Human Anatomy at Colby

There is difference as well as an intersection between doing well in a class and all related academic pursuits with “enlarging one’s understanding of the world” (thanks Milton Glaser). Classes don’t always give you that sense of enlargement, the sense that you have not yet reached the end of your understanding of yourself or the world. They can provide you with that sense if you let them and if you dig deeper yourself, but I often find that classes are too trivialized and reduced to grades and performance. Think about it—our full-time job is to be students. We literally have no other job but to learn, and this is often minimized and downplayed to how well you did on a test or the final grade for the class. The only thing that a test grade tells you is how well you meet the professor’s expectations, or the department’s expectations, or someone else’s expectations for that particular evaluation in that particular moment in your life, not what you actually know, understand, and wonder about in your free time. Perhaps I am biased too much towards thinking about things because that’s my major; I think and argue for a living. But I think there are kernels of truth to be gleaned, there is some sort of meaning to be created in trying to find that sense of enlargement in a class.

Despite how it may appear, a class is not really about impressing your professor, though this does not give you an excuse not to make an effort. A class is about impressing yourself. Study, read, and make an effort to do well because it fulfills you, not because there is an A at the finish line. (Arguably, this depends on your priorities. I understand you can’t always do things because they fulfill you, but at least try to make something out of the things that don’t.) Sometimes, this means that you won’t do as well as you would have wanted to, so you need to learn to fail gracefully. You gotta get creative and redefine what success means to you. I promise a class will be much better if you find a way to connect with it.

That said, classes won’t teach you everything you need to know to face the “real world” (whatever that means). There is much to learn outside of school, and this is not a slight to Colby. Classes in our college bring us to a starting point so we can make good work. Being a student is easy, smart people are a dime a dozen at an institution like ours. Beyond just smart, Colby can help us start to be excellent at whatever we do, but it’s up to us to take it from there. As Adrienne Rich said, “education is something you claim, not something you get“–education requires a strong personal effort and active initiative. You can learn a great deal from a course like this, but it is up to you to internalize it and incorporate it into your interactions with the world. Rich calls it a sense of responsibility to ourselves:

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. […] Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions– predigested books and ideas, weekend encounters guaranteed to change your life, taking “gut” courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing solid work, marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. […] It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others–parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, children–that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons.

– Adrienne Rich, “Claiming an Education“

Don’t just be a biology student, or whatever-your-major-may-be student. Be an everything and anything student, a lots of things student. Grow beyond this class. Grow beyond what you thought you were capable of. And at some point during the day, ask yourself “what matters?”

– Amanda Sagasti

No neuron in my head knows who I am, not individually nor collectively. I cannot point at a brain structure and say “that’s who I am!” What is this “self” we speak of and where do I find it? How do I know it is not a fiction? Where does the sense of individuality emerge in this fleeting collection of cells we define as ours? What are we in this boundless, vast world?

– Amanda Sagasti

Hello from the infinite chasm of meaninglessness that is the internet. Our interaction is mediated through a screen connected to a complex network that acts as its own nervous system—perhaps even an extension of our own. Along these artificial synapses you will find my story. I hand it to you. Think it over. Perhaps you can give us a different story.

– Amanda Sagasti

“Drawing on chalkboards is too much work to be erased,” I overheard one of the bio professors say.

Yes. I mean, you’re not wrong.

But this is joining the toughest of analytical sciences with an ephemeral art form. Both involve inspiration, discovery, tedious hours learning and practicing, but also a refuge from hostility, and ultimately, redemption. Physicist Lisa Randall said it best: both science and art “promise, in their different ways, to help transcend the narrow confines of individual experience and allow us to enter into—and comprehend—the realm of the sublime.”

The fleeting reality that someone is gonna come and sweep all of this away, that the janitors will come in when it’s too late and too early and spray the chalkboards clean before anyone gets here, is not something to condemn, but rather something to embrace and celebrate. The lack of stability of the medium is not meant for longevity, but for impermanence. My drawings may not last long (a few weeks at best, like some of the cells in our bodies), but I find that drawing them is illuminating and inspiring. I’m making something out of nothing, and as always, someone said it better than me:

            “I suddenly realized that you could create life — that you could create life with a pencil and a brown paper bag — and it was truly a miracle in my recollection. Although people are always telling me that memory is just a device to justify your present, it was like I received the stigmata and I suddenly realized that you could spend your life inventing life. And I never stopped since — at five, my course was set. I never deviated, I never stopped aspiring or working in a way that provided the opportunity to make things that, if you did right, moved people.”

— Milton Glaser

For a few hours, I draw things and forget about my own struggles, and if I do my drawings well, they could help other people forget about theirs. There is some sort of creative, temporal glory in drawing on blackboards, kind of like an inside joke. If you get to see my drawings, I hope they make you feel something before they’re gone.

– Amanda Sagasti

A lot of my work is done quietly, in a coffee shop, with lots of books, thinking… That’s kind of a given for philosophy majors. Do I only think? No, sometimes I doodle:

Over this month I contemplated somewhat seriously dropping out and raising sheep in New Zealand. Dissecting pig hearts and the functions of hemoglobin are processes a little outside my comfort zone–I’m not a biology or chemistry major, I’m not premed… I’m a philosophy major writing a thesis on time.

I knew this course would be incredibly challenging when I signed up for it, not only because of the subject but because of the long hours that included both lecture and lab, one after the other, and all the work outside of class I needed to keep up. This is NOT an easy JanPlan, this is in fact a very challenging class that tested way more than my academic abilities. At times I found the subject hostile, like the cells inside my body were laughing at myself and my inability to comprehend my own inner workings. As if my brain were somehow smarter than me and had a sort of biological awareness of what it’s doing while my conscious self was completely in the dark. Most of the time we aren’t aware of what we’re doing anyways.

Eventually I made peace with the fact that drawing was the best way I related to anatomy, and I dedicated a lot of time to it. I took comfort in the words of the great designer Milton Glaser: “the great benefit of drawing … is that when you look at something, you see it for the first time. And you can spend your life without ever seeing anything.” So I drew on pretty much any surface, from chalkboards to notebooks to the little placards they have in Dana announcing new courses. However, I was very conscious that drawing by no means was an excuse not to know what was happening. In fact, I felt even more pressure to understand what was happening precisely because I was taking the time and care to render an image as close to the actual thing as possible. And I understood, eventually. Maybe not everything, but at least some parts of it.

– Amanda Sagasti