told you about earlier.  And, I haven’t said a word about those blasted, intrusive, and distracting cell phones.

Back to this artist at the Forbidden City.  He reminds me,diary,  of a technique I use in one of my teaching workshops and will use at one of my Lilly presentations in September to deal with classroom “attention deficit disorder.”  The most effective means of understanding is by slowing down, peering, focusing, noticing, and describing what we see or hear by descriptive “word drawing,” that is, writing, or by drawing.  I have the people draw or write about the room they’re in.  It’s not about how well they can draw or write; it’s about learning how to see, to notice, to develop a sense of “otherness” rather than merely look.  I mean, two  people go out for a walk; the one is has a sketcher’s eye that is accustomed to searching and penetrating, the other just takes pictures and passes along.  There will be a great difference in what each can later describes.

How accustomed we’ve become to inattention.  There is such a desire to say, “I’ve been here.  I’ve seen this.”  There is so little time given to “This is how I felt.  This is what I came to understand.”  It so often ignores how rich in meaning details can be. Reflection is fugitive.  It requires time, effort, and penetration that’s contrary to the tourists hectic pace.  Think about how long it takes that artist to sketch one of the buildings.  And, then, think about these tour groups being hussled along as if it would be a crime to stop and peer at, and engage in acute concentration to think about, a place for as long as it would require that artist to draw it.  It seems that our desire to do travel fast and furious, to look at as many things as possible, is connected to a declining appreciation and a rising presumption.

Am I being too harsh, diary?  Maybe, but it’s curious, that the most meaningful and penetrating, and by their own admission the most memorable, times for the students are those when they are not clicking cameras and personally interacting with the Chinese people.

Sounds like a lot of what goes on in the classroom, doesn’t it.  Student, like tourists, have academic ADD.  They madly rush through class having been trained to think that it’s enough to blindly takes notes that they will vomit back on a test, think what’s important is only what will appear on the test, think of other things outside of class while in class, don’t pay all that much intense attention, don’t see much purpose or significance in what’s going on, cram for that test, want only that passing grade, seek the credential for a job.  Deep, lasting education, penetrating insight, meaning and purpose beyond job and themselves, emotional and social growth are low on their list of priorities because they are for most professors.  Click, click, click.

Professors, like tourists, also have ADD.  They lecture, transmit information, let the technology do their job, speed to cover the material, assume little responsibility for students to secure “mastery of the subject” (whatever that means),  distance themselves from students by claiming they are experienced and accomplished adults, often don’t give the classroom its due, don’t really know who is in that room with them beyond at best a name, test, grade, think of and are distracted by other things outside class such as research and publications and securing tenure while in class, and equate learning, like the students, with a grade or score..  Click, click, click.

Diary,wouldn’t it be great if we all, professor and student,went go into a classroom as an artist with a penetrating artist’s eye rather than merely as an impatient shutter bug.  I know what you’re going to say, diary, but…..

Louis