Thirty Things, Number 19: Read 'Daniel Deronda'

… Do not think of me sorrowfully on your wedding-day. I have remembered your words – that I may live to be one of the best women, who make others glad that they were born. I do not yet see how that can be, but you know better than I. If it ever comes true, it will be because you helped me…

(Eliot, G, 1876: Daniel Deronda, Penguin Books, 810)

I admire George Eliot. Sometimes I think I want to be her. She writes awesome sentences like this one:

The fact was, notwithstanding all his sense of poetry in common things, Deronda, where a keen personal interest was aroused, could not, more than the rest of us, continuously escape suffering from the pressure of that hard unaccommodating Actual which has never consulted our taste and is entirely unselect. (380)

However, I also like the way she refuses to submit to the standard conventions of a fairytale romance. I like that it takes her 800 pages to tell a story, and that in those 800 pages she can talk about love, literature, religion and politics and I don’t get bored, rather I slowly fall in love with her quiet, soft spoken parentless hero myself. And yet, at the end of 800 pages I couldn’t really tell you that much about Daniel Deronda or why, were he real, I’d be leaning on him just as Gwendolen was. He isn’t an obvious heir to a huge amount of money, he isn’t a dashing navy captain, he isn’t a classics reading Cotton Mill owner he doesn’t own Donwell Abbey or even Pemberley, he is just a well educated, considerate and thoughtful guy. Turns out that’s much more attractive than those other things.

And because he is well educated, considerate and thoughtful he becomes something of a saviour to two women, rather than a suitor or lover, and I kind of like that about him too. Deronda saves two drowning women, and encourages them to live full and meaningful lives. The first rescue is from a quite literal drowning. Daniel rescues Mirah when she despairing of ever find happiness again, prepares to meet her fate in the cold wet embrace of the Thames. He then brings her into the hospitality of good, gentle and caring women, who help Mirah find her place in London society through music, as Mirah is able to teach singing to earn her living. The second woman, Gwendolen, he saves from drowning in her own sorrow caused by the strangling grasp of her marriage and her narrow view point which has not prepared her to think of any life beyond herself, or to find any joy past her immediate disappointments.

Poor Gwendolen. In the hands of any other novelist this young, attractive and energetic heroine would have made a brilliant marriage. But, shaped by Eliot she looses her fortune, marries a bastard and then quietly falls in love with a man who does not love her. I say quietly falls in love, because I don’t even know if Gwendolen herself knows she is in love with Deronda, but I get the clear impression that she was. Even before her bastard of a husband conveniently drowns. If she’d been alive today and not been a Victorian wife she would have been stalking that boy on twitter big time, and pouring out her soul on that soulless medium that makes deep emotional confessions with even relative strangers possible; facebook chat.

Instead Gwendolen and Deronda steal snatches of conversation in the ballroom and at soirees. At first I found Gwendolen somewhat insipid. She’s selfish and she moans and she’s a little bit emo, and she’s fairly certain life is “all like a dance set beforehand” (451) and she is every bit a Gen Y lass. And then I realised she was a bit of me, or maybe I was a bit like her, and that perhaps was the brilliance of Eliot in creating a woman who when I first met her I didn’t really like. She was a brat and she was selfish and served her right marrying Grandcourt, and being cut up with guilt and jealousy over his lover and their kids. Then as she poured out her soul to Deronda I realised that like Gwendolen I had opportunity before me, but I was afraid of disappointment or getting my hands dirty and so I didn’t really know what to do. That sometimes I found life to be so pointless that I was frozen into inaction because did it really matter what I did, I was never going to change anything. I was just a woman in love with the wrong man, cut up with jealousy over his ex-girlfriend and their kid.

So when Deronda took Gwendolen under his care and did his best to lift her from the muddy waters of self doubt and self pity, I heard him saying to me that I needed education, passion and purpose. That then:

life would be worth more to you: some real knowledge would give you an interest in the world beyond the small drama of personal desires. It is the curse of your life – forgive me – of so many lives, that all passion is spent in that narrow round, for want of ideas and sympathies to make a larger home for it. Is there any single occupation of mind that you care about with passionate delight or even independent interest?” (451)

And though Deronda is a piece of fiction, the point that Eliot makes in him is a good one. Life is bigger than the “small drama of personal desires”. And there are things that I care about that are beyond my own needs and wants. And its high time I got back to being a generous, other-centred person, to looking out for people like Mirah who need practical love and people like Gwendolen who sometimes need a hug and sometimes need to be kicked off their backsides, and to realise that at any given point I myself might be bit of a Mirah or a Gwendolen. For while Eliot refuses to submit to the narrative of pretty lady heroine falls in love with dashing hero and lives happily ever after, that is the story we can hope will be fulfilled in Mirah once the novel closes. So maybe the possibility of a fairytale is always there, it just depends whose eyes you look through. Mirah’s life though riddled with pain and disillusionment when we meet her is actually full of fairytale coincedences. She is rescued by Deronda who just happens to be rowing by as she contemplates suicide. He searches for her family and just happens to find her brother, in London, without even really trying. Then to top it all off, he meets his own mother, discovers he is a Jew and therefore much more appealing to Mirah and Mordecai than when everyone thought he was the son of an English Baron. And so the downtrodden but virtuous Mirah gets the hero. If that isn’t a fairytale, I don’t know what it is.

So Mirah gets a fairytale, but Gwendolen gets reality. She marries the wrong man, then falls in love with the best man in the world of the novel, and has to watch as he marries someone else. But, she has learnt to see life beyond herself. To see that Deronda had a life beyond her own, and that other people deserve fairytales too, because the world is bigger than her own suffocatingly narrow desires.

Thirty Things, Number 17: Watch Les Miserables

This is not a review. I’m not stupid enough to contemplate writing a review of a show that I work on. This is just a quick little note to record the fact that I have done yet another of the things on my list. And if it’s a review of anything, it is of my watching experience, because I was apprehensive and feared that maybe I’d seen and heard Les Mis too many times, and concerned that rather than like or not like it, I just might not be interested.

So, on Tuesday 31^st January, I went to the Queens theatre and watched the longest running musical in London[1] and I felt like a tourist, even though I spend most evenings in the building, knew everyone on stage and was mentally aware of where I would be backstage at any given point in time depending on which plot I was doing. It’s a strange way to view theatre. To be thinking things like can I see the onstage wig change (no) and so that is what the make-up looks like under lights (much more subtle than I imagined) while at the same time being involved in a narrative and the (forgive me) journey of a character or two, and every now and then thinking something like oh, that’s who sings that bit! because previously you’ve only heard something from side stage and didn’t recognise the voice, is, well, a different experience to just watching a show.

All that in mind, I was actually positively surprised about how excited I was to be watching the show, and how much I did enjoy it – the music and the narrative. Because I confess I had doubts. Its been over ten years since I saw a professional production of Les Mis. That was in Sydney. I went with school. I more remember things like being shocked that lovely ladies drew their cleavage on (to think the painting of ‘gulls’ would become quite a regular part of my job!), and not having anyone to talk to at interval because I went with my drama class and I was that popular to somehow managed not to have a single friend with me. Since then I’ve seen a schools production and an Am-dram youth theatre version, both of which were good, but slow, and left me thinking that perhaps I’d seen Les Mis enough. So although I lived in London in 2009, was here on holiday over Christmas 2010, and have now been back since May, I was never in a hurry to watch the show.

Then, when I began to put together my list of things to do, I realised that here I was working on a show that claims a space in music theatre history, is a major tourist attraction, and that if I left London without seeing it except from the wings, I’d probably feel a bit silly. So I put it on the list. I have to thank Tim Southgate for including a line from Stars in his status update a few weeks ago which prompted me to ask him to come watch it with me and actually buy tickets. And I did get excited. The day before it hit me. I realised, not only was I looking forward to hanging out with Tim before he flew back to Sydney, I was also really quite looking forward to seeing the show, even though I hear it every night.

So I can happily tick number 17 off the list. Watch Les Miserables. Done. Added bonus: I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it, and by the nerdy little bit of me that was filled with a rush of excitement as the curtain (screen) went up at the start, simply because I was there. Not be interested? What a silly fear. Ok, so I love opera, we all know that. But sometimes I think I forget how much I like going to the theatre.

Did I mention I like theatre? I like theatre.

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[1] I’m slightly unsure about this fact. I even checked the website, but that made me confused as it claims that is “now the world’s longest running musical”, but further down the page says, “In Broadway history it is the third longest running show after Cats and Phantom of the Opera”. So, yes. That is all.

Thirty Things, Number 15: Go to Lates at the Science Museum.

A while ago, I was roped into handing out leaflets outside the Science Museum as apparently a lot of people gather there for the late opening session. It turned out to be true. On the last Wednesday of the month a lot of twenty and thirty somethings gather at the museum and form a very long and orderly line - it stretches back to the Natural History Museum, but there is no pushing in happening. It was odd to see a bunch of adults queuing to get into a museum. So I thought to myself I’d come back some time and check it out. I even put it on my list of things to do.

Last night, in the company of two wonderful ladies, Cathryn and Amelia, I went back to check out the museum. I arrived at South Kensington station a few minutes before 6:30, alighted there for the museums, as the cheery voice over on the tube suggests, then walked down the pedestrian tunnel underneath exhibition road, past the familiar doors of the V&A, all the way to the end, and came out at the Science Museum. I then walked back down Exhibition Road to the back on the line. The grown-ups only session begins at 6:45 and by the time we were there people must have been queuing for some time. I stood with my gloved hands in my pockets, wondering what I would actually do or see in the museum. Amelia grabbed a brochure which suggested going to the Launchpad, as we might remember it from when we were nine, and now we could go back and experience it again. Given that when I was nine I was in Sydney, I didn’t remember the hands on gallery of this museum, but I knew the concept. Amelia was excited. She remembered it. So once we progressed through the line, we headed inside, bought ourselves a glass or two of wine and made our way up through the museum to the Launchpad looking at various exhibits on the way.

We had a look at iron lungs, and skin cells, and strange mathematical polyhedra things from the 18^th century that we couldn’t find out anything about. There was a stunning display of old microscopes, telescopes and other bits and piece of scientific paraphernalia. We read about open lectures during the Victorian Era and looked at models of DNA. I was struck by just how much information we humans are gathering and by how much we, as a general population, know now, or have access to, yet how little I am aware of. There is an awful lot of learning, researching and experimenting going on.

And then we got to the Launchpad and I got to pretend I was a kid and it was pretty awesome. We had way too much fun. Truly. I haven’t felt like such a child in a long time, and it was ridiculously fun.

We teamed up with strangers to move bits of grain around in the creatively named Big Machine, we got outrageously dizzy spinning round at the Rotation Station, were suitable impressed and excited when we generated some electricity and were enchanted by the patterns formed by dry ice.

The interesting fact of the evening was provided by the one actual science student/professional amongst us, Cathryn, who informed us that if you are in a room where the level of oxygen drops to 6% you will pass out in 2 breaths and be dead in 8 minutes. That was a cheery thought.

I’m glad I put a visit to the Science Museum on my list. I don’t know if I really learnt that much about science, but I had an absolutely fantastic evening, drinking wine in a plastic cup in a museum, getting ridiculously excited by simple things, and declaring I loved science.

I love science!

Considering Homesickness

It is three years since I’ve been to South West Rocks. In the summer, that is, as a leader of a beach mission team. I did go in the winter of 2010, just for the afternoon, so I could show the place to Matthew. I took him because it is a place that has come to feel like home to me, though I have never lived there, except for ten days at a time, in a tent, around this Christmas New Year holiday time. Despite that, the moment I turn off the highway and start driving out to the coast I am flooded with the feeling that I have arrived back where I belong, back where I am safe, perhaps even where I am special. And I wanted him to know, see and smell that place. There are two other places that come to mind which also create this sense of home, and which when I am not there I miss and long for, if only in some quiet and unfocused way. The more obvious of the two is the Sydney Opera House; the more peculiar is Baker Street tube station. I’ve become vividly aware of this in recent months as I have just moved to West London and come into work at Soho via the Hammersmith & City and Bakerloo lines, and often I’m struck by how happy I am simply to be back passing through Baker St, if only to change trains, as it was my nearest tube when I first lived in London in 2009. Changing trains there I feel suddenly like I’m balanced again, even though I hadn’t previously been aware of any unbalance. But there it is, in something so common place as walking up the stairs from platform three and crossing over the concourse to platform six, that feeling as though I have come home.

Throughout 2010, when I was back in Sydney, in my real home – either in The Party House, the apartment I had rented since late 2006 or in my parents’ home, which we had moved to in 1986 – I missed London, my 8^th floor bedroom/cupboard on Marylebone Road, The Volunteer on Baker Streets and the friends who had hung out with me there. In London I miss the Opera House and the fact that most people in that building knew me, and particularly around this time of year I miss South West Rocks. When life takes me away from these places I am homesick for them.

While this is a homesickness for certain locations, it is obvious to me that is much more a homesickness for the memories, emotions and people associated with the places. A longing for an emotional home, rather than a physical one. For the comfort of particular people, situations and significances rather than the comfort of familiar homely surroundings. It is at this point that I think perhaps homesickness and conversely a sense of home coming, have a lot to do not only with longing and security but also with nostalgia, and a hanging on to the past.

The places that create in me a sense of homecoming whenever I am there are locations attached to formative experiences. They are places of learning which have come to signify a development in my sense of self, my ability to organise and lead others, to think intelligently and creatively. They are places of sometimes intense emotions, of flirting and falling in love and consequently the occasional heart battering. It is in these places that I have found enthusiasm and passion I didn’t realise I possessed. For education, music, literature. For talking about the God of the bible, and how my belief in him has shaped me.

When I pass through Baker St, if I take the time to stop and take note of the specific memories which flood me, I remember the liberating excitement of being in London, mixed with the comfort and contentment that came with realising I was still essentially the same me, just on the other side of world. The simple joy that I was actually on the London Underground (I still wonder, how it is, that this city has made even its transport system iconic) and of course Met Line adventures with Mel, Matthew, Kate, Chris and Hollie coming home from Midsummer rehearsals, discussing everything from feminism and Shakespeare to killer possums and giving lessons on how to speak like a character on Kath and Kim, and like a school girl, contriving as often as possible to sit next to Matthew for those precious eighteen minutes from Northwick Park to Baker St. It is a memory of having fun; of feeling like the things you thought, no matter how trivial, were interesting, important, somehow life changing; a sensation of aliveness which seemed different to anything I’ve known before. That’s where nostalgia comes into it, because I don’t want to let go of that. Because since then I’ve left the bubbles of safety and optimism I cultivated at university, in which one could dream of revolution - personal and political, and that other more common bubble of perfection and bliss: the first six weeks of brand new relationship.

When I miss the Opera House, its not just work or the work place or tickets to the opera, but the people and the fact that I know I have changed how I conduct relationships due to experiences connected with that building. Because I told myself it was significant, I can recall the surge of happiness and almost illicit pleasure of running down the ugly concrete stairs late one night in a candy pink formal dress to meet someone I naively thought I was in love with. A memory of self importance, of stepping outside of time and viewing my life as though it were a fictive invention and knowing that that moment would be one of the highlights, even though, with the retrospective knowledge, it was a moment that would never amount to anything and shouldn’t therefore retain any importance, except that it does because I told myself to treasure it.

But the place I feel I should treasure even more than I do is South West Rocks. I think of it now, from the other side of the world as I sit on the ferry approaching Dublin, and remember how when I first went there in 1999 I couldn’t imagine ever going back. Beach Mission was hard work. I hated camping. I had to sleep in a tent and walk a ten minute round trip just to go to the toilet. I was covered in mosquito and sand fly bites. I wouldn’t be going back. But I was wrong. A year later, when asked if I wanted to go to a training day I agreed, with an air of nonchalance. At some point I made a commitment to be on my beach mission team for ten years. And I was. But it was a long time before I realised I loved the place, in an enduring kind of way. Maybe its because there weren’t any candy pink formal dress moments. I never said to myself ‘Remember this moment. Hold it dear for all time’. Maybe that’s because once I got over my initial conviction that I would never go back to South West Rocks, I replaced it with the assumption I would never not go back. It became habit. Its what I did. I couldn’t imagine the weeks that preceded Christmas being filled with stresses that had to do with presents and cooking, they were about buying craft materials and finishing (or occasionally starting) to write a talk, or plan an activity or return trips to Officeworx to do photocopying and bind booklets.

But its not because of the work that went into preparing beach mission that made it feel like home, I’m not even sure if its primarily missing the people or relationships which makes me long for South West Rocks around New Year, but the fact that for ten years beach mission clearly focused my attention on God and shaped my time, my year and my life. Sure, like the Opera House, like Baker St, South West Rocks signals many, many happy memories. Moments of light hearted joy and serious insights into how the world operates. Mars bar milkshakes, singing along to Vegietales while washing up, watching Chris commando role his way to the shower block, hearing about the time Sally got herself stuck in a coat hanger, being told off by a team leader in my second year for staying up talking several hours past a sensible time for someone who had to get up early in the morning to run a full day of activities. These sorts of things I miss. Churning over all those big questions you usually don’t have time for: sanctification, forgiveness, elective salvation, mothering, divorce, eating disorders, death. But it is more than any of these moments. It is one of the few projects I have committed to for several years, and it is one of the few that gave me a reason to go and speak to strangers about why I believe in God. Being on a beach mission team taught me practical things about being a team leader, writing talks and bible studies, and making tricky decisions – like whether or not to cancel the hire of jumping castle due to imminent bad weather, I cried while making this decision I was that torn and afraid of getting it wrong, and in the end I’m not sure which decision I made, but I don’t remember any negative repercussions. Yes, part of feeling at home is one of belonging and feeling needed, important. And when I miss South West Rocks and going on beach mission, there is perhaps a selfish or needy part of me, that misses feeling like I was important, that people knew me, relied on me, looked up to me. But I also miss knowing that I was part of a team that were serving others. That we weren’t just providing some holiday fun, though there is nothing wrong with that, but that we were giving people a chance to think through some of life’s big questions.

Maybe I miss that too. A space in which to think through questions. To meet up with people who at times think like me, but who also know things and think things that I don’t. Right now, I feel like someone who has come to the end of a set word count and is desperately trying to tie things up, make one last final point, but without much luck. I wanted to write about missing beach mission, because its happening right now, on the other side of the world, and I’m not there, which still feels a bit strange. But then I wrote about homesickness, and longing for the past, and wondered if, in my case at least, these two feelings are intertwined, and I guess I have to say they are. I feel homesick not for places that have been my physical home, but for places with emotional significance. Places I have felt needed, loved, valued. Where I have contributed, where I have learned new things. And maybe its fitting to think about these things as the close of the year approaches, and people make resolutions, and to resolve that these things that I miss need not be a thing of the past, but must be made a part of the future, so that I can build my emotional home, a safe place, of love, value, significance and learning wherever I go.

thirty things: Number 22 - Bake Gluten Free Panettone

24^th of December 2011. I did it. I worked with yeast. I got my gluten free bread/cake to rise ... though that was about the most successful part of my baking adventure. It didn’t start off too well. I read my recipe quickly and chucked a tablespoon of sugar in with my buttermilk and yeast instead of teaspoon. So I threw it out and started again. I wanted to do this right. I left it for ten minutes while I creamed butter and sugar and eggs. The Buttermilk/yeast/sugar was meant to be going frothy. Nothing was happening. I left it for another 10 minutes and shook it about. I chucked it in with the butter, sugar, eggs. Of my own accord I chucked in an extra egg because in the past I’ve noticed this helps gluten free things stick together. I even separated two of the eggs so that I could whip up the egg whites all nice and fluffy like to add a bit of excitement. Later I read that yeast works better with sugar to feed it. Maybe I should have kept the first lot.

Adding an extra egg of course adds liquid. Oh well. No matter. I added the flour. A mix of cornflour and gluten free plain flour. It was all looking very runny. There was no way I could turn this mixture out to knead it. I added a bit more flour, but in the end I took the advice of an unknown gluten free baker who keeps a blog and accepted that in my mixing bowl my raw cake would look more like batter than dough. I left the bread/cake batter/dough in a warm place and, when I came back to it some time later, I was absolutely over the moon to see the batter/dough had doubled in size.

I put it in a tin (the wrong shaped tin, mind you. I wasn't about to buy a new cake tin for one GF baking experiment). I put it in the oven, baked for ten minutes, turned down the temperature, baked for another half an hour. I left it to cool.

I sliced it, I ate a bit. All I can say it’s a good thing that on my list of things to do I didn’t include any qualifiers. All I said was bake gluten free panettone. And I did that. I worked with yeast and gluten free flour and I got my bread/cake to rise. I didn’t say it had to be good, or tasty or soft. My panettone smelt right, and tasted ok, but it was super crumbly and quite dry. I did enjoy it, but I don’t think I would have served it to anyone, especially not a gluten eating person. Still, I ate it for breakfast on Christmas day, and that made me quite happy, and got me prepared for a full day ahead of festive eating.

I’ve now frozen the majority of it and will at some point use it in trifle or tiramisu or some such thing. I think surrounded by cream and other nice things it will work a treat.

On Metafiction

or realising I was a nerd or a text or some such thing. Because that’s how it is. Especially if it is late at night. Which it is.

I did this really nerdy thing on the tube last night. I sent a text to my boyfriend to tell him the book I was reading was very 1960s, and a little metafictive. I flipped to the front of the book to check the publishing date (1969), and inwardly I did a little dance of joy. And then I realised not only am I a total nerd but, also like all those high school things I couldn’t remember last week, I don’t actually remember how to define metafiction. In terms of style. What made me think oh yes, here we have a piece of 1960s style, with just a dash of metafiction. I know that broadly it’s a piece of writing which is aware of its fictive status, but how to describe the style, how to explain it, gone. All I could think of was that short story I read that was about Ambrose at a playhouse. That was 1960s, post modern metafictive stuff. So come on brain, I know this blog is called reflections and fragments, but please, please, do some solid remembering.

*

The remembering probably wasn’t going to happen of its own accord. I say wasn’t, rather than isn’t because I wrote that first paragraph this afternoon and I’m writing this one now. And its now 23:32, which as it happens is a pretty awesome time. But back to the remembering, which wasn’t happening, I did a second nerdy thing. I opened up a file on my computer containing my notes from ENGL three-oh-whatever. To read my notes on metafiction and Ambrose, who as it turns out, was at a funhouse, not a playhouse. There on the screen was a list of facts about metafiction, which I knew. Metafiction pre-empts criticism, breaks the illusion that art is reality, highlights the writing process, makes direct intertexual references, directly addresses the reader, parodies established modes, acknowledges that all stories have already been told, and so on and on and on. Oh yes, I knew all these things too. And it still makes sense. Which is a relief.

I don’t even know what I’m writing about anymore. Or why I’m writing about it. I think tiredness is slowly seeping into my brain…

…I think I am a metafictive text. That would certainly confuse the illusion that art is reality. That is what I have learnt today. Because I pre-empt criticism, can be self-deprecating, enjoy parody, address the reader (Hiya, you right? – see that, I even went for local vernacular like a real Londoner), I acknowledge the writing procedure, and that everything has been said before, as all stories have already been told, and so on and on and on. Except I am not a fiction, because I actually exist, well, unless of course this is merely the voice of an implied narrator who actually doesn’t exist, because I actually did write this as myself. I am so confused right now.

So as you read this, if it makes any sense, or even if it doesn't please feel free to drop me a line. I'd appreciate it. We could enter into a dialogue. We could write a new text, and blur our roles of writer and reader, sender and receiver, art and reality. We could have a conversation about metafiction. We could be metafictive. Except that we are real. The conversation, however, would be both real and virtual because this is a blog not an actual verbal exchange taking place in actual time and space.

I'm confused again.

I should not write when I am tired. I do not know if I am writing a thought about metafiction, or about being a nerd, or if I am a text waiting to be read.

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For example:

“… People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun.

This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

It ends like this:

Poo-tee-weet? ...”

Vonnegut, K. (1969). Slaughterhouse 5, London: Vintage

I Used to Know Things...

I have a favourite study technique. I refer to it as Learning via Osmosis. LVO usually involves placing a text book under my head while I close my eyes and lie in the sunshine. It was a technique I discovered in high school and have refined over the years. And now I find that years of referring to osmosis as a technique for study, I no longer quite remember what osmosis really is, except of course that what I’m doing has nothing to do with osmosis because osmosis requires water and a semi-permeable membrane, whatever that is. Also, it isn’t about the transfer of information.

Back in the day, when I was at school in my kilt, lying in the grass, beside the school pool (the water that made Learning via Osmosis possible), with one book under my head and another balanced over my face, I knew what was osmosis actually was. I also knew how it differed from that other thing, that thing that I don’t recall, but was perhaps called diffusion. I have, just now, lowered myself to the level of someone who checks Wikipedia in order to rediscover the general knowledge they already knew, and can confirm that yes, diffusion was the word I was looking for. I used to know things. All sorts of things. About the working out of the hypotenuse of a triangle. I knew that. And working out the sizes of angles in various geometric shapes. I could do that. I knew about how cells divided, about mitosis and meiosis and which was which, and if I looked at pictures of these processes taking place I could tell you which was which, but I certainly couldn’t now.

I feel that more than anything I need to ask, where did the knowledge go? Has it left me, or is it just buried? If I started reading something about gametes and cell reproduction, would that part of my brain kick back in to gear? Or did that information leave me and become replaced with Peep Bo’s line of So Please You Sir We much Regret, a harmony I found tricksy at the time and went over so many times that when I came to learning Pitti Sing’s part ten years later, although I’d not looked at the music once in all those years, I found it was Peep Bo’s harmony and hers alone that my brain wanted my mouth to sing. Why had I retained a piece of music I hadn’t needed to sing for ten years? Why is it that the only French phrases I know (aside from the one in Lady Marmalade) are about chocolate, Je voudrais un chocolat chaud,(well, I would) le chocolat me regarde! (seriously it is, and it wants me to eat it!), yet I couldn’t ask for directions nor can I remember how to ask for train tickets. Like wise my patchy German allows me to ask someone the ever important question, bist du eine orange, but not much else.

If this is the outcome of thirteen years of school education, its tempting to ask what the point was. Why did I need to learn that stuff about osmosis and gametes and geometric proofs? Obviously, that knowledge has not been at the front of my brain for some time, and I am, for the most part a well balanced, happy and capable adult, so did it ever need to be at the front of my brain. Did I need to spend all those hours learning those things, only to forget them? But such a sentiment goes against my inherent love for learning and life long education. I place huge value on education and firmly believe that all people should have access to a wide and varied education as it helps us grow and develop and opens possibilities. I’m not for a minute suggesting that isn’t the case, I just wonder why I can’t retain endless bits of information. I worked hard at learning things, and they made sense to me, and now that knowledge is gone. I find it disturbing that once I understood something of valencies, plant and animal biology, French grammar, but that over time I let those abilities go.

While I may have had to let go of the information I wasn’t using in order to reduce clutter and make brain space available for more relevant skills, memories and theories, it just doesn’t seem fair, or even right, for knowledge to be transitory.