Supervisions

We did seminars; now it's time to get a little more intimate. The other primary outlet for human contact in the life of a classics graduate is the ominously titled 'supervision'. Scrub the word of its management speak surface rust and imagine a tall professor pacing back and forth in a book-crammed room, stoking fire, wielding cane, occasionally stopping to loom over the bedraggled student who scribbles away in the corner. Congratulations: you haven't imagined a supervision.

Or at least not one of mine. The supervision is, education wise, probably one of the best things about Cambridge. It is a rare event, happening only once every two or three weeks, but all the more special for the infrequency. Something wonderful indeed is it to pant up a narrow medieval staircase, boards creaking and hearts aflutter, knock on the door of your all-time academic hero, hear the first muted tones of that voice on the other side of the heavy timber, that honeyed voice which will be yours alone for the next blissful half hour. On paper, all a supervision involves is talking over your work, one on one, with your supervisor. But in practice, it's a whole lot more.

I scored a supervisor this term who may just be the best teacher I've/ll ever had/ve. Let him be known as Prof H. His method might be described as inspiration through bafflement. I sat down on his generous couch for the first time last Thursday, and, after venturing a bit o' the old tiny talk, started making lame enquiries about what he thought of the draft I had handed him the day before. An hour and a half later, I had no answer. Here is a sample of the notes I took:

No public broadcasting - lack of microphones.
No populace to be addressed by prophetic voice nowadays. We don't have a crier. Invented idea of upping and leaving.

Anchored.

Agrippa out there changing landscape.
What is the city? Something that could get into a boat?
The gubernator - ship of state. Those guys are reshaping the world...
Certain way of attending to reality.

...

Love is madness - access to philosophy. Erotic love to be the same thing as reading Plato.

Hating love, loving hate. Rough, real talk - perfect iambic woman a match for him? Just dreamt up woman. Giving elegy to iambist - the hatred a turn-on. Is this like difference between 7 and 16?

...

Everyone knows what Virgil is about to say.

...

Plutarch anecdote - two crows trained, one to say 'Ave Caesar', the other 'Ave Antoni'. Flexibility of civil war.

If that doesn't look nonsensical to you, then you are a genius. And that's not a quarter of my frantic scribblings transcribed. Basically the whole thing was one fantastic flight over the rooftops of Greece and Rome. Prof H hopped back and forth, digressing, alluding, eluding; I caught what I could in my flimsy ink and paper net, but fear I lost the catch of the day. An added problem was that the thoughts seemed to wilt as soon as they flowered, never lingering longer than the brief apex that the life-cycle demanded. Like those time delay shots of nature budding and dying in the space of a few seconds, it all appeared and vanished in a blink or breath. And then, just as you're kicking yourself for letting the delicate kernel fall through your fingers, he destroys everything by chucking a retrospective cloak of doubt over it all, topping off a five minute spiel with a 'or something like that, anyway' or the sonic silence of a verbal 'dot dot dot'. So do you really think like that, or were you donning the mask? Is that Prof H, or his inner devil's advocate? Will the real Prof H please stand up? Tangled in strands of irony, never until now did I really mean 'really makes you think'. Really. No irony. Dot dot dot...

To the untrained eye that may all look frustrating and pointless. And when I left the room, I did walk a rather perplexed walk up to hall for lunch. But a couple of hours later - the stupor snapped and dispersed - I revisited my notes, and they began to form a very fuzzy logic. I repeated a few days later, clarity factor rising; intervals of time seemed to make them speak, louder at a distance. Like the man's execrable handwriting, the squiggles started to reveal their secret forms.

After whining a few weeks back that the written word has become my only meaningful medium of communication, I now have to reassess. If I came across the story of the two crows - man in Rome brings out his talking crow after Octavian's (Caesar) victory, trained to say 'Hail Caesar!', then reveals that he had another one at home all along, trained to say 'Hail Antony!' in the event that the battle of Actium had gone the other way (or something like that...) - in Plutarch, I would have forgotten it straight away. But now the two crows peck at me for life.

Eight Hundred Years of Cambridge is a long time to get things right. This educational megalith has accrued untold wealth, eighty something Nobel prizes, buckets of Lord Byron's vomit (no matter how poetic). But eclipsing them all is that modest model of transmission, where Knowing Little meets and talks with Knowing Lots, baffled collides with baffler - and gets supervised to smithereens.