Color/colour

Our philosophy professor, Jamie, challenged us to think of an instance of color without shape.

'There is no color without shape,' he said, 'just as there is no mass without matter.'

People called out various suggestions. The sky, someone said. Closing your eyes. The idea of color, or color as a Platonic form.

Most people in our philosophy class spoke before they thought, making it very noisy in there indeed.

'Can you have shape without color, though?' someone wondered, and again the room was abuzz with speculation.

The best part about that class was that it didn't matter what was at stake in the discussion. Any topic would do. The whole color-shape conundrum was introduced to illustrate something about contingency, I think, and here we were, scrounging for counterexamples. The whole class was bent on arguing about whatever we talked about, and nobody could say 'You're missing the point' or 'That's irrelevant.' Anything even tangentially related to the topic is fair game, because it might be the brick that holds up the whole argument. Being nit-picky is an advantage in - what was that class again? - epistemology.

Most of what I remember about epistemology (TR 3:30 - 4:45) is fragmented,  isolated incidents with little relation to the lesson; much of my memory revolves around the mannerisms of the erudite, scatterbrained professor. Jamie was the most endearing teacher we could possibly have had. He was so absent-minded that he continually had to be reminded what we were talking about, though he could jump back in with reasonable acuity. He even had the tendency to look off into the distance when he got distracted, which I thought was charming. Once he put his coffee mug on the shelf inside his podium, and forgot right away; he leaned forward pensively on the podium, tipping it forward, and dumped all his coffee on our term papers. Oddly, he was only in his late 20's, just a few years older than we were.

Anyway, the color-without-shape discussion stayed with me, even if most of the principles of epistemology didn't. Sometimes I look at something and it takes me a few minutes to account for its shape. Darkness doesn't really have a shape, and neither do the streaks in a sunset, so some people in that class weren't too far off.

I wonder what I was supposed to have learned from that class. It's odd how school makes you spend so many nitty-gritty seconds memorizing and ruminating and processing and internalizing, and what you're left with is random flotsam.

One day I found a box in my hall closet, on the floor beneath a tent, two sleeping bags, a vacuum cleaner, and other boxes. It was filled with textbooks, notes, and papers from college. Naturally, being incredibly vain, I had to read all of my old papers. There was one on Frank O'Hara and his ostensible relationship with Rachmaninoff, Protestant poetry from Northern Ireland during the Troubles, nature imagery in Hopkins, and one on Aristotle's approach to epistemology.

They were fascinating. Not because they were particularly groundbreaking, though they weren't bad, either. They were fascinating because there was something of myself in them that I had forgotten, or perhaps not known at all. I remembered writing the Hopkins one - I'd been sick, and heavily dosed with pseudoephedrine, which I'd augmented with energy drinks. The result was a manic, scattered, long-winded but quite passionate argument on behald of Hopkins' nondemoninational spirituality, despite his having been a Catholic priest, which I recall feeling very strongly about. The paper on the Troubles was more sober, but I don't remember writing it, so I have no idea whether that's because of the content or my state of mind.

The strange thing was, they didn't all sound familiar, although they were my words, and from just a few years ago. I don't remember reading that many Hopkins poems, and I certainly have no recollection of ever being that acquainted with Aristotle's syntax. And yet, here, staring me in the face, were the papers that had given me my final grades, and thus, my degree. And the most I remember about one of them is some spilled coffee, a really likable man named Jamie, and a debate about color.