Wild Sage

I don’t ever recall experiencing musical love at first hearing as passionate as this. Not since I discovered Donovan a year ago, anyway. But John Darnielle’s Mountain Goats are much better than Donovan’s hippy-trippy flower power. Well, loves always get better, don’t they?

Luckily, musical infatuation is not quite that exclusive, and “Rain has showered far her drip/ Splash and trickle running”, the line which got me into Donovan in the first place, still runs and trickles down my spine and showers me with amazement. But there is a sense in which The Mountain Goats seem more authentic than Donovan. It’s the same Rembrandt versus Rubens antimony I’ve explored in “Triptych” – The Mountain Goats are raw emotions, while Donovan tries to impress with his raindrop-clear voice. Of course, I don’t really believe Rembrandt is necessarily better than Rubens – my own blog, with its flowery metaphors and “how amazing seemed the sky!” is usually more on the Rubens side, and it bloody sure is authentic. And, I’ve said it before, I’m all for the sublime and for baroque/prog rock showoffishness. The fact remains, though, that at the moment there’s something special for me about the Mountain Goats.

As an aside, the issue of authenticity in music is a delicate one – I suppose what’s authentic for me is just what I can more or less relate to and understand. Thus while I find Simon & Garfunkel’s harmonies sublime, Art Garfunkel’s solo work (with perhaps the exception of “Bright Eyes”) strikes me as unnaturally sugary-sweet. I’m inclined to argue that there’s a significant difference between the two, and songs which say “So I’ll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end, and flowers never bend with the rainfall” will be authentic no matter how polished the vocal harmonies (in fact, for me they're more authentic because of the polished vocal harmonies); but others will draw the line in different places, and I suppose I can understand them if they say the lyrics I’ve just quoted are pretentiously philosophical and overintellectualized.

Returning to The Mountain Goats, there’s a few songs I’ve been listening to over and over again these last couple of days. One of them is “Wild Sage”, and one line in it – “wild sage growing in the weeds” – resonates with me so strongly I decided to base a text around it. So, finally abandoning overintellectualized, baroque, and unauthentic ramblings about imagined aesthetic distinctions, let’s get on to the real thing.

My first scout trip. Chest full of excited breaths, head full of dizzying happiness, I’m on top of the world and I know it. We went to a bar to eat some pierogies before the train back home – when I come back to the waiting room, I remember I have shortbread cookies to share with everyone. “Can I have one?” a stranger asks me. A homeless man, with a broken arm, looks like an alcoholic. “Sure,” I say and smile, his eyes a hungry dog’s. There’s a second man next to him, more wolf-like.

The canines don’t listen to us when we ask them to stop smoking. Still, one of us takes out a guitar, and we all take to singing. The wolf-like man sniggers, interrupts, protests. The hungry one says “Ssh, I wanna listen”, but this sounds like the last faint sparks of independence of mind. My eyes dart to his broken arm and I feel an unfounded dislike towards his “friend”.

“Crowds dragging through streets, vodka drunk in parks, and sunsets will deceive, but remember: nothing ever really happens and nothing ever will – ‘til the very end”. I hear a sob next to me. Vodka and sunsets and nothing!... Liquid humanity in the dog’s eyes – surely there’s something somewhere.

“Let’s go, leave these f-ing kids,” the wolf growls. (“Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (Generals order their soldiers to kill)”). “Oh, shut up!” – the dog’s answer is surprisingly assertive.

Sensitivity grows in odd places. Wisdom, untamed and unpredictable, grows in weeds, and weeds can be flowers too.

“The Water of Life does not exist, but you should always search for it, you should always search for it...” the same message of meaningless meaning, of nothing being something or something being nothing. “What an idiot must’ve written that!” the dog barks fiercely and unexpectedly... Wild weeds growing in the sage. Sun rays drowning in the vodka. There goes my belief in humanity.

Of course, the image John Darnielle’s song really conjures up in my mind is that of a bearded hermit of inexplicably increasing height, philosophy twinkling in his eyes, running around like mad in fields of cannabis.

PS Sorry about the awful translations of the Polish songs...

Nightmares Revisited: On Polish Education

This is going to be singularly unpatriotic. Quite awful of me, really, beating the hell out of Poland's educational system on an English-language blog. But throughout the whole of this year, my brother would tell me things about his school that made me really want to hit someone, and so I couldn't stand it any longer and decided this beating would have to take place, even against a defenceless enemy.

When I told a friend that we decided Chris would be best off being homeschooled, he replied in a voice full of concern “Are you sure about this? You know, there’s risks attached”.

The thing that would have risks attached would be keeping him in Polish school any longer. The risk of his voice trailing away into inaudibility, of his smiles hardening into irony, of “learning” becoming a synonym for “torture”. How can anyone believe homeschooling could have a more negative impact on social skills than Polish school? If I had been homeschooled, would I be any shyer than I am, would starting a conversation terrify me more than it already does? Or had my social inability perhaps been caused, at least in part, by collections of kids and teachers who mocked any attempt at uniqueness?

If there’s any non-genetic reason for my brother’s being more outgoing than I am, it’s the fact that he went to a private school, with a maximum of eight students per class. When I visited him there, I was astounded that he had absolutely no qualms about asking teachers questions. “But aren’t you afraid?” I would ask, and he would look at me with uncomprehending eyes and answer “Why would I be?” On entering middle school, he was not afraid either – yet. He would raise his hand during history lessons, sharing fascinating facts – for the first two months or so, at which point he realised that the teacher never once showed any appreciation of this, though she readily rewarded with “pluses” students who raised their hands to summarize the previous lesson or read a page in the textbook... Woe on you if you don’t fit in the tight box we’ve prepared for you...

About those boxes... There’s much talk these days of tolerance, of combating discrimination and that sort of thing. But – I say – intolerance will never be defeated. Not as long as the average human is anything like what he’s like today, anyway. Sure, you can have black and gay people star in leading roles in films, and yes, it will make the average TV-viewer think better of them. But the most you can achieve that way is getting people to leave some boxes alone. Ah, he’s black, can’t touch him. But what if someone doesn’t fit in any box? Or rather, what if your box is too unique for the common man? Long as there won’t be any Beatle-loving, American-accented but Polish-born movie stars who wear chequered shirts and don’t believe in God or free will but smile much more often than is socially acceptable, kids will continue to make fun of other kids.

So, I ask – where’s the social danger of homeschooling? In having fewer, but much closer and realer friends? In having time to be with your family, who gives you infinitely more support than even the best of teachers? In segregating yourself from people who don’t appreciate you? In living in a pretend world? Damn it, I say – leave me alone, let me live in my “pretend” world. Oxford is such a world – why should it be any less real than the bleak reality of Polish middle school?

So much for the defence of homeschooling. I still owe you an attack on Polish school, though – for there are stupid kids everywhere, yet we didn’t consider homeschooling when living in Bristol.

When I describe the Polish education system to friends here in England, I hear my voice from a new perspective and somehow I find that what I’m saying is too incredible to be true. And yet Polish people on the whole cannot even imagine it being different.

The one thing that neither my Oxford friends nor I can ever understand is the practice of “oral answering”. What it means is that during each lesson, the teacher has a right to choose any student and ask him or her questions (while the student stands up, oftentimes in front of the whole class) about the past three lessons – and grade him or her on his or her answers. What – will someone ever explain this to me? – can the purpose of such a practice possibly be? To make your insides do somersaults at the start of each lesson? To teach you that what matters in life is ultimately luck (for no student ever prepares for each and every lesson)? And what claims to fairness can this practice have? How does asking one student one set of questions compare to asking another student another set on a different day?

Perhaps the idea is to teach you to work under stress. Great. Concentration camps probably taught people the same.

Oxford tutorials are stressful. But they serve a purpose – they make you think more clearly, teach you to defend your point of view, structure your argument clearly, etc. But the typical “oral answering”, consisting of questions about facts, not puzzles to think about, serve none of these purposes. And even the few that are a bit more sensible (e.g. physics “answering”, which tends to consist of solving problems on the board) differ from Oxford tutorials in that they are graded.

This brings me to another issue I have with the Polish system – students are graded on how they learn, not just on what they learn. You are expected to be systematic – learn from day to day, do your homework regularly, etc. But people are different. Some are organized, some aren’t, and I don’t think there’s a strict correlation between this and intellectual ability. From my point of view, if you learn what you need to learn in time for the exam, it shouldn’t matter whether you studied twenty minutes each day for the week leading up to the exam, or the whole night before it. But here, you have to opt for the twenty minutes per day.

And what of free time? In middle school in the US, right before going back to the nightmare of Polish education, after arriving home after the day’s lessons I’d play Pinball on the computer for an hour. Then I’d talk to my family for a long time, laze around, maybe play some games with my brother, go to the park and play tennis with Dad, go to a concert maybe. I’d spend perhaps an hour doing homework.

Now the Polish teacher will mock this with all the venom he can spit out, and cite my description as evidence of the awful state of American education. But – I believe with all my might – long hours spent talking with family over dinner, tennis, concerts, even Pinball are extremely important, in a way that memorizing definitions of biological terms never will be. Polish teachers think their school should be your life – but to what end? Do I remember any of the definitions I struggled hours and hours to learn? You improved your memory, they’ll say – but science is not about memory. I would have done better to read a book of my choice than to study for those pointless exams. And that’s what bothers me most about the amount of work you get in Polish school – you don’t even have time to learn other things you might have preferred to learn.

In Poland, you have to take all the courses there are. Even in high school, every student takes, apart from mathematics, Polish, and physical education, things like “knowledge about society”, "history of art”, and “preparation for defence” (yes, “preparation for defence”, or “military education” – sounds like we’re in communist Russia, doesn’t it? After two years of that subject I still haven’t a clue what it’s about...). The belief behind this is that there are things everyone needs to know. This myth is so widespread that when I moved to Bristol to do my A-levels, even otherwise perfectly sane and sensible friends from Poland asked me whether I was worried that if I only studied maths, physics and English, my “general education” would suffer. But what is the general education hidden in falling asleep in “preparation for defence” lessons or memorizing definitions of biological terms? Surely the free time I spent in England reading books, watching BBC documentaries, visiting museums and travelling contributed to my general education in an infinitely richer and more meaningful way...

Another contrast between the Polish and Western systems I’ve lately discovered is the fact that while in the West education seems to be geared towards success, in Poland it is geared towards failure. Let me explain. I’m a student at Oxford, allegedly a pretty good university. And yet – the horror! – all our lecture notes are available online, as is the syllabus, which tells us exactly what will be on the exams, and as are past papers from the last ten years, which make doing well on an exam, to Polish eyes, trivially easy. For a professor, master of your future, should have the divine power to throw whatever questions he fancies at you, laughing manically as you struggle to attempt them.

When I hear intelligent Polish friends worry whether they’ll pass their exams, I think something’s deeply wrong. Exams are for passing, not failing, my friend.

In the same way, Polish middle school teachers fail to praise. As if saying “good job” hurt. And it certainly hurts less than not hearing it said does – and much, much less than hearing the venomous comments teachers sometimes make in Poland (I’ve said this in another article in another place: when I first moved to the US, I was greeted with “How wonderful you joined us!”, whereas in Poland the greeting was “You’ll have so much work you’ll never catch up – the level of American education is so low”...).

Did I mention cheating on exams? If you’re expected to memorize ridiculous amounts of utterly unimportant facts, the temptation is just too strong... The students in my brother’s class, the most intelligent and resourceful in the school, cheat on almost every exam. The one time he followed in their lead, he was caught...

When faced with all these accusations, a teacher might say: your brother is lying. Or at least exaggerating. Even if I hadn’t gone through the same hell of Polish school and didn’t know exactly what my brother was talking about, I’d have a strong urge to punch the teacher in the face. Students. Are. To. Be. Trusted. Innocent until proven guilty. Praised before blamed. Appreciated.

I believe in education without stress. If you say a stressless school wouldn’t prepare you for the real world, I reply: we make the real world. If we have an educational system which teaches students not to trust anyone, to be eternally stressed out, cheat, memorize random facts thoughtlessly and despise people different from themselves, that’s what our real world will be like.

To sum up: my brother and I are wimps who are/were unable to survive in the completely sensible world of Polish school, a world of loving teachers and caring pupils who form one big, happy family. We require constant praise, ridiculous amounts of free time, we have no concern for the value of general education and no respect for teachers or students.

That’s the idea – now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to a wimpy tutorial with a wimpy tutor who praises me, to prepare for a wimpy Oxford exam.