Small Consolations. (Forum on the Arts).(artist's musings about the World Trade Center attack)(Column)

In August, when it was easy to sleep, I had a teaching dream. I had brought John Lennon to class as a guest lecturer. He had complex algorithms for peace. He was explaining the mathematics of them with the confident precision of a research scientist. The room was filled knee-high with dirt and in it he spelled the word, "love" with his finger, right-to-left. The students in the classroom lifted their eyebrows with polite bemusement, as if he were advocating the manual typewriter...

A student from my sculpture class came into my office a few years ago. His name was Rusty, and he looked as if he probably lived in a wild-weekend frat house. He possessed the sort of young-twenty masculinity that could cause lesser beings, myself included, to assume he was mostly just waiting for class to be over. He was tall and quiet and not particularly interested in hanging out with the "art kids." I can't remember ...