hiding

“I prefer silence. Then you can hear thoughts and see into the past. In silence you can’t hide anything … as you can in words."

August Strindberg,The Ghost Sonata (1907)

talking

I enjoyed talking today, Rory and I've given a lot of thought to your your point about working with second-language speakers - how operating outside the mother tongue makes one particularly conscious of the magic that language works. I've also been thinking about the place of language in the radical movements of the 60s and 70s. I'll blog on both these issues in the coming days.

ownership

After writing yesterday, it struck me that I had only recently read a book about children who are in some sense unlike their parents – Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon (who has also written a well-regarded book about depression, The Noonday Demon). The second chapter has interesting things to say about what happens when the deaf children of hearing parents come into contact with deaf adults, often in the context of education. To encounter a community of signers – a linguistic and cultural context in which the deaf child might feel ‘at home’ – can be an experience that is on the one hand fulfilling for the child and on the other painful for the parents:

[T]he fear of losing one’s child to the Deaf world is more than a dark fantasy. I met many deaf people who thought of the previous generation of deaf people as their parents. The higher achievement levels of deaf of deaf [i.e. deaf children of deaf parents] were often used as an argument that deaf children should be adopted by deaf adults. Even a pro-Deaf hearing parent said, ‘Sometimes Deaf culture looks like the Moonies to me: “Your child will be happy, just don’t expect to see her any more, she’s too busy being happy.”’

In this context Solomon quotes Cheryl Heppner, herself deaf, who offers information and advice to families:

Deaf people feel ownership of deaf children. I admit it. I feel it too. I really struggle in not wanting to interfere with a parent’s right to parent, at the same time knowing that they have to accept that the child can never be one hundred percent theirs.

I’m not sure what I want to say about this dynamic – it is probably unwise to comment from the outside – but, if we’re talking about learning how life is done, about insights passed from one generation to another, there is something particularly arresting about the case of the Deaf.  

acceptable

Looking back, I sometimes wish that, when I was 18 or 20, I had known some older gay man who could have shown me how to live. I'm not imagining a relationship (although a little sex might have been welcome). More a kind of apprenticeship, a supervised 'becoming'. I'm not sure what this tutelage would have consisted in but at the edges of my field of vision I catch glimpses of the man who would have offered it - broad shoulders, urbane manner, voice like a block of mahogany.

His conservative masculinity is not, I think, a matter of chance. What I am really imagining is a context in which it is normal to be supported in the formation of a gay identity or - to put it more bluntly - in which I am able to consider myself as a normal person (which is certainly not how it was in 1987). That's the thing about apprenticeship, no? It is an induction into a status quo. It is a becoming like the older people. So there is a trickiness to this vision. On the one hand, it arises from a sense that in my youth I was alone and directionless - no map, no route, no obvious way ahead. On the other, it is conformist and limited in its ambitions - a picture of acceptance by someone who is himself unimpeachably acceptable.

--o0o--

Better, maybe, to follow a holy fool (although the question then is how you are going to find one...)

dal

Oleg Dal as the Fool in King Lear (USSR, 1971)

foolish

I'm struggling with this post - have been trying to write it for over an hour now - must bring it into being and stop for the day.

     So...

             ...what I want to say is something about holy foolishness. There is a perversity that is closely connected with the divine - a rejection of reason because reason is too mundane, too rooted in the temporal, too constrained, too inert and inflexible and imprisoning to be a creative starting point. It is something to do with consequences - not caring for consequences - and hence abandoning oneself to some kind of pure possibility. Walking barefoot, walking backwards, walking on all fours, speaking in riddles, speaking in paradox, sleeping in a barrel, sleeping in the open, dancing without music, talking to animals, washing in ashes, obstructing the highway. This must not be a performance of eccentricity but a rejection of convention's protective armature. Fear and shame and the danger of rejection become irrelevant because the foolish life offers no shelter from them anyway. Since everything is already at risk, the idea of risk itself is neutralized.

To become a holy fool is to offer oneself undefended. It is a training in the possibility of difference. It is a habitual rejection of the safety of what already is. 

becoming

So, apprenticeship. I'm not really thinking of this in a literal sense - more as a figure for a certain kind of relationship or dynamic that is possible between older and younger people. But with figures of this kind it is often interesting to think about what the image offers and so I looked around this afternoon for something to read on the subject. This is from an article by Selena Chan which appeared in Vocations and Learning in 2013:

There have been many recent studies of apprenticeship in traditional ‘trades’. For instance, the work of Lave (2011) on apprentice tailors in western Africa, Rogoff’s (1995) work with Guatemalan midwives, Keller and Keller’s (1996) ethnographical examination of American craft-based blacksmithing, Gamble’s (2001) investigation of how cabinet makers in South Africa learn tacit skills, Racca and Roth’s (2001) study of Canadian apprentices in electrical trades, Simpson’s (2006) research on apprentice ship-builders in western India, and Marchand’s (2008) ethnographical field work with minaret builders in North Africa. Each of these studies, contribute to an understanding of how apprenticeships are enacted. From these studies, emerges the understanding that the enactment of apprenticeship is more than the development of a set of occupational skills. As such, an apprenticeship also constitutes a rite of passage, a form of induction into working life and adult responsibilities (Lehmann 2007), accompanied by the formation of occupational identity (Kirpal 2004). An apprenticeship, therefore, does more than prepare young people for work: it provides them with a particular identity and positions them in a world where occupations may also be shorthand statements of their individuality (Hall and Chandler 2005).

I like the lists of 'trades' which form the focus of the studies (most of them ethnographic, I think, Kate). I also like the emphasis on what apprenticeship offers beyond 'the development of a set of occupational skills'. There is the idea of 'induction into ... adult responsibilities' (which echoes what I said yesterday about this being a relationship that comes after those with parent and teacher). And there is the formation of 'a particular identity', which Chan talks about elsewhere in terms of a type of 'becoming'.

Can one undergo an apprenticeship as an activist?