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?

apprenticed

Yesterday I mentioned three types of contact between generations - parent to child, teacher to pupil, and master to apprentice. Perhaps the third is different, from the other two. Apprenticeship comes after rearing and schooling - it is something new, perhaps even something one has chosen for oneself. It is less generic, more focused in practice, an alternative to what has gone before. I would like to have been apprenticed to someone who really knew what the world was about.

elusive

There are certain familiar structures for contact across the generations: parent to child, teacher to pupil, master to apprentice. But there are also contacts that elude these categorisations and, in doing so, become particularly charged. The older person who is neither parental nor teacherly can open a door to something beyond what is already familiar. I am thinking of Charles, whom I met some fifteen years ago and who simply said ‘I see you’ – a remark that rang like a bell and resonates still when I think of it. To be seen as I was and not as a unit in a predetermined system was an experience so striking and so strong that I have never quite forgotten it.

question

Today has been a long and, in some ways, difficult day, so this post will be short and will just record a question that I asked myself while crammed into an excessively crowded train as it rattled through the Peak District towards Manchester: Why (when I was young) didn't the older people tell me what life would be like?

Perhaps they did and I didn't hear them? Perhaps I never met anyone who knew? Off into the wilds we go with a hand drawn map and a rusty penknife. And so this aging bastard lays himself down to sleep with just a hint of concern at what what the next slice of futurity will consist in.

listening

It’s 07.12 on Thursday morning, quite dark outside, and I’m sitting here with a cup of coffee, trying to put my thoughts in order. They are clustering around two centres. One is to do with listening. The other is to do with talking across the generations. Perhaps I’ll say something about listening today and come to the other point tomorrow.

Last night I read your piece ‘The Words We Share’ and I was struck by the Quaker text that comes at the end – the emphasis on ‘redemptive silence’, ‘the duty of listening’, ‘attentive minds and silent hearts’. I don’t think I’ve read the text before but I recognise the sentiments. Once upon a time, I used to visit the Quaker meeting house in Cambridge and these are the familiar concepts of a movement in which the cultivation of receptivity is a primary virtue. I remember struggling then with the texture of the silent meeting. I remember being bad at it. Or unskilled (which is how a Buddhist would put it). I remember feeling irritation at some of the witnessing that I heard and I remember wondering endlessly whether the time was ripe for me myself to witness. (The answer should have been obvious – it wasn’t – I was better off listening.)

These days my focus is more on Buddhist practice where sitting in silence is also of great importance, although the dynamics of sitting are understood very differently. Contrary to what people sometimes think, the practice isn’t self-centred. In fact, the point is more that it produces a ‘softening’ (not quite a dissolution?) of the self, which in turn gives rise to that most Buddhist of virtues, compassion. By observing what arises in one’s own mind and heart, one begins to stop identifying with one’s thoughts and feelings. One learns to watch compassionately as anger or grief or humiliation arise and subside in the space that one calls the self. And, in the process, one learns compassion in a wider sense – one becomes able to offer the same generous attention to other people. So – yes – the dynamic is different but the basic practice is seen as producing a greater receptivity to something beyond the self whether that is understood as listening to the voices of others or experiencing compassion in response to their suffering. In both cases, receptivity is something that must be cultivated through a certain type of practice, one that involves being present, maintaining silence, and paying attention.

--o0o--

It’s evening now and I’m struck that on the first morning of writing I was thinking about language from the point of view of the listener rather than the speaker. I suppose I’d assumed that I would begin by thinking about the difficulty of using language to speak about the future. But there is also something important about making oneself receptive to the possibilities that language offers. And why examine what spiritual traditions have to say about this? Because when so much contemporary discourse on listening is so corporate – so managerial – it is powerful to read texts that make receptivity an end in itself and not simply a means of ‘dealing with difficult people’ or ‘getting the most from your staff’. The rediscovery of listening as end and not means – that is what the spiritual disciplines offer.