Guru or Teacher

Asked a question, I grope for an answer....

A friend writes a comment on one of my pieces. My instinct is to reply immediately. But then the Schloss puts his hand on my fingers…think a little longer, go deeper, take the cage to the bottom of the mind’s shaft.

My greatest skill? Reading, writing, spreadsheets…put to the question I struggle to answer; then think of what my eyes don’t see: how do these words appear before your two portals? Typing. Before the magic of AI it was the touch-of-ten that kept me chapters ahead of my two-fingered, tap tap, colleagues. Type a novella before they’d finish a memo. And where did I learn this miraculous skill? A Pitman training centre. Left alone in an enormous room with an electric typewriter until my head cracks under the repetitive boredom and a thousand and twenty one patience wrecking mistakes.

Should have been done at school. Oh, for sure I passed the exams, got a degree and a few other qualifications. But when, in my mid-twenties, I thought about it, I didn’t think I had any skills at all. Yes I could read and write a bit above the average, do a few intellectual tricks of the most rudimentary kind; but these hardly worth two decades in the classroom. In truth I was an amateur in all activities.

I knew it. Mam pushed me to Pitman’s; in her wise way she knew I had to master the new skills of the computer, of which the keyboard is the most important. Once learn QWERTY and the mind is free to wander the screen, my thoughts on a direct telepathic line from headpiece to Microsoft Word. Typing the foundation on which I have built a mental life. The French chateau came through a different kind of effort and due to that odd school I attended in my early twenties: the dole. It was in my twenties I acquired the arts of the autodidact, skilled myself up in the subjects that matter most to types like me: literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas. It was to take another two decades before my fingers did the thinking.

Working Class Highbrow explains why it took so long. I had to acquire not just the skills of the upper bourgeoisie but also its mentality, essential to the arts. I had to learn what comes naturally to them, and this takes not only longer but happens at an older less flexible age. What if born in Hampstead would have been completed by age 25, took another fifteen years before I passed my own exams. For having learned I then unlearned much of what I’d taught myself: like a postgrad at Cambridge I had to master the art of reshaping a tradition around my fingertips.

Jon asks what did school do to me. To this day I think it a long, painful exercise in deskilling. A factory constructed to turn out admin officers and middle managers it did the business and has received its rewards. Taught to think with the clarity and simplicity of a bureaucrat, I learnt the lesson well. Luckily I resisted. I knew there was something wrong. Felt that this barrel was empty of biscuits. School. If I hadn’t taught myself, I’d have remained among the lumpen manageriat all my life…a terrible fate for characters like me, one that not even a Marxist should wish on their class enemies.

I should have listened to Raymond Geuss.

So you taught yourself outside the classroom? No. I was a fool. My resistance was pool, pinball, Led Zeppelin and Frank Zappa. Didn’t do any work at all, except for a night’s cramming before an exam; and even then I’d stop to watch Brazil making the only art I knew. By the time I left Portsmouth I was hardly literate; just enough to write a letter, read a newspaper article, skim through a Frederick Forsyth.… Sounds familiar? It was most of the population before the Internet was even invented. This why it took so long to catch up with those who paid handsomely for their fine phrases and carefully modulated paragraphs.

Much to do with the sort of school I attended; a decent but workday comprehensive in the South Wales Valleys. Coalpark Comp was not designed to turn out artists, scientists and leaders. Our future was to man and woman the factories and offices, sweep the conference hall after Paul Foot and Tony Benn had delivered their Socialist speeches. So no blame attached to my teachers. They were doing their job, and as well as the County Council could expect. Beyond them was the type of personality described in Working Class Highbrow; I doubt if any had ever encountered such a character. Make a Schloss? Only the Schloss could do that. So I repeat: the school was not to blame. And yet it is also true that it stunted and held me back. An orchid stuck on an ash tip. I was lucky to survive.

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed; the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claims to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools and other agencies….

…I will show that the institutionalisation of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarisation and psychological impotence….¹

What function does the institution of teaching perform in a modern democracy? For the majority it has a quite distinct role: to produce a few basic skills that allow us - à la Paul Kingsnorth - to fit comfortably inside the Machine. It is get a job and learn the sacred but simple texts of our (democratic) religion from the newspapers and light magazines. Fine if we want the gardens cut and our pensions paid. Yet such a low-level education frustrates those who need far more from life than a dishwasher and a television set. To create, to fly free, to leap into the unknown…instead you are trapped inside an office, that gets smaller by the year. John Berger knew what freedom means: I needed, and still need, to feel the enigma of existence, my fingers tingled by its magic. Alas, my sort of school is apt to kill such intellectual excitement. The natural bias in schools like Coalpark, I talk not of the Dragons or Bryanston, is towards the safe, that is the comprehensible. We are taught to know things. To be secure in the world. It is confirm our existence, rather than lose it.

Squeezed in and suffocated by bureaucrats. And what a class they are! Superior beings! It is confirmed by their qualifications that tells them they are experts, that they know things. Ha! If only they knew…It is precisely what we don’t know that grows us, makes us alive. I try to learn as little as possible.

But you read thousands of books, says the Schloss. Each page a new territory where I disappear into the unknown.

This is not how most see the educated mind, which they mistake for a storehouse of facts and figures. Though school complicates this simple notion, for as Illich rightly says, it tends towards the process: taught the skills of knowledge so that we can operate a production line, whose product is not self-discovery but the benefits of an institution. We learn how to adapt and kowtow to the organisation; put an abstract noun before our thinking, feeling, self. Intelligence, we are told, is the passing of exams…yet the cleverest people are those who question the questions…better to fail an exam than pass it. We are machine-schooled not to become scholars or thinkers, but mechanics and technicians. Again, fine for many; but the mistake is to squeeze us all into this jam-jar of a concept. Raymond Geuss again.

There is a wonderful story Bertrand Russell tells in his autobiography about his brother teaching him Euclid: ’but you have to accept the axioms’. The very thing young Russell couldn’t accept. It is the problem of school: it finds it almost impossible to accommodate such scepticism, greatest amongst the most and the least talented.

I’m talking of mass education. Barry Grammar in its pomp, Winchester College, Oxbridge, the arts and music schools, are where we must go if want to experience the qualities of an educated mind. Timothy Hyman was an artist and teacher extraordinaire. Let’s listen to his eulogy….

Timothy went to Charterhouse and then the Slade. Such places belong to a medieval tradition, where students are apprentices, who learn not just the learning-trade but imbibe the personality of their teacher, through whom they absorb the spirit of what they are taught. The atmosphere and practice brilliantly described by Roy Mottahedeh in The Mantle of the Prophet. It is to push the student until they transcend their abilities, losing themselves to God or Plato’s ideal forms.

Stop the tape. I revise my opinions, after reading Audrey Richards on the initiation rites of Bemba girls: all societies except our own create an adult out of a child; who is forced to lose her childishness and discover the secrets of existence.² Here I go again: to grow is to lose a self….

The purpose of education should be to produce epiphanies. A moment when we are replete with meaning and insight. It is there in Socrates, if you read Plato carefully. Such rites and practices designed of course for an intellectual elite. It was why in the Middle Ages the Church was open to talent to all classes (and it is why a woman from the royal clan won’t necessarily be mistress of Bemba ceremonies). This style of instruction goes back millennia; and is the foundation of the West’s philosophical beliefs and its universities. A practice where we absorb a maestro’s personality and are transformed by it. Miraculous things to happen if our guru is of the top rank. Here is Ravi Shankar travelling to see the genius who transformed his life.

This ain’t going to happen in an educational factory. At best, I think of Miriam in A Small Country and David Parkin in real life, gifted teachers recognise the gifted pupil, and help them escape the educational shop floor. In egalitarian times this less likely to happen. Indeed, talking to parents, I find that today’s teachers are more likely to block the gifted individual, a disaster for those from the lower classes; for school was once a safe place, where the brilliant child was protected from the lowering effects of family and neighbourhood. School pushed one up into the higher reaches; though sadly for many that meant the Civil Service or local government. Nevertheless, some made it to sit beside John Stuart Mill and Coleridge.

The clever working class kid, I think of the narrator in Rachel Trezise’s In and Out of the Fish Bowl, is apt to be cynical, sceptical and rebellious. Disastrous qualities for growth. They can keep us in a permanent suspension of intelligent ignorance, as we lack the humility to submit to a tradition and its teachers. I thought I was marvellous! Preening myself on my own cleverness. It is the arrogance of the intelligent dimwit who is forever cutting through the crap…god have I been there…thank god I escaped before it squashed me flat. Such characters need inspirational figures to escape this all too easy egoistical round; a master (or mistress: I think of Miriam) who can inspire, push, make a space where we create a new self. Timothy Hyman was one such guru, who with his own great gifts and insight not just taught his students but resonated with them. As much friendship as a formal relationship. In other cases I think of a son and surrogate father; the brilliance and the closeness of Ustad Allauddin Khan transforming his pupil from a multitalented wild boy into a virtuoso of the sitar.

Shankar prostrated himself before his guru. His independence had to be broken. The self smashed to pieces by someone close to a tyrant…but in a profound and beneficent cause: to learn the skills, acquire the mental attitude, to receive the gifts of God: music, art, literature. Not all gurus are as harsh as Ustad Allauddin Khan. Timothy Hyman was a gentle soul.

Of course there are risks. In A New Dominion, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala writes of foolish young westerners taken in by false gurus. It is a risk that has to be taken; albeit most clever and talented kids have the nous to sniff out the fake and hopeless. It is usually the innocent and the mediocre who are lost to the charlatan.

For nearly seven years Ravi Shankar was a serf. Only thus could he realise his gifts, become the most original musician of his generation. It is the paradoxical nature of the teacher-pupil relationship; whose secret lies in the relationship, that intimate bond of emotion and talent. It is to inhabit a mode of being in the world of the virtuoso, and navigate it through your own resources. Ultimately, I would argue, such a learning is not really about knowledge or technique, important as these are, but a feeling; it it that ability, a trust, to let one’s self go.

It required a certainty of mind remarkable in a eighteen-year-old for Robu to choose what one critic has called ‘the path of most resistance’, spurning the comforts of his flourishing career in dance in order to learn classical music the hard way. Ahead of him, as it transpired, lay six and a half years of fanatical dedication in Maihar. As he travelled there with Rajendra, a journey of about eight hours from Benares by train, he was still in turmoil, doubting his own powers of self-discipline, knowing how spoilt he was, how sensitive to criticism. ‘I felt as though I were committing suicide and knew that I would be reborn, but had no way of knowing how the new life would be.’³

It is to open the self up beyond the ego, as you learn to express the soul in the arts, in religion, in all kinds of creative thought. It is that mix of thought and feeling, which when heated up and distilled we call spirit. Only the alchemy of talent, its strange metamorphosis, where emotions are turned into embodied thought which is yet at a distance from the self, can do this. As if from a different place…. Since the Schloss likes to speculate, I will leap naked into the pool of spec-u-lat-tion: as if penetrating to the very stuff of the universe, our fingers tingling with Leibnizian monads: the thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer’s Will, Brahman…God is within as well as without.

Here is the secret of Winchester and Charterhouse (Hyman went to Charterhouse), a variant found in the old non-conformist chapels of Wales, the secret of Welsh educational success. Emyr Humphreys wrote a wonderful novel about a minister of this milieu: Outside the House of Baal, which describes just how smart these characters once were. David Lorimer, the director of The Scientific and Medical Network, gives a marvellous portrait of Winchester, where as a don he’d hold Friday evening philosophy talks with the most gifted boys. It is to grow and stimulate personalities not just teach the curriculum. The college allowed the dons complete freedom to choose six books they’d recommend and discuss with their pupils…to take them to a secret garden; find the door; open it, and lose the self to the spirit of creation, the essence of life and mind. Because the master is close to these gifted students - David recalls having to read Stendhal at pace to meet a boy’s demands - there is a level of equality as they learn simultaneously. For a virtuoso teaching itself is learning, the master grows through his pupils and disciples. In The Tongue Set Free, Elias Canetti describes a young teacher who is all fluid mentality, his mind a springtime of growth and renewal. Teaching as an art, where each day offers something new and valuable. This what the talented need; the excitement of discovery, a feeling of transmutation, the magic of finding themselves in a strange but alluring place, with those who are their superior in wisdom and talent to guide them. We need great men and women to worship.

These qualities are few on the shelves of a mass market education. Even in Canetti’s school, most of the pupils didn’t understand and therefore didn’t like this teacher. They needed someone solid and stable.

Coalpark Comprehensive School didn’t employ an Ian Fleming-Way or a David Lorimer. On the whole they recruited solid and stable and safe characters (there was one exception, who had taught himself Serbo Croat). Their job to teach those who were going to work in industry or administer an office. It is to know how to learn new things, follow orders, read the news, listen to the arguments on Question Time. What about James Joyce’s Ulysses? The question would never be asked…. I’m not complaining. There is nothing wrong with this kind of schooling; people are needed to work in factories and run hospitals. Numbskulls like myself need to find our own way. Writers, artists, musicians…the useless people. It is in the uselessness where the treasure lies. And I learned the big lessons, which it has taken almost three decades to unlearn, as I have found better teachers and more profound guides, who have taken me to that secret garden….

The Old Man was called in their language Alaodin. He had had made in a valley between two mountains the biggest and most beautiful garden that was ever seen, planted will all the finest fruits in the world and containing the most splendid mansions and palaces that were ever seen, ornamented with gold and with likenesses of all that is beautiful on earth, and also four conduits, one flowing with wine, one with milk, one with honey, and one with water. There were fair ladies there and damsels, the loveliest in the world, unrivalled at playing every sort of instrument and at singing and dancing. And he gave his men to understand that this garden was Paradise.⁴

I was taught to staff an institution. My fate and tragedy that I am not a bureaucrat. Taught and conditioned to be one, I have since lived the divided life, a peculiar kind of schizophrenia, as I cajole and negotiate these words in my free time, and organise sentences and manage figures in office hours. It was only in my twenties that I heard of the Old Man of the Mountain, and his garden of assassins. A brilliant teacher – we must talk in superlatives here – may have shown me the way earlier, my trek not a lonely one up the Welsh mountains, but a group expedition across the Himalayas. That said, it’s an odd thing about artists; to become themselves, to grow their own originality, they must unlearn what they’ve been taught, even when taught by the best masters. Listen to Timothy Hyman telling us about those troublesome twenties when he had to struggle to find his own voice.

Education works on many levels, and changes with periods in our life. What is perhaps telling about formal education is how little attention is paid to those troublesome twenties, that make-or-break moment for the creative personality, when they either find or lose themselves to bohemia and routine. The idea of our education system is that it ends when we get a job. Intellectual growth to stop at the last exam. At best we are trained to do new things….not without value, as I know, touch-typing these words…but training deals with the technics, makes us more efficient, more useful machines. A true education requires a different metaphor: of the plant, with its growth and, most crucially, its ‘death’ and resurrection.

Brian Eno says, correctly, that we are supposed to define ourselves through work: the job is what society values most. It is this value which school inculcates, as it trains us not to be individuals but parts of an institution. Organisational units - roles - not human beings. You laugh and say I am talking nonsense. But this I ask: have you paid the consequences of behaving like a human in one of these places….

Eno mentions three traits of the artist: stubbornness, attention, play. If we are not stubborn we cannot protect our talent, which will be noised out by news alerts and email notifications. With no stubbornness there is no originality. Again you laugh. But I think of my own experience; I could tell you horror stories at the workplace; but not today, another time, when in more expansive mood. An institution - and what is school but an institution supreme? - sees stubbornness as a problem; it is a failure to adapt, believed central to success. This why schools often work against the original and the eccentric.

Eno’s second quality is attention. Evelyn Waugh says it best: artists hate the makeshift and boring. Alas, much secondary and now university education is both of those things. If you have any spark at all you will tune out of these places. Not so if with David Lorimer, in a candlelit room, discussing Herman Hesse. The gifted need to be absorbed in work that they find interesting and meaningful, and tests them in ways that stimulate curiosity and exploration. Such tailored learning is almost impossible in a state school. And indeed, the very idea of such individuality appears at odds with current orthodox thinking. Quite right too, if you conditioning pupils to work in the Council or manage a branch of Tesco. But oh oh…you are going to give me plenty of examples to the contrary…. Let me give just a single case which explains my meaning. Noam Chomsky’s friend, Morris Halle, was puzzled when his American school told him off for being late: he’d forgotten the clock figuring out some mathematical problem. Time-keeping trumps intellectual growth. We are back to Illich’s identification of process as the issue. It is the structure and rituals of school that work against characters like Halle and myself.

The third Eno quality is play. I used to love board games, and, as friends know, I’m as competitive as Garry Kasparov in anything from chess to crazy golf. To immerse the self in play. It is why I write, a game with words. Eno makes the crucial point that play is supposed to stop when we are eleven: time to get down to serious work. Yet you can always tell the unserious – they are too serious! I’ll let you sort that paradox out.

It is in those troublesome twenties that an artist learns to play seriously for the first time. And it is here we see the fatal weakness of school: by putting work before play it removes the most important quality in a child’s learning experience: the wonder and the joy, the triumph of play well won. I often wonder if I’d been better educated if allowed to play board games all day. Rather than just playing chess in the evening, the classroom given over to the Ruy Lopez and Sicilian…. I would have certainly grown up quicker: there is nothing matures one faster than being checkmated after five hours of hard mental grind, then accepting defeat with a shake of the hand. I know somebody who literally educated himself through gaming – he is one of the most intelligent people in the building. For some kids auto-didacticism is their only salvation.

Teachers. It depends on the teachers! That my initial thought, when Jon asks this question of the Highbrow: ‘if teachers have any potential impact or whether they are a barrier to the self-directed learning you seek to inspire?’

It is not a question of teachers but institutions, education today less about individuals than the organisation. In mass education such dehumanising and demotivating traits are at their most extensive and extreme. Such schools, in my opinion, do place a barrier to the gifted child, who are usually the most likely to learn themselves.⁵ Their only chance – I think of that famous local band the Manic Street Preachers – is their peer group: if lucky they’ll find a guru. Although there are problems if a Valley boy: Patrick Jones is hardly top notch. It would have been far better if the Wire & Co had joined your circle Jon…Mr B to take them to another level.

A bright working class kid faced by the institution of mass education is likely to make the wrong choices; as he rejects education in toto; seeing it as worthless, a con, a social oppression. Not all wrong…they are reacting against the indoctrination and conformist elements in modern schooling. Here is the tragedy for working class children like myself: we have no idea that knowledge can set us free. Resistance, rebellion, and a kind of low level counter-culture, its brash outsiderdom, is the most usual consequence; an attitude and its milieu disturbingly captured in Trezise’s In and Out of the Fish Bowl. A tale of a clever girl from Treorchy who stuck in her early precociousness seems destined never to recover from its deleterious effects. To read Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter, a novel about a very different social place, is to predict her future: trapped inside her own cleverness. The Valleys are littered with these intellectual casualties. They are the wreckage, the detritus, of our schools.

In 1947 [Ian Fleming-Way] was appointed art master at Charterhouse, in Surrey, where he would remain for the next 23 years. He supervised the building of a separate studio block; recruited some gifted young assistants (including, in 1954-56, Howard Hodgkin); but above all he created, within a conventional public school, an alternative realm where outcasts of all kinds could find refuge. He was a wonderful teacher, both in informal tutorials and in his memorable epidaiascope lectures; his rare flashes of temper had earned him the nickname "Flaming Onions", but mostly he radiated calm, a benign white-overalled figure, available but never oppressive.⁶

Even institutions vary. I think of the extraordinary chapter in Galen Strawson’s Things that Bother Me: Winchester was prepared to bend to breaking point to accommodate what was beyond the pale behaviour. An elite institution, full of talented and tolerant masters, knew enough about human nature, and had an extraordinary respect for brilliance, to do everything institutionally possible to save Strawson from himself. Coalpark Comp would not have been so liberal.

The clever working class child needs to be educated like an aristocrat. Alas, they are trained to join the class of clerks. Thus the frustration, the inertia…do I hear the catcalls? They did the same to Aneurin Bevan. Hugh Dalton called him ‘a tremendous Tory’, because:

…he was determined to build big houses; as a working man himself, brought up in a tiny cottage, he knew the importance of space and privacy to human dignity.⁷

For the Etonian Dalton, it is self-evident tiny minds fit into tiny houses. He didn’t realise that Bevan himself was an aristo:

What all these men appreciated in Bevan was the clarity of political purpose - not to mention the political limelight - which he brought to a Department more often filled by somewhat grey functionaries. He had the precious gift of being able to concentrate upon essentials and leave the detail to his civil servants: he would expound to them the principles under which he understood the proper roles of Minister and civil servant. Like Lloyd George, he preferred to master the work of the Department by listening, questioning and arguing rather than by reading. He was extraordinarily quick to pick up points in discussion, and never forgot anything he was told. Like Lloyd George, he was not orthodox in his methods, but he inspired and stimulated his staff and got things done. When he had taken a decision he stuck to it. He was above all a creative Minister, who believed in using power.⁸

I know that most public schools are not Winchester and Charterhouse. That many masters have a touch of Dickens’ Wackford Squeers. But even Dotheboys Hall is leavened by the social background of its pupils.

Even dull places can produce creative spirits, if the atmosphere is propitious, and the gifted child is touched by the grace of learning. One reason for the success of English public schools is that however mediocre they do create a belief and a confidence in a pupil’s powers; while at the same time making them aware there is a higher world than the monthly pay packet; although, of course, much is platitude and pretence: many may know the name Benjamin Britten but few ever listen to his music. I was spared that hypocrisy at Coalpark Comp: that stuff was for the Other Lot; though such an attitude, so fresh in some ways, enervates the intelligent and the talented through lack of ambition. There is no escape hatch, unlike those at a minor public school, who will almost certainly find a boy who not just likes but plays Bartok.

The talented will be in tension with the institution. Beautifully caught by Lindsay Anderson’s If. Yet many forget when watching this film that without a public school to go to there’d have been no public school to blow up…and therefore no film. You can always tell a radical: the pound signs before their education. Good institutions encourage that tension – the openness, the exploration, the frisson – bad institutions close it down. The problem of Coalpark Comprehensive: it didn’t even know such a tension should exist. Radicals and original thinkers are not supposed to exist in an office or on a production line: a cog doesn’t tell a lever what to do. This why many of the best working class minds lose themselves to a low grade counter-culture, its drugs, its booze, its sex, its reflexive anti-establishmentarianism. I was saved because my nan went to chapel. Something of the mystery of the Word emanating down to myself. Education, I instinctively felt, was more important than my educators; I knew something special was missing from the classroom.

I found it at age 21, when a friend told me to read Catch-22.

The Working Class Highbrow: I had to teach myself an elite education, and when I did…I opened Pandora’s Box. Many many wonderful things, but also a life condemned to friction, conflict and a permanent outsiderdom: no institution likes a smart arse, especially when he advertises the fact. Who cares! Artists, the clever, the crazy have always been on the outside, where they are both feared and revered. The cop kills the Motorcycle Boy in Rumblefish, but the Motorcycle Boy himself says that every society has an instinctive respect for the insane. The problem of Schloss in a nutshell. The managers dislike me and freeze me out, the clerks find me uncanny.

I hated school. I considered a weirdo for feeling so; while everyone quick to make this confident prediction: wait and see, you’ll be a teacher too. ‘What, the worst job in the world?’ The clever adolescent the most stupid of adults. And of course these voters weren’t wrong: what is a writer after all….

If only I’d met Werner Herzog.

I always felt like a stranger [in the Maximilian Gymnasium] but only toward the other pupils, who all came from prosperous middle-class backgrounds. I didn’t often think of myself as poor - the contradictions of a class society were not so pronounced that I was unable to deal with them. Even in my schooldays, though, I had a sense of everyone working on their careers; that was something that struck me. I had few friends and hated the school, sometimes so passionately, I imagined going there at night when it was empty and setting it on fire. There is such a thing as academic intelligence, and I didn’t have it. Intelligence is always a bundle of several qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, organisational capacity, and so on and so forth; but in my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed. My older brother suffered much worse, as he fitted even less into the scheme. It emerged that he was a complete misfit at school even though he was an extraordinarily intelligent boy; but it was another kind of intelligence that manifested itself in his leadership qualities. At school, he was invariably in charge of whatever dissident activity we put on.⁹

It is mad to do what I do.

Touch the spirit of an idea, and lose yourself to it, becoming free and alive. I have stepped into the Zone. Ha! The Zone. Always I come back to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The Zone…in the Zone there is a special room, where your deepest wish will be granted. But there is danger…. Do you know thyself? Step into that room when you don’t have the talent and the wish will crush you. It is a modern form of grace. And as Stalker knew, it is only the crazies, the nutters, the true weirdos, or what Rowan Williams calls the ‘uncomfortable people’, who are touched by this spirit, though few will risk entering that room.

No institution likes a girl who can move glasses with her thoughts alone….

Winchester, Eton, Charterhouse are prepared to take the risk, because there is something in that spirit that produces the leader, the entrepreneur, the top flight civil servant. Add the bonus of the original scientist, the famous artist, and the charismatics that lighten up a landscape, and that risk becomes a wise investment. All essential for the health of an elite society. But what sane education system would educate the masses to become Stalkers? Imagine a local Council run by the Schloss….

I hear the earth move, the voters of Caerphilly running for cover.

1. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, p.9.

2. Audrey Richard: Chisungu: A girl’s initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia.

3. Oliver Craske, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, p.72.

4. Marco Polo, Travels, translated by Ronald Latham, p.40. I have changed Sheikh to Old Man.

5. Andrew Robinson, Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs.

6. From Timothy Hyman’s obituary of Ian Fleming-Way.

7. John Campbell, Nye Bevan: And the Mirage of British Socialism, p.156.

8. Nye Bevan: And the Mirage of British Socialism, p.153.

9. Werner Herzog, Every Man For Himself and God Against All, pp.94-5.