photography

Carved in Stone 18

18

Day-dreams, cloud castles,
châteaux en Espagne.

I climb the castle tower
in Segovia, and watch
Golden Eagles flying
in the air below me.

I walk the walls in Avila,
feel the stonework, warm in the sun,
and sense the passing of time
as it slowly gathers,
like clouds in the air
when they foretell a storm.

I trace masonic signatures
on the cathedral’s central façade,
and marvel at the master carvers,
who shaped the statues.


 
They also created angels
and the praying pay-masters
condemned to kneel there,
seeking forgiveness for their sins,
as flickering candles mark time.

Commentary:

Avila: 3.8 kilometres of walls. 9 entrances. Inside the walls, the old city. I lived for three summers in El Rincon, a Hostal in the city centre just outside the Mercado Chico. I still dream of walking those city streets, visiting the bars each with its different customs and tapas. And I remember the tapas, each bar specializing in something different. The Rincon, a marisqueria, and I learned so much abut sea-food, its transportation, the ways of preparing and cooking it.

And while in Segovia, you look down at the Golden Eagles, in Avila, an eternity of storks looks down at you. I remember my friend, standing at the door of the Hostal and calling the storks, as they returned from a day in the fields, by the names of the churches in whose towers they built their nests.

I never thought those days would end, but end they did. As all things do. Now I must take a delight in the memories as they walk before me and call me by my name.

Raven

Raven

When Raven flies through his trap door in the sky, a light bulb clicks off in my head and I fall into darkness. Is there some safety net before oblivion? Raven’s claws scar crow’s feet on a fingernail moon. His bleak black beak widens the hole in my head and the Easter egg of my skull shows thin blue cracks. Outside my window, the river moves backwards and forwards with the tide. Raven shrugs at cancerous creatures, promising nothing. He soars into clear skies in search of his private exit and extinguishes sun, moon, and stars, plunging our world into blackness. The light on the point picks out a heron, mobbed by a clacking ring of gulls. The sea mist wraps the real world tight in its cloak. Now sea and lighthouse, heron and gulls, are distant things of memory. Raven, shoulders hunched, stands like a stone, an anthracite block hacked out from the coal seam in my mind, hand carved from feathers and my forefathers’ blood.

Commentary:

I had forgotten all about this poem in prose. It comes from Fundy Lines, if I remember correctly. Photo credit (below) to one of my former students, an excellent poet herself, who took the trouble to locate the correct rock and then take a photo of book and rock together.


Moo thought his painting of a dark shape that looks a little bit like a bird of ill-omen would be just what this prose poem needed. Maybe he’s right. I trust him with his choice of paintings. Well, most of the time anyway. He can be a bit ‘off’ from time to time, but mostly we form a good team, especially where Surrealism is concerned.

I guess Raven formed part of my Surreal sequences. I really do enjoy Surrealism. The mixing of metaphors, for example, the unexpected meeting of a sewing machine with a carving knife and an umbrella on an operating table. And look what Raven’s up to. He discovers a trap door in the sky. Well, that would be very useful, if we had wings and could fly. Then he turns off the light bulb in my head. I didn’t even know I had one in there. I guess Raven, like coyote and zopilote is a bit of a Trickster. Next he changes into a woodpecker and widens the hole in my skull. Poor old me – avian trepanning – no wonder I have problems! My head becomes an Easter Egg and has cracks in it giving birth to what? Some mad ideas, I guess, pecking their way out into the wonderful world in which Moo and I live in perfect harmony with my beloved and our cat. And look at all those Welsh mining memories – lignite, house coal, steam coal, anthracite, jet – and remember, when the coal comes from the Rhondda down the Merthyr – Taff Vale line, I’ll be there.

It will be a long way from Canada to Taff’s Well. Maybe Raven will be kind and fly me there, through his Island View trap door that has direct access to the trap door just above Castell Coch, the Fairy Castle of my childhood. That would be faster, and easier, than my old two-wheeler Raleigh bicycle with it’s Sturmey-Archer three gear click on the handlebars. I bet Raven can fly faster than I can pedal. And if I could have pedaled as fast as Raven flies, downhill and uphill, I would have been King of the Mountains and an all time winner of the Tour de France. Now that would have been surrealistically surreal, seeing me as a cereal winner, with my snap, crackle, and pop! Not that my dad would have been happy. He never was happy with anything I did!

How has technology changed your job?

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How has technology changed your job?
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How has technology changed your job?

I suppose I must begin by saying that, having retired fifteen years ago, I no longer have a job. So, Technology has not changed my job at all. However, when I was actually working full time, technology made an enormous impact on my work.

Keeping up with the Jones’s! I travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico, on a faculty exchange program in 1995 and was astonished to find that the Escuela de Idiomas of UABJO, had better computer and technology features than I did in my home university. I was way behind the Oaxacans in what I taught and how to deliver it. How to catch up, that was the question!

In 1996, I started a Multi-Media Certificate at the University of New Brunswick, completing it in 1999. As a result of this certificate, my beloved and I built our first web pages and produced our first Quevedo Online Bibliography. This also enabled me to start teaching a course entitled Mexico Online. This course took place in the university’s computer laboratory and, instead of requiring written papers, it asked the students to create their own web pages and to do their own online research.

This was the first step into the brave new world of WebCT, Blackboard, and the many other web platforms that rapidly became available, often at great cost to the student. Student costs – well, they skyrocketed. So, I did my best to cut them down. Texts, especially literary texts, in online format, for free. A formal course outline, online, discussed with the students each term, and changed in accordance with each class’s particular needs. This guaranteed that teaching and learning were both flexible, and did not become bogged down by the trap of the one course, set “in electronic stone” for all eternity. This is a trap into which far too many teachers fall. The everlasting course, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, taught without further changes and with no end, amen. No thought, no development, and knowledge a static state.

But technology also changed the teaching environment. We began with the static classroom with rows and rows of desks looking down on the stage where the professors, at the podium, performed their annual circus acts of passing knowledge from their notes to the students’ notes, without it passing through anybody’s head, as my first prof in my first university once told the class.

Then we moved to the chairs and tables classroom, where the professors could, if they chose, wander among the students, get to know them by their names, and create a dynamic small group teaching environment in which each individual received increased professorial attention if and when needed.

Enter Technology. The Computer screen replaced the black, green, white board (I have scrawled with chalk and marker pens on all of them). Classrooms became fixed spaces again. And the computer program doubled with, or replaced, the formal lecture. Static knowledge delivered to stationary students sitting and passively watching.

They were called smart classrooms. My favorite moment of the day? When I stood up and asked the class if this was indeed a smart classroom. Yes sir, they always replied. I would tap on the wall and ask the wall – “What’s two plus two?” The class would wait and wait. No answer. I would ask again. No answer. “Not such a smart classroom, then,” I would tell them.

Technology is great, as a tool for genuine teaching and learning. But it brings problems with it, as we are beginning to find out. Brainwashing, false information, erroneous material that misleads, quite often deliberately … Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who shall police the police? Who shall program the programmers? Perhaps the Romans, all that time ago, had it right. Caveat emptor – buyer beware.

What could you do less of?

Daily writing prompt
What could you do less of?
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What could you do less of?
I shall deliberately misinterpret that prompt / question and answer it my way. I could do less of listening to stupid adverts, repeated ad nauseam, sometimes with gimmicky tunes – one to two lines maximum – again and again, all day, every day. Surf the channels to escape an ad, and what do you get? A synchronized set up where almost every channel is blasting out the same, or similar, ads at the same time. Have you noticed that when you leave the TV room, and retreat to the kitchen to get some limited peace, the ads follow you because the volume is turned up at ad time so you just can’t escape.

I remember my grandfather, back in the sixties, with the advent of ITV in Wales – the Independent TV channel that used ads – sitting before the TV set, his foot up before the screen and his fingers in his ears so he would not be able to see or hear those ads. Alas, once heard, seldom forgotten, and I can still sing most of those meaningless jingles heard back in my childhood. How it I hate when I go shopping in the supermarket and shoppers tunelessly whistle a TV ad as they shuffle along behind their carts. Alas, ad free programming, all too often, is either expensive or non-existent.

And what about those telephone calls when they put you on hold until the next agent is free to attend to you? I won’t mention names, because I don’t want to get sued, but I guess we have all had the same experience. I had a ninety minute online wait one day, with horrible music, an exhortation to stay on the line so I wouldn’t lose my place in the queue aka line-up, and a 90 second ad that glorified the joys of the company’s product, repeated once every five minutes. I suffered through that ad 18 times on that one call alone. Another local firm gave me the similar treatment, except that it was a one minute ad, repeated once every ninety seconds. I suffered through 10 repetitions in a wait of 15 minutes, got fed up, and hung up the phone.

Look at the peaceful scene above. That’s the view from my bedroom window in Island View. Even the crows are absent, and the early morning silence, like the sun, is golden. Two birds with one stone – a morning person or an evening person? A morning person with dawns like this, but an evening person when a sunset like this one miraculously occurs.

Do you ever see wild animals?

Daily writing prompt
Do you ever see wild animals?
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Do you ever see wild animals?

Indeed I do. And sometimes, just like this Wapiti, or White-Tailed deer, they see me as well. Some are camera shy. But this one, caught one morning walking past my garage door, heard the click of the first camera shot, stopped, turned towards the sound, then kindly waited until I had shot him, in the only way I would ever shoot a wild animal, with my camera. Isn’t he a handsome fellow – very photogenic.

Some of the animals that pass through our yard do not seem that wild. This one lay down for a little rest about forty feet from the house. Early morning light, not easy to shoot, but he sat there and waited for me. Alas, I was using a camera with a laser focus and the red flash of the light disturbed him. I didn’t mean to do so. Whoops – there he goes, tail-up and now you know what they mean when they say ‘high-tailing it’ out of the woods and up the road.

And what about the chipmunks, and the squirrels, and the skunks, and the raccoons, and the jack-rabbits, and the porcupines? They all drop in from time to time. Look at this happy couple. Aw! Aren’t they sweet?

And don’t forget the birds – but give us another prompt – all about our feathered friends -and we’ll talk about them next time