Notes from a small mind

This blog is a bit of a mess, but it's alreadly full of pretty interesting stuff. Radhika's been sticking to the poetry so far (I like emphasising her writing, by adding an article before poetry. Not any poetry. Hers is the poetry), and leaving the dirty work to me. Each person in his/her place...

I've taken to reading Anita Desai, after picking up a wrinkly old copy of a novel in the English department. Her prose is so simple and restrained, but yet loaded with symbolism and charged with a narrative energy. A sort of anger boiling beneath a froth of pleasant prose.

The politics poem brought home how cynical I am about politics lately. I have reached a stage where I don't even really read the news much anymore. It takes a huge effort for me to pick up a paper, when I used to do it most days last year. I guess it's so easy to tower yourself away in a school like mine, and have nothing to do with the dirty world of politics. A prison of ivory.

I have been going for walks by the sea as much as possible. Watching the lapping of miniature waves against mossy rocks, and trying to seize what happens when the sun reflects off moving water. I don't believe for a minute that we would be able to build a model of light refraction off waves, using our modern understanding of physics. Not in the sort of detail that you see when you watch the sea. There are far too many variables to be able to model it with any decent accuracy.

Not that this is a big deal for most people, but I think it says a lot about how limited our scientific capabilities are. If we are still unable to sound out the complexities of a neural network, then we are still at a point where the most simple operation of a brain is incomprehensible to us. And brains are things we have been trying to understand for a long time; putting much more effort into investigating them than we have into light refraction off the waves of the sea, for instance.

But then which is more important? OK, we need information on artificial intelligence more than we do knowledge about how pretty the scenery is in Duino's port. But then again, isn't aesthetics a core part of physics? Weren't the best physicists concerned with how harmonious and elegant the world is as it unfolds before them? I think that a real scientist needs to be an aesthete.

I am neither, of course. Because I am a mere English teacher, it is the symbolism of waves which interests me more than their reality. Seeing the individuality of each wave as it travels, both unified with the other waves and separated from them. Waves are a fabulous way of understanding people. If we are seas, then each of our separate identities is a wave. Our selves move, shift, break, and reappear elsewhere as we renew and redefine who we are. Like in Woolf's novel, I think it's naive to assume we are always one identity. We actually become mentally unbalanced when we limit ourselves that way. Schizophrenia, multiple personalities are integral to each one of us. I behave differently as a brother than I do as a teacher, and so every day a wave breaks and another is created.

As I meander my way down to the port each day, I wonder where I could sail to if I had a boat. I wonder how long I could survive if I hopped on one of the ones marooned at the dock, and made my way towards Croatia. Perhaps I'd find something mind altering on the way.

You see, Radhika? It's this sort of time-wasting rubbish you end up with when you study literature. Like the mothers in your poem would say, stay with the practical stuff. Study law or medicine and do something useful for the world. For God's sake at least make a little money, rather than sitting in front of a computer on your Friday nights rambling rubbish about light, waves and boats, na?

D