More autobiography
Sunday, May 30th, 2004 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerLong-term readers may remember that last year, for no good reason, I started writing an autobiography. Now grades are in and I can return to unfinished projects, I've written a little more.
Things got more interesting when I transferred from Infants to Junior school at the age of seven. In fact, these were just different branches of the same school housed in buildings separated by a few yards of grass, but to a seven-year-old it was almost as wide as the gulf between home and school. It was reinforced by the fact that I was now living in the market town of Shrewsbury rather than the local village, so I was a commuter, albeit a passive one.
School suddenly started to deal with interesting things, like Greek and Norse myths, and the difference between an Iron Age hut and a Saxon drinking hall (we made little models of them, and I was so furious that my friend's Saxon hall was so better than my Iron Age hut that I secretly messed it up). I was also introduced to acting, featuring in school plays. I was the genie in Aladdin, and a king in one of the Kwaku-ananse stories; I played first a stone and later Loki in some Norse vignettes (I have to say the stone role was the nadir of my acting career, while Loki was the high point). Thanks to the much-villified progressive education of the 1960s, my world opened up. I continued to invent fantasy worlds, but now they were informed by history. I drew maps of worlds inhabited by cultures similar to the civilisations of the ancient world. My imaginary homeland was Eloyta, which was like ancient Greece with a dash of social democracy. To the north was the island of Alerot, populated by blond Aryan barbarians, who used to raid Eloyta but were now in alliance with the Eloytans against an empire whose name I can't remember, but were a cross between the Persians and C.S. Lewis' Calormenes.
I also became fascinated with human evil. One of the downsides of studying history is that you find out how nasty people can be to each other. While graphic displays of violence were not allowed in before-bed-time television, there is no similar censorship of books, and I developed a strong interest in torture, sparked off by Hieronymous Bosch's depictions of Hell. I even designed my own implements of torture, which I drew in action on my unfortunate teacher. This proved to be a passing fad (I think it was some seventeenth-century engravings of the practices of Conquistadores that finally put me off) but it left me with a distrust of political power and organised religion. My radicalisation had started, and was reinforced by news footage of the Vietnam War, which provided scenes reminiscent of Bosch.
One result of this was an attempt at creating my own religion, to which I gave the unoriginal name "Robinism". My attempt at grappling with the Problem of Evil, combined with the emphasis on mythology in the curriculum, led me to create a kind of neo-paganism: evil existed in the world; therefore there must be gods who do evil as well as good. For good measure, I threw in reincarnation and karma. I even set up little altars at which I would sacrifice bits and bobs (my grandfather's three-foot reproduction of the Statue of Liberty became the centre-piece of a shrine to Athena, for example). I would also change the words when singing hymns at school: "All Things Bright and Beautiful" contained the line "We thank thee then, Demeter" and John Bunyan's classic was renamed "To be a Pagan." Little did I know that this kind of syncretism would soon become extremely popular; the Aquarian Age had started, but it hadn't reached rural England at that point.
Robinism, however, was short-lived. I was distracted from moral and theological speculation by my first, and most extreme, experience of Love. Seven is a good age to fall in love because you can experience it in its purest, most idiotic form: aesthetic, asexual and unrequited. The object of my passion was three years my senior; eventually she got fed up with my attentions (which usually consisted of staring at her from a safe distance), knocked me over and sat on my chest, saying "Stay away from me, you stupid first-year." While I rather enjoyed having a girl sit on my chest, I was incensed by the ageism, and promptly fell out of love. Like Marx's proletarians and capitalists, first-years and fourth-years can have no interest in common.
Like many a disillusioned lover, I turned once more to matters of the soul. Shortly after the chest-crushing experience, I moved to an Anglican school. Unlike Catholic schools, Anglican schools do not believe in burdening young people's minds with too much religion (which seems in accordance with Church of England practice in general). Nevertheless, we had occasional visits from local clergymen, both of whom were lovely fellows, the very picture of an English country vicar (except that Father Shannon was Irish - he might even have been a token Catholic for all I know). This prompted me to give Christianity another try, but it only lasted a few months. I can't remember what caused me to lose the faith I had so recently acquired. Perhaps it was reading Plato's Republic, of which I understood very little, but by which I was deeply impressed.
I decided that I still needed a faith, or at least a philosophy, and picked up a book on comparative religion. The chapter on Buddhism impressed me, so I then read a book on Buddhism, and was converted. In fact, I remained a Buddhist for the next five years. As might be expected, my change of creed, which in my normal way I proclaimed loudly, was bound to cause problems in an Anglican primary school, but of course because it was an Anglican school, such problems were dealt with diplomatically; the worst sanction was that I was demoted from the postion of "server" (a powerful and prestigious position involving doling out food at dinner time) because I not only didn't say grace but didn't require the other children to do so either. This reinforced not only my religious non-conformism, but also my anti-authoritarianism; there's nothing like losing privilege to make you opposed to privilege. Down with the servers!
Things got more interesting when I transferred from Infants to Junior school at the age of seven. In fact, these were just different branches of the same school housed in buildings separated by a few yards of grass, but to a seven-year-old it was almost as wide as the gulf between home and school. It was reinforced by the fact that I was now living in the market town of Shrewsbury rather than the local village, so I was a commuter, albeit a passive one.
School suddenly started to deal with interesting things, like Greek and Norse myths, and the difference between an Iron Age hut and a Saxon drinking hall (we made little models of them, and I was so furious that my friend's Saxon hall was so better than my Iron Age hut that I secretly messed it up). I was also introduced to acting, featuring in school plays. I was the genie in Aladdin, and a king in one of the Kwaku-ananse stories; I played first a stone and later Loki in some Norse vignettes (I have to say the stone role was the nadir of my acting career, while Loki was the high point). Thanks to the much-villified progressive education of the 1960s, my world opened up. I continued to invent fantasy worlds, but now they were informed by history. I drew maps of worlds inhabited by cultures similar to the civilisations of the ancient world. My imaginary homeland was Eloyta, which was like ancient Greece with a dash of social democracy. To the north was the island of Alerot, populated by blond Aryan barbarians, who used to raid Eloyta but were now in alliance with the Eloytans against an empire whose name I can't remember, but were a cross between the Persians and C.S. Lewis' Calormenes.
I also became fascinated with human evil. One of the downsides of studying history is that you find out how nasty people can be to each other. While graphic displays of violence were not allowed in before-bed-time television, there is no similar censorship of books, and I developed a strong interest in torture, sparked off by Hieronymous Bosch's depictions of Hell. I even designed my own implements of torture, which I drew in action on my unfortunate teacher. This proved to be a passing fad (I think it was some seventeenth-century engravings of the practices of Conquistadores that finally put me off) but it left me with a distrust of political power and organised religion. My radicalisation had started, and was reinforced by news footage of the Vietnam War, which provided scenes reminiscent of Bosch.
One result of this was an attempt at creating my own religion, to which I gave the unoriginal name "Robinism". My attempt at grappling with the Problem of Evil, combined with the emphasis on mythology in the curriculum, led me to create a kind of neo-paganism: evil existed in the world; therefore there must be gods who do evil as well as good. For good measure, I threw in reincarnation and karma. I even set up little altars at which I would sacrifice bits and bobs (my grandfather's three-foot reproduction of the Statue of Liberty became the centre-piece of a shrine to Athena, for example). I would also change the words when singing hymns at school: "All Things Bright and Beautiful" contained the line "We thank thee then, Demeter" and John Bunyan's classic was renamed "To be a Pagan." Little did I know that this kind of syncretism would soon become extremely popular; the Aquarian Age had started, but it hadn't reached rural England at that point.
Robinism, however, was short-lived. I was distracted from moral and theological speculation by my first, and most extreme, experience of Love. Seven is a good age to fall in love because you can experience it in its purest, most idiotic form: aesthetic, asexual and unrequited. The object of my passion was three years my senior; eventually she got fed up with my attentions (which usually consisted of staring at her from a safe distance), knocked me over and sat on my chest, saying "Stay away from me, you stupid first-year." While I rather enjoyed having a girl sit on my chest, I was incensed by the ageism, and promptly fell out of love. Like Marx's proletarians and capitalists, first-years and fourth-years can have no interest in common.
Like many a disillusioned lover, I turned once more to matters of the soul. Shortly after the chest-crushing experience, I moved to an Anglican school. Unlike Catholic schools, Anglican schools do not believe in burdening young people's minds with too much religion (which seems in accordance with Church of England practice in general). Nevertheless, we had occasional visits from local clergymen, both of whom were lovely fellows, the very picture of an English country vicar (except that Father Shannon was Irish - he might even have been a token Catholic for all I know). This prompted me to give Christianity another try, but it only lasted a few months. I can't remember what caused me to lose the faith I had so recently acquired. Perhaps it was reading Plato's Republic, of which I understood very little, but by which I was deeply impressed.
I decided that I still needed a faith, or at least a philosophy, and picked up a book on comparative religion. The chapter on Buddhism impressed me, so I then read a book on Buddhism, and was converted. In fact, I remained a Buddhist for the next five years. As might be expected, my change of creed, which in my normal way I proclaimed loudly, was bound to cause problems in an Anglican primary school, but of course because it was an Anglican school, such problems were dealt with diplomatically; the worst sanction was that I was demoted from the postion of "server" (a powerful and prestigious position involving doling out food at dinner time) because I not only didn't say grace but didn't require the other children to do so either. This reinforced not only my religious non-conformism, but also my anti-authoritarianism; there's nothing like losing privilege to make you opposed to privilege. Down with the servers!
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-30 07:07 am (UTC)