Friday, March 26, 2010
The Medium is the Massage
A while back now I was in Tashkent in Uzbekistan and developed a bad back. Someone arranged for a physiotherapeutic massage. I turned up at what seemed to be a night club in the basement of a high rise block of unsympathetic concrete. The tale could be a long one. Suffice it to say that the masseuse was a lithe woman, dressed only in a white towelling dressing gown. She spoke no English and I no useful language. The effort to beat, pummel, knuckle, twist, scrunch and slap my back utterly exhausted her. At the end she collapsed into a chair, her gown fell open, revealing her nakedness and in this intimate and frank posture, she had a cigarette. I suspect that if the course of events had been what she had expected, she would have been less tired!
This week I visited a health spa in Ghana, near Accra, run by a doctor and with a little flock of engaging Ghanaian masseuses. I had a two hour session of oil massage. My masseuse, Celestine, worked very hard for the entire period. She did not want conversation and was very careful about unwarranted physical contact, other than what her fingers and palms intended. It was almost pitch black. Music played at a level below really hearing. Two hours went by and all but the obviously taboo areas were kneaded and cajoled into soft rubber. It struck me how extraordinary such activity is. The meeting of strangers who are in constant physical contact but with their own thoughts and mental isolation. What did she discover about me in that long silence? Did my muscle and skin speak? What did she learn from these daily encounters with passing human trade? What fulfilment was there for her in this work?
I never had the opportunity to ask her. She blanketed me at the end and told me to wait five minutes before getting dressed. Like an oil-slicked creature from a deep sea, I emerged into the light, no wiser about Celestine and only a little wiser about myself. My body had been like Braille but I had no idea how literate its reader had been.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Brain damage is good for you...
Of course, when I was a boy there was no such thing as sats – standardised tests of children at ceratin stages of their school careers. But there was the eleven plus examination which weeded out snotty grammar school children from grubby secondary modern children. When they dropped this divisive and discriminatory examination in all but a few independent schools it was with great relief to all parents except those who were snotty in all regards and felt it was their privilege. The pressure was fearsome. I was lent a gold Parker pen by my father, as if this magic implement would turn an ugly duckling of an exam paper into a swan. The nib was scratchy and I was impeded by its progress across the paper but I didn’t dare tell him afterwards.
One of the post-war myths among those of us who were trying to transcend our inauspicious beginnings and go to grammar school, was that a girl in Newcastle had had her head run over by a bus , following which she became a genius. I am not sure how many of my peers considered this unique therapy to please their despairing parents but I am reminded of it as I see on Sky News that a man who had a cerebral haemorrhage has been changed into a poet and a painter as a consequence of the blood letting. It seems as though there are short cuts to better brain output, then. Perhaps we could adopt the approach announced today in skin cancer treatment. Eighty per cent guarantee of a cure. A cream is put over the tumorous growth and then a sticking plaster to cover it. The cancerous cells gobble up the cream. Three hours later a charge is released which turns the cream into a potent killer and the tumour dies, leaving the healthy cells to grow again. No scarring.
We should do the same with our kids. Instead of sats, that long term inhibitor of flowering creativity and self-assurance, we should put cream on their skulls, wait three hours and then charge it up. All the dumb cells would die, leaving the healthy ones to propagate. A bit like the old vinegar and brown paper cure for Jack in the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill.
The trouble is that everyone would then have kids bordering on genius and those that have always relished their children’s dominance in exams and the wold of work, afterwards, would bring in a law to protect their interests. You can’t win in class warfare if you belong to the underclasses.
Of course, when I was a boy there was no such thing as sats – standardised tests of children at ceratin stages of their school careers. But there was the eleven plus examination which weeded out snotty grammar school children from grubby secondary modern children. When they dropped this divisive and discriminatory examination in all but a few independent schools it was with great relief to all parents except those who were snotty in all regards and felt it was their privilege. The pressure was fearsome. I was lent a gold Parker pen by my father, as if this magic implement would turn an ugly duckling of an exam paper into a swan. The nib was scratchy and I was impeded by its progress across the paper but I didn’t dare tell him afterwards.
One of the post-war myths among those of us who were trying to transcend our inauspicious beginnings and go to grammar school, was that a girl in Newcastle had had her head run over by a bus , following which she became a genius. I am not sure how many of my peers considered this unique therapy to please their despairing parents but I am reminded of it as I see on Sky News that a man who had a cerebral haemorrhage has been changed into a poet and a painter as a consequence of the blood letting. It seems as though there are short cuts to better brain output, then. Perhaps we could adopt the approach announced today in skin cancer treatment. Eighty per cent guarantee of a cure. A cream is put over the tumorous growth and then a sticking plaster to cover it. The cancerous cells gobble up the cream. Three hours later a charge is released which turns the cream into a potent killer and the tumour dies, leaving the healthy cells to grow again. No scarring.
We should do the same with our kids. Instead of sats, that long term inhibitor of flowering creativity and self-assurance, we should put cream on their skulls, wait three hours and then charge it up. All the dumb cells would die, leaving the healthy ones to propagate. A bit like the old vinegar and brown paper cure for Jack in the nursery rhyme, Jack and Jill.
The trouble is that everyone would then have kids bordering on genius and those that have always relished their children’s dominance in exams and the wold of work, afterwards, would bring in a law to protect their interests. You can’t win in class warfare if you belong to the underclasses.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Under the skin of Geert Wilders
Being a beatnik; donkey jacketed, side-burned, quiffed, d.a.’d, Aldermaston-marching late teenager in the early sixties, I had the utmost respect for Michael Foot and am sorry he has passed to that other place where idealism conquers cynicism and humility snuffs out ambition. I hope his soap box is a golden wing’d chariot so he can declaim forever from a moral height upon democratic principles. More or less at the time of his death there arrives in the UK a Dutch politician from the far right called Geert Wilders with a short film about Islam. He too declaims about democracy but his freedom is about keeping Holland for the Dutch and excluding all others. In those days when I found Foot’s rhetoric so persuasive, I also found the Dutch tolerance of youth culture in all its forms, seductive. Today (though I’d come across it before) the Lemba tribes of Zimbabwe have been shown (genetically and in many aspects of their current social/religious behaviour) to be a lost tribe of Israel dating back 2,500 years. If you take a swab to your inner cheek and send off the resulting evidence to a genes web site you will inevitably have African lineage. It’s true of us all.
Geneticists say we probably all descend from the same tribe in East Africa, long before Moses. The Lembas were just coming home. Wilders’ antecedents (the same folks that became the Lembas) instead settled up north and gradually whitened their skins under pallid suns. So it was with the Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists and all other god fearing folks in all their skin colours and eventual nationalities. They prospered in their different ways and slowly forgot their roots.
Now, tens of thousands of years later, they pretend to themselves that they are different. They develop hatreds. They develop pretentious self-esteem. What’s to be done?
Being a beatnik; donkey jacketed, side-burned, quiffed, d.a.’d, Aldermaston-marching late teenager in the early sixties, I had the utmost respect for Michael Foot and am sorry he has passed to that other place where idealism conquers cynicism and humility snuffs out ambition. I hope his soap box is a golden wing’d chariot so he can declaim forever from a moral height upon democratic principles. More or less at the time of his death there arrives in the UK a Dutch politician from the far right called Geert Wilders with a short film about Islam. He too declaims about democracy but his freedom is about keeping Holland for the Dutch and excluding all others. In those days when I found Foot’s rhetoric so persuasive, I also found the Dutch tolerance of youth culture in all its forms, seductive. Today (though I’d come across it before) the Lemba tribes of Zimbabwe have been shown (genetically and in many aspects of their current social/religious behaviour) to be a lost tribe of Israel dating back 2,500 years. If you take a swab to your inner cheek and send off the resulting evidence to a genes web site you will inevitably have African lineage. It’s true of us all.
Geneticists say we probably all descend from the same tribe in East Africa, long before Moses. The Lembas were just coming home. Wilders’ antecedents (the same folks that became the Lembas) instead settled up north and gradually whitened their skins under pallid suns. So it was with the Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists and all other god fearing folks in all their skin colours and eventual nationalities. They prospered in their different ways and slowly forgot their roots.
Now, tens of thousands of years later, they pretend to themselves that they are different. They develop hatreds. They develop pretentious self-esteem. What’s to be done?
Labels: Geert Wilfder. Rce. Lembas.