Category Archives: Ahimsa

Merry Christmas From New York

I was headed downtown to visit friends in from far away.  After a groggy start to Christmas Day, a day that generally fills me with despair,  I was running late, well after the time I’d told my friend I’d aim for.   I had a twenty minute or so southward train ride to get there, then a short walk west.  

As you approach the elevated Number One line at Dyckman Street you can see up the track almost to the next station north.   If you see the southbound train coming around that bend, experience teaches you can catch that train if you run into the station, Metrocard in hand, and make a smart dash straight up the steep steps.  

I went through the turnstile and made my dash smartly, but there was no train.  The one I’d seen, apparently a mirage.  There was no train on the horizon either.  I noticed how winded I was, I’ve run up these stairs many times– this was the most winded I’ve been.  I walked it off.  

At the end of the platform a man was talking on the phone with his back to me.  He had a baby carriage with him.  The baby was also turned away from me, but I noticed how solicitous the man was, walking the baby carriage in little circles to soothe the baby.  I watched them absently for a moment, thinking of the human parent’s instinct, if everything falls right, to comfort their child.  I recall feeling impressed with how this guy was taking care of his baby.

The train came.  The man turned the baby carriage slightly to move his child on to the train.  I could now see that the baby was a full grown beagle, sitting very patiently upright in the baby carriage.   I made a note to tell this story to my friends when I arrived, but as things happened I forgot about it.

We exchanged handshakes, hugs and pleasantries and then my friend said “I have a small gift for you,” as if remembering some trifle.  He went into the other room and returned with the best gift anybody has ever given me, possibly the best gift anyone has ever given anybody.  “It’s really nothing,” he said, handing me a hard-shell ukulele case with the imprint of a palm tree on its shell.

Over the years my friend has mentioned a dream image he has, of himself, sitting on a porch somewhere beautiful at sunset after his work day is done.  His work would be gently but firmly bending wood, plying it, smoothing it, skillfully using tools to turn beautiful wood into a beautiful musical instrument.  In another life, he’d have loved to have been a luthier.  

A few years ago he took a course from a master luthier and made a tenor ukulele, out of beautiful wood, over the course of several weeks.  He sent me photos of it at the time and mildly self-effacing comments about the instrument when it was done.   I opened the case and there was the hand-made ukulele, a very beautiful one.  Everyone I showed it to later could not help stroking it.  It is lovingly detailed, with several unique flourishes, and finished to the texture of perfect skin or something like that.  It is so silky that it’s hard not to pet it if you hold it in your hands.   Everyone who held it did.

It plays beautifully, with a rich tone I haven’t heard from most ukuleles.   He also somehow rigged the lowest string to be in a lower octave, as on a guitar, making this uke a much more useful instrument to play melodies on.  I smiled as I played a little Django ending that had been impossible to play on my other ukes.  Sekhnet could not stop commenting on its beautiful tone, just as I could not stop playing it in the car after we left our friends.  

“What an amazing gift!” Sekhnet said, “I hope you really thanked him.”  I assured her I did.  I think I did, I’m sure I did, I had to have.  Of course, now that I’ve played it for hours, and re-tuned it to concert pitch, I’ll sing its praises some more when I talk to him tomorrow.  He’d looked at the label inside, with his name and the year he made it, 2009, and told me, since he never played it (although he certainly could), that I should have it, since I would play it.  I certainly am playing it.

I played it happily for an hour or so in the background with Sekhet’s family.  Each of them had admiringly held and petted the beautiful instrument, a few even strummed the open chord it plays if you don’t finger the frets.  I then played it all the way back to the city.  When we got back I was concerned that the constantly sleep deprived Sekhnet get some sleep.  I left her and walked to the subway to head uptown.

Being Christmas, it was only natural that the train service would be fucked up.   The high-tech interactive electronic information signs on the subway platform gave random misinformation.   According to the fancy new sign the next A train was a Brooklyn-bound one scheduled to arrive in 46 minutes (average wait is supposed to be about twelve minutes).  There was no information about any uptown trains at all.   “We’re working harder to serve you better,” I said finally to two other sour-faced men waiting for information on the uptown train to take them home Christmas night.

A moment later there was an incomprehensible PA announcement and a Brooklyn-bound A train rumbled in on the downtown platform.   Another announcement began as the Brooklyn-bound train was departing, making a great racket across the station.

The MTA had decided, in its infinite puckishness, to have the crackling, irrelevant, over-driven announcement delivered by the employee with the heaviest and hardest to decipher foreign accent.   I don’t know where this guy was born, but I’m sure the last thing his parents ever dreamed of for him was delivering this incomprehensible message to disgusted New Yorkers over the public address system moments after the end of Christmas Day. I have no idea what he said, but I do recall sincerely muttering something about fucking retards that I do not now feel very proud about having muttered.  

A dirty, smelly beggar was striking out as he made his way toward me on the platform.  He’d start to speak and get waved off.  I saw this happen a few times, found I had a single dollar bill in my pocket and thought “what the fuck?”   When he came toward me I handed him the dollar, which he dropped.  

Before he picked it up, he looked me in the eyes and asked “could you please help me out with two or three more?”  I told him I didn’t have it.  It was true.  My other bills were twenties, and outside of that, I had two pennies.  He continued down the platform and I was reminded of my dislike of people who don’t have the grace to say thanks. 

On the uptown A, which finally arrived, a large man asked “may I sit next to you?”  This is not a question anybody phrases this way on the New York City Subway.  It was the only seat in the car, and I nodded, almost imperceptibly, and without looking up from my book, only because it was the right thing to do.  

Then, because you know what they say about unpunished good deeds, he began humming in a soulful way, and turned his head toward me as I tried to read, which made his humming suddenly way too loud.  He began to sing, in the same manner as his humming, turning his head like a slow moving leslie-speaker to heighten the effect.  

He did that African spiritual-inspired melisma, making every quavering note a long, stylized, if cliched, statement of his soul.   After a few minutes of this I wanted to do something to make him stop. I thought about my vow to remain mild and kept reading.  

A seat opened across the way, and I took it.  I couldn’t hear his fucking singing from over there, and it was a relief.  Suddenly, I smelled ass, dirty feet, filthy clothes.  The smell was coming from the seat behind me, turned out to be a homeless woman.  But the smell wasn’t that bad, it was better than the fucking soul singer.  

The singer got off a few stops later and I went back to where I’d been sitting.  I watched the poor homeless woman, who appeared to be very much insane.  I thought of the almost infinite varieties of suffering in this world, and of God and the mythical baby Jesus weeping over it all, less than an hour after Christmas.  I  took out the ukulele, played a bit of Django’s version of “I’ll See You In My Dreams” and put the lovely instrument into its protective case as the train pulled into Dyckman Street.

As I walked up the hill to my apartment, carrying the perfect tenor ukulele my old friend had made, I thought of the blessings of this life. Those blessings are not the physical things everyone is taught to covet, of course, but what lies behind them, what we might call their spiritual dimension– what they represent in terms of our souls.   If the physical manifestation is also a beautiful thing, that’s ideal.

I thought of my friend’s ancient mother, now well-past ninety and noticeably much older than the last time I saw her, not that long ago.  She made mention tonight of her approaching death.  I’d never heard her speak of death, but when I quickly broached the subject of Trump, during a moment when her son had gone back upstairs to fetch something she’d forgotten, she told me that the only good in it for her is that this would be a good time for her to die.  

I told her that my mother, at the end of her life, had begged me to promise her that Sarah Palin would never be the president.  I made the promise and I’m as sure as it is reasonable to be that Sarah Palin will never be the president of the United States.  There are things as unthinkable as President Sarah Palin, but that’s an imponderable story for another time.

When I put her son’s ukulele in her hands she immediately began stroking it.   She admired it for a long time, and mused about how many other hidden talents her talented son had (he was cooking a delicious smelling dinner at the time).  

Later, sitting around the coffee table, my friend’s mother smiled, and pointed at her son and her grandson, huddled over the young man’s cellphone, looking at photos of some of the grandson’s recent architectural projects, I assume.   To her daughter, with a big smile, she said “kvelling…” This is Yiddish for a parent’s pleasure in seeing their child do something that makes them kvell with pride.  The daughter looked at her blankly and asked “who?”   

“Me,” said the old woman happily, as she pointed to her chest with a gnarled hand.

Anger and “The Insula”

Last word.

I will keep this simple.  I’ve heard (granted from a historian Bill Moyers interviewed) that there’s a specific part of the human brain, located in the primitive, survival-oriented region that’s sometimes referred to as the lizard or reptile brain, where anger is experienced.  Let’s call it the insula (or insular cortex), and assume, for our purposes here, that feeling anger is one of its primary functions.  

When the insula is engaged for anger, all bodily engines are mobilized for fight or flight.   Cortisol and adrenaline, already coursing through the system, are ready to be released in a flood, as soon as the insula gives the command.  The ability to see nuance and make distinctions disappears, along with the ability to compromise.  All the person with the glowing insula can see is rage and the enemy in the upcoming battle.  There is a clear evolutionary survival advantage to this hyper-focus.

It explains why it seems impossible for an angry person to acknowledge certain things that may seem easily seen.  An angry person, told that his ignoring three requests for a comment was hurtful, cannot process that information.   You would think anybody who had been ignored several consecutive times would feel hurt, at least slighted.  You’d think it would be an easy matter to put yourself in the other person’s place and feel and express regret for not doing the decent, human thing for a friend.  If your insula is glowing, and you never learned how to calm it, it is actually biologically impossible to do any of those things.

First of all, you will say, I don’t remember ever having ignored you, so I couldn’t have done it on purpose and you’re the aggressor for blaming me.  Second, you say I ignored you but it’s quite possible I responded to you, I think I did, and you just, for whatever reason, maybe to feel justified in your irrational rage, blocked it out.  Third, I don’t even remember if I even read the thing you asked me to comment on, it made no lasting impression in any case, so what’s the fuss about?  Fourth, you’re a fucking hypocrite, I sent you something you never responded to, even though I realize now I must have somehow sent it to an address where it never reached you.  Fifth, I will need your unconditional surrender before any peace negotiations can begin. Blah blah blah.

The effective thing to say, if you meant to have a sincere and lasting peace, and friendship, with the other, would be more like:  

Of course I’d be hurt if you did that to me, anyone would.  A friend should not have to beg another friend for feedback on a project they had a long, animated conversation about.  This is especially true between two writers who have discussed one of their projects. Three separate requests should have been enough.  It’s not necessary to send me the email string to prove I never uttered a peep in response.  It was wrong of me to question your veracity on that, I was angry and feeling desperate.   I was an asshole not to get back to you, a jerk to insist you should have contacted me for feedback a fourth time, and a fifth if necessary, and I apologize.   It’s not as though I’m working two full-time jobs and am overwhelmed by work, I’m semi-retired.  I understand it was hurtful, I didn’t mean to do it and I hope you will forgive me. Would it help if I read it now and gave you some notes you might be able to work with?  

The insula, glowing, knows only how to continue the do-or-die fight for survival.  God bless the reptile brain, when fight is needed.  Hard to be friends with an angry reptile, though.  I speak from long experience.

 

NOTE:

The frontal insula is where people sense love and hate, gratitude and resentment, self-confidence and embarrassment, trust and distrust, empathy and contempt, approval and disdain, pride and humiliation, truthfulness and deception, atonement and guilt.

The NY Times printed this, on June 2, 2007.  (source)

 

Knots

When I was a sprout, in the late sixties or early seventies, a brief period of creativity when there seemed to be wonderful possibilities for the human and natural world, there was a book called Knots.  It was written by a Scottish psychiatrist named R. D. Laing, about whom Wikipedia offers this great line:  Many former colleagues regarded him as a brilliant mind gone wrong but there were some who thought Laing was somewhat psychotic.

As I recall the short book was a series of poetic vignettes about things like Complementary Schismogenesis (“creating of division”), somewhat gnarly psychological concepts involved in relationships, laid out, with some wit, in simple, down to earth scenarios, or dialogues.  As I dimly remember the book, they were more elegant versions of things like:

Guy is very sensitive to being ignored, interprets silence as anger.   He writes a play about the pain of being ignored, asks his friend the playwright if he’ll have a look.  Playwright cheerfully agrees, takes the manuscript and never writes back about Guy’s play.  Guy asks the playwright three times for his feedback.   Each time he gets a short, witty reply unrelated to his play.

Months pass.  Guy gets another unrelated note from the playwright, complaining that Guy is now ignoring him.  Guy writes an arguably nasty poem about the playwright, or at least one the playwright might find insulting.   Playwright’s attention is called to the poem, which is tacked to a small door around the back, by a troll.  The poem infuriates him, he seethes about the unprovoked attack, attacks Guy as an oversensitive jerk for not simply asking a fourth time when he didn’t hear back the first three times. 

“Plus,” says the playwright, “I said I’d look at his fucking play, I didn’t promise I’d say anything about it, Jesus.”

Complimentary Schismogenesis, I am told, is when two opposites are locked in some kind of conflict, neither getting what they need out of the arrangement, the attempts of each to resolve it, coming from opposite orientations, only make the problem more intractable, tighten the knot.   The schism continues to deepen as the two struggle cluelessly in opposite directions to heal the underlying fissure.

If we assume everyone is somewhat fucked up, damaged by life, laboring under certain sometimes vexing disabilities, friends are those whose asshole side we are able to overlook.  The friend has other lovable qualities we value that counterbalance the bad tendencies we all have.  We extend the benefit of the doubt to friends, a benefit we do not readily confer on random people we encounter.  

I told a friend recently that whatever other problems we may have had with each other over the years, we both are confident that neither of us would, seeing the other strapped in the electric chair, throw the switch before insisting that every single witness had a chance to speak.  He agreed.

I got a short, infuriated email today, keeping it simple, telling me I must agree that I’m dead to the writer of the email.  I read it to an old friend who immediately suggested I call the guy and see if I could placate him.  I told him I’ve already written back, trying to be gentle, comparing the guy’s hasty, angry email to an arrow let fly in a spasm of anger, an arrow that can’t be called back.  I told him I’d replied as mildly as I could and wasn’t sure there was anything to be achieved by calling this angry fellow who had already done the prosecutor, witness, judge and jury bit in very short order.

During the call to my friend I had an email back from the infuriated man.  I was reluctant to read it so soon after his “you’re dead to me” note.  Curiosity finally got the best of me.  He placed conditions on our possibly remaining friends, reminding me again that, in his opinion, I had attacked him viciously.  As for what I claimed he had done, he certainly hadn’t meant to do it, if he even did do it, which he was not prepared to admit.  Plus, if I was hurt by his behavior, it was my own fault for not telling him he was being an insensitive jerk since obviously he hadn’t been aware of it.

It got me thinking about the nature of friendship, whether friends ever get the right to have a temper tantrum, ignore your needs and rant angrily at you until they are satisfied.  I suppose there are certain friends who have earned the right to do that one time, maybe twice, for good cause, and get a pass.  Then, since they are good friends, they calm down and apologize for their outpouring of anger, and are able to see the situation from your point of view and promise to try to do better in the future.

I have to think about this proposed detente more, since my general policy is once somebody shows me raw rage, that savage inability to empathize that is characteristic of righteous fury, there is really no coming back from that.

Or, rather, without an honest and mutually vulnerable exchange, there is only the possibility of returning to a false and fragile peace, ready to be set ablaze the next time a spark comes near the short, highly flammable  fuse. Another chance to prove to yourself, and intimates, that you have mastered the urge to strike back in kind, a fairly paltry reward for a very strenuous bit of forbearance.

Life As Metaphor

Thought I was on my way yesterday to meet a guy I haven’t seen in about thirty years.   A scamp texted that this likable fellow, who had been spotted recently, would be joining us for lunch.  As my life does not have the recognizable shape of most people’s I know, measured in a real-world career one can speak of, I thought of what I would say when he asked what I was up to.  I mused about this as I made the long trek by public transportation to a $40 snack with old friends.  

“I am living my life as metaphor,” I was planning to tell him.  He’d give me his patented puzzled look and I’d explain.

“For example, I founded a highly successful child-run public relations firm for the children of the doomed.”  

“Hell of a name for a P.R. firm,” he’d say.

“A metaphor,” I’d say.  

“From this you make a living, from the children of the damned?  Someone pays you for this?”

“Metaphorically,” I’d say.  “Of course, here in the literal world, everybody would know the first thing you need to have before even thinking about undertaking such a project is a funder — in addition to a name making no mention of the horrible fact that millions of American children, and billions worldwide, are in fact doomed, the children of the damned.  Some generous corporation or rich individual to pay people to do the work you have dreamed up for making the world a marginally more hopeful, playful place.”  

“From this you do not make a living,” he would say.  

“Again, metaphorically.  I’m alive, I’m making, I’m living.  Who’s to say my life dreaming in metaphors is any less rich than that of the billionaire who wakes early each day to go into combat for even more, and who once or twice a month sits on a board that decides whose big ideas will live and whose will die.  Which fledgling organization will wax rich and which will fall like the dry grass.”  

“Metaphorically speaking,” he would say.

“You were always a man who could grasp a metaphor,” I’d tell him.

“Metaphorically,” he’d say, with Talmudic precision.  “You got any more?”  

“One has a choice in life, I’ve discovered, between bitterness and happiness.  I choose to be happy, extremely and unremittingly fucking happy.  You got that, man?”  

“You are singing to the choir director, mein friend,” he would say, and I’d watch the famous Cheshire Cat smile spread across his gigantic, cherubic face like a metaphor for the Moshiach and the World to Come.

penmanship 101

20160512_035750-1~2

note to kids:  because there is no smell-checker for drawings, and visual artists frequently are not the world’s best spellers, the word “pusillanimous”, meaning ‘marked by contemptible timidity, cowardice’, has been misspelled above.  Sorry about zat.  Always spell that shit with two ‘els’, kids

The Actual Book

“The Book” itself, I realize now,  turns out to be something completely different than any of those three hypothetical discrete, daunting book projects I laid out the other day.  

For one thing, it has to draw all three themes together, for lack of time and because of the maddening specificity of the case it must lay out. Hatred, love, slaughter, mercy and play must be interwoven, weighed out chapter by chapter.  In the end you will have to care about it, see the work I am trying to move forward as animated by something very real and pressing, or the book is nothing.

The Book, this The Book of Irv (Book of My Father), pieces together a tricky puzzle, tells each strand of the history to lay out the unifying theory.  It is an attempt to explain the unexplainable, make clear things that are hazy at best.  

You cannot understand hate until you experience it directly, cannot love until you’ve been loved. Simple idea, though complicated to explain well.

Everything we believe has been sold to us. Everything.  

Our world is increasingly based on selling, from everything you can see with your eyes to the deepest beliefs you hold.  If I can’t package and sell I’m basically through, and the thing I must sell is, above all, a compelling story of the theory that moves me.   It’s got to move you, too.

The Book of Irv is equal parts beauty and horror; the fun and invention of play — the first and deepest mammalian bonding and learning– (and Irv was always playful with children and small animals) and the unspeakable horrors of hatred, the despicable civilities committed in the name of our American law.  The devil is, as always, in the details.  These historical strands need to be patiently, clearly set out, in order to give the reader the full context for consideration.

Irv as a unifying figure is ideally situated at the center of this explanation.   His life began in dire poverty, a Jew born in a New York City tenement who moved with his family to a shit hole in Peekskill.   He was an outsider consumed by outrageous injustice.  He fought racism in America after returning from a stint in our occupying army in post-war Germany after that modern nation showed how muscularly racism could be flexed, if insanity actually ruled.  

My father, for all his frailties, fought a fitful fight for social justice across decades, as he fought his kids, dominated his wife, quipped, raged at the inhumanity of the world.  He imparted to his children deep and important values that would influence the course of our lives, to our great detriment.   All this should be explained, the strength of this irresistible force that compels us both to work with the children of the fucked.  

The principle is straightforward:  poverty breeds despair, violence and fear.   Poverty stinks worldwide, kills millions and shortens every life it touches.   You want to heal the world?  Start by working on eliminating poverty.  Start with the kids.

In our modern world of unlimited wealth, poverty is a problem that can finally be ameliorated.  It won’t be, but that’s another story.  I suppose the thing that finally drove Irv to despair was his feeling of hopelessness.  Justice does not prevail, except sometimes incrementally, for moments in certain lifetimes, and without a community of comrades it is impossible to continue the good fight.  

Irv understood that the moral center of a society that can enslave millions solely to amass great wealth is indistinguishable from a culture that sends its believers scrabbling to cut their neighbors’ throats.    The names of the atrocities change over the centuries: impaling, shooting, lynching, drowning, whipping, but the song remains the same.

The Book of Irv must walk the line on this side of rant, unreliable narrator or no. Play must be at the center of it, because play is the only dependable relief from the oppression all around.  A tall order, friend, but while I am taking orders, why not?

“So you’re going to talk about this fascinating, all-explaining, theory unifying book you’re supposedly going to write, Dr. Bronner?  Or are you going to knuckle down and start writing it?”

I’m going to knuckle down and continue to talk about starting to write it, at the moment.  But first to get back to my long-stalled project to make some space in here.

Write the Book

So what is this book?  

It is more than one book, actually.

The subject of each has been dictated by the world, each book is needed to demonstrate my point.  These are entwined but distinct points that need to be separated out.  Let me try to disentangle and prioritize them, make them less abstract, seem less the ravings of a madman.

Book One —  to convince the reader of the obvious: how important careful listening, participating and empathetic feedback are in learning.   Make the case for why I care about these things so deeply, why others should too.

This is a fraught book, perhaps more than the others.  It is a do or die attempt to sell, more than my name or skills, a big idea I’ve already invented the machine to demonstrate and have put into  practice dozens of times in classrooms in New York City. 

The world has largely moved away from these quaint values of care and appreciation, at least on a mass level.  If I’d make a business out of helping kids learn these old-time, hand-made type skills, I have to tell the story in a way that will engage and excite.  I need to find the way to inspire a creative and caring sector of a world that values, far above everything else it also espouses, competition and the metrics of who is wining and who sucks.  

Until I find the way to tell this story compellingly enough to get it funded, or finally give it up as a bad job and find something else to do, I continue to lose the only competition everyone readily understands.   Quicksand, my friends, in which I swim in extreme slow motion.

Book one, the detailed and compelling case for wehearyou.net, (or whatever you want to call it) an interactive workshop where public school kids’ imaginations run the show as they work together to master the interlocking skills needed to produce original stop-motion animation.  This is clearly the hardest of the three books to write.

There are two easier ones that come to mind– the easiest would lay out the devilish details, fleshed out by memory and imagination where the world has wiped away all trace, of the destruction of the roots and trunk of my family tree by centuries-deep hatred that finally had the technology to carry out its ultimate goal– killing every last one of the fuckers, everyone like me.  

This had happened before, has happened many times since, has tangled roots and a million implications.  It has haunted me since I learned of it as a boy, applies over and over as we read the news today.   Who gives a shit about this story? Probably a few middle class people here and there.  It is a story that will mostly have to wait, it would appear, or show up as a long article in some journal somewhere, along with my research into the unfathomably sad, sick history of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The third book is the tip of the iceberg, really, the iceberg itself being the preceding book.  Or, picture, instead of the iceberg,  the fruit of the destroyed tree, if you prefer another cliché.  To understand how somebody of great intelligence, humor and charm can act like a cornered rat, lash out viciously at loved ones, you need to picture the exact circumstances that put the rat into his dreaded corner.   This would be the most interesting of the three, perhaps, and require the least by way of imagination.

But let me tell you a little story that might be the best way to set the stage for the first book, the story of my most tangible real-world quest.

In a region of Italy ravaged by World War Two, in a village called Reggio Emilia, the first thing the parents built, when peace finally returned, was a school.  This school was built in a charred landscape, for children who had known only war.  The parents wanted a better world for their children and their first priority was imbuing these poor devils with a love of life, a deep appreciation of the wonder of creativity and every hope for a beautiful future.

To that end they made the school beautiful, had the children plant and tend a garden to make the blackened earth blossom.  When the plants in the garden were cared for, green leaves magically sprouted and their fruits ripened in the sun. These delicious ingredients were harvested and lovingly cooked.  Kids and their teachers prepared and ate the things the earth produced, the things they had brought forth from the earth. 

Colors, flavors, scents, everything that could excite the senses of young kids was brought into play.  The childrens’ excitement  guided the things they studied.  Adults carefully listening to the children nurtured their creativity, childish intellectual curiosity and everything else that makes students into life long learners.

I was told of this program by a friend who’d encountered it in San Francisco.  It reminded her, she said, of my program, since it placed adults listening to children’s ideas and discoveries in the forefront of education.   She believed it was now a worldwide movement, that there was probably a Reggio Emilia school or two in New York City.  

I was delighted to find a couple in New York City. You will not be surprised to learn who the children in these Reggio Emilia schools are– they are children whose parents can afford the $35,000 a year tuition for their kindergartner.

Below is what Reggio Emilia says about itself (see ruptured appendix 1).   Here is what a writer for a major magazine has observed– a fairly obvious point about which children need this humanistic approach to education the most.

Which completely ignores the question of how these creatively engaged kids do on the life or death standardized tests designed by testing corporations to measure learning and guides us back into the crippling cul de sac that I must somehow leap out of if I am to proceed, if my long-stalled program is to go forward.  In a world of limited resources, whose children will get the rare, difficult, precious thing and whose children will get the predictable, easier, more crippling one?

If you will excuse me now, I have to go bash fucking City Hall in the face and get back to practicing so I can find my way to Carnegie Hall.

More tomorrow, when I must somehow avoid writing anything in this vein, or this vein.

 

ruptured appendix 1

At the heart of this system is the powerful image of the child. Reggio educators do not see children as empty vessels that require filling with facts. Rather they see children as full of potential, competent and capable of building their own theories.

Children have the right to be … active participants in the organization of their identities, abilities, and autonomy.. .  “better citizens of the world”… (this system) also credits children, and each individual child, with an extraordinary wealth of inborn abilities and potential, strength and creativity.  Irreversible suffering and impoverishment of the child is caused when this fact is not acknowledged [my emphasis– ed].

Each day and every moment, we, the teachers, follow the directions of the children and adapt ourselves, always observing, documenting, listening and interpreting their goals, theories and strategies so we can gain insight into their thinking, always ready to make changes and support the children in their discoveries.

“Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.”  Chinese Proverb

source

 

 

 

 

The power of “nice”

Nice people, while they may well actually suck, are a lot better, as a group, than mean people, a sour-smelling pack of unhappy assholes.  Most of us are not strictly nice or mean.   We swing both ways, according to circumstance.   One good “fuck you” deserves another much of the time and the reciprocating can be done in every flavor from affectionate to sadist.

I was grown in a hothouse of rage.  It took me decades to start to understand the obvious:  that it’s better not to engage with insane anger.  There are things you can do to become less angry yourself, to resist the impulse to engage with a person who is mad.  But only if the pain of that pushes you to change the pattern.    

One of the most important things is recognizing what is intolerable to you.  This will help you stay out of situations where anger starts to look like the best option.   Easier said than done, of course, in this often infuriating world, where the aggressive and unscrupulous always seem to have a much bigger say than the meek and kindly, but it is something you can work on.  That’s all I’m saying.

My sister once gave me a great compliment, by expressing confusion that I wasn’t like either of our angry parents (although, of course, she noted that I am angry too, just not obviously like either of them).  

“If the only option was being like one of them, I’d have bashed my own head in years ago,” I told her.  It never occurred to her that there could be a choice beyond one from Column A or one from Column B.   Given two bad options, she chose the seemingly strong one to model herself on and has done pretty well struggling against the mean side of what she learned from the Master.  

It’s hard work, Brownie, to overcome deeply ingrained reflexes, but something that can be worked on. That’s all I’m saying.

So on the old “what is hateful to you do not unto others” tip we have the woman who told me the other day that it bugs her that the excellent writer she sends her work to usually writes nothing more than “nice!” in reply.  “Sometimes not even the exclamation point…” she exclaimed.  

“Whell, shoot,” I said, spitting a stream of terbaccer juice past my horse’s ass, “ain’t nothing wrong with ‘nice’, especially from an excellent writer.”  I spat again, much more taciturn than I am in real life.

In real life I explained, in tedious detail and dispassionately, that I’d learned, after decades of aggravation, that most people you send creative things to are at a complete loss for how to respond.  They think, incorrectly, that writing something like “nice!” is insufficient, perhaps even insulting.  They figure they need to write more than that, the ones who even click on the link to see the unsolicited creative work.

And even if they opened the work in question and thought it was cool, not having the thirty second attention span it would actually take to make a comment more detailed than “nice”, they forget about it.  Even if they were in that 5% that actually clicked the link and thought the thing was genuinely nice.

If someone has paid for the creative work, people are much more likely to understand why you did it and take thirty seconds to reply.  “You’re so talented, glad somebody paid you for it.  Good work, brilliant!” they will write of such things.  But anything else?  Good luck, kid.  

Most people have no idea why anyone would spend time doing something creative unless someone was paying them for it.  Just the Free World we live in, brothers and sisters.

“Nice is nice,” I told her.  “Nice is excellent.  Nice is all you need.” I neglected to tell her the excellent point some wise man made on a TED stage about the difference between a teacher who encourages and a teacher who discourages her students being one tiny, elemental thing.  

Overworked teacher looks over the student’s work, searches it for completeness, hands the kid back the work without a comment.  This is the way of the world and it is basically discouraging — all you get is a grade.  

The other overworked teacher reads the work, searches it for completeness, hands it back with a small smile and says ‘nice’.  Investment of time and effort– almost none.

But the second student’s work is no longer Sisyphic, as the man on the stage who described this said.  That five seconds of connection and appreciation is all it takes to make the other person feel they are not talking to a wall, a fucking firing squad wall that stinks of the shit and piss (while mention the bile, blood and puke?) of everyone the commandant’s ever lined up there, the line of Nazi sharpshooters spattering their fucking guts on it.  Can you dig that?

“Nice!”

 

 

RIP Tawny

My sister loved her dog, a pit bull named Tawny.  My memory of Tawny is as an ageless lioness, limber, strong and perfectly formed.  Sekhnet recalls her as a giant lioness.   She was not small.  She had boundless nervous energy, if you threw her saliva soaked white sock for her once you’d be obliged to do it a hundred more times.  

The wet sock would be on your lap, at your feet, or next to you on the couch, Tawny, head cocked, staring longingly at you, at the sock, at you, making sure you saw her, knew the sock was there.  Whatever else might have been going on, she had one concern, her paw up on you now, to focus your attention to the matter:  throw, run after that sock and bring it back, drop it for throwing,  repeat.  

She was beautiful.  She was gentle, too.  She wouldn’t bite a hamburger, as the phrase goes.  She was not cuddly, had too much energy for that, and her coat was not smooth and silky for petting, she wanted to move, to bring back the sock, a ball, whatever.    

You could picture her on the savanna, with no fear of any creature, sitting under a tree gnawing a bone.  My sister said that is how she died today, at the ripe old pit bull age of more than 13, deaf, unable to use her hind legs any more.  Chewing on a bone, peaceful, as her loved ones sat around her and the vet administered the stuff to knock her out.  Very gentle and very sad.  My sister and her family are all crying tonight.  

To those who have never loved a dog or a cat or other animal, I have to say, I am a little bit sorry for you.   There is no love greater than that shared with a familiar, loyal animal whose life and warmth connect with yours.  We are lucky who have experienced that kind of love with another human.  

This love between humans and animals is not a new thing, either.  The bonds between human and animal go back to earliest prehistory.  The first friendly wolves who ran with humanoids, becoming the first dogs, defending the group, being rewarded with food and affection, a warm place to sleep by the fire.   The pack was as familiar to dogs as to humans.  Cats and other animals long ago joined into this most excellent arrangement.  

 

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Freedom (and the Unthinkable)

Born free and in chains at the same time, it is written.  We are free to choose, within our choices, chained to things beyond our control.

“Good fortune, I have found, comes most often as the result of hard work.”  This was written by an industrious young man who’d inherited a thousand acres of fertile farm land and almost a hundred slaves.   History remembers him as one of our greatest geniuses.

Bad fortune, I suppose, to have been born one of this humanist philosopher’s slaves.  Hard work would not likely fix this egregious pre-birth planning mistake.  Your options are fewer than the boy landowner: you can complain, look for justice, or vengeange , you can seek to be the illuminating exception — but those don’t usually make for a felicitous pursuit of happiness.  

Once a prince left an opulent, pampered life in the palace, he renounced his wealth, the life of desire, searched for enlightenment, became the living embodiment of enlightenment.  Simpler, ironically, for the son of a king than for the son of a field laborer.

We are free and we are in chains.   Your government.  The policies and laws by which some live as philosopher kings while others lead lives of fear, violence and want.   Fairness and the world?  A grimly humorous idea.  Good social media skills in 2015?  Inspire a worldwide band of psychologically delicate people looking for a cause to rally to, convince them to create terror for that cause.  Stand back and wait for the internet to blow up.

 

 

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