CategoryEducation

purgatory

Today I awoke with a start, in utter darkness. Is it after noon? Did I miss the meeting with my scavenger hunt teammates? I reach for my phone — 09:10. Nine in the evening? No, I use ISO 8601 time. But it’s not really nine in the morning, not yet, not here where we are, wherever we are, in the middle of the ocean. I need to set back my clocks one hour, as I did yesterday morning, as I did the morning before that, as I did a couple of mornings before that, during this long transatlantic voyage.

I am barely able to communicate with the outside world: obviously there are no cell phone towers, and I did not spring for satellite and anyhow it’s Starlink and I won’t give another penny (let alone hundreds of dollars) to Musk. So I sip on the 150 minutes of data included with my cruise, an average of fifteen minutes per day. I upload and download email and text in batches. If I have a factual question, it goes on a list to look up later, or I simply rely on memory: just like the old days, the “before” time.

Even when I do connect to the Internet, my MacBook Air (M1 2020) and iPhone (14 Pro) don’t update automatically to the time onboard the ship, so I adjust them manually. I, the human being, need to inform these machines of the hour, rather than vice-versa. However, for whatever “user-friendly” reason, the Apple UI does not allow the user to simply define timezone in terms of UTC offset. Instead, I enter the name of a city that happens to share the same timezone. Far from land, how are we to do this?

Fortunately I maintain a habit of making lists and spreadsheets, and fortunately I store most of my data locally rather than in the cloud. We have moved far enough longitudinally over the past twenty-four hours that ship time is now shared with Santiago, Chile rather than Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Before that, it was Fernando de Noronha, Brazil; Praia, Cape Verde; and of course where we began in Lisbon, Portugal.) 

Oh, wait, even that methodology does not work. I suppose because Santiago and Rio don’t share the same {Daylight Savings Time / Summer Time} convention? My spreadsheet is based on timezones as defined by my trusty Oceanus (OCW-S100-1AJF) watch, so another possibility is that the timezone convention for those places has changed since the watch was manufactured. Another question to look up after I return to shore. In the meantime, I find a way to change the hour directly on these devices.

With twenty-five hours in a day, I sleep in. I seem to recall a circadian rhythm study in which someone entered a cave and allowed their own body clock to flow completely independent of external influences such as sunlight, temperature changes, clocks, and mealtimes. That person settled on a twenty-five hour day. I think this was conducted in the 1960s, in order to understand the sleep patterns that astronauts might prefer. I wonder if this study has been replicated, and whether the results hold across age, gender, and other variables, such as whether a person is alone or in a group. It’s the sort of research that is low cost, relatively easy to perform, and should easily receive IRB approval. 

On this ship, the Norwegian Epic, I was assigned one of the least desirable cabins (inside stateroom, without any windows, and at the fore, where the rocking of the ship motion is stronger than in the middle). Fair enough — the $89 fare I paid after CruiseNext credits to travel east to west, from Lisbon to San Juan, is even more affordable than the $129 fare on Norse Airways to cross west to east, from JFK to Rome. And in addition to being conveyed thousands of miles, I’m receiving ten days of food, lodging, entertainment, amenities, and service.

Upon arranging my four pillows to block the glow of the phone and my chargers, I sleep in complete darkness. The twenty-five hour days allow me to enjoy late breakfasts.

…

Here is what I ate at breakfast today:

  • mushroom, onion, mozzarella omelet, seasoned with Tabasco
  • baked beans
  • hash-brown potatoes
  • roasted, seasoned tomato
  • toasted English muffin with butter
  • yogurt with dried cranberries, dried apricots, walnuts, canned peaches, honey
  • peach pastry
  • pain au chocolat
  • regular and decaf coffee blend with cream and sugar
  • two glasses of cold water

I sit in La Cucina, one deck down from the Garden Café, because it is quieter and I can always find a seat near the prow. I look out onto the water, more blue today than any other. The second morning of our crossing, just before it rained, I thought I saw some flying fish leaping in front of the boat. I also saw a bird, hundreds of miles from land, and wondered why it didn’t alight to rest. I’ve occasionally seen seaweed and rough waters, but not today. The white caps are infrequent, and I already tknewll we were in relatively smooth waters, from the rocking of the ship when I’m in my stateroom.

I bring back to the room a couple of cups of crushed ice, in order to scrub the walls of my high-walled 1400 ml Nalgene bottle, which has a couple of stickers from my Alaska cruise in September. Over the summer I discovered that black beans work well to clean the walls of the bottle, rather than trying to use a long-handled brush. It turns out that ice, some liquid body soap, a bunch of good rinsing work well too, to remove the musty smell.

…

Here are the sorts of things I have been thinking about at breakfast each day:

  • how swiftly and safely we are crossing the Atlantic, in comparison to centuries past
  • how deep the water is, what kind of life is present, and whether the ocean is more like rainforest or desert
  • the ocean is my heritage as a Filipino (my father’s habit of describing the Philippines as a country of a thousand islands)
    • the Filipinos who serve on this and every cruise ship
    • the Filipino-Americans in the Navy —  according to Romer, whom I met three nights ago at Noodle Bar and who served as a radio technician on a nuclear submarine, there are many Filipinos in the Navy

Yesterday morning I revisited my childhood thought that Filipinos would make ideal astronauts, crossing the vast ocean of outer space. Reducing payload is essential when overcoming the gravity well of the Earth, and Filipinos generally occupy less mass and volume. Similarly, we consume fewer calories and breathe less oxygen — our bodies and mind run efficiently, at least based on my limited observations as a scuba diver whose tank runs out more slowly than others’.

Maybe this is on my mind because Apollo 13 is on the TV at the moment. I think this is the fourth time I have seen it on the TV. It repeats, presumably on some cycle, along with movies such as Interstellar, a film where Carey Mulligan plays a singer of a folk duet, Captain America: Winter Soldier, and the most recent Captain America movie in which Falcon has become Cap and the President played by Harrison Ford nearly goes to war with Japan over adamantium (this same movie promoted at a pop-up Marvel store near Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo last January).

Yesterday the two movie channels started to put on rotation the one where Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks coaching the 1980 US Olympics team, maybe it’s called Miracle or Miracle on Ice. I also spotted part of Roman Holiday yesterday afternoon. In that movie you can see the Spanish Steps and the interior view of the Colosseum, but on this trip I didn’t see the former and in fact didn’t enter any of the usual tourist sites in Rome. I only visited outdoor spaces around the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, and my beloved Pantheon.

In fact, on this trip I dedicated about as much time awake in Rome as in New York City, having decided to explore Naples for the first time instead. I took only one day in Sintra, and just a couple of hours in Lisbon, because I had visited last year. I tell myself that these decisions are fine because I will have other opportunities to visit these places again. I tell myself that I will have other opportunities because I firmly believe this to be true.

…

During this trip I continue to make spreadsheets and lists, including of the places I visit, the activities that I do, how much things cost. And the day before yesterday I began to a spreadsheet to figure out how many days I am at home each year versus how many days I have been traveling, from 2019 onwards.

The other day I checked out some books from the ship’s library. I have been reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell while waiting for shows to begin, since sometimes the theater and smaller venues fill up. In the first chapter Odell describes how spreadsheets reflect a drive for mastery over time — the drive of capitalists to control the how laborers move their bodies, which perversely becomes the drive of ourselves to increase our own efficiency, so that we bind ourselves in servitude to time.

To build on Odell’s observation that time is not fungible: The bare reality is that a day in the life of a 17-year-old is not the same as that of a 60-year-old. The minutes on first awakening are not experienced in the same way as those before going to bed. The capitalist seeks to give equal weight to every unit of time, but they are manifestly different. We have created the idea of money, which is fungible and countable. But then when we say “time is money”, we enslave ourselves to the idea that our time is also fungible and subject to accounting.

Our society is in general obsessed with quantification. Imagine life before being railroaded. We used to perceive time through the movements in our heavens, the beating of our hearts, the rhythms of our songs. Imagine life before stickers were placed beside your name on the kindergarten door. We used to learn for the pleasure of knowing and sharing.

…

When I was a child, we would say bedtime prayers. We would ask God to bless family members. I wondered what it meant for the dead to be in purgatory. How did they experience the passage of time? How could we pray to them or for them, how could we communicate to God, if they were approaching or experiencing eternity, while I manifestly continued to grow older all the time?

Yesterday I awoke with a start, in utter darkness.

Posted on by William Alba 0

a tale of two campuses

Today I learned Macalester College is supporting their international students to stay in the United States this summer, in order to mitigate their fears that they would not be able to re-enter and continue their studies if they go home between terms. Both the college and the surrounding community have pooled resources to take care of these students.

As far as I can tell, Macalester is helping their international students not because they are compelled by law, not in order to raise money, not because it helps their college rankings, and not because it makes them look good. Indeed, the news of their generosity isn’t even on their website; I can’t find it anywhere, at least as of this moment. I learned about this good deed from an email newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the main trade journal of the industry.

Macalester is helping their international students this summer because it’s the right thing to do. Imagine that.

Meanwhile, yesterday Carnegie Mellon University hosted Trump, who is destroying the ability of students from around the world to study in the US, who is throttling funding from the sciences and the arts, and who is threatening to shutter the most prominent universities in order to silence all of them.

Having worked at Carnegie Mellon for seventeen years, I know how the university operates. I concur with this professor that CMU is image conscious “beyond comprehension and beyond the bounds of what universities used to be about, which was the interaction of civil discourse … If it’s just a private sort of a corporate brain-think with no opportunity for question and answer … maybe a university campus isn’t the right place for it.”

What a world of difference between these two institutions. They both have Scottish roots — tartans in their logos, bagpipes at their ceremonies, Scottish animals as their mascots. But in their hearts, how very different.

I am so happy to be free of Carnegie Mellon. I am so proud our eldest will study this fall at Macalester.

Posted on by William Alba 1

and then

This morning I completed the Duolingo tree for Spanish. I had expected to receive some colorful animation, musical fanfare, or at least a badge to note the occasion. Instead a new section called “Daily Refresh” simply revealed itself. It’s fine, just as with pilgrimages and birthdays, it’s less about recognition, more about the journey. But a little celebration is also always welcome.

Anyhow, I had already planned to continue with Duolingo. I did not complete all of the sections to Legendary status on purpose, leaving about half of them to review and turn gold. There are “side quests” too — additional exercises and word matches. I’ve considered doing the reverse tree (Spanish to English), or returning to French, or taking on a related language such as Portuguese, or an entirely different one like Japanese or Mandarin.

Of course there are other ways to learn Spanish and other languages. I could focus more on Repaso Total; Clozemaster; and immersion through Dreaming Spanish, movies, music, travel, Pimsleur recordings, and online and in-person classes. To help people move in the other direction, I’d also like to complete my TESOL certification.

Yet I’m still likely to continue with Duolingo. I probably will ease up a bit, after Sunday. I currently hold first place in the Diamond League finals, so it would be great to finish there, making my own way to mark reaching the top of the Spanish tree.

Posted on by William Alba 1

soñar con lo que aprendo

When I was fifteen, sixteen years old I would wake up remembering dreams about things I was learning at that age. There were dreams of organic chemistry mechanisms floating through space, of driving the streets of my hometown, of speaking French. I don’t recall now if I dreamt at the time about karate, but that would surely fit the pattern.

…

This morning I woke up with a phrase in my head: respeta naturaleza. I was with a group of hikers, including some younger ones who were stomping on some mushrooms on a log, no reason, just to smash them into the rotting wood.

I thought: that’s not quite right. I should have dreamt, I should have said in my dream, respeta la naturaleza. Or if Nature is personified, perhaps respeta a Naturaleza. If I’m addressing one person formally, like the safety instruction cards on an airplane, the imperative would instead have been respete. But hold on, this was a group of hikers, so respeten. Unless I’m in Spain, and then I had to look up whether it was respetad (which is correct) or respeted — my knowledge of vosotros conjugation is lousy, I need to work on that.

…

But at least I dreamt in Spanish! It was wonderful to dream once more about something I’m learning. I’ve been wondering for a long while if this could ever happen again, whether I would ever dream in Spanish. For some months now I’ve reached other milestones. Sometimes these are delightful: during the last year when I had conversations with people around Spain and Mexico, I’ve sometimes been unable to remember later that day which language I was speaking. Other times, not so much: there have been a few occasions when I’ve wanted to say something to an English speaker and had only the words in Spanish. To lose my abilities in French while learning Spanish, whether out of disuse or the Spanish “crowding out” the French in my head, that’s one thing. But to lose my ability in English!

I asked my parents a year or so ago whether they dreams in Tagalog, Visayan, or English. (It’s strange how often we know so little about the inner lives of the people close to us.) My father said he barely remembers any of his dreams, so he couldn’t say. My mother said her childhood dreams are in Tagalog and her adult dreams are in English, even though she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t know both languages. I asked the same question of a couple of other fluent multilingual speakers I met last summer, and they both said it depends on the situation, on the people they’re meeting in their dreams.

…

Over the past month I have been inviting dreams about a particular Spanish word: patria. This is a key word in Filipino hero José Rizal’s last poem, which he wrote in the hours before he was executed. Sometimes he capitalizes the word, at other times no. It makes its presence felt as the second word, embedded throughout the poem, and then its stark literal absence from the last stanza. But what does it mean to him in each of these instances, and what word or words would be most fitting to use in an English translation?

My friend and former student, Daniel Davis, who is an accomplished multilingual translator of technical works, suggested one resolution is to leave patria unchanged in my translation. I had already considered that for the word salud elsewhere in the poem, which I believe is acceptable because as an interjection it is already on the edge of being a loanword in English. But if I were to take this route with patria, it would be because I see it as a shifting, nebulous concept in Rizal’s own thinking, both historically and within the poem. I’m not sure if I want to leave both of these words, salud and patria, in their original forms when the causes for doing this would be such different reasons.

There is so much more I would want to write about this one word, what it seems to mean throughout the poem and how different English words don’t quite fit, but I want to finish our taxes today.

And so I find myself still hoping to dream of patria.

Posted on by William Alba 0

of pilgrimages

Last Saturday around 4am, my younger brother-in-law replied to some texts I had sent earlier, where I casually remarked that the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and various waterways could be considered “pilgrimages” (with the word in scare quotes). He wondered what I meant, so I replied with some groggy early morning thoughts, which I’ll organize a bit more here.

For me, a classic pilgrimage involves several elements:

  1. Trail. There is a path, or a set of possible paths. For example, there are defined routes for the Camino de Santiago (I completed the last part of the Portuguese Coastal Way from Vigo). There are also different routes on the Kumano Kodo, although only four or five are recognized for Dual Pilgrim status. While the way of a pilgrimage could be long-trodden foot trails such as these, for me a pilgrimage could be along converted railroad tracks or canal paths, such as the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal Towpath from Pittsburgh to Washington DC, or on a natural body of water, such as the Colorado, Mississippi, or Hudson Rivers.
  2. Trial. A pilgrimage involves physical hardship or mental challenge. Such difficulties are relative to individual capabilities; I think many people visit the Holy Land at an age when they are less spry. As for me, because I already tend to travel lightly, at low cost with little baggage, and close to the ground, the challenges of a pilgrimage need to be commensurately higher. On the Camino, I was unaccustomed to walking long distances anymore, it often rained on my hikes, and without reservations I worried whether the public albergue that night would be full. On the Kumano Kodo, while I stayed in comfort and often took public transit, it was challenging to figure out how to navigate rural Japan.
  3. Rarity. Would it be possible to have a pilgrimage every day, for example when traveling to and from work? I think it’s possible to have an appreciation for living those moments — the year when I worked at Bard College and lived in Rhinecliff, I often felt for the beauty of my commute, the Catskills flashing between the trees from across the Hudson. However, I do think in general a pilgrimage should take you out of yourself and your daily life. I don’t know. Last spring I met Antonio, who had walked the Camino de Santiago forty times over the last twenty years, making it his life to help people along the way.
  4. Recognition. When I landed in Narita last month, the customs officer was surprised that I had only one backpack, small enough to fit under the seat in front of me (and at the time weighing only 4 kilos in total). When I explained that I will be walking the Kumano Kodo, he immediately understood. I feel a sense of fellowship and shared experience when talking with others who have walked either pilgrimage. As far as recognition, for both of these pilgrimages are also the stamps in the credential booklet, and at the end the certificate / compostela. On the Kumano Kodo I also collected special goshuin to honor the 20th anniversary of its status as a World Heritage site.
  5. Destination (or destinations). Generally a pilgrimage should involve a destination, something on which body and mind are focused on reaching. In the case of the Kumano Kodo, there are three destinations, a triumvirate of Grand Shrines. But although a pilgrimage should have something to aim for — whether singular or multiple, intermediate or final — for the Camino de Santiago, the Way was more meaningful for me than the End. Or rather, the point of the pilgrimage was not reaching the end, but rather what happened on the journey.
  6. Reflection. This gets to the most important aspect of a pilgrimage, which is internal. Although a physical body may travel with difficulty along a well-known path to reach a destination, what is most distinct for a pilgrimage, as opposed to a hike, is an element of mindfulness. On the Camino de Santiago, I often considered thought about how the parts of the pilgrimage reflected life, and how ultimately you are walking along a path that does not belong only to you. On the Kumano Kodo I learned to ritually purify my hands and mouth, and then bow and clap while I thought about the focus of each kami to be best of my ability.

Like every definition or classification scheme, this is imperfect. Jay, a history professor at my last full-time job, took a personal pilgrimage to retrace the road trip that his father had taken across the United States in the days before the Interstate. Ed, a history teacher at my first full-time job, had a mission to visit every Major League Baseball stadium.

If I compare my own experiences on the Camino de Santiago and the Kumano Kodo, my journey on the former trip was more trying, and the final destination was more clearly defined, and it is more widely known. But even though it didn’t fit my archetype of a pilgrimage as closely, the Kumano Kodo was not a lesser experience.

My brother-in-law in our texts last weekend shared that one of his spiritual teachers dissuades his students from pilgrimages, because they can exhaust your money and health, and that the main practice of mindfulness/meditation can be done anywhere, and the bias of saying one place is more sacred than another is a created concept. I agree that the notion of “sacred” is a created concept, a kind of crutch. But so are mandalas. Words are created too, and I lean on them every day. Words and pilgrimages, even as they are invented, help us in our finitude.

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expectations

According to Duolingo, I’ve reached a high intermediate level in Spanish (CEFR B2). I do believe it’s true. The day before yesterday, when Marissa asked me to translate some attention-getting phrases for her class, I immediately saw when Google Translate had mistakenly substituted “hablar” for “decir”; knew as if it were second nature the use cases for those two verbs as well as “contar”; understood her intention to use the affirmative imperative in the second-person plural and corrected the machine translation even with an irregular conjugation; suggested an alternate second line so the lines would rhyme; and removed an unnecessary definite article from the vocative. As an example, I suggested

Alumnos, denme:
A, B, C, D, E

in place of the machine translation:

Los estudiantes me dan
cinco cuatro tres dos uno

Then yesterday at the laundromat (one of my projects this weekend is to determine which thermal fuse or solenoid needs to be replaced inside our dryer at home), I understood what other people were saying to each other in Spanish. In the afternoon, when I read the label on the bag of corn chips I bought from a Mexican grocery store, I simply read the paragraph of text in Spanish, not bothering to look at the English until afterwards, reading everything con fluidez, pausing only once at “totopos”, which I learned from context as the Mexican word for corn chips. 

…

Still, I have much to learn. For example, I believe I don’t fully understand how Spanish speakers distinguish among the meanings for “esperar”. I know it can mean “to hope” or “to wait for” or “to expect”. While these concepts are similar, they are rendered quite distinctly in English. In contrast, in Spanish, these blur one into the other.

I get that a single word can serve many functions in a language, and that often you just know which one is intended from situational or grammatical context. It just seems to me, as a native English speaker, that these three concepts are more ambiguous than they ought to be, when rendered by a single word.

…

The other day I ordered four pizzas from Domino’s, one for each of us, in whatever style we fancied. Our eldest child complained that Domino’s is not great, and their “New York style” is certainly nothing like a slice of pie you’d get at a shop in the city. I absolutely agree, there are better pizza joints in Vegas, even accounting for the general rule that pizza gets worse going from east to west in the US. But the point, I said, is to have a reasonable expectation. Don’t think of it as a pizza from New York. Just accept the food on its own terms, enjoy it for what it is.

I relearned that lesson for myself this morning. I had picked up a Too Good to Go bag from Whole Foods last night. It was my first time trying one here in the States; I had them last fall in London and in Dublin. Getting home, I was disappointed on opening the bag that they were salted caramel and plain brownies, as well as cake donuts, because at my age I avoid chocolate late at night and I much prefer yeast donuts. But after popping a sour cream donut in the air fryer for breakfast, I realized that if I think of a cake donut not as an inferior substitute for a raised donut, but simply as a kind of cake, it’s actually enjoyable. It’s cake, made even better without the usual excess of icing.

…

It’s as though I continually have to wake up to this notion, to relearn the lesson expressed by sayings such as

You get what you get, and you don’t get upset (a phrase I learned when the children were about the age of the ones Marissa now teaches)

Happiness = Reality/Expectations (I believe I first heard this expressed aloud by my friend Marc when were in college. Less commonly I’ve seen: Happiness = Reality – Expectations, but whether expressed as a ratio or difference or more complicated algebraic expression isn’t the point)

Comparison is the thief of joy (in this case, comparison not to what others have or do, but to what you wanted or expected)

This does not imply fatalism nor blind acceptance to one’s situation when seen as as a portion of the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference

…

Today I will finish reading Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, which describes the inner peace that comes with accepting that we have mortal limitations. Being the sort of person who needs to wake up every day, I will immediately begin re-reading the book, perhaps on a regular basis.

And I will not be disappointed by how much more Spanish I want to learn. I will continue to enjoy the process in the hope, though I suppose not necessarily with the expectation, that one day I may achieve CEFR C2 proficiency.

Posted on by William Alba 1

gather ye rose-buds

En unas de mis clases de español a veces hablamos de nuestras vidas, a veces hablamos de palabrotas.

Anoche al principio nuestro maestro nos preguntó sobre cualquier chisme, es decir, las noticias en nuestras vidas. Un compañero estaba disfrutando un cono de hielo y pregunté cómo se dice la acción de comerlo. La respuesta fue “chupar” pero ahora me pregunto sobre la palabra “lamer”. Entonces mencioné que acabo de celebrar el aniversario de mis padres y hablamos de la salud de nuestros propios padres y abuelos. Después conversamos de los problemas con la memoria y de las discapacidades físicas como ser ciego, sordo y mudo. Hablando de lenguaje de señas, dije que mi hijo menor usaba un gesto que significa leche mientras diciendo “babu” (que significa “botella” en inglés). Además, mostré un gesto que quiere decir, pues, literalmente “caca de toro”.

Resulta que hay muchas maneras para decir este concepto de decir tonterías o mentiras, depende en el país. El maestro dijo que “hablar paja” es común en Latinoamérica y la palabra “paja” puede ser una palabrota, depende en el contexto. Una de nosotros mencionó que “hacer paja” es un ejemplo que significa una acción sexual con la mano.

Me pregunté sobre esto. “La paja” es comida para caballos y otros animales en una granja. Por eso, “hacer paja” en inglés literalmente puede significar to make hay.

¡Ninguno de mis compañeros angloparlantes había escuchado este dicho! Una dijo que hay una frase “to make haste” — de hecho, no me había dado cuenta de que los sonidos de “to make hay” y de “to make haste” y los significados de estas frases inglesas, los dos son muy similares. Pero “to make hay” es distinto, es una parte de la expresión completa “to make hay while the sun shines” (que significa “apurarse para aprovecharse una oportunidad”). Me gusta esta frase en español — apurarse para aprovecharse — por el sonido. 

Acabo de darme cuenta de la frase “hacer paja mientras el sol brilla” puede tener dos significados. Puede significar “apurarse para aprovecharse una oportunidad” que es neutral. Pero puede significar “tener relaciones sexuales durante el día”, es decir, ahora mismo. Y los dos significados existen en el poema de Robert Herrick “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (“Para las virgenes, para aprovecharse el tiempo”). 

En resumen, “haz paja mientras el sol brilla” es literalmente un consejo con una metáfora botánica (“make hay while the sun shines”). Pero también puede significar algo sexual y más crudo que un poeta inglesa expresó por una metáfora botánica y hermosa (“gather ye rose-buds, while ye may”).

Un gesto en lenguaje corporal, una frase en lenguaje hablado. Cada puede ser inocente o crudo. La frontera no siempre está definida bien. Así es la vida, esta mezcla de ideas y cuerpos, encontrado en la lengua, se encuentran en la lengua.

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un regreso al hogar

La semana pasada regresé a Bard College para familiarizarme con la currículo del “Language & Thinking Program”, es decir, un programa del lenguaje y pensamiento. La semana que viene regresaré a Nueva York de nuevo.

Me gusta mucho el paisaje en el norte del estado de Nueva York. Para mí es el paisaje de Dios, de verdad, especialmente los lagos Finger alrededor de Ithaca y al lado del río Hudson cerca de Rhinebeck. Cuando mucha gente piensa en Nueva York, piensa en solo la ciudad. La ciudad sí es buena, me gusta también, es mi lugar de nacimiento, pero el resto del estado es tan precioso. Tengo muchos recuerdos como estudiante y profesor allí.

Regresar a Bard College fue algo así como un regreso al hogar. Es el primer lugar donde enseñaba mis propias clases en una universidad. Además, aprendí mucho del estilo de la enseñanza en el Instituto de la Escritura y Pensamiento. Está enfocado en usar el acto de la escritura para explorar y explotar textos y para recurrir tus propias experiencias. Tengo muchas ganas de enseñar en esta manera otra vez.

Hay un dicho que no se puede volver al hogar. Es verdad, con el tiempo hogar cambia y tú también. Hay edificios en el campus que no existió la última vez que estuve allí. El centro de estudiantes tiene una piedra angular con el año 1999 y recuerdo cuando se estaba construyendo frente a los dormitorios donde los profesores nos alojábamos. El edificio es antiguo ahora, se puede ver óxido y otros signos de desgaste. Antes fui uno de los más jovenes profesores, al principio de mi carrera, y la semana pasada fui el más mayor en la sala.

Sin embargo, los métodos siguen siendo los mismos. Hay un objetivo común ahora, un ensayo al final de las dos semanas y media, y pienso que esta tarea es buena. Sin duda será difícil y agotador, tanto para mí como para mis estudiantes, pero vale mucho la pena. Es un lugar para jugar con el lenguaje, es una comunidad verdadera de escribir y pensar.

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Un camino (una conclusión)

En este blog llevo una quincena escribiendo sobre mi camino. En los títulos, escribí “Un camino” porque para mí este viaje fue solo mi camino. Sería impertinente decir que mi camino es El Camino de Santiago. Es simplemente uno camino, sin mayúscula.

Es un poco irónico que el cuento dura más de dos semanas aunque el viaje real dura menos de una semana. Además, no pude escribir todos mis pensamientos, solo algunos de lo más destacado. Esto es característico del acto de escribir. No se puede decir todo.

De una manera, mi camino sigue. Según algunas personas, no hay tiempo entre un viaje en El Camino de Santiago y el siguiente. Estos simplemente son descansos en un solo Camino de Santiago largo. Puedo ver este punto de vista. Como dije en el final de mi última entrada, no me parece que mi camino terminó cuando llegué a la catedral en Santiago de Compostela.

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Salí de la ciudad muy temprano en la mañana del 3 de mayo. Traté de tomar un autobús hacia el aeropuerto pero nunca llegó. Vague por las calles y finalmente tomó un taxi. Eso me sentí un poco más como el final, montar en un coche.

Cuando regresé a Madrid, fue como volver a casa. Tomó un autobús a Atocha y hablé con dos estudiantes universitarios de botánica — estadounidenses en su primer viaje a España. Mi hostal no aceptó mi mochila, así que regresé a la estación para tomar un tren Cercanías a San Lorenzo de El Escorial y El Valle de los Caídos. Pero eso es para otro momento.

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Voy a tomar un descanso. Llevo ocho semanas escribiendo todos los días (excepto 11 de junio) en este blog. Me he demostrado a mí mismo que puedo mantener un hábito de escribir cada día.

Pero escribir en este blog ha sido un poco difícil, especialmente recientemente. A veces me costaba mucho escribir sobre mi camino. Tenía que ser auténtico e interesante. En vez de eso, suelo escribir cualquier cosa en la que esté pensando. Contar una historia exige más estructura.

Además, tengo proyectos que tienen que ver con la escritura, con plazos para completar. En varias semanas estaré enseñando en un programa intensivo de escritura y pensar. En septiembre daré un presentación sobre riesgos en comunicar con extraterrestres. Quiero empezar a una traducción de español a inglés.

Por eso, desde ahora voy a escribir menos a menudo en este blog. Todavía tengo un propósito de escribir todos los día, pero en formas diferentes, no solo aquí. Mi racha de ocho semanas fue un éxito, pero tengo otras cosas que hacer …

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Conocimiento del fuego

Yo solía correr cada vez que había fuegos artificiales. De hecho, durante muchos años investigaba su ciencia. Asistí a una conferencia sobre este tema. Viajé con un amigo para recoger algunos equipos desechados de un facilidad del Ejército. Trabajaba con estudiantes de ingeniería química para desarrollar mi visión de fuegos artificiales en condiciones inusuales.

Estoy un poco triste de que ese proyecto no tuvo éxito. A lo mejor estoy más triste que los fuegos artificiales ya no son tan importantes para mí. La última vez que los he visto fue el año pasado, hace exactamente un año, cuando me paré en una azotea en la Universidad de Chicago. (De hecho, Chicago ha estado en mi mente porque hoy estoy mirando la serie “Dark Matter”; el octavo episodio ocurre en lugares alrededor de la universidad que yo frecuentaba.) En fin, esta noche no hice planes para ver un espectáculo destellando.

Pude oírlos afuera para la celebración del Día de la Independencia. Pero se detuvieron hace un rato por la lluvia. Ah, están empezando otra vez.

Gracias, Prometeo, por su regalo del conocimiento del fuego.

Posted on by William Alba 0