2009
22nd January
My third lesson of this academic year will take place inside a car garage that is no longer in use. The garage is one of five that stands on a weed-infested plot of land directly opposite the school named Gradgrind Academy. Five teachers and their students will inhabit this space in the coming two weeks while construction of the new classrooms takes place across the intersecting dirt road. Awaiting the arrival of the Grade 8s, I feel considerable discomfort. This does not bode well. By way of antidote, I focus my eyes on the perimeter fence and the road that threads its way to the ocean, inducing a soothing sense of melancholy.
6th February
Yesterday I discovered a sanctuary. Nailed to its door is a sign: TOILET. MALE TEACHERS ONLY. Before lessons began this morning, I studied the Teaching Schedule (2009) on the first page of my Lesson Plan Book—a book handed to teachers at the start of each academic year. The schedule indicates that I am the only teacher who has free periods from 12h10 to 12h50 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This provides the opportunity to sit in the cubicle and record my experiences and thoughts in a spontaneous fashion, with a view of bringing them to fruition when time permits. The cubicle is approximately two and a half square metres in size. Upon entry, one notices a small basin in the right-hand corner. Above the basin hangs a grubby towel. The inner side of the door is adorned with graffiti, presumably contributions made by schoolboy invaders. But scratch marks indicate that the largely obscene words and drawings are scrubbed away regularly by one of the janitors.
9th February
The instant the eyes of the Grade 9s meet mine, the light in them is extinguished. Who might I be to them; what might they be to me? This morning I noticed, to my surprise, that a low wall of concrete bricks separated a small section of the floor from the rest of it. Inside this area stood two desks. Behind one of them sat the girl with pink-streaked hair and a nose ring, and sitting next to her was the boy wearing a headband coloured red, yellow, and green—illicit adornments I chose to ignore. The boy’s right hand rested on the girl’s lap. I asked them to explain the newly constructed space and their presence therein. Smilingly, the girl replied that the Head had asked the maintenance man to create the area for the purpose of separating students who misbehave from their classmates. I asked the two of them to pick up the bricks, place them outside the garage, and depart. The request appeared to nonplus them for a short while before they stood up, lifted the bricks, deposited them outside the garage, and departed. I felt a twinge of relief at their departure at the same time as I wished they would return and re-inhabit their place of refuge.
11th February
The Grade 11s are on their way. I imagine Murphy using scarves to tie his ankles to the legs of his rocking chair, until my thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a hedge clipper in action. I look to my left and see a short black man, wearing a Kaiser Chiefs cap and a Liverpool t-shirt, clipping the scraggly hedge that stands thirty or so metres below the neighbouring garage. Outside the rusted door of the garage sits the Life Orientation (LO) teacher holding a bottle of Coke in one hand and a cell phone in the other. He orders the gardener to clip the top of the hedge in line with the fence in front of it. I cast my eyes to the bottom of my own stretch of land and see a makeshift wire fence tangled with brittle vines punctuated by piles of dog shit. This contrast leads me to reflect upon the LO teacher’s capacity to exercise the skills of teacher one instant and gardening supervisor the next. My skills at multitasking fall far short of those possessed by him. I resume my seat in the garage and regain the image of Murphy tied to his chair, rocking back and forth, waiting.
13th February
The din in the garage is a force of nature far beyond my capacity to intervene. However, whenever the Head of the High School is doing her daily rounds, she responds to the cacophony by entering my garage, raising her hands and commanding silence. The command is instantly effective but as soon as she is out of earshot the roar regains its innate intensity.
16th February
Several drops of carelessly aimed urine require wiping away before I can take my seat. Fortunately, this does not happen often. It has not taken long for the inaugural sense of foreboding to be confirmed. The situation has grown dire. Each day a spirit of blame rankles in my gut and feet as I impart literary analyses that evaporate as soon as they are mouthed. There is a dark force at work. It is larger than them and me, and its talons rake their way through the tissue of my brain and ventricles.
27th March
Easter vacation is upon us. In the coming two weeks I shall set my journal aside and devote myself to the discipline of idleness, which might revive my soul before it returns to the coal face. Thoughts that are mine and mine only, going nowhere, circling silently. Lips and tongue idling, ears playing free, absorbing the fall of the rain, the motions of the waves. The wind. The bats in the rafters.
15th April
Easter vacation is done. True to promise, not a word written in my journal to myself or any imagined reader. I sit now in my place of refuge, having busked through my first two lessons. The lessons, in general, are events that take place. In this morning’s first I asked the students, firstly, to gather in groups of four or five and talk freely about events and thoughts that took place during their vacation and, secondly, to write prose poems of approximately 125 words in length in which they express these events and thoughts, and to read these out loud in next week’s class. I had little confidence this second instruction would be met. As they talked, I sat against the shut door of the classroom, close enough to the passageway to hear the footfalls of the Head doing her rounds; close enough to know the instant I would need to stand in front of the students, raise my forefinger to my lips and warn them: “She’ll be here soon.” Doubtless, such a strategy would strike any self-respecting pedagogue as a flagrant dereliction of duty. But something in me baulks against feeling guilty about this anxious inattentiveness to the students’ apparent needs. I prefer to think of my remissness as a contrariness that might inspire insights or revelations in the minds of at least one or two learners, regardless of how tangential or obscure these insights or revelations might prove to be.
17th April
On that first day of the school year, arriving on my scooter drew a good deal of attention. The news spread fast that my helmet displayed purple grape vines against a pale pink backdrop. Voices of mockery and bonhomie greeted me through the course of the day. “Quite a bike you’ve got there, sir, and your helmet!” I knew that by the end of the week the back slaps and shoulder nudges would be entrenched. This outcome had to be nipped in the bud. I had to dedicate myself to keeping my eyes directed at my feet as I walked down the passageways, into the classrooms, across the outdoor assembly quadrangle and onto the sports fields. In addition, I would have to perform a classroom skill I had mastered many years ago—gazing into the middle distance when speaking to the students. This skill often helps me to manage my shyness and other forms of psychological ineptitude. Halfway through the first term, the students had grown bored of teasing me, and it ceased. Unfortunately, however, it had circulated long enough to set in place the tone and tenor of my tenure—an orientation of them toward me best described as disrespectful and indifferent, and of me towards them as casual, libertine, lonely, and miserable.
1st May
A free period. I sit on a bench ten or so metres from the school. None of the inmates can see me. There is a sign next to me, out here in the open air, that says NO SMOKING. I have never smoked. I escaped during my free period while students and staff were gathered in the Assembly Hall for a special motivational session. There are birds within sight, jostling and cooing, housewives reversing cars from their driveways, an old lady walking her poodle which stops to drop a turd next to what is, most likely, the same tree every day, except on rainy days. Uninspiring sightings, but a welcome and fortifying range of them; variety being the spice of life and angels rushing in where fools fear to tread, proverbially. Hope springs eternal.
4th May
Back home, and their eyes continue to scour my insides. Constantly, I am watched as I walk through the primary school courtyard, past the IT centre, the school chapel, the administration office, through the gateway onto the high school campus. Relentlessly surveilled, eyes clawing at the tissue of my brain and the chambers of my heart.
6th May
A few of the youngsters are dimly present, the majority entirely absent. Nevertheless, I share the details of my love affair with an unprescribed poem. The poem is beyond their reach, but I apportion no blame. I cannot reach them. The poem cannot reach them. They own the unreachability, in a sense, as do I. At least we have that in common—longing, forlornly, to be elsewhere.
25th May
At the age of nineteen I took a course on transcendental meditation and was presented with a mantra in untranslatable Sanskrit—a sound instead of a written word. Naturally, I obeyed my compulsion to transcribe it. On paper it said Iyeem. It stayed with me until my late twenties when half-remembered circumstances evicted it. However, it has returned to me in my mid-40s, four months after my first day at school. This return coincides with a sharp knot of pain in my umbilicus. Sitting on the toilet, bent over, I silently chant Iyeem in the hope that it nulls the pain. It does not. I will try again upon my return home.
25th May (evening)
The mantra fails again. The bats fly from the rafters and the sky resumes the colours and shapes of its gloom.
3rd June
Over breakfast, it strikes me that the silent chant might well explain the problem instead of enacting the cure. Acknowledgement of this fact appears to have yielded a degree of success. Scooting to school this morning, I experienced pain in my umbilicus as a twinge instead of a stab.
5th August
For good reason, I have attached the name Dick Head to the Chief Executive Officer of Gradgrind Academy. Dick Head takes his place behind the rostrum with his deputies, named Dumpling and Nutcracker, seated either side of him. He recites the Lord’s Prayer before asking Dumpling to present a brief reading from the school bible. He lifts his hands to instruct the teachers, students, and parents to rise from their chairs and emulate his motions. He places the palms of his hands on the crown of his head, drops them to the level of his midriff, raises them to his ears, clenches his fingers in the shape of fists, stretches his arms to half their length and extends them to their full reach. In the style of a ship bobbing on waves, he shifts his torso and arms from side to side repeatedly. Finally, he twists his hips while moving his arms up and down. At the end of the performance he says, “You have just performed The Pretzel with me, but I must show you one more thing,” and he uses his thumbs to apply sustained pressure to his upper lip. “By doing this,” he says, “we set free the blood that gathers in our upper lips because of stresses that come from our prefrontal cortexes. We release this stress and restore the necessary amount of serotonin in female brains and dopamine in the brains of males.” He promises that in one of next month’s assemblies he will provide a fuller understanding of The Pretzel. The day-long churning of my stomach is set in motion.
8th August
With the Grade 12s three days ago, I paid attention to another unprescribed poem—Walt Whitman’s “Song for Myself”. Whitman’s words were met by the familiar dead-eyed, dead-eared, and open-mouthed bewilderment along with a collective smirk. It was the smirk that unhinged me most. After reciting the first ten or so pages of the poem, I suggested we end the class early. Scooting home at the end of day I felt sunken and, sitting here in front of the TV, the spirit of sunkenness persists. I know that I bring it upon myself. The vacant eyes and ears and smirks ought by now—eight months after the start of the academic year —to come as no surprise to me. What in God’s name motivates me to rattle on about how we all contain multitudes while sitting in classrooms in which the expression of multitudes is impossible? It amounts to no more than shooting myself in the foot, as is my wont. Perhaps these attempts are a way of justifying the salary I draw each month, however meagre it might be. I might blunt the seeming futility of it by trying to gain a sense, however vague, of the styles of misery experienced by my students. I might read out loud a page or two of the epic poem, then pause and ask the learners to write down what the words say to them on the level of their gut-brains. This might establish a pattern: read the poem aloud, pause briefly to write down their impressions, return to reading the poem, pause again to record impressions, and so on. Perhaps, at the end of each lesson, a student or two might be willing to share their impressions with their peers. If luck prevails, this learning strategy might stand a chance of making the poem real to them. It might reel them in. But I have my doubts. Reading “Song for Myself” in its entirety would take days, perhaps weeks, and such time is not available, bearing in mind the inevitability of Nutcracker and Dumpling hearing from their spies that I am teaching yet another unprescribed poem. Nutcracker would scrutinise my lesson plan book and issue the familiar reprimand—the poem is not in the syllabus; it cannot be studied.
7th September
Waking this morning, I carry the weight of a dream I hope might help me to gain a sense of my days that are spacious enough to enable my survival. In the dream I am on the road on my bicycle, knowing that I must meet the CEO before giving the first of my day’s lessons. Lost in a domain I do not recognise, I arrive at a traffic circle, uncertain whether to take the first point of exit or the second. I take the second, ride for a stretch of time, and sense that I have taken the wrong turn. I am supposed to be on a familiar road, the name of which I cannot remember. I turn back to the traffic circle and take the first point of exit. Soon I realise that it, too, is the wrong road. I ride downhill, knowing I ought to be riding uphill, park my bicycle in a fenced-in parking area and walk to a building some distance away to make enquiries as to the location of the road that leads to the high school. The first person I speak to has no idea. The second offers directions which I don’t comprehend. I return to where I recall I had left my bicycle but cannot find it. A throng of people are walking toward me and I cut my way through them. Several of them look at me with expressions of irritation, disapproval or pity in their eyes. It strikes me that I might find my bicycle by walking straight, then left, then straight again. Eventually, I arrive at a dead end, knowing that it is long past the deadline for my appointment with the CEO. I decide to let him know that I am on the way. I search through my pockets for my cell phone but cannot find it.
9th September
Now and then, I detect slivers of hope concerning the end—that it might be somewhat milder than I have imagined thus far. At school, I continue to devise strategies that serve to minimise my visibility. And upon returning home each school day, I collapse on my lounge floor and fall into a deep sleep, surprisingly void of nightmares, for an hour or two before rustling together a make-shift supper, watching TV in a soft-eyed fashion, and retiring to bed by no later than 21h00. In previous months, I have suffered nightmare renderings, in black and white, of the days’ lessons. However, my dreams of the past three nights have appeared in the colours blue and green. Fields and oceans. I have made a couple of attempts to record these dreams, or at least the gist of them, hoping to flesh them out when time permits, which it won’t.
16th September
Dick Head begins the morning’s assembly by lifting the school bible from its regular position on the rostrum, handing it to Dumpling, and placing his laptop in the vacant space. A large screen stands on the right-hand side of the stage within the view of teachers, students, parents, Dumpling, and himself. He taps a button on his keyboard which brings to the screen the large image of a skull that contains an erect penis. The image is met with gasps, grimaces, and nervous laughter. Dick Head gestures for silence, points at the image with his cane and asserts, “The male and the female brains are worlds apart.” He illustrates this claim by clenching his right hand in the shape of a fist, tightening his bicep, holding his stiff forearm against the side of his skull and proclaiming, “This is the male brain.” Then he pauses briefly before saying, “And the female brain? Let me show you.” He lifts the palms of his hands and clenches and unclenches his fingers, repeatedly. “This”, he said, “is the female brain. It is squishy.” He concludes by placing his laptop in its bag before asking Dumpling to conclude the assembly by opening the school bible and reading 1 Timothy 2: 9-15 to all present.
18th September
The complicated black and white dreams have returned. They overcrowd my head as the alarm bleeps. They linger through my semi-sleep as I rise from bed, get dressed and descend the stairs. By the time I arrive in the kitchen the images are vague and disconnected. As I drink cups of black coffee, I attempt in vain to reconstruct them. No more than the feeling of them seeps, darkly.
21st September
The eyes of the ingrates remind me that notions of light are delusional. It takes no more than the opening lesson of each day to confirm the delusion. On Mondays and Wednesdays, my first lessons that begin at 08h00 are accompanied by a clanging of bells from the Catholic church nearby; bells that invite parishioners into the House of the God of all Knowing. Such bells will never ring in my ears. In this morning’s lesson I listened carefully to myself speaking to the students about the ecstatically wayward architecture of an unprescribed poem written by e.e. cummings. I preached the redemptive magic of strange words strangely strung. I preached the delights to be gained from half-knowing or not knowing, knowing all the while, and contentedly, that the persuasiveness of my sermon was shaky.
23rd September
My craphouse confidence is at the lowest of its ceaseless ebbs and flows. For the past two weeks, words of encouragement from colleagues have not touched base. I have told them that writing and typing for an hour or two every morning is no more than going through the motions of the enterprise, and that the enterprise itself is dubious. They suggested that half an hour or so of writing might suffice, that it would be preferable to twiddling my thumbs, forlornly, all day. I replied that the twiddling appears to be inescapable.
7th October
Driving from school to home brings with it half-formed thoughts that are fixed in a space beyond the command of words. They circle inside my skull in the company of calming or combative mantras, on the road that stretches past the supermarket, the naval base, the housing estate, the penguin teetering at the edge of the boulder before plunging into the water. Images in passing that speak of desolation.
9th October
Many places I have visited are easy to recall, as if I had in fact visited them. Where do they come from then, these memories that appear in my dreams or snatches of my waking life? Towns and villages in other countries on other continents. A village with its market square, its stone church, art gallery, road-side pizzeria. In a dream I walk down a familiar street in Naples with a person I know from my school days, and the two of us are searching for a restaurant next to a giant fig tree in which on a previous visit we drank ice-cold beer-on-tap and shared a giant pizza. A village, simultaneously familiar and strange.
12th October
Back home after another Monday at Gradgrind Academy, I linger on memories of the village, although I am no longer certain it was Naples. For that reason, it appeals to me to call it a name-free village. Remembering the village serves to calm me, even though each Monday is the day upon which Nutcracker conducts the most fastidious of her patrols. My calmness is highly likely to draw disapproval from Nutcracker and her spies. But allowing the soothing sights and sounds of the village to nestle in my head poses a risk I am more than happy to take. Perhaps the nameless village came to me from a page inside a travel magazine that I skim-read while waiting to see a dentist or a doctor or a lawyer. Or perhaps it came from the novel I read or a film I remembered while waiting to pay a heavy traffic fine. The common circumstance appears to be waiting for something disagreeable to take place. It is a circumstance that resonates with the one I mentioned in an earlier entry: that of driving from one place to another. I know, each time I depart from my cottage, that it might no longer be there upon my return. It might have burned down to the ground or washed out to sea. Likewise, Gradgrind might have disappeared or taken on an unrecognisable shape. For all I know. I carry these thoughts with me as I drive my scooter to and from school every day. How might it be otherwise? It confirms my identity as a miserable son of a bitch. For the sake of long-term survival, I must speed up my expulsion by committing a broader range of misdemeanours.
14th October
In my classroom before the arrival of the Grade 11s, I think about the solitary walk, every Monday, first period, from my scooter through the common room, across the quadrangle to the classroom in which I sit and wait. Some mornings the walk is a dragging of feet that verges on a limp. Suddenly, I catch sight of a boy standing at the doorway, poking his head into the room. A boy from the Grade 8 class, or Grade 9 perhaps. He asks if I had not noticed him standing at the doorway for the past few minutes or so. “No,” I replied, “I had not.” “Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say,” he says, nods his head and departs. How am I to survive such visits? How am I to hold close to my chest the precious cargo of my disinclination, my rancour and bile? How am I to sustain the vitality of my affliction? I have the tiniest stretch of time in which to open my notebook and lift my pen.
21st October
Dressed down again by Nutcracker this morning after my Grade 11 class. Having scrutinised my lesson plan book for the purpose of identifying learning intentions and outcomes, she complained that there is nothing there, no practical methodology expressed, no projection of outcomes; in fact, hardly anything in the book but random notes scribbled down as in a private journal, peppered now and then with lists of poems to be studied in class, the majority of which are unprescribed. As she complained, I concocted in silence an account of my alternative modus operandi that might make sense to her. If I had mustered the courage, I would have said my modus operandi is not to work with a modus operandi; that the most intelligent response to projected outcomes is projectile vomiting. What exactly is my modus operandi then? Something to do with turning a key, or running one’s fingers through water, or lip-synching the music of the spheres? My private speculations shriveled as Nutcracker timed her departure with the arrival of the Grade 11s. I needed to be pragmatic—to secure my salary till at least year’s end by heeding the dicta of plans, intentions and outcomes and recording them in my lesson plan book. Later, as this newfound resolve took hold, I wished that the shoes in which my feet shuffled past the fissures and cracks in the quadrangle were Charlie Chaplin’s and not my own.
28th October
Shuffling up and down in shoes too big for my feet, from kitchen to laptop on my desk, wind blustering loudly through the trees, bats and dormice scurrying and shitting in the tiny cavities between drywall and half round logs and ceiling and zinc roof, from whence they invade my sleep most summer nights, onward to share with the youngsters the devices of literary composition; conscious all the while of hazy dreams of epiphany cradled in the chambers of my tin heart.
Paul Mason is a writer and scholar who lives in South Africa. He holds a PhD in Literary Studies from Rhodes University. At the same university, he teaches and supervises theses in the Masters in Creative Writing Programme and the Department of Literary Studies in English. He has published poetry, short stories, autobiographical fragments, journal articles, and critical reviews in South Africa and abroad.