Put your camel to bed

Hey ho. We're in transit (not yet by camel). The last two weeks have been a blur of fevered activity - so many things to do to pack up the house, find tenants, take care of the animals (the emotional affects of that), plan for Qatar and a myriad of other things. The modern life is very complicated - we love forms and protocols and details. Henry David Thoreau told us the life is frittered away by (or in?) details and he was spot on (again). It's also interesting to see how little you actually need (one suitcase each).

We have managed it though. One week to get organised would have been impossible, but two weeks has been merely difficult. We are nearly ready to go. We depart New Zealand at 6.45pm on the 2nd of December (Wednesday) and fly to Sydney (1 hour 40 min wait), then Dubai, then Doha. We expect to arrive there on Thursday morning. We'll see you soon Angela!

We are now in the throes of our final farewells: A few weekends ago we visited Biddy and Sallie in the Hawkes Bay, we had a great dinner with Roger and Deirge, I finished at school on Friday (go to my re branded blog http://baggytrewsers.blogspot.com/ for that stuff), Keegan came down to say bye and pick up a car to use while we're away, we'll see Adam and Ross et al on the journey north to Auckland in the next few days and we'll say our goodbyes to Taranaki as well soon.

We owe lots of thanks to Michelle and Gavin - yesterday we had much needed help from them to clean up the house and pack the last of our gear in the storage unit we've rented and we're currently staying with them for a few days until we depart. They've been terrific!

I probably won't have time to update the blog before we land in the Middle East so - thanks for all the support you've given via emails or Facebook messages. Next posting will be from the third sand dune from the oasis.

Love and peace - Wozza

Red light blinking in the twilight,tracing in a path right out of here and now

Some big news in this week's post - Jacky and I are off to Qatar to work and live in the next few weeks. I've been offered an educational consultancy position there to help train their local Principals and I decided to accept (I can feel those mouths beginning to fall open all over the world).

This, of course, has sent us and Jade into something of a spin as we try to find a house-sitter to join Jade at home until she leaves for Victoria University in February 2010. We have tons to do in the next two weeks - we leave New Zealand at the end of November. We do plan to return at some stage. We intend to keep our fantastic property in Stratford. There is a mixture of excitement and anxiety amid the frantic activity while we get organised.

If you feel so inclined you can keep track of our progress via this blog and the music one. I'll be rebranding the 'From The Principal' blog and deleting 'Shakespeare Society' in due course.

Should make for some interesting posts over the next few months!

Here is a good site to give you some background. http://www.hejleh.com/countries/qatar.html

Love and peace - Wozza

Now I understand that I'm the door and you're the key

As promised - here is my final catch up on my Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance reading to date (I'm up to page 239). It picks up on the mountain climbing motif I talked of a few posts ago. Remember that Pirsig is using the allegory of the physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal. Do try to keep up!

And stop slouching!

Here's Pirsig again:

"Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But, of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides. So on we go...we have a long way...no hurry...just one step after the next...mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think that what they hear is unimportant but it never is."

Okay - there are a lot of resonances here for me. Here are some - I like the one-day-at-a-time philosophy (that's why you have a line from Lennon's song in the title). It aligns with the 'be here now' buddhist idea. More alignment comes from the 'your focus is your reality' quote from Qui-Gon Jinn and a whakatoki (Maori proverb): Ki te hamama popoia te tangata, e kore e mau te ika. Translates to 'if a man spends his nights yawning, he will not catch any fish'.

Love and peace - W

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others (Groucho Marx)

The Marx Brothers. Genius comedy.

1) You'll recall from my previous posts that dad loved the Marx Brothers. So do I. So does Keegan.

2) I was shocked, on the weekend, when (seeing me reading The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia) one of Jade's friends asked her, "Who are the Marx Brothers?". Jade's face was a picture as she said, "Are you serious?"

For those reasons, and because 3) I've been watching a lot of their DVDs over the last two weeks, here is a post on the famous five.

I'm going to pretend that I'm talking to Erica (Jade's Friend) and explain who they were and why we love them. The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia and the extras attached to the DVD's provide a lot of detail but nothing can beat the source material.

Anyway - The Marx Bros were five actor/comedians who worked under nicknames given to them early in their vaudeville careers for fairly obvious reasons - Chico chased woman or chicks etc. Iin chronological order: Chico (pronounced chick-o); Harpo; Groucho; Gummo and Zeppo. Gummo dropped out of the act early on, then Zeppo after Duck Soup. That left Chico, Harpo and Groucho to establish themselves as comic geniuses in a number of films of the 1930's and 1940's. Vaudeville, by the way, is the American version of music-hall and morphed into television variety. Groucho got his start in vaudeville at age 14!

Anyway, here are the movies starring the brothers from The Cocoanuts (their first proper film) onwards.

The Cocoanuts (1929)
Animal Crackers (1930)
Monkey Business (1931)
Horse Feathers (1932)
Duck Soup (1933)
A Night at the Opera (1935)
A Day at the Races (1937)
Room Service (1938)
At the Circus (1939)
Go West (1940)
The Big Store (1941)
A Night in Casablanca (1946)
Love Happy (1949)

What are the must sees? For me the top three are Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera. You'll know after any of those three whether you're a fan or not.

So, why do we love them? The type of humour is a combination of slapstick with an anarchic bent thanks to Harpo, vicious sarcasm and put downs from Groucho, and the playful frolics with language from both Chico and Groucho. Some of the routines are justly famous like Groucho's small room on the ship in Opera that gets filled with people, or the swordfish routine from Horse Feathers that I've mentioned before, or the rapid fire gags throughout Duck Soup. The British radio programme The Goon Show, Woody Allen and Monty Python's Flying Circus are all fans and plow the same comedic furrow. Seinfeld's Kramer would have had little to do without his Harpo like antics.

To finish - here's a clip of Harpo at his manic best in A Night at the Opera (fast-forward to about the 3.30 mark for the start of his zaniness).

Joan was quizzical; studied pataphysical science in the home

Wow - what a weekend for my teams. The All Blacks kept up their dominance of the Australians with another win in Japan. Rochdale do the unthinkable and score 4 goals away from home and are now SECOND on the table! The mighty Arsenal completed the hat trick by smashing the old enemy (Tottenham Hotspur) 3-0 at the Emirates. Yahoo! Jacky got sick of me yelling, "YEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!" LOUDLY at the goals and scaring the dogs (Soda-pop, the cat, who was sleeping next to me didn't even move a muscle), but she doesn't understand what a goal against the hated Spurs actually means to a gooner. A great great feeling.

The weekend also had magic weather - finally the sun came out from behind the clouds and we were able to do some outside chores - washing cars, weeding gardens, planting shrubs, putting up the shade sails, and digging out the outside furniture. Even had a BBQ. So after 8 months of cold and wet we had a decent Sunday!



Ross got in touch after my last posting on classical v romantic with some interesting points. My memory isn't as good as his and I do compress time in generalised ways. He confirms that he did the taking-apart-to-see-how-things-work lark but he points out that this process involved different stages - over to Ross: "stage one is taking something to pieces. Only after you have done this many times (and wrecked lots of stuff) can you move on to phase two which is figuring out how to put it back together. I assure you I remember phase one vividly! I've always thought people fit into two categories - Artists & Scientists and we seem to be born this way. It is easy to pigeon hole people in either categories if you think about it."

Back to Zen... for more on the classical (scientist) v romantic (artist) bizzo.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. 'Art' when it is opposed to 'Science' is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws - which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behaviour.

So - where do you measure up when you apply your own analytical knife? There is no point (according to Pirsig) at which these two visions of reality are unified so you have to figure out your predominant mode. When my 1920's Massey-Ferguson tractor needed some oil replacing I (romantic) needed a scientist (Brian Smith) to give me the clues. My lack of understanding meant I couldn't describe things to him on the phone so he had to come over and give me a demonstration.

Ross also disagreed with my title for him of 'software engineer'. Ross again: "I don't think of myself as a Software Engineer that always seems so geeky. The stereotypical Coke drinking, pizza eating computer nerd just doesn't fit (I don't drink Coke for starters!). I'd like to think I'm just a Engineer (Scientist) with a bit of Purdy business sense!"

I'm nearly up-to-date in my catch-up of my outstanding notes from Zen...In the next post (hopefully during this week) I'll finish off my thoughts about climbing that spiritual mountain.


Love and peace - Wozza

P.S. I love the lead photograph - we're all in there (I took the photo in case you were trying to see me in there somewhere). Ross has his tongue out - not sure why - maybe at me? He and Adam share a capacity for pulling off interesting poses in photos. Anyway - love that photo.

These visions of Johanna/Jeanette are now all that remain.

As I mentioned previously I'm a tad behind in my posts on Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. So this is a bit of a catch up.

Pirsig talks of two realities and a conflict between them. I'll try to explain.

There is the world as we see it right here and right now. That's a reality of appearance. The other is the more scientific reality of the world explained (the scientific world that explains the reasons why things are as they are).

For instance - the radio is playing at the moment - my reality right now is listening to a (poor) song on a radio show. The other reality belongs to the radio waves that have produced the sound and the mechanisms within the radio that reproduce the sounds being broadcast from an office somewhere in New Zealand.

As you can tell it is the first reality that I can identify with - my aesthetic reaction to the sounds I am hearing, and NOT the reality behind the sounds.

Displayed in red, this image shows the spectacular filamentary structures that appear in centimeter radio wavelengths, apparently.

There is a tension at work here between, on one hand, the immediate artistic appearance and, on the other, the one of underlying scientific explanation.

Pirsig expands on these two visions of reality to divide human understanding into two kinds - classical understanding and romantic understanding. A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic one sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.

I have zero interest in how a car works (the underlying form) but I use one to travel around. I don't want to know how the laser works on my CD player - I just want to listen to my CD.

My brother and I very different in this regard. When we were growing up Ross and I were given various toys. Ross would pretty much take them apart and put them back together to see how they worked (not a conscious thought at the time I don't think). I had no interest in seeing the mechanisation behind anything - I'd be off reading a book somewhere. In this regard Ross takes after my father, who made our first TV set and had many boxes of transistors and electronic devices. This has led us down different paths. I am an English teacher, Ross is a (very successful) software engineer. We're both very happy in those roles, too. It's just that we see (vision) the world in different ways.

I've just had a terrific experience talking on the radio (The Breeze) to my friend Jeanette Thomas (aka Jynette Harnish or Jyn). It's World Teacher Day and she rang me on air to say hi. Jyn was in my classes at Maclean's College in Auckland in 1988-1989. Wow - that's now 20 years ago!! She hasn't changed much over the years - still a huge ball of positive energy. She's on the Target TV programme and has a terrific family of her own. Bit weird saying 'she' all over the place cos she's been getting my blog updates like the rest of you. Loved talking to you Jyn!! You won't know this but dad always told me when he saw you in the Orewa foodmarket. You probably thought he was an elderly stalker! I think he loved the fact that he knew you vicariously through me.

Love and peace - Wozza

Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain, with the barkers and the colored balloons.

I've not mentioned much about my return voyage through 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' for a while. I will have to back track a bit at some point. However - I've just read a great passage that I need to share - particularly given events of last week (more on that later).

Pirsig has earlier talked of the allegory of a physical mountain for the spiritual one that stands between each soul and its goal. He says most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, who are either inexperienced or untrusting, attempt to make their own routes.

Where do I fit? Well not in the first group. My spiritual life early on was all about Sunday school every week at St John's Anglican Church in Royal Oak, Auckland; regular church attendance; confirmation into the Anglican Church; and until I was 26 (November 4, 1983) a solid set of spiritual beliefs. But then my mum died at an early age and I got angry (anger turns to hate) and frustrated and I lost my footing on that mountain path. So not the first group.

The third group? Maybe. During my university years I attempted to make my own routes. The spiritual church gave way to the church of reason and Wordsworth, Bly and Ginsberg, Ferlinghett1, Uncle Walt, and Chaucer made an impact. But all the while the anger, and the frustration was along for the ride.

And so to that group of experienced guides that leads to ultimate arrival. Just before dad passed away he explained to me the question asked of those wanting to become freemasons. I had my copy of Zen... with me at the time and wrote it down on the title page: 'In times of danger and adversity - in whom do we place our trust?' Dad told me with a bemused grin that some answered, 'My wife' or even incredulously, 'My mother-in-law'. The correct answer, of course, is, 'In the lord'. And he did. Hearing my father say that in a moment of serene calm was like a sudden awakening and an epiphany. After 26 years I felt the anger and distrust and frustration evaporate, as if by magic. My father is the experienced guide (still).

Those events from last week? One of my students committed suicide. The repercussions from that action are huge - like ripples in a pond. I've been thinking about him a lot over the weekend. A lovely guy - cheerful, friendly, a great artist. Unfortunately, in his short life, he never even glanced in the mountain's direction.

Time I did some climbing.