Patch Adams (or パッチ・アダムズ, as it read last night) is not a fantastic movie. In fact, it is borderline family-feel-good generic. But I love it: not for its script (which was only decent), nor its cinematography, and certainly not for the music; but for Mr. Williams' fantastic presentation of a man of unconformed insight, of the bare simplicity of a complicated, excessive compassion. The desire. He models the bright spectrum of colors that channel kaleidescopically through his spontaneity by the power of his unselfish desire. He calls it a "high" (again, confined to the limits of an underdeveloped script), but my experience of it is as a 'depth,' a foreboding into the unknown that is both terrifying and thrilling. It is 'high' only figuratively, only numerically, as though the most radical extensions of the virtual could be measured; and yet I mean radical as in being most efficiently rooted in one's line of becoming (I certainly don't mean as in 'radicle'), and thus would better return to the better descriptive term of 'depth.'
My interest, my love for my students isn't so much implicative of a fascination with the English language (though there is one), or the conservation of the methodology of its teaching, but with the ostentation of passing borderlines, of the com-passion-driven fever that accompanies diving into self-forgetting consciousness of the bizarrely foreign. It is a love for seeing past the mask of similarity, and of difference, to come to recognize that the masks cover our eyes more than they do our faces. How many fingers are there?: Eight -- but don't get too caught up in that. If all you walk away with is the conviction that there are eight, you will bypass the significance of counting in the first place; you will have mistaken the depth for the numbers, the insight for the newer point of conformity. Always look more deeply: that is the theme that I've taken from Patch's story and my current teaching experiences.
