Yesterday's Men

Historians are the vanguard of the past. They serve as the shockwave front as the future tries to understand its past; they have auxiliaries such as chroniclers and journalists, but their task is the great strategic one.

Historians are Yesterday's Men, those who serve the ever increasing and diminishing vision and tapestry of the past. And slowly, slowly, I am becoming one of them, one with the past, one with a past.

I am halfway to the enormous silence, at the very least. Even if I enter it tomorrow, yesterday I would have thought it a longer way away. And so I sit, contemplating the accumulation of history faster than any grass can grow.

Touchies

It wasn't until I was about two years out of the classroom that it struck me. I had taken for granted, whether true or not, the idea that I was significant in some way to the hundreds of students I knew. No doubt, at some low level of significance, this was true.

But what hit me harder was that for a very short while, to be honest, I felt sad that I no longer meant anything to so many people. Fortunately, some old boys turned up and disabused me of that thought. They were quite clear I had been of significance to them — but also that now I was just a slightly odd friend for whom they had some residual respect a bit above the norm.

You have to let it go. I had come to secretly, unconsciously believe that I was of greater import than I really was. What was really important was my work, my service, my calling. In the dark days, I had sometimes forgotten that.

It reminds me of the etymology of the word 'arrogance'. This word comes from the Latin verb rogare — 'to stretch out (one's hand in demand)'. 'Arrogance' is the attitude of assuming that anything you want is there to be taken when you stretch your hand out for it. Mea culpa. Guilty, guilty.

Prosaic

It may not be poetry, but it is engraved beautifully on a jade tablet. Everything here is green; I squat on a mossy rock, next to a cool green brook. In this forest are fish, and deer, and foxes, but most of all, green.

I have chosen not to write poetry, but prose. Look at the mineral complexity, the crystal clarity of the stone! Look at how it suppresses reflection but glows in the light! It is like water locked in time, but not frozen.

Brightness and levity, held down by gravity. Why do we not see such things when they are passing by? Are we so old now?

New Year

It is a new year, and today's date is 1/1/11 — the first day of the first month of the first year of the new decade of the new millennium. Looking back, 2010 was an outstanding year for adventure, peril, and poetic justice.

A happy new year of things justly done
Of bad things ended and good things begun
So thanks be to God, both Father and Son
And to the Spirit, all three into one!

That is my prayer in thanksgiving for the year just past and the year that has just come. I feel, more so than usual, like a feather of ice in the wind, a grain of sand on the shore, dust in the glorious spectacle of the universe. Praise be to God.

Familiar

I'm looking back at the day just past and thinking what a fine thing it is to have a family that is reasonably familiar and familial. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing that happened today, which made it a good day.

I was doing my weekly run to Serene and then I thought to call my father up. "Hoy dad, where are you?"

Grouchy perturbation. "Waiting for your mother, she's late, I don't know where she is. She's supposed to be here!"

You don't expect that sort of reply. So I went, "Errm, where exactly are you?"

"Buying lunch! And I've bought the lunch and I'm waiting for here because she went shopping! If she gets here, we'll be home in about ten minutes. Where are you?"

Well, at least I knew he was about ten minutes from home. Since he's a fast driver, that makes it a fairly large radius though. I made a fateful decision. "I'll be there at 1 pm, see you!" And I hung up.

I grabbed some food of my own and drove over. Yes, they were late. But that was compensated for by the chance to help my mother stash the groceries away, sit down over a meal, chat a bit, and in general do the sort of thing I haven't done for years — have lunch with my parents at home, instead of some restaurant somewhere; lunch instead of dinner, in a house that used to be my home.

Soon

Soon it will be the anniversary of my leave-taking. I never thought I would leave the College of Wyverns; after all, my line stretches back to the beginning of the College, and my ancestors and family are steeped in its heritage.

When I left, I suppose I was a little unhappy. That unhappiness I think could not have lasted more than 60 days; it could possibly have lasted for fewer than 60 hours. Unhappiness is the state of being struck by misfortune, as the Anglo-Saxons in days of yore might have said. And within a very short while, I did not think it was misfortune.

From the well-wishes of the many well-wishers, I realised I needed no wishing-well to be fortunate. I had been slowly stifled, suffocated in the steeping and odorous toxic venom of the place for too long, not realising. There were many sign that the old goodness was seeping out and the foul humours soaking in. There was too much shopping, too much gossip, too much stuff irrelevant to the life of education.

And so a year has passed. In that one year, I wrote 45000 words of prose; I prepared four papers and read ten times that number. I collected certificates, testimonials; I stretched, and in some places broke, the narrow confines of my world.

I have learnt much and been humbled much and felt the worth of things that were once hidden from me. I see that the ideals of the Wyvern Shield live on, though darkness and foulness and madness hunt almost unchecked.

There is light in every corner, sometimes hidden, sometimes in unexpected places. For there are wyverns still. On the Road of the Dogs, on the Eastern Approaches, over the Sea and in the Village, you will find them. Not all are as they were or as we were, but they are there. There may yet be hope.

But above all, there is nothing higher than the Highest. There is nothing greater than to live the life of service and to walk away from Egypt, from the cities of the plain, from Babylon — and yet into Nineveh, and into the service of the heathen, and the pagan, and the wielders of Mammon.

I am sorry for the comrades who took grievous wounds for what was good and right. I am glad that they live still, that many have found places of honour and a second life. It has not all been easy and noble; I have learnt that I too can succumb to vindictiveness and schadenfreude.

It is all adventure, and growth, and in the end, to be counted all as joy. We give thanks in all circumstances, and for all things. And we forgive others not because we are higher than they and can afford to condescend, or because we are lower and are afraid of consequence, but because we too have been forgiven.

I never thought I would have left the College of Wyverns. But there wasn't much of it to leave; only some newish buildings, few friends from the old good days, a tyranny of pale injustice, and oppression of belief. If the young wyverns are to fly, someone should tell them what the past was like, what the present can be made to yield, and what best is yet to be.

Looking Back

If you look back, it is never a good thing; Orpheus did it, unable any longer to withstand the gloom of the underworld on his own, and he lost his wife Eurydice forever. Lot's wife, whose name we do not know, turned back to look upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and was turned into a pillar of salt. And who knows what happens to pillars of salt who turn back? Perhaps they become sea water, and their identity is lost forever.

Time Passing

I remember being 18 years old and writing this line in a poem: "Time, pass us by; pick on some other pair of lovers." Well, the pairs have changed a lot, time has changed a lot, and even the word 'pick' has got several meanings.

Time has passed, and with it, so has the entire range of perspectives which one had as an 18-year-old. Everything seems overwhelmingly less serious or more serious; little has remained untouched. Time itself, and the perception of it, seems to have come unglued.

And so it goes, and so it goes.

The Black Swan

Those of you who have heard me speak before might remember the mentions of black swans, chaos and catastrophe theory. This all came back to me as I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It is an interesting book; it is, as far as I know, pretty ground-breaking in exposing the facts people don't often think about.

Taleb destroys, with great finesse and remorseless logic, the idea that the normal distribution is a useful predictor for the big movements in history and in life. In fact, statistical arguments depending on the normal distribution and its proxies seem to end up giving us more-of-the-same, mediocre possibilities. History may have these as her staple diet, but the muscles and bones of history require sterner stuff.

But this is not all of his argument. He goes after Platonicism and other models that seek to shoehorn data into ideal models. He comes out in favour of the legitimate imagination and the knowledge of unknowledge, this last typified by Umberto Eco's antilibrary. An antilibrary, as he deftly explains, is that portion of a person's library which has not been read and yet is an integral part of that library; it is thus the mobile resource on the intellectual battlefield. People who don't read are one thing; people who have nothing they want to read are quite another.

The problem is that the world tends to seek to find consoling and conforming narratives to explain chaos, catastrophe and crisis. St Paul's epistle to the Romans mentions as much: be not conformed to the world. I remember very distinctly my meditations on this the day before my career was elevated to a different plane. I only read Taleb's book yesterday. To my surprise, I found myself feeling validated.

I do believe firmly that vision must be broad and imaginative. I also believe firmly that contrasting and outlying views must be fully examined before the decision is taken to reject them. There is, as many have said before, a bias against those who solve problems that haven't occurred yet, or who invent problems which might never happen. This bias favours those who solve problems that have come to be; the problem about such problems is that once they have already arisen, they are much more expensive to deal with than when they were merely imaginative possibilities.

That is why we must be transformed by the renewal of our mind. That is why we must see with 'blinding sight', with inspiration and not with the conventional wisdom. That is why we must not conform to the normal distribution of the world. We are all, in potential, far better than that; it is mediocrity that creates the curve and treats the outliers and possibilities of excellence as fantastic and irresponsible. On the contrary, it is the mediocre mind which is being irresponsible, which holds back the flowering and blasts the stalk before a bloom unfolds. How sad it is, to see the garden burn.

Silvery

I woke up this morning feeling a little cold, a little tired. It's part of the new physical development. I'm not a young person anymore, and walking ten kilometres a day is probably doing me some harm as well as good. Then again, there are all those people who are older than I am who swear by it.

The weather is getting to me too. I'm one of those 'sit around in the afternoon and watch the world go by' types. But it has been raining pretty heavily, mostly in the afternoon. Watching the world go by appears more to be a matter of watching it get flushed away at such times.

That's not to say that life is particularly bad. It is good. I have had time to reflect and to gather my thoughts in many ways, sometimes in little cardboard boxes, sometimes in little pieces like this one. Back in January, I already knew I'd have to do all this. The wolves always know, as do the ravens, when the time is right for pickings.

And I shall be meeting up with old friends today. I've just realised again that it's been 25 years since I took my O-level exams. It's yesterday once more.

Erdgeist

English, altogether Germanic in its bones and sinews, took on infusions of its father-tongue in further installments. With the psychopomps and psychogogues of the Viennese age, for example, the Anglo-Saxon bastard child adopted (co-opted?) words like schadenfreude and angst, along with secondhand Latin imports like anima and superego. Words like zeitgeist and the rarer zeitnot and zugzwang (and zusammen, for the organische chemists) duly joined the throng. But the not-so-surprising fact is that much of the German remains understandable, and some of it is pretty universal.

Take for example the erdgeist of Paracelsus (he who once said, "All substances are poisons.") Like all the other geists, the erdgeist is a spirit (cf. poltergeist). Whereas the zeitgeist is the prevalent spirit of the time in which it manifests, the erdgeist is the dominant spirit of the place which it represents.

All that went through my mind as I was listening to this song. It's an old song by Jefferson Starship, and it's about Los Angeles in the early 1970s. The lyrics are inspired, the music pounds a hole in your head, and you are left wondering (unless you do a bit of research) why Marconi plays the mamba.

And there are many other examples of the kind of music which summons more of the erdgeist than the zeitgeist. One of my particular favourites is Billy Joel's New York State of Mind, a moving tribute to a man's hometown (and what a hometown it is!) And there was this very old song, which unaccountably brought a tear to my eyes. Liverpool fans will recognize the group – after all, they came up with You'll Never Walk Alone.

That's when I realised: here where I am, there is no real erdgeist. We are culturally adrift, in an empty space. And the moment we sense an evolving erdgeist, we make it silly and commercial, trendy, nifty, flashy – all the things that kill the ephemeral realities of the hidden world.

Alternating Current

When I was much much younger, I remember asking where my cousin had gone. I received the somewhat peculiar answer, from my aunt, "Probably with one of the blackcurrants."

I like fruit (one of my nicknames in university was 'Tasmanian fruit-bat'), and I am insatiably curious. So I asked, "What do you mean?"

My aunt, honours graduate in Literature etc etc, replied, "Well, they're black, and they're current. She's out with one of them."

It took a few minutes to realise (I was really young then!) that the 'blackcurrant' was really a date. At that time, I suppose I wouldn't have given a fig.

=====

But all that's irrelevant to the matter of today. I was feeling oddly disconcerted and ill at ease as I sauntered (with my old pre-broken-toe saunter) down the familiar corridors on the fifth level (which housed the First for two years). Then I saw a colleague (he's been with the school pretty long, so let's call him BC) leaning over the balcony railings. It's not a thing he does much, so I wished him a happy new year and asked him how he was.

He replied, "It's terrible. It's like a parallel universe. The buildings are all the same, the classrooms, the corridors, but the people are, are, are... dif-fer-ennnnnt." He sounded almost plaintive, and although that is not uncommon with him, it was genuine this time. And at that moment, I sympathized utterly.

You see, he was absolutely right. He had placed his finger on the very thing that was disconcerting me. After two years of seeing the same faces along those corridors and in those classrooms, I was walking the old pathways and not seeing any of those faces at all. We were both (as were others of our company) walking around in psychotraumatic shock. He was being uncharacteristically reflective; I was being uncharacteristically purposeless.

It will pass. But the sense of being transported into an alternate timeline or a different dimension will persist for a while. The ghostly memories still hold fast, and the wraiths of two (or four, or six) excellent years of common enterprise are not so easily banished. The current reality has not quite established itself as a powerful enough rival.

Imprints In The Sand

You teach people, the same people for two, three, four years. You would like to think something of you (hopefully something good) stays with them. It is like mana, the excrescence of numinosity.

But one day, they're gone. The link is gone, and if not gone, is stretched by trail and contrail, or trial or mistrial, to a tenuous something that isn't even quite there. With time, the associated ideas and memories will fade. And the essence of you will be lost; after all, they owe you nothing, and you have paid your debt.

Sometimes, though, the magic may return. The mana reforms, is magnified or transformed oddly. The old wolf, decrepit but dangerous in his lair, is remembered; the egg of the dead phoenix is reborn. This is how a sword is forged: tenuous strands of metal are hammered, rebonded, recrystallized, broken and remade.

And although the steps you walked those months and years ago are washed clean by the salt water on the sea strand, the fact that you once made them is not lost. It has a mana of its own. Hence, the Eternal Hoodlums. Hence, the many faces on the Book of Faces.

You sit on the stony margin of the beach and watch the footprints wash away. There is regret, perhaps, but that too washes away. And the new years begin, one, another, a third. They end, and time ends with them. What remains is joy.

All Things Made New

The flesh I live in is beginning to show its age; I am reminded constantly of the fate of the meat I inhabit – connective tissue disconnects, circulatory systems choke, respiratory systems expire. Everything dims, fades. We are indeed 'not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven'.

But I realise that my duty is not to this flesh, or to the pattern of this world, but to what the flesh can do in this short span of time. Man, since the Fall, has always had to work; it has become the means by which he lives out his redemption and the means by which salvation can be glimpsed (though not attained, since that is by the grace of God). And that is why there is nothing better than to work with one's hands and lead a quiet life.

I remember the days in which power burned bright and attracted us, as moths to a flame. But the power doesn't last, the glory does not glow, the only things left are the strong metals left after the refiner has done his job. It is the fate of men to strive for the useless and worthless, only to realise that they grieved the God they claimed to serve. It is a hard thing, that.

And yet, there is the promise of a newer time, not necessarily a better age, but a time for peace and the breaking of spears. Rain and tears, blood and fire, ethanol and poetry, tea, coffee, chocolate, mercury, ruthenium, stone and glass, steel and pain. All these things run together and are one. One day we shall sit in the Eternal City, wondering why we thought of Rome as such. One day we might be elevated to a state besides which our current state is mephitic.

I look out of the window and see the rain that has not come and the fire that is yet to come alive. The exultation of angels is in the air, and the exaltation of the lowly things is on its way. I am happy, glad, makarios. The best is yet to be.

Godfather II

When I was young, I used to read a true classic of the British New Wave of Science Fiction. It was a tatty little periodical called 2001 A.D.. One of the linchpin characters in that periodical was a lawman (the word is used broadly here) named Judge Dredd. The learned (well, at least skilled with implements of violence) judge was famous for the saying, "There's no justice; there's just us."

Along the way, I learnt the subtleties of shifting the letters in a sentence just a little bit. It's called adjustment for a simple reason; what is just is exactly so ('just so') while what is unjust is not quite right. What is adjusted is made more correct; what is justified is made fully correct.

And so one day, when I came across the phrase 'in justice we trust', it was the work of moments to rearrange it to say, 'injustice, wet rust'. Years later, reading Tim Powers's Dinner at Deviant's Palace, I would come to appreciate this more. Then, I would have thought I had reached the limits of my appreciation.

In the last three years, 2005-07, I have come to understand that the ability to appreciate injustice, irony and idiocy all at once is something you shouldn't take for granted. Occasionally, that rare ability might yet be called upon to serve its time. Perhaps, "There's no service; there's 'serve us'." Or more amusingly, perhaps I have become happy just to watch the show as it goes on, all the while thinking of King Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar. All of these are about fatherhood, kingship, and the madness of crowds.

Which brings me to the fact that it's almost the end of the year. Not all the news is bad, silly or peculiar. Some of it is touching, perhaps a little sentimental, perhaps sharing a bit of romance. I remember feeling sad about my godson for a while and thinking of my role as a godfather. Well, I've made contact with him again. He and my god-daughter, lovely young people, are West Coast artistic types through and through, with a liberal and liberating intelligence that I'm happy to admire.

And so it goes; some triumphs, some disasters, and over it all, the sense that the overwatching Spirit does indeed make all things good in time. I look forward to the year ahead. I trust all will be well, and even if not, that it really is. To the young people of the First (you know who you are), and those of the Second who succeed them, I can only think of one wish: "May you have light upon your way sufficient unto the finding of your home."

God bless you all.

Extension

When I was a far younger person, I was taught to follow a parry with an immediate riposte, with extension if necessary. This is fine with bladework. But the thing to note is that sports are not always the best metaphors for life; and sports may sometimes be the worst metaphors for life. We talk of 'moving the goalposts' or 'overcoming hurdles' or 'running with the ball', not realising that 'covering your bases' and suchlike can actually lock us into patterns of inappropriate behaviour.

I remember that as I grew up, and even later, when the Eternal Hoodlums gathered, that I used to parry with immediate riposte all the time. In social conversation, this tends to lead to the feeling that your tongue is sharper than necessary, that you are too 'quick off the mark', that you are glib, affectless, demanding, rude. I have never had a stutter. I have often listened to others in the same way that a duelist observes an opponent.

It is not the best paradigm for conducting one's social affairs. And over the years, I adopted that paradigm less and less. Then I became a teacher, only to discover that being a teacher is sometimes like putting a target light on over one's midriff. There were always junior versions of the hellhound I used to be, all trying for a chunk. To my horror, the old skills came back. Like bicycling or swimming, when required, they returned with a semblance of the old facility.

I learnt to suppress the urge – to not parry, bind, riposte in response to every innocent or ignorant jab. And there came a time when I learnt to listen without sporting metaphors running through my head. The problem, perhaps, is that most men do indeed have those metaphors in a dominant role, whether they like it or not. Other kinds of listening tend to be thought of as feminine, or unnatural, or manipulative, or deceptive.

It's a problem indeed. But again, as the years go by, I become less and less concerned. I am me; this blog an extension of my hand, of my mind. What I show is part of what I am; it is never the whole simply because one is never wholly and fully committed along exactly one dimension of movement. But it is I who am here, displaying his ignorance and his laziness, his charm and his strength, his faith and his weakness, his learning and his folly.

What that makes me, I don't know. I care about what it might really make me, but I care not so much about what people think it makes me. I don't need assurance about who I am, or speculation as to who I might be – what mythic stereotype, what Freudian type or Rorschachian inkblot, what Jungian archetype best symbolises me – I am amused by it, sometimes confounded or rebuked. Most of all, I am me, human in weakness, steadfast in duty, simple in virtue.

It isn't what I grew up with, but it is what the good ladies taught me in the very beginning of my career. I never forget, though, that sometimes I am horrible in arrogance, dangerous in wrath, blind in obstinacy, erratic in execution. I can always try to be better, and I can always hope that God judges mercifully. And I rest in that, not because my conscience is clear, but because my conscience is satisfied; satisfied with the idea that some day I will receive both just reward and just punishment, modified by whatever grace is given to this poor soul of mine.

Mockery And Judgement

I remember that in late 2004, I was being pilloried for the contents of this blog. Those contents are still there for you to see, if you're wondering why this should be so. At that time, I remember distinctly the phases of emotional sensation that passed through me.

First, I was amused. I could not believe that people were reading it the way they claimed they were. I could not believe that rational people could do that, anyway. It did not help when the Inquisition got its facts wrong. But then, they were the inquisition, and I was being put to the question. Lesson: the Inquisition cannot bear to be wrong.

Secondly, I was furious. I could not believe they were charging me on the basis of their misinterpretations. I could not believe that they were actually taking a line of peculiar interpretation, applying it in defiance of all hermeneutic principles of analysis, and using it to club me over the head and gag me. Lesson: the Inquisition will always claim the higher ground.

Thirdly, I was defensive. Perhaps, this was my undoing. I believed I was perfectly right in what I had said, that there was no wrong in it. And in a technical sense, I was indeed right. However, I learnt something. If the Inquisition could be misled, it must indeed be true that what I had written was misleading. Lesson: the Inquisition are people too.

Fourthly, I was repentant. If I had misled anyone, no matter what they were or who they were, I was guilty. Whether the rational man-in-the-street, so beloved of law and criminal justice, interpreted me correctly or not, the fact remained that at least three people were confused and two angry about it. Lesson: the Inquisition sets the tone, regardless.

And so, I stepped down from any authority of position I held. I could not totally divest myself of personal authority or the authority of skill and knowledge, but I voluntarily and in a spirit of reconciliation stepped down. I apologised to the community, and I meant every word of my apology. And there the matter rested for a while. But in my heart and mind, I remembered one last lesson: the Judgement of Gamaliel.

In Acts 5:17-42, the apostles were arrested for preaching about Christ. I claim no such apostolic status, and neither was I blogging about exalted matters. But the principle of Gamaliel's judgement remains the same for all unclear and ambiguous cases of new social phenomena: "And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God."

I make no such claims, I say again, about apostolic legacy. However, I would put these questions, given the opportunity, to the Inquisition: Did you apply the principle of Gamaliel's judgement to my case? Has my blogging enlightened or darkened the world of men? Why did you think what I said was harmful despite the fact that at least one of you admitted it was truth?

The fact is this: God is not mocked, or deceived about the truth – what a man sows, he also will reap. The whole lesson of this episode, for the Inquisition as well as for myself, can be found in Galatians 6:1-10. I fully expect to be rewarded or condemned accordingly. In the meantime, I also know that this applies to all of us, every man and woman alike. God have mercy on us all.

Past Oral Care

I spent today working hard at stuff I like working hard at. In my spare time, I pick apart the education system to see how it works and how, perhaps, it can be made to work better. It alarms me at how much we do in the service of education without understanding what it is; it terrifies me to see how, sometimes, we pay so much lip service to unknown gods that it's a wonder we don't blow our budget on lip gloss.

In any system, in any society, people fall prey to the Golden Age syndrome. We tend to think that the past (specifically, our own past) was better than the present, or that we were wiser or less foolish than our successors. We claim that we are confident about the future and place great responsibility in the hands of our heirs, but we second-guess them and baulk them and constrain them. Sometimes, this is good simply because our putative successors are unready as yet to meet the ghastly wasteland that lies ahead (a picture that we have sometimes painted for them). Sometimes, it is because secretly we fear two things: that people will blame us for not being cautious enough, or that our successors will achieve what we thought was impossible – thus showing us up as fakes.

In every society that has ever been of note in our fractured and fragmented accounts of history, there are the 'old men'. Gerontocracies abound, and not every society has found ways to deal with them. The former Soviet Union is a case in point. 'Old men' need not be men; they need not even be old in a chronological sense. But they are the voice of a specific kind of limiting conservatism with is arthritic and afraid. You will know them when the large bulk of a society is ossifying but makes claims to glory and dominion, power and authority. That was Brezhnev's USSR; it was also so in the last days of Rome.

But this is not only about the 'old men'. This is also about the 'young ones'. Again, 'young ones' need not be young; they are identifiable by a galvanic and restless imagination, a need for difference, for testing and overcoming boundaries. Where the 'old men' over-justify and are dishonest through withholding of information 'for the greater good', the 'young ones' under-justify and are dishonest in the name of 'transparency, creativity, newness'. When the large bulk of a society is in perennial flux and nothing is held as certain; when 'truth' is used as a label meaning 'sterile, boring and irrelevant material', you have encountered the 'young ones'.

The worst thing is when society becomes polarised between 'old men' and 'young ones'. Then one of the major forces in society urges restraint and petrification in the name of safety and security, while another major force counters it with cries of iconoclasm and anarchy in the name of freedom and creativity. When both are successful, society is the loser, a corpse picked apart by jackals and vultures, each group convinced that they are doing the best with limited resources.

There is a thin and often maligned barrier that keeps either from full ascendance. That narrow wall is a kind of reason. It isn't logic; neither is it obfuscation or philosophy. It is the voice of deliberate agenda to determine what a better world is like, and how we might reach it through means which are congruent with ends. 'Good means leading to good ends' characterises it best. Many scoff at it, claiming that it is naïve and impotent. And in a fallen world, it sometimes is.

When we know the apocalypse is upon us, when we say, "Aw, we should have listened to the voices which counselled moderation, hope, dialogue and kindness," and realise that there is none left for us; then, we will have lost everything that was worth fighting for, whether old or young. It has to be our aim, despite the knowledge that the future will certainly contain much evil, to shoot for the stars and to dream great dreams. It has to be in us to make the effort to work for a future and not lose hope or break faith.

In the end, people will still accuse the idealists of, "No action, talk only." It is a common accusation, and sometimes too true. It is a statement that the oral will not suffice; it must be rebutted by the moral and humane. It is not enough to pursue endless pinnacles of excellence without asking what they're for. It is not enough to do science without solving the mystery of why there is such a thing as scientific law in the first place. And most of all, we should learn to lead quiet lives, minding our own business (which is indeed, the business of the world), not being a burden to anyone, and working with our hands to make as much that is of lasting value as we can.

Little, Big

That's the title of the immensely perceptive and World Fantasy Award-winning novel by John Crowley, who has been mentioned elsewhere here. What it taught me, many years ago, was that there are three kinds of things in our lives: the big things, the little things, and the unclassifiable, pointless or absurd things – and that sometimes, things can fit into all three categories at once.

There are some things far bigger than ourselves: the history of nations and of the world, the salvation and damnation of humanity; art, philosophy, education and science; war, poverty, famine and death. Yet, they are only as important to us, personally, insofar as they impact on us. We can be swept up in causes and lofty ideals, but that is just a projection of a particular philosophy into a world which might very well just get along fine without us.

It's like my itch to reform education. On the face of it, it is a grand endeavour, a stirring ideal. But I have no idea whether it will affect anyone if I do it. Sure, many people will say it is a good thing; some will say it is me being idealistic, and so on. But it is like spreading a gospel – you will never know, even if people assert that they do, how much you yourself have actually done. You might have run around doing things, speaking to people, eating many flavours of ice-cream or making a spectacle of yourself – but nobody actually knows what the ultimate effects of these things are.

Don't get me wrong: this is not some kind of postmodernist evasion of responsibility or meaning; it is not a claim that truth does not exist. I have much respect for the truth. But I do claim that we as humans cannot know the ultimate significance of our actions. We can assume a limited measure of knowledge about the immediate significance – the more immediate (i.e., in the strict sense of there being no mediating period of time between events), the more probable that we can know something.

Which leads to three kinds of responses from people: 1) why sweat the small stuff, look at the big things; 2) you can't affect the big things, deal with what you have at hand; 3) it's all nonsense (or absurdity, or chaos, or irrelevance) anyway. I think we all respond in these three kinds of ways, and often our responses in categories 1 and 2 fall firmly into 3.

At least two people have commented online that I seem preoccupied with my fractured toe (aha, is that 20 posts already, you of the not-green eyes?) The truth is that it is a great inconvenience in a practical sense, relative to my usual mobility. I rely a lot on walking faster than most other people, and it's a little frustrating to be limping around. But it's a small thing in the long term. It's not death, war, famine, pestilence, plague, the inexorable destiny of humanity or the inevitable chaos of perception.

But it is immediate. There is no mediating period or distance between the fact of my temporary disability and my state of mind. Whether Singapore education is in a parlous state or not, is not my responsibility. But the toe is mine. It is nobody else's responsibility, and nobody else's irritant in the immediate sense. I don't wake up in the morning thinking of the fate of badly-educated millions, or of war-torn and poverty-stricken nations, or of the spiritual health of the oppressed, or of the great and silly philosophies of our time. I leave that to God, and if I can help, that's nice. But you would be a liar, or severely odd, or having a transcendent episode, if the first thing you felt on waking up didn't have something to do with the more immediate needs of your body. Like taking a leak, or unkinking your back muscles.

And then, after dealing with the immediate, I can think about the mediated, the intellectual, the blogospherical, the 'higher' and more distant things. Which I probably have less impact on, and may not be within my grasp as something to be done with all my might. From navel-gazing to crystal-ball divination, I suppose. But me, I will look at my ice-cream, my fresh hot coffee, and gain revelation – revelation of the kind that says, "Wow, this is really good coffee. It makes me happy."

Which reminds me: I still have to finish off that second chapter on the woeful inadequacies of the education system, and what we know of it. Toedles... oops, associational slip there.

Historicity

This boil has been festering for about ten years now. It came to a head in the past year or so.

Over the last twelve months, I've been looking with professional curiosity at how people put together histories of local events. Some of it is engrossing, immensely readable stuff, with verifiable facts jostling with human perspectives and journalistic reporting on the significance of various key events. That kind of stuff is pretty good; I read a glossy book which took as its subject matter the rather morbid history of the SARS epidemic in Singapore (2003) and made it into a tale of intrepid doctors and the triumph of the human spirit, and it was really inspiring.

Some of it is terrible. Trying to analyse the history of Singapore's education system, one runs up against account after account of data wrenched into some kind of shape indicating progress. Yes, the numbers increase, and the progression is good. But what does it mean? And why are there so many lacunae? How come former Education Minister Goh had so many bad things to say about the Ministry he led? How come they acted so slowly and ineffectively on some of his ideas and so quickly and ruthlessly on others? We do not know, and at this stage, with Goh descending into the fate of all mortals, we might never be able to tell that kind of story.

We know that many things achieved in this small nation-state are good. They are highly competitive, world-class achievements. But in some ways, the stories that are concealed, that are left untold, that are selectively told, these make a history that is incomplete, that is sometimes like mythology or hagiography or some other kind of narrative that is not history.

Recently, I read an account purporting to be a historical narrative concerning a famed educational institution. It was the second edition of an earlier account. The discrepancies between the two were alarming; although one should not judge a book by its cover, the second edition in garish gold was a far cry from the sedate dark blue of the original. The claims within were correspondingly magnified in a few areas as well. The said institution was originally honest in reporting that it had won a particular award only 'five times in six years' – in the second edition, this had become 'every year since its inception'. Blatant untruth, and deliberately crafted as such – and if not, surely a sign of shattering arrogance or ignorance or both.

What is worse is that future hagiographers, having adopted the gilded lily as canon, will certainly gild the lily further, thus creating a lump of gold which no longer possesses the aesthetic beauty of the original truth. Is this what we expect from 'history' these days? Are we yet so cynical, so arbitraged and leveraged and impoverished, that we must accept this?

No, I say. And perhaps the enterprising young men who flung the book into the trash were right, and there is yet hope for the past in the future.