RATIONALE PARA EL SPICARISMO...

Still on Miller's study for this post, but I believe there is still a lot to learn from, "The Picaresque" (1967). In one of the chapters Miller writes about the education of the picaro or picaresque character. Miller says that "the pattern of education into roguery by the world reflects on the world more than on the picaro. It is the world that is picaresque; the picaro only typifies that world in his dramatic change from innocent to trickster" (1967, pg. 56).

And this is relevant because education is something I am deeply ambivalent about. Sometimes I get all quantitative and think that really education is mostly a battery of exams that one manages (or doesn't manage) to overcome. And then I get all qualitative and start to cry so that I have to snivel on the cuff of my sweater that I am a public school mutt and that I wouldn't want it any other way. But what have I learned from the battery of tests that I have overcome and the many years of public school university and college grinding. I guess I have learned that timing is the quartz and not the other way around.

And then to have come throught the machine of education, to have esconced myself in the catacombs of drudgery smack dab in the middle of ground zero of the economic disparity in the U.S. To have been an educator in the poorest county of the country is nothing to balk at, although to be honest this honor is most important to the person who had to trudge through that task. Teaching in the most poor county in the country is like being a war correspondent without any of the cool acoutrement and sexual radiation that being a war correspondent connotes. In other words, I would rather be Anderson Cooper in the Afghan hinterlands than Yago Cura in the Mosul Educational and Babysitting Complex in the Bronx.

Miller is right. The world is unmistakenly picaresque, and the common, heathenish carbon-based lifeform must transform themself into a rogue just to get by, just to survive the snares or more importantly to detect the snares and to avoid them or to rouse from their foxholes the scions and magnates that set the snares and traps. I refuse to take education seriously, because ultimately an education opens the world up and shows you the motives and rationales behind things. I am all for education because it will in the long run make me a better spicaro.