The argument for uselessness
When I was in school, we had rare occasions when we could Ask Questions. These were excitable, noisy occasions, because we could finally play the game of Embarrass the Teacher. Sooner or later, when all else failed, when reasonable explanations were provided for seemingly insane things, the clincher would be: But what is the use of this? Do we need to know it? Is it relevant to our lives at all, in any way?
This might give you the impression that ten to fifteen-year-olds are remarkably practical creatures. That we had a vocation already laid out, a map of the future presented. That education needed to be chopped up into little neat blocks that might fit into the perfect cavities we’d carved out for our future selves. But then you’d have missed the point of the game itself. Children are practical, yes, but not omniscient, not clairvoyant, at least not to that degree. They are argumentative though. And they know that the point of an argument is to win.
The usefulness of things was a winning argument. What answer could the responder make? Who knows whether or not any of this would be useful? Who knew whether we would turn into carpenters or scientists or mop-makers or flag-wavers? Almost anything could be useful. Or useless.
As I grew older, I started loving useless knowledge. We were made to memorise poems in school. How beautifully, delightfully unnecessary to remember something that could be accessed easily even then, in a book, and now on the web. I haven’t made any money out of knowing the parts of a flower. But I take great pleasure in reciting them to myself. A tiny meditation. A poem.
Older still, I started wondering why my notion of usefulness was so banal. Anything that can save your life is useful. In that sense, a remembered poem is possibly the most useful thing in the world.
Useful things
By that definition, I learnt many things as a child, in and out of school, that were remarkably useful. Let’s say I were to pick a few. Things I learnt in school. Things that surprised me years later. A list, a helpful practical list of useful things. It would look something like this:
1. A poem by John Donne – Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go
Back when I first read it, I was repulsed by this poem. I couldn’t believe that any sane human being would start a poem or a sentence with the words sweetest love. I didn’t like sweet things. Each time I read that phrase, I would clench my jaw and I spent a lot of time heedlessly attacking poor Donne. Just for saying sweetest love, sweetest love, and forcing me to learn it.
Later, I remembered this poem. It was in a season of arrivals and departures (that went on for a few years). Yesternight the sun went hence, and yet is here today. How reassuring, I thought at the time. Yes, the sun went and came back, over and over. He hath no desire nor sense, nor half so short a way. Now, I was never sure whether I was Donne or Sweetest Love. I didn’t trust Sweetest Love, so I could be the speaker, the traveler. But I also wanted it said to me. Finally, I compromised and allowed Donne to say it to me.
But since that I must die at last, ’tis best, thus to use myself in jest…
I try saying this to myself, when I’m holding on very tight. I try to say it at the moment of not accepting losses. It doesn’t work. I don’t accept losses. I fail at this one every time. I say another line from another poem, to soothe myself over the failure. What falls away is always. You can let go when you know it’s all beneath you, like a river. Maybe Donne was a little too practical.
2. A line from a poem, The Eagle. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.
I don’t know why this image was imprinted into my brain, never forgotten. I wonder whether it’s simply a lesson in perspective. To me, the sea is a great rush of movement, being tossed and turned. But from the vantage point of an eagle, it is a slow, crawl. Waves are wrinkles. So slow, from those chilly heights. I see the fierce golden eye of an eagle. Then I take a dizzying fall into a blue sea, inching towards the shore, white-edged with cresting waves. This is a wonderfully calming memory. I liked this poem, even as a child. Eagles are cool. Eagles are sexy.
3. The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven…
Now this was another thing that really annoyed me back in school. If we had to do Shakespeare, why couldn’t it be cool Shakespeare? Something involving wars, intrigue, popping eyeballs, bloody hands, sprites, monsters. Why did it have to be, essentially, a play about a business contract gone wrong? The only promising gruesomeness was a man’s heart being cut out of his body, and even that didn’t happen. Who wants to read a story where cleverness wins? Also, what was the point of Portia’s mercy speech? Like Shylock, I wanted revenge. I cried over Shylock’s speech and slept through Portia’s.
And many years later, proverbially, at an embattled moment, it came back to me. The quality of mercy is not strained. Strained as in an overstretched human, strained as in put through a strainer. Droppeth as the gentle rain. A blessing.
In a film I watched, a few hundred years later, called Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a group of men spend a very dark night hunting for a dead body – killers, gravediggers, doctor, police – a conflict zone of a group. They stop for dinner at a village. The lights go off. A woman brings candles to each pocket of darkness. There is a moment, when each embattled human looks up to see a face lit up in gold. Like the quality of mercy. Like a gentle rain. It changes nothing in the story. It changes nothing but the state of consciousness. She falls alike on each head of this motley crew. She offers nothing more than a moment of peace and acceptance.
I was right, though, in thinking that cleverness shouldn’t have won. A sensible child-practicality, for once. It should’ve been something else that won. I would spend a lifetime feeling a pang for Shylock, because cleverness won.
Irrelevant things
There were a lot of places to hide in the school I went to. It was big enough to get lost in, if you were small enough. The classrooms for younger kids had red terracotta tiles, a little uneven, so warm and pleasant to be barefoot in, on rare opportunities. The older kids’ classrooms had grown-up granite floors. Corridors and stone pillars. Tremendous echoes. Hallways. Fields. Trees.
Education is moving away from all that biohazardousness now. They’re keeping kids safe at home. No place to hide.
When you can’t accept loss but it happens anyway, what you do is remember.
Thinking like a child
I didn’t think about irrelevant things, in school. Why think about trees when you have them around all the time? There was a brief moment when we thought the great tamarind tree was going to be cut down, and there was a tiny protest, and a lot of worry. But it wasn’t cut down, not for fifteen years after I left.
I thought about school, though. Why it couldn’t be relevant, useful, connected, creative. I thought it could all be managed a lot better.
I wonder, sometimes, if I would’ve liked it if it was managed better. I might very well have thought it one more adult condescension and looked down on it. There’s a lot of effort now at managing better, at making ‘education’ useful, connected, creative, relevant. They don’t try to fit square pegs into round holes anymore. They try to make square, rectangular, triangular, hexagonal holes, to convince themselves that they have run the gamut of human diversity, that they have left no peg unplugged.
All the while, though, even as these wondrous distinctions are being created, kids are learning something, sitting at home in front of their laptops, if they have them. They’re learning that their parents’ worlds, their homes, are central, inescapable, and they’re collecting everything that comes with that very functional knowledge. They’ve already been plugged. It would be painfully hard to dislodge them, when they’ve lost an entire world, and have been abandoned to the holes they were born into.
Lost worlds
In Ursula Le Guin’s short story Solitude, there are small fragmented patches of civilisation left on a post-apocalyptic planet. In this world, women live in auntrings – socially distanced villages where everyone is left with just enough space to grow. Men are outcast – when boys hit puberty, the auntring comes together to bid them goodbye. Learning happens through songs, snatches of information passed over the wall. ‘Aunts’ do not enter each other’s homes.
In this pared-down world, in this sparse life, girls get to do one thing, and one thing only. They get to grow up to be a person. They don’t have to learn how to become people, because community is a fragile thread of minimalist communication and nothing more. They learn to collect things, in what are called soulbags. Bits of things – stones, shiny objects, things that hold nothing of greater value than the making of a memory. They learn, by doing, how to make a soul.
Boys don’t get to grow up and become persons. In some strange, fierce consolidation of powerlessness, men are not allowed to do anything besides go away and stay from the auntring.
One of the exercises that forms part of soul-making starts at twilight. Girls go out in unattached pairs to a spot on a hillside. They fix on a star, and all they have to do is watch it, till morning. Fade-in to fade-out. They can look away, even take a nap, as long as they come back. This is a lesson in concentration, yes, and also a lesson in perspective, like the eagle. It’s also a lesson in loss, I think now. Fix on a star long enough and you lose connection to the ground beneath you. Fix on a star long enough and you might just lose yourself, and become stardust. This might be an irrelevant learning, or it might be that acceptance of these two very big losses is also an essential part of soul-making.
The auntring is essentially an ego-less community. Children are not taught by an officious holder of holes for pegs that today They Will Learn to Make a Soul. They’re mostly sung to, and most of the songs are about being aware. Like just being aware is enough direction to give the willing an idea of how to make a soul. Sitting on a hillside and watching a single star is an extreme form of being aware. It’s being aware of a whole planet, its turn, its pull, its distance from other worlds, its smallness in space.
Nothing is boring if you are aware of it, says Serenity, in the story.
Possibly, the window-gazing, poem-gathering, stone-collecting and star-watching we did as children were unconscious attempts at soul-making. In which case, one can still hope that these kids who have lost worlds, who are being kept safely locked away from biohazardous otherness, have the opportunity to reclaim fragments. Have access to doorsteps, windows, streets and snatches of song. Useful things.
