Learning for Learning's Sake

Ancient Roman patricians were proud of being able to enjoy "ocio", similar to leisure in English. It set them apart from plebeians engaged in "negocio", the negation of ocio – now the Spanish word for business.  Interestingly “ocio”, in a round-about way, is the root of “school” in English, as the place where lectures are given.  One aspect of ocio can be learning for the sake of learning.

I had the good fortune to experience three days of ocio last week at the Ivan Illich conference in Cuernavaca. Held on the 10th anniversary of his death, the conference covered the wide range of topics that this keen thinker and writer explored in his lifetime. 
Illich is mainly remembered for his writings on education, transportation, and medicine, but he also wrote about how modern society faces the challenges of growing population, limited resources, increasing concentration of wealth, governments' ever expanding control over our lives, gender issues, and the rights of indigenous peoples.  In each case Illich's point of view was very different from the mainstream.  

Illich identified the same topics of study in four important time periods in western culture. The first was ancient Greece and Rome. The second was Europe in the thirteenth century, a period which was important in shaping the Catholic Church and which saw the rise of institutions such as universities and religious orders. Then he focused on the industrial revolution and the modern times of the latter twentieth century. 

He criticized modern marketing institutions which “create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the earth.”  He noted that an automobile owner in the U.S. in the 1970’s spent 1600 hours per year in the car or working to pay for the car and its upkeep. When dividing that cost by the miles driven, he found that cars were no more efficient than a peasant walking. He asked why we didn’t ride bicycles instead.

The conference organizers treated us to some of the more obscure topics Illich studied too, such as water, the acts of reading, and gazing.  

According to Illich, the ancient Greek concept of water was as an abundant crystalline purifier.  Today it has been reduced to H2O and sold as merchandise and is frequently a conveyer of waste. 

Before the advent of the printing press reading was usually done out loud in a gathering.  Words flowed together melodiously along with a good dosage of hand gestures and body language on the part of the reader.  Today we usually read alone, the words are independent of each other on the page, and body language has disappeared.  

An even more surprising topic was Illich's discourse on gazing or seeing.  Today we think of the eye as passive and receptive -- like a video camera receiving light.  The ancient Greeks maintained that when we look at someone our gaze goes out like an organ -- Illich actually used the phrase 'erectile organ' -- and touches what we look at.  In a sense making gazing a sensual event. When we close our eyes after staring at something bright we can see an after-image. This supports the idea of our eyes absorbing light. But if gaze isn't an organ going out and touching what we are seeing, how do we explain that feeling that someone behind us is staring at us?

For me the "Illich's Radical Humanism" conference was three days of ocio in its truest sense -- leisure and learning for nothing more than the sake and enjoyment of learning and questioning what we engage in during our daily lives.   However participants in their 20s remarked that they had not gotten anything they could use in their workplace or with which to further their studies.  I interpreted that as evidence that education itself has become expensive merchandise, even here in Mexico.   That was not a concern as recently as five years ago at the first of Cuernavaca's homages to Ivan Illich.  The nature of this conference was more along the lines Illich described when he referred to his study center in Cuernavaca, "free and powerless thinkery which can be squashed by its rising influence." 

I enjoyed a privileged seat in all the sessions as translator/interpreter from Spanish to English.  The translating equipment was rudimentary. Those requiring translation sat as close as possible around me on folding chairs.  My listeners had no headsets. I had no microphone. We quickly became an accepted group within the auditorium and head turnings and nasty stares by people in the audience ceased after the first session.  After particularly complicated presentations I found myself asking my little group if the translation had made any sense.  We had the good fortune of having Dougald Hine sitting with us. Five years ago he was working with the School of Everything in London. His extensive knowledge of Illich's work allowed him to give us a synopsis of each talk.

Many of Ivan Illich's essays and books are available free online.  His Wikipedia article lists his titles.  I encourage you to download some of them and enjoy some well-deserved ocio yourself. 

The Days of the Dead

Tomorrow is Halloween, what I consider an imposition from the north pushed by chain stores here eager to sell costumes to children. Shortened from Hallowed Evening, Halloween is just the build up to the days traditionally celebrated in Mexico--All Saints Day on November 1st and and All Souls Day on November 2nd. Here both days are called the Days of the Dead--Dias de los Muertos. You know they are approaching by the mounds of marigolds, special breads, and sugar skulls abundant in markets.

In Christian tradition All Saints Day honors all saints, known and unknown.  All Souls Day is one on which to assist through prayer the souls of the deceased who have not yet achieved purification and are still in purgatory. 

While that's what the Church says, Mesoamerican tradition is quite different. Death is not the end of life, it is merely a transition.  Dias de los Muertos are days when the souls of the deceased return to visit with their families. Family members who have migrated away from their traditional home make their way back, just as the souls of the deceased return to where they were buried.  That’s why these are the busiest travel days in Mexico.

According to Johanna Broda, who has written extensively on the overlapping of Mesoamerican and Spanish rituals, "the dead make their appearance during St. Michael's fiesta on September 29, and share with their family members their happiness over the first corn cobs.  In this way the dead show their intimate link with the agricultural cycle and the welfare of the living." 

Early Spanish friars were successful in extending Mesoamerica's harvest celebration for another month to blend with the Christian All Souls and All Saints Holy Days.  You can't but give credibility to the idea that Days of the Dead are linked with a harvest celebration when you see an altar to the dead, be it an authentic family home altar or a tourism department sponsored extravaganza in which groups are competing for prizes awarded to the "best" altar.  Loaded with the foods that the deceased enjoyed in life, Mesoamerican crops are well represented.  You’ll find candied squash, tamales made from corn, turkey in "móle" sauce.  Rice and sugar cane arrived hand-in-hand from Spain, but strangely rice is not a common dish on the altars while four- or five-inch-long pieces of sugar cane are. European wheat is well represented in the fancy Pan de Muerto (bread of the dead).  In fact, bakeries usually do the best job of decorating their store windows with allusion to Days of the Dead. 

Though the underlying meaning is the same throughout Mesoamerica, the way the Days of the Dead are observed changes from one village to the next.  Don't be surprised if your Mexican friends each describe different ways of celebrating these days.  They are all correct.  Just listen and take it in with fascination.  The one constant throughout Mesomaerican is the use of the bright yellow cempasuchitl (marigold) to decorate tombs altars and walkways.  Yellow is definitely the color of days of the dead.

If invited to visit a home altar jump at the opportunity because it is very much a family observance and celebration.  As outsiders we don't really play a role in it unless we have deceased family members who are buried here. 

With that in mind, I invite you to accompany me to decorate the tomb of a dear friend of mine, John Spencer.  John has no family members in Mexico, yet his tomb has never been bereft of flowers on Days of the Dead.  His tomb will be decorated by friends of his in life as well as others who have come to be his friends through his lasting legacy to art and design in Cuernavaca. We will meet and decorate his tomb on Thursday with a design copied from a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, an artist he particularly admired.  We'll recreate it with marigold petals. 

If you would like to join us at The Church of the Three Kings in Cuernavaca, send me an email.  The more participants we have the grander the "painting" will be.  While we work, we'll be surrounded by the magnificent walls he designed. John Spencer was one of us -- a foreigner enticed by Mexico's charm who settled here.

For more about these holidays refer back to the very first Charlie's Digs in October 2010,  three in October 2011, and one in November 2011.  They’re all posted at <charliesdigs.blogspot.com>.

Last month in a column about Ivan Illich, another foreigner who has left his mark on Mexico, I told you I'd let you know the dates of the forum commemorating the tenth anniversary of his death.  It will be December 13-15 in Cuernavaca with a series of talks by an impressive list of speakers about Illich's thought and writing.  If you’d like to attend send me an email and I'll forward the registration form to you.

Dodging the wheel

Ancient Mesoamerican cultures reached extraordinary heights in mathematics, astronomy, architecture, art, farming, and writing.  Yet they did not develop the wheel into their means of portage.  Constructors most certainly used logs as rollers on which to move huge pieces of sculpture or stones used in construction.  The Maya used enormous stone cylinders to flatten their roads.  But overland Mesoamerican cargo moved on the backs of porters with tumplines going around their foreheads.

If the load was heavier than a single person could carry, the burden was tied to a pole resting on the shoulders of two or more porters.   In the Palacio Cantón Museum in Merida you can see a three dimensional life-size carving of just such a scene:  two men carrying a deer they have just hunted, hanging upside down from its feet tied to a pole. 

So why didn’t Mesoamericans use carts rather than their backs to transport goods? Probably because unless its wheel and axel were as efficient as a bicycle wheel, it was more energy efficient for people to carry the load than to pull the cart. 

Ivan Illich touched on this topic in his book, "Energy and Equity."  A keen thinker and writer on many subjects but mainly remembered for his writings on education, transportation, and medicine, lllich thought and wrote a lot about how modern society faces the challenges of growing population, limited resources, increasing concentration of wealth and governments' ever expanding control over our lives.  Though he traveled extensively, Cuernavaca was his base of operations from 1959 until his death in Germany in 2002.

In his writings he frequently led his readers off on fascinating tangents to the most unexpected destinations.  One of the more esoteric topics that he explored in the area of transportation is the ball-bearing and how it increased human mobility. In the 1970's he wrote "Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently.  He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. . . . Thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals.  For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rat or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon.  At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history."

With the invention of the ball-bearing in the late 1800's, Illich contends that transportation made a tremendous leap.  "Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process.  . . . Equipped with this tool man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well."

The ball bearing caused a revolution in transportation, one of four revolutions in transportation that Illich identified.  Two others are the invention of the wheel early in our civilization and the simultaneous invention of the stirrup, shoulder harness, and horseshoe in medieval Europe “which increased the thermodynamic efficiency of the horse by a factor of up to five." The fourth revolution was the building of oceangoing vessels by the Portuguese.
"In Mexico, the wheel was well known, but never applied to transport.  It served exclusively for the construction of carriages for toy gods.  The taboo on wheelbarrows in America before Cortes is no more puzzling than the taboo on bicycles in modern traffic."

However equally amazing as it is puzzling, is that Mesoamericans did without all four revolutions in transportation that Illich identifies.  They knew the wheel and axle but only used it for toys.  They had no horses or similar animals for transportation. Their ocean going vessels did not stray far from shore.  And the development of the ball-bearing came long after the conquest.

Illich was a big fan of bicycles because they are cheap, durable, easily stored, and an egalitarian means of transportation. He was not as fond of the other 20th and 21st century means of transportation that the ball-bearing opened the door to.

Unlike the stirrup which "raised the knight onto his horse," or the Portuguese galleon "which enlarged the horizons of the king's captains", the ball-bearing is used by both the egalitarian bicycle as well as the automobile which Illich referred to as "the accelerating individual capsule [that] enabled societies to engage in a ritual of progressively paralyzing speed."

On the tenth anniversary of Ivan Illich's death he would be pleased to see how bicycling is encouraged in Mexico City.  He would be even more delighted to know that Copenhagen, Denmark -- where one third of commuters bike to work or school -- is building a 186-mile (300 km.) network of cycling superhighways linking the city with its suburbs at a cost of one million dollars per mile.  As the US’s National Public Radio reported last Saturday, the superhighway network is "expected to save Copenhagen's health care system some $60 million dollars a year."  

I did the math:  in a little over three years the network will start turning a hefty profit just by keeping people out of the reach of physicians!  That combination would make Illich even happier.  He may be best known for his book "Medical Nemesis" about the dangers of modern medicine.   What a marvelous way to keep people healthy. 

A three-day Illich seminar is being planned in Cuernavaca from December 13 to 15.  I'll let you know the schedule, topics, and location as soon as I receive them.

The pioneer of Spanish grammar

Queen Isabella’s explorations started a process of conquering this hemisphere with the sword; Antonio de Nebrija (1441-1522) solidified that victory with the word.  Little is known about a fascinating man who was probably essential to the consolidation of the Spanish Empire and the homogenization of the Spanish language.  

Queen Isabella (1451-1504) was born at the renaissance of writing, science and exploration -- a time of an explosion of new ideas. 1492 was certainly the most tumultuous year of her reign with the unification of Spain, through the completion of the Reconquista over the Moors, in January the expulsion of the Jews in March, Columbus sailing west in August.    

Europe was emerging from the Dark Ages into a new world of enlightenment. Lost knowledge in the areas of philosophy, mathematics, science and medicine were being rediscovered; Gutenberg’s printing press, invented in the very year of Isabella’s birth, assured that it was no longer just monks who had access to ancient knowledge.  Imagine the proliferation of printed material!  With printing presses popping up all over the place anyone with a minimum of resources could have their ideas printed on a broadsheet and distributed.  

On another front, by the late 1300's, Spanish and Portuguese seafarers understood that the invention of the compass -- shrouded in mystery with both the Chinese and Arabs claiming its origin -- was a valuable tool for navigation and went on to develop shipbuilding and mapmaking abilities superior to other European countries.  The confluence of these three developments, essential for seagoing exploration, profoundly changed western civilization and led to first Spanish and then European economic dominance of the world.  

The allegorical tale of the Tower of Babylon is instructive of the importance of language and the ability to communicate.  Spaniards came from many different areas, each with its own dialect.  When Spanish exploration began a common language was needed to allow sailors and crew, clergy, military commanders to communicate. 

I thought about this three Sundays ago as I walked in the march led by Javier Sicilia along Paseo de la Reforma and had the opportunity to talk with Jean Robert (yes, Robert is his surname), a disciple of Ivan Illich.  I took advantage of the fact that I had a recorder in my pocket, we had time on our hands, no other place to go, and as participants in a silent march, no slogans to shout.  I asked Robert to refresh my memory about Antonio de Nebrija.    

Robert reminded me that Illich, with an interest in the vernacular, had written about Nebrija, defined as the creator of the Spanish language or the first mother tongue that had to be learned.  What follows is some of Nebrija’s story as told to me on August 14 by Jean Robert.

“Nebrija gave rules to Spanish.  In his youth he had watched the explosion of printing.  Each town had a printing press that printed the strangest of things in the most disorderly manner with no uniformity of language, spelling or grammar.  Nebrija thought, ‘This chaos can not continue.’  So, he came up with the idea of instituting a small manual of linguistic engineering; this kind of book is called a grammar.

“But in those times nobody would have thought of using a grammar book to learn the language that they spoke.  They would say, ‘I speak.  I am the master of my language.  I speak as we do in my house.’  

“A grammar book was something used to study a language that is no longer spoken…  like Hebrew, ancient Greek and Latin.  Using this model, Nebrija wrote a Spanish grammar. He even included proper pronunciation and guides to the chaste use of language.  

“Nebrija wanted Queen Isabella to finance this ambitious project.  He requested an audience and said, ‘Majesty, I have something extraordinary to present to you. We can apply it in all your dominions.  It is a grammar like you used to learn Latin but it is to teach Spaniards how to speak correct Spanish.”  The queen laughed uproariously.  ‘I am the queen of this country.  But with the regard to language spoken at home each subject is king in his own house.’   Nebrija went away saddened.   

“A few years later he learned that Christopher Columbus had obtained financing for an even crazier project.  He returned for a second audience with Queen Isabella. 'Majesty, now that you are preparing to civilize half the world, China, Japan, India (or so they thought) you must understand the importance of a unified language.  A country is conquered with a sword but you maintain power with the tongue.'   She agreed and financed the printing of his grammar.

“It is supposed that those aboard ships sent to colonize New Spain were trained to speak Spanish, according to Nebrija’s grammar.  There is no place in Latin America where a Spanish language other than Castillian Spanish is spoken.  In Spain the various dialects have survived. Though early settlers certainly came from all areas of Spain, boarding  ships speaking Catalan, Gallego, and even Basque they disembarked as subjects of the Viceroy of New Spain speaking Spanish.  It was Nebrija’s grand achievement.”