David L. Powell            Contracted Studies

Degree Field ---English and American Literature
Actual Field ---Culture History: Literature
                     Philosophy, Art, Psychology,
                   Music, Architecture & other
      forms of expression.
 
         In primary terms, I take my cue from Thoreau in the desire and need to live life deliberately in order not to die having failed to live. To be sure, there is an Observer among my Dramatis Personae who can sit and record and be horrified or amused by the antics of his more active partners, but I most often act out my me in the roles of Dreamer and Realist. Sometimes they are at such complete odds that nothing one can do will please the other, but most often they sync to create some balance between energy and rest, in the best times between joy and peace. Their darker peer is a Brooder who, like all his kind, sits on unfertile eggs.
 
 

        The time I spend is related to the spaces I occupy as I do such things as: loving my three sons (from whom I am separated); teaching new questions and learning by the asking; trying to balance reading and cutting wood; listening to music and being with my dog; writing poetry and hiking; thinking and smell- touch-hearing the sunrise (the balance seldom seems quite right); fly fishing for steelhead.

        As a teacher I am a slut in the desire to learn, experience and think, and a puritan in the conviction that learning, experiencing and thinking is an absolute necessity. Many of those who preceeded us in the world took the trouble to leave records of their journey. (I am especially interested in the records from the fall of the last great world-ordering view at the end of the 18th Century to the present.) The gut level courage of attempting to leave information for succeeding travelers fascinates me as a person, turns me on to what evergy and power I have as a teacher and is the means by which I see us honing our minds and consciousness up to the level necessary to have an actual presence in A.D. 1972.

        Thus, though the skills necessary for involvement and understanding are quite diverse, I treat Dicken's Great Expectations, The Prison Letters of George Henry Jackson, Wagner's Parsifal, Hegel's Phenomenology, Emily Dickinson's lyric poems, Jung's Symbols of Transformation, the so-called folk opera, Hesse's Glass Bead Game and on, and on, and on as tangible records by living people of where they live and, to the degree that we fully experience them, I see us providing ourselves with the only short-cut I know of to experiencing all of these things as actions in our physical lives. I teach the cultural artifacts of the past and present because I can thereby multiply by 100's, even 1,000's, the number of experiences I have, the number of lives I lead.  I am greedy and I want to act as a guide or instruator to others who are also greedy and who can use books, books, films, operas, paintings, old and new houses, books, records, tapes, photographs, essays, books, poems, carvings, graveyards, etc., to give their minds the P.T. necessary to make it a full partner with the rest of their consciousness in being alive. In my terms I am an intellectual; I would like to share with others the journey records
I know and care about and have others so share with me.

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