Are we really meant to be up there, aloft, afloat?
I think not.
It's a conspiracy, I say.
In fact, I don't think anybody actually hurtles up into the sky at all.
More on this startling realization, but first:
Hearing about the airliner that dived into the waters around New York City, all my anxieties about flying in general (and crashing in particular) bobbed to the surface.
Not that I have all that many hesitations about flying. Some of my earliest memories revolve around flying with my father (who had his pilot's license) in that little plane he steered so skillfully into the skies from the small airport in St.Catharines, Ontario. We would soar in the little two-seater above the streets of my hometown, as he pointed through the window at the little Fisher-Price house that he assured me was my real, actual home that we had left only an hour or so earlier.
Flying that young, in a plane that small, seems normal when you're four or five. (Of course, everything seems normal at four or five. "Eat snot? Let's do it!")
It was only later, years later, that I started to get a wee bit uncomfortable about the whole hovering-above-the-earth-thousands-of-feet-in-the-air thing.
What freaks me out the most is: it never feels like you're moving. In a car, or a bus, or a train, you can look out the window and see cows eating grass and children playing catch and mothers hanging laundry out to dry in the fresh spring air, and you zoom on past them, and your brain starts to wonder who they were and what they were doing, and whether they are happy, and whether they think the same things about you as you hurtle past, your face for them a one-second glimpse-through-a-window.
In a plane, you usually get none of that.
Once the plane takes off (the only really mobile part of the journey, in my opinion), everything after is simply shaking. Jostling. Yes, you can look out the window, and see clouds, and mountains, and various bodies of water bobbing next to each other, but it's all in the abstract. ("That's Alaska? Cool...")
You can't see the frozen breath of a forest ranger as he walks through the woods. You don't catch a glimpse of a little girl's sarcastic roll-of-the-eyes at the latest warning from her mother as they stand on the edge of the highway, scouting out traffic. All sense of proportion is reduced, narrowed, diluted.
The plane shakes, and four, eight, ten hours later, you're in another country. As if you stepped into some kind of science-fictional contraption that bashes you around like fruit in a blender. Like you are not moving at all, in fact, but everything around you is shifting and altering its molecular state.
Perhaps that's what's really happening.
A car-wash world, in which the illusion of movement is necessary to perfect and uphold the illusion itself.
Planes do not lift off at all, I'm thinking.
The universe, instead, rearranges itself, physcially discombobulates its quarks and neutrons, its atoms and cells, folding in on itself until we emerge from the plane, thinking we have moved a great deal, when, instead, the air and space around us has accomodated itself to our geographical desires. A constant, unending Rubik's Cube of a planet that contorts itself to fit our moods and whims.
Which would mean my cherished childhood memory of flying in my father's plane might very well be an illusion. Authentic, yes, yet nevertheless a ploy designed to make a child feel safe and ennobled.
I may never have actually been up there, between the clouds. I was granted the perception of flight, and yet the truth was more mundane: that little speck of a house, which I was told was mine, had been an untruth concocted by my dad, a picture painted outside the window, designed specifically to give me a sense that the world was both smaller and bigger than I could imagine, that I could elevate myself, and yet still see my home from such a great height. That the world could simultaneously be viewed from a vantage point both high and low. We could go from here to there and remain intact; we could see where we came from, even though we were so far away (and above).
How intricate such a plan was!
I did not go up. The world rearranged itself for me and me alone.
An adult's scheme to make a child feel comforted in a vast, cold and disproportionate world.
So that's what it's all about, I'm thinking.
I've got it figured out.
All of these airports and airplanes were designed by adults to make kids feel that they were actually going somewhere.
I mean, come on: who actually believes that thousands of planes are above us, daily, hourly? It's absurd. Much easier to acknowledge the truth -- that when we step onto that plane, and settle into our seats, and fasten our belts, we remain immoble.
I'm waiting for when the truth is finally revealed, via an email, or a midnight phone call, or a knock on my door on a late-winter's morn. The simple message will be delivered by men in black suits and somber ties and silver shades when they've judged that I'm ready for its impact: It's a vast conspiracy, this whole flying thing, something grown-ups have invented to reassure kids that we can move from left to right and yet still maintain a sense of ourselves. That we can somehow control all of our flights and our falls.
The truth is, as we all soon learn, we never truly go anywhere.
(We think we do, yes, and we feel we do, certainly, but the world cannot truly be that wide. Such lateral and horizontal mobility cannot tangibly be that simple.)
The world comes to us, and we make do with what we have before us. Bending the world, for good or ill, to suit our needs, hopes, heartaches and longings. Going anywhere changes nothing; only that which comes towards needs to be confronted, and comforted, and loved. The shaking we feel on a plane is a shoddy replication of what trembles within us on a daily basis, but it invigorates us, this jostling; it makes us feel that we have the power to withstand tension and emerge, more or less, intact.
But: shhh!
Keep it yourself, this knowledge, as you would your mother's secret or your sibling's sickness.
For right now, at this very moment, somewhere in the world, a child is in a small plane with his father, staring down at their family's house, believing that the world can so easily be divided into up and down, large and small. Not understanding, as no child possibly can, that the true journeys we take are always stationary. That the world does with us what it will, and we have to be ready and open to embrace all that stands before us after the shaking subsides, when the final illusion of landing fades away like morning mist.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
STAY IN TOUCH
Have you touched anyone today?
One of the things that infuriates me about modern mass-media and its relentless focus on celebrities' personal lives is the fact that actors are rarely asked anything at all about what they do on a daily basis -- namely, act. How do they do what they do? What choices do they make when preparing a character? Why this or that particular reading of a line? Instead, the reporters ask about the stars' personal lives, and the stars dutifully answer, instead of saying: "Next question." (Of course, if they actually said "next question", they wouldn't appear on the cover of the magazine, and their movie wouldn't be shoved down everybody's throat, and their per-picture salary would go down, and they wouldn't be stars anymore, so they give in and give up and decide to play the game and talk about this or that aspect of their friendship/courtship/marriage/divorce, and then have the audacity to be pissed off at all the media attention, when they've spent the last several years letting everybody know about their girlfriends/boyfriends/wives/daughters/sons/exes etc.)
But I digress.
Michael J.Fox, appearing on Inside The Actor's Studio, actually bucked the trend and mentioned an honest-to-god acting tip, one that I found startling in its simplicity, one that could be applied to all arts, and, indeed, all life, if one so chose.
One of his first gigs after moving down to the States from Canada was a TV movie he made with veteran actress Maureen Stapleton, and she advised him, in every scene, to touch someone. "Physically touch someone?" he asked, and she said no, no, it didn't have to be physically, although it could be. Just touch someone. With your words, voice, intent. Touch someone. It was advice he subsequently thought about in every scene he ever did from that point on.
Touch someone.
I kept thinking about that thought.
I had never been able to articulate what was bothering me about the internet in general, and blogs in particular, and life in even more particular, but that comment kind of crystallized a couple of things for me.
The internet is designed for such high-speed, quick-read access that it sometimes seems so impersonal and glossy and slick and superficial that any real focus, any real meaning is inevitably buried beneath a blizzard of blogs and links and websites and homepages, until the whole ungainly mess begins to appear, more and more, less as a source of information and inspiration and more as a repository for all our half-baked, ill-thought out thoughts and conceptions. Our venom, spite, sarcasm and self-embellishment.
Thinking about the stuff I read, the newspapers and websites, I realized that very few, if any of them, touched me.
Made me think, yes. Made me laugh, certainly.
But moved me?
Actually moved me?
Thinking about life, too.
How we wander day to day through our family and peers, co-workers and strangers. A joke, a wave, a sigh over here; a good-morning, what's up, not-too-much over there. Everybody looking like they're so contented and ready to face the day. Or else visibly pissed-off, barely holding on, suffocating with real or imagined stress. (Which ultimately are one and the same thing, I guess.)
One of the few spiritual gurus that I actually find a) insightful and b) practical is Eckhart Tolle, whose first book The Power of Now I kind of, sort of think is somewhat profound, especially in its focus on the present moment being the source of all power, hope, life. This moment is all we have, and since life is lived in an eternal present -- the past erased, the future never arriving -- the fluid continuum we inhabit becomes all the more precious.
Isn't it depressing that we have to describe athletes and writers as 'being in the moment'? As if it's a rare thing. As if living in 'the moment' can only be attained through monumental diligence, and enacted only under extreme situations of competition, concentration, or duress.
What if we focused on 'the moment' constantly? What if we were conscious of the who we are and what we're doing and who we're doing it to at all times?
It's something I try to do, more and more.
Be present.
Be aware.
Not become caught up in things that are gone, and things that may never be.
Focusing on what is before me, and not judging it, and not cursing it, and not blessing it, and simply allowing it to unfold.
The person serving you drinks at Starbucks. The boring wait-in-line at the immigration office. The mind-numbing traffic jam that inches along, inch by infuriating inch.
All of these receiving equal attention.
A little abstract, I know, but I find it can actually work, this focus on the present.
You start to become more and more aware of not the stuff of life -- the things and the roads and the people and the weather and the ground and the lights -- but the space in which all of these things exist.
And by being comfortable in that space, simply, I don't know, resting in it, you can be aware of how subtly you can manipulate it.
Mostly by touching someone.
Giving them their attention. Deflecting away from yourself. Smiling. Letting the ego descend within. Being conscious of the fact that you can actually alter a circumstance by your words, gestures, actions and comments. You can sometimes bring a miniscule amount of joy, or contemplation, or solace, or levity, merely by allowing others in.
Too often we trudge through life as if we're wearing snowshoes and the whole earth is thick with deeply packed snow. We carefully glide along the top, worrying about falling. Getting stuck. Careful not to press too hard against the ice, fearful of cracking its fragile surface.
Who shall I touch today? I sometimes think. A student? A friend? The person taking my pizza order? Will they notice? Will they even care?
Outside this internet cafe, on this crisp January morning, Session Road is humming along. I can see the KFC across the street, the endless array of white taxicabs slowly driving by, patiently scanning for passengers. A generic pop song floats through the air.
A minor life moment, it would seem.
And yet, I am, as you are, exactly where I'm supposed to be.
Waiting to touch, and be touched.
One of the things that infuriates me about modern mass-media and its relentless focus on celebrities' personal lives is the fact that actors are rarely asked anything at all about what they do on a daily basis -- namely, act. How do they do what they do? What choices do they make when preparing a character? Why this or that particular reading of a line? Instead, the reporters ask about the stars' personal lives, and the stars dutifully answer, instead of saying: "Next question." (Of course, if they actually said "next question", they wouldn't appear on the cover of the magazine, and their movie wouldn't be shoved down everybody's throat, and their per-picture salary would go down, and they wouldn't be stars anymore, so they give in and give up and decide to play the game and talk about this or that aspect of their friendship/courtship/marriage/divorce, and then have the audacity to be pissed off at all the media attention, when they've spent the last several years letting everybody know about their girlfriends/boyfriends/wives/daughters/sons/exes etc.)
But I digress.
Michael J.Fox, appearing on Inside The Actor's Studio, actually bucked the trend and mentioned an honest-to-god acting tip, one that I found startling in its simplicity, one that could be applied to all arts, and, indeed, all life, if one so chose.
One of his first gigs after moving down to the States from Canada was a TV movie he made with veteran actress Maureen Stapleton, and she advised him, in every scene, to touch someone. "Physically touch someone?" he asked, and she said no, no, it didn't have to be physically, although it could be. Just touch someone. With your words, voice, intent. Touch someone. It was advice he subsequently thought about in every scene he ever did from that point on.
Touch someone.
I kept thinking about that thought.
I had never been able to articulate what was bothering me about the internet in general, and blogs in particular, and life in even more particular, but that comment kind of crystallized a couple of things for me.
The internet is designed for such high-speed, quick-read access that it sometimes seems so impersonal and glossy and slick and superficial that any real focus, any real meaning is inevitably buried beneath a blizzard of blogs and links and websites and homepages, until the whole ungainly mess begins to appear, more and more, less as a source of information and inspiration and more as a repository for all our half-baked, ill-thought out thoughts and conceptions. Our venom, spite, sarcasm and self-embellishment.
Thinking about the stuff I read, the newspapers and websites, I realized that very few, if any of them, touched me.
Made me think, yes. Made me laugh, certainly.
But moved me?
Actually moved me?
Thinking about life, too.
How we wander day to day through our family and peers, co-workers and strangers. A joke, a wave, a sigh over here; a good-morning, what's up, not-too-much over there. Everybody looking like they're so contented and ready to face the day. Or else visibly pissed-off, barely holding on, suffocating with real or imagined stress. (Which ultimately are one and the same thing, I guess.)
One of the few spiritual gurus that I actually find a) insightful and b) practical is Eckhart Tolle, whose first book The Power of Now I kind of, sort of think is somewhat profound, especially in its focus on the present moment being the source of all power, hope, life. This moment is all we have, and since life is lived in an eternal present -- the past erased, the future never arriving -- the fluid continuum we inhabit becomes all the more precious.
Isn't it depressing that we have to describe athletes and writers as 'being in the moment'? As if it's a rare thing. As if living in 'the moment' can only be attained through monumental diligence, and enacted only under extreme situations of competition, concentration, or duress.
What if we focused on 'the moment' constantly? What if we were conscious of the who we are and what we're doing and who we're doing it to at all times?
It's something I try to do, more and more.
Be present.
Be aware.
Not become caught up in things that are gone, and things that may never be.
Focusing on what is before me, and not judging it, and not cursing it, and not blessing it, and simply allowing it to unfold.
The person serving you drinks at Starbucks. The boring wait-in-line at the immigration office. The mind-numbing traffic jam that inches along, inch by infuriating inch.
All of these receiving equal attention.
A little abstract, I know, but I find it can actually work, this focus on the present.
You start to become more and more aware of not the stuff of life -- the things and the roads and the people and the weather and the ground and the lights -- but the space in which all of these things exist.
And by being comfortable in that space, simply, I don't know, resting in it, you can be aware of how subtly you can manipulate it.
Mostly by touching someone.
Giving them their attention. Deflecting away from yourself. Smiling. Letting the ego descend within. Being conscious of the fact that you can actually alter a circumstance by your words, gestures, actions and comments. You can sometimes bring a miniscule amount of joy, or contemplation, or solace, or levity, merely by allowing others in.
Too often we trudge through life as if we're wearing snowshoes and the whole earth is thick with deeply packed snow. We carefully glide along the top, worrying about falling. Getting stuck. Careful not to press too hard against the ice, fearful of cracking its fragile surface.
Who shall I touch today? I sometimes think. A student? A friend? The person taking my pizza order? Will they notice? Will they even care?
Outside this internet cafe, on this crisp January morning, Session Road is humming along. I can see the KFC across the street, the endless array of white taxicabs slowly driving by, patiently scanning for passengers. A generic pop song floats through the air.
A minor life moment, it would seem.
And yet, I am, as you are, exactly where I'm supposed to be.
Waiting to touch, and be touched.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Saturday, January 03, 2009
BLESSED ARE THE MEEK
"There's obviously a good aspect to competition -- the development of the mind, the body, creativity," Mr.Vanier says. "But there's something where we can walk very quickly on
people -- I want to prove I'm better than you. How to find a world where the essential thing is to work for peace, to work to build something together?" He notes that the United Nations has recommended that the study of non-violence be included on all school curricula.
"I'm amazed that this is not being done. What is more important is that I should go back home and show that I'm better than others...The pain of parents comes when children don't seem to be doing as well as others. Everything becomes competition."
If humans -- part of a strange and immature species that is still only a little more than 100,000 years old -- are still evolving, then what's the next step? We have now reached the level of consciousness, something that dinosaurs, in all their millions of years on this planet, never did.
We know we're going to die, and that troubles us. And so we mask that anxiety in the veil of anticipation, hoping against hope that we will someday be better than those around us. We will become strong because others we will remain weak. We judge our success based on the fact that we are doing better than the person before us and behind us.
But what if we surrounded ourselves continually with those who have no vested interest in that struggle? Who aren't playing that game? Who are what society calls 'weak' to begin with, but who may, in fact, be the metaphorical finger pointing to the destination we as a species have to eventually reach?
If the collective human ego is still morphing over the millieniums into something larger, which I think it is, then the next step must somehow involve an acknowledgement that we cannot continue to judge our own worth as human beings based on how much higher, faster, stronger and smarter we are than those beside us and below us that breathe our same air.
Some kind of symbiosis may be in order, a necessary, mutual realization on the part of all of us that life exists for its own sake, and has not been designed or accidentally developed so that we spend years and years trying to prove our self-worth to indifferent others who are immersed in their own cocoon trying to prove their self-worth to us, with neither side watching the other yet each flank nevertheless futilely trying to impress an invisible, future mass of spectators who could care less.
The meek may not, eventually, inherit the earth, but they certainly can, at the moment, enlighten it.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081225.wnbvanier1227/BNStory/nationbuilder2008/home/?pageRequested=1
people -- I want to prove I'm better than you. How to find a world where the essential thing is to work for peace, to work to build something together?" He notes that the United Nations has recommended that the study of non-violence be included on all school curricula.
"I'm amazed that this is not being done. What is more important is that I should go back home and show that I'm better than others...The pain of parents comes when children don't seem to be doing as well as others. Everything becomes competition."
If humans -- part of a strange and immature species that is still only a little more than 100,000 years old -- are still evolving, then what's the next step? We have now reached the level of consciousness, something that dinosaurs, in all their millions of years on this planet, never did.
We know we're going to die, and that troubles us. And so we mask that anxiety in the veil of anticipation, hoping against hope that we will someday be better than those around us. We will become strong because others we will remain weak. We judge our success based on the fact that we are doing better than the person before us and behind us.
But what if we surrounded ourselves continually with those who have no vested interest in that struggle? Who aren't playing that game? Who are what society calls 'weak' to begin with, but who may, in fact, be the metaphorical finger pointing to the destination we as a species have to eventually reach?
If the collective human ego is still morphing over the millieniums into something larger, which I think it is, then the next step must somehow involve an acknowledgement that we cannot continue to judge our own worth as human beings based on how much higher, faster, stronger and smarter we are than those beside us and below us that breathe our same air.
Some kind of symbiosis may be in order, a necessary, mutual realization on the part of all of us that life exists for its own sake, and has not been designed or accidentally developed so that we spend years and years trying to prove our self-worth to indifferent others who are immersed in their own cocoon trying to prove their self-worth to us, with neither side watching the other yet each flank nevertheless futilely trying to impress an invisible, future mass of spectators who could care less.
The meek may not, eventually, inherit the earth, but they certainly can, at the moment, enlighten it.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081225.wnbvanier1227/BNStory/nationbuilder2008/home/?pageRequested=1
Sunday, December 28, 2008
A BOWL OF COOKIES AND CRACKERS
"The Filipino people," she said, shaking her head. Stopping herself short. "They do not value life."
We stood in the kitchen of her modest stone house, as her daughter-in-law puttered around the kitchen, preparing food for her two small children. (This was in a village in Ifugao, a northern mountain province of the Philippines. If it could be called a village. What do you call houses snaked along the edge of an endless highway?)
The night before, on Christmas day, a cousin of a cousin, a relative of a relative of a relative, had drunkenly stumbled along and been hit by a truck just a little bit down the road from this house (The van I had been traveling in had stopped so the driver could say hello to this same man only a few minutes or hours before he was killed.)
Nobody was sure who had hit him. The driver hadn't stopped. It had happened late at night, along a winding, mountain highway road that was completely dark by dusk. No street lights for miles and miles, not this far up.
"They found his insides on the road," she said. "And his tongue, too."
She was worried about her son. He had been drinking rice wine all day the day before, since early morning, had eaten nothing, collapsed at some point during the night, and was now too sick and ashamed to come downstairs. She feared that someday he would wander along this same road. Get hit by a truck in the dark. Dead before dawn.
I thought about she had said.
That the Filipino people do not value life.
I knew what she meant. Everything is closer to the ground here. People ride on tops of vans that careen down spiralling country roads. Seatbelts are optional. Kids play basketball on the side of the highway. Drivers are reckless, if not completely insane. Dust and diesel perfume the air. There is the sense that the future is already here, and, in its present state, at least, it does not seem offer much, so why bother?
But life is not only about planning and precaution, and its value does not stem solely from how we try to bandage ourselves against time's inevitable assault.
I think of another person I met that Christmas night, a clerk for the local election office. Upon meeting me he sheepishly said that he hoped that I was able to adjust to the Philippines. He knew that it was a third-world country, and that it might be difficult for me.
Apologizing, essentially, for the poverty.
And that is another aspect of life here, a certain decency, a desire to put other people at ease. A welcoming.
In the west we insulate ourselves, cocooned within our houses and cars, our finely-tuned budgets and carefully worded blogs.
Here, people are on top of each other. A dozen or more to a house. Cities teeming with chickens and cows and orphans and executives jostling for the same simple space.
There's nowhere to go, so you learn to inhabit the realm of others more easily.
This is not to say that such proximity doesn't breed avarice and selfishness, greed and resentment. One only has to glance at the headlines of The Philippines Inquirer each and every day to recognize that blunt reality. Poverty is not pretty, and the kindness and generosity of the poor sometimes seems like a conscious way to keep pushing against the darkness that stains the streets.
And yet, how strong the bonds of family are here! How readily people are able to accept one another's faults and imperfections. They may not have much of a future, but they do have each other.
I keep thinking of that winding mountain road. A drunk man hit by a car on a dark Christmas night. A worried mother looking out the window at the pavement, wondering if her oldest child would someday meet the same fate.
Anxious, yes, but there was a guest in the house, and she made sure that a bowl of cookies and crackers was kept full throughout the afternoon.
We stood in the kitchen of her modest stone house, as her daughter-in-law puttered around the kitchen, preparing food for her two small children. (This was in a village in Ifugao, a northern mountain province of the Philippines. If it could be called a village. What do you call houses snaked along the edge of an endless highway?)
The night before, on Christmas day, a cousin of a cousin, a relative of a relative of a relative, had drunkenly stumbled along and been hit by a truck just a little bit down the road from this house (The van I had been traveling in had stopped so the driver could say hello to this same man only a few minutes or hours before he was killed.)
Nobody was sure who had hit him. The driver hadn't stopped. It had happened late at night, along a winding, mountain highway road that was completely dark by dusk. No street lights for miles and miles, not this far up.
"They found his insides on the road," she said. "And his tongue, too."
She was worried about her son. He had been drinking rice wine all day the day before, since early morning, had eaten nothing, collapsed at some point during the night, and was now too sick and ashamed to come downstairs. She feared that someday he would wander along this same road. Get hit by a truck in the dark. Dead before dawn.
I thought about she had said.
That the Filipino people do not value life.
I knew what she meant. Everything is closer to the ground here. People ride on tops of vans that careen down spiralling country roads. Seatbelts are optional. Kids play basketball on the side of the highway. Drivers are reckless, if not completely insane. Dust and diesel perfume the air. There is the sense that the future is already here, and, in its present state, at least, it does not seem offer much, so why bother?
But life is not only about planning and precaution, and its value does not stem solely from how we try to bandage ourselves against time's inevitable assault.
I think of another person I met that Christmas night, a clerk for the local election office. Upon meeting me he sheepishly said that he hoped that I was able to adjust to the Philippines. He knew that it was a third-world country, and that it might be difficult for me.
Apologizing, essentially, for the poverty.
And that is another aspect of life here, a certain decency, a desire to put other people at ease. A welcoming.
In the west we insulate ourselves, cocooned within our houses and cars, our finely-tuned budgets and carefully worded blogs.
Here, people are on top of each other. A dozen or more to a house. Cities teeming with chickens and cows and orphans and executives jostling for the same simple space.
There's nowhere to go, so you learn to inhabit the realm of others more easily.
This is not to say that such proximity doesn't breed avarice and selfishness, greed and resentment. One only has to glance at the headlines of The Philippines Inquirer each and every day to recognize that blunt reality. Poverty is not pretty, and the kindness and generosity of the poor sometimes seems like a conscious way to keep pushing against the darkness that stains the streets.
And yet, how strong the bonds of family are here! How readily people are able to accept one another's faults and imperfections. They may not have much of a future, but they do have each other.
I keep thinking of that winding mountain road. A drunk man hit by a car on a dark Christmas night. A worried mother looking out the window at the pavement, wondering if her oldest child would someday meet the same fate.
Anxious, yes, but there was a guest in the house, and she made sure that a bowl of cookies and crackers was kept full throughout the afternoon.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
INTERPRETATIONS
A few weeks ago, myself and nine of my Japanese co-workers took a test designed for non-native speakers of English who wanted to teach English as a second language. My company offered the course to the Japanese university students enrolled in its program, but only one student signed up for the course, and a minimum of ten people were mandatory in order for anybody to take the test, so myself and some of the other Japanese office staff were recruited just for the hell of it.
The test itself wasn't all that difficult for a native speaker of English, as it was mostly designed to test common-sense ESL teaching competency, of which I, admittedly, have little, so I was thrown by a few questions here and there. What threw me even more, however, was the checklist at the beginning of the test, where you were supposed to put a checkmark in the little box next to your native tongue.
I realized I am, and will forever be, hopelessly illiterate.
And ignorant regarding most of the world's languages.
Below, in alphabetical order, are the languages that I had never even heard of. (Please feel free to play along at home and raise your hand or ring the bell whenever you come across a language that sounds even vaguely familiar. Two points for each language, and no cheating.)
Amharic. Assamese. Aymara. Baluchi. Bambara. Bemba. Bihan. Efik. Ewe. Eaeroese. Fulani. Ga. Gilbertese. Gujarati. Hausa. Ibo/Igbo. Igala. Kannada. Luba. Luo. Luxemburgish. Malagasy. Malinka. Malayalam. Marathi. Marshallese. Malinka. Malayalam. Oriya. Ponapean. Quechua. Rajasthani. Riff. Shona. Sindhi. Swiss German. Tatar. Telugu. Tigrinya. Trukese. Tulu. TupilGuarani. Ulithian. Wolof. Yoruba. Yao. Yapese.
Whew.
How did you do?
Four points? Eight?
Me, I knew that people spoke German in Switzerland -- but I didn't know that 'Swiss German' could actually be considered one's native language, and that it was different enough from German German to be thought of as something else altogether. I knew of Luxemburg -- but I didn't know the people there spoke their own language. All the other languages simply sound vaguely African, or Asian, or just plain foreign.
And even though I've lived in Asia for close to ten years, I'm still thrown by my own ignorance.
After all, those languages were all listed at the front of the test because people actually speaking those languages wanted to teach English. And here I am, already an English teacher, and not even aware that these languages existed.
A similar thought was pounded home for me a week or so ago when I was reading an article in the New York Times about a new biography of McGeorge Bundy, one of JFK's confidantes and collaborator in the Vietnam fiasco. At one point Kennedy's bipartisianship was pointed out by this quote of his: "I don't care if the man is a Democrat or an Igorot."
This phrase stopped me cold because I've been living in a house with a bunch of Igorots in the Philippines in between my jaunts in Tokyo for the past few years. I knew that word. I understood that word, and the people it represents. It had an emotional connection for me, whereas only three years ago I had never even heard of an Igorot. (Igorots being one of the tribal peoples of the northern Philippines.)
I doubt you could find many North Americans today, let alone political leaders, who could tell you where the Igorot people live. That Kennedy was able to throw such a quote out in casual conversation, and expect it to be understood, made me think that we've (or maybe just I've) lost something in the intervening forty years of development, civilization, progress.
A knowledge about the wider world, perhaps.
A desire to know its peoples.
Another example:
Last year I was teaching at a university in Saitama in Japan, and in one of my classes were a handful of friendly, vaguely Turkish-looking people who were decidedly not of Japanese origin, and they told me that they were Uighurs, and I smiled, and nodded, and eventually had to admit that I had never heard of their people, at all, and it turns out they were Chinese citizens who occupied a western corner of that massive, impenetrable country, had an autonomous government, were spread across the world, and incidentally occupied a considerable portion of Toronto, where I went to university.
And I had never heard of them.
Taking this test, and reading through the vast names of languages I did not know, had never before considered, would never learn, reminded me of the Uighurs I had met. About how ignorant I felt, confessing that an entire peoples' -- their peoples' -- history and culture was a blank slate in my brain.
I understand that it's a big world, and I am only one, and they are vast and many.
But still.
Language after language, unknowable. Illiterate in all of them. (As are, most likely, you.) We only have so much time, and capacity, and distance is a detriment we cannot cross.
And so many of their speakers desperate to teach English.
I lay awake the other night wondering what it would be like if everybody, everywhere, spoke everyone's language. Every word of every tongue. No strange vocabulary. All concepts complete. Almost intimate. A perfect grounds for communication.
I tried to imagine a person for each language I had read on that meangingless test. Were they black, white, brown, yellow? Could a speaker of Tulu and a speaker of Yapese somehow be able to chill out with a beer and a smoke and solve the world's problems?
If we all knew what everybody was saying, would anything change?
Probably not.
Still, confronted by a vast sea of languages that remained insufferably foreign, I wondered if it would be worth it to try and learn them all. To put a dent in the distance that lies between us, however hollow it might prove to be. It would take a lifetime, perhaps two, possibly three, to achieve such a feat of linguistic power, but who is to say it could not be done?
What a thrill that would be! The one human on earth who could speak to any other person on the planet, no matter their age, race, sex, location, language, whatever.
Everyone an ally. Noone impenetrable.
Not possible, I know.
Yet in those drifting minutes before sleep, listening to the sound of a distant train rumble along the rickety tracks, I could almost hear that medley of languages melding together, and I thought, if I listened close enough, and tried hard enough, a single meaning could be found. A single voice might be heard, one similar, if not identical, to my own.
The test itself wasn't all that difficult for a native speaker of English, as it was mostly designed to test common-sense ESL teaching competency, of which I, admittedly, have little, so I was thrown by a few questions here and there. What threw me even more, however, was the checklist at the beginning of the test, where you were supposed to put a checkmark in the little box next to your native tongue.
I realized I am, and will forever be, hopelessly illiterate.
And ignorant regarding most of the world's languages.
Below, in alphabetical order, are the languages that I had never even heard of. (Please feel free to play along at home and raise your hand or ring the bell whenever you come across a language that sounds even vaguely familiar. Two points for each language, and no cheating.)
Amharic. Assamese. Aymara. Baluchi. Bambara. Bemba. Bihan. Efik. Ewe. Eaeroese. Fulani. Ga. Gilbertese. Gujarati. Hausa. Ibo/Igbo. Igala. Kannada. Luba. Luo. Luxemburgish. Malagasy. Malinka. Malayalam. Marathi. Marshallese. Malinka. Malayalam. Oriya. Ponapean. Quechua. Rajasthani. Riff. Shona. Sindhi. Swiss German. Tatar. Telugu. Tigrinya. Trukese. Tulu. TupilGuarani. Ulithian. Wolof. Yoruba. Yao. Yapese.
Whew.
How did you do?
Four points? Eight?
Me, I knew that people spoke German in Switzerland -- but I didn't know that 'Swiss German' could actually be considered one's native language, and that it was different enough from German German to be thought of as something else altogether. I knew of Luxemburg -- but I didn't know the people there spoke their own language. All the other languages simply sound vaguely African, or Asian, or just plain foreign.
And even though I've lived in Asia for close to ten years, I'm still thrown by my own ignorance.
After all, those languages were all listed at the front of the test because people actually speaking those languages wanted to teach English. And here I am, already an English teacher, and not even aware that these languages existed.
A similar thought was pounded home for me a week or so ago when I was reading an article in the New York Times about a new biography of McGeorge Bundy, one of JFK's confidantes and collaborator in the Vietnam fiasco. At one point Kennedy's bipartisianship was pointed out by this quote of his: "I don't care if the man is a Democrat or an Igorot."
This phrase stopped me cold because I've been living in a house with a bunch of Igorots in the Philippines in between my jaunts in Tokyo for the past few years. I knew that word. I understood that word, and the people it represents. It had an emotional connection for me, whereas only three years ago I had never even heard of an Igorot. (Igorots being one of the tribal peoples of the northern Philippines.)
I doubt you could find many North Americans today, let alone political leaders, who could tell you where the Igorot people live. That Kennedy was able to throw such a quote out in casual conversation, and expect it to be understood, made me think that we've (or maybe just I've) lost something in the intervening forty years of development, civilization, progress.
A knowledge about the wider world, perhaps.
A desire to know its peoples.
Another example:
Last year I was teaching at a university in Saitama in Japan, and in one of my classes were a handful of friendly, vaguely Turkish-looking people who were decidedly not of Japanese origin, and they told me that they were Uighurs, and I smiled, and nodded, and eventually had to admit that I had never heard of their people, at all, and it turns out they were Chinese citizens who occupied a western corner of that massive, impenetrable country, had an autonomous government, were spread across the world, and incidentally occupied a considerable portion of Toronto, where I went to university.
And I had never heard of them.
Taking this test, and reading through the vast names of languages I did not know, had never before considered, would never learn, reminded me of the Uighurs I had met. About how ignorant I felt, confessing that an entire peoples' -- their peoples' -- history and culture was a blank slate in my brain.
I understand that it's a big world, and I am only one, and they are vast and many.
But still.
Language after language, unknowable. Illiterate in all of them. (As are, most likely, you.) We only have so much time, and capacity, and distance is a detriment we cannot cross.
And so many of their speakers desperate to teach English.
I lay awake the other night wondering what it would be like if everybody, everywhere, spoke everyone's language. Every word of every tongue. No strange vocabulary. All concepts complete. Almost intimate. A perfect grounds for communication.
I tried to imagine a person for each language I had read on that meangingless test. Were they black, white, brown, yellow? Could a speaker of Tulu and a speaker of Yapese somehow be able to chill out with a beer and a smoke and solve the world's problems?
If we all knew what everybody was saying, would anything change?
Probably not.
Still, confronted by a vast sea of languages that remained insufferably foreign, I wondered if it would be worth it to try and learn them all. To put a dent in the distance that lies between us, however hollow it might prove to be. It would take a lifetime, perhaps two, possibly three, to achieve such a feat of linguistic power, but who is to say it could not be done?
What a thrill that would be! The one human on earth who could speak to any other person on the planet, no matter their age, race, sex, location, language, whatever.
Everyone an ally. Noone impenetrable.
Not possible, I know.
Yet in those drifting minutes before sleep, listening to the sound of a distant train rumble along the rickety tracks, I could almost hear that medley of languages melding together, and I thought, if I listened close enough, and tried hard enough, a single meaning could be found. A single voice might be heard, one similar, if not identical, to my own.
Friday, December 12, 2008
ALL HEART
Roger Ebert recently commented on one of my comments on his journal over at http://www.rogerebert.com/, saying that he's read this blog, liked it, and bookmarked it, which I mention a) because it was incredibly nice of him to even take the time to read this humble little assemblage of words and b) because it meant a lot to me. More than I expected.
His words, I mean.
The words he wrote about this blog, the words he writes now, and the words he wrote years and years ago, in the annual collection of his movie columns from the Chicago-Sun Times that I used to receive for Christmas each and every year all through adolescence.
I had always loved movies, and I had always loved writing, but it was Roger Ebert's writing about movies that opened up a new way of thinking and feeling about both subjects.
And I use those words deliberately.
Thinking. Feeling.
My household only received the local paper, The St.Catharines Standard (delivered just before supper each and every night, ready to read right after school and just before dinner), and it had a decent-enough movie reviewer, the local film-prof from the local university, but it was Ebert's books that showed me that one could think about, write about, and feel about movies in a whole new way, one that was not about academic analysis or snide, sarcastic one-liners, but something deeper, that 'deeper' thing that all teenagers yearn for and look for and hope to find sometime soon. You could use films, Ebert was hinting, to learn about life. About yourself. About your friends, and family, and the world around you. If you watched them carefully enough, you could even access parts of yourself that had otherwise remained humble and hidden. He altered something for me, in other words. Helped me arrange a new alignment within myself.
(At first I read only his reviews about movies I had actually seen. Then I soon realized that I was interested not so much in Ebert's opinion itself, but in the way that he wrote, the simple cadence and rhythm that I quickly realized was not so simple at all, and so I started to read the reviews of films that I hadn't seen, too, just to listen to the workingclass music of his words. Ebert himself is fond of saying: "A movie is not what it's about, but how it's about it." His writing helped me unearth another truth: "A piece of writing is not what it's about, but how it's about it.")
He's been on Letterman and Leno, Oprah and Conan, but it was always his writing that stuck to me. It was spare and accesible and emotional. I liked that part the most -- the emotional part. Siskel once said that he was the reporter and Ebert was the columnist. I admired them both, but behind Ebert's words you could somehow sense its heart, and hear it beat.
I met Mr.Ebert a few times in Toronto about ten, eleven years ago, once at a book signing at Theatrebooks, and another time during the Toronto Film Festival, where I ambushed him at the Varsity Cinemas as my friends and I waited to watch Emilio Estevez's film The War At Home, asking if he had any advice for a young writer.
I used to lay sprawled across my bed on lazy, snowy Sunday afternoons on gray December days and slowly, methodically flip through his books, re-reading the reviews a dozen times and more, checking with a blue pen all the movies I had seen in the indexes at the back, and now knowing that my writing in this little space has been read by this same man, who taught me a lot about movies and writing and life...
Well.
It feels like an odd little circle has been completed, one that began at the age of ten or eleven and continues in its erratic arc and orbit to this very day.
Roger Ebert helped teach me: that linguistics aside, aesthetics aside, perception aside, opinion aside, even skill aside, in the end all good writing is simply about heart. If you can't hear its steady, persistent beat behind the words, then your original intent will flatline fast.
If it ain't got heart, it ain't got anything.
Oh, and that advice he gave me, at the Varsity Cinemas?
"Keep writing."
I have.
And so has he.
His words, I mean.
The words he wrote about this blog, the words he writes now, and the words he wrote years and years ago, in the annual collection of his movie columns from the Chicago-Sun Times that I used to receive for Christmas each and every year all through adolescence.
I had always loved movies, and I had always loved writing, but it was Roger Ebert's writing about movies that opened up a new way of thinking and feeling about both subjects.
And I use those words deliberately.
Thinking. Feeling.
My household only received the local paper, The St.Catharines Standard (delivered just before supper each and every night, ready to read right after school and just before dinner), and it had a decent-enough movie reviewer, the local film-prof from the local university, but it was Ebert's books that showed me that one could think about, write about, and feel about movies in a whole new way, one that was not about academic analysis or snide, sarcastic one-liners, but something deeper, that 'deeper' thing that all teenagers yearn for and look for and hope to find sometime soon. You could use films, Ebert was hinting, to learn about life. About yourself. About your friends, and family, and the world around you. If you watched them carefully enough, you could even access parts of yourself that had otherwise remained humble and hidden. He altered something for me, in other words. Helped me arrange a new alignment within myself.
(At first I read only his reviews about movies I had actually seen. Then I soon realized that I was interested not so much in Ebert's opinion itself, but in the way that he wrote, the simple cadence and rhythm that I quickly realized was not so simple at all, and so I started to read the reviews of films that I hadn't seen, too, just to listen to the workingclass music of his words. Ebert himself is fond of saying: "A movie is not what it's about, but how it's about it." His writing helped me unearth another truth: "A piece of writing is not what it's about, but how it's about it.")
He's been on Letterman and Leno, Oprah and Conan, but it was always his writing that stuck to me. It was spare and accesible and emotional. I liked that part the most -- the emotional part. Siskel once said that he was the reporter and Ebert was the columnist. I admired them both, but behind Ebert's words you could somehow sense its heart, and hear it beat.
I met Mr.Ebert a few times in Toronto about ten, eleven years ago, once at a book signing at Theatrebooks, and another time during the Toronto Film Festival, where I ambushed him at the Varsity Cinemas as my friends and I waited to watch Emilio Estevez's film The War At Home, asking if he had any advice for a young writer.
I used to lay sprawled across my bed on lazy, snowy Sunday afternoons on gray December days and slowly, methodically flip through his books, re-reading the reviews a dozen times and more, checking with a blue pen all the movies I had seen in the indexes at the back, and now knowing that my writing in this little space has been read by this same man, who taught me a lot about movies and writing and life...
Well.
It feels like an odd little circle has been completed, one that began at the age of ten or eleven and continues in its erratic arc and orbit to this very day.
Roger Ebert helped teach me: that linguistics aside, aesthetics aside, perception aside, opinion aside, even skill aside, in the end all good writing is simply about heart. If you can't hear its steady, persistent beat behind the words, then your original intent will flatline fast.
If it ain't got heart, it ain't got anything.
Oh, and that advice he gave me, at the Varsity Cinemas?
"Keep writing."
I have.
And so has he.
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