After assigning the book Evocative Objects, my english professor later assigned the class a paper on our own evocative object. Some of the evocative objects in the book included: stars, a datebook, a radio, an ax-head, a car, photographs, etc.. Always, the author's evocative object led to a grander philosophy, that in turn intersected with his profession.

Mitchel Resnick's object was "stars" --the pure wonder they initially put inside him, and the childish yet essential questions they caused him to ask: what is it for? how big and how far and where and when and who and what?

But before his essay was a long quote from Jean Piaget that, more or less, closely analizes the "assimilation of reality into systems of transformations."

Interestingly, and take a deep breath, Resnick is now............"LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research and Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab."

Resnick's eagerness to pursue his quesions, as child, student, and graduate, turned him from the stars, to complex mathmatical equations, and then to a multitude of philosophical paradoxes and riddles.

In class, the discussion of his essay morphed entirely into LEGOS, and brought me back to the interesting idea of delight and simplicity. This simplicity took me away from the muddled concepts of New Criticism, reader-response criticism, and New Historicism criticism; away from the objective the subjective the relative; away from modernism, naturalism, realism; away from the exact and precise definitions of the simile, metaphor, and personification.

The clarity of these LEGOS led me to find my own evocative object which made a good amount of sense to me-- my first tackle box.

I guess the point is--I returned clear and unattached when I returned from the chaos that occurs when you closely study something( in my case literature), and blind-sightedly accept the dogma of its religion as FACT or even FAITH.

These are a few excerpts I wrote on my tackle-box: