Day 26

She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.

Jeanette Winterson

You know the really scary part about uni? I don’t remember most of it. It’s not even that it was simply a blur, like time so often is, as we race through everything we are trying to achieve. Sometimes it feels like the more we try to accomplish, the less truly we actually live. Like stuffing down food without stopping to truly taste it. But with uni it was more than that. Such was the rush to tick all the boxes and achieve all the milestones and goals that all the information I forced into myself simply did not stay there. What a waste of three years! Nearly everything I “learned” is now gone from me. I found that I had to get rid of most of my text books because they looked like the books of a stranger. I don’t remember them. They never became a part of who I am and resisted all attempts at entry. I would look at them and know logically that I had read them, or at least the parts of them assigned for my courses, and all I would see was blankness. Complete blankness. Or lines and squiggles. That’s more like it. Just like before I learned to read. Once upon a time I remember being desperate to learn to read but my parents said I had to wait until I went to school. The teachers there would help me learn the secrets of writing. Except that I don’t think they used such “romanticised” language as “secrets of writing”. That’s my description, imposed on memory.

I used to pick up every piece of paper I could find that had words written on it, entranced. Most of what I saw was probably shopping lists, but who knows? My mother wouldn’t have been worried about invasion of privacy back then! Of course I picked up books as well, admiring the strong black marks on the pages, knowing that they somehow went with the pictures. But it was hand writing that fascinated me the most. Probably because it felt more real and alive. Books arrived in pretty, neat packages – complete objects that gave no indication of them ever being anything else beforehand. But hand writing was different. It started with a blank page – and grew. Suddenly a piece of paper was not simply a piece of paper any more but had some special meaning and had to be carried around. Pieces of paper could give instructions and tell grown-ups what to do!

I would ask my mother to write, just so I could watch her do it. She didn’t say yes very often, no doubt afraid that I would try to learn to read “too early”. But I thought adults were almost like gods in their ability to take strange codes and make meaning out of them. Not only could they understand the codes but they could create their own! And teachers, I imagined, must be the most god-like of all, because they had the power to pass on this special knowledge. One day, if I was very, very smart, I too would perform this magic. I was quite worried about it because it looked impossibly hard and I couldn’t imagine that I would ever be smart enough. I was afraid that I would be left forever outside the magic. School, when it came, was not the place of wonders I imagined, but it did hold the miracle of letters. To my amazement and delight, I really did learn the magic and both books and pieces of paper revealed their secrets to me. If there is one thing I am more glad of than any other that I have accomplished in this life, it is that I have learned to read.

But at uni, so many of the books turned back into meaningless squiggles, and when I looked back on them afterwards, they made me shudder. I know there are some acquired brain injuries that leave people with the ability to recognise individual words but not put them together and create meaningful structures from them. That is what most of the text books looked like to me. Lots and lots of words, all of which meant something individually. But put together? They became so much nonsense for me. I could not understand why the writers took such perverse delight in taking the beauty and magic of language, and placing murky obscurity upon it. It wasn’t as if they were even speaking in a secret code that had to be learned; I could have understood and appreciated that. Instead, to me, they seemed to be taking magical words and turning them into mindless lumps of clay. That I could never understand. And it scared me that others could still find meaning in them. It should have made me feel inadequate, as though I simply weren’t good enough, not smart enough to understand. But it didn’t. Instead I felt like an alien. No, I wasn’t the alien. They were. All these people who could take up mindless lumps of clay and declare them to have meaning. Just like the “Emperor’s new clothes”. It was though everyone was agreeing to believe that the meaningless had meaning, in order to belong. That sounds like I made myself superior to everyone around me. I didn’t. Or maybe I did but didn’t want to believe that. Instead I was simply scared of them, like someone caught up in The Twilight Zone.

It probably didn’t help that I romanticised again, as my father would say. I had seen that old Michael Caine movie, Educating Rita and I loved it. In my mind, university would be all that school wasn’t. I refused to recognise the reality of a vocational education institution where one paid to become more useful to society. I fantasised about leaving behind the crazy rush of school, where we became robots spitting out information. I saw instead, Susan being encouraged to work on just one paper, one idea, at a time. In my mind, I was a modern Australian version of Susan. With the aid of my own personal mentor, I would drink in information and be challenged. I would try and try again, writing the same paper over until I had understood the secrets of interpretation and analysis. Until I had learned to express that learning clearly, so that others might understand. There would be no pass or fail, no deadlines. There would simply be the magic of learning. And, like Susan morphing into Rita, I would slowly be transformed. It would change everything about me, even down to my name and my physical appearance. Even as Susan chose someone she admired to become, I would create myself into whoever I wanted to be, through the power of learning. And maybe, even, as I learned to express beautiful, secret thoughts with clarity, I would also become one of those teachers I had long ago turned into gods.

The reality, of course, was nothing like the ivory towers I built in my imagination. It looked so promising at first – so many wonderful and enticing subjects I didn’t know where to begin. I wanted to embrace so many of them! It was like going to a new restaurant and discovering a menu so full of wonderful and exotic foods that selection becomes the pain of abandonment – forced to choose and thus deny all the possible worlds in which those other wondrous foods might be selected and experienced. But the bright, shiny exteriors hid empty interiors I discovered. Here were no Freud and Jung, no body language or NLP. Here was the cold, harsh light of critical analysis. Even, they managed to kill poetry.

I remember her well, the teacher who killed poetry. Hands down, she had the most phenomenal – and single-minded - brain I have ever encountered. I have been intimidated by many supremely intelligent and capable people, but she could easily swallow them all. She could glance at a previously unseen text and literally within seconds begin expounding upon it as though delivering the wisdom of decades of study. All would fall silent when this unexpectedly occurred. Then, in a scrambled rush, keyboards would begin to clatter and pens would scrape frantically as students madly tried to keep up, knowing that this was probably the greatest level of insight they would achieve from any source. All would be furious concentration and deep puzzlement as we attempted to construct understanding from her abstract theories and thoughts. Then one day a guy I didn’t know asked how it is possible to deconstruct a poem. The messages and meanings of a poem, he asserted, were far greater than any search for assumption, bias and constructed reality could reveal. I wished I knew who he was and that, when the class finished and everyone dispersed in a mad frenzy, I would be able to reach him before he disappeared in order to thank him. In that moment, he became my hero and my champion. Sadly, I never did find him.

The teacher, I remembered, sighed with the weary patience of one who is doomed ever to repeat herself to the ignorant, to those who wilfully do not understand and persist in old habits and beliefs. She asked us to look at the words he used as he described a poem and talked about its soul. His own words were revelatory. What could it mean, she asked, to talk of the “soul of a poem”? Had she encouraged us to think about what that statement might truly look like for each of us individually, and challenged us to describe, analyse and defend our positions, considering what a soul might be, what relationship it might have to life and how it might become embodied within a poem, I would probably have been her devoted slave for life. I could imagine exploring all the people, all the ideas, all the magical languages over aeons, contributing to the birth of that poem and asking the question of how a poem, born of many, could contain a single, unique soul. How did it get there? And what did it mean to have a soul? Did it change over time? Did it seem different to everyone who encountered it? And could it die? Could it be destroyed if the poem was forgotten? Or, once created, would it live forever? But she didn’t give us that challenge. Instead, as though talking to children who must learn to become adults (she would have made a good friend to Richard Dawkins!), she encouraged us to understand that such a concept as the “soul of a poem” was in fact meaningless. Without meaning. With that simple belief she consigned all of learning to the cold depths of emptiness.

The funny thing is, I became quite good at critical analysis, at least for the time I was there. I couldn’t do it now. She, and others, attempted to convince us that there was no “formula” that could guarantee success in assessment. The only answer was original thinking. If we could demonstrate original thinking, we would pass. Otherwise not. This naturally had everyone tied up in knots. Except me. To my sadness, I discovered that if I behaved as though a formula existed, then I would succeed. The more I applied my “formula” the more “original” my thinking apparently was. This was not a recipe for gladness.

And so “learning” became a pathway to dullness and conformity for me. It also became a terrible shifting blur of words, targets and assignments. Imagine being on a children’s merry-go-round, and that you have found your favourite horse to sit astride. In excitement you look forward to moving slowly up and down and round and round as you pretend that you are riding a unicorn through the heavens. Only, this merry-go-round exists within a nightmare. And when it takes off, it moves faster and faster and faster – so fast that you are convinced that you are going to fly right off and spin out into space. Everything is a nauseating blur and you can see and experience nothing except your own terror, nausea and the conviction that you won’t be able to told on until the end of the ride.

After one exam I had studied anxiously for all semester, I sighed with relief when the “pens down” command was given. I had succeeded in cramming everything that needed to be crammed in order to answer the exam. It was only as I walked away that unease hit me. What were those answers I had forced into myself? More and more anxiously I scrabbled for them and came up empty. My elation and relief turned to mild horror as I came to accept that every single fact had simply vanished. As though it had never been. Apparently, the putting down of the pen was the signal for my brain to eject and discard everything. To this day, not a word of it has returned.

I therefore find myself asking, “What is the point?” What is the point of cramming ourselves full of information dedicated to a single end-point? Perhaps others retain information gained this way. I apparently do not. And so three years of my life passed, in which I learned only to call formula “original” and to dismiss as irrelevant the question of whether a poem may be considered to have a soul. As for the rest, I was left with a stack of expensive text books that told me only that they were meaningless squiggles that I had once read but been singularly unable to absorb.

What happened to all this information? Who am I in all this? I ask the question now: what does it mean to have a soul? Is it unique and unchanging? Can it be erased? Or worse, moulded and shaped into something else entirely? What happened to all that information that failed to remain a part of me? Am I diminished for what my brain has failed to hold? It makes me think, of course, of dementia, and of who the person becomes when the brain has changed. Most particularly I think of conditions such as Alzheimer’s, where it is not simply a matter of loss or diminishment. With Alzheimer’s, and other conditions, your personality changes. My friend Lyn’s mother developed it and Lyn had to watch as she turned into a different person. From laughing and sparkling at life, she became suspicious, grasping and angry. She came to distrust everyone, even Lyn. In fact, most especially Lyn, to whom she had always previously been close. She began to accuse Lyn of all sorts of strange things no one in their right mind would ever consider accusing Lyn of.

In their “right mind”: what does that mean? How can we have a wrong one? And how can our hormones and brainwaves change who we are? In magic we learn to listen deeply to our intuition and to respond as authentically and truly as we possibly can to life. I can understand the idea of not remembering, though it scares me. I can understand losing my intellectual capability. But what is it in me that I consider most absolutely fundamental to who I am? I would have said my thoughts and feelings. I am what I think and feel. Buddhism would tell me otherwise, but I still cling to the idea that these are me. Otherwise, what would it mean to live a life of intent? But thoughts and feelings can change. Can be changed, not by experience, but by our own brains. My hormones, for example, could change the entire way I see the world and show me an entirely different reality. What becomes of “me” then, when my deepest intuitions would paint for me an entirely different picture and my most authentic self would be someone entirely different?

There’s a guy near here whom everyone avoids. He had a car accident and has never been the same since. A bit like my dream in which my friend’s husband became a substitute. Only this guy got to keep his body; it was the rest of him that changed. Now he spends nearly all his life screaming, shouting and cursing in a rage that seems never to abate. If he catches anyone he becomes violent. He used, I am told, to be a very gentle man. No longer. What is it like to live locked within so much unending rage? How utterly exhausting and despairing must it be? Or is he no longer truly there, having left behind only a deadly musical track stuck on endless loop? What of his soul? And his ability to know and believe it be there through connection with his intuition? Who is he?

In her most recent newsletter, Joanna DeVoe wrote about the beauty of Prince and David Bowie and about:

their wonderfully strange creations, which inspired so many of us to reach deep inside ourselves to create something wonderfully strange as well...

These are men who had the power to set others free, because they themselves were free…

Your Soul did not choose this body, this time & place to incarnate in order to blend in with the masses.

Your Soul is here now to act as the unique expression of Divine Energy that it is...

The operative word being "unique".

Otherwise- why incarnate at all?

Why indeed? As I think of the fragility of our identities and of the ability of our lives, and the meanings we give to them, to be so easily wiped out and replaced by something – someone – else, I find myself asking “Why?”.

Who am I?

You are this moment,

this breath.

Memory entwined with possibility;

Wisdom,

clothed in fleeting sight.

A thousand thoughts

and unseen dreams:

all you choose to see,

to feel,

and all that you do not.

The past is a shifting shadow

written in your body

and changed by Time.

It shapes your every breath,

but cannot be

the reality of now.

Every word,

every image,

fades.

You are your history

and your becoming:

all -

and none.

You are a choice:

to breathe,

to be,

to feel.

You are the world you touch.

You are this moment.