Something to think about

Quotes: I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. (Maya Angelou)..The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when confronted by what goes on outside his skull. (Eric Berne).. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. (Theodor W. Adorno)

Monday 15 June 2015

34 Sympathy, empathy and a culture shock

As a sort of reward for not being a social entity, my many and varied talents are starting to become known and I'm being pushed by all and sundry along on the road to the kind of fame or maybe it’s notoriety that I now realize I have always wanted.
And I am lucky, at least in those early days. Most people's dreams never see the light of day, but mine are unfolding like the scenes in a drama, and it does not matter if it happens to be a school version of somebody's version of the English version of Molière's miserable Miser with me covered in pallid greasepaint and a talc rubbed into my hair doing a character role because my speaking voice is much too deep for the heroine. I am too histrionic for the milder roles. Tackling the dramatic parts is good preparation for my operatic targets.
One of my better friends - I can't say best friend, because I have friends for music, friends for tennis, friends for walking to school, and even friends for the breaks between lessons – named Sarah has a delicate constitution and frail appearance. So she is playing the heroine in a mild, frail, harmless sort of way, reciting her lines as though she is reading a shopping list, holding her hands like herrings and displaying her left profile as often as possible, because someone has told her she looks more like Elizabeth Taylor from that angle. A pity she hasn't taken a leaf out of Miss Taylor's book and thrown herself into the part a little more energetically. She has a habit of scraping her throat between the lines, and when I watch her, I can see quite plainly that she is untalented. But she looks the part, there's no doubt about it. I wonder fleetingly if I look the part I'm playing, and hope not. It comforts me to know that all the lines on my face are painted ones.  I get even more comfort from the knowledge that I am too dramatic for roles that require a gentle constitution. A gentle constitution is the last thing one needs on an opera stage.
Sarah is actually my walking to and from school friend, and she is anything but talkative, which is off-putting until you get used to it. I think that's where I must have learnt to talk to myself. She has a neurotic brother called James, and the family live in a semi-detached pebble-dash house with a pocket handkerchief front lawn in the road between my bus stop and the railway bridge we have to cross to get to school.
Sarah has a difficult life. Her mother has an incurable disease and is already very lame and in pain a lot of the time. There is an affinity between Sarah and me, because we both have a sick parent. But that's about all we have in common. Sarah has dark, shining, shoulder length hair which turns up magically at the ends and which she washes lovingly every Thursday. Don't ask Sarah to go anywhere on Thursdays. Even her boyfriend, who was her first and last, as she married him soon after she left school, doesn't stand a chance on Thursdays.
Sarah isn't much older than me but she is more grownup and quite probably wiser. She shoulders the burden put on her by the progressive disease afflicting her mother with a conscientiousness far beyond her years. She cooks, shops, cleans and nurses, and never complains. She is solemn and usually frowning. Her face lights up very rarely and when she does find something funny, she just laughs a bit then returns to being morose and withdrawn.
When we walk to school in the morning she never says more than five words, so I invariable prattle on to myself. In the classroom she merges in with the group who aren't classed as academic or promising, but industrious and persevering. Though we take most lessons together, I can't remember having any communication with her at all once we enter the school grounds. She keeps a low profile during lessons. I don’t really know anything more about her than I’ve just written. She’s really just my walking to school friend.
Sometimes, if Sarah and I happen to leave the school premises at the same time, I go into the house on the way home from school to say hello to her mother, who sees little enough of the outside world. As time goes by, she stops being able to drag herself on sticks to the garden gate to look for Sarah coming home. She is carried up and down stairs by Sarah's dad, and a few years later the family moves to a bungalow in the country, because Sarah's mother now has to sit in a wheel-chair and very soon even that will be too much for her.
Being around Dada during the dark days of his relapses has made me philosophical about illness, if only from the aspect of feeling lucky that it is not me. Watching Sarah's mother struggle to hold a biscuit and direct it into her mouth is a lesson in learning compassion and it is mortifying to realize how powerless I am to help her. Sarah's mother senses my discomfort. Her eyes even twinkle and she tries to comfort me. She has accepted her fate. But I haven't. I would dearly love to be able to wave a magic wand and have her get up and walk normally. But as much as I would like to, I am unable to think of anything to say or do that would be of any use to her. Somehow, all my histrionic antics seem trivial in the face of this real-life tragedy. But she has a wonderful smile, and somehow seems to spread happiness despite her predicament. I remember her smile to this day and am grateful for it.
I am starting to realise how little I understand my own father's critical state of health, but the silence which prevails at home goes on and on, leaving giving us children no chance to show even that we care and could share the burden. Mama never asks me to help her. All I can do to alleviate the situation is to keep out of her way and be the best at everything I do so that nobody will have to bother about me.
For quite a while, I attend both Miss Orlando's singing lessons and her choir, and have elocution lessons, recommended by the English teacher, who thinks I should get rid of every vestige of an accent if I am serious about going on the stage. But she has an ulterior motive, too. She would like me to go in for a reciting competition, and countrified vowels do not go with Robert Browning.
Our Latin teacher has also decided that I am a candidate for reciting, but he’s thinking about Esperanto. This owl like figure, gaunt and spectacled with horn-brimmed glasses that make him look thoughtful, could probably write poems in any of the six languages he speaks fluently. He has instead been writing poems in this weirdest of weirdo tongues and I am to attend a congress with him and read them out after his talk. After school, I stay behind for Esperanto lessons, so that I shall at least be able to hazard a guess at the meaning of what I am reciting, but I must confess that I never do get the hang of it.
Reciting Esperanto on the podium of a huge assembly hall is like having a bad dream in a language you have never learnt. When you enter the hall, it’s like the tower of Babel, except that all around you, voices float through the air chanting what sound like rhyming hexameters in a single curious lingo. There is an echo and no microphone, so while the other speakers labour on, I lean forward as though I am hard of hearing, in the hope that some of the mumbo-jumbo will make sense, but it doesn't. Whatever pearls of wisdom are being dropped on the multitude, they are inaccessible to me.
The conference itself would be like a parent's meeting at school, if it weren't quite so reminiscent of an ancestral gathering. Nearly everyone is as old as, or older than the hills, which I don’t quite understand, given that Esperanto is a modern invention. When they are not comparing poems, they are bickering over esperantic grammar. My contribution is not until the small hours, reciting an ode in which the letter 'K' predominates.
In real life, the Esperanto freaks are indeed mostly retired teachers. Owl is the brightest spark there, and certainly the youngest. He explains a new and innovative grammar rule to the enchanted audience, quoting lots of examples taken from the poem I am to read at the end of his talk. There are so many languages in the world, I am thinking, why couldn't they take one of the endangered species and revive it? That way they would be doing their bit for posterity, instead of reinventing gibberish. And anyway, isn't English perfectly acceptable as a means of communication all over the world?
I'm even looking forward to getting back to French, or I would be, if we weren’t going to have a newcomer, Miss Owens, teaching us. And Latin has its good points, too, now I’ve finally mastered ablatives and vocatives and no longer need the special, dry-bones tutoring by Miss Greene, the prune-faced classics scholar who was dug up to coach people like me, who have to catch up on a whole lost year, like it or not.
Soon after the Esperanto conference, Owl announces his imminent departure. He's going to devote his life to higher things, whatever that may mean. So that explains Miss Owens’s appearance. How can he do that to us?
Owl is going out with a bang. There's to be a Fête Champètre, which is a sort of French party in a field only we’re having it in the inner courtyard next to the assembly hall. The party is entirely in his honour and much to my relief I am not to be called on to rehash his Esperanto poems. Instead, I am going to sing one of Edith Piaf's greatest hits that can be translated to mean ‘no, I don’t regret anything’  and probably has more significance for Owl than it will ever have for me, since I constantly do things I will regret forever.

I don’t really want to admit that my rendering of the Piaf song has brought tears to Owl’s eyes and caused audible sniffs from other members of staff, but it has.

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