Mind your language

I haven't posted for yonks because I've been busy forging a new career in English language teaching. Actually, the latter sentence makes me appear like some sub-Apprentice-like Thatcherite wannabee - "The sky's not the limit when there's footsteps on the moon"...Pleeease.
The truth is I was bored and jaded by my old note-taking job (waiting ages to get paid, long commute)and heard from various sources about the joys and financial opportunities created by teaching English as a foreign language - both at home and abroad.

Anyway, I forked out the £950 (I actually had some money for a change) for the one-month intensive Tesol course at a school in Edinburgh, and spent four weeks in grammatical purgatory as I attempted to both understand and teach esoterica such as 'Present future continuous', 'Gerund's', 'Modals' and 'conditional clauses'.
Yeah, the grammar stuff is hard but nothing prepares you for that sharp punch in the stomach when you finally have to stand up in front of other sentient beings and appear to know what you are talking about.

Luckily, our students/victims were all 'mature' Spaniards on a two week 'freebie' course courtesy of the school. We, the apprentice teachers were actually paying them to be there. This was fortunate, both for us and the students own sanity - I have no doubt that were it the other way around, an avalanche of refund applications would have swamped the school's admin desk like January snow.

Thank god it did actually get easier as the course went on...well a bit, and revelation of revelations, I actually passed! Just.
Anyway, I had only a few days of relative calm and freedom to ponce about on my laurel's (Hardy) before being head-hunted by a dynamic and upwardly thrusting internationally renowned English language 'provider'. 'Head-hunted' is probably a touch dramatic, I did e-mail them a CV a couple of days before...I think the previous candidate got run over by a bus or something.

So there I found myself on teacher induction day, in the gloomy classroom of a local Uni masquerading as a summer school, babbling incoherently as I showed my new teaching manager my 'provisional' Tesol qualification (the real Mcoy was still in the post) and a rather ancient and dog eared copy of my degree certificate from an ex-poly most people had never heard of.

My initial contract was for two weeks full-time: 30 hours contact teaching time per-week (15 Min's between lessons), one hour 'free lunch' in the Uni canteen and all lesson plans prepared for us on on our special corporate pen drives. The money was okay-ish and I needed the experience...and who can afford to waive the offer of a free lunch in these economically fragile times?

First lesson. A typically rainy Scottish Monday morning. There I stood in front of 14 hormonal and very tired and demotivated Italian teenagers, an electronic whiteboard shimmering behind me, its surface awash with the green Crayola scrawl of conditional sentence examples that were virtually unintelligible to me, never mind the kids. I never got the hang of those electronic pens, you had to angle the thing just right or you'd end up with a spastic scrawl - Frankenstein spellings and odd letter omissions. I was constantly dodging the 'spotlight' from the overhead projector too, which either blinded me or painted strange hieroglyphs on my face and body, a blank canvas for a YouTube conceptualist.
Amazingly, both myself and the students seemed to settle down and create a 'meaningful and disciplined language learning environment'...which basically means they became a little less bored and I was half-competent at making myself understood. We sort of met in the middle.

Thankfully, I was teaching intermediate level groups, which meant they had some grasp of basic English - I'd heard horror stories about the awkward and deathly silent wildernesses generated in beginner classes, tumbleweeds of incomprehension hitting inexperienced teachers squarely in the mush.

As the days wore on(literally), a grim and very dark concentration camp humour was adopted by us teachers - a psychic defence mechanism to ward off the horror of repeated exposure to loud, cocky and very privileged Italian yoofs - and that was just the girls. These summer schools are very expensive and all the students I got to know were the offspring of Roman and Milanese doctors, lawyers and very private dentists - no urchins from the mean streets here. In the student handbook there is a specific warning about straying off campus and meeting 'undesirables', it goes very much like: "If you should meet children from the local area, be polite but don't initiate conversation." So much for authentic cultural exchange.
The last 'excursion' on the kids summer school fortnight is a shopping trip to Prince's street...the high street brands and their accompanying logo's already neatly printed along with other Edinburgh landmarks such as the Scots Monument and the Castle on photocopied 'local culture sheets'.

I had my contract extended and completed another two weeks of teaching at the summer school, and despite everything, I have to say that overall it was 'interesting' if very hard work. But I would much rather teach adult learners, especially economic migrants such as the Spaniards I taught on the Tesol course. Its not just the behaviour/concentration aspect, its about teaching individuals authentic everyday language they will meet on the street, helping them to apply for jobs and accommodation and helping them to integrate into our culture and contributing the best of their own in turn.

The Subversion of Laughter

“…Laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasants entertainment, the drunkards license; even the church in her wisdom has granted the moment of feast, carnival, fair, this diurnal pollution that releases humours and distracts from other desires and other ambitions…Still, laughter remains base, a defense for the simple, a mystery desecrated for the plebeians.
That laughter is proper to man is a sign of our limitations, sinners that we are. But from this book many corrupt minds like yours would draw the extreme syllogism, whereby laughter is man’s end! Laughter for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God. This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the whole world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown even to Prometheus, for cancelling fear.”

The character Jorge’s explanation for hiding Aristotle’s second book of the Poetics (a treatise on comedy and laughter) less it contaminate and subvert Catholic theological dogma. From The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco.

Jorge is terrified that the kitsch pomposity and linear narratives of the Christian faith will be destabilised by Aristotle’s very learned, reduction of the sublime to the ridiculous; the ‘revelation’ that The Word, language itself, and therefore truth - when laughter is elevated to an art form by syllogism, metaphor and pun – becomes fragile, deceitful and absurd.
Laughter is also the engine for creativity and change, which is another reason Jorge, the dogmatic reactionary, fears the dissemination of Aristotle’s sacred text. He begins tearing up the pages of the book (already poisoned) and eating them – the levels of irony, simile and metaphor are brain numbing in Eco’s novel, but that’s the point.

In his book ‘The Act of Creation’ Arthur Koestler sees human creativity as having three distinct aspects, a tri-valency, illustrated by his triptych: The Jester, The Sage and The Artist – which can be reduced to humour, discovery and art.
Jorge knows that the slippery slope begins with the aggression of the comic comparison, then comes the objective analogy, and finally the poetic image: a new synthesis, a new aesthetic truth.
The importance of aesthetic persuasion in every field of human endeavour is what Koestler is attempting to explore by isolating the important trigger mechanism of laughter, as was Aristotle in his second book of the Poetics.
Out of laughter comes comparison, juxtaposition, simile, satire, metaphor – synthesis.
Koestler said:
“That the Jester should be brother to the Sage may sound like blasphemy, yet our language reflects the close relationship: the word ‘witticism’ is derived from ‘wit’ in its original sense of ingenuity, inventiveness. Jester and savant must both ‘live on their wits’; and we shall see that the Jester’s riddles provide a useful backdoor entry, as it were, into the inner workshop of creative originality”.
The philosopher Nietzsche understood perfectly how the subjective aesthetic force is always threatening the narrative ‘slave moralities’ as exemplified by Jorge’s Catholic dogma.
Nietzsche was searching for an aesthetic justification of man as an individual - the life as a work of art – using metaphor, allegory and his favourite literary weapon, the aphorism. The poetic sensibility overcomes the objective seriousness of systematic narrative thinking.
Nietzsche announced the death of God by using his aphorism’s as sophisticated jokes to kick the cycle off from the comic, to the abstract, to the poetic – and back again. Jorge would have loved Nietzsche!
In our day, postmodernism has weakened and diluted the power of the aphorism and metaphor somewhat – it has been reduced to casual irony without much subversive/creative possibility. The end of history? (Although, conspiracy theories can be seen as interesting little subversive, creative jokes.)

As the natural successor to Friedrich Nietzsche, and the purest example of the Ubermensch, Morrissey is still aphorising the ridiculous into the sublime, the banal into an epiphany, and laughing at the crashing kitsch obsessed Jorge-like bores.
It is Morrissey who is truly beyond good and evil and responsible for the Death of God:
“Outside the prison gates, I love the romance of crime,
And I wonder, does anybody feel the way I do,
And evil is just something you are, or something you do?”

“Now I know how Joan of Arc felt,
as the flames rose to her Roman nose,
and her Walkman started to melt.”

Quite.

Acoustic Routes - Bert Jansch and the Brit Beatniks

Discovered this documentary the other day on the legendary guitar player Burt Jansch.
It was filmed in the early 90's and narrated by Billy Connolly, who gives a humourous take on Bert's career development by noting how the home interiors on the latters album covers became progressively more opulent as the years went by.
The film is done in a semi fly on the wall style with Jansch talking about his influences and visting some of the old 60's folk clubs in London with John Renbourne.

Davy Graham, Martin Carthy and Ralph McTell are amongst the other talking heads who ressurect the wandering folk minstrel vibe of the 60's beatnik scene in all its earnest, black turtleneck glory.
It inspired me to have another bash at learning that fingerpicking classic 'Anji' or 'Angie' - Unfortunately I couldn't get past the first 4 bars as usual, but I might invest in a couple of turtleneck sweaters from e-bay as a mark of respect.

Anthony Peake and Patrick Harpur - Spirit and Soul

Have you ever experienced that much discussed near-death phenomena of your entire life ‘flashing before your eye’s? Experienced Déjà vu and pre-cognitive dreams and visions? Maybe you’ve felt a sense of the uncanny by a ‘meaningful coincidence’ or synchronicity as Carl Jung called it? If you have an unhealthy interest in Quantum Mechanics too, you might enjoy Anthony Peake’s book ‘Is there life after death? The extraordinary science of what happens when we die’.

According to Peake, at the penultimate moment of brain death our entire lives are resurrected and 'flash before us' - every sight, sound, taste, smell etc. Nothing is lost. But what appears to us on one level, as a rapid, kaleidoscopic flicker of images and sensations at death, is, on another level of our awareness, a ‘slowed down’ awareness, experienced in REAL TIME (It may be helpful here to remember the stories of Zeno's time paradoxes, for example, the arrow that takes forever to reach its target if its trajectory is plotted at each point).

Peake explains how this ‘slowing down’ mechanism may occur on a biological level by citing clinical and anecdotal evidence of temporal lobe seizure epileptics who often experience a violent flooding of the brain by certain neurotransmitters (including dopamine and glutamate) in the pre-seizure ‘aura’ state; imagine watching grains of sugar taking minutes to fall into a tea cup, while the people around you experience everything in real time.
The second, and most important example that Peake uses to bolster his argument, is the evidence gained from near-death experiences - again, both medical and anecdotal.

Research has shown that the same neurotransmitter flood occurs in the brains of those who believe or intuit that they are literally seconds away from death and so experience a ‘dropping out of time’ very similar to temporal lobe epileptics. The classic example that Peake uses is the car crash victim who watches, almost serenely, as the bonnet of their vehicle blisters and buckles in slow motion before the final impact.
To experience the past life recall in its entire, miniscule, real time detail (slowed down) indicates that our brains must record our complete lives like a DVD; and the research included in Peake’s book appears to show empirical evidence for this.
Studies done on stimulating certain memory area’s of the brain reveal how subjects will recall certain events from their lives, often mundane, in exquisite sensory detail – not like a dream, but identical to conscious lived reality.
When the artificial stimulation stops, the person is brought back to the present…when the stimulation is reapplied in precisely the same place, the previous memory will start off again from the exact point where it ceased before - like a You Tube clip restarted after a pause.

But, where does some modicum of free will enter this theory of consciousness? Wouldn’t we be condemned to a permanent ‘ground hog day’ forever if we could never change any details of the replay? Wouldn’t all the people around us be merely actors in our own unique, self-generated (or regenerated) world?
By expanding Hugh Everett’s Many worlds theory, David Bohm’s Holographic universe, and the ‘Participatory principle’ of John Wheeler; Peake illustrates how it might be possible for personal choice to intervene and change aspects of the replay through a process of ‘enfoldment’ and the splitting off of our narrative replays into parallel universes…I know, I know, it sounds like Sci-fi (which in a way, as a theory, it is) and is pretty complicated trying to hold all this stuff in your head!

The summation of all this theorizing is the postulation that we never in fact die, or reach death, but endlessly branch off or bifurcate into endless, eternal fractals of the original, primary blueprint of our lives. Like a fractal, we replicate into an identity that is self-similar but never identical.

Going back to the brain stimulation studies again, when the person who is being stimulated is supposedly reliving the past, they are in fact – according to Peake – actually there in that place now, living it in the present.

Peake explains this consciousness splitting with a discussion of Split-brain research, right/left hemisphere dominance and so on - we are never really a single unified being, but have two selves: the Eidolon, which is equivalent to the conscious ego, and a more hidden, instinctual aspect. Peake calls the latter the ‘Daemon’, after the creatures of Greek myth, similar to guardian angels, an aspect of self outside of the normal constraints of linear time and causality.

If you use the above as an overlay to an investigation of Déjà vu and/or precognition, it is possible to understand how we may experience an overlap of previously lived experience in our dreams and waking lives. This may explain those uncanny synchronicity’s that pop up in our lives now and again too.
Anthony Peake explains precognition by seeing it not as an indication of a future event, but as a 'memory' from a past life - as something that has already happened in the old consciousness and has sneaked into the newly replayed pre-death movie. We don't really see the future; we see the past.
According to him and philosophers like Nietzsche (who Peake discusses) our lives are cyclic and spin through many quantum/holographic ‘incarnations’ in what Nietzsche called 'The Eternal Return'.
But, as I explained earlier, Peake differs from Nietzsche in that he believes we still have something approaching ‘free will’: there is a continuity of self but it changes with each incarnation. Remember that this type of thinking drove Nietzsche insane eventually!

Something about Peake’s model of consciousness reminds me of something I read by Patrick Harpur in his book ‘The philosophers Secret fire: A History of the Imagination’. In the book Harpur talks about the importance of imagination and memory as the central creative motor between mind/ego and body/matter. Without memory we are nothing, just empty vessels, creatures of habit. By drawing on memory and imagination we commune with the soul of the world, the storehouse of the archetypes and mythical imagery from the present to antiquity (Harpur is a Jungian), we are possessed by the Daemons of yore to play out our unique life-paths in the here and now.

One thing from Harpur’s book that has really stuck in my mind in relation to Anthony Peake’s theory, is his retelling of the Greek myth pertaining to the River of forgetfulness.
Before birth, as the tale goes, we are made to drink from the waters of Lethe (the river of forgetfulness) and we spend the rest of our lives ‘re-collecting’ and relearning what we really already know.
Harpur’s ideas on the collective unconscious, the ‘Otherworld’, daemonic manifestations and the difference between literal reality and mythical reality may be developed even more by being filtered through Peake’s quantum prism.

I’d like to see Harpur and Peake collaborate on a book together - that would be really ‘hermetical’. Peake would broadly represent the healthy ‘Spirit’ (curious, open science, non judgmental empirical data – the horizontal axis), Harpur would represent ‘Soul’ (Depth, mythical verticality and the importance of imagination and memory in perception from an anthropological and poetic point of view).
Between the two, some kind of cultural Individuation may be achieved: the macrocosm meets the microcosm, ‘as above so below’.
Maybe Hermes could set up a meeting or a synchronicity?
I need my tea now, my brain hurts.

Just Words: The shamanism of Writing

Feeling inspired by a recent great blog post by The Domesticated Bohemian I've spent the last day or so trawling through my own memories of the profound significance that books have had on my own life.
Certain conjunctions or synchronicity's between a particular book I was reading at the time and a real world event most immediately spring to mind.

For example,I recall riding in a car with my sister and brother-in-law to visit my (almost 90 year-old) gran who was in hospital with pneumonia about ten years ago.
There was a feeling in the air, even though nothing was said, that this could be the last time we see her. I was reading Dostoevsky's 'House of the dead' at the time - I know, something of a portent! When we finally stepped blinking into the brightly lit hospital ward after the long dark car journey, my uncle greeted us with tears in his eyes: she had just died about twenty minutes before.

The impact that Dostoevsky's tale of the gulag was impressing on me at that time, coupled with the experience of my Gran's death have been inextricably entwined over the years, so that now, whenever I recall that specific bereavement or hear or read something or other about Dostoevsky, I find that I'm caught by an auto-cascade of imagination and memory - the nocturnal car journey to the hospital, my Gran's serene face in death, and the bleak 'prison diary' of the old Russian writer, and last but not least - the olive green cover with an old oil painting reproduction of some Dickensian looking characters lost in their existential trauma.

Another extreme association between a book and one of the more darker moments of my life occurred when my mum was first diagnosed with cancer around six years ago (apologies for the bleakness - but it does get a bit lighter in a minute honest- well sort of.)
I remember going to the hospital with her for the results of a biopsy; it was freezing cold day and we'd been told that, yes there was a malignant tumour in her bowel, but with treatment (chemotherapy and a colostomy that could be reversed after 6 months or so), her prospects for full remission were reasonably good. We had a pot of tea and a cigarette together in a little cafe in town later.
Our too fast, nervous, freakishly optimistic conversation hid the sizzling hysteria that lay just below the surface - and we both knew it of course.
"At least they caught it early"

"Yeah that's the important thing, so lucky really"

"Yeah, thank god eh, doesn't bear thinking about"

"Its all positive when you think about it"

"Yeah, quick op and finished, over and done with"

We could both see the fear and sadness in each others eyes, but were ferociously determined to remain upbeat. It was that or go insane.

A couple of days before, I'd started reading Niall Griffiths' Novel 'Grits'. Set in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth; it is a dark, many-voiced tale of outsiders, junkies, the alienated, the lonely and the lost. Through the technique of using multiple first-person narratives, Griffiths exposes the secret fears, guilt, neuroses and often bizarre and contradictory hopes and dreams that saturate the psyches of those many would call the 'underclass' (I loathe that word.)
Also, the book had a further resonance for me: that coastline was the site of many family caravan holidays in my youth.

In our society, being diagnosed with the big 'C' is about being de-classed, de-skilled, pushed to the side, hushed up, labelled as 'unclean', stained, a burden - all those unspoken, but inherent implications that cloud the air of the ill person like a malignant white noise.
You become a Chemo-junky, A 'user', your hair falls out, you lose weight, you can't hold down a job, you need people to care for you, you become incontinent and mentally 'disturbed'.
Griffiths' characters consoled me at that point in my life (as his characters continue to do in all his books.)
Their sense of anger, day-to-day isolation and de-realisation from the mainstream of what passes for 'normal' life, helped me to understand and appreciate how my mother must have felt in the cold, dark outer-space that her diagnosis had ejected her into.
My mum had her operation and the chemo, but they never managed to totally kill the cancer, and it inevitably spread and killed her a couple of years later.
Literature did its bit though, once again, to keep me sane and enable me to help her as best I could - by being strong and sensitive at the same time.

Unsurprisingly I suppose, I cannot remember what I was reading during the last horrible months of her life, or what I was reading when she died - and I WAS reading something, I need it like oxygen - but I guess that the physical and mental fatigue had by then washed away my imaginative capabilities for a while.

Another really powerful conjunction of literature and life for me was being literally half-way through Don Delillo's ‘Mao II’ when a a couple of planes flew into the World Trade Center in September 2001.
Like most people on the planet at that time, I was transfixed by the unfolding of events of that day: the constantly recycled video of each plane hitting its tower, the ball of orange flame and black smoke, the terrified, running dust-coated figures, the jumpers spiralling out of the blue like discarded bus tickets.

Delillo's Mao II is a novel about the loss of individuality to mass events, the symbiotic power of the media and the crowd to spawn a third space; a space where the self ceases to exist and only the spectacle of the many has any emotional impact. Be it Diana's funeral, The Gulf War, Moonie Weddings, earthquakes and tsunami's, 'Live' Charity rock concerts, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the latest terrorist 'outrage'; - rolling TV news and the Web have desensitized us to such a degree, that our myth's are no longer generated via the artist, the poet or (especially) the novelist - the individual voice of the shamen has been lost to the High definition immediacy of the media channelled EVENT.
As Delilllo writes in the book, "The future belongs to the crowd".

The irony for me, is that the mass public event to top all mass public events, 911, was virtually predicted almost ten years earlier in 1991 by one individual tapping away on his word processor. The book is spooky in its similarities to the events surrounding 911, and the way that day was, and still is, mythologized via the media circus that was impossible to escape.

The twin towers appear very early on in the book, as the two main characters – a famous but elusive J.D. Salinger style novelist and a photographer – gaze out over their coffees at the New York skyline.
The photographer wants to complete a series of author pictures in an attempt to capture the ‘essence of the writer’ – that supposedly powerful single voice that is able to speak for a generation and change the world in the process. The author is cynical though, and believes that it is the terrorist who has now usurped the role and myth making power of the lonely, scribbling genius.

‘The Terrorist’, who always had an affinity with ‘The Writer’, can change the consciousness of a society in a much more dramatic and immediate way - with the help of the global media – by creating an iconic, real-time ‘spectacle’ that far surpasses the clunky, time intensive and very private narrative device of the author.
There’s a section in Mao II where the author is sitting in his London hotel room after flying in from the States, and remarks to himself how lax British customs are as he scrutinizes a little hunting knife (a sentimental keepsake) that he unwittingly brought over with him, and remained undetected by airport security. Very sobering stuff to read at that time as it became apparent as to how the 911 ‘bombers’ had used ‘craft knives’ to rest control of the planes from pilots and passengers.

As Delillo foretold, a decade before the event, the terrorist became the new mythmaker on that day in September. To watch the event at home on the TV, or wherever was to forget the ego-centred self for a while and dissolve into a pure horrified spectator, a member of the crowd, both in New York and around the world.
Try reading Delillo's 'White Noise' too, another great novel.

The profound synchronicity of witnessing 911 as it happened via the TV coverage along with millions of others, and reading Delillo’s brilliant thesis, convinced me once and for all, how we must really listen and re-read our greatest authors, our Shamen, because those loners locked away with their typewriters and word processors channel the future for us as well as the past.
The novelist is still as important today as ever. Even if they cannot offer us inspiration they will always provide consolation.

When I’m skint, lonely and feeling angry at the world, I’ll dip into Bukowski’s ‘Last Night of the Earth’ poems or ‘Ham on Rye’; Beckett’s ‘The Malloy Trilogy’, Henry Miller and Orwell, Hakim Bey, Robert Anton Wilson, Raoul Vainegem and Penny Rimbaud.
When I want to look at my everyday world more objectively, like an anthropologist witnessing the oddness of an alien culture, I’ll read Iain Sinclair’s Psychogeographical journeys through the urban jungle; learning from him how to read the graffiti on the bus shelter walls, the unique history, architecture and custom’s pertaining to place, the invisible ley-lines of energy that constitute meaning and significance to a locale…and my locale too if I care to look a little deeper.

When I require a little ‘heads up’ at the profound strangeness and wonderful weirdness of being conscious at all in this vast cosmos of the mind blowingly large and unfathomably small ; of matter as energy, Black Holes, time-warps and parallel universes - I read Paul Davies, Kip Thorne, David Deutsche, Danah Zohar and David Bohm.
When my soul starts to cry out for the great myths that structure our psyches, I grab for Patrick Harpur, Carl Jung, James Hillman – and even a bit of Colin Wilson can educate and illuminate at these times.

Three books that I will never sell and have always stayed close to my heart are: ‘The William Burroughs Reader’ Edited by James Grauerholz; Roland Barthes’ little book of essays on the semiotic myths that underlie popular culture called ‘Mythologies’, and Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ – a brilliantly dark and personal interpretation of one man’s coming to terms with the horror of war…god bless Kilgore Trout.
Of all the literary shamen, I think Burroughs is the Great Magus and truth teller of our times. He should be read and re-read by every one.
Maybe one day, his beautifully rich musings on the ‘societies of control’, escaping the ‘Reality Studio’, intentional ‘Pirate communities’ and the ‘animistic universe’ will be on every school syllabus.
Remember: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”.