PONDERING THE ROAD

With everything going on in the world today I am drawn to reminiscences. Note the words drawn and scenes included in the sentence. It indicates painting pictures in the mind  or rather pulling images out of one’s hippocampi. The present preoccupation with memories is slightly overwhelming. It is spurred on by looking at photographs my mother gave me over the years - a few at a time, which she had extracted from various family albums and which she thought might amuse. They did just that. 

I cannot recall many of the pictures actually being taken, but I know they were, as I was there. I can recall the journeys, but only certain instances have become deeply embedded in my brain. I cannot say why that is, but clearly there was something about the particular event that stayed with me. Also, in looking more closely at the time line (I assume my mother’s notes are correct) what I remember as being ‘forever’ was but a short space of time. A journey of two and a bit years seemed a lifetime back then. I am amazed at what was packed into those years. To have travelled such distances in so short of time seems unbelievable, and to what end? The number of churches, museums, galleries and historical sites we visited is prodigious. I was probably dragged through quite a few of them, although I did spend quite a lot of time in the Louvre in one way or another. Getting into the building was nothing like it is today as there was nothing like the numbers in 1949 to 1951. Indeed on our return to France in 1953 nothing much had changed in terms of numbers.  On reflection, it seems to me, it was as if my parent hardly stood still. We appear to have been constantly on the move at every opportunity. The travelling continued in very similar fashion from 1952 to 1956 and as many miles were covered  with slightly different destinations all across the European continent. 

My mother claimed that our frequent travels were to do with our education. On reflection, it appears to me that our education was secondary to the travelling. Whenever my parents thought we should be in school, they rented a house and we were enrolled in whatever state school was within the vicinity. Every school break - spring, summer, easter, Christmas, whatever- the trunks were put on the roof rack and off we’d go. Our parents, however, were very keen on education and always encouraged, indeed, pushed us to attend school. Learning was important. Having an education, a degree and a profession was, for them, essential to be able to get on in life.  Yet, my father had no formal degree of any kind and was entirely self educated. My mother did finish High School, but had no higher education. She too was mainly self educated. What they felt they had missed out on, they were determined that we would not. We would not go through the hardships they went through. The key to an easy life was a well paid profession and that required a college diploma. That lesson was always paramount. 

Indeed, on our stop over in New York, in 1956, I was with my father visiting the jewellers building around 47th Street. He was looking up old friends and amongst the numerous work benches was a bald  headed man leaning over his bench trying to set a gemstone, wearing what appeared to be a multiple number of magnifying glasses. His names Lustig. They created each other with laughs and hugs and chatted in Hungarian and Lustig’s heavily accented English. During the course of the conversation the matter of my education came up.  Lustig insisted that I must get a college degree. He remembered that during the depression even if you wanted to get a job as dishwasher, if you had a college degree you were more likely to be hired over anyone who did not. He also told me that my dad was a very well liked man in their youth. “Your father could go out on a date with just a nickel in his pocket, and sometimes he’d come back with a dime”.

Along the journey my brothers and I went to a lot of different schools. So why did we never stay put? Was it to expose us to a wider education? Was it to open our eyes to differences or similarities? Was it to show us the roots of civilisations in ancient stones and monuments? 

As to higher education, I enrolled at UCLA in September of 1959; however, my university career soon came to an end, sans degree of any kind. Looking back, the longest continuous period I have spent in any particular educational establishment was at age 65 when I enrolled at Dartington College of Art in 2006, finally obtaining a BA in 2009 and an MA in 2012 from Falmouth University.  My parents did not live long enough to know this. That I stayed the course I can only put down to the miles of travel in my youth, treating this late scholastic effort as a road I had avoided. Was it a road less travelled by or rather full of wanderers? I don't know that it has made life any easier, and it wasn't so bad before.

What did happen during this late journey into education? I don’t think I have any greater knowledge or insight. I have more questions than answers. It is perhaps a more contemplative attitude to life; although, I have more critical opinions, with fewer possibilities to get them heard. Whether the rant in my blog is sufficient to relieve the frustration of an inability to communicate is a question in point. In any event, the accumulation of events over 84 years stored in the brain, both conscious and unconscious, or in whatever state of mind considered as ‘active’, is quite a lot of memory to sift through.  In the course of my academic education I came across an item by Dr Netta Cohen entitled Understanding Spatiality in the Brain. She deals with mapping the brain, its complexity, features and manifestations. She looks at intracellular morphology, the network topology and connectivity of these structures and where space fits in. It is this survey of the brain’s systems which becomes a model for examining and mapping other systems, other spaces. Dr. Cohen describes the brain as ‘a spatially embedded complex adaptive system’.

“One of the key things is that there are many interactive components, interacting in a non trivial way, as physicists would say interacting with degrees of freedom. There are microscopic degrees of freedom and macroscopic     degrees of freedom that are interacting. Each of those (components) are acting and interacting on a wide range of scales, this includes both temporal scales; you’ve got very very quick proteins acting on nanoseconds, all the     way to the range of microseconds and sometimes milliseconds and you’ve got lifetime learning. A very broad range of time scales and a very broad range of spatial scales, things acting intracellularly, at the molecular level and the G-network level which are very localised and you’ve got things happening at whole brain level and that’s excluding your interaction with the environment which is whole organism level... A single protein can change the macroscopic state of the system; a single macroscopic perturbation can cause some gene expression which then causes some cascade which completely changes your system”                                                                                             
So I’ve got a lifetime of learning happening at whole brain level and probably including whole organism level. I wonder what perturbation will trigger the cascade which will completely change my system? I’m sure there are some traumatic as well as therapeutic memories somewhere in the spatial scales of my brain. Time will tell.                                                                                                                                           
In the meantime I ponder just the first 14 years of my life trying to assemble the surfeit of country roads, autobahns, highways, hotels, motels, restaurants, amusement parks, railways, lakes, mountains, museums, galleries, sites, catacombs, seas, undergrounds, cable cars, rivers, trolleys, operas, cinemas, concerts, coronations, ships etc. into some sort of what? Order? Understanding? Meaning? Gift? I know not what, there is just so much of it. More of this anon.