Decided

I can still see my friend A standing in the door of N’s office, tugging at her abaya and singing “I want to break free”. She did, although it was years before “free” re-entered her dictionary. Now she looks radiant and has a purpose in life. She says it takes her a long time to make a decision, she is slow in weighing out her options and choosing the best one. But once she’s chosen, she goes with it and takes it to its conclusion. Today she showed me a video a friend sent her from Iraq of a glorious sunrise on a farm full of palm trees and chirping, trilling birds. No sound of bombs. Only beauty and freedom. No need for decisions, just breathe in the dawn.

My decisions, if rash, can be like exploding bombs, leaving rubble and devastation, scorched grass, broken glass, injured parties. They are marginally better when I don’t make them immediately, but sleep on them after drinking suitable quantities of thought-inspiring beverages. There is a lot to be said for hangover as a source of insight and serenity.

In general, I think, my decision-making skills are mediocre at best. Therefore I have made a decision not to make decisions. “Don’t rock the boat”, a good friend told me last night. Let the sleeping dogs lie. No decisions. Let it be. I’m feeling decisively mellow having made that decision.

 

Sleeping and not dreaming

The young ones sleep well

They fall into sleep and sleep in a shell

Still unafraid of the fading light

They dream dreams softly with their young dreaming might

Dreams of mountains un-climbed and oceans un-crossed

Of apples un-eaten and dice still un-tossed

Of lights un-lit and dresses un-made

Sleeping while dreams begin to fade

Not seeing light turn into shade

 

We envy the young the soundness of sleep

We envy the dreams, the light, and the lightness

We watch them and whisper and even weep

To see encroaching, impending slightness

To see ourselves not long ago

To hear our elders say ‘told you so’

 

Morning after

After a blast of a Thanksgiving party last night, an unexpectedly early start followed a very late finish. At 4 something this morning a strange noise woke me up, like a thud or crash or something. I was alone in the house and in complete darkness, including that present in my still-inebriated brain. I froze under the duvet and had a rapid succession of not entirely coherent thoughts: what the fk…, a werewolf, giant cockroach, masked intruder robbing me of my bottled goods and sprouting potatoes I keep for a special occasion? Not an awakening one would hope for after a night of imbibing. “Get out you stupid bastard!!”, I shouted in the strongest whisper I could muster. Finally, curiosity replaced fear and I ventured out of the bedroom to discover that Katherine’s bookcase had collapsed under the weight of education: her notebooks from Doha College fell out through the bookcase’s back passage so to speak. Some questions arose from that experience, as I noted on Facebook: What is education really for? Does anyone know a carpenter? Or have a bookcase for sale? 

 

 

Lifebelt experience

I tried to explain the power of words to my students the other day. Words, I said, have power in and of themselves (paraphrasing a great writer of course), they create our reality – it does not exist in and of itself, but only through words. They sat in dead silence, but one was less dead than the others. I think her reality came into being at that point.

On a seemingly unrelated topic, I must state here for the record that sometimes one needs a lifebelt to swim to the shore when one is “not waving but drowning”. And sometimes words fail me. That’s when I go back to black and spend money on new clothes. Anyway, my friend Adina is coming over for pre-party drinks shortly. We’ll talk.

 

“A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.”

― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

My day

Not everyone likes Baroque music, but this well-known and maybe slightly overplayed piece is simply stunning, especially in its original version. It made my day as I listened to it in the car one morning, driving slowly in the fast lane on the way to work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soIQ52hkMXw

Lamentation on education as business

I feel uneasy, or even disturbed, at the thought of marrying education with business. The changing ethos of the educational environment simply means a more business-like approach to teaching and learning. The new organisational discourse employs terminology from the field of corporate management, not education. For example, what does the phrase “meeting expected productivity standards” mean in the context of a classroom? Or, “achieving objectives by setting challenging quantitative and qualitative goals”? Such lexical developments could lead to significant changes in the overall ideology of an educational organisation. They are also potentially contradictory to the spirit and mission of any self-respecting educational institution.

There are other developments, too, including installation of bio-metric attendance monitoring, i.e. dumb thumb-printing to clock in and out of work, just as it is done in factories. What differentiates teachers from factory workers? What’s the difference between a classroom and an assembly line? Not much? Woe to the world if that’s the case… Now, I’m going to re-heat the old brick in the wall. Has it always been like this?

 

Sitting here and thinking

That I can do it, write it, finish it, understand it and then discuss it intelligently, arguing for its main points, interpretations and conclusions. But, heavens above, I’m a woman of average cognitive capacity, whose verbal output is mostly characterised by an intense dislike of repetitions. I wonder how my students put up with it. My PhD supervisor told me that a doctoral thesis should not be a review of a thesaurus – or something to that effect. Easy for him to say. He is Irish and has the gift of the gab. I seem to remember writing an article about that once, about the Irish propensity for telling stories, spinning them out of nothing, on the spur of the moment. Their stories confirm the validity of their existence: an experience narrated is an experience shared. That commonality of life, of lives lived separately yet according to parallel plans, is what brings about a sense of human community.

I like writing, only wish it were more substantial. Here is a link to a Spectator article on insubstantial writers, flimsy, lightweight, un-earnest: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/leading-writers-inhumanly-cool/

It struck me as accurately describing a phenomenon I happened upon several years ago in Poland when I started reading something by one Krystyna Kofta, a popular writer of well, stuff. Fluff. Couldn’t put my finger on it then, except for identifying a distinct feeling of un-(not dis-)satisfaction. Like swallowing cotton wool. Apparently that’s what models do to keep their weight in check. If it weren’t for the unpleasant texture, I’d try it myself. I don’t eat, I’m hungry. I eat, I’m fat. What to do? Drink? My friend suggested smoking. Must take it up. In earnest.

This is a piece of fluffy writing. I’d be good at that! No idea about the photos except for the painting – it’s by my friend Asmaa. Oh, maybe the one with the Omani flag was taken by me in 2013 when I was in Oman with family (minus son).

 

Grammar etc.

Broca’s area in the brain is responsible for the production of grammatical sentences, says Gardner in his Multiple Intelligences. But which area is responsible for making me actually LIKE grammar – in any language that I have ever studied?

Anyway, I’m posting links to these articles here so I have them handy whenever I wish to re-read them.

http://www.economist.com/style-guide/singular-or-plural

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/29/grammar-pedant-personality-type

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/09/unhand-that-comma/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9381417/Its-cruel-not-to-teach-children-grammar.html

 

 

 

Mid-week dullness

Never underestimate dullness – quite out of the blue, it may turn into diabolical excitement and who wants that, except for the media? So, I’m savouring the dullness of this mid-week afternoon on a yellowish, sandy Tuesday, although I should be correcting my final draft. But the peace and quiet of the empty house is… benumbing. I’ve even switched the BBC off – it’s either paralympics, or Trump, or refugees, or Syria that they are showing and frankly, I’m over-informed on those issues. Too much noise, too much repetitive action.

Inactivity, even if it seems dull, is good: it’s a perfect state of equilibrium, stasis. It is during such periods of cessation of liveliness, that things actually grow and change – because real change is always imperceptible, surreptitious (what a delicious word is “surreptitious”), leisurely. Like a foetus growing in the mother’s womb, or a pupa slowly transforming itself into a butterfly. I remember when we learnt about it in biology at school. I must have been very young, but I was rather puzzled by the apparent improbability of the slimy pupa turning into a butterfly, a blast of colour and movement, some Peacock or other Red Admiral. Initially, I didn’t quite believe it. But I had no option, the evidence was overwhelming. It didn’t make me like pupae any more than before, but I stopped chasing and murdering butterflies.

So here it is, slow change is the only change that actually changes anything. It is the same with education, one has to wait forever to see a new thought emerge from a young and hitherto thoughtless head. But once it does emerge from the recesses of an underdeveloped mind of a dim student, it has the potential to change the student’s life, imperceptibly and subversively. I’ve seen it happen. I’m waiting for some more.

 

On writing such as it is

I’ve just read a rather nice article in the Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/17/tracy-chevalier-my-writing-day) on writing as a magic trick (annoyingly, cloyingly cute). One good bit in it is the bit on procrastinating and finding oneself distractions – that’s what I do. Plus, the author (a woman, obviously, who else would write so nicely) quotes Yeats and Beckett at the end of the article – that’s always a winner with me. She could have included Oscar Wilde, only she didn’t.

So here is a selection of OW’s quotes on writing (and reading, what the hell, can’t be bothered weeding those out):

1. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

2. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

3. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

4. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

5. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

6. An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

7. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

8. I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

9. A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

10. Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless.

11. In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

12. I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

13. With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?

14. The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

15. A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.

FROM: http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/15-oscar-wilde-quotes-about-reading-writing-and-books