STUDY WITH ALFONS

“The sentences The man ate the fish and The fish ate the man comprise exactly the same words, yet they have quite different meanings.” — Excerpt from the book, Frank Smith, Understanding Reading

Frank Smith makes an argument about reading and grasping meaning. He says knowing the words and grammar is by far not sufficient to learn the meaning of a sentence. The entire book goes on about this, and it proofs from a scientific point of view what I have been always cross about: in Chinese language classes they give you rather dull and totally made-up texts to read, with a list of vocabulary and grammar. “Here you go, swim or sink” was the attitude of all 3 dozen or so Chinese language teachers I’ve had the pleasure to sink with.

“It is quite clear that sentences aren’t understood by trying to put together meanings of individual words,” writes Frank Smith, the Canadian psycholinguist. “A computer is befuddled by the different possible meanings of a simple expression like time flies. Is time a noun, or a verb (as in time the race horses), or an adjective (like the word fruit in fruit flies)? Is flies a noun or a verb?”

He then goes on to dissect the argument of grammar: “The onions are planted by the farmer is a passive sentence, because it contains the three grammatical markers of the passive form—the auxiliary are, the participle ending -ed, and the preposition by. But the sentence The onions are planted by the tree is not a passive sentence, although its surface structure would appear to contain the appropriate three grammatical markers.” “She was seated by the minister; the grammar depends on the meaning,” argues Frank Smith. And I couldn’t agree more.

A wonderful read for those who love language and are interested in how language [insert verb here] meaning.

The man ate the fish … The fish ate the man. What can be said of the written word can also be said about movement. For example, “The ear moves to the shoulder” and “The shoulder moves to the ear” sound like the same movements, yet they are quite different! Why is that?

In the first way the shoulder is held in place, and the spine bends and twists to bring the ear closer to the shoulder. A dozen or so vertebrae moving in relation to each other. The hundreds of tiny muscles that attach to the facet joints on the right of these vertebrae shorten, whereas the same amount of tiny muscles on the other side need to let go and lengthen, in an equally controlled fashion. All the while the main body mass needs to be shifted to the left of the pelvis, in order to hold the body in balance and not fall over to the right. A marvellous feat of the nervous system.

In the second way the spine must be stiffened, the muscles around the vertebrae of the neck equally stiffened to stabilise the spine, so the shoulder can be pulled up towards the ear. Two very different methods of movement, the differentiation of these two… years in the making. No less a marvel than the highest praised literature, yet almost completely un-praised, underrated. Valued only when it is lost, due to (for example) a stroke or a birth defect.

Or maybe, maybe we’re the curiosity here, you, the reader, and I, the writer. Maybe we are the rare folks who’re interested in language, learning, movement, meaning, in peeks behind the great veil and spirited conversations?

“Be that as it may,” to quote J. R. R. Tolkien, the English writer, poet and philologist, and let’s enjoy the day. Let’s be grateful and cheerful for having a healthy, well grown and well groomed nervous system, let’s cherish the fact that these two distinct movements, The ear lowers to the shoulder and The shoulder lifts to the ear, work well in us, and we are able to distinguish the meanings of The man ate the fish and The fish ate the man just as well.

“My road to Sunk Creek lay in no straight line. By rail I diverged northwest to Fort Meade, and thence, after some stay with the kind military people, I made my way on a horse. Up here in the Black Hills it sluiced rain most intolerably. The horse and I enjoyed the country and ourselves but little; and when finally I changed from the saddle into a stagecoach, I caught a thankful expression upon the animal’s face, and returned the same.” – Excerpt From, The Virginian, Owen Wister

Reading the book The Virginian; one of the things that strike me most is how people interacted and viewed animals, back in 1902. If I may take Owen Wister’s sentiment of the world as the general one. As if an animal, a dog, a steer, a chicken, had a life on its own. As if they had their own thinking, feelings, their own realm of being, imagine that!

I flip through my ebook collection, stop at a book by Arno Gruen. “These young people have been trained not to respond to experience with feeling, but by distancing themselves,” the randomly opened page reads, giving account of Arno Gruen’s thinking. Arno Gruen, the famous Swiss-German psychoanalyst, as he wrote in the early 1960ties in New York. He wasn’t talking about animals though, he was reading rather disturbing texts by Henry Miller to his clients, who found these texts not disturbing at all; thus making his students aware of the alienating power of abstract thinking.

I myself, I mostly try to write and think in relation to movement, movement learning, and the physical representation of ourselves. I try to have one foot in the physical body. Through this I try to have an anchor in the real world. I believe this is one of the distinguishing features, distinctive characteristics of my writing.

Are you standing right now? Sitting? Where do you lean the bulk of your weight against this Earth—on your behind? Your thighs? Your feet? Your back? Are you leaning more on your left or right… sit-bone? Arm? Leg? In your holding right now, is your chest bent more to the left or to the right, slouched over maybe? Into which compartment do your lungs fill easiest right now? Are you breathing more through your left or through your right nostril? Or through your mouth, maybe? I would reason that the mouth is for speaking, eating and drinking, and kissing maybe, but for breathing? Only in life threatening situations of emergency.

On the other hand… yesterday a strange sadness did overcome me. A sadness I’ve encountered many a times in the most recent months. I was thinking, “Is there really no magic in this world?” Or did the magic die with the old forests? With the animals of the wild? Humans are on the verge of turning even the last spot on this planet into a landfill, and uprooting even the last free animal and putting it onto a plate. At the very least, shouldn’t Earth have become the kingdom of some dark lord, like Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor? Is there no all-seeing dark master who seeks to enslave just about everyone?

I took the elevator down to get me a bottle of sparkling water. Those face masks, why do we still have to wear them? On the way back up there was this cute Korean-American dad with his small son. I’ve seen them before, in the elevator, a week ago. At that time the father was carrying his boy in his arms, and they were jesting and joking and it was lovely to hear… lovely to hear the absence of child rearing for once.

This time the small boy was standing next to his father, at the back of the elevator. With big eyes gazed the boy up upon the many buttons and numbers of the panel. “One Five,” said the boy, looking at the numbers illuminated in bright red color. The elevator came to a halt, one person got out, the doors closed, and the elevator continued its ascent. “Two Two,” the boy called my floor, “Two Two You-tiu-ber,” the boy said. “Youtuber,” he repeated. I turned to look at him in surprise. He slid behind his father. How could this small boy possibly know that I’m a Youtuber? I said “Good evening,” to them both on leaving. While walking down the hallway to my apartment I took off my face mask and was thinking, “Maybe there is a little bit of magic in this world after all.”

Somewhen around the end of 2020, I decided to make 2021 my year of daily reading. I was aiming for (at least) 40 minutes of Free-Voluntary-Reading per day, reading fiction and such… texts written by people who care about how their sentences turn out, like David Sedaris, Wolf Haas, Raymond Carver, George RR Martin, Friedrich Torberg, Billy Collins, Thomas Bernhard, etc.

In hindsight I can’t say whether I’ve reached that daily goal of reading…, but I guess I got some reading done, at least more than in the previous two decades.

On the other hand, in fact just yesterday, I was wondering if it was worth it, the time investment. When in fact I could have bought a Playstation 5 instead, and played apocalyptic Zombie survival games, instead. I mean, here in Vietnam I could have actually bought a PS5. SONY’s gaming console is hopelessly sold out in most other countries.

So I was thinking, with my iPad resting in my lap, the book still alit. I glanced down at the page again. “Actually, that last page went quite well,” said I to myself, in my head; however that works. “Actually, my reading out loud became a lot smoother, compared to when I started out over a year ago” And then I read another 5 or 10 pages or so, finishing Chapter 2 of Wolf Haas’s book, “Das ewige Leben.”

I recalled this table from the book “The Power Of Reading”, by neurolinguist Stephan Krashen. The book says: “The table summarizes the impact of in-school free reading programs. In each case, free readers were compared to students in traditional programs (assigned reading, grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, spelling.)

Two findings clearly emerge from this table: First, in-school free reading programs are consistently effective. In 51 out of 54 comparisons (94 percent), readers do as well as or better than students who were engaged in traditional programs. Note that a finding of ‘No Difference’ suggests that free reading is just as good as traditional instruction.

There is also strong evidence that free reading is extremely pleasant and results in superior general knowledge. Even if free reading were equivalent to direct instruction in terms of literacy development, it should therefore be the preferred option.”

Oh, and there’s something else I’ve noticed. All this reading of fiction for more than a year, it seems to have the same effects as Crop Rotation on what I think is my brain. Sort of. “Crop rotation is the practice of planting different crops sequentially on the same plot of land to improve soil health, optimize nutrients in the soil, and combat pest and weed pressure,” says Wikipedia.

Somehow, it seems like, Free Voluntary Reading makes it more pleasant for me to read more. Even studying Chinese language—or low and behold—Vietnamese language, becomes thinkable again; Now that I’ve completely abandoned vocabulary learning and burned (deleted that is) all traditional language learning text books from my iPad. It was about time that “they” burned, instead of us. I don’t need no pesky grammar-drill books and graded readers when I’ve got J. R. R. Tolkien and Stephen Krashen on my shelves.

Also, as an afterthought, I guess I’ll hold off buying a Playstation 5 as long as there’s no diversity Zombie survival games where I can play the Zombie. Hear Me Roar.

“Researchers in early reading development have concluded that we ‘learn to read by reading,’ that we learn to read by attempting to make sense of what we see on the page (Goodman 1982; see also Flurkey and Xu 2003; Smith 1994b)” – Excerpt From The Power of Reading, by Stephen Krashen

“We learn to read by attempting to make sense of what we see on the page,” what a glorious expression, I said to myself while I was sitting in a coffee shop and glanced around me: “How would this translate to movement?”

I observed a guy who was turning around in sitting, a girl who was sitting cross-legged on a chair while typing on her laptop, and the barista washing a dishcloth. The world, the page. The people, the writing. Do we learn to read the world in the same way we learn to read a page in a book? Or is it the other way round? What is this city? What is the story? What am I doing here, what am I doing with my life?

If someone asked for more challenging movements, what would those be?

Challenging in terms of flexibility, mayhaps? For example, by being required to place both legs behind the head, doing the splits, or folding the hands behind one’s back for prayer?

Challenging for strength, like handstand push-ups or one legged squats? Or challenging in terms of balance? For example circles of the pelvis and head, while standing on one leg?

Challenging for memory and muscle memory? Like a piano player being able to produce a difficult and long piece of sheet music from memory? Or a stage actor who faultlessly produces a long text from memory? A movement lesson with a hundred different moves?

Maybe challenging would mean the ability to stay focused, or maybe even awake? Or maybe, challenging for the ability to feel and sense small differences?

Challenging in cultural or ethical aspects? Movements that would seem indecent, like reaching down to touch ones sit-bones, or sliding the tongue in circles over the teeth or lips with an open mouth, or for example a twerk, movements of the buttocks, maybe even in a sensual fashion, that some would judge to be sexually provocative?

Or challenging in terms of pain, like finding a way to do joint movements without discomfort, for someone who is crippled by osteoarthritis or gout?

What is a challenge, to whom?

“The cure for the literacy crisis lies, in my opinion, in reading. Specifically, I am recommending a certain kind of reading—free voluntary reading (henceforth FVR). FVR means reading because you want to. For school-age children, FVR means no book report, no questions at the end of the chapter, and no looking up every vocabulary word. FVR means putting down a book you don’t like and choosing another one instead. It is the kind of reading highly literate people do all the time.” – The Power of Reading, Stephen Krashen

Maybe something similar could be said for the move… movement… movement-cy… mov-eracy… moveiracy… crisis. Ok, I need to look at this word first. I need to find the word for it, or make one up. Moveiracy, based on the Old French word “movier”, would that be it? Either way, let me start with literacy:

Literacy, in its broadest sense describes particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form. (Definition from Wikipedia)

Numeracy is the ability to understand, reason with, and to apply simple numerical concepts. (Definition from Wikipedia)

Movement is already a noun, but it does not hit the same mark as the terms literacy and numeracy. I’m looking for a word that in its broadest sense means to act in particular ways of moving, thinking, sensing and feeling to understand and express ourselves through physical movements that serve intent, purpose, that express the state of our nervous system, our expertise and accomplishments in movement learning, our history, identity, our belonging to a class or group; through movement, instead of words.

Heck, where’s the nail that can nail down that definition? It’s like making a sentence that makes sense, but instead of using words it’s movement. And when the left arm moves but the pelvis does not support this movement then the sentence sounds funny or lacks momentum and roots, or is part of a play, a jest, a twitch or twiddle… something like this.

So, hm, 🤔 am I missing something here? Is the crisis so big and so all-encompassing that we don’t even have the first word to describe it?