SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

are the subject of the essay. The work of art serves as the catalyst, if you will, for your
reflections about your own life.” They rewrote their essays and brought their revisions to me.
We sat in my office while I read their essays aloud, a torturous experience for most of my
students. “Okay. You aren't saying enough about yourself yet.” Then I'd repeat the dictum of
Carl Klaus, one of the first theorists of the personal essay, “There need to be two stories: 'the
story of the event and the story of the mind.’ You are narrating the story of the event—that is,
seeing the work of art. You aren't yet telling me the story of the mind. What did the art make
you think and feel? And what, in turn, did those thoughts make you think and feel? What did
this work of art teach you about yourself and others?”
In other words, what does the art make you remember?
Writing a personal essay engages memory. When Montaigne wrote, he spoke to the memory of
his friend. When we write, we typically speak to an invented reader who inhabits the memories
animating our personal histories: events, people, places, snatches of images that burn through
the fog of our past like flickering film projected onto a wavering screen. Wordsworth called
such a moment a “spot of time,” a memory “recollected in tranquility” (608). This is what I
wanted my students to do. They weren't art history majors or fine arts students. They were
cadets at the U. S. Coast Guard Academy, one of the five federal service academies, like West
Point or Annapolis. What meaning would art have for them if I'd limited their thinking about it
to its elements of design or Modernist features? These considerations are fundamental, of
course, and class discussion built on them. But when my students were back in their own
rooms, facing their computer screens, I wanted them to engage the art in a less objective
manner. I wanted them to take what they had seen and connect it to memories about their life,
in the hope that through this process of reflection they would learn something about life and
the role of art in teaching us those life lessons.
In The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster connects the three acts I wanted my students to
perform—seeing, remembering, and writing—showing inextricable links among them. His
analysis suggests that personal writing should inhabit a fundamental place in the study of art.
Auster recounts visiting the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam as an adult. As he stood seeing
the canvases, he remembered an April day when he was sixteen and had skipped school to go
with his girlfriend to a Van Gogh exhibit in New York City. Seeing the art with her had inspired
him to write his first poems, each titled after one of the paintings. The memory had been
lost—indeed, the poems were lost—until he stood in front of the paintings again in Amsterdam
(141-42).
Auster's story testifies to the fleeting nature of memory, perhaps, but it also links memory with
vision. He remembered as he saw the paintings. If he had only glanced at the paintings when
he was sixteen, if he had not seen the paintings, he would not have remembered them as an
adult. The entire memory of the day with his girlfriend, his first poems, and what had inspired
them would have been irretrievable. Seeing had to come first, and this act requires, as Auster
says, forgetting oneself in order to observe one's surroundings: “from that forgetfulness arises
the power of memory” (138). For Auster, then, there is no difference between “the work of
writing and the work of seeing” (138). Writers must be able to see—their writing translates
images into language. But if what one writes reflects what one has seen, then writing is also
intimately connected to the act of memory. Writing does not merely translate images into
language: writing translates memory into language (136).
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