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When I graduated from high school in Salem, Oregon, in 1982, I had no plans to attend a college or university. The college experience was just not part of my industrial-agrarian heritage. However, most of my friends did attend, and by the late ‘80s they had lived the college life and acquired their degrees. Meanwhile, I had followed my inherited affection for automobiles, and that soon lead me into the auto-body-repair industry. I was to spend the 15 years after high school in auto-body shops, not customizing my own cars as I had once fantasized but rather repairing and refinishing other people’s vehicles—people with college degrees, I routinely noted.
Over the next decade and a half I grew progressively more weary and depressed, and I routinely experienced headaches that would last for days on end. It eventually came to light that I was suffering from chemical pneumonia as a result of my prolonged and continuous contact with toxic chemicals, fumes, and solvents. At age 33, with a wife and two young children to support, I began the process of seeking a new vocation that would allow my body and mind to heal and yet still enable me to support my family.
It did not take very long to realize one thing: Without a college degree—any degree—I wasn’t going anywhere but back to the body-shop. With my wife’s support, I quit my job and sold our house in Salem. Vicki, the kids, and I moved to Abilene, Kansas—a small, picturesque Midwest town where our West Coast money could buy us some time and peace, and where I could try to heal and think clearly about our future.
I spent a year in self-imposed “de-tox” as the only employee at the only local furniture store. Then, with Vicki’s encouragement and support, I applied to attend Kansas State University as a 34 year-old freshman. Driving east on Interstate 70 for the first day of classes in fall 1998, I was so happy I cried my eyes out. I was also scared.
Of all of the classes I took as an undergraduate at Kansas State University, it is possible that Conceptual Physics, “P-World 101” with Professor Christopher Sorensen, was the class I dreaded most—or perhaps better put, anticipated the least. This was not because I knew anything about Christopher Sorensen (I did not), but because as the art major I had become I could not see the relevance of academic physics to my interests and pursuits. Since my decision to attend the university was motivated not so much by my belief in the value of higher education as by my hope that an undergraduate college degree—any degree—might serve as a ticket from my past to somewhere brighter, I was still wrestling with the burden of an inherited familial and cultural mistrust of the type of institution in which I was now immersed. “P-World 101” with Christopher Sorensen appeared to me on paper as just one more drably painted institutional cinder-block lecture-hall mid-morning obstacle course to negotiate for three months in order to get my BFA ticket punched.
But...
Although I had accurately imagined the institutional architecture, I could not have underestimated more the impact that Christopher Sorensen and P-World were to have on me. In his book Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric, Daniel Tiffany writes, “Both science and poetry proceed, in part, by making pictures of what we cannot see (or merely escapes our notice), by attributing corporeal properties to inscrutable events.” In the course of Sorensen’s lectures, I was a witness to the exquisitely profound phenomena of a teacher who is so deeply and devotedly at one with his craft that he is what he teaches. Christopher Sorensen taught class as if there was no place on earth—or elsewhere—that he would rather have been, and in this way he became conceptual physics embodied, corporeal.
Tiffany speaks of these marvelous mechanical models of solar systems that we have all seen, or seen pictures of, as a way in which humans have traditionally given body to inscrutable events. I suggest that a teacher at the highest level does the same. If you think of a writer who brings to life through the written word a character so compelling, beautiful, and real that you, the reader, fall in love as well, then that is the best analogy I can give you for how Christopher Sorensen gave me the first non-linear vision of our world and the universe in which I had lived and worked my entire life. When he showed me that physics is all around us—informing, affecting, and enabling all we do and who and how we are in the world—he not only gave me new eyes to see my future, he also gave me back my past as something of deep and abiding value. His teaching and guidance have unified my life, a life that I had imagined was so deeply divided.
As a practicing studio artist, the most significant personal paradigm shift I have experienced in both undergraduate and post-graduate studies occurred without a doubt as a result of the P-World 101 class. As a husband, father, and all-too temporary inhabitant of this planet Earth, I am deeply honored that Christopher Sorensen’s paths and mine have intersected; we all need good and trustworthy guides when we travel in unfamiliar territory. The life I live now, and the manner in which I see and engage the world, is inextricably woven into and draws strength from the fabric of his teaching.
In the spirit of Daniel Tiffany’s quote, Christopher Sorensen, while standing on a desk in that cinder-block lecture hall in Manhattan, Kansas, wielding either a pair of reading
glasses and/or a dented lead ball, gave me a deeper sense of, and relationship to, our world than I had ever imagined possible. He is teaching at its highest level: embodied, human, humane, and beautiful.
After working as an auto body painter and freelance cartoonist, Randy Regier completed a BFA at Kansas State University in 2003 and an MFA at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, in 2007. His art works are represented in numerous private collections and museums. This is an expanded version of the letter he wrote nominating Christopher Sorenson for the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year, which Sorenson won in 2007.