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Moon Reign O’er Me

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Saturday is fast fading. The minarets still shine like Saturn rockets while out at sea the tankers chart a course along the edge of the known world. The winter sun will corkscrew down behind the mountains in around three hours from now and the purpose for the bronze cast of the crescent moon – al hilal – that juts from the top of the minaret will become clear as faith in the night sky.

How the sun does its parabola, is that the trajectory of love? It comes for a day: warms the dumbstruck in the morning with its pastel harmonies, dazzles at noon when the heat of passion ramps up, sustains itself throughout the afternoon, and then starts playing reddened tricks on the landscape, fading in power and intensity as dusk falls.

Here where the sky is flawless 350 days of the year the clouds do not arrive to obscure its path. The Arabian sun sets the human agenda with its moves, the quickness of its ascent, its peak power, followed by a slower, sometimes more dignified descent. Only when it disappears did we know it was there. Only when it burned us did we know that it was colour and not paleness we always needed. Only when its glare overwhelmed us with its everything did we realise that in its absence all we felt was underwhelmed. But best of all, even when at day’s end and it sinks behind the jagged mountains, our grin catches the moonlight knowing that while one sun comes to an end a new love will enter our skies, if not when it rises but whenever it chooses to shine.

Light is a rare thing when everything around is illuminated. If you don’t venture out into it you’ll never know if it had right kind of waves to truly penetrate.

 

What is the Ultimate Nature of Reality in a Classroom Full of Young Arab Women?

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It starts thus: you walk into the classroom expecting nothing. And it ends like this: you leave with everything: with heads doing hoopla, smiles skewered and brains beguiled. Breathe in the air. Don’t be afraid to care.

How can we encourage critical thinking in our classrooms when those classrooms are located in parts of the world where thinking critically is effectively discouraged? So we stay off the private property and we dare to voice doubts on what they all know they know. Or they think they know.

Theology – perhaps the founding father of post-enlightenment critical thinking is strictly off-limits. Epistemology – the ‘what’ of knowledge – is just too damn recondite for a target audience more accustomed to casting a critical eye not on a thought but on a thing, a thing usually purchased at a shopping mall. Logic appeals because we are dealing with a people who snatched Greek equations from the anti-intellectual clutches of dark age Christendom. They then translated them and even improved upon them in some cases. So logic is in, but it’s also out on account of being a head-wringer for all but the most logical of logicians. La suite, we have the scientific method, which might have worked if there hadn’t been no method in the madness of teaching critical thinking in a society where thinking has not yet reached critical levels. The logical fallacies stand a fighting chance if we can only separate our slippery slopes from our straw men, our ad hominem from our no true Scotsman.

So the teacher quickly dispenses with formality, preferring to jump right in with both feet first: ‘what is reality?’ he asks. Hitherto disinterested faces turn like sunflowers, each as beautiful in its reaction as the other. ‘What do you mean by that?’ one asks.

‘What does it look like?’ To which most blush, remorseful not to know perhaps the most unanswerable question in cosmology. ‘Does it consist in waves of differing length? Does it shift according to the observer? Is it apparent in little pixels of differing colour or is reality a film in B&W?’

‘Are you for real, Sir?’ is the question on everyone’s eyes.

Just then a member of the unkindness of ravens fed faithfully each and every day comes tapping on the window, looking for its benefactor.

‘I mean is what we are seeing the same as what that bird at the window is seeing?’

‘But Sir, it is seeing you and you are seeing it, so yes.’

Another curveball is pitched. This time it’s about how the human brain is a live experiment in biochemistry. Chemical neurotransmitters flood the cortex then are flushed down into the blood stream. Do we see the world, for example, in favourable terms because we’ve received a mega-dosage of serotonin? When reality appears blissful and its constituent parts all bound by harmony, is that not a overdose of oxytocin? The class ponder thi

‘Have you ever looked at a person and thought ‘I am seeing this person in a new light?’ Some nod eagerly. ‘Have you ever let love turn to dislike, or even indifference?’ Yes and yes. ‘Seen the same thing from tow different angles and it appears totally different?’ A bombshell has been dropped in the room. ‘That is reality at work.’

Another asks: ‘Reality changing like when you hallucinate? Have you ever taken drugs, sir?’

When the conversation takes on a solemn edge, honesty really is the best policy.

No faces are veiled and now eyes really do grow large like harvest moons.

Their interest in finding out what happens to reality when LSD breaks down the barrier between ‘I’ and everything else is stoked further when the revelation breaks that blue tastes different from green on LSD. Attention is absolute when, after yet more probing, it turns out that molecules fizz before eyes that become electron microscopes. And as for motion: bodily movement goes at 100 frames per second, the hand leaving traces of the orbit it took when it was swooshed through the air. Yes, class, you can still see your hand as it was on the way to being here.

We digress. Peyote and shamanism crops up, which propels thought toward the necromancer in the tribe, the heady fumes and the rites that put the medium of two worlds into a trance-like state. It is here that the spirits of the forest are unleashed and everything that cannot be seen suddenly can be.

One student claims to live surrounded by djinns. Then another, then another. Purgatory, limbo and all the lost souls enter through the backdoor and suddenly the room is filled with spirits of a conversation that sought to ask: what is the ultimate nature of reality? Lost souls take seats at empty tables. The living – or what has only come to life in the past hour – are hooked on tales from another land called alternate reality.

Reality will never be the same for some of these country girls again. Shifted by the mere mention of itself, reality has shown its true colours. Lo & behold, it turns out that orange is not the only colour with a distinctive taste.

 

 

The Cosmic Wooden Spoon

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There can be no worse karma laid upon an impoverished soul than to be a dog. And not just any dog, but a street dog. And not just any street dog, but a dog born on the streets of the Middle East.

There these woebegone canines take on a life best described as desultory, trotting along from who knows where to who knows when at who knows what time of the day or night. Their bodies are emaciated, their bones poking through such that all it takes is a sudden move and their ribs will puncture the hide. But that bodily disaster might be ultimately to their advantage, because then at least they will have some marrow to chew on. They are the unwanted, the caste-offs, the dalits of the dog world. Their sorrow is our indifference.

Their tongues loll almost to the deck on account of the temperatures they have to endure for the few summers they manage to cling to life. Their coats are dull and threadbare due to the deficiency of vitamins and the mange that routinely strips them half-naked. This sorry plight again may be to their advantage, as wearing an overcoat is not quite what the Arabian climate had in mind for much of the year. The only thing they can take for granted is that they will never go cold.

Their only friend is the Indian wallah who carts the supermarket’s butchery off-cuts out to the skip. The only other friendly face these dogs are ever likely encounter is the zealous migrant – that itinerant who arrives in the Middle East seeking only riches and leaves having found a purpose: namely, to alleviate the suffering of all the world’s waifs and strays. Of course, this mission is a hopeless one, because when these ex-patriots suddenly up sticks and repatriate to their developed worlds where strays are either sterilized or euthanized, the street dogs of the hot and heartless Middle East are the ones left to fend for themselves.

It is good to do one’s bit for the nameless ones. The effects of kindness are instantaneous. What seems at first an intimidating straggle of street punks led by a bristling alpha sporting a scar over his proud nose soon gives to a bunch of wagging tails, delighted not be be forgotten by the cruel world yet still wary that the kindness of strangers is but a trap for fools. Street dogs are many things, but fools they cannot afford to be. In spite of their hunger, the capos snap and nip the lowly henchmen, for in a world where they mean less than nothing, within their pack universe they have first dibs. Some kind of structure is needed if they are to make it on Arab street. To watch them is to realise that it is not through brutality and strict hierarchy that they overcome the odds, but through good old cooperation. They look out for one another while we stand back, looking out for only ourselves. In this way they may share in their misery, shrugging off the crappy karma that the cosmos has cooked up for them.

(n.b. During a year-long stint of volunteering at an unnamed shelter on an unnamed island in an unnameable gulf, the Indian dog handlers – with what little English they had at their command – told this writer that when the locals pulled up outside the kennels, even before they got out of their cars, the dogs would bristle with anger and hostility. The expletives were damn-near discernible in their bark. Conversely, when non-locals likewise paid a visit the dogs would go wild with excitement. At this the two men laughed as if this was the worst-kept secret in the world.)