For an ‘idler at large’
has a pretty impressive work ethic, this being her second contribution here in the last few weeks. But that’s the way it goes more often than not. Much of life is paradox and it is sometimes only in not trying to be smart that you gain wisdom, just as it is only in not focusing on working that you actually get some meaningful work done. This is the lesson for all of us, and a perfect lesson it is to end the week with.Enjoy.
TJB.
P.S. This Sunday is the day when the latest Symposium is out. Don’t miss it.
When my family and I came back from living in the UK, I was proficient enough in the language to be able to sit in English class and ignore the teacher. Those two hours per week needed to be discreetly filled with something else, and so I started reading the essays from the textbook our teacher disregarded only to favour stupid exercises on grammar, verbal phrases and declinations of irregular verbs1. I read one essay about the existence of a museum in a small town somewhere in Girona (I think)2 that had a taxidermied body of a black man as one of its exhibits. If I recall correctly, this pigmy black man had arrived there in the XVIII century (please see reference 2) when black short men would be considered a freak of nature by a small town full of white illiterate, untravelled people (I will not go into how problematic this is in of itself). Fast forward to the XX century, there was a huge debate on the ethical responsibility of the museum curators to give this man a proper burial. There were two opposing fronts; on the one side, the group of people who thought this man’s body was an “antiquity” and part of a collection of rarities, and it would destroy the ensemble and the legacy of the donor of the “piece” if it were to be buried. On the other side, there were the ever-annoying people who saw the stuffed body of this man for what it was- the body of a man who had been alive. I do not remember if the essay ever explained how the man’s remains had ended up in some God-forsaken museum to entertain a bunch of clowns, but what I do remember, since it is engraved forever in my brain, is the last remark of the author:
“It’s imagination that is dying out in the world.”
What was so problematic was not only the display of a man’s body as a curiosity but the incapability of team “keepers” of looking at the face, legs, hands and fingers of a man who had been given birth to, breastfed and raised by his mother, taught to hunt by the men in his tribe, maybe fell in love and possibly had his own children. A man who, when he disappeared, left his people wondering what had happened to him, a void that could not be alleviated by a burial ritual where his people gathered to celebrate who he had been and to ensure he had all that was needed for success in the afterlife.
My children use their imagination a little bit too often, and that would be fine if they did not force C and I to use ours constantly, too. These “use your imagination” prompts usually start with questions like “What would happen if we lived in Iceland and a volcano erupted?” Sometimes, we are so tired that the answer will be, “Mum cannot possibly begin to imagine,” but most of the time, these questions end up with us doing a checklist of the kit we need to survive the event that will never happen because there are no volcanoes in the vicinity. The other night, for dinner, P and CA wanted to know if they could adopt a bat (the most hideous creature I have ever encountered), and this question came about by their sighting of a bat, which is very common in my hometown. We needed to plan where Puchi-Puchi (CA’s choice of name) would sleep; he would go to school with them and wear a vest and a pocket watch and comb his hair with a side partition. Of course, then they needed to figure out how the poor creature would make it to school, given the circadian rhythms of bats. And like that, they learn (we hope) that living in Iceland can be challenging but understand that it is also a beautiful country precisely because of the volcanoes, and they learn that bats (and other animals) are night creatures that hunt and need us to respect their needs and environment. This all might sound like we are fantastic parents, but we are not; I swear. We shout, and we lose our patience as much as the next set of parents (sometimes, in quiet Sweden, it feels like more than the next set of parents), but imagination is the source of empathy, and we like them to have second helpings of the first to playfully develop the second. The world seems to have a chronic shortage of empathy.
For my readings on idleness, I picked up “In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays” by Bertrand Russell. One of the essays is entitled “‘Useless’ Knowledge”, which commends the benefits of knowledge that has no practical application, no purpose other than to be enjoyed. I don’t think Bertrand Russell meant this knowledge as an accumulation of facts in our brains to vomit on occasion on innocent bystanders who just wanted to enjoy a beer on a terrace and made an inaccurate random comment about man’s landing on the moon, only to be utterly corrected with a flood of facts. I understand that he meant it like the “useless” knowledge that one acquires in the quiet of lazy afternoons when drinking the aforementioned beer and wonders when mankind stumbled upon the fact that fermented oats tasted rather good and then makes a mental note to go to the library and check out a book on beer and while leisurely reading this books, learns the origins of the name “beer”, and “cerveza” and why the words are so different, maybe one even starts brewing their own, the sky’s the limit. According to Russell, this is the type of knowledge that will allow one to enjoy the drink even more3 .
I agree; we should bring “useless” knowledge back. Not the quick Wikipedia search type of “knowledge” that kills casual conversation with fast facts one reads in diagonal, but the unshowy type that spends time with a random book that tells you about the origins of words like tomato4, the social make-up of ant nests, and how the pygmies live and bury their dead, just in case, should we stumble upon the body of one in display in a museum, we will know how to honour their life and give them a proper send-off because we can imagine how they would like to have it.
Yours in divine (im)perfection,
Ana (idler at large)
We lived in the UK from 9 to 11 and again when I was 16. This story happened when I sat in through English class at 17 years old. The way they taught English in Spanish schools in the 90s was deplorable.
I have not googled the story to get it accurate since I prefer how it stayed in my memory.
He made the case for “apricots and peaches,” but what can I say? When thinking of an example for this letter, beer came to mind, maybe because I am enjoying it this summer of idleness, even if I have no clue what the origins of this drink are.
One of my favourite words- from the Nahuatl word tomatl meaning “swelling fruit.” Never a word expressed so well its meaning. Nahuatl is the language spoken by Nahuas, one of the Indigenous people of Mexico.
Nice!!! Loved it, for an avid excavenger of facts!!! 😃😃
A really terrific read! Thank you.