lykanthropoi

"To The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me"
Mindy Nettifee

I am writing you from an eight foot snow drift
somewhere south of somewhere.
I would call, but I lost my phone two days ago
at the ice rink pity party that was really just me,
a frozen lake, some cheap Russian vodka and
a depressed polar bear. (Those guys are dark.)
I still have six waterproof matches
and what Vogue Magazine assures me
is twenty extra pounds of body fat.
No, I am not proud of myself.
No, I am not “done with my obsession with Survivalism.”
But I am sorry, I am sorry we fought.
You were right when you said writing poetry is not a real skill
applicable post-apocalypse, and I said but who will tell the good stories,
and you said guys who can fish with their bare hands.
It turns out that’s really hard.
Trout are ticklish,
and my hands do not have to do what I tell them to,
some sort of freezing cold water clause.
I have nothing but the time and space I’ve been pining for now,
and I am using this opportunity to try and remember
why I thought this was a good idea.
I think it had something to do with Escape,
which has permanent offices in the romance division of my brain
and ground troops in my solar plexus.
The flight instinct comes on quicksand,
muscles out all rational thought,
starts Morse coding my limbic system with
complex dots and dashes for strange verbs that mean,
roughly translated: “joyous chewing your leash off,”
and “fire without readiness or aim.”
It always feels so right to go,
like it’s the only story my body knows by heart:
the creation myth of Alaskan shorebirds,
the bedtime story highways whisper to dirt roads,
the real reason horses sometimes obey.
You really wanted to marry me didn’t you?
My eyelashes are soaked now.
I’m beginning to think I will never see you again,
that I will never see anything again
but the twenty yards or so of visibility
in stark panorama around my broken sled.
I feel like an idiot, but I’m not scared.
You’d think I would be scared.
These are the soft frozen fields tundra vacations too,
the great white quiet.
No one to distrust.
I deserve this.
You would be amazed how much light there is.
The stars stay out all night.
Each snow flake is a mirror.

The class I have taken over for the past 4 and the following 10 weeks is interesting. They're a bunch of year four children, so between eight and nine years old, although a lot of them were born just after the cut-off point and so are almost an entire year younger than the average year four child. Which is REALLY interesting, because a year is A LOT in terms of development at that age. Possibly unsurprisingly the class is known as being a bit immature. It's noticable, they still tattle on each other a lot (something which tends to die down at the beginning of the year), are very needy (wails of unfairness when someone else gets picked as a volunteer and wishes of random cuddles during the school day) and find independent learning very hard.

On top of that, thirteen out of the twenty-eight children have a learning disability of some kind. Four are have autism or aspergers syndrom. Most of the other children with learning disability statements are either dyslexic, dyspraxic, have dyscalculia or just general learning problems. (Sometimes a child is just slow.)

As a whole I've found myself drawn to the autistic children. Mostly because they need a lot of individual attention. Three of the form have milder autistic tendencies, although one of them is an autistic savaunt and can draw maps from memory. (And I don't mean the blobby things that adults usually manage with a bit of prompting, I mean the things that look like they were traced out of a book. Except they weren't.)

C., the boy who has a stronger case of autism, is lovely. He didn't meet my eye for the first two weeks, and spoke in a low, toneless voice when spoken to, or not at all. He has a "gold card" he keeps on his desk which he sticks on to a special plate when he feels upset, so the TA and I know that we need to talk to him or remove him from the situation.

Over the past weeks we've grown to understand each other a little more. At the beginning there were a lot of things we found confusing about one another. I was a new teacher with a different teaching style, he was a child whose facial expression never changed. Even when he cries, he doesn't scrunch up his face. I'm slowly beginning to understand him. There's a difference between tense and slightly less tense. When we separate him from his friends, he gets very tense and anxious. When he's back with his friends, one side of his mouth curls into a brief smile, and he relaxes into them. His friends are very cuddly with him, and he seems to like the physical contact, although he never initiates it.

Last week something beautiful happened - C began to chat to me with animation! I almost dropped the books I was holding in surprise. His voice was not low, but high and squeaky - incredibly cute! And yesterday he told me - before the whole class - how you played Smelly Jelly. We're very proud of him at the moment.

It's taken me a long time to warm to the class as a whole. They zone out almost instantaneously when spoken to as a whole. It takes a lot of energy to get them thinking, or working, or doing anything productive. Mixed with the social problems that seem to emerge on a daily basis ("Grace made a nasty face at me!" "I did not! She always lies about me!") I'm coming home shattered. They forget what you taught them yesterday. They forget what they learnt an hour ago. It's exasperating.

And different. I'm beginning to like them now. I've stopped using my voice as a way of behaviour management - it's pointless, see, the autistic kids often don't react to verbal instructions anyway, and I can't raise my voice over the chattering. I've since resorted to signals - counting down from five with my hand, holding my hands up in the air and making gestures the children copy. If it gets too noisy, I sit back and wait. I could be shouting and waiting, but that just makes me annoyed, scares the children and frankly accomplishes nothing. A teacher's voice should be used for creating new learning opportunities. Not as a way to get children quiet.

It's an interesting experience. I am still learning so much, day by day.

When I go for a drive I like to pull off to the side
Of the road, turn out the lights, get out and look up at the sky
And I do this to remind me that I'm really, really tiny
In the grand scheme of things and sometimes this terrifies me

But it's only really scary cause it makes me feel serene
In a way I never thought I'd be because I've never been
So grounded, and so humbled, and so one with everything
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything

Rock and roll is fun but if you ever hear someone
Say you are huge, look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky
Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye

When I saw Geneviève I really liked it when she said
What she said about the giant and the lemmings on the cliff
She said 'I like giants
Especially girl giants
Cause all girls feel too big sometimes
Regardless of their size'

When I go for a drive I like to pull off to the side
Of the road and run and jump into the ocean in my clothes
*I'm smaller than a poppyseed inside a great big bowl
And the ocean is a giant that can swallow me whole

So I swim for all salvation and I swim to save my soul
But my soul is just a whisper trapped inside a tornado
So I flip to my back and I float and I sing
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything
I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything

So I talked to Geneviève and almost cried when she said
That the giant on the cliff wished that she was dead
And the lemmings on the cliff wished that they were dead
So the giant told the lemmings why they ought to live instead

When she thought up all those reasons that they ought to live instead
It made her reconsider all the sad thoughts in her head
So thank you Geneviève, cause you take what is in your head
And you make things that are so beautiful and share them with your friends

We all become important when we realize our goal
Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole
And yeah, rock and roll is fun, but if you ever hear someone
Say you are huge, look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun
Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky

Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye
And I don't wanna make her cry
Cause I like giants

In my dissertation, which is slowly approaching completion, I'm comparing a play by Tony Harrison called The Mysteries with its original medieval counterpart: the "cycle plays". For all of you who do more sensible things in their time than look up silly historical facts, in the medieval times some towns such as York and Chester performed so-called 'cycle plays' in which the biblical and apocryphal history of mankind was presented episodically on pageant wagons through town. The Cycle Plays existed for about 200 years until the reformation suppressed them. It's all quite interesting stuff, especially if you imagine that at one time York had a play which stretched from 4:30 in the morning until midnight and that God and Jesus were played by people.

Anyway, I just came across this report about a cycle play from the sixteenth century. The backstory is this: basically a man with great debts hides from his debtors inside a church. Up come the people running the pageant, and on seeing this goodlooking bloke decide to make him their Jesus. Although it's a big honour, the man declines for a long time - after all, once he sets foot outside of the church he can get arrested again. So the people tell him that he can perform it on their pageant wagon - a wagon belonging to the church, and therefore like an extension for the church. The man consents and the wagon sets of to perform the play.

However, there's a problem: the man's debtor predictably hears of this, curses, and bribes the person playing Judas to help him out. When Judas gives Jesus his kiss, Judas is also to give Jesus a push and throw him off the cart.  I'll let the author tell you what happens next:

"...[Judas] gave him so forcible a kiss and a push, that he fell to the ground. The Alguazil (constable) captured him then and there; but as the good Lord was looking most woefully at his disciples, St. Peter, who stood next to him with his sword, took pity upon him and almost cleft the Alguazil's head in twain. Thereupon a great turmoil ensued in the whole village, so that the Justice intervened and arrested St. Peter, the Lord, and Judas with all his Jews.

Thereupon the Judge proclaimed: sententia, Firstly, Judas to be given the birch for a scoffer of God. Secondly, the Alguazil to have himself physicked  at his own cost. Thirdly, St. Peter to be set free, as a pious and faithful apostle, and the Lord likewise. The merchant to forfeit that which the Lord owes unto him and to make no further claims upon him for all eternity.

Of this, for lack of better news, have I wished to give tidings unto you."

I laughed out loud when I read this. I really hope it's not a joke, the whole thing is too good to be true.

 

 I've thought a lot about the Holocaust the last few days. I think it was triggered by a conversation with my Muslim  housemate, on whether we believe in God and how much. I told her that I don't know if I can believe in a God who would allow such a thing as the Holocaust to happen. She said she had a similar experience, except  in her case it was knowing what happened during the independence war in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and the situation of the Arabs in Israel.

There was an article I came across after our conversation, published in one of the biggest German newspapers, der Spiegel. In the artikel, the writer stated that he was rather proud that the people of the street he lives in in Hamburg had extensively researched what happened to the jewish people living in their street during the second world war. There are so-called 'Stolpersteine' you can  order in Germany- it's a small, golden-plaited stone which you place into the pavement infront of your door or street in memory of the deported people who had once lived there. When people started doing this housing-agencies complained, saying it would make the houses more difficult to sell. The writer described how he was very touched when golden stones began appearing everywhere in his street, with people clearly determined to show that they were not going to let the victims of the Holocaust be forgotten.

I decided to do the same. Growing up in a small German village I had walked past a small remembrance plaque at the place where the old synagogue stood on my way to school every day. I had always wondered who these people were. After some searching, I finally found a register with the names of jewish people who had been murdered in the holocaust. Over 3000 had been killed in the entire town, about 30 or so in my village. A few names had been 'adopted', people from Karlsruhe had decided to research their lives and find out who they were and what happened to them. One story struck me quite strongly. There was the story of a family, father, mother and daughter, who had grown up in the village. The father was a respectable man who was making a lot of money selling textiles. They were well-dressed and even had a servant. When the war came it slowly all went to hell. The little girl was the only one to survive, and she describes as one-by-one all her friends in school began to turn against her, how her father's friends spat on him in the streets, the unfairness and how her family lost her wealth and her parents died in a concentration camp. She emigrated to the US and hasn't been back. 

What was difficult to read were the familiar places. I passed her house on my way to school. We went to the same school. The place her family was gathered before they were deported- my family and I used to eat in the restaurant right next to that.

The writer from the paper went on to explain how, during workhours, he decided to google his streetname in combination with words such as 'holocaust', 'extermination', 'world war II' etc. And how surprised he was to find that in his street lived the very man who had stood at the front-line of Auschwitz and had decided who should go to the gas-chamber directly and who could live for a little while longer. (During the Nazi's trials one defender actually argued that this was a good thing and that he had thereby actually 'saved' a lot of people from the gas-chamber.) This was a heartless man, one who would shoot people at random because he felt like it. 

On finding this out, the writer decided to go to all his neighbors and confront them with this. Did they know which monster had lived in their neighborhood? Surprisingly, he found that the answer was a chorus of mumbled 'yesses'. Everyone knew. Noone talked about it.

This had made the writer thoughtful. Should we, he wondered, really worry so much about finding out what happened to the victims of the holocaust if there is such a gap in trying to understand the perpetrators? New Germany was built up on the shoulders of old Nazis. This wasn't avoidable, according to my mother after the second world war they were all that was left. The mentality of the second world war in Germany is treated as an embarassment, as a one-off thing which could not happen again.

But I think it could. Because all these people were normal human beings who were making rational choices. And what is more- they believed they were making moral choices. 

Neil Gaiman in his journal mentioned that a large part of his family tree was murdered during the Holocaust. He mentions his cousin, Helen Fagin, Professor in New College, Florida. I'll leave this entry with an excerpt from his journal, and her words.

Like Fagin's writings and teachings, the 1,000-volume collection emphasizes what she calls "the moral lessons" of the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews.

"While it is important to learn about the Holocaust," she says, "it is even more important that we learn from the Holocaust."

The most chilling of those lessons, to her, is that extermination, civilization's ultimate betrayal of its own humanity, was the work of highly civilized people.

"These were educated, erudite individuals, thinkers, who came to the conclusion that the final solution was perfectly plausible.

"And then they were able to enlist the help of chemists to devise an efficient gas for extermination, and architects to design an efficient death house, and industrialists to create the machinery of annihilation."

The lesson of the Holocaust is not that human beings are "somehow capable of resigning from their human obligations to one another," she says, but that "they do so out of conscious moral choice."


I should mention that I don't think the people in my village were highly educated, simply knowing the time and the descendants of those people. At the same time, they were all people able to make choices. And they all chose not help their neighbors, they chose to walk with the times and spit on human dignity. I lived with their descendants. Watching the way immigrants were treated in the village, I don't think the lesson has been learnt.

I'm kind of dumbstruck. It took the German news to tell me. German news has a way of occasionally slapping me in the face, but it's usually an account of the second world war by a holocaust survivor or the fact that they found another ex-nazi tucked up cosily in my village. This is a bit different, though.

There's Eels, and there's Mark Everett, who is Mr. E, and there's Hugh Everett, the physicist who came up with the theory of parallel universes. The famous physicist, the one who debated with Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and got shot down, the one who's theory has never been discarded and keeps getting picked up by scientist, and-

And Hugh Everett was also the father of Mark Everett. Famous physicist, father to famous singer/songwriter, famous Mr E. What the hell?? 

E recently found tapes off his father in his attic. In the foreground his father explains in very excited terms  his new theory. In the background you hear E practicing the drums. Now the BBC has made a documentary about his father and him. And E wrote an article for the Times documenting the whole thing.

It's just a small thing, but it's another proof to me that the world is incredibly WEIRD.

E's article for the Times: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article2909142.ece

E's  interview in the New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19626311.800-interview-parallel-lives-can-never-touch.html

 Does anyone know any jobs around London/ Bristol? Preferenably focussing on development work, but if someone's out there who knows someone else's mate is working in a restaurant and they're looking for waiters, or there's some random job down the road waiting to be done, can you let me know?

It's not for me, it's for a handy 24-year-old lad who will stay in Vancouver until he either finds a job over the internet or makes enough money to come over. He's nice and reliable, and it would be great if you could aks around, because it looks like it's going to be three months of not-seeing-each-other and i miss him.

Of all the places I have ever been to, I've always felt that my little town in Belgium- the one I moved to when I was twelve- wins the Oddness Award for little towns. Going into Mol is like walking into a world that functions on a different time and with different rules from the rest of the world. The closest I can compare a trip to Mol to is a trip to the 1950s small-town USA. There's a sleepy feel to the place that lasts all day, as though it's perpetually midmorning. Even today, on the first sunny day we've had in months the amount of people is minimal. Women wear skirts and watch their appearances while doing the shopping. Some kids congregate at an ice-cream stand. A lot of people, mostly old men, slowly cycle through town.  There's a supermarket that sells good food and- since about six years- fresh milk. There are small shops among the bigger brand name ones, although I haven't seen a shop besides the CD shop and the charity shop stay in one place, if at all. In between sparkling shops announcing beautiful clothes in Belgian fashion there are empty shopwindows announcing the new owners soon to come.

As with most towns in this area (the Kempen), Mol only grew large because there was a rather large natural resource of coal in the area, and a railway line ran through it from Germany to Antwerp. This is the railway I used to take when I went home from Maastricht. It's been disconnected from its service from Germany and no longer runs through the Netherlands (according to the Dutch it's to preserve a nature park; according to everyone else because of the rivalry between the harbours of Rotterdam and Antwerp. Whatever the real reason, this is why my way home for the past four years would take three hours instead of one). Mol sports a couple of small areas with bizzare names: Donk (with its nuclear power plant and- less well known-  underground nuclear dump), Ezaart (lit: "a shrubby place"), Millegem, Gompel, Achterbos ("behind the woods", used to be a pilgrimage route with 15 little chapels along the way), Postel and Ginderbuiten. Each district has its unique feel and places of pride, although in most cases you have to search for a long time to find a little chapel hidden in someone's backgarden, or a crossroad that's famous for some reason or another. 

I like history, and I find it a shame that for most of my time in Belgium I appraised it with eyes used to Southern German beauty. South Germany is beautiful- really, really beautiful- but Belgium sports a kind of bizzare and odd beauty that's unique to the region. I've never found another place that time seems to have forgotten, and where the people are so friendly. In Germany, I was constantly surrounded by reminders that I lived in a village that was 1000 years old. Here, I live close to a town that is just as old, if not older- but with the lack of funds to show this off. 

There's a lot of space, and I have time to focus on myself when I'm here. It's a place with a unique feel- although if you're not into that kind of thing, I'd advise you never to set foot here.

The week before the theater performance is called Hell Week, and it's called that for the reason that traditionally everyone is stressed out and usually everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Our hell week started yesterday and things have been going thus:

On saturday we had a tech-rehearsal, a rehearsal in which the technican (in this case mostly the director and a little bit the writer) works out lighting cues with the actors and last minute technical stuff gets done. Well, to start off with, the director's computer broke down completely and refuses to start up again. It has all the edited songs on it and was basically all up and running until blop. The director panicked, sent me home to get my computer and we rehearsed the music parts with music from Les Miserable and random punk rock instead of Ray Charles and Eels. Aside from a mild buzzing in the loudspeakers (which is where the writer's technical expertise comes in, I turn the amp on and off three times) the music worked.

Then we left the hall for ten minutes to look for cables, and when we got back the projector (a small metal box tucket away in the darkest corner with no light and hidden under a jacket) was gone. We frantically hunted through all the places we'd been and hadn't been, called up all people we knew who occasionally operate in the same building and might have an interest in projectors, snapped at each other for loosing it in the first place and were eventually put at rest when Tim, one of the inhabitants of the LBB, came and informed us that he had taken it and given it to someone else, for one reason or another. The rehearsal, which was planned to last three hours, in the end took nine.

Sheduled for today was the costume rehearsal, with all the cast and the costume designer present. What happened instead is that the main actor's coat, the coupe de grasse of the entire play and the one thing our costume designer has set her heart on, was eaten by the costume designers sewing machine in the late hours of the night. The costume designer, upon realizing what the machine had done and that fixing this would cost her an extra 10 hours, had a nervous breakdown, which was the state I found her in this morning. She was sheduled to come to the LBB and show the actors how to apply their makeup, but instead I arrived with half the costumes and the makeup on my own and we inexpertedly applied makeup, then started rehearsing.

*sigh* Aside from that, every day there seems to be a birthday party of some good friend I won't see because I'm moving to another country or a goodbye party of a friend who's leaving the country before me, so between rehearsal times and organizing stuff for the play the director and I find ourselves helping out at parties at 3 am in the morning and saying emotional goodbyes. During the day we'll randomly remember something for the play and call each other up, yell frantic sentences at one another which don't make sense to the other person as our ability to make sense is slowly dropping. To save energy, we quote lines of play because occasionally that's all that's in our head and we've heard them so often. We're also paying less attention with what we do, consequently the count is that the director was almost hit by a bus and I was almost hit by two cars. At the same time, it was a busy crossing.

But aside from that... the dress rehearsal today was amazing. The actors were the best I'd ever seen them and for the first time the play came over simply great. Even though there were minor mishaps of forgetting the lines and wrong cues, the energy was amazing and just right, and it really came over. I hope they keep up that performance for next week.

Breath in, breath out. All will be fine. All will be lovely.

*realizes she's just quoted lines from the play and goes to bang her head against the wall*

Acryllis will be performed on the 13th- 16th of June.

More info...

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2769820651