Geography GCSE, wilfull ignorance and of course rats

What I've learnt in my Geography GCSE (aside from a head-full of statistics that are wholly outdated and likely incorrect) is how we are taught about the huge wealth disparity and suffering in the world - from a carefully unbiased perspective - and how people come out of the exam with no better empathy or understanding at all.

Indeed, the course dryly confronts floods, earthquakes, migration, rivers (and yes, the infamously boring Ox Box lake), birth control and a whole wealth of information which, credit due to the exam board, was actually pretty interesting and useful.

However.

Never once in a lesson have I heard even the slightest tone of outrage or upset when reading aloud how mx + c people die when badly built factories collapse because we wanted our trainers cheaper and so the MNC (look, I'm learning and repeating!) cut down on the building structure.

It is remarkable that people nowadays need things to be presented to them with an obvious slant and bias for people to actually think about and/or/perhaps/ifyou'relucky have an opinion about any of it. In fact, it is an indicator of the dangerous level of reliance and ineptitude that our generation possesses.

The "West" (we also learnt that there is more to development than what side of the map you live on) has bloody hands. We 20% produce 60% of the pollution, stirring up Global Warming, leading to worsening tropical storms killing 1,100 in Bangladesh. We consumers cause the deforestation of the rainforests and extinction of the creatures we have cheaply printed onto canvases for our living rooms. We self-proclaimed humanitarian charity-donors are stirring up civil war across the world due to the wealth disparity, corruption and suffering we create across the world.

Furthermore, our fuse is burning down.

I saw the film "Interstellar" a while back, and one scene really stuck with me. We're talking a few generations into the future. Land is infertile. Most people have died. Humanity has only a few years, winds of dust and corn, left. The protagonist (a father) has a meeting with the headmistress in a "careers guidance"-like meeting. He talks of his daughter wanting to be an engineer. The headmistress replies that the world doesn't need any more engineers. It needs farmers.

And indeed, how many more bankers/marketers/programmers/yoga teachers/film directors does the world need. And how many can it support? "Education" is held up as the redeeming path of all evils of humanity. I want to finish by questioning this.

In my History GCSE (the best one. Seriously.), I read a letter by a Holocaust survivor, addressing the UN. Begging. Begging for education to be given a moral compass. For the engineers made bombs, the chemists made extermination gas, the politicians condemned millions to death and the people allowed it all.
The survivor asked what the point of education is if it doesn't make the world a better place.

Emily Dickinson, agony and of course rats

I like a look of agony,
to quote Dickinson

I LIKE a look of agony,
Because I know it ’s true;
Men do not sham convulsion,
Nor simulate a throe.
The eyes glaze once, and that is death.	5
Impossible to feign
The beads upon the forehead
By homely anguish strung.

this is the poem that really first made me realise that she's totally different to everyone else.

The image combing "beads" and "anguish" on the "forehead" recalls (to me) Jesus on the crucifix [which may have been her intention. Dickinson definitely found more genuine meaning and personal connection (and comfort) with God and Jesus (and religious passion (in the agony sense)) than most other people. Somehow she manages to make all her poems about God not feel trite or a following of the establishment. She conveys a more real image of God, I think). And yet, this image of Christ dying is interesting because "the eyes glaze once"- and of course, Jesus doesn't really die once, or at all. Some may see his death as "feign[ing]". Perhaps (now this is on a real limb. An "alternative interpretation" to the obvious one) this poem is partially reconciling the impermanence of life and death and agony with the permanent afterlife; the simplicity of "and that is death" mirroring the holy simplicity and restfullness of it all. And all the agony and life and death and permanence is crystalised by the real truth of agony and pain, which she indeed saw as "homely" - perhaps something grounding and comforting, as she is used to agony. Maybe she saw this constant agony as a gateway to the better, "true" existence, similar to a purgatory.

I love the image of a kind anguish, stringing beads upon her forehead (like a crown or Indian jewelry). However, it makes me question what "beads" mean: one assumes it means "beads of sweat", or perhaps rosary beads? Or like a child, when they make you a necklace out of shitty yellow wooden beads. Either way, this poem overall conveys to me this image of a woman totally at one and affectionate for the agony that plagues her and fellow humans, a link between all the superficial shit she encountered. The delicacy of a row of beads on her forehead giving whispers that the pain isn't permanent: the eyes "glaze once" and the calmness of that juxtaposed with anguish gives a sense of acceptance. This association makes it unclear whether she sees (in this poem) death as painless. "anguish" feels like a resignation. the simplicity: she "like[s]" a "look" of agony.

it's all rather quiet.

Jane Austen, IS, Foucault and of course rats

I've recently been trying to read "Persuasion" by Jane Austen - partially as a distraction, and partially because the name has always jumped out at me in that singular way that only Jane Austen can: there is something so dry and enigmatic, and yet unpretentious about her titles (and portrayals). Also, the idea of a less-beautiful, aged but wise heroine feels more than a bit poignant. Also I fucking love sailors.

I'm only at the beginning and I keep having to re-read pages because my eyes keep dripping from the page in fatigue (and probably also because Austen's characters generally take a bit of wearing in before they fit and become interesting). This means that I keep staring at sentences, when they suddenly jump out of context and feel abstract - or rather, bizarrely relevant. 

Specifically, this keeps disquieting me:

"It was painful to look upon their deserted grounds, and still worse to anticipate the new hands they were to fall into; and to escape the solitariness and melancholy of so altered a village, and to be out of the way when Admiral and Mrs Croft first arrived, she had determined to make her own absence from home begin when she must give up Anne."

This is in the context of a man having to rent out his home to Admiral Croft because he is very deep in debt due to his... unwise purchases. This is a man consumed by his own self-worth: he is obsessed with his own (and others') beauty, as well as the social status of his family. 

Anne is a quiet but admirable woman (unmarried, late twenties). The person whose thoughts these are is greatly fond of Anne, although many others are embarrassed by her - as one who has lost the bloom of beauty and was reaching old-spinster territory. So far, she feels tossed about like a hot plate between people, and filled with regret (and many loud despairing and nervous sighs).

This idea that is was "painful to look upon their deserted grounds" - an image of house, still furnished with many generations of a family's possessions, empty of the people who define it as home, left for those whom have the money to afford it - felt reminiscent of how I imagine it looks and feels in Syria right now. And perhaps, the "pain" is felt not only as the genuine loss of the house for the family, but "still worse" that the place will become occupied by people who will not see it as 'home' but as a 'house' - a "ground". 

In the same way that (Foucault) words take on different meanings depending on who and where and when they are said, places too lose and gain meaning from the same factors. The room in which your father died is seen as merely a room, perhaps with some coffee stains on the table. Indeed, I think this is the "solitariness" that Austen describes at seeing a place move on. In Syria (and elsewhere in time and place), land which to a family means the whole context of their life is degraded to a mere political conquest. Having to flee one's home is more than just losing what you own and to strip yourself of familiarity and memory, but also to strip the place of the same - leading to a feeling of injustice and many other complex emotions I cannot possibly understand, never having been forced to flee my home. Perhaps Anne here, one hand always tracing her footprints, can be the symbol of memory and a time left behind. 

This book, apparently, explores how Anne retrieves a past and possibility she'd thought was lost (and her fault). 

Persuasion. 

I anticipate that I shall learn a lot from this book. 

Purgatory and of course rats

Sometimes we need to go back to heaven and hell to give ourselves context. Sometimes I miss the definitive sense of direction and hierarchy that the priests I knew as a child would instill in me, sitting in the corner of a pew at church.Christ's pale wet face, a confusing yet poignant sign of redemption, a beacon between the arches. Or (my favourite) chancing upon a near-empty church on a Saturday afternoon, hearing that distinctive clop of my shoes across the cool tiles, standing before the heart-warm prayer candles when an organist begins to practice. At first, a few big heavy chords, before the harmonies break and the roof of the church seems to swell and splinter with the discordant cries of ancient longing, "O, O," like lost whales.

When we burn in purgatory, our past is burnt off of us and we become free of our memories. All conception of self  - our pride, our presumed morals, our likes and dislikes - vanishes, alongside our pretension and guilt. 

I, for one, think purgatory sounds like just what I need right now. And I bet that idea curled some pangs of longing in your belly, just now. 

And here comes the obvious leap: what is stopping us from visiting purgatory right now, tomorrow, this evening, when you're lying in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling, unsure if you can actually see or feel or think anything at all. 

Broadchurch and of course rats

So I've been worrying about a few things recently. Mainly small, but grating, permanent things. Ultimately insignificant, but disturbing none the less. Things that are gonna stay with me forever. Been trying to get over them, cos ultimately, things are only significant/painful if you allow them to be.

I've also been watching "Broadchurch", ITV. It's one of those who-dunnits about an 11-year-old boy in a small Dorset town. It was good (despite being ITV). At the end, they hold a funeral for the boy.

There is a church service, in which the priest quotes Ephesians, "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you". Earlier, a man with a very painful past had said on the beach on which the dead boy was found, surrounded by huge cliffs (very similar to the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"), "God will put you in the right place in the end". Later, after the funeral, the family and community had gathered on these cliffs and lit huge torches, and up across the whole coastline, other communities joined in solidarity. The mother "saw" her dead son standing before the cliff. 

As I was watching this, I had my (blind) cat purring on my lap, and these images and words roused in me this sense of acceptance and peace over my "things". I'm not a hugely religious person - much of me wishes I were, but lo! I am of scientific soul by blood - but I try to believe in a God, because I would like to think that the world isn't as lonely as it sometimes can feel. I find it so easy to brush through each day without a true thought towards our relationships with people around us, and the context of our existence. It is like when you see an old man, back hunched, unable to look up, only able to stare at the ground as he walks around. When was the last time he saw the sky? He would be incapable of lying down in a field. To what extent is he conscious of this lack of sky? Does he angle himself so that he can catch the reflection of clouds and sun in the windows of buses and trains? What is it like to feel rain on your back, and not be able to see where it's coming from? I suppose that's a bit like what it is like living in a world with no proof of God. One must have faith that there are clouds above.

But "Broadchurch" did give me a sense of hope that there is a context. That in time, I will be "Put in the right place", provided I do what I see as righteous. I think this is true regardless of God, as if you do what you think is right, you shall be spared guilt and feel strong in your cranny in the world. But I do like the idea of an angel (especially if they are the original meaning: not furry birds, but ancient warriors of the afterlife) somewhere nearby. I'd had a revelation recently in a mock exam: an image came to me, of myself standing in a forest, by a hut, alone. The realisation that, despite family and friends, one is always ultimately alone, as one looks out for oneself better than anyone else ever can. We all have goals. See divorces, abuse and murder. As "Broadchurch" tries to remind us: you can never truly know someone. And, as I believe, you can never truly know yourself: ultimately, we may in fact just be vessels for bacteria anyway! Why bother with goals!

But with a God or angels, you're not alone. 

I've also been thinking about death a bit. Sitting their with my cat in my arms (staring into his fragile ears), at that present moment, it was just wonderful to revel in the feeling of not having lost something yet, that one day, I will lose. 

We must remember to always appreciate and love the moments we share with people, because one day, we are going to lose each other.

Peace and love, faithful readers.

Ahab and of course rats

O, if it were in my grasp, Ahab, I would. 

And I would tell you, dear procrastinator, about him and the woes which surround himself and myself.

But Alas, that would be weird. 

So instead I shall speak in  an awkward and strained, vague tongue, so that I may look dear Ahab in the eye again and not feel yet more guilt. 

Consider this, O intimate friend, an exercise in self-expression - which, due to my British heritage, I have naturally lacked since birth - and a reconciliation of heart and fingers.

Separated by near every conceivable social constraint (and your own indifference, admittedly) I stand a figure below the cliffs, hazy in the fog as you come into harbour on your worn whaling boat. A brief periphery. Irrelevant and quiet, but peaceful only because there be no words that could change a thing. It is said the sailors could smell the perfume of their ladies of Salem even whilst amidst the tumult. But where does that leave me, if not sitting quietly on the rocks, the tips of my dress wet in the swash, and waiting aimlessly for no one.

Yet perhaps this bough tearing in through the mist is but a mirage - a nod from Above, a reminder to keep watch and faith, as if there can be two marvelous people on earth, then there can certainly be three.  

Therein, I shall sit still and enjoy your coming and going, Ahab, from my harbour, and wait for a seaman of my own to part the waters.

Secrets and of course rats

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, you have lent me your ears.

And so now I think it'd be cool if you told me a secret. As a comment? Or by bottle in the sea.

Regardless: secrets are fun and humanising and it's damn swell to share them.

I'll start: I'm a time traveler from three days in the future and I've come to tell you that something awful is going to happen soon.


Your turn.