September 5, 2022 BY ALFONS, IN In rage against the machine

At the doorstep of Kindergarten

My neighbours somehow convinced me to join their 6k morning runs. Three times a week at 5:30am, at the break of dawn. Pretty awesome actually. Especially since I have the luxury of taking naps afterwards.

Jogging in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, figure that. That’s actually possible because of the lockdowns and the New Normal, in terms of air quality. Also, I live in one of the cleaner areas in the city. As most everywhere else, there’s no notable sidewalks or parks here, however traffic in the early mornings is slow enough to use the streets for running.

One of the things you would notice about this area is, that it’s jam packed with hyper-expensive schools and pre-schools. Very fancy daytime detention centers. Facilities in which children are temporarily confined, denied a variety of freedoms and trained to adapt a mindset of obedience, under the authority of the state or state licensed private organisations. In some streets these facilities are built almost back to back, with very prominent roadside advertising billboards in between them. As I limped-by by the tenth or so, I asked myself, “Am I too upset about schools? Do I take my critique too far? Shouldn’t I focus more on my running?”

I recalled Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and her five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. “Now at age 48, shouldn’t I have reached the stage of acceptance already?” I thought.

But then I also recalled the great Alice Miller, I paraphrase into a first-person perspective:

“After having experienced child maltreatment it is not enough to grieve about what happened, as psychoanalists assume. It is indispensable to rebell against the endured cruelty, as well as clearly recognize and reject it. Only this way we become free of the tendency to unconsciously repeat the same pattern. The suppressed rage subsists in our bodies if it was never consciously experienced, nor expressed.”

I was thinking, “True that. I haven’t even started to feel angry. My rage is just in its feebly beginnings. I will write more about what compulsory schooling really is, about its unreformable, psychopathic nature. And how I clearly reject it, as my professional choices are proof of. I will not hold back.”

As I passed by another fan·cy-schman·cy Kindergarten, I suddenly saw it very clearly: Children are experts at studying the feelings, expressions and behaviour of adults, the grown-up’s interactions and daily routines, as the child’s mission is to become a member of society, be a valuable part of their community. All this is taken from children at the doorstep of Kindergarten.

Children are grouped by age. They are put into cells they call classrooms, together with a (quite often stressed-out by the burden of responsibility) woman with a shrill, loud voice. Not only is a whole range of freedoms taken from the children, such as privacy and the right to refuse compliance, but worst of all, they are robbed of context.

Small wonder I felt so alienated in Kindergarten myself, when I was a child. Children are removed from their parents, their parent’s work and life reality, and put in a room with children the same age. There’s nothing of importance to do or learn, no mind to study. And soon enough, in the absence of meaning, the children will stumble into games and quarrels of hierarchy, social class, possession of items, levels of compliance and playing favourites, and so forth, and so forth.

Right there at the doorstep of Kindergarten the processing begins. Even the most well-meaning, hard working educator does not stand a hint of a chance to help it. And if they try, they will burn out quicker than you can say Herbert Freudenberger. Stripping meaning and context from human lives is the very nature of the psychopathic, narcotic compulsory schooling. It’s the system’s design, and it’s perfectly resilient against change or reform.

September 2, 2022 BY ALFONS, IN Not designated yet

Snippets of speech

I’ve just watched an interview by Quanta Magazine with Leslie Lamport, the Computer Scientist, titled The Man Who Revolutionized Computer Science With Math [link to Youtube] Youtube kept shoving the video’s thumbnail into my face so I said, “Stop it already ok ok I’ll watch it.” Leslie Lamport said, “Coding is to programming what typing is to writing.” Well, before I spend a whole lot of time paraphrasing let me just copy-paste a snippet of the transcript (spoken in a rather dramatic voice):

1:25
Writing is something that involves
1:26
mental effort. You’re thinking about what
1:28
you’re going to say. The words have some
1:30
importance but in some sense even
1:32
they are secondary to the ideas.
1:35
In the same way programs are built on
1:38
ideas. They have to do something. And what
1:41
they’re supposed to do, I mean it’s like
1:43
what writing is supposed to convey.
1:46
If people are trying to learn
1:48
programming by being taught to code… well,
1:51
they’re being taught writing by being
1:54
taught how to type. And that doesn’t make
1:56
much sense.

So I wonder, “Could something similar be said about movement?” Typing is to writing, what movement is to …? dot dot dot? And… should I place movement into the spot of typing or writing?

Quanta Magazine’s Youtube video is a great viral video, and works really well as such. However, from my point of view, as a writer, my definition of writing would be very different from his, if I gave one. Does writing really involve mental effort? Is a writer really thinking about what he is going to say? Is the purpose of writing really just to convey ideas? For example, when I google for “Writing saved my life,” I get about 1,390,000,000 results. What’s going on here? And how would this compare to movement? What is movement?

August 31, 2022 BY ALFONS, IN Not designated yet

Grandmother’s belief in the value of effort

So I was browsing through the largest bookstores here in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, brushing my palms over the books like in the wheat field scene of 300, the movie. Nowadays most shelves seem to be stocked with books on how-to woman, how-to gay, and how-to money. One shelf with various versions of the new definition of history by Harari, and two shelves of Neil Gaiman. As if thousands of people stormed out of their houses to get hold of the collected writings of Neil Gaiman, as soon as the credits rolled on Netflix The Sandman.

Next to the IELTS textbooks I found a stack of The Catcher In The Rye. Nice cover design, close to the original. I picked up one. Good re-read. Depressing though. I downloaded a copy of Catch-22, funny at first. Until I remembered why I don’t watch TV. I started the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hilarious at first. Watched a couple of interviews with Hunter S. Thompson on Youtube. The late Hunter, the image of long term drug abuse. Didn’t find his book funny anymore. Great insights, hilarious still, but not funny.

A dear reader of my blog recommended, A Prayer for Owen Meany. So far I’ve only read half of chapter 6, The Voice. I didn’t get it at first, but the deeper I got into the chapter the more I understood Grandmother’s belief in the value of effort. Maybe Grandmother would side with Jack White, as he talks about inspiration and effort in the documentary Under Great White Northern Lights [Link to Youtube]. I enjoyed this stark contrast to Rick and Morty, the popular cartoon. Rick is the smartest man in the universe, is very active, does whatever he wants, but abhors effort (“Something Ricked This Way Comes” Season 1, Episode 9).

In Feldenkrais classes we distinguish between work and effort. Moshé Feldenkrais talked and wrote about those two words often. Work in a neutral sense, as the product of force and displacement, of superfluous work, effort, habit and self-image.

In his book Awareness Through Movement he writes, “Persons who normally hold their chests in a position as though air had been expelled by the lungs in an exaggerated fashion, with their chest both flatter than it should be and too flat to serve them efficiently, are likely to indicate its depth as several times larger than it is if asked to do so with their eyes closed. That is, the excessive flatness appears right to them, because any thickening of the chest appears to them a demonstrably exaggerated effort to expand their lungs. Normal expansion feels to them as a deliberately blown up chest would to another person. The way a man holds his shoulders, head, and stomach; his voice and expression; his stability and manner of presenting himself—all are based on his self-image. [..] However, not everybody is capable of identifying himself easily, and one may be greatly helped by the experience of others.”

To understand the difference between work and effort in movement, posture, and self-image, it’s best to look outside of movement, I guess. Into the stories of humankind. And then try to see it in ourselves. In our stories, believes, actions, thinking… and when we break it down even further, we may see it in our movements and posture as well, “and all that stuff.”

August 23, 2022 BY ALFONS, IN Not designated yet

I asked Artificial Intelligence to write excerpts

It’s almost 23 o’clock and past bedtime, but I quickly want to get this off my chest. Since a long time I wanted to create a table of contents for my blog, but held back because of the lack of excerpts. I didn’t write any. So tonight I was wondering if there’s some machine who could do that for me. And mother of god, there is.

I stumbled upon the website openai.com which provides access to an Artificial Intelligence. It can do all sorts of things, but it can also read books and write summaries. So I fed it a couple of my blog posts.

I’m still not sure whether I should be amazed, flattered or thoroughly scared. I don’t know how to feel about the current state of Artificial Intelligence. But what I do feel is… that it can write great summaries. And that it somehow seems to understand my writing better than I do myself. These summaries are really helpful for me as feedback, to understand what it is that I am writing.

For example, my recent text, “A taste of freedom – Trauma healing in Somatic Education.” So how it works is this: I use the web-interface for convenience, and there I tell the Artificial Intelligence in plain English what I want, and then it answers me. Here’s how this looks like:

Version 1: I wrote, “Summarize the following text.” And then added my blog post. The result was this:

The text discusses the work of famous trauma-experts Bessel van der Kolk and Peter A. Levine, and how they fail to mention the role of compulsory schooling in causing trauma. The text also discusses the work of psycholinguist Frank Smith, who is not afraid to look at the origins of trauma in compulsory schooling.

Version 2: I wrote, “Write an angry sounding summary of this text.” And then added my blog post. The result was this:

This text is a long-winded diatribe against famous trauma therapists who fail to mention the role of compulsory schooling in causing trauma. The author bemoans the fact that these experts are not brave enough to speak out against the machine.

Version 3: I wrote, “Summarize this text in one word.” And then added my blog post. The result was this:

Healing

I kid you not, this is what the Artificial Intelligence wrote back to me. I’m tempted to change the phrase “The result was this” into “The answer was this.” As if it was a real person answering, someone with a heart and compassion and humour and all that, not a machine.

August 23, 2022 BY ALFONS, IN In rage against the machine

A state of physical ease and freedom from pain

There’s a boatload of ex·tra·or·di·nar·i·ly expensive international schools around here, where I live. At lunch time or late afternoon, when I sit in a coffee shop, I most always have some teachers around me. They make most of the Western looking faces around here. Overhearing them, usually they talk about holidays, family, travelling and making plans, and jest about the problems at school. I talked to some; really nice and cheerful folk.

Sometimes I think I would have made a good school teacher. On top of that, I heard that schools around here pay really, really well. And I have to admit, I do envy these teachers to some degree. They get plenty of students, great social integration, a huge, worldwide, very diverse network of colleagues, flexible hours and long holidays, a taste of luxury and adventure at the forefront of society. In return they have to sign work contracts and submit themselves to their school’s mandates, ethics, rules and regulations… become part of the schooling system, cogs in the wheel, bricks in the wall, henchmen for the Rockefeller family.

So there you have it: before I become a teacher in the schooling system, hell has to freeze over multiple times until it’s at a bearable temperature. What’s the difference between numbness and comfort? Between turning-a-blind-eye-to and being liberal? Will we humans ever form a society where everyone has the feeling that everything is all right?

August 21, 2022 BY ALFONS, IN Poems

the finals illusion

grown-ups
everywhere
speaking and acting as if
they were still
in that classroom
in those schools they were put-in as children
as if their school teachers were still standing next to them
grading them
teaching them their place
in·ex·tri·ca·bly
stuck in the endless illusion
of upcoming final exams

August 18, 2022 BY ALFONS, IN In rage against the machine

A taste of freedom – Trauma healing in Somatic Education

Bessel van der Kolks’s book The Body Keeps the Score, #1 New York Times bestseller for 27 weeks, long time Amazon bestseller in nonfiction, published in 36 languages, has 124 mentions of the word “school.” Throughout his book Bessel van der Kolk writes of rape and violence happening in schools—and of domestic rape and violence, obviously performed by people who went through compulsory schooling themselves. Yet, he fails to critique compulsory schooling, the bureaucratic system. Quite to the contrary, his book concludes, “The greatest hope for traumatized, abused, and neglected children is to receive a good education in schools.”

The next famous trauma-expert celebrity on main stream media, Peter A. Levine, seems to ignore the trauma-causing system design in compulsory schooling all together. I couldn’t find anything much about it in the following books of his: In An Unspoken Voice, Waking the Tiger, Trauma and Memory, Healing Trauma. In almost all schools children are subject to coercion and indoctrination, by design. On top of that, some schools are so rotten that the danger of actual rape and physical violence is real and ever present. 12 years in such an environment do nothing to a child? Really? And not a single chapter on that by one of the most acknowledged trauma experts in the world?

So much for the work of the famous and much praised psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk and psychotherapist Peter A. Levine. And how many do follow their lead?

However, psycholinguist Frank Smith is not afraid to look at the origins of trauma in compulsory schooling. Psycho-linguist, not psycho-therapist. In his book Understanding Reading he writes, “A final point. It is not necessary for any readers, and especially not for beginners, to understand the meaning of everything they attempt to read [..] children are rarely given credit for their ability to ignore what they can’t understand and to attend only to that from which they will learn. Unfortunately, the right of children to ignore what they can’t understand may be the first of their freedoms to be taken away when they enter school.”

Credit where credit is due. How come a psycholinguist can write what the most famous of the trauma-therapy bunch can’t even hint at? But then, of course, Frank Smith’s work has been discredited, debunked, factchecked. Of course. Speak against the machine and see your life’s work being pulled off the shelves. Bad luck for the people who are kept in the dark, by the best of the best of trauma therapy? Or their own fault, for trusting the top selling experts of mainstream medicine?

On top of all that, I don’t even think that “The right to ignore” is the first freedom taken away from children upon entering school. The list of freedoms taken away immediately upon entering school is a long one.

“Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and arbitrary power really is by granting and denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. In this way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed into privileges not to be taken for granted.” John Taylor-Gatto wrote about it truthfully and without a muzzle in his books, for example in The Underground History of American Education, Weapons of Mass Instructions, Dumbing Us Down. That is after he has quit his job as a school teacher, he wouldn’t have been able to speak up like this and hold his position in the system.

And all this is not mentioned by the great trauma-expert celebrities?

Classes and the environment for Somatic Education must be set-up very differently than classes in compulsory schooling, if humans ought to grow and heal.

For example, when you come to my classes of Somatic Education, be it in person or on video, your freedoms are not taken away from you. This is the first thing that confuses new clients. Where should they lie down? Should they lie down? Or should they sit? Stand? Do they need to participate or can they just watch? Why don’t I stop them from talking, or being silent? Why don’t I tell them which books they have to read? Why don’t I give instructions with a voice of superior authority, why don’t I correct and adjust clients, but make mere suggestions instead? And why don’t I get upset when they fall asleep?

When you come to my class, you may even keep your freedom to ignore me. “You don’t need to see me, but if you would like to participate, I’d suggest you chose a place from where you can hear me well,” I often begin. You don’t have to look into my eyes when I talk to you. “Look at me,” is a command you will never hear in my classes.

And so healing begins. Your freedoms are built into my teachings. The movements are the vehicle, the work is the work, your freedoms are the teaching; for you to remember.