Christmas again? Yay!

This is now the second Christmas I have written about since I started this blog. It's getting a little samey, as I read back to the previous posts, but I guess anybody's writing does.

I feel better about Christmas this year than I did last year, but I really couldn't deal with the idea that there is so much pressure at this time of year to engage with family in ways I usually don't. I had to take some very decisions because of a holiday which is supposed to bring joy, a sense of community. At the same time, I have now understood a lot about them since.

Christmas a time when most Christian westerners agree to disagree on pretty much everything for at least a week, offer each other gifts they can't afford and claim not to want any themselves, and overindulge in food and drink. The good side of this is of course that, in a good setting, it can be fun and can strengthen ties with the family. Even though I really struggle to listen to Uncle Bob's ranting about foreigners and unemployment, I drink a glass of wine with him, and team up with him in a silly board game. After all, it's not because he's a bigot that I can't sit and enjoy a bit of time with him. In reality, I don't have an uncle Bob; this is all hypothetical. But if I did, that's how I'd try to deal.

But my own decisions aren't really tough compared to a lot of people I've discussed this with. A friend of mine who moved away from her family in the USA finds Christmas particularly stressful because of this. She disagrees very deeply with her family's beliefs and often extreme political views which they inevitably voice at the dinner table. She is forced to either sit tight and put up with the most offensive comments and views, which go against everything she represents and believes in, or else she is the party pooper. The troublemaker who spoils everyone's Christmas once again by riling up Uncle Bob with her artsy-fartsy grad school smart-ass comments. What to do? Put up and shut up? Be the black sheep and ruin everyone's good time?

The sense of community Christmas builds is, to my mind, pretty fragile. It's not like eid or ramadan for Muslims. They will get together and fast as a way of reminding themselves what it is like to be deprived, to give food and wealth communally, and stick together through a hardship. This makes a lot more sense than splurging over each other, in my view. Westerners use the birth of a prophet as an occasion to consume even more recklessly than usual. A happy Mastercard holiday for all.

I'm about to see what it is like being a 'visitor' for Christmas, for the first time, in a couple of weeks. I will be travelling off to Canada, and travelling across the border to my aunt's place in Buffalo, New York State. It's going to be very interesting to be the outsider, who is a member of the family, but yet doesn't know anything about the culture or the people themselves. I know my aunt to see, but hardly spent more than a conversation at a wedding party in her presence. I haven't seen my cousins, Liam and Niamh, since I was about 14. I have no idea who they are, what they are like, or if I will have anything in common with them. Stragest of all, they are the same age as the kids I teach, and I really don't know how living with kids of that age will fare with me, with all my teacher instincts which kick in with adolescents. Will I be a teacher around them? Will I fit in like a ferret up a cosy sleeve or stick out like a sore, puss-filled thumb?

Tune in next month to find out...

coaching

Jesus, it's been ages since I last blogged. I'm getting very lazy with this thing.

The most recent spur in my lazy side, prompting me to revive this dying blog, is coaching basketball. I've been asked to take over the Under-18 boys' team for my school, and have had a pretty hard time of it. The team is pretty disheartened from an unreliable coach who missed many a training and match. So it's pretty hard getting it going again. I'm used to boys flocking in to play basketball, not having to be begged to join the team, like in this school.

At the same time, it's been enriching. I spend most of last Sunday trying to patch together enough players to actually play our scheduled game, but it was really worth it. The boys fought like wildcats, and really played to win, despite being in serious need of training, and having no team plan. They got hammered, but at least it went ahead, which I don't think it would, without my involvement.

The players are hanging onto their team, despite the disillusionment. For kids of their age, that is really impressive. I know at least that I will move on from this school having offered some stability and reliability to a handful of boys from this school, who need it.

History repeats

The pictures here were taken two weeks ago, on the Parvis de Notre Dame. The fire jugglers were part of a city-wide festival called the Nuit Blanche, which is a sponsored night of arts events across the city. All sorts of quirky theatre, dance, music, film and food-tasting events happened all over Paris. Unfortunately I had to get a night train to go home and couldn't stay to see most of it.

The reason I wanted to write about these fire jugglers is because it's a tradition which has gone on in the same place for hundreds of years. At least back into medieval times. The opening chapters of Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo tell of the gypsies, who were egyptian immigrants, scorned with the same right-wing conservatism which greets the 'arabs' in France today, gathering in front of the cathedral to perform shows. They would have performing animals, dances, beggars performing 'freak show' acts, and of course the famous carnivals, in front of this church. But rather than being some sort of holier-than-thou tourist attraction, Notre Dame was a refuge for the lowest of the low. Society's underdogs who had nowhere else to go, who were automatically presumed to be criminals - and mostly were - but who were always welcome in this stony, draughty building. They could even take refuge from the king's army there, as Esmeralda does in Hugo's novel.

Standing on this square and watching these guys with punk haircuts and combat trousers breathe fire and juggle for the crowds somehow brought out how weird it is that human beings can be doing the same thing for over 900 years - gathering in front of a cathedral and entertaining each other with fire tricks - without this ever becoming institutionalised. Unlike religious tradition or readings of canonical literature, there is no aura of veneration, no artificial sense that these lowlifes are doing something particularly special or even traditional, as they entertain the crowds. It's a real tradition.

I guess it's closer to what Nietszche called 'Dyonysian art'. The art which consists of celebrating life, sexuality and collective madness, rather than venerating one's masters. The art which is found at the bottom of a glass of beer rather than collecting dust in a museum. If only reading a blog came anything close to a 'dyonysian' artistic experience...

Dregs

I am reading 'Chronicle of a Death Foretold' by Marquez, in my English class. This novella tells the story of the death of a character, Santiago Nasar, as a revenge for the deflowering of a promised bride. It is never clear, although the answer is suggested, whether Santiago is guilty of his crime. But the collective guilt borne by the community which puts him to death in their need for a scapegoat, shows in their obsession with superstition and omens.

I find myself looking out for the signs of my own flaws and faults, these days. The omens which should have been clearer, showing how I was going to hurt someone close to me. Hindsight is always 20/20, but the fact remains that there are signs if I am willing to see them. The person I hurt most recently gave many signs that they would be hurt by my actions and I chose to ignore them. Isn't it true that, as Oscar Wilde says, 'each man kills the thing he loves'?

Although we know that some superstitions are just examples of bad knowledge (that the world is flat and we'll fall off it if we stray to far...), the idea of recognizing signs of fate or the future doesn't strike me as blind superstition. I think there's a thread in my own life, and a meaning to a lot of what happens. The infinite possibilities which fracture at every moment in time don't explain some of the patterns I've seen in my own life.

Perhaps getting good at reading the 'signs' of what will happen in the future is just a form of sincerity. When you know yourself and your flaws well enough, you can predict the mistakes you're likely to make. A fantastic singer I've been listening to recently puts it well:

Je me sens coupable parce que j'ai l'habitude
C'est la seule chose que je sais fare
Avec une certaine certitude.

Go figure.

Shaking the mortal coil

I've been prompted to write a trite entry today after watching an episode of season 5 of 'Six Feet Under' where Nate finally kicks the bucket. The one series made for television which is actually worth forking out any stupid amount of money to watch. If for nothing else than it does a decent job of showing how western society deals, or doesn't deal, with death.

I took this picture in a graveyard just above where I live. There's a forest round the corner from my flat which climbs up onto the hill where my school is, and I've gotten to know it pretty well from sundry hikes to school on weekends and holiday mornings, when I actually bother to take the time to walk there.

This graveyard is pretty impressive. Germanic as it may be - overplanned and organised literally down to the bone - it's as good a place as you can imagine to come and honour the dead. Most days when it's not raining - that's more than you'd think in this city - the sky is clear and the light hits the place really nicely through the trees. It's a good a place for photography as you can imagine.

I want to capture what this particular tombstone represents. It's dedicated to a kid who barely saw the face of the planet. Who barely made it past the womb, and then was buried by her parents. The decoration is colourful and bright, but it doesn't seem to me like the relatives are pretending that she's still alive or just compensating for the unbearable idea of losing your kid so early in their life. Again, cheesy as it may be, I think they're thanking their child for having made it into their lives.

It's pretty hard to keep the idea that we're all going to die, and it could happen to any of us at any time, in mind. How can we bear to live in complete knowledge of the contingency of our life? You can't keep reminding yourself of the inevitability and possibility of death at every moment. Going to a friend's birthday party, and saying to yourself 'well perhaps I should bring 100 euros to ensure a decent burial in case the peanut butter disagrees with me', would be ludicrous. Paranoid, even. But it remains a possibility.

Somehow death has to be a part of what we are, and we don't understand it. We understand it better than most animals do; although many animals have some system of graveyards, some even mourn. Worse still to me is the fact that life itself is nigh on impossible. What are the chances of the world evolving into the delicate balance of oxygen and carbon forms as it did, to be able to host the sorts of species we've got? What are the odds of being exactly the right distance from the sun to be able to support plants germinating, and that ecosystems can keep evolving through this fragile state of affairs to allow a species to grow millions of years out of plankton, to eventually be able to write epic poetry and develop atomic energy which can both destroy the planet umpteen times over, but can also give us more resources than we know what to do with?

Wars have been fought throughout the history of mankind, and many at a scale hard to fathom. Look at a map of the Middle East 2,000 years ago and wars were being fought by the world's strongest empires in almost exactly the same areas. The Tigris and the Euphrates washed away enough corpses and bloodshed to paint the Red Sea... red. But somehow we haven't yet completely done away with the planet or our own species. In fact, both are pretty healthy. Some disturbances in the planet due to our stupid use of its resources could be corrected with a few more generations of tsunamis, earthquakes and melting icecaps. The earth is doing a decent job of curbing our overgrown species, and looks like it will continue to do so.

The possibility of life is bigger than my puny head can fathom. Trying to explain how we can actually live is much harder than accounting for the fact we die. Although there is no biological need for death, and it's less easy to explain than it might think. Some single-cell life forms simply don't die.

A fantastic book on the philosophy of science, called the Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch explains the near-inevitable thesis that our universe is inhabited by an infinity of other universes, each accounting for the choices, probabilities and contingencies of each event that happens in ours. In another universe, I just misspelled the word 'universe', but everything else was the same, ad infinitum. How stupidly complex is that?

How frustratingly, mind-blowingly complex the statement: this universe exists. And yet it does. And so do I. And in another universe, this kid does too.

Geneve

Big shot money machine sunset seagulls and swans, bridges, bars, polo shirts and mountain air, lake, lapping, along the shore, rollerblades and Nike shorts. Pizza pasta expensive beer, electric busses and high-speed trams.

Everything works. Water shoots up and 'aaahs' complete the satiated meals of healthy well-fed Genevois, as they wave credit cards to waiters.

Dégobillage linguistique

trypique dythirambique je tripe
pour ecrire un poeme qui rime
et qui repond aux conventions, nom d'une pipe,
pour atteindre les sommets du sublime

entretemps je me contente d'une ballade lyrique en brousse
je pousse mon bic sur une page a traits. quand je tousse
l'encre se defait. tache amassée mon stylo a trois francs cinquante
n'est pas délirant, avec si peu d'attentes mon encre mousse.