For a Spanish Conquest with Arabi

Quixote & Sancho by Picasso 

I had a very interesting evening with my student, Arabi. I have been meaning to write a short piece about how I met him, what my first impression of him was, and how I see him developing — and how, eventually, we shall end our short-lived camaraderie, because these things are all ephemeral in the very end. We began by talking about how we could add Spanish as the third languge on his Common Application portal. That discussion of Spanish as a language soon turned toward the great writers of the Spanish language. I happened to mention the inimitable Cervantes' Don Quixote the knight who wakes into dementia, where the Don represents idealism and his servant Sancho Panza represents a more grounded, down-to-earth attitude. I also mentioned to Arabi that Spain has produced a few other artists of the finest quality, products of a modern world. 

Apart from Cervantes, I brought up Pablo Neruda and the inevitable Federico García Lorca. I also mentioned how Picasso, though not Spanish by birth, lived a long time in Spain, and much of his painting draws on his Spanish experience. I could not help mentioning that Salman Rushdie also wrote a novel called Quichotte, set in modern times, a very funny, very comic novel that tries to mimic the comedy and playfulness of Cervantes' original. I also brought up an important booklet-length study, Myths of Modern Individualism, by Ian Watt, the famous author of The Rise of the Novel. In it, Watt discusses the great individualists of the sixteen, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Robinson Crusoe, that great singular man of the eighteenth century. None of them married or started a family; all of them lived lonely lives, set against the norms of their societies. 

We discussed all of this, and at the end I told Arabi that the best way to write is to talk without any guard, automatic writing, if you are really ok with the term. In such a writing, you talk without any guard, which gives free play to all the emotions and thought processes that come to a writer. It is sometimes compared with stream-of-consciousness technique, though automated writing is less of a technique than a practice — one I first found genuinely effective with students in a creative writing course, where I had them write their first pieces of fiction. These are some of the things Arabi and I discussed today, and I am very happy to note that he wrote around nine hundred and eighty words in about twenty-five minutes — a real achievement by any standard.