Devenish

11 today!

2012-01-24T09:51:00.001+09:00

[After only one year, he's able to take Julian down the slope—something I can't do :(]

The last piece is still not complete, and nearly a month has gone in. There are good reasons—as well as bad excuses—for the slowdown, which perhaps I'll be able to discuss in the future, but for now at least I can mark Sean's 11th birthday today with some recent pictures, all real, and—since it's his birthday I should say—all representative of the really wonderful person that he is. The miracle, of course, is that he's survived my impatience and criticism for this long: my incessant hectoring over 'cello practice, homework, watching bad television, fighting with Julian. When I look back at my own practice, it's amazing he's turned out as brilliantly as he has. Maybe when he reads this, he'll know just how proud I am of him, despite all the parental harassment. Happy Birthday, Sean！誕生日おめでとう! Gefeliciteerd!

A Year in Review (Niets van dat alles)

2012-01-03T01:33:00.000+09:00

First snow of the season: just a dusting, gone by 10:30am

I'll start this post in the final hours of 2011, just after putting Justin into bed, though no doubt it will only be finished in the New Year. This is the first time that I have recorded the passing weeks of any year since I kept a diary in my teenage years: whether a coincidence or not, it has also been the most difficult year since then; physically, emotionally, intellectually—supposing, that is, there is anything left of whatever intellect I once possessed. I was listening yesterday morning to Radio 4's 'Book at Bedtime' adaptation of Nancy Mitford's Pursuit of Love. Mitford had many qualities, including wit, self-irony, compassion— considerably more appealing political views than her sisters—but she was not well-disposed towards children, or to parents who brought up their offspring themselves—rather than leaving in the charge of professional nannies and governesses. 'I love children,' she is supposed to have said 'especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.' The lines that struck home, though were these: 'In Oxford, I've seen the wives of progressive dons bringing up their children: they would gradually become morons themselves; while the children looked like slum children, and behaved like barbarians...' And that was only the wives: presumably Mitford would have regarded hands-on fathers as too alien and aberrant to be countenanced. Yet, despite the self-conscious, anachronistic snobbery, Mitford was right on the mark in one way: as I noted in another post several years ago, modern parenting does gradually transform you into—if not a moron—then someone who is much diminished by the experience of child-care. This year has lessened me more than any that I can remember: I am, as they say, "all in" (Some sources claim that this is a purely American idiom: it sounds so natural to me, perhaps they're wrong, or I've just assimilated it, like gasoline).

Ironically, the phenomenal tiredness I feel as 2011 comes to a close is not due to worrying about, or caring for, Justin. As we celebrated our second Christmas with him in our lives, I was able to reaffirm the growing conviction—which has emerged as the months have gone in—that indeed (as other people had told us 12 months ago when we were still in shock and denial, and which we greeted with disbelief), having a Down Syndrome child is not the worst thing that could have happened. Instead, Justin has brought real joy to us all, and enriched our lives immeasurably. Of course, we have also been extremely lucky that his health and development have both been great so far—I know I would be much less complacent if he were ill. But—if it should help other new parents out there—I can honestly say that I worry less—and am less wracked—about Justin in the short to medium term than about Sean and Julian. And part of this has to be due to the terrible oppressiveness of normality (or normalcy—as George W preferred). People often confuse normality with the status quo, with how things are in typical contexts, forgetting that normal is normative: it tells you how things should be. Thus, I worry about Sean that he isn't yet serious enough about school work (or much else), or about Julian that is much too serious—and sensitive—for his own good, that I have so far failed to teach him how to read at all, in any language. I worry about such things because I compare my own children to "age-matched controls"—and find them and myself wanting, in comparison. With Justin, on the other hand, the bar has not so much been lowered, as taken away entirely. We celebrate every small achievement, all of which we previously took for granted—or desperately waited for in our older children. He's not walking yet, he has no words, but he claps beautifully, can pick up and feed himself small biscuits, and can almost stand, supported by a low table. I have no doubt he'll be able to do most things that typically developing children can do—it will just take that much longer...

[to be continued]

Out of the rut

2011-12-16T14:00:00.005+09:00

I realized yesterday that almost exactly a month has passed since my last post on this blog, and wondered how and why the time had gone in...and where? Always under time pressure, I have nevertheless been able to make the time to write at least once a week. 'It's therapy, like, you know...' So this post is long overdue, but it's also time-limited: I've given myself 30 minutes between chores, paid work (teaching prep), and real work (academic writing) to try to catch up before Christmas—as low-key as this festival is in Japan, for families at least.

First, because most recent—Last In, First Out— the zarigani (crayfish) on the left. This is the close-to-'last man standing'—there's one other in a different tank, but I think that he'll go first—of the collection of 14 or 15 crayfish that Julian was given by a teacher at Seán's school, and which muggins here has had the job of feeding and cleaning for several weeks now (since the end of September, I think). Same goes for the fish in another tank upstairs. In more anthropomorphic moments, I feel sorry for this creature in its solitary confinement, with only an algaed rock for company; but who's to say that he's (she's/it's?) not happy as Larry in the best of all possible worlds, or even that happiness is relevant to crustaceans' lives. Pangloss (or Larry) is a good name for him/her/it, though...

To other things domestic. Except for the usual round of colds and minor infections, we're all doing well here, enjoying the most beautiful time of year on Rokko mountain: the air is clear, the views are exceptional, there's little precipitation—though we had a dusting of snow last week, and as the leaves change and fall, can look forward to the ski season: this year, perhaps, Julian will make as much progress as Sean did last January. In spite of all the inconvenience of living so far from the railway station—see, I'm turning Japanese by even admitting this—this year on the mountain has been unique and rewarding one, and I'll be sorry to come down...

My teaching at Kobe College is also drawing to an end: another source of regret to me, though likely one of tremendous relief to my students: it is awfully hard to listen to anyone for 90 minutes straight (a systemic fault of the Japanese university system, which somehow must believe—if systems can have beliefs attributed to them—that students' attention span can be usefully extended beyond 35 minutes) but it is a real trial to listen to someone lecturing in a foreign language for that length of time, when there isn't even a text book to hold on to. Life is hard, as I tell them. One of the things that I'll miss most about the Okadayama campus are its trees, which are some of the most beautiful I've ever seen growing on university property: here are two autumn pictures taken last week:

As usual, time constraints prevent me from writing properly about the most important subjects: the children. But pictures can reveal a lot. So here are some, with commentary. A general point: understanding my children is for me one of the most bewildering problems in my addled life (or should that be adult? or is it just an alternate spelling?). I think—though I'm too closely involved to be a good judge, and too old to know their minds—that each is growing well, enjoying their lives, and discovering new things and new perspectives.

Objectively, I know that Justin is doing really well because that's what the doctors tell us (though he has yet to stand or crawl properly): he is certainly growing well, and passing developmental milestones at his own pace, and seems to be the happiest of all of us (not, I'm pleased to say, in any muted or overly passive way, but in an open, curious manner). As for Seán and Julian, they both appear to be doing well, and to be content—just as long as they don't spend too much time in close proximity. But maybe that's normal for boys. I can't tell, not having had a brother, and Ayumi doesn't know either. So, here are a couple of ironic and remarkable pictures, in which (i) they both are in the same photo looking at the camera—a new and welcome attitude from Julian who didn't let me take his picture at all until recently; (ii), they appear to like each other. Perhaps this is what they'll remember when they grow up—a beautiful distortion of the daily struggle for dominance and attention...

This morning, as I was trying to get everyone ready for school/nursery, having already taken Ayumi to the cable station, the older boys were watching a programme on Discovery about parallel universes and other realities. (Breakfast tv needn't be dumb!) First, a cosmologist talked about the mathematical possibility of finding identical copies of oneself somewhere trillions of light years away, but closer to us than infinity by another impossibly large order of magnitude. Then, it was explained to us that even if other "us"es existed, we could never reach them if the universe is ever-expanding. What wasn't adequately explained to us why we would ever want to meet identical "us"es, in any case). But following this, we had the quantum mechanical alternative: what we call reality is just one of an infinite number of present parallel universes. Heady stuff this, before the 8am watershed. Anyway, the reason for bringing this up is partly related to the reason for my non-posting: I had got into a rut, my reality—or at least my perspective on it—had seized up for a while. So this is, hopefully—in both senses of the word—the beginning of a new prospective perspective (just in time for New Year!)

PS. Only a real old-school journalist would believe that I kept to my 30 minute deadline on this piece.

View of Kobe (Port Island) from Rokko Mountain: December 2011

Low Drama (‘Ça n’est pas ce qu’on fait qui compte, c'est l'histoire’)

2011-11-28T23:29:00.007+09:00

Either I am a poor excuse for a father, or everyone else is lying to themselves and others about family life. (Or both, of course: I’ve been teaching enough basic logic recently to know that these are not mutually exclusive options, that both propositions can be true simultaneously, even if it is not especially likely in this conversational context.) Assuming the latter—at least for now, to maintain the illusions necessary to keep me from running away come Saturday morning—there are some home truths that could do with an airing.

Click to play

The first is this: weekends with children are really hard. As much as I love my kids, 48 hours at a stretch…is a stretch. Like Peter Cook in speaking of his intestines—though, in this particular clip the immortal line “I wish my intestines were shorter” is tragically omitted—I sincerely wish the same of my weekends. This desire is likely a reflection in part of my own childhood, when—from the age of 8—I had school six days a week, where my weekends started when I got home “after games” on Saturday afternoon around 4pm, settling down near the hearth with a mug of hot chocolate in front of the tv, to watch the wrestling and then catch the football scores on Grandstand, read by the nearly inimitable Len Martin, a man who could—by intonation alone—impart the news of wins, losses and draws before you heard the name of the away team (Leeds United …(5), Manchester United…(1)—League Division 1 1971-72 season, oh happy days!). When I was a child, my only fully free day was Sunday: as dedicated non-church-goers, we were able to lie in, and play around the house until—rather occasionally, and usually sometime after lunch—we would ‘go for a run in the car’ (as my great-aunt liked to say). Or not. The key characteristic of Sundays was their very uneventfulness. Not exactly indolence, or conscious relaxation, more a marked slowing in the passage of time.

Things are different now. The pressure to cram each weekend with what turns out to be a poorly co-ordinated schedule of household chores and rewarding activities, ‘fun for all the family’; to clamber like over-burdened free-runners—a child in each hand, and one in a buggy—over a chaotic and abrasive landscape of sharp hurdles—domestic duties, social obligations, and healthy outdoor experiences—instead of letting time pass over us for just a day—is enervating, rather than stimulating. By 5pm on Sunday, I am worn out, even on relatively good weekends, as this one mostly was (as you will see from the pictures at the bottom). In contrast to the popularly presented view, I often long for Monday morning, and then dread the next weekend to come. Strike one.

One might think they liked each other...

As I think about it, it’s not the noise or dissension that is so wearing—Justin’s crying, or the fractiousness of Sean and Julian’s bickering—though this certainly makes a significant contribution. ('Life is short,' I tell them in withering, misanthropic tones, 'even childhood: why can’t you guys be nice to one another??' Strike two against me as a parent: how could I say such thing to a ten year-old and his five year-old brother—children five and ten times younger than me—who cannot possibly grasp the awesome finiteness of existence?) No, it's not the clamour, but the persistent, continual sense of failure—of failing to achieve even the simplest of domestic goals—that is as frustrating as it is debilitating. In contrast to weekdays, where at least some clarity, coherence even, can be found in the regularity of the teaching schedule, the chapters to be finished, the overdue reviews and committee paperwork—even the nonsense is well structured (!)—the home weekend teems with the edgy unpredictability of five souls devoid of any collective agenda (nor yet in search of one), harrying through the hours and minutes of their lives together, and of two parents trying to give meaning to this allegedly precious time. Carpe diem, and all that...

Our family life is not high art, nor action movie. That’s to be expected, and comforting to a degree: I suppose I'd rather the pale banality of domestic soap opera than the cheap excitement of 24 Hours (I stopped watching after Series 1). What’s more surprising perhaps is that our life together rarely attains even the modest heights of fictional family stories. Over the last couple of weeks now, we have all been enchanted, and brilliantly distracted on longish car journeys, by back episodes of Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café radio podcasts. For the benefit of non-Canadians, Stuart McLean is a CBC broadcaster: each week on the Vinyl Café he hosts a programme from a different town or city across Canada, briefly relating the history of the region, introducing local musicians, then—the best part—telling a story of the mishaps and adventures of a possibly mythical, but very real seeming, family: parents Dave and Morley, children Sam and Stephanie (though daughter Stephanie features very little in these accounts, much less than Sam’s friend Murphy, for instance. Truth to tell, these are stories for boys, in the main). Every week there is a new story—each one a diverting treat—in which McLean recounts in beautifully measured prose stanzas some otherwise insignificant event in the life of these ordinary Canadians, in such a way that even Sean laughs out loud and Julian breaks off from needling his brother to repeat a phrase or two. These are not momentous or critical situations he's talking about—the time Sam and Murphy found an abandoned 1948 Studebaker in a field, the time that Dave dropped his neighbor’s keys down the sewer, the time Morley that forgot about the lunch boxes in her children’s school bags over the whole summer—yet through his story-telling Stuart McLean manages to make of each a perfect home adventure, a just demonstration of Yves Duteil’s assertion (‘Ce n’est pas ce qu’on fait qui compte, C’est l’histoire’).

Story and history are different words in contemporary English: in French, the ambiguity of the word histoire makes clearer that (most) ‘facts’—analytic truths aside—are really (hi)stories, constructs rather than objective reports of sense-data. So, while McLean’s stories bring us a richer warmer reality than any we could imagine ourselves, they also point up the inadequacy of our own family experience. If I were my children, I would surely be thinking: why can’t my Dad be more like Dave—more easy-going, more patient, more creative, more resourceful, more…fatherly? And, since I have no good answer to this other than to say that Dave is not real, I have to hope that this is true. Strike three, if I’m wrong.

Had I any respect for the baseball metaphor, I would be required to stop here. Since I don’t—I am as unmoved by the game as my American or Japanese counterpart is by cricket or snooker—many more strikes are allowed before I shuffle off the Good Parents’ field. Among them, just this weekend, would be the staggering hypocrisy of my yelling at Sean for not practising his ‘cello (‘If you don’t want to practise, we don’t need to pay for the lessons’) when I have not even practised five minutes between the first three—equally expensive—weekly singing lessons that were Ayumi's anniversary present to me. Or my impatience with Julian, who said he wanted to bring his bicycle to ride at the car-park near us—the only flat piece of ground for 4km—and would push it up the hill from the house himself, and then—predictably—didn’t. Or even my annoyance at the baby, for continuing to fuss even after milk, change and being carried, rather than sitting quietly in his buggy. Or—more generally—my knee-jerk “No” response to harmless requests for a drink from the (ubiquitous) vending machine, to change, or not to change the music, to rent a DVD when we drive down the hill, simply because my nose is streaming with a cold, a pinched nerve in my neck is squealing its dissatisfaction through the mask of unhealthy doses of ibuprofen, and I’m distracted by an itch that might have come from a mosquito (had all the mosquitos not been killed off by falling temperatures some weeks ago. One of the things we failed to get was a ‘fumigating bomb’ from the supermarket, which worked a treat last time we had this problem.) Dave doesn’t seem to get neck pain, colds and insect bites on the same day; or, if he does, it doesn’t get in the way of Happy Families. Could be because he's fictional. Could be, though, because he’s not a grumpy old man…Mea culpa.

Having thus relieved my conscience, I can now comment on the pictures below (omitting all the negatives):

‘We had a really great weekend. On Saturday morning, after tidying up the house, we all walked up to Kinenhidai so that Sean could practice on his new bike, and Julian could show us how much he has improved on his old one in just three trial sessions. They both did briliantly. Then we drove Ayumi down to Asagiri, so that she could get a haircut, and the boys could take their model cars to the boardwalk. Stunning views of the sunset beside Akashi-Kaiyoo bridge. On the way home, we stopped off in Suma for a wonderful supper at Torimitsu (a chicken restaurant). Got back late, children straight to bed. Next morning, drove down to football practice on Rokko Island. I completed the 5.1 km run around the island with two other fathers, in under 26 minutes, a personal best over the last five outings. Headed back for lunch. In the afternoon we were visited by a family we met, who have a ten year old girl with Down Syndrome. They loved our house, and the view, and are considering moving up here. Later in the afternoon, with Sean and Julian’s help, I changed the wheels on the car, replacing summer with winter tyres, before it starts to snow. A gorgeous clear evening before dinner. After dinner, we sat down together and had a 'movie night': watched Finding Nemo (Julian’s choice, this time). Another good one.’

Great stuff. What I can’t figure out, though, is why I can’t write for s***, or should that be toffee (?) about domestic bliss: the foregoing paragraph reads like the diary of a barely articulate six year-old. Perhaps it’s really true, as in those famous example sentences from Pollock’s (1989) paper on French and English syntax, that unhappiness and a sad childhood are the keys to good writing.

(1) a. Ne pas être heureux / n’être pas heureux …
         ne not be happy ne be not happy
        ‘Being unhappy….’

     b. Ne pas avoir eu d’enfance heureuse / n’avoir pas eu d’enfance heureuse….
         ne not have had a childhood happy ne have not had a childhood happy
   'Not to have had a happy childhood...'

             …est une condition pour écrire des romans.
                 is a condition for write det novels
                ‘…is a pre-condition for writing novels.’

I presume Pollock means necessary, rather than sufficient, conditions. Even if this is the case, if the statements are true, then as a parent, I guess I'm doing something right...! ☺

Hoping for the worst? ('Que sera sera')

2011-11-16T23:49:00.002+09:00

Click to play.

This week finds me in an interesting quasi-ethical dilemma, one that must be familiar to any parent of a disabled child, but which is new to me.* The quandary is only quasi-ethical because it does not materially affect our behavior or course or action—we will do the same thing either way—but rather pertains to our hopes for Justin: is it ever right to hope for the worse?
Let me explain. On Friday, we will take him to a clinic for his condition to be assessed. If his physical and cognitive development is assessed as falling below a certain threshold relative to typically developing children, he will be entitled to additional state services, therapies and assistance, including a personal carer in his nursery; if he is deemed above the threshold, he will not receive these services. Since every child, however close to normal, must benefit from such assistance—as the Tesco slogan has it "Every little helps"—I have to wonder: what to wish for? (Benign administrative incompetence seems to be the best way out of this one. On verra bien...)

*Just me: Ayumi is little troubled by such ethical niceties.

Postscript (1/12/11): As it turned out, benign administrative incompetence—if a lax attention to the descriptors counts as incompetence—is what we received: Justin was classified as mild, but eligible. So now we can hope for the best again.

Justin at One ('Birthday Song')

2011-11-15T12:20:00.004+09:00

Click to play
Other demands in the last couple of weeks, including a trip to Vietnam and the attendant preparations, forced me to postpone posting this set of pictures. Even now, I'll have to keep it short as I'm way behind on other chores and work priorities. Nevertheless, it's important to record what a good year it has been for Justin, and how lucky we have been that he is growing and developing so well. (Ayumi took him yesterday to Tsukaguchi hospital for his monthly checkup: developmentally, he scores 80 on a scale where the median typically-developing child is 100, and where the average Down's child score is 60. Given that he is only just one year old, this is really encouraging news.) He also pulled himself up to a kneeling position beside the coffee table, and is gradually learning to drink using a straw. These may not be monumental achievements, but for us, they are milestones of a sort. Without wishing to tempt fate we should celebrate his good health and the happiness he has brought us to this point.

Chronicling the year...

Growing older (A thousand kisses deep)

2011-10-31T01:21:00.002+09:00

It's Justin's birthday tomorrow, and this post will be developed to reflect and celebrate this anniversary, so much better than we could have anticipated just under a year ago when we were first told of his condition.

Meantime, for various reasons I have had cause to think of birthdays towards the end of life, as well as the beginning, and of the consolations of age and experience (The Autumn leaves have got you thinkin', about the first time that you fell...). Physically, there are precious few of these, perhaps none: there is no upside of the loss of health and vitality. Intellectually and emotionally, things are not much better: growing old sucks, and pandering talk of greater wisdom and broadening perspective is just so much pap to help us keep down the bile of wasted time.

And yet, as long as there is this...there is still hope. Some poets fade like everyone else, or grow sour, but Leonard Cohen really seems to get better with every year, every poem, and this is perhaps the best so far.

The only sadness is—to use the title of a song composed in tribute to a singer-songwriter that has not aged so well at all (Don McLean)—is that Cohen is 'killing me softly with his song': after hearing this, further creation seems futile, there is nothing that I could ever write that would come close to capturing the sublime with such simplicity ('so elegant, and cheap').

The Fire Raisers (reprise)

2011-10-25T09:29:00.003+09:00

About 40-odd years ago, when I was little older than Sean is now, I took part in my first school play at Campbell, an English adaptation of Max Frisch's ,Biedermann und die Brandstifter' (The Fire Raisers. I was in the chorus, dressed as a fireman, and the shortest by a long way. My parents only identified me under an oversized helmet about half-way through the play, and then started to worry about my height). By coincidence—or perhaps not, it may be a perennial favourite among school drama teachers—it is the current school production running at Canadian Academy on Rokko Island, where we all go on Sundays for Sean and Julian to play football, and where I puff around a 5km running path with some of the other fathers. I was reminded of this last night, when Sean appeared on local tv and in the evening paper (see below), setting fire to stuff inside a public building.
Happily for us, this incendiary act was completely legal: his appearance was as a member of the winning team in his school Rokko-san Elementary School, the first group to make the fire to light the school's wood-stove. No fire-lighters, no matches, just wooden sticks, friction and tinder. (Somehow I don't think the Health and Safety people would look well on this in the UK.) His school is one of the few left in Japan—probably in the developed world—to depend on a wood-fired stove to heat the building in winter, and being half a mile up the mountain and an average of five degrees colder than anywhere else in Kobe, it is the first to light the fire, signalling the beginning of the season. Thus, all of the local media send cameramen, photographers and junior reporters up the hill for a view of young wannabe arsonists, and what do you know: Sean triumphs again.

Full story (in Japanese) here:

Demise deferred?

2011-10-21T11:52:00.002+09:00

There are many versions of what Mark Twain is supposed to have written concerning the misreporting of his demise, but this [left] appears to be the most authentic "The report of my death was an exaggeration."

Less deadpan (!) are the words of the 'corpse' in this clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "I'm not dead yet." Words of hope.

And so it is with Devenish. In spite of the trials and time pressures we experience as a family—like everyone else—we have a duty to look on the bright side and where possible to celebrate what is positive as well as to give time to problems, without being overwhelmed by them.

So I'll start up this blog again albeit in attenuated form, focussing on what matters most: our family. (For occasional posts on other topics, see the other blogs. I also intend to set up a new blog dedicated to decent music 1950-1980: Lusty Beg Island (Lóiste Beag)) — Coming soon.

It's less than two weeks until Justin's 1st birthday, which is surely something to celebrate.

Autumn Thoughts (Les parapluies de Cherbourg...)

2011-09-25T00:31:00.005+09:00

A time to remember...zonder paraplu. Michel Legrand: click to play.

Scorn not his simplicity (follow up — 500 miles)

2011-09-10T05:15:00.003+09:00

Click to play. Though Devenish is now closed for business, there are still a few loose ends to tie up. And in compiling the complete music list for the site ("All the music"), I found this German version of Phil Coulter's song by Frank Viehweg, one of the stars of this blog.

Enjoy: click to view

Return to Devenish

2011-08-21T05:06:00.001+09:00

Last week, after so many years away, I returned with my family to Devenish island: here are some pictures, more to follow.

Postscript

2011-08-05T00:15:00.005+09:00

Postscript

Love and Death Part 2 ('Cwucial Questions')

2011-07-15T16:24:00.013+09:00

Part II

Having established the logical point that Shakespeare’s characterization of love could be mistaken, even while he ever writ, it is time to tackle the central challenge of demonstrating how and why Shakespeare is wrong about Love in this sonnet. This discussion will only be of value if I can somehow develop a proof, such that it is is more than a matter of subjective opinion, but rather an analytic truth: that is, I will need to show that if my intuitions and analysis are correct, then Shakespeare is wrong by logical necessity.

I aim to achieve this in three stages, moving from a set of general intuitions about what love is, stemming from Julian’s question of some weeks ago, through an exploration of Shakespeare’s metaphors in the sonnet—explaining why they are so unsatisfactory given these intuitions—to a linguistic consideration of ‘Love as concept’ and love as an English predicate, exposing the gap between these two notions. May God forgive me if I end up sounding like a literary critic or—geschweige denn, God forbid—a cognitive linguist: I pretend no talent or experience in either domain. And yet in the words of the sadly under-rated Spandau Ballet—and the justly under-rated Wally Lamb: I know this much is true. I’ll end the piece with a brief discussion of episode two of the second series of Wallander, the Swedish detective show (Prästen—The Priest), which provides the most beautiful, accurate and revealing representation of love, jealousy, death—and what is mistakenly called ‘chemistry’—of any piece of contemporary drama.

First, to Julian's question: "Daddy, do you love me more than Sean?". This affected me at the time, and has bothered me since. The trite and politic answer, which is the one I probably gave (being generally a trite and politic sort of person) is: "No, don't be silly, I love you both equally, and baby Justin too." Yet the truth is that there can be no answer to this; the question is a non-sequitur. There are two kinds of reason for this, one quantitative, the others qualitative. The dull, quantitative reason—for arguments about quantities are rarely of interest to anyone except university and health service administrators, computational linguists, baseball fans, and some autistic children—is this: I cannot compare what I cannot measure. Since I don't know how much I love my eldest son, it's impossible to say whether I love my middle child more or less. (The claim that I'm advancing here is that love is never unconditional, not that it is not infinite.) Of course, I could with some difficulty calculate and compare the acts of parental love: since Sean is 5 years older than his brother I must have expressed my love for him on more occasions. But that would yield a meaningless statistic, since—as in the case of language—it is the immanent mental state(s), not the associated behaviors, that are important; (emotional) 'competence, not performance' in linguistics jargon. Incidently, this is another place where Shakespeare is mistaken: the line "Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken" clearly implies that one can measure love ('take his height'). But this is wrong: Love's height is as well unknown as is his worth.

As for the qualitative reasons for the unanswerability of Julian's question, these are considerably more interesting. First off is the observation that my love for Sean is qualitatively different from my love for Julian or Justin, or indeed my love (of any kind for any other human being; be it sexual or filial, parental or vicarious—eros or agape). So, even if I could compare amounts, it would be to compare two different properties; as it were, chocolate ice-cream vs. sushi, waterskiing vs. piano-playing. Only an alien, or other creature devoid of Theory of Mind, would think to ask about such preferences, and yet we frequently ask about love, as though it were the same on each occasion.

This reason, of course, underpins the other glib answer I could have given Julian, and which we too commonly use to wriggle out of tight spots: "I love you both equally, but in different ways." Glib though it may be, it expresses a powerful truth. For love is different, every time, and each time around; if this were not the case, there might be very little reason to go on living. This is why jealousy and envy in respect of love is so deeply irrational: it makes no sense to be jealous of someone's love for another person, since you could not enjoy that strain of love in any case; it is—as the measurers would say—a 'non-transferable' benefit. This does not mean that jealousy is irrational tout court: for love (of any type) takes time, attention and energy, and all of these are finite resources. Our capacity for loving relationships may be unbounded, but our time is not, and we may rightly resent the person who steals from us our lover's hours. Which brings me rather naturally to the next error in the sonnet: 'Love is Time's fool', as are we all—as Shakespeare himself noted in many other places:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

But perhaps the more important question is why love is different every time. To this question, the most obvious answer, which is no doubt partly correct, is that as we are all constituted differently, different physical bodies as it were—so the interactions between us will perforce be different as well. Just as sound-waves produce a different effect when they come into contact with different surfaces, or a ball assumes a different trajectory as a consequence of the smoothness of the cushion, the composition and weight of the golf club, the tension of the racquet strings, the angle of the kicker’s foot—pick your favourite sporting metaphor—so the quality and intensity of our emotional interactions will be determined and individuated by our physical properties; the roughness of our edges, the depths of our respective layers…But this is ballistic love, love as Newtonian physics. Or perhaps, love as inorganic chemistry: the high-school chemistry teacher safeguards his job—and his charges—by knowing which chemical compounds will react in which range of specific conditions; a peck of this, a pinch of that, heated above this or that critical temperature. Love whose outcomes can be replicated, as long as the initial conditions remain the same, as long as the same quantities of chemicals are combined: 'Take a girl like you,’ a guy like me, and the results will be the same each time. Except that they won't of course, for the physics and chemistry both change, as a result of contingent experience. I am not the person I was last week, let alone thirty years ago: my physique and chemistry is altered, mutated, by the history of my interactions, and by the ravages of Time and Fate.

What’s more, even if I had remained constant the nature of my relationship to another person would have changed as a function of the others in my universe of discourse. A basic and enduring insight of linguistic structuralism is that elements have meaning only in relation to one another, whether one considers word-sense, or semantic roles, or any other notional constituent of the grammatical system. In a language like Japanese, for example, without a separate word for foot, one’s leg (ashi) extends from hip to toe; in a language like English, with such a word foot~feet, the meaning of leg is discretely terminated—docked, as it were—at the ankle. (If we need an expression to cover both leg and foot, we have recourse to technical language—lower limb—but in English no single morpheme can do the job for us). Or, in respect of semantic roles, the interpretation of a subject noun-phrase is immediately transformed from ‘involved participant/experiencer’ to ‘agent’ by the presence of an object in the same clause: cf. Alice burned with righteous indignation/Alice burned the toast.

It is the same with love—as concept: I’ll come to the predicate meaning anon. The particular quality of my love for Julian is affected by the presence of his siblings as much as by his character and mine: it is different since he became the middle child, and can never be like that of an only child, as it was for Sean before Julian came along. We are all equally—but disparately—victims of birth order. Likewise, my response to him will be continually adjusted by the myriad interactions with all of the other people I know and care about, not just now—over whatever stretch of proximate time that term extends—but in all my recorded experience.

(If the enduring insight of structuralism was the essential interrelatedness of things, its enduring flaw—which persists in post-structuralist linguistics, including generativism, as well as in all conventional science—is its zealous ahistoricism: the notion that current physical, chemical and biological states form coherent, closed systems, and that everything can be explained by internal, synchronic mechanisms. In the case of love, though—and I suspect, of any construct complex enough to be intellectually interesting, including language—this is tosh, bunkum, a face-spiting nasal amputation (so to speak). A ‘misleading idealization,’ at best. For the particular quality of love I feel for any person is constantly infused and infected by past associations, and remembered sensations: a certain perfume, the after-dinner cigarette, that view from the bridge in the summer of ’83; the recollection of some private ritual. I leave the details to experts—Baudelaire or Proust—but the point should be clear: our current feelings and emotional responses are the non-linear sum of our life’s travails. Which is, no doubt, why it is so damned easy to be young, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time...)

But if only a fraction of this is correct—if love is dynamic, interactive, ever-changing, always contingent, if it is neither (classical) physics nor (inorganic) chemistry, but rather biochemistry—the biochemistry of the specific human at that, not the disembodied gene—then Shakespeare just has to be wrong:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove;
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark

If Love did not alter when it alteration finds, it would not be human love: it would be an aberration of Nature, wherein no straight lines are found;
If Love did not bend with the remover to remove, we should lose contact with those we love everyday;
If Love were an ever-fixed mark, it would have no place in our metaphysics, for nothing else is so rigid in that domain;
If Love is the star to every wandering bark, then it is also a wandering star (as all stars are).

And yet, though the metaphors are bankrupt (!), there is something true about the basic sentiment. What Shakespeare is surely right about—what is eternally fascinating—is the constancy of the fact of the love that can exist between two people: the qualities of that relationship may change almost beyond recognition, the individuals themselves may change, still the connection remains, at times tugging, churning, comforting, flowing. It’s just that there are better metaphors for this. For instance, if I am loved by someone, I am paddling in their stream; however I move my feet their water surrounds me. Or again, I once said to Sean, ‘I love you as I love my little finger’—I still feel that constant inseparability, even when we fight and argue. There is no rigidity to this type of constancy. Quite the contrary: like the water of the river, it alters where it alteration finds, it can do no other.

In the final part of this piece—should it ever appear—I’ll consider the predicate ‘love,’ rather than the concept. This really might be for linguists only, except that you’ll miss the discussion of Wallander...Which would be a shame. There again, you’d be better off just watching it without commentary.

End of Part II.

Intermission

2011-07-10T08:21:00.002+09:00

For anyone who cares, the Love and Death post will be completed next week. Meantime, we should celebrate the end of the rainy season in this part of Japan. Had it lasted one more week I might have lost the will to live (less melodramatically, the will to live on Rokko): after weeks of living in thick swirling cloud, the sunshine has broken through...

Thanks too to Kayo and Nathan for a great end-of-rain barbecue!

Love and Death Part 1 ('A kiss to build a dream on')

2011-07-07T20:50:00.041+09:00

And jealousy, Time and infinite longing. So nothing serious, then. Click to play.

Let’s start with Shakespeare and me. First, the words of one of his most famous sonnets, which I now recall was read at our wedding ceremony…

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove;
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheek
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

…then the words I wrote a few weeks ago on the topic, with particular reference to the love of one’s children:

There is no such thing as unconditional love, beyond the intoxication of adolescence. There are always strings. It’s simply that for our children we are infinitely willing to alter the conditions of our emotional contracts, on the turn of a dime......whereas for most other people we are not: in the case of other adults, we prefer to maintain the illusion of personal integrity, and clinging forever to the letter—rather than the spirit—of the original document. As if were real...

Clearly both of us can’t be right: either Love alters when it alteration finds (as I suggest), or it alters not—[it] is an ever-fixed mark), as Will would have it: there is not much wriggle room here.

Now, I shan’t for a moment claim any superiority of style, scansion or high sentiment—no-one is likely to have my words performed at their wedding or engagement party—but nor am I about to recant. This is because I believe as a matter of fact that Shakespeare was dead wrong in his characterization of Love. Being a theoretical linguist in my day job rather than a poet means that what counts for me as an empirical demonstration may seem highly abstruse and pedantic to some, but I use the only analytical tools I have to hand. If you don’t care for, or about, arguments of this kind, and simply want to enjoy the sonnet as a expression of a poetic ideal—what love should be, not what it is—read no further, though bear in mind that throughout the sonnet Shakespeare uses is not should be; he is (emphatically now!) making existential claims.

Part I: A little bit of Logic

Before attempting to show why ‘this be error, upon [him] proved…’, it’s worth pointing out, as I mentioned last time, that Shakespeare is not just advancing a false claim, he’s sneaky with it too, using the last two lines to insulate this claim from any criticism by means of dirty logic. Indeed, these lines may count as the finest and most creative misuse of material implication in English literature (and which I’ll use in next term’s Meaning & Cognition class). For those unversed (!) in basic logic, material implication refers to the truth or falsity of ‘if…then’ conditional sentences, in which the truth of the consequent (then)-clause necessarily guarantees the truth of the whole conditional, irrespective of the truth of the antecedent clause. By embedding the ‘this be error’ in the antecedent (if)-clause—and then further muddying the waters with implicit or actual negatives (error, never, nor no man ever)—Shakespeare is able to trade on a common misunderstanding of logical properties to scotch any possible contradiction.

The truth table below shows that the only way for a conditional statement of this kind to be false is where the antecedent clause is true and the consequent clause is false, as in the following example:

1. If it’s raining outside, then a lot more people than usual will be carrying umbrellas.

(1) is true if, as a matter of contingent fact, it is raining outside (A=T) and a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=T). (1) is also true if it’s not raining outside (A=F) and it’s not the case that a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=F). And it is true even if it’s not raining (A=F) and a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=T). It’s only false if the consequent clause is false, but where the antecedent clause is true: i.e., it is raining (A=T), but no more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=F) (~q -> ~p).

This is of course how the ‘then I’m a Dutchman’ trope works in an argument.* For example, if I say “If Brit-art is Art, then I’m a Dutchman’” then the fact that I am not a Dutchman logically implies (the claim) that Brit-art is not Art (~q -> ~p).

Shakespeare’s ploy is devious because he exploits the fact that in ordinary language (outside of Dutchman contexts) people typically don’t think logically: we can’t help but interpret conditional statements as bi-conditionals, assuming either that both parts of a condition must be true or both parts false. Consider a well-worn statement (in our household at least) such as that in (2):

2. If you don’t do your homework, we won’t go to Mr. Donuts.

This is correctly interpreted by most children as blackmail, a threat not to go to Mr. Donuts if the homework is not done. But it’s also incorrectly—if conveniently—interpreted by many children—though not Sean, who’s now very wise to such tricks!—as an implicit bribe: if you finish your homework, we shall go for donuts. But this doesn’t follow: ~ ((~q -> ~p) -> (~p -> ~q)). I could truthfully utter this even if I had no intention of going to Mr. Donuts under any circumstances: that wouldn’t be nice, of course, but it would be perfectly logical. No-one said logic was fair, or reasonable.

Because of this common interpretive failing, when we read the last two lines of the sonnet, it is natural to infer that the antecedent clause and the consequent clause must agree in truth or falsity (TT, FF): since we know that I never writ, nor no man ever loved is false, we assume that this be error must be false, too. (Note the tricky implicit negative in error: if [this be error] were false, it would mean that this [=the claim] is not false, but true—that Shakespeare is right about love. ) But really Shakespeare is playing us for fools, using a cunning variant of the Dutchman ploy. Because [this be error] is in fact true…

*Needless to say, this ploy doesn’t work—or works differently—if one happens to be Dutch. Helaas!

End of Part I

Just in case this all seems too serious, and for want of a better place to put this clip, we should start with some comedy, lest we end up "like the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat...that isn't there!" Enjoy (Click to play)

More delays (What a good boy/Smooth Operator)

2011-07-04T01:37:00.008+09:00

It really is coming soon. Should have been now, but the distraction of gnat bites, plus the need to find 15 multiple choice questions on Child Language for a makeup midterm tomorrow morning, have combined to delay this effort for one or two more evenings. In the meantime, two trivial notices from a day spent taxiing children around Kobe:

Click to play
The first is that one insect bite may not be a bad thing—even if it's not John Donne's Flea—since the itch reminds you forcefully that you are human with a real body, and not a brain in a vat. (Or at least that you were human once—it's hard to exclude the possibility that you are now an envatted brain with a recollection of having been bitten. But then I realise that in my memory, I was much younger and fitter than this, and my flesh a good deal more perfect, so this itch must be real, for better or worse). The same principle as a hairshirt, I suppose, without the self-hatred. However, though one bite may be sobering, several—all performing a complex symphony of irritation—conspire to become a very bad thing indeed. Eeyyaaaa!

Click to play
Second is the observation that for as long as there is Starbucks, Sade (the 80s singer, not the 18th century aristocrat) will not want for a royalty check (cheque). I'm not sure how many times it is now that I have drunk a tall cappuccino—which is neither one nor the other—to the tune of Smooth Operator, as again today. And yet, how marvelously apt, for this is a marriage of souls 'as dreams are made on', the café and its song: both professional, innocuous, welcoming; both transcending national and cultural boundaries with ease and poise, pleasing to the senses, contemporary yet 'established', devoid of class, yet studiously bourgeois; both ultimately as unsatisfying as they are inauthentic—the places where we pass our lives while aspiring to something better...

Tot straks/à bientôt.

For German speakers looking for an antidote to Starbucks, click to play

Another Day (Another Day)

2011-06-30T00:45:00.002+09:00

No, this isn't it—the last post, that is—but perhaps it should be. After Scott Walker, I thought it would be a while before stumbling across another great singer-songwriter. And then via Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush (duet), another great talent is unearthed: Roy Harper in a 1978 Rockpalast live recording. There goes the next hour of my potential sleeping time..!

...She really needs to say:

"I loved you once a long time ago, you know
Where the winds on forgetmenots blow
But I couldn't let myself go, not knowing what on earth there was to know.
But I wish that I had, 'cause it makes me so sad,
that I never had one of your children."

Coming next: Season Finale

2011-06-28T16:12:00.000+09:00

In the spirit of American soaps, this trailer is to announce that the next blog entry will probably be the last, more considered, piece before September. There may be other random picture updates, and family news, but that's about it until the autumn. The summer season is upon us, and I've just realised that I do have to write a new paper for a workshop on polarity emphasis in Ghent at the end of September—see Inishmacsaint—as well as finish the first chapter of the Vietnamese monograph. Not to mention teaching, and exams, and booking a ticket. All before the end of July. So, if after the end of this week, there is no more activity, it's not for want of material, but for lack of time...

Up next then: why Shakespeare and Chomsky were wrong, and Elvis (or rather, Shroeder/MacFarland) may just have been right. To get in the mood, click to play.

Coming to terms with normality

2011-06-24T11:44:00.005+09:00

Yesterday, while walking to my place of work (aka Starbucks in Okamoto) I saw a group of three Down Syndrome children in school uniform with their carers, waiting at the JR station. They were about 12 years old, and they seemed to be quite happy and—as we say in British English—'relatively together.' (It has not occurred to me before what a strange expression this is). It should have been a hopeful scene: instead, tears welled up; I had to turn away.

Sometimes, realization does not so much dawn, as poke you in the eye. After nearly eight months, I believed until that moment that I had accepted Justin's condition, and moved on to work through a present and a future quite different from the one we had imagined before his birth. This belief was encouraged by the excellent physical progress he is making—he is only a month or so behind his typically-developing peers—and by his evident happiness and contentment: he really is a wonderful baby, and I love him quite as much as I do my other children.

At this point, I'm supposed to say "I wouldn't change him for the world." I know that this line is expected because it crops up so often in blog posts from parents of DS children, as well as in this booklet, which some friends in Sheffield very kindly sent to us, as a help and comfort. Though the booklet is both helpful and comforting, I can't write these words as it would be dishonest. (This blog may not contain the whole truth, but there is not a word of a lie in it.) For the truth is, if I could, I would change him, I would remove his disability, I would give him all the same life chances that Sean and Julian enjoy. Whatever they make of those chances is beyond my control—I can't even get them to brush their teeth in the mornings—but at least they have choices to make. It is not because I love him less that I would change him, nor would I love him more if by a genetic miracle that third chromosome were deleted from every cell in his body. It is because I love him as much as I do that I would give the world to alter his genetic code, so that in 10 years' time, he can stand at the same JR station, and decide for himself whether to take the train to Sannomiya, or Osaka, or to turn around and walk into Starbucks for a Mocha Frappuccino. So that when he is 10, like Sean, he can understand and share the joke of the bizarrely named ACID MILK delivery truck—we think they're a courier service—that we see on the way to the supermarket. So that he can say "on the other hand...", and comprehend the vital importance of perspective-taking. (I know there are many more typical human beings that appear to lack this capacity, not just among our political leaders.)

But the fact that I would change him 'for the world' means, I suppose, that I haven't come to terms with his—our—situation. Perhaps, as I joked in the last Inishmacsaint post, I really am "a deeply superficial person". Whatever the truth of this may be, it's clear there's a gulf between the external notion of habitual, usual and the internal concept normal that I have yet to bridge. That's the trouble with being an idealist, I guess.

Day job

2011-06-23T13:35:00.000+09:00

The reason I haven't followed up on Shakespeare yet—or even done the decent thing in posting family pictures, though here's one (!) to be going on with—is that I've been busy thinking about linguistics, for a change. If you're a linguist, or feeling masochistic please have a look at this, and give me your feedback (if you think it's worth it); if you're not, normal family service will resume shortly.

Grasshopper Mind — Postscript (Montague Terrace)

2011-06-21T06:32:00.002+09:00

It was only a matter of time, perhaps, but it took me too long to discover that the English-speaking world has its own Brel: from Tim Hardin...to Scott Walker: click to play.

The little clock's stopped ticking now
We're swallowed in the stomached rue
The only sound to tear the night
Comes from the man upstairs

His bloated belching figure stomps
He may crash through the ceiling soon
The window sees trees cry from cold
And claw the moon

But we know don't we
And we'll dream won't we
Of Montague Terrace in blue

The girl across the hall makes love
Her thoughts lay cold like shattered stone
Her thighs are full of tales to tell
Of all the nights she's known

Your eyes ignite like cold blue fire
The scent of secrets everywhere
A fist filled with illusions
Clutches all our cares

But we know don't we
And we'll dream won't we
Of Montague Terrace in blue oh in blue

Grasshopper Mind (Misty Roses)

2011-06-17T02:07:00.003+09:00

Click to play

Do you have a 'Grasshopper Mind?'

When I was around 12 years old, there was a recurrent advertisement—Japanese readers, think A/XA Direct!—placed on the lower right column of the front page of the Daily Telegraph, one that caught my eye whenever I would pass it on the news agent's shelf. (At the time, I had no idea of the conservative politics of this paper, which I later shunned, and now accept as not much worse than the best British print journalism can offer, and a damn sight better than most—God protect us from the Daily Mail: all I knew then was that it was English politics and therefore moderately foreign: for the same reason—my xenophilia started early—I was attracted to the paper, and especially to its advertisements. I also read the Irish Times for good measure, but never the local papers, on either side of the sectarian divide, even though my own father had started his career as a journalist on the Belfast Telegraph, and would, I believe, have been happiest had he stayed there.)

To the point, Nigel: the advertisement claimed to offer a cure—or at least some self-help therapy—to those plagued by a Grasshopper—should that have been locust?—Mind: the chronic inability to stay focussed, the constant desire to flit from one topic to another, from one half-finished project to the next, hopping cheerfully and somewhat rapaciously across the intellectual landscape, feeding on bright green leaves...

As should be abundantly clear by now, I have that Grasshopper Mind to this day: I didn't send off £2.75 plus P&P—I really can't remember how much it was, but it was post-decimalisation—but I doubt it would have done any good at all. Even then, I was too far gone...

In retrospect, my Grasshopper Mind has stood me in good stead, all these years. Though it almost certainly has held me back in academia—where the (open) secret of success is to publish a thousand variants of the same damn paper and not to encroach on anyone else's micro-plot "over a distinguished career"—the irrational desire to follow a trail of information wherever it might lead, has kept life interesting, and brought me to places and people, ideas and tastes, that I might otherwise never have encountered, and been so much poorer for it.

So today, my wandering rewarded me by introducing me to the American singer/song-writer, Tim Hardin, whose best-known song If I were a carpenter will be familiar to many, most likely through Bobby Darin or Johnny Cash cover versions. Tim Hardin, like Bobby Darin, died tragically young. Neither made it to 40, both had much more to give the world; in Hardin's case, death was the result of an accidental heroin overdose. Listening to his songs now, and his singing voice—which is reminiscent in tone and content of the much underrated Ron Sexsmith—is to realise how great American popular music can get beyond the cliches of country. Misty Roses is just brilliant, lyrically and harmonically.

So, how did I end up here? It's been an interesting trip. Yesterday, you may recall, to wish Julian Happy Birthday I posted a link to Les dates anniversaires by Yves Duteil. This song comes from a compilation album that also contains Si j'étais ton chemin (If I were your road). As I listened to that song, I was struck by the structural, thematic and tonal similarities between it and a great little song by the German singer/song-writer Frank Viehweg (remember Nicht mehr als), called Alles was ich kann (all that I can), but also by the contrasts: though both entertain a similar hypothetical—if I were the most important person in your life—the Viehweg song is wittier and yet at the same time more conventional, concerned as it with domestic romantic love, whereas Duteil—as so often throughout his career—is expressing a different kind of love, parental love, agape, empathy with children and childhood. His sincerity lacks a little humour, though, comes across a tad sanctimonious at times. Mea culpa, too. And all this put me in mind of If I were a carpenter, which is where today's journey began, and where all the time goes in...

It will be 2am again before I get all the links sorted out: these days I'm averaging three hours' uninterrupted sleep, which is not good, as I found out in reading another paper this morning by St. Clair and Monaghan on grammar abstraction during sleep, but that's a whole nother story, as they say [hops off...].

Five today! (Les dates anniversaires)

2011-06-16T01:28:00.005+09:00

Click to play (Amazon—No YouTube Available)

It's Julian's birthday today. Hard to credit that five years have gone by: a scrap of early middle age for me, an unremarkable quinquennium for the world, a whole lifetime for him. My raison d'être—these three children, each providing their own annual well-spaced milestone (January, June, November), measuring out our lives together. Birthdays mean more than presents and cake*, or the mere passing of time, as Yves Duteil points out in his beautiful song Les dates anniversaires: they connect us those we love, wherever they are, and remind us to look out at the passing countryside...

J'ai un profond respect des dates anniversaires
Ces portes que le Temps dispose autour de nous
Pour ouvrir un instant nos coeurs à ses mystères
Et permettre au passé de voyager vers nous.

...
Il existe en tous cas dans les anniversaires
Une part de magie qui fait surgir d'ailleurs
Les visages ou les mots de ceux qui nous sont chers
Des êtres qui nous manquent et dorment dans nos coeurs.
...
Sans amour notre vie n'est plus qu'un long voyage
Un train qui nous emporte à travers les années
Mais celui qui regarde un peu le paysage
Ouvre déjà son coeur pour une éternité.

Full lyrics here

Happy Birthday, Julian, Bon Anniversaire!

*These things are important too, though: we're off to Toys 'R' Us in the afternoon!

Snippets (The Rules)

2011-06-10T14:49:00.001+09:00

Click to play
...Salesman says this vacuum's guaranteed, it
Could suck an ancient virus from the sea,
It could put the dog out of a job,
Could make the traffic stop, so
Little thoughts can safely get across...

It's the rules, it's the rules
Guaranteed or not, it's the rules.

Tragically Hip, The Rules (Phantom Power)

This piece is a placeholder, and will disappear, I expect, whenever I have time to develop the previous post on life in Japan, and to expand on the second of the two 'little thoughts' I've had today that have nothing to do with reviewing linguistics abstracts, revising a syntax paper and trying to prepare three midterm examinations before next week. (Incidently, if you are a linguist reading this, please have a look at the Inishmacsaint piece, and let me know what you think; if you're not, you probably don't want to go there). It's Poets' Day, effectively the weekend in a couple of hours' time, from the time that Sean takes the bus down the hill from school to meet me at Julian's nursery—after that, banal domesticity trumps reflection, until Monday 9am. So, here they are, in no particular order, those thoughts:

Why does nobody want you unless you're unavailable? (I was thinking particularly about employment, but it may apply more generally.)
Shakespeare was wrong about love, in perhaps his most famous sonnet on the subject—see below—at least as it is usually interpreted. Not only that, his beautifully crafted error conceals a wicked logic trap. Billy Joel, on the other hand, was right (maybe!). As so often. All will be revealed next week.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove;

Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken

It is the star to every wandering bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheek

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI.

(No, in case you might be thinking it, I don't know it by heart. But it did come up in last night's CSI: Las Vegas episode—another plus for crap tv shows!—and got me thinking again about my previous post on the subject last month (not the crime show, unconditional love)).

Here's wishing us all a good weekend!

Into the trees (A Forest)

2011-06-07T14:38:00.005+09:00

Click to play
It's been over a week since the last post, and so there is a lot to catch up on. What I want to talk about in this post are cultural variation—those Japanese-English contrasts that have amazed or repelled me recently—in particular, in what is regarded as acceptable driving style and desirable living, and this is what I shall do, presently. But I know that what most people who read this want to hear about are the children—it is a family blog after all (in fact, for those interested in less domestic concerns, there are a few new posts on the Inishmacsaint blog).
So, the first news is that the children are all fine. Everything is as dyfunctionally normal and ridiculously noisy, raucous and untidy as a family with three boys—one not yet even crawling—can be: despite the impression of cozy fraternal affection that may be suggested by certain photographs on this blog, Sean and Julian have now moved sibling rivalry and gratuitous bickering up to a level familiar only to skilled mediaeval torturers, in which mere gesturing is sufficient to provoke pain and start conflict all over again. I'm sure they love each other really, but it's sad to watch sometimes, and worse still to have to intervene. As for Justin, he continues to grow well, and has started on 'more solid' food. His vocalizations are sometimes unsettling—being more corvine than cooing, gurgling or babbling—but he seems to be happy enough in himself, if smiles and kicking count as reliable evidence. His sleep patterns too are a cause of stress to me—what used to be the 4:30 am alarm caw has now moved back/forward (Lera Boroditsky has been dining out on this perspective problem for years now) to 3:00 am; since I only went to bed at 1:30 am last night, this was a rude awakening. But all of this is comparatively minor, and will—must!—pass; otherwise, such disorder is as good as one can expect. Voltaire had it right here:

Ceux qui ont avancé que tout est bien ont dit une sottise: il fallait dire que tout est au mieux.

[And here too: 'Un instant de bonheur vaut mille ans dans l’histoire.' Something to hold on to, in moments of domestic purgatory]

With luck, I'll get to the main text tonight...!

Postscript: I didn't get to it, and it won't be today, either. In the meantime, you can find some recent pictures of the children here.

Clouds (Both sides now)

2011-05-29T01:01:00.003+09:00

Early Friday morning (4:50 am): View down through the clouds to Kobe

Click to play

Rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air
and feather canyons everywhere, I've looked at clouds that way.

But now they only block the sun, they rain and they snow on everyone.
So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way.

It's been, as they say, a funny old day. Extremely quiet, as Sean is away on a five-day field trip with his elementary school to explore the delights of a typhoon-swept island just to the Southwest of Awaji-shima (which you would just be able to see if this picture was the type that allowed you to squint around to the right). Also, extremely wet, yet again, even in town (and almost certainly for Seán): after the last five weeks, if any Japanese person criticizes British weather in my presence, they can expect less than no sympathy at all, possibly a sharp kick—and it isn't even the so-called 'rainy season' yet. It is hard to imagine that it can really get more damp and grisly than it is already; the only consolation being that sometimes—as yesterday morning and again this evening, we're high enough up the mountain to avoid the worst of it ('That is why we have come up on this mountain, to be safe...') I am reminded of a ski-trip to Whistler Mountain near Vancouver a few years' ago now, when, instead of skiing down out of the clouds, it was blind skiing through drenching fog for the last 100 metres down to the lift. Have I mentioned that I'm sick of this weather?!

Most of the day passed in the way of damp Saturdays in the city, unseized and unseasoned—though we had a good lunch in a pasta restaurant at Hankyu Rokko station called Ryu-Ryu, whose toothpick wrappers boast of 'serving pasta and happiness in Kobe since 1970', which by coincidence is the year of the first Joni Mitchell video recording you might be listening to, if you had clicked the link above. (It's worth noting that the reason we ended up there was that we were turned away from a much more up-market Italian bistro in Nishinomiya for being 'unsuitably accompanied', by Julian: they refused to admit children under 6, even at lunchtime on Saturday, with us standing pathetically in the rain.)

The day ended oddly too with me responding to the comments of a 'friend' of a Facebook 'friend', who—in a less than reasoned comparison (of his view of) European reactions to Israeli and Syrian aggression—accuses Europeans (en bloc and en masse) of widespread anti-Semitism and "depravity":

Really, at my age, I should know better than to even engage in conversation with someone who fails to see the irony of accusing hundreds of millions of people of xenophobia and race hatred, while using expressions such as "X is in their blood and their bones". What hope for peace when prejudice is so powerfully expressed? Still, I didn't know better, and did protest the point, as pointless as this gesture was. For my pains, I was sent a series of articles, which indeed suggest that the problem of anti-Semitism in Europe is much greater—and more dangerous—than I suspected. But that does not excuse or lend any significant support to the blanket charge of depravity. Yes, in my life I have met many people who are critical of the government of Israel (including not a few Israelis.) I am critical of Israel, but then like most citizens of the world who are not blinded by chauvinism, there is not a country I am uncritical of. Not that it makes a blind bit of difference. I have also met many people who are critical, and fearful, of what they understand of Zionism (granted their—and my—understanding may be deeply flawed). But I can honestly say that in all my life, over many thousands of encounters, and hundreds of thousands of conversations, I have only directly met two instances of anti-Semitism. Two may be two too many, but it is hardly a majority view.

As I've noted before, life is too short and love too precious to engage in political shouting-matches: I just don't have the energy any more. What I do have time for is music, and I'll end this piece with one final quote from a previous post, and a second link to this most wonderful song by Joni Mitchell, thirty years on. If only we all matured so beautifully:

And he took up his 'cello, and he began to play. And someone from the press ran out and said: "Sir, why are you out here playing your 'cello while they're dropping bombs?" And he said: "Why are they dropping bombs, while I am playing my cello?"

Click to play

Tears and fears and feeling proud to say 'I love you' right out loud,
dreams and schemes and circus crowds, I've looked at life that way.
But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads and they tell me that
I've changed.
Something's lost but something's gained in living every day.

I've looked at life from both sides now,
from win and lose, and still somehow
it's life's illusions I recall.
I really don't know life at all.

Toucan Triptych

2011-05-26T15:05:00.000+09:00

Consider these pictures, taken last weekend at Kobe Kachoen (Bird and Flower Park), our refuge from the miserable Sunday weather. The idea is that you get to interact with birds, and both of the older boys were able to feed and/or hold first owls, then toucans, then other smaller water-fowl. A larger selection of pictures can be found here, but what is most interesting is the following sequence of Julian feeding a toucan (the bird of choice of Guinness drinkers everywhere):

Now it may be pure coincidence or a fevered imagination, but the psychologist in me sees a boy subconsciously imitating a bird: down-up-down (all that is missing is the fruit in Julian's mouth!). Parrot-fashion, if you don't mind awful puns. Mirror Neurons, anyone...?

Strawberry Picking (Avec le temps)

2011-05-19T19:10:00.012+09:00

Click to play (Ferré)

It is no small irony that we can’t learn lessons from literature at that point in our lives when they might be most useful to us, and through such learning change things to avert future pain. I’m not talking Hamlet here, or Oedipus Rex—most of us do not, could not, live on such planes of extreme experience; rather, the bourgeois tragedies of everyday adolescence: missed chances, hesitant failure, lost love, the symptoms of obstinate immaturity. It’s not that we can’t relate to it—what twelve year-old cannot understand Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, or the pre-teen protagonists of Kate DiCamillo’s equally wonderful stories The Tiger Rising and Because of Winn-Dixie (both triumphs of modern children’s literature, especially the latter). But it is one thing to empathise with a character, quite another to realize that the character is you—or at least a significant enough part of you that the shock of recognition almost seems physical.

So it was today, several decades too late, that I finally deeply understood the poignancy and ashen heartache of Theodor Storm’s ‘old man’ (the man that Reinhard has become) in the Novelle Immensee (‘The Lake of Bees'), as I accompanied Julian on his nursery excursion to a strawberry-farm, in the wooded countryside behind Rokko not far from Arima. It was a bright, slightly hazy morning, already too hot and bright for those of us genetically deprived of melanin, whose summer hue strikes terror into live lobsters. Julian and I were not alone: we were surrounded by other chattering children, and nattering nursery mums, and every few minutes a country train would shuttle past the farm. A noisy, cheerful, alliterative scene, therefore. And yet suddenly, in the midst of this bustle, rattle and hum, I was transported back, just like Storm’s old man, first to a stuffy mobile classroom in Belfast, circa. November 1979, reading Immensee for the first time (for German A-level), then several years’ forward to a time when I, like Reinhard, failed to seize the moment: remembering the text, but forgetting the lesson yet again.

“…Das brauche ich euch auch wohl nicht zu sagen: wer keine [Erdbeeren] findet, braucht auch keine abzuliefern; aber das schreibt euch wohl hinter euren feinen Ohren, von uns Alten bekommt er auch nichts. Und nun habt ihr für diesen Tag gute Lehren genug; wenn ihr nun noch Erdbeeren dazu habt, so werdet ihr für heute schon durchs Leben kommen…”

["I probably don’t need to say this: whoever doesn’t find any [strawberries] doesn’t need to bring any to us; but get this into your pretty heads, they can’t expect anything from us old folks either. Now, you’ve had enough good lessons for one day; if you collect as many strawberries, you’ll be set for life, at least for today…”]

Theodor Storm, Immensee (Chapter 3 Im Wald/In the Woods)

In Kodachrome, Paul Simon writes:

When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School

It’s a wonder I can think at all,

And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall.

A great song, except that it’s not all crap.

Here’s another one, from a slightly later time: BAP Für ne Moment... 'Un su manche Liter Wasser floß sickdämm ahm Dom vorbei.'). Hardly Ferré, but diverting nonetheless...

Coming down the mountain (Rocky Mountain High)

2011-05-17T09:35:00.001+09:00

Click to play
On a lighter note, some video from last weekend's trip back to Hanshin Country House (site of the 'No Fear' post several months ago. Sean was equally Gung-Ho about this experience, which must rank—per second—as the most expensive fairground attraction in Japan: 600 Yen for a circuit of just under a minute. And, though it wasn't particularly dangerous, I might have been happier if there had been some seat belts in the cars...like Justin's, maybe. Health and Safety would have a field day in this country!

Life and Times? (Piper at the gates of dawn)

2011-05-14T10:22:00.011+09:00

Walking home last Monday evening.

Click to play

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. Lewis Carroll

Feeling damaged today by how accurately this quotation sums up my adult life to this point, and by the related observation that 'winning' is crucially different from merely 'coming first'.

The consolation is the following, more whimsical—or should that be mimsical?—pun by the same author:

No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise. Lewis Carroll

Postscript: the soundtrack for this piece was to have been Underlying Depression, but life is much more nuanced than that, and we all need some more hope...

Happy Birthday Aislinn! (Oud geboren)

2011-05-12T00:39:00.003+09:00

I'm coming to regret that I mentioned summer in the last post—the phrase "don't count your chickens..." comes forcefully to mind—for today (and yesterday, and tomorrow, they say) has been absolutely vile in many parts of Japan, certainly here in Kobe. Until this morning, walking up the hill to Kobe College, I hadn't realized that it was possible to get wet in two directions at once, the drenching rain meeting the soaking sweat halfway. This punishment continued pretty much unabated all day, the only consolation being the view from our bedroom window during a brief lull about an hour ago: looking down from above the cloud is miles (well, several hundred yards) better than sitting inside it.

I hope that climatic conditions are more radiant and cheerful in Carnalea, Co, Down for my sister's birthday. Happy Birthday, Aislinn! I hope too that this post will serve in lieu of a card, and—in place of a present—find below a poor translation of a beautiful Dutch song by Veldhuis & Kemper (Oud geboren 'born old').

(You don't have to know Dutch to enjoy this music, as evidenced by the fact that Julian's very favourite song, which he chooses on my ipod almost every day, is another one by the same artists Ik wou dat ik jou was 'I wish I were you'; there's a longer post coming about this sometime soon. You do need not to be too cynical, though; it has a corrosive effect on all sincerity.

Click to play

Oud geboren

Born Old

Waarom word je niet oud geboren

Why aren't you born old
zodat het leukste nog komen gaat?

So that the best things are still to come?
Alles ging dan achterstevoren

Then everything would be the other way around
en was te vroeg te laat.

And too early would be too late.

Dan was je je onschuld nooit verloren.

Then you would never have lost your innocence
Kreeg je die juist aan het einde terug

You'd get it back right at the end
en was je wijsheid al geboren

And you'd be born with wisdom
je toekomst al achter de rug.

And your future would lie behind your back.

Je elke dag weer iets naïever bent
You become more naive with each passing day
en alles is leuk, want je bent niets gewend.

And everything is great, for you're not accustomed to anything
Tegen het einde goedgelovig en klein,

And towards the end trusting and small
zodat ik niet als de dood voor de dood hoef te zijn.

So that I don't have to be like death before death (?)

....

Dan zag je je lijf steeds sterker worden.

Then you'd see body grow steadily stronger
Had je je jeugd nog voor de boeg.

If your youth was on your prow

Alles kwam goed wat ooit ontspoorde

Whatever derailed would get back on track
en was te laat te vroeg.

And whatever was too late would be too early.

Als ik dan 16 ben geworden,

Then, when I turned sixteen
voer ik m'n laatste strijd.

I'd fight my last battle
Verlies ik opnieuw mijn wilde haren,

I'd lose my wild hair again
maar nu in m'n puberteit.

But now in my puberty

Beter nog, ik wil heen en weer.

Better still, I'd go to and fro
Bijna sterven en dan nog een keer.

Nearly die, then go back again
Hoe het ook gaat, ik wil een zachte dood,

However it goes, I want a gentle death
zodat ik in kan slapen,

So that I can fall...
in kan slapen

fall...
in kan slapen in m'n moeders schoot.

fall asleep in my mother's lap.

Leuk.

Soon Summer (Nicht mehr weit)

2011-05-09T01:20:00.002+09:00

At Shiawase no mura (Happy Village)

Wenn der Sommer nicht mehr weit ist,
Und der Himmel violett,
Weiß ich, das das meine Zeit ist,
Weil die Welt dann wieder breit ist,
Satt, und ungeheuer fett...

Click to play

Being the sometimes exhausted parent of three children hardly leaves the energy to appreciate, much less realize, the potential of this great song by Konstantin Wecker, yet nearly thirty summers after I first heard it, it continues to move and inspire me as much as any other in his repertoire. And, as the weather on Rokko mountain oscillates from dense cloud to clear blue—this evening at 5pm, it was 23 degrees on the hill (28 on Rokko island earlier in the day), while yesterday evening after a beautiful day, you couldn't see more than 10 metres—it's clear that summer is on its way, and we mustn't hesitate.

After a somewhat grim start to the week, reflected in the last post, I'm pleased to report that things have improved considerably in our small patch of Earth, at least...

Working backwards from today, Seán (and now Julian too!) started playing Sunday football at an altogether friendlier and more relaxed training session for kids 5-13, organized and run in English by some teachers and senior students of Canadian Academy on Rokko Island. I'm still somewhat ambivalent about Rokko Island, as perhaps I can discuss in another post, but this morning it was about as attractive as planned ex-patriot communities on tree-lined grid-plan boulevards with all amenities built on an artificial island constructed of landfill can get, which was very—and the kids were able to play on real grass! Yesterday, we spent part of the day with our friends Rob and Hideko, and their child Eureka, at Rokko Country House (aka, some months ago, as the Rokko ski hill) now transformed from ski resort to go-kart park and boating lake). On Friday, I was treated to a welcome party by colleagues at Kobe College—thanks to all who came, and to Yumi for babysitting and staying over so that we could both go out. And on Thursday, we spent the afternoon at Shiawase no Mura (Happy Village), Kobe City's answer to Centerparcs (I guess, not having visited the latter) which was though Golden Week-crowded, an extremely pleasant way to divert the children on yet another public holiday, during which Julian managed to ride his bike without stabilizers. So all things considered, some reasons to be cheerful. If Justin would only sleep past 5am, I might even have the energy to enjoy it all...

Wenn mein Ende nicht mehr weit ist,
ist der Anfang schon gemacht.
Weil's dann keine Kleinigkeit ist,
ob die Zeit verta'ne Zeit ist,
die man mit sich zugebracht.

An Drochshaol (Nicht mehr als)

2011-05-02T01:32:00.006+09:00

I have an uneasy feeling that this post will have the flavour of a homily, which Google dictionary variously defines as: '1. A religious discourse that is intended primarily for spiritual edification rather than doctrinal instruction; a sermon; 2. A tedious moralizing discourse'. Perhaps it's that time of the week, more likely, the particular circumstances of my day: whatever the reason, I need to explore some more difficult subjects, if only—very selfishly—as a means of putting my own troubles in perspective; so, if this comes across as a sermon, too bad. Also, to the three, or five, or seventeen even, who may read this, you are scarcely a captive audience, you can (do) leave at any time...

Click to play

As background to these reflections, a wonderful piece by a little appreciated German poet and song-writer—the English word folk-singer does no justice to the likes of Konstantin Wecker, Reinhard Mey, nor to the singer in question: Frank Viehweg. One day, in another life perhaps, I'll find the time to write that book which introduces these Liedermacher to the English-speaking world, singer-poets who so intelligently weave personal, political and social themes in simple well-crafted lyrics, usually with only basic guitar accompaniment, and still manage to find a receptive audience. In the absence of that book, or even the time to sketch a worthwhile translation, this song can be paraphrased as follows: 'I'm no action hero, I can't end wars or suffering through heroic physical acts or news-catching gestures, but I can give you these few words to try to make a difference.'

Nein, ich hab' nicht mehr als ein paar Worte, gegen alle Kriege und für Dich...

Increasingly, I am coming to the conclusion that, as a native-speaker of English, the only—but totally sufficient—reason for learning another language is to understand its poetry and other lyric writing; everything else can be readily translated, has already been translated, or is just not worth the effort. Incidently, if you do understand this song, then you'll need to hear Leicht verschrammt (from the same concert, Viehweg's translation of a song by Jaromír Nohavica), which is a simple masterpiece. I'm sure it's not the 'same song' that Nohavica wrote, but very occasionally an accomplished poet can create an equally interesting version, as was also the case for Mike Poulton's so-called translation of Schiller's Dom Carlos, one of the few plays I watched at the Crucible theatre when we first came to Sheffield.

Before the need for sleep overtakes me, here are the three things that—at least temporarily—smothered my self-pity today.

First, I discovered last night on Facebook that a party is taking place today in Belle Neige (QC), une journée de compassion et solidarité, for the family of Patrick, the son of my friend Lise Vinette. Patrick, who turns 37 this week, and is married with two children, Nathan and Penelope, was diagnosed last year with Lou Gehrig's disease (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, ALS). Even though I have little faith in faith—my East Belfast upbringing outside of my immediate family has given me a awesome fear of God without the comfort—I have prayed quite often since Justin was born, and I pray now that Patrick and his family will be stronger for the support they receive today. Bon courage!

Second, driving up Rokko today after collecting Sean's tropical fish from his friend Natsuki, who's been looking after them for a while since we went to England (there's a longer story here, but it'll have to wait; in brief, all but one perished on the journey 'pining for the fjords [?]') we passed an old man, who we see often, painfully, and slowly making his way up the first kilometre of the hill. This man must be at least 70 years' old, bent over, wizened embodied, yet strangely vital, doggedly genki. It is said that he is homeless—or rather, that his home is under the flyover bridge that scoops traffic up a shortcut crossing the valley above the more winding old road we were driving on. It seems that he makes his way down to the city in the morning, then spends a good part of the day trudging back up. Our Sisyphus. And like the mythical hill-climber, we only ever see him walking up, never down, as though perhaps a car arrives under cover of darkness every night, bundles the poor man in, and leaves him stranded at hillfoot, to begin the climb again. There is little expression in his face, and no-one ever stops to offer help (myself included): one has to wonder why he goes on, other than sheer force of habit.

The third topic, which informs the title of this piece, was the Irish famine. I started thinking about this recently, when finally I got around to listening to Famine, another track on the Sineád O'Connor CD Universal Mother, which also features Scorn not his simplicity, the focus blog post about Justin a little while ago. I am very grateful to Sue Smith for sending me this, even if—or perhaps because (!)—the Famine rap is so troubling it's taken my mind off a lot of other stuff recently. So this article will come ...but not tonight (it's already 1:30 and Justin will be up at 5) Meantime, here the track.

Click to play

Will this wind....?

2011-04-27T01:44:00.003+09:00

Yesterday's view down the hill

As I write this piece, with the wind tearing strips off the trees around the house, a terrific shaking and howling on the balcony outside, visibility down to the other side of the glass, and the realization that all of the children's books that were sitting on the window-sill are now just that bit softer and wrinklier than they were yesterday, I know that Spring is over as suddenly as she came—at least on Rokko mountain—and has been superceded by a prolonged storm with son et lumière atmospherics of the kind that would not be out of place in a Kirk Douglas disaster movie. The sakura scenes of the last post belong to another country, entirely.

The good news, of course, is that just as in the afore-mentioned B-movie, nothing really bad will happen: "up here on the mountain, we shall be safe, safe as houses" as Peter Cook reassures us (!); even if we don't have a picnic basket, eventually, this storm will blow itself out. Most importantly, there is nothing figurative about it, no pathetic fallacy here, thank you very much. The children especially are thriving, barring minor infections (which kept Julian off school today, snoozing on the sofa). And Justin is doing particularly well: it was Ayumi's turn to take him off to Amagasaki yesterday for one of his monthly checkups, this time with the physiotherapy people: she returned with the excellent news that his physical development is at the level reached by typical DS babies—there's a nice phrase—at eight months, and he'll be six months old on Sunday next. I neither know nor greatly care how this measures up to non-DS babies: all that matters is that people who should are really pleased with his progress, and so are we. More reasons to be cheerful, even as the fire is dancing on the jeraboams...

'Great shall be the tumult thereof, I should think' (hoods purely coincidental)

Unconditional love (You can never hold back Spring)?

2011-04-18T12:27:00.006+09:00

Sakura at Kobe College

I have been thinking a lot about love, recently. Not deliberately, nor intentionally, and certainly not to great effect. Instead, the thoughts extrude, cropping up unsolicited in more reasoned reflection, like Spring crocuses, or dandelions perhaps. It may be the season, which is not the cruellest month this year, but a welcome relief from so much snow on the mountain, and the huddling around the kotatsu in the mornings. Or it could be the discussion I heard on last week’s Start the Week, in which Andrew Marr’s interviewee was the author of a new book on the subject of other than romantic or erotic love—on varieties of agape. Or it might have been Julian asking me last week whether I loved him more than his older brother (How have I failed as a parent so far that he harbours such insecurity?). Most probably, these are all related phenomena, the warm breezes and chatter of the end of winter. I can’t express the sentiment better than Tom Waits, you should just watch and listen (Winter dreams the same dream every time, but baby, you can never hold back Spring)…

Click to listen

Anyway, these minor eruptions of the unconscious have produced two small insights in my own understanding of love, which is all we can talk about with any confidence. The first is the right ‘long answer’ to Julian’s question, which requires a piece to itself to unpack properly. (The short answer is No, of course.) The second insight is this:

There is no such thing as unconditional love, beyond the intoxication of adolescence. There are always strings. It’s simply that for our children we are infinitely willing to alter the conditions of our emotional contracts, on the turn of a dime, whereas for most other people we are not: in the case of other adults, we prefer to maintain the illusion of personal integrity, and clinging forever to the letter—rather than the spirit—of the original document. As if were real...

The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat
You win a while, and then it's done
Your little winning streak.

And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat
You live your life, as if it's real
A thousand kisses deep.

Leonard Cohen, A Thousand Kisses Deep (Recorded Version)

And the infinitely superior spoken section of the poem

With that sorted, I can get back to preparing my lessons.

Fukushima vs. Calpol (letter to my mother)

2011-04-13T00:36:00.007+09:00

Dear Mum

Thank you for calling earlier this evening. I'm very sorry that the BBC news reports from Fukushima, combined with our presence in Japan, have caused you so much concern. Please don't think that I am dismissive of the risks when I try to put things in perspective. I am worried too, but then, where the children are concerned, I worry about everything! I only know that...

(i) some things tend to look worse when you are further away, just as N.Ireland from 1969-1989 (for almost all my childhood, and early adulthood) seemed to be a total war zone from the perspective of London, or Los Angeles—yet we did not flee, even though the statistical risks to the population were so much greater than the risks posed by Fukushima to the population of Kobe;
(ii) even a few months after the dropping of real bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it seems that people who had not been exposed to the initial blast lived healthy lives in the area and bore children with no greater risk of cancer than anywhere else on the planet—and that's before considering lifestyle choices, such as the Western diet. (I don't doubt the Ulster Fry and Players killed many more people than the IRA and UDA put together, and they never signed up to any Peace agreement);
(iii) even the BBC website which carries the news story that so alarms you points out that "There have been no fatalities resulting from the leaks at Fukushima, and risks to human health are thought to be low.";
(iv), at some point, as my friend Zlatko pointed out to me, we have to trust what scientists say, and there is uniform consensus that, at the moment, this far from Fukushima, the risks to health from escaping airborne radiation and/or food contamination are negligible. (Contrast that, for a moment, with the scientific consensus on children's Calpol, a product that I tried to obtain in Japan two days ago, only to find that it is banned here—also in the US, Norway and several other countries—because the colouring used in the medicine (Carmoisine E122) is a suspected carcinogen. Yet in the UK we can walk into Tesco, and freely buy this potential poison, to help our children, without any warning of the potential danger. Surely the risks are low, but that is, in a way, just the point....

Tonight, as I watch Justin wheezing through his first viral infection since he was born, I ask myself which is the more serious health hazard: the fact of my having brought him here, or the strong possibility that, had we stayed in Sheffield, I would have dosed him up with Calpol to lower his temperature. Medical science suggest he's better off in Kobe (though I wish I could make him feel better overnight).

So, please don't worry about us, or—if you must, just as I must worry about my children—at least direct that concern to the real risks we face: of crossing the road on the way to school, of not washing hands before preparing food; of not paying due attention when walking down the stairs; of drinking, or not drinking (!) that unit of alcohol—me, not the kids!; of driving up and down the hill.)

As they say in Japanese, shinpai shinai de kudasai! (Please don't worry!)

Much love

Nigel

More Inspirational Thoughts

2011-04-12T00:28:00.004+09:00

Sunday walk to Rokko Farm (3.5km, not a vending machine in sight!)

Back late to the mountain after a first day's teaching, with Justin sleeping rather fitfully across the room, I lack the energy needed to complete the new piece I was intending to publish today. In its place, prompted perhaps by the news of yet more dramatic shaking around Fukushima—the anthropomorph in me wants to ask Poseidon whether he doesn't think those poor souls up North have suffered enough?—and by the countless moral quagmires of Lybia, Gaza, Yemen, Bahrain and Ivory Coast, I offer a piece originally served up in November 2008, which is mostly a vehicle for a Raph McTell cover. Music and literature will solve none of these problems, but they do provide perspective, and make things a little easier to bear: enjoy!

An interest in life...
This I found yesterday at the beginning of Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana, which happened to be sitting on Ayumi's bookshelf at her parent's home, and which I picked up faute de mieux.
—I could give you a medical certificate, said Dr. Hasselbacher.
—Do you never worry about anything?
—I have a secret defence, Mr Wormold, I am interested in life.
—So am I, but...
—You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us — I'm sorry; I wasn't referring to your wife. But if you are interested in life, it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese. You don't do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold? I do, and they are like people, one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion — although of course one dreams that perhaps a time may come...One day I must show you my laboratory.
—I must be going, Hasselbacher.
—You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.
[The fact that Dr. Hasselbacher's optimism is later ruined by the shallow carelessness of the protagonist Wormold does not detract from the hope the paragraph conveys.]

Summer Lightning
The second item, only tangentially related, is a song by Ralph McTell called Summer Lightning. It was on the B-side of Streets of London—when there still were B-sides—and was McTell's only real hit (in 1974). Unlike Streets, which is quite mawkish, this song has a simplicity and private sincerity to it that makes it more appealing. The important thing is the message.

Here's the text:

Move over here, c'mon sit down beside me,
Come closer now, come and put your arms, put your arms around me,
You've had a bad day too, and I feel the same as you, c'mon sit down.

It's just that when I get mad I end up saying things if I thought about I wouldn't ever say,
And I think that you already know that, though I'll say it anyway, I'll say it anyway...

(repeated)

Don't let the day go down, the two of us still fighting,
It's not a storm at all, no, it's only summer lightning,
And we've still got the night, so there's time to put it right...
...let's go to bed.

Our good fortune

2011-04-10T13:18:00.004+09:00

Carlsberg doesn't do babies—at least, not intentionally!—but if they did...

Seriously, though, we are incredibly lucky that everything has turned out so well thus far. All our fears and apprehensions of the first weeks after the diagnosis have mostly faded away, as in almost every respect, Justin is a normal 5 month old baby: cooing, paying attention, feeding and sleeping well; as of the past couple of days, he has even managed to turn over (from stomach to back—we're still waiting for the other direction).

To any new parents reading this, who have just received the news that their child is a Down Syndrome baby, I hope this picture offers some comfort that things can turn out for the best (very probably!)

Onderweg (Lost in Vertaling)

2011-04-02T09:39:00.011+09:00

So, we’re all back in Japan now. (The linguistically minded will notice this is signalled by the comma after so, (,) my nod at an unfortunate habit of many Japanese writer of English [sic]). And I’ve survived two long-distance flights as sole guardian of three children (two under 5). I’m expected to say “survived”, because travelling long distances with small children is generally assumed to be a form of self-inflicted middle-class purgatory—or limbo perhaps, given the altitudes involved. In point of fact it was extremely easy and relatively painless, at least once we had managed to get […the eight pieces of luggage and sleeping baby from the rooftop parking (for car rental returns), through the drenching rain via a long line at Emirates check-in desk, through security with its infant-formula tasting sessions, past the near interminable maze of duty free, champagne bars, and supercar lottery concessions… ] to the departure gate. All without the benefit of hand-luggage trolleys or baby buggies. That British airports refuse to provide these conveniences, and also feel they have to charge a £1 deposit for larger carts that don’t run smoothly and anyroad can’t be found when you really need them, when airports in other countries provide these in good order for free, is one more strike against them; a plague on all their terminals! As I said though, the journey itself was fine, a good deal more pleasurable than a family trip to IKEA or Meadowhell on a rainy Saturday (if you’re not from South Yorkshire, pick your own hideous shopping mall). The older children were great, variously asleep or engrossed in the ICE entertainment system with 140 movies plus video games and internet, with only minor bickering, and Justin was his usual brilliant self, cheerfully clugging and cawing—his version of cooing—when not feeding contentedly, looking around or dozing. All in all, as good as it could be. We only started to pay for this good behaviour on arrival, with children bouncing off the walls from 1-3am, jetlagged, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as the saying has it (though where this saying comes from is a mystery, and apparently to Answers.com too—cats indeed!).

No, the problem of long-distance flying with children is not the children, but the immense amount of time it affords for: (i) reflection on how you managed to end up here at this time of life, ferrying three small children into a country from which several nations have only recently been organizing evacuation flights; (ii) reminiscence on past flights (which in turn makes recursive calls on memories of other journeys in more care-free decades); and regret about all the bad judgment calls in the meantime. These three Rs are no doubt induced—or at least exacerbated—by low lighting, reduced oxygen levels, and several glasses of the poor quality Sauvignon Blanc that was used to chase away the more dreadful Budweiser (“Sorry, our Asahi is not yet chilled, will this do?”) and they are so much harder to elude on a nine-hour flight than on the ground, when the mundane requirements of daily life—crossing the road safely, passing the time of day, shopping, work even (!)—helpfully impinge, offering distraction from more existential concerns. But on a plane with kids, there is just nowhere to hide from the echoes of roads not taken. Without children, that extra after-dinner liqueur that would offer a few hours of pleasantly blank, dreamless stupour, but with responsibility for feeding bottles and nappies/diapers, temporary oblivion is hardly a wise option. Instead, you sit on the night watch, and listen to nostalgic music selections and comedy sketches that you had forgotten about years ago. And this is where the real damage starts…*

Click to play Brahms’ Third Symphony and Woody Allen’s Moose Sketch, just two of the several pieces that neatly pulled off the knotted scabs on my emotional memory—melted a burning hole in the containment vessel, if you will—and left me wondering where all the time had gone…

The title of this piece, Onderweg, is significant. It means en route—curious that there isn’t a native expression. Wikipedia informs me—which I didn’t know—that it serves as the Dutch translation for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But it’s also the title of an addictive pop number from 2000 by the Breda-born singer Abel, a song about reminiscence and lost time (Het is al lang verleden tijd...), whose video features an exceptionally beautiful woman in the grey morning and evening of a Randstad commute. The song would be a brilliant example of its genre were it not for the singer-songwriter’s uncanny resemblance—physiognomically and auditorily—to a bleating goat. One can’t have everything…

and then there's this wonderful parody: click to play.

Finally, it should be noticed that I have got through this whole piece with only passing mention of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in the North. This negligence, like the initial comma, most accurately relects the awful normality of life here in Kansai. If a sizeable chunk of the Northern Irish coastline, from Cushendun to Derry, say, had been swept into the sea, killing several hundred people and leaving thousands homeless, I'd like to believe that people in Belfast would still be mobilized in a series of personal relief efforts, and would talk of nothing else. Life would not go on as before. The fact that life in Kobe is exactly as I left it a month ago is as comforting as it is chilling: this is not stoicism, as Western journalists and politicos would have it; it is insouciance, bordering on callous indifference.

Ceci n'est pas un désastre

*The damage is best summed up in an Yves Duteil song Et puis voilà que tu reviens from the album L'écritoire. There's no Youtube version, unfortunately, but it's worth the 89 pence purchase price.

Safe levels of reporting?

2011-03-25T20:44:00.008+09:00

Sitting it out in Sheffield

Yesterday, Ayumi returned to Japan, our willing canary. We're going to wait until next week, in the hope that the reactor problems are finally resolved, or at least until some internationally agreed consensus on the health risks emerges. Because at the moment there is a worrying disconnect between different news reports, even on the same website (BBC). On the one hand, Fergus Walsh reassures us that life in Tokyo is safer than Cornwall, radiation-wise:

...the extra risk from drinking tap water in Tokyo for a year would be far less than that of someone moving, say, from London to Cornwall for a year.

And there's this piece too, which seeks to convince us (in spite of the garbled syntax early on "But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to.")

On the other hand, if this is the case, and everything is well, why have two Japanese tourists coming from Tokyo been hospitalized in China with radiation sickness?

...In another development, two Japanese tourists who arrived in China on a flight from Tokyo are being treated in hospital for high radiation levels. It remains unclear how the two may have become contaminated as neither traveller is reported to have been within 240km of the Fukushima plant, says our correspondent...

Unless we've been lied to by the English tourist board for decades, no two-week Cornish getaway has ever resulted in a trip to the isolation ward of a London hospital. So it is safe to conclude, purely as a matter of logic, that someone is lying now. Given this, one has to ask: cui bono?

Throughout this crisis, the gulf between BBC and NHK reporting has been widening to the point that neither can be considered reliable. I know the line between journalism and propaganda is a shifting one, I know that scientists are often awful communicators (as nicely demonstrated by the quote above!), and journalists are sometimes risibly poor at reporting science. Surely, though, there must be some international monitoring of radiation levels in all parts of the country, and this information could be released, as raw data. That this hasn't happened inevitably raises the suspicion of a cover-up at the highest levels of government. Or dire incompetence. Or both.

Postscript: It's great to read today that Greenpeace monitoring of radiation levels will shortly commence. I can only hope that when they are able to report, their counts tally with the official figures, but I'm not holding my breath...

Watching the Wheels

2011-03-15T08:20:00.002+09:00

Still sitting in Sheffield, return to Japan on hold for a week, it's hard to write anything insightful or coherent in face of the enormity of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear accident. The scenes are quite horrifying: it is difficult to imagine even a fraction of the distress, loss, grief and suffering of so many lives interrupted. We can only be thankful that so far no-one close to us—physically or emotionally—has been caught up in this (Kansai is 450 miles away from Sendai), and pray that this is as bad as it gets.

As I've noted so often in recent posts, because I'm made so acutely aware of it so frequently these days, life is phenomenally uncertain and fragile: worrying about how our children may or may not turn out, or cope, as adults is much less important than how we pass the time in between times; it may also turn out to be completely irrelevant. With that in mind, we drove out to Chatsworth and spent a gorgeous Spring day in beautiful surroundings. A happy distraction from the grim horror of explosions at nuclear plants, but no less real for all that. Time for more John Lennon, methinks...

Back in the USSR?

2011-03-09T20:43:00.003+09:00

Justin at Kansai Airport, February 25th

Click to play

Back to the UK it should be, of course, but there was something vaguely Slavic about this picture of Justin wrapped up at the airport, and "back to Sheffield" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Anyway, we've been in the British Isles (England and Northern Ireland) for about two weeks now; having finally recovered from jetlagged children, it will be time to return to Japan on Monday for another 10 day bout of alternating insomnia and grumpiness. In contrast to the last post, this piece contains little but family pictures—an antidote to turbulence.

But it may still be of interest to anyone who doesn't know how beautiful Belfast Lough can be on a still, sunny winter's day in the North of Ireland... (they do happen)

Belfast Lough around Helen's Bay (Co. Down)

Boats leaving Belfast Lough, looking towards Scotland

Evening view towards Belfast, from Crawfordsburn

With thanks to my family and all our English friends for their hospitality, and for saving us from cooking dinner on so many evenings this week. Also to Sean's old school, who have let him come in for a couple of days to see what he's missed...

Waiting at Cultra station: hardly as frequent as Japan, but a good deal more bucolic

Turbulence (Thanks for all the fish, and more)

2011-02-22T12:05:00.030+09:00

[Note: this piece is not about about my family, nor does it involve literary or musical criticism. I’m not anticipating any attractive illustrations or other lures, and no musical accompaniment either. So if that’s what you came for, look away now. There will be more such articles in the future, I hope, but this is not one of them. You have been been warned.]

Tokushima Naruto Whirlpool (Shikoku Excursion)

Events of the last few days have left me, both literally and figuratively, in a painfully disordered state of mind. In plain English, I’m stressed, and my head aches. Actually, it twinges, rather than aches, but the precise description matters little; at all events, the pain ‘comes and goes’, as they say. (Where pain goes to, when it goes, is a puzzle in itself. I have this anthropomorphised image of Pain, like some peripatetic poison dwarf, doing the rounds of the neighbourhood: “Hi, Nigel didn’t want me this hour, so I’ve decided to drop in on you for a while. Don’t worry though, I won’t stay long, I’ve got to get back to his place for tea.”)

There are a few recent sources of this existential torment, some familial, others external (uchi to soto, as Japanese has it; I’ll come back to this directly): however, on the principle that one shouldn’t wash one’s dirty linen in public, even the semi-public readership of this blog[1], I’ll limit attention to the external influences, which until last night involved only Youtube and Facebook status posts (albeit through a complex chain of other URLs and sundry mouse-clicks), but which now includes Libya.

The first is a kind of memento mori, a shocking reminder that we rarely consider where the time goes, and what we’re doing with it, or realize how little there might be, until it is too late. It started last night, when I received an invitation through a Linked-In group (ELT Professionals Around the World) to participate in a contest:

Calling all ELT Professionals! Do you accept the Do-Nothing Teaching Challenge? I invite you to participate in a contest to see who can accomplish the most in their classroom by doing the least.

The immense attractions of such a competition should be evident to the meanest intelligence (certainly to the laziest): this is the kind of lateral thinking—inverse, rather than lateral, really—that one cannot help but embrace with blasé enthusiasm. The implication that some near imperceptible gesture of the left eye brow following ten minutes of silence might bring about an exponential increase in vocabulary acquisition, or ToEFL proficiency scores, is well-nigh irresistible. So far, though, I have suppressed the temptation to sign up, lest this demonstrate that I am already doing too much—people can be tricky). But this didn’t stop me from clicking on the poster’s profile, and following some of his external links. Which led me to TED (www.ted.com, to which I’ll may return, if for no other reason than it seems to show that large corporate entities are not necessarily antithetical to creative or intellectual activity, even if this is generally true)[2]. Which in turn led via a Palestinian-American poet to the proximate cause of my discomfit: this Youtube video of Douglas Adams, author (in case you didn’t know) of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, which is incontrovertibly one of the finest comic creations of the last 30 years. In the footage—a wonderfully anachronistic term—Adams was filmed giving a lecture at University of California, Santa Barbara concerning lemurs (aye-ayes, in particular), komodo dragons, and other rare and endangered species of Madagascar and Indonesia:

Click here for the video

It’s just brilliant: David Attenborough with humour and caritas, as diverting as it is informative. It's also unconsciously ironic, for within a few days of this lecture on endangerment and extinction, Adams’ own life was extinguished, snuffed out by a heart attack. Prior to this, he had been a fit 49 year old ex-pat, working out regularly, and living a good Californian life with his partner and young daughter. As I’ll be a rather less fit, considerably less renowned, 49 year old ex-pat in a couple of weeks, it’s all a bit too close for comfort. I even spent a day in the early nineties at UCSB, where I was offered my first temporary teaching job. There can be few more pleasant places to give a valedictory lecture, I suppose, but for all that I’d like to know in advance that it was indeed the last talk. That’s the unsettling part: the suddenness of it all. Adams was a very smart man, more importantly, he gave the impression of being a very humane and caring one: what other message might he have had for us, had he known that 'this was it', especially since he had lived beyond 42 (which is, you should recall, "The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything")? You can follow this link to some of his best quotes, but these give a flavour of his phenomenal wit and intelligence:

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth – when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another – particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

My favorite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

What an awful loss, the more so since our society recognizes and rewards baneful mediocrity, applauds shallow incompetence, and readily elects the sanctimonious and deceitful hypocrite. I would name names, but no-one needs a libel action, so we can stick to initials: DB (writer), JB (singer), AB (politician). A curious coincidence about those bees, eh? Go figure. And those are just representatives of the legion of inconsequential personalities with station above their ideas, to invert a cliché, who we consider worthy of praise and six figure salaries. I apologise for the the unusually misanthropic tone, though as I said earlier, you were warned.

A second cause of discombubulation was my friend Scott Koga-Browes' posting of an article about mask-wearing among Japanese. The link and the following commentary are posted here.

It’s not the story itself that is so distressing, though it certainly confirms the notion that the Japanese enjoy expressions of eccentricity distinct from those of the typical English weirdo. What's troubling is Scott’s final comment, which comports so well with my own main worry about bringing up children in Japan. As I’ve noted in other posts, I'm not concerned about their personal safety, or their physical health—especially if we can enjoy the slightly fresher air of the mountain—nor do I worry about the kindness and generosity of friends and family (uchi ‘home’), which is no different from anywhere else, as well as I can determine. It’s soto that promotes insomnia, mild panic, and has me wondering about going back to England pronto: the feeling that unless you are with friends, you don’t actually exist for other people. It’s not only my incompetence with the language that leads me to believe that Hell—or its Shinto equivalent—would freeze over before anyone would strike up a conversation with a stranger, or even spontaneously offer to help an obviously lost tourist clutching a map. The evidence is just too easy to come by. Which all makes the mask thing so much more insane, as Cormac pointed out: no-one here could care less about those they don’t know—not enough to even look at them—so why bother covering up? Perhaps Tim’s comment sums it up best…

Then, just when I had worked through these immediate issues, Gaddafi starts aerial bombing of his own civilians, and with that piece of news, the early death of a man who had already given us so much, the mystifying celebration of the inept and the petty talent, and the blankness of the other in Japanese life pales into bourgeois insignificance. Sometimes, mostly perhaps, the world is sfu: to put it more poetically, a vale of tears.

Better get back to the garden, as Voltaire advised a while back: more family news in the next post!

PS. A few moments after I had posted these words came the news of the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Not Lisbon, perhaps, and no mention of Pangloss, but uncanny nevertheless...

[1] To those ten or so friends and others who regularly return to this pages, including those that I don’t know personally who live in Falkirk, Kettering and Alsace—Statcounter provides such details—thanks for reading! I’d write this anyway without you—as expiation and catharsis zugleich—but knowing that someone takes an interest, when there are millions of such blogs out there—provides an additional incentive to keep going.

[2] The most impressive aspect of this site is not the calibre of the featured artists, writers and thinkers—which is high, but not overwhelmingly so—but the quality of critical feedback from other viewers of the website. Of course, by comparison with the average Youtube comments, the ranting of an overexcited gibbon would count as an insightful carefully considered response; even so, TED commentary is uncommonly good.

Night and Day

2011-02-18T13:52:00.004+09:00

In 1982 Joe Jackson released the album Night and Day. Arguably the most mature, and generally engaging, of his early records—and certainly the most popular, reaching the top 5 in both UK and US album charts of that year—it is, as its title suggests, a 1980s-style tribute to the flair and urbanity of Cole Porter, and indirectly, to the sophistication of Manhattan. It includes several of Jackson's best songs of the period: Breaking Us in Two, Stepping Out, and A Slow Song; really, there isn't a bad tune in the collection.

Click to play (Youtube)

The principal reason for mentioning it now though is because of how Jackson interpreted the title. Back in the day when records played on both sides—astonishing to consider how often one got up in the course of an evening to 'change the record'—the A and B sides of albums could be alternately themed and textured, an option that was lost in the switch to CDs, and can scarcely be imagined in an era of mp3 single downloads. On Night and Day, Jackson created a Day Side and a Night Side. Nothing to that, you might suppose, except that the Day Side contained the slow, relaxed, contemplative songs, while the Night Side was brassy, up-tempo and energetic. This is how cities are, Jackson was saying, and if you are (or were) a regular night owl, tholing the doldrums of a tedious day in the office for the stimulant of nights spent in downtown pubs and clubs, you will understand him. But I was never that kind of person, even as a student, or—if I was perhaps—after ten years of suburban domesticity, of bath-times and early nights, of the school run, of 'movie nights' in the living room, and bottles of wine round the dinner-table with friends, I had entirely forgotten that buzz, the energy of the city at night.
Until two days ago, when I spent most of the day up the hill, enjoying the gorgeous post-blizzard thaw, and talking to virtually no-one but myself—for the excellent reason that there was no-one to talk to, and that wild crows make poor conversation partners. This was the Day Side: tranquil, easy-going, literally devoid of any traffic (automotive or otherwise):

'Day Side': lunchtime traffic at our intersection

Later however, I took the cable-car down the hill, picked up Julian from the nursery, and headed into the centre of Kobe (Sannomiya) to meet up with Ayumi, Sean and Justin, who had gone into town ahead to collect new passports, and go to football practice. Remarkably, Sean's football training ground is two-minutes' walk from Sannomiya station, occupying a ludicrously expensive plot of real estate in one of the most densely built-up inner cities in Japan. Coming down from the hill to the blinding lights of the football field and the noise and bustle of thousands of homeward bound city workers at evening rush-hour, and still carrying my snowboots—of course, there's been no snow lying down here for months—I couldn't help hearing the words "country bumpkin" in my mind, and remembering the scene in A Bug's Life, when our banished hero comes into the city for the first time. It was all so busy, so bright, so...tremendously, effusively alien. And I also understood why this was the Night Side (only 45 minutes, but another world, away from home).

Night Side: Sannomiya 6pm

Pincher Martin's House

2011-02-15T12:01:00.003+09:00

I've never thought much of William Golding's writing: he may have received a Booker Prize, and a Nobel Prize for Literature to boot, but that doesn't make him an attractive author in my eyes. It's not his bleakness or the Gothic undertones—I can do bleak, or at least E. Annie Proulx or Cormac McCarthy can, for me—or his apparent misanthropy—Martin Amis plays the misanthrope, but at least he makes you laugh: it's the unmodulated pessimism that's hard to take. Of course, my assessment is hardly helped by the fact that Lord of the Flies was a set book in my prep school, when I was just a little older than Sean: in that school, the critical challenge was not so much to understand the allegory, which was obvious to even the least engaged pupil, but to figure out exactly how William Golding knew so much about my classmates twenty years before they were born, and why he bothered to change their names. (I have the same question about Francesca Simon, who has evidently used my children as models for Horrid Henry and Perfect Peter.) Within the first week, we knew precisely who Jack, Ralph, Simon and Piggy were, and unfortunately, so did they...

Now, I understand from a brief bio. piece that Golding was profoundly changed by his experiences in the Second World War...

Golding himself later reported to Douglas A. Davis in the New Republic, "When I was young, before the war, I did have some airy-fairy views about man. . . . But I went through the war and that changed me. The war taught me different and a lot of others like me."

... but equally, a lot of people came through that war with greater faith in the rest of humanity, and a sense of humour. In the end, through The Spire, Free Fall, and much of the rest, one can't escape the feeling that this was a man who could have benefited from therapy, or at least a few of those 'free hugs' that it was the fashion to dispense on campus when I was a graduate student at USC (and which came to Sheffield more recently).

The reason this came to mind is very trivial, really. Waking up this morning, I pulled on my clothes, coat and boots, then spent 40 minutes shovelling snow on our 150m long driveway up to the main road. We had to get Julian and Justin, and Yumi, down the hill, and to do that we somehow had to get out of the driveway. But the snow had drifted higher in the night, and even with chains, and the adults walking, we barely made it up the slope. On a bleaker, more miserable morning, we might have been trapped in our house all day. Hardly Pincher Martin's rock, but cut off nevertheless, and, we imagined, miles from any help. The irony, though, is that it was just our driveway that is an island of winter: when we finally got the car out, the main road had been cleared, and all we had to face were a few patches of slush, vainly holding out against grit and sunshine. And it reminded me of the end of Pincher Martin—not the real ending, but the one I misremembered all these years—that though he thought he was on a isolated piece of rock, help was just around the corner. Grit and sunshine, that's what we all need...

Abominable?

2011-02-14T20:55:00.003+09:00

Abominable is one of those words, like dessicated, that means nothing like it should, its semantic meaning having been overwhelmed and nicely subdued by its associations. According to wordnetweb.princeton.edu abominable is supposed to mean "unequivocally detestable" (cf. abomination) just as dessicated should denote dried—but for most of us, especially those parents subjected to the nth replay of Monsters Inc, abominable only calls to mind an oversized—do they come undersized?!—and very amiable, irrepressibly cheerful yeti, while dessicated simply means chopped (as in coconut). In that associative sense then, the past 72 hours have indeed been abominable, for it has snowed continually, returning us to the depths of winter that I thought—and Ayumi profoundly hoped—we had finally seen the back of, and mostly it's been fun, as these pictures show. Rokko winter, it seems, is like Canadian winter: thrilling at first, then an alternating mixture of exhilaration and wind-chill, then...enough already! (I'm still at phase two, but for Ayumi, who was hoping to go out for a Valentines' Night meal, instead of hunkering down beside the bedroom radiator, it's very definitely phase three.)

In fact, we were very lucky to get home at all tonight. Both mountain roads were closed, and only by driving around the barrier whose kanji I couldn't read (but whose meaning was clear enough), and with a good angel looking over our shoulder, were we able to drive the 4km up the Ura-Rokko back road through deepening snow and increasingly slick car tracks, to our intersection. We passed only one other car, and it was going down; if we had stopped, no-one might have come for quite a while, and there's no cellular service at that point in the mountain to ring for assistance. However, we wouldn't even have made it to the start of that mountain road without the snow chains that I put on on Friday morning with much strain and effort (and mostly because I didn't want Ayumi to have paid for something we didn't end up using at least once). But today, that hour of sweat, chilled knees, and swearing at the indecipherable instruction sheet paid off handsomely. The moral is that winter is great, if you're prepared for it, and hellish otherwise—abominable, in fact: three of the reasons that I'm still smiling are my sheepskin coat, a proper snow shovel, and a cheap pair of insulated slush boots, the latter the best that Canadian Tire [sic!] had to offer 10 years ago.

For all that, it would have been nice to go out this evening: Yumi, who enjoyed (endured?) the rally drive up the mountain, was to have babysat and put the kids to bed for us while we enjoyed a couple of more urbane hours to ourselves. But we'll have to take a rain-check (snow-check), I guess. Roll on Spring!

[I'll find a suitable piece of music shortly...Got it!

(Even though I used to mock this New Age stuff dreadfully, it has something, and the video is apposite, reminding me of the winter months spent in Ottawa when Sean was around just a bit older than Justin is now: see Expatriotism)]

Click to play

Stop gap (Gracias a la vida)

2011-02-11T00:13:00.001+09:00

This was not meant to be the next post, but tomorrow is yet another school holiday (see Grouch), so I had better get on now with some of the work I would have done then.

In the meantime, and to buck the trend of 'miserable men' (which Ayumi maintains defines my musical taste), here is a link to an uplifting and beautiful song Gracias a la vida, sung by the late Mercedes Sosa. I in turn am grateful to Max Reinhardt for playing this on BBC Radio Three this morning/last night.

Click to play

Tonight, the snow is falling again on Rokko: just when the last patches of ice had lifted from around the gate, and Sean's snowman was little more than an amorphous lump of dirt and bracken, we're expecting another 20cm of the white stuff. I hope that warmth of this woman's voice, and the beauty of her song, will help us through.

Honesty and Wealth

2011-02-09T11:19:00.004+09:00

The path down from a small shrine on Rokko Mountain

In constructing the piece that will follow on the heels of this one—see, dogs already!—I was reminded of this quotation by Bertrand Russell:

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.

Poor, but honest?! Shouldn't that be the other way around? The truth conditions might be the same, but the implicatures are quite different. What was Bertie thinking of?!

Priceless

2011-02-03T09:25:00.007+09:00

—Dad, how do you spell eczema?
—You mean, like skin disease?
—No, the one who lives in igloos...

There are some things that are too good to make up. This Mastercard moment came this morning, as Sean was trying to log in to Club Penguin: it's interesting, to see what sorts of lexical misunderstanding can still be entertained by a ten year old, and entertaining, perhaps inevitably calling to mind the Peter Cook and John Cleese Secret Policeman's Ball sketch about ants and Arabs, mosques and mosquitos (which I've just found!). Or it could be the situation in Egypt... I'm not sure ('I get them muddled up, 'cos they're next door to each other in the dictionary...')

The other piece of priceless news came yesterday at Justin's three month checkup at the Children's hospital. He's gained another kilo, is growing stronger, kicking firmly with chubby legs. The doctors were most impressed with his physical progress, including his brain development, which we were told was also good. The empiricist in me wondered how someone equipped only with a white coat and stethoscope could discern brain function. So I asked him (well, Ayumi asked him on my behalf!).

—You can tell by his facial expression and by his clear focus, he said.

So that's ok.

We'll be back in April for more extensive examination: blood, hearing and sight tests. But, in the meantime, all is well. We are incredibly fortunate, really. And to cheer us up further, here's a link to some classic Pete and Dud sketches.

Missing England

2011-02-03T00:18:00.156+09:00

A couple of days ago, Ayumi asked me if there was anything I missed about England. We're going back for a fortnight at the end of this month, so I suppose it was a timely question. Of course, I miss English friends, and the kindness of strangers, the ease of social relations, the banter, but England itself? I wasn't so sure. We have a 100-year old house that has taken upon itself to fall apart since we left, to our frustration and to the annoyance and increasing disgust of the tenant; it's damp and overcast, and even when it's 10 degrees warmer than Rokko (minus 8 when I started this piece), it feels that much grimmer; food, after Japan, is another source of lamentation, rather than expectation; customer service is at times hand-wringingly awful—let's not even mention call centres; God alone knows how long I'll have to hang on the phone, then wait 8-9 days, for a non-urgent GP appointment, always assuming they haven't delisted me in the meantime. Petrol prices will have reached some new high, the streets will be unkempt, in spite of a ridiculously generous provision of litter bins. No-one will welcome me when I enter the supermarket (the constant irrashaimase! s might lack warmth or sincerity, but at least you know you exist—by contrast, one doesn't so much visit as haunt a late-night Tesco, the shelf-stackers oblivious to everything but their mate's story about the previous night's session down the pub, as you push your trolley down wide aisles through the flourescent glare). And then there's Galaxy FM... "There's Glory for you!"

No, I thought, I don't miss England. And then I remembered this walk, and realised that, on a sunny day in the countryside, there may no more beautiful place to be.

Click to play

In September last year, just before we left for Japan, I put on a hat, grabbed my ipod, a book and a pork pie, and took off for the day—the first unencumbered day to myself in several years. I took the train south to Derby, which not a place to tarry in, but (since the 1960s, I expect) an unavoidable interchange if you want to get to Cromford by rail. And I did want to get to Cromford, not only because it is a charming village that manages to be picturesque without being twee—no cream teas here! but some good real ales, and a decent sandwich and sweet shop where you can get cash back on your debit card, because there's no ATM for 10 miles—but also because it is home to Scarthin Books, one of the best bookshops in England outside of London, and the only decent bookshop within driving distance of Sheffield. (If I were ever to retire in England, I'd rent a small house next door overlooking the millpond, and spend a few weeks at a stretch just browsing the shelves, and eating some of their great homemade soup of the day in the little café upstairs. Justin can come too!).

Cromford is not only unassuming about its current treasures, it also wears its heritage lightly (something that the tourist traps of England could learn from), for this Derbyshire village is one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution, to borrow a cliche. In 1771, Richard Arkright engineered and established Cromford Mill, the world's first water-powered cotton mill, in this valley:

[thus] creating one of the first factories that was specifically built to house machinery rather than just bringing workers together. It was one of the first instances of the working day being determined by the clock instead of the daylight hours, of people being employed rather than just contracted. In its final form, combined with his carding machine, it was the first truly continuous process. Its social impact was the sheer quantity of thread produced, supplying the new powered looms (Wikipedia: Cromford).

In other words, the Clockwise existence, which is the only one most people reading this blog will ever know, started here, in Cromford. Ironic then that I came to this place 'to get away from it all', and that the most beautiful walk I could find out of the town was along the tow path of the disused Cromford Canal (pictured right), built by Arkwright to ship materials in and out of one of England's first "dark, Satanic mills" (though perhaps, being water-powered, it was less infernal than some others.)

Upon reflection, the whole experience of a walk in the English countryside is deeply ironic, from the disused canals and railway embankments that are decaying symbols of aggressive industrial capitalism, past the patchwork of green fields, hedgerows and dry stone walls that bear testimony to centuries of gruelling agricultural labour, across the moorland heather that is only easily traversable because of countless years of upland sheep grazing. The romance of the battlefield. I know all of this is true, I know that rural England is only a very well-established theme park built on the ruins of derelict industry and agriculture, but that's not what I feel when I walk there, and that's not what I miss...

From the rolling road to the winding lane,
From the field to factory,
From summer's haze to winter's glaze,
And all the colours in between.
It's a stillness in the evening.
It's the heartbeat that I'm feeling.
From Cornwall to Northumberland,
From the Pennines to the sea.

And the echo from the green hills
Runs through the city streets.
And the wind that blows through England
Well it breathes its life in you and me.

Ralph McTell, England

It will be good to come back.

The Roof is Leaking

2011-01-25T14:50:00.013+09:00

The roof is leaking and the wind is howling
Kids are crying, 'cos the sheets are so cold
I woke this morning, found my hands were frozen
Tried to feed the fire, but you know, the damn thing's too old.

Click to play (youtube)

Actually, it's the kitchen ceiling, in our house in the suburbs of Sheffield, 9000-odd kilometers and 9 hours' worth of time-zones away. A burst hot water cylinder, I'm told, in the urgent email updates from our tenant. Claire is not happy about this situation. Understandably so, but at least she can monitor it, and let the plumber in. I'm distracted and frustrated, and powerless: none of us needs this, on top of everything else. Curiously, in searching for the lyrics to the Phil Collins song that introduces this piece, I came across this site on the interpretation of dreams:

To dream that the roof is leaking represents distractions, annoyances, and unwanted influences in your life. New information is slowly revealing itself to you. Something is finally getting through to you. Alternatively, the dream means that someone is imposing and intruding their thoughts and opinions on you...

Quite so, though the distraction, annoyance and unwanted influence relates in good part to the presumed state of our English kitchen, and to whether or not the insurance company will pay up...

The other reason that the roof is leaking, figuratively speaking, is because of the news story I heard this morning on The World Tonight (last night, such is the nature of my Radio 4 experience these days). It is a story that affects me deeply, and is set in Tokyo, though I very much doubt the Japanese media will pick it up or will give it much attention, if they do. The feature concerns a protest by desperate, divorced—generally foreign—fathers struggling to gain access to their children, something that is nearly impossible to achieve in Japan, even where the divorced parents live in close proximity to each other; for joint custody is just not a concept. The story is truly devastating: to hear of a man who howls in anguish every night, missing the daughters his ex-wife won't even let him see, goes to the very heart of the phrase 'cruel and unusual punishment.' Click here to listen to the broadcast (from 39:45).

Here's the text link.

Japan is a wonderful place to live in so many respects: in terms of personal safety, affordable access to good health care, a generally excellent distribution of wealth and education, a laudable absence of machismo and hyper-sexualization, tremendous public honesty (if you lose your wallet, it will invariably turn up; you get on at the back of the bus and pay on exiting—and everyone pays!), a country where children are free to be children and to play on their own in the park, six year olds walk and take the bus or train home from school alone—all these are truly admirable facets of a secure and developed society. In respect of custody rights, however, of honouring and fostering paternal love, this country is hatefully, powerfully, reprehensibly unenlightened. Evidenced by non-adherence to international treaties (Hague Convention), divorced fathers are about as well-served as whales*, and as poorly understood, both legally and culturally. The law, and Japanese popular opinion, resolutely refuses to acknowledge that one can be a feckless or lousy husband, but still a deeply loving parent. I can only hope and pray that I never find myself in the position of these lost souls, watching from the street as their children grow up without them...

*The ethical treatment of animals is another huge moral deficit area for most Japanese, it is fair to say. It is still acceptable to dress up monkeys and chimps, and have them perform party tricks (Pan-kun being perhaps the best known tv victim of 19th century attitudes to animal rights).

As for Phil Collins, this song and the album from which it comes—which also features the much better known In the Air Tonight—represents the high point of his solo career, when his lyrics still meant something, or at least pointed to something meaningful; after Face Value, there follows a not so graceful decline into insipid pop twaddle (to use a technical term). But this is still good stuff.

Original is best? (Town I loved so well)

2011-01-25T00:49:00.004+09:00

A few posts ago, I mentioned in passing Phil Coulter's most famous composition The Town I Loved so Well. Which, this evening, got me lost on YouTube again...

Does anyone watch television anymore, when there is a near infinity of inspirational content in 5-10 minute bite-sized chunks? Of course, there's also a near infinity of unmitigated garbage, but the great thing about near infinities of storage is that everyone can get along without treading on toes.

Anyway, my contribution here is simply to present four versions of the song: the first by Phil Coulter himself, the second by the late lamented Luke Kelly, the third by Paddy Reilly, the fourth by Josef Locke. My personal opinion is that Josef Locke wins hands down, not just because he had a voice in his eighties as strong and clear as that of most singers fifty years younger, but for the fact that, like the Johnny Cash number posted last week, this is a man who gives you a piece of his soul, not just a good performance. But they're none of them shameful (and it's hard to resist anything with Norwegian subtitles!)

No Fear!

2011-01-23T08:58:00.100+09:00

Sean's new ski jacket bears the logo NO FEAR! Unlike some other ski fashion labels, this slogan is neither meaningless tosh (Gush, Soldowt, Blueblood) nor indicative of some alpinist aspiration (Descente, Quiksilver, North Face); instead, it explains his actual performance. These videos taken on Sean's third day out, and Julian's first, show how easily one can do things, if you're a child, and without fear.

"How did you learn to do that?," I asked him, as he herringboned faultlessly up to to the lift, then slid down backwards, and turned to talk to me.
"I watched other people, and did what they were doing," he said.

And it's probably true. But I can watch other skiers endlessly, and like most adult learners, will never be better than an awkward intermediate. It's not (just) that I'm incompetent, but it's not beautiful to watch: I lack the fluidity that comes of spare synapses, young muscles, and a fearless view of the slope.

Of course, as Ayumi points out, we have reasons to be fearful as adults: a sprained ankle might be a badge of honour for Sean, but the inability to drive children to nursery, the slower recovery period—my toes have never recovered from a fall three years ago—the health insurance costs, the indignity, the list goes on). More significant, perhaps, is the fact that whereas Sean and Julian bounce like soft tennis balls, I bounce like an apple: I may well survive, but with considerably lower resale value.

I suspect, though, that it is more superficial fears—inhibitions, hesitancy, adult learner's reticence—that mean that I will always look like a Brit on skis, rather than a Swiss or an Austrian, or a true Canuck: the alpine equivalent of White men can't jump.

(Yesterday on the slope, my friend Nathan—who is the one teaching Julian in the second video—introduced me to his friend Herbert: even before we had spoken, I knew from his completely fluent skiing that he had learned young; his skis moved together so well, you might have thought they were one. Another well-spent Swiss youth.)

Apart from the sheer joy in watching kids do so well, these outings also tell me a good deal about child language acquisition: what we might achieve in second language learning without such self-consciousness, anxiety, fear. Perhaps this is what is critical about the Critical Period Hypothesis?

Epic Covers

2011-01-16T23:55:00.007+09:00

On this morning's Radio 4 broadcast of Desert Island Discs, Alex Salmond's penultimate choice was Johnny Cash's San Quentin. A fine song no doubt, but one limited by time and place and by Cash's personal history, and largely confined to its genre. But then later, while searching for something else, I came across these transcendent covers by Cash, recorded in the last months of his life: the first, one of Gordon Lightfoot's most moving songs If you could read my mind, the second a cover of Hurt by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails). It's not merely that neither of the original artists is a great vocalist that makes Cash's renditions so much better, for they are both interesting performers, it is that you feel this man giving us in these final songs not just a performance, but his whole life, his flesh, guts and soul. Most of us can only dream of containing a fraction of this visceral humanity, let alone projecting it. Enough said, just watch and listen.

Click here for Hurt

Scorn not his Simplicity

2011-01-16T02:17:00.005+09:00

I had just finished the last post, in which I made passing reference to Phil Coulter, an Derry-born songwriter best-known in Ireland for the nostalgic Town I loved so Well—when I read this in his Wikipedia entry...

Some of his most personal, famous and indeed most touching songs come from the loss of family members. “‘The Old Man’ still haunts me when I play it in Derry,” he reflected. “I can still see my father’s face appear when I’m playing it there. These are my roots, my place, so the ghosts and memories come out of the woodwork when I play in Derry.” Phil’s sister, Cyd, drowned in Lough Swilly. One year later he lost his brother, Brian to the same ‘Lake of Shadows.’ His struggle to come to terms with the loss and resulting emotions are captured in his songs ‘Shores of the Swilly’ and ‘Star of the Sea’. Furthermore, "Scorn Not His Simplicity", pleads for tolerance and understanding of his son, who was born with Down's syndrome and died at the age of four.

God in heaven.

Sinead O'Connor cover [youtube]

See the child
With the golden hair
Yet eyes that snow the emptiness inside
Do we know
Can we understand just how he feels
Or have we really tried

See him now
As he stands alone
And watches children play a children's game
Simple child
He looks almost like the others
Yet they know he's not the same

Scorn not his simplicity
But rather try to love him all the more
Scorn not his simplicity
Oh no
Oh no

See him stare
Not recognizing the kind face
That only yesterday he loved
The loving face
Of a mother who can't understand what she's been guilty of

How she cried tears of happiness
The day the doctor told her it's a boy
Now she cries tears of helplessness
And thinks of all the things he can't enjoy

Scorn not his simplicity
But rather try to love him all the more
Scorn not his simplicity
Oh no
Oh no

Only he knows how to face the future hopefully
Surrounded by despair
He won't ask for your pity or your sympathy
But surely you should care

Why bother with writing prose when there are songs like this? It may not be brilliant, but its raw honesty is unmatchable.

Click to buy

Castles in the air

2011-01-16T01:34:00.009+09:00

I can't decide whether popular music is merely the enduring and consoling soundtrack to my emotional life—or better, the sounding board, amplifying and accentuating the most trivial thoughts (think Nick Hornby's High Fidelity)—or whether perhaps it has a deeper significance suggesting, presaging, even determining changes in my desires and sensibilities far into the future.* Either way, it's damned important, sometimes it can cut deep.

So it was today, as I struggled to explain to Ayumi why I want to stay up this hill for as long as possible, that the following song, by Don McLean, a masterpiece that I had not listened to for 25 years or more, entered without knocking...

Click here to play [youtube]

And if she asks you why, you can tell her that I told you
That I’m tired of castles in the air.
I’ve got a dream I want the world to share
And castle walls just lead me to despair.

Hills of forest green where the mountains touch the sky,
A dream come true, I’ll live there till I die.
I’m asking you to say my last goodbye.
The love we knew ain’t worth another try.

Save me from all the trouble and the pain.
I know I’m weak, but I can’t face that girl again.
Tell her the reasons why I can’t remain,
Perhaps she’ll understand if you tell it to her plain.

But how can words express the feel of sunlight in the morning,
In the hills, away from city strife.
I need a country woman for my wife;
I’m city born, but I love the country life.

For I cannot be part of the cocktail generation:
Partners waltz, devoid of all romance.
The music plays and everyone must dance.
I’m bowing out. I need a second chance.

...To anyone born too early or too late, or in the wrong country, or just unlucky enough not to have heard of him, Don McLean is the songwriter best known for American Pie and Vincent (Starry, Starry Night): he is also the subject of the equally beautiful Killing me softly with his song, by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, recorded by Lori Lieberman, after seeing an as yet unknown McLean perform Empty Chairs. All of these—including Gimbel-Fox-Lieberman's (the attribution is complicated!)—are almost beyond criticism, though some of the cover versions leave everything to be desired: I've just seen that even Susan Boyle has a cover of Killing me softly on Youtube. So perhaps it's for the best that Castles has not been pawed over.

Had I a decent singing voice, or had at least taken some voice training, I could have saved myself much grief and spared Ayumi my inchoate rage and frustration at our mutual incomprehension, just by singing this simple song. It might not have changed her mind, for it's fair to say that she remains unconvinced of the value of living away from the city, of the cold and the inconvenience of the mountain, and in this she would appear to be in good company: in four months of living here, I have met only one Japanese woman who considers this country life desirable. But even if it doesn't change hearts, or overcome cultural differences, at least it speaks to me, and of me, more eloquently than any words I will ever write myself.

Click to play Roberta Flack cover [youtube]

He sang as if he knew me
In all my dark despair
And then he looked right through me as if I was not there
And he just kept on singing,
Singing clear and strong...

Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
Telling my whole life with his words
Killing me softly
With his song...

Having got this out of my system, in the next post, I'll come back to the most important subjects of this blog, the children. There's plenty of good news to report, including an optimistic follow-up to What's love got to do with it?—we've been sent some inspiring youtube videos about talented and happy young DS adults which counteract the poison of the last set of posts I wrote about, also, some reflections on what Sean and Julian's incredible first days on skis might tell us about the critical period hypothesis. And many more pictures.

*Curiously, classical music cannot achieve this, since as George Steiner observed—see the extract The Retreat from the Word in the other piece I've been working on this week, it represents 'a mode of intellectual reality...founded on a different communicative energy.' Without remembered lyrics to hook into and snag on our everyday reality, to weave or (sometimes) cobble together associations of word, place, sound, touch, fragrance...musical notes alone, however powerful, beautiful or abstractly evocative, no matter how compassionately sophisticated (Beethoven's late quartets, perhaps) or sublimely ordered (Bach's partitas), classical music doesn't come close to Jacques Brel, or Leo Ferre, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison—Phil Coulter, even!—in linking past and present, melding physical and emotional time and merging and remapping memories. Classical work is surely greater art, but it does not speak as clearly, it doesn't really speak at all.

Grouch

2011-01-10T23:45:00.010+09:00

There must be some good explanation for the fact that in Japan, a country notorious for allowing its citizens to work themselves to death (such that there's even a special term for it karoushi 過労死)—there are more public holidays than you can shake a stick at.

Grrr! As someone at the other end of things in terms of employment conditions, it's completely infuriating and frustrating: it seems like hardly a week goes by but there's yet another public holiday when I can't get anything done because the children are off school once again, asking what we are going to do today? In point of fact, Sean doesn't return to school until the 18th January, while Julian has an extra day off nursery this week just to ensure that I cannot prepare classes or do any research. I love my children dearly, but it would be nice to be able to get through a two week period in the calendar without another scheduled interruption.

Of course, it might be well argued that if I stopped grumbling and did some proper work, now, instead of writing this, I could enjoy the public holidays. There is something to that argument, but even so, I'd still have a lot of dead time on my hands. I just checked, you see: of the five countries surveyed Japan leads the world by far:

Japanese Public Holidays 15
French National Holidays 11
US Federal Holidays 10 (11 in Washington DC)
German public and religious holidays 8-12 (varies by federal state)
England & Wales Bank Holidays 8

Now, I know that many Japanese workers don't take all or any of these holidays, and that even if they do, they may well have no other personal holiday time in the year—which partly explains the apparent discrepancy, also that "pulling a sickie" appears to be as alien to the Japanese mentality as marmalade and brie sandwiches are to the Japanese palate—actually, this one might be just me!—but still, enough is enough, and it's only the middle of January. Bah! Humbug!

The Principle of Contrast

2011-01-06T10:43:00.006+09:00

Click here [YouTube]

Winter skies: Christmas morning on Rokko-san

Never saw the morning till I stayed up all night
Never saw the sunshine till you turned out the light
Never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
Never saw the melody until I needed the song...

Japanese houses are wretchedly cold in winter, except where they're snug and warm. Unlike Canadian homes, in which you need to remove six layers of outdoor clothing (fur to t-shirt in two minutes) to avoid heat exhaustion, or our house in England, which generously dispenses its pale heat across the neighbourhood through leaking walls and uninsulated roof spaces, retaining for itself only a breath of warm air and exhorbitant energy bills, Japanese houses are warm in just the places where people are...and close to freezing everywhere else. After just a few hours of cold weather, one appreciates the inspired genius of the heated toilet seat that is virtually standard bathroom equipment here. The very contrast is exhilarating, though: when, a few hours ago, I slunk off the heated carpet in the living room to go upstairs and check on the temperature in the children's bedroom, the fluctuation—from 24 (living room) to 6 (hall, stairs) to 26 (bedroom) gave me a better appreciation of both temperatures than if I had stayed at the constant 19 degrees that our Sheffield home boiler aims for, on its good days.

Entering the children's room, and perhaps other things today, put me in mind of the introductory music, San Diego Serenade by Tom Waits, from the album The Heart of Saturday Night. (Which is his best, unless that would be Closing Time... or Blue Valentine..or...or... at all events, one of the best) The song is about the appreciation of contrasts (...never saw the East Coast till I moved out to the West) but, more than this of course, it is about loss and regret, about how we often know and express love only after it's too late:

I never saw the white line till I was leavin' you behind
I never knew I needed you until I was caught up in a bind
And I never spoke I love you till I cursed you in vain
I never felt my heart strings until I nearly went insane

The corollary is also true: contrasts appear less meaningful when they are surrounded by similarities. So it was earlier today (27th December), when we took Justin to a support group for DS families at the prefectural hospital. I had been dreading this encounter—I'm still highly ambivalent about joining any such club—but in the event the surprising, and encouraging, outcome was the appreciation of how normal the condition is: after only a few minutes, I stopped noticing the traits that distinguish DS children from others, and started to see whether the child I was looking at bore closer resemblance to his or her mother or father. As you do, in normal situations...

If a tree falls...

2011-01-06T09:39:00.023+09:00

If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

No.

(I'm glad we've got that cleared up!)*

*For those who still believe this to be a conundrum, a fuller explanation will follow on Inishmacsaint shortly)

Three Little Birds

2011-01-05T02:50:00.008+09:00

View from the balcony, January 1st 2011

Click to play [youtube]

Don't worry about a thing,
'Coz ev'ry little thing gonna be alright...

(Bob Marley, Three Little Birds)

If Wikipedia is to be believed, no-one is quite sure who or what Bob Marley had in mind when he wrote this hopeful, upbeat song, but it's as good as any to start the New Year, and not completely irrelevant. Justin again, who's sleeping in his cot next to me as I write this, and still growing well. No real smiles, despite the counter claims of Seán and Julian from the back seat of the car earlier today —"You just don't see it Dad, you're too busy driving!" (the second part of which was, fortunately, true...), but he seems content nevertheless.

Which leads to the point of the post. Should we believe only what we see, or what others—be they children or doctors—tell us? On the left, the baby I see, who's growing, stretching, gazing, cooing like any normal baby; on the right, the chromosomal evidence that supposedly seals his fate (trisomy 21, bottom center-left)?

Both are true pictures, but the one on the left makes the other one seem considerably less frightening, and easier to bear. Of course, the music doesn't hurt either. Have a good day!

Happy New Year, from down Totoro's way (となりのトトロの森)

2011-01-01T02:19:00.006+09:00

It's probably just wishful thinking, but when I took this photograph on 28th December, hiking down Rokko-san, I couldn't help being reminded of Totoro, as Sean and Julian ran down ahead of me...into a sunlit afternoon. It was a beautiful winter's day, cool but sunny, perfect for a forest walk.

And only just in time, it turned out. Yesterday it started snowing in earnest, and we headed off for a day's skiing. This morning, New Year's morning, it's -12 outside, and little warmer in the hallway. But that's a story for another post. For now, the picture can stand for my hopes for all my family, and especially for my mother, for a happier and warmer 2011. Happy New Year to all.

Remembering Dad (Thinking about Madeleine II)

2010-12-29T14:28:00.007+09:00

Over the past few days, I've been thinking a lot about my father, Gordon Duffield, who died earlier this year, far too soon, before we had a chance to talk.

You might think that in nearly fifty years, we would have had a proper conversation, but though I told him about myself (too much at times, at times too little), and though he always listened, he only rarely shared his innermost thoughts, his personal beliefs as a man apart from his parental role, as a father and breadwinner; even then, when he revealed anything of himself, it was only in writing, never in conversation.

My father was the kindest man I have ever known, the most forgiving of others, the hardest on himself: in all my life, I only once saw him lose his temper, and it was not with me. (If I can get through a single day without berating one of my children, it is a rare achievement.) He was a good man, without a trace of self-consciousness, generous and tolerant to a fault, and—until his last weeks—optimistic beyond reason: for him, the empty glass was not half-full, it was spilling over.

The main regret I have—children are so ungrateful!—is that, until his final letter to me, he never told me what to do, what he would have wanted me to become, or not. He never advised, cajoled, persuaded or encouraged me to take one course of action over another: somewhat ironic, given that he spent most of his professional life in public relations. Whatever I chose was met with pride and quiet support, even though he must have known with the advantage of experience that so many of my life choices were ill-conceived.

I can recall only two occasions in my childhood and adolescence when he offered unsolicited advice: once, when I was about Seán's age (9), he told me, as we were working in the garage on the underside of some piece of woodwork: "It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do it to the best of your ability"; another time, just after I had received an entrance exhibition to Cambridge, he advised me that if I wanted to do well in business, it might be better to go straight in to it now. I laughed at this then, though of course he was right: with every year of tertiary education that followed, I made myself less and less employable outside of academia. But I have tried to live by the first motto: it's not easy, and usually it makes no difference on the surface, but it is right (a Puritan humanism inhabits us both).

Yet, for all he inspired confession in others, my father was personally inscrutable: not because he was cold or defensive—far from it—but because, like an amateur psychoanalyst, he filled any conversation with outwardly directed questions and concern about others' ambitions, beliefs and desires. Even when asked directly, it was harder to prise a judgement or opinion from him than to open a live oyster with only one's fingers. Until his final letters, I never really knew what he thought of me—or more importantly, what he thought of himself: he always joked about writing the 'Great Ulster Novel'; surely he had the talent, but never the opportunity. And until those letters, trapped as he was in his culture and generation (despite all superficial evidence to the contrary), he never told me he loved me. Nor I, him, except in writing: something we always had in common. I never doubted his love, but it was good to hear nonetheless.

My father's last letters are also one of the main reasons for writing this whole blog, when I should be preparing classes or writing research papers, or helping to clean the house or to change diapers. A modest attempt to achieve the one thing he has ever asked of me. The better part of his brief correspondence is too personal—it is also too kind, too flattering—for me to make public. Yet to publish certain lines is not exploitative, but rather restitutive of his memory: for those many people who knew his public side as a great communicator, as a humorist, as a non-political, non-partisan activist—his work for the town of Holywood being only the last of his selfless causes—it is important to show what he held inside.

My father was not a great man in the popular sense—he was neither famous nor flawless—but he was a good one, and a great human being. I loved him, and I wished I could have told him properly before Parkinson's disease stole his attention from us, and ultimately his life.

Here then are two excerpts: the first explains his reticence in his own words, the second, the reason I have to keep writing:

05 November 2006

As a child I never learned to bond.

Your grandfather was the original shy commander—a man used to administering authority in a rough shipyard, but with an inability to show affection to those around him (he himself had been brought up by two maiden aunts in the absence of a runaway husband and a mother who, after the scandal of a divorce drove her for many years off to Scotland.) [sic]

I never doubted his love for me and my siblings (although we never used the 'L' word in working class Belfast) but I can remember only one instance in my young life when he held me and that was when he and my mother were going out shopping leaving me at the dining room table to work on my school 'exercises.'

He put his hands on my crouched shoulders and squeezed them - the remembered mark of physical affection in a young life that had been plagued by low (sometimes high) level illness and a deafness that wartime medicine was not able to deal with and school authorities failed to recognise.

The result was that, like my father, but for different reasons, I grew up a self-centred and 'distant' child uncertain of how to cope with relationships and whose determination to succeed was in the non-communicating world of writing and music...

(A few years ago, my father embarked on a less confessional, but equally fascinating genealogical project—The Bickerstaff Connection, which I posted as a separate blog: it would serve his memory well if you would read it. There are also a few tributes on this blog.)

His final letter to me was inspired by one of my first blog posts, written in 2007 Thinking about Madeleine (I), which I fully intended to follow up, and haven't done till now. It is a personal reflection on parenthood, and on the situation of Madeleine McCann's parents, whose story has disappeared from the headlines, but whose tragedy is ongoing. Of the post my father wrote:

26th September 2007

Writing is a powerful tool.

I have gained a greater understanding of you in the few minutes of reading 'Thinking about Madeleine' than I have in over forty years as your father...

...You've learned how to express your inner self, an achievement more valuable than ten years at a college of writing.

I hope to be able to read much more of it in the coming years—remember that I have determined to reach 85!—so that I may exit the mortal coil knowing that I have a son who has attained a recognition in a discipline in which his father has only ever been at the edge.

Love, Dad

My father didn't make it to 85: he turned 77 this year. Nor was I able to fulfil his last and only ambition for me. I only hope that these continuing efforts offer some small recompense, and that they are as good as they can be.

What's love got to do with it?

2010-12-22T02:06:00.011+09:00

Click here to play the first track [Youtube]

When I was young/My father said
Son, I have something to say
And what he told me I'll never forget
Until my dying day...

(Cliff Richard, Bachelor Boy, 1963)

Since just after Justin's birth, I have tried to be positive and optimistic about our future, and particularly about the challenges presented by his condition. Sometimes, as will have been clear from other posts, this positivity is aided by an ostrich-like refusal to contemplate future eventualities, but mostly, it's because I feel we've been really lucky: he had no postnatal medical complications; he's loved and accepted by his brothers, he's growing well; there's even a hint of a smile on his face...

There are some days, though, when optimism seems like an overwhelming challenge, days when I almost lose the will to move forward, and when I look around for a large tub of sand (something, like litter bins, that is in desperately short supply in urban Japan). Today was such a day, and it was all occasioned by a short piece that Ayumi found on the web about the family of a DS child (more evidence, if such were needed, that one shouldn't go looking for bad news).

In this chat, a girl asks whether she should still marry her boyfriend now that she has found out that he has a brother with Down Syndrome. Lest it be imagined this is invented, here is an image of the relevant text. The question is bad enough: the responses—overwhelmingly negative—are generally poisonous:

Now, I know that Justin will almost certainly never have children (there are just three reported cases in the history of the condition). It's also very likely that he will never marry, though looking at my single friends, there's no evidence that he will be any less happy for that: Cliff Richard took his own song (well, his and Bruce Welch's!) to heart, remaining steadfastly unattached, and appears to be one of the most content individuals I've ever seen interviewed). So I'm quite sanguine about Justin's future as a single man: in any case, he's only six weeks old, and we have infinitely more important things to worry about over the next 20 years!
Yet the idea that his condition could blight the marriage prospects of our other children is upsetting, less for what it says about this Japanese girl's attitude to Down Syndrome than for what it reveals about her attitude to love and marriage. Call me a hopeless romantic, but until this news I had naively thought that in the modern age—aside from marriages of convenience—if people got hitched at all it was because (they believed—rightly or not—that they loved each other: whether the feeling lasted, the impulse was not a selfish one. Now, I have to wonder if Tina Turner was right: (Though the song comes at this from the other direction, it ends up in the same place.)

Of course, it could be argued that my reaction to this girl's story is a symptom of my cultural insensitivity: it is certainly true that on average, family ties are more important in Japan than in the UK; the idea of marrying 'into' your partner's family is still a concept; the reality may be that this Japanese girl could have ended up with some real responsibility for the care of her partner's brother. But I refuse to accept this defence: in my professional life, I struggle against cultural relativism, and I'm not about to let it excuse callow selfishness in this case. The girl is wrong.

But what still troubles me is whether I am being naive about this: is this girl's attitude representative of that of many women in the world, or only of most Japanese women (I might despise cultural relativism, but I could be wrong!), or—as I fondly hope—of this one sad individual. I don't have a good answer to this, but to save me from despair, at least there is Jacques Brel:

Click to play

Pour un peu de tendresse
Je t'offrirais le temps
Qu'il reste de jeunesse
A l'été finissant
Pourquoi crois-tu, la belle
Que monte ma chanson
Vers la claire dentelle
Qui danse sur ton front
Penché vers ma détresse
Pour un peu de tendresse ?

(Jacques Brel, La tendresse)

Days like this (another hospital visit)

2010-12-16T15:18:00.007+09:00

Click here for the accompaniment

Last Autumn leaves at Julian's nursery

When it's not always raining
there'll be days like this
When there's no-one complaining
there'll be days like this
Everything falls into phase
like the flick of a switch
Well my momma told me
there'll be days like this

When you don't need to worry
there'll be days like this
When noone's in a hurry
there'll be days like this
When you don't get betrayed
by that old Judas kiss
Oh my momma told me
there'll be days like this

When you don't need an answer
there'll be days like this
When you don't meet a chancer
there'll be days like this
When all the parts of the puzzle
start to look like they fit
Then I must remember
there'll be days like this

Van Morrison (Days like this)

On the face of it, yesterday was not one of those days, as we took Justin to the Children's hospital for his one month check-up—as I mentioned before, hospital visits are rarely uplifting—but this was the song that the Genius playlist brought up on the iPod attached to the car stereo, and really it wasn't so bad. Thank you, the Man...

The good news is that Justin is staying and growing very well: he's put nearly 500g since the last visit, his heart is fine, his eyes are straight, and his muscle tone is good. (Of course, just that description tells me why I dislike hospitals—he's a baby, not a racehorse: they didn't ask or investigate how happy we think he is, how close to his brothers, how loved? Stethoscopes and blood tests provide little further information about such things).

What was interesting was that we got a full genetic print-out, showing the extra 21st chromosome (trisomy): astonishing that having a spare chromosome—and the smallest one at that—can have such profound effects.

The other good thing about the hospital, or at least unexpected in a Japanese institution, was this musical entertainment: the hospital orchestra came by to cheer up the children at Christmas. (This is the theme tune from Ponyo, virtually a national hymn for the under 8s: the movie very much worth seeing if or even if you don't have children).

[This failed to load: I'll try again later]

In other news, we did have a "Day like this" (you see, semantics students, it's possible to use analytic sentences informatively) on Sunday last. It's turning cold on Rokko, but still mostly sunny, and on a clear day, as beautiful as any place I've ever been. Here are some pictures of all of us out on a Sunday walk around the neighbourhood (Justin is the bundle in the front).

When all the parts of the puzzle
start to look like they fit
Then I must remember
there'll be days like this

(Julian was there, too, but has turned camera-shy again). More to come in the next post, including Sean's art prize, third in the prefecture: who would have thought that someone so artistically challenged, at least in thr visual arts, could have such a talented child (he boasts)...

Sean's wood-cut

Scents and Sensibility (repost)

2010-12-12T07:42:00.011+09:00

A relevant book by my former History teacher (CCB 1975-1980)

Over the last few weeks an old post, Expatriotism, has been attracting some attention. So I thought it might be of interest to re-post another, which I was nearly as happy with. (At least, it may be of interest to those who happened to grow up in East Belfast in the 1960s).

You can read it here too Scents and sensibility

Dreadful pun though it may be, the title captures the theme of this post (I was going to say essence, but that would compound the sin).

I'm losing my sense of smell. This is not some private affliction, though its loss to me is certainly personal; it's less a symptom of aging than of the age itself. With regard to other cognitive faculties we are told to "use it or lose it", but my nose hasn't got a chance, really. It's not for want of trying, but for lack of stimulus, that the sense of smell is gradually giving up its ghost. The same homogenisation of popular culture that has turned every high street into a paltry clone of the next, has done the same for the smells, pongs, stinks, odours, aromas and perfumes that used to infest them. Actually, it's done for most kinds of smells altogether: "reeks" have gone the way of smallpox, leaving only feeble "scents", and pathetic "hints" of this and that...It's not only that everywhere smells the same, everywhere smells of nothing much at all.

For perfect accompaniment to the next paragraph, click here:

As a child, for instance, I remember being taken shopping by my great-aunt along the Upper Newtownards Road in Belfast. First, we'd go to a newsagent just opposite Evelyn Avenue: you walked in to the smell of old broadsheets, packets of Players, Sherbet Lemons, and furniture polish mixed with shoe cream. In the butcher's shop further down, other mixtures breezed around on the draft under the door: sawdust, blood, fresh sausages, cured bacon, mingled with smoked haddock from the fish counter, and wicker shopping baskets. Further down still was the bakery (on a street called Bread), and Irvine's shoe shop: a new pair of shoes used to colour my bedroom for a fortnight at least. And nearer home, a weekly dose of woody mustiness in Ballyhackamore Post Office filled out my sense of place.

I also remember the stench from the Lagan and the nearby gas-holders on summer days in Victoria Park: since the barrier was built, and gas is 'natural', that's gone too, as has the fantastic smell from Gallaher's cigarette factory, the coal lorries on their delivery runs, fumes of leaded petrol and old diesel.

[1;40] ...Call it pagan streams, and it spins and turns/In a factory on a street called Bread, in East Belfast, where Georgie knows Best, what it's like to be Daniel in the Lion's den, so many friends, only most of the time... (Van Morrison, Ancient Highway)

All these have vanished, and with them an olfactory topography of East Belfast, replaced by the same vapid nondescription found in Bracknell, Boston, and—for all I know—Bogota. The term "air quality" refers only to levels of noxious carcinogens, eye-watering sulphurs, particulates and their gritty ilk: the contemporary ideal is sterility, absence.

Nowadays, even milk goes off without emitting any cloying warning of its transition to unpalatability. This may of course be good for those of us with a toddler who regularly dribbles said liquid across the back seat of the car; time was, this meant a new car in extreme cases! But it should raise concerns, even among the sanguine, about food science and genetic modification.

It's not just the undesirable smells that have been driven from these islands: I can't recall the last time I noticed aftershave or perfume in a public place—or come to that a private one. We've become a Simple^TMr generation: washed yet unperfumed, cleansed but literally unremarkable, and the poorer for it. (This is not universal: many Italian and French women still inhabit scented microcosms, other European men retain their nasal sensibilities, but the Anglo-American world is aggressively fragrance-free.)

Most likely, this is just another Golden Age rant: no doubt something has been gained by the expulsion of scents and sinners, but I suspect much more has been surrendered. When bemoaning the loss of biodiversity, we should spare a thought for our noses too. If I were a dog, I would weep at such sterility (or whatever dogs do instead).

"Barring Pathology": Nature vs. Nurture just got personal!

2010-12-09T13:47:00.005+09:00

Fruit tree in December: Are these lemons?

On my academic website, under Current Research projects, I've written the following:

No-one with young children, and an appreciation of human history, can reasonably prefer social over biological determinism, unless they are incredibly optimistic about society, and I'm not...

The line was written with regard to three closely-related 'big questions' that most of us professional linguists care about: (i) how much of Language is innate?; (ii) are there Language Universals, or can languages 'differ from each other without limit...and in unpredictable ways (Martin Joos)?'; (iii) does the language you speak materially affect the way you think? At first sight it might be thought that the first two questions are different ways of asking the same thing: if significant aspects of language are innate, then there must be Universals; conversely, if languages can vary without limit then it would seem that no aspects of Language can be innate. Now, I've argued elsewhere (in print, and in the blogosphere) that this is wrong, that one can well be a nativist about Language with a capital L, while arguing the toss about language universals. (I also believe—as a typical academic—that the answer to the third question is 'Yes and No', though more 'No' than 'Yes' (I hope!)). But none of that is greatly important.

The reason for bringing it up here, on this family site, is that what I research and teach just got personal. For I've realized that, like most nativists (see Steve Pinker's discussion of this in his Blank Slate book), I'm hopeful about biological determinism because I've only ever looked at typically developing children. Nativist introductions to language development argue for the innateness of language on the grounds that typically developing children acquire their native language perfectly, with astonishing speed and accuracy (compared, for example, to the usually abysmal performance of adult second language learners). And in almost all of these texts, there is some reference to atypical children: the phrase that one frequently reads is "barring pathology". The following quote from James Hurford is representative, and I've trotted it out myself in previous work (see directly below):

All human languages have these properties which must be mastered in a few years by the child; and, barring pathology, children achieve mastery spectacularly well (Hurford, 2008 BBS)

The goal of determining the precise nature of Universal Grammar is externally constrained in two ways. First, as we have mentioned, there is the fact that first language acquisition is uniformly successful (barring pathology) and that it is also astonishing rapid; by the age of four at the latest, children show clear evidence of having acquired all of the major grammatical properties of their particular language (Duffield, 1995).

Barring pathology. A simple dismissive adjunct clause, signifying "we've got those cases out of the way; now, we can get on with the main business". All very well until your own child belongs to that small minority: for Justin is a pathological case (as literally defined) but he is also our baby. So now I wonder: should I still prefer biological over social determinism?

The shrine near Julian's nursery: time for a quick prayer

The right answer to this is not yet clear: like the symptoms of Justin's condition, it is something that will emerge and evolve over time. One thing has changed, for certain: I'd better start becoming more optimistic about what the environment can do to improve his life quality; I'd better hope that social and educational services can be forces for good, and can help us to make a real difference to his life, because pessimism about these things will not help any of us. Yet, at the same time, my nativism is also a source of optimism: for though the general prognosis of (genetically determined) moderate mental retardation gives us sleepness nights, there is a small amount of research out there—some by my friend and colleague Helen Goodluck—that suggests that understanding of complex language is relatively spared in high-functioning DS (even if speech remains a great challenge). So, there is hope in this idea, after all.

'Saved by hope...saved by love': Parenthood revisited

2010-12-05T23:49:00.002+09:00

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.” Reinhold Niebuhr.

I've just found this, by the "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change..." man: perhaps it is well known, but it was not to me. It is brilliant, I think, and a neat preface to a re-post of an article I wrote a few years ago, when I was struggling with parental responsibility: the sentiments expressed there, I feel more intensely now, yet the realization that we can be 'saved by love' is no small comfort.

Parenthood (originally posted on Inishmacsaint, 2007)

People say that I am a good father. It may be true, but it does not reflect any strength of character or personal virtue. Quite the opposite: it is a symptom of loss, of involuntary abandonment, transformation of the person I used to be. Every time I change a dirty nappy, or put Germolene on a grazed knee, or quarrel about who should pick up the kids this time, or serve tepid pasta at 6pm, a piece of me is lost. There is no less of me, but I am less myself. Every tiny sacrifice for the sake of domestic continuity is just that: a sacrifice. The laws of physics demand that such loss is replaced: entropy requires that what replaces it is more smoothed out, dissipated and disordered than what came before; and so it is, molecule by molecule, cell by cell... The result is parenthood incarnate, not the realization of some ideal social virtue, but a slow, largely painless, smothering of vitality and egotism. It is not that we change our priorities for our children, which might indeed be a virtuous impulse; rather, the priorities change us.

This insidious transformation is not without consolations, of course: there is probably nothing to equal the experience of seeing a child's first smile, first steps, their continual pleasure (for now at least!) in having you around, the feeling of watching them sleeping soundly. The principal consolation is that it provides an easy reason to live, to go on, a banal raison d'etre. Just because it's banal doesn't mean it's not true; just because it's true doesn't make it interesting. Parenthood is a pastime, like almost everything else in our existence, a distraction from our purpose, whatever that may be...

My friend Eric Kellerman told me before Sean was born that he was too selfish to have children. From anyone else, this should have been interpreted as mild self-deprecation; from him, it is only the truth, and he is right to believe it. What he can't know of course, is that everyone with a reasonably healthy mind is too selfish to have children; soon enough, though, like Winston Smith coming to love Big Brother, that selfishness slips away, leaving only a remembered trace in photographs, occasional rages, and passing flirtations. This may not be a bad thing—surely it is better to have the consolations of parenthood than to grow old without achieving any other purpose—but it is sheer self-delusion to believe that it is an inherent good, or that it deserves any special reverence. To coin a phrase, "parenthood happens".

And here it is happening, in a good way: a scene from today's Christmas party at Kobe (International) Club. (By the time this picture was taken, Sean had disappeared off with his friend to Wadamisaki (Home's Stadium), where our local football club—Vissel Kobe—was putting on an end of season thank you event for its fans, as we have become (totally unexpectedly):

Christmas Party at Kobe Club, 5th December

How special?

2010-12-05T01:23:00.005+09:00

Saturday evening/Sunday morning. As more people hear about Justin, so I've heard many stories about friends whose own experience of parenting has been so much harder than ours. Some people, my mother is one such, wonder why this is a comfort: does it make you feel better knowing that others have faced more tragic situations? For me, it does: first, it's chastening to realise that ours is no tragedy, we are not specially chosen, and that other parents can cope with so much more, but also to know that many people care and sympathise—if I didn't think much of social networking at the beginning, it's because I didn't realise how much it could help. So thank you!

And then there's this picture, taken earlier this evening: far from being in any difficulty, we are so lucky to have moments like this...

Catch up

2010-12-03T13:36:00.001+09:00

Realizing that it's a week since the last post, I've resolved to spend a few minutes catching up on odds and ends. First, the weather: not only because it provides such a dramatic contrast to Sheffield: until about 1am this morning, it had been another beautiful week, with clear skies and warm temperatures (up to 16 degrees down the hill). The following pictures were taken on the road from the cable car to home, and at Kobe College in Nishinomiya (where we'll both be teaching fulltime for a year from next Spring).
Sheffield offers a slightly different view, I understand: I'm grateful to Sue Vice for sending me the picture below of the Botanical Gardens. If you happen to be stuck in the snow, take comfort from the fact that this is just a seasonal aberration for you: no doubt after a week or so, it will be back to 6 degrees with blustery winds and extended showers in time for Christmas (which is, curiously enough, how it is here today: looking out on the mountain, I can barely see the houses 50 metres away, let alone into town). The other consolation is that quite soon, we'll be up to our knees in snow here: though I'm looking forward to the mini ski-slope 10 minutes away on the bus, the prospect of trying to dig out the car, and attach snow-chains at 7:30am, to get Julian to nursery, does not inspire enthusiasm.

To other matters, on Monday (I think it was) we drove to unlovely Amagasaki, between Kobe and Osaka, to see another specialist about Justin. Hospitals and doctor's visits are rarely uplifting experiences—there was nothing wrong with the hospital, or with the specialist: she seemed to be a very experienced and caring woman, who will set up a course of meetings and possible therapies for Justin in the coming months—but it's hard not to feel discouraged everytime we look to the future, and prognosis always seems more consuming of energy and hope than diagnosis. Also, she did confirm the DNA diagnosis of Down Syndrome, which finally laid to rest any residual hope we might have had about Justin's condition. This only confirms my growing conviction that (other than precautionary) thinking about the future is a recipe for misery. What's important is that he's well now, and growing well. The fact that he hasn't smiled no doubt makes things harder, but he's hardly atypical in this respect either: probably most typical babies aren't so hot at smiling in week 4.

We have at least two other reasons to be cheerful, the two in the following videos: Sean at a mini sports day event at Kobe Golf Club (now closed for the season) he's the one running around in white and Julian, practising a new nursery song, in a quite inimitable style. (When I have more time to spare, I'll have a rant about BBC World (tv, not radio) which you can see playing in the background — how jaw-droopingly insipid and wretched it is, but for now, someone is crying to be fed, and I have a chapter to be getting on with...)

Justin's news, Friday evening

2010-11-26T23:35:00.001+09:00

Today, I received a book that Ayumi had ordered for me from Amazon—two-day delivery from Seattle, Washington to our door!—on Early Communication Skills for Children with Down Syndrome, by Libby Kumin. It looks to be excellent, and hopefully will give us (and Justin) a head start on the months and years to come, but it's also daunting, and not a little enervating, even to peek into. Meantime, as you can see from these images, Justin continues to thrive. It's just a pity he thinks he's a bat: having slept pretty much continuously from 3-8pm today, he's now awake and set to snuffle through the early night-shift...