You are team-teaching a class with an artist, in which both you and your fellow teacher received full credit, called Free Us from the Western Canon and you are currently working on a project in which the students recreate Plato’s Symposium along the model of MoMA’s first “Supposium”, held in March 2014 under the title Beyond Default Geographies of Attention: Six Thought Experiments Beginning with ‘Suppose,’ and featuring Anne Carson, Sandi Hilal, Peter Krapp, Fred Moten, Adam Pendleton, and Joan Retallack.
You bring the students into the classroom, filled with an assortment of junk, including ladders, ropes, boxes, risers, etc. You tell half of the class to wait outside while the other have spends 15 minutes altering the environment into which the others would return.
You are excited about his project, as you know that the students, a mixture of Artists and Classicists, will generate a fantastically ritualistic place with all kinds of thing happening for the others to do. Be prepared for the second group to be more formal than the first, making the entire event more ordered. You may find, however that the first group will create a definite pathway, which could include going through dark tunnels, climbing high levels, passing couples making love, or being pelted by balls of paper.
After each group has taken its turn and the class continues into the evening, you will rejoice at the great deal of discussion about the differences between group one and group two that the class project generated. Then you wake up and realize that it has all been a dream.
[I realized that the book from which I have taken these maps of the Myths environments reproduced “Dreams” for “Totem”, leaving it to our imagination what “Totem” would have looked like, schematically]