On Teachers Day: At a decisive instance of life, a student must abandon or leave behind his teachers and plunge into the abyss of one’s creation without their help, not out of vain arrogance or immature impatience that is too quick to assert itself, but precisely out of a gratitude, marked by nobility and a profound respect for their irreducible alterity, for it is this irreducible alterity, this non-commensurability itself which constitutes the relation at all between a student and a teacher. For it is the utmost responsibility of a student as student to plunge into one’s creative task of life, a task impossible without confronting the immeasurable excess of life that manifests at the instance when one is abandoned to abandonment. In that sense, every act of creation of something beautiful and worth of a life time, is an absolute experience of abandonment, of having to find oneself abandoned at the point of degree zero, to be left with nothing and with none – a desert or a wilderness. The immense greatness of teaching lies precisely in this act of showing the student the signposts that bear such directions that will lead him to the point of this utter abandonment wherein the name of the teacher will be erased – and yet, perhaps, emerge for the first time – in that act of creation that the student is to pursue out of this confrontation with the immeasurable excess of all that exists. A student pays greatest homage to a teacher by learning how to abandon the other, and to be abandoned by the other, and to create, out of this experience, the great works of art or knowledge that will stand like lights in the darkness of the world.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 10:20:00 +0000