Illusion, truth and reality (Part 1)

I don’t quite know why I am finding this so hard to write. Come to think of it, yes I do, and you will understand as well, I hope, before I’m done. Maybe it’s just the getting started. But fortuitously I have a way in and I’ll run with that.

   The other day, last week it was, I got a surprise email from a former student. His wife, whom he described as ‘an avid iPhone tweaker, twiddler and tweeter’ came across my blog, he said, a couple of days before. I’m using some of his email to grease the wheels of this posting. Don’t worry, I asked his permission.

   Steve completed his Graduate Diploma in Islamic Studies in 1997. His knowledge and experience of Islam were well in advance of the majority of his classmates and future employers, which was both a blessing and a curse for him for reasons I won’t go into here, or this will never get off the ground.

   He retired six years ago, and I’ll let him tell you what he’s doing now, in his own words:

   Now I describe myself as an agroforester. We're in a joint venture with State Forests, growing eucalypts for veneer production. After teaching adolescents, growing trees is just wonderful, viz

• they stay where you plant them, and don't just go away into another paddock 

• they don't decide to go and hit other trees for mysterious reasons 

• they don't call you '****head' 

• when you're sick of them, it's quite OK to get out a chainsaw and chop them into small pieces

   I don’t know if Steve would ever have been my student if it weren’t for his father’s desire to get a degree from the UNE. Believe it or not, Peter, Steve's dad, was in my very first class of external students here at UNE in 1976. At that time he always wore denim jacket and jeans. With greying temples in a rather distinguished, post-modernist hippie sort of way, he looked much more the part of the 1970s university teacher of Asian cultures than I did, for I was still in my 20s. He knew a great deal more about life than I, which you’d expect, as he must have been well into his fifties by then, but at least I had the edge in some of the specific things I was teaching about.

   Ah, that Class of 1976! My experience of short Residential Schools as an External Student myself at Queensland University was jaundiced, I confess. The other students looked as if they were dragged there, said little and wrote much down. They were there to mine information in the sense of finding out what the lecturer thought and regurgitate it in the exams. So I expected not a great deal from my first ever batch of Externals as their teacher when they came for their first Residential School.

   How wrong I was! They were fantastic – eager to learn, eager to discuss, unafraid of going out on a limb. After four days of lectures and tutorials, I felt as if I had been through a physical and intellectual wringer, but smiling all the way. And Peter was leading the charge.

   So it was with some sadness that I read in Steve’s email:

   I have been retired for six years, having started by taking leave to become my father Peter's carer. He slipped out of camp nearly two years ago, with the sort of dementia I hope to get, a 'golden dementia' in which he was having an absolutely lovely time; everything around him was utter chaos, but, hey, things were great for him.

   Apart from telling a story that I believe has sufficient merit on its own for inclusion in my Blob, this is all leading to something. But I must round this part of the story off with this. I wrote back to him:

   I am genuinely happy for him that if it must be dementia, he has this form, though recognise the heavy burden this places on you as his carer. ... Of course, the critical thing for him is that you are there to steer him along and hopefully in the end he will slip away gently.

   Now, I understood from what Steve wrote that his Peter was still alive, though in his own world, but I was wrong. I’m sure you understood what Steve meant, but my mind was on another track. By ‘out of camp’ he meant that Peter had died, whereas I thought he meant his body was still here but his mind was elsewhere.

   My mistake certainly, but, as I wrote to Steve yesterday, I was making the assumption I did for a good reason.

   I’ll come back to that in another posting, because it links a lot of things that have been on my mind – life and death, reality, the universe and everything.

   By the look of that agenda, I might have to leave a few things out....

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | reality? | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8
home | stories from my past | WHAT'S NEW!