I fell to hard ground

I fell to hard ground 

And was taken by the wrist

Shown the answer to every question I asked before

This time, unasked

This is how I knew he wasn't lying

The myth of nation and blood part 4. Dreams three and four.

Two more dreams came to you in your sweaty cold hot old young delirium. How you were able to remember them is inconceivable not retainable almost not retellable yet in your brain your diseased brain your brain where trails of thought were going down foxholes, rabbit holes, spider holes, serpent holes and pathways the dreams were forming, woofing and warping, silken, sodden, storming, swirling, shaping, emboldening. All leading to the dark. A darkness lined with deep red velvet walls like the casings of a heart's blood vessel. The vessel you used to mark your water landscape, the vessel you pitted against hardship, drought and flood, the vessel you modeled as you built your houses, your fields, your waterways, your reservoirs. This heart-vessel, like a hand vessel, it took and distributed. It meted out the portions. It pumped and it powered and it separated and it combined and it spread and it mixed and it flushed and it nourished. Its internal geography, its landscape of muscle and connective tissue, its network of veins and feints and walls and chambers and valves. For it, this heart, you had named your valve-like lakes the vavas, language echo of the far forgotten misbegotten language of your far forgotten misbegotten cousins of cousins of cousins of cousins the Romans, whose word for valve, like the valvelike chambers of the heart or the valves that controlled water, distributed water differentially, took in water and released water was valva. A cognate. These dreams, the dreams traveling down this terrible red dark black banausic path, the path you trod every day, every day since you learned to walk, every day since you learned to breathe, they constituted part of your entity, your reality, your body. Its corpus of being and believing. They were as real as the mat you lay on, the dog that bit you out of the blue, the wind in the rice or the growing circular ripples of a stone thrown in the pond. The dreams were as real as your skin. Scabbed, clammy, bearing bumps of sliver and shiver and crookednesses of breakage and accidents and bites and scrapes and growings and deformings. These real things came pouring into your life and the way your life was pouring out of you now, so were your dreams. These real things were like the valves and chambers and passageways and linings of a heart, the model from which you and your people derived your landscape, the plan from which you drew and built, the central thought you and your people and your ancestors and their ancestors had always ever held as the center of the universe known and unknown. And so these dreams were a realness. Not only for you. For the people around you, the people of your village, the men and boys you worked with in the fields, commanding the dikelets, spreading the manure and seed and paddy, releasing and directing the water, searching, watching that water in its small and big streams, in its eddies, its currents and waves, in its drops and droplets. The people near you, all of you, saw water this way, saw the rise and ebbing of water like the flow of life or better, like the controlling of a life, the disciplining of a life, its releases and dammings and portents and markers. The way a heart distributed blood, valvelike, the lake, the vava, distributed water. This disciplining. This exercise of sameness. You saw the rice that way in its growing and its greening and subsequent browning and moldering and sputtering and crackling before harvest in a hot sun, putting an end to the season. You saw seasons the same way. All of you. The days of planting and the days of offerings and the days of song and the nights of song and the howlings, hootings, stampedings of wild animals close by in the forest or coming out of the forest, the forest places just darkened off from the brightness and greenness of your fields. The forest cool and unknown. The forest peaceful but dangerous. The forest a curtain up against your narrow rich reality of the water and the fields, their sounds familiar. The forest sounds cloaked and muffled under darkness and leaves. Because you, all of you, most of you saw things in much the same way, just like your elders did and your ancestors had, because all of you did things the same way, your body actions, the raisings of your hands, the stance your feet and legs took as you lifted objects or cut objects or carved objects or dug out the mud or placed the mud in small piles or carried mud in baskets for building or repairing the dam, because there was so much sameness to you all in those days, to your ancestors in those days, your dim blurred smoky ancestral columns and crowds, the people of your village, the people of your clan beyond, the people of your valley, your thoughts were similar or the same. You were one heart. You shared one heart. Your geography was one heart and its valves. Many vavas one heart to model them after. And your dreams? They were communicated just by dreaming. 

Your first dream that is your "third" dream in this chronology was the harder dream but not the stranger dream. The strange dream was the second dream or the "fourth" dream in this chronology, where distillation happened. But the first (third) dream happened in a way different and lighter, bolder, simpler. You were there. Your cage had held you and your people, a cage of letting in light and protection and succor. A cage of protection. A small cage. A cage with places of shade and sun and water and being, a crowded cage. And in the cage on that day, the day you dreamed of, the Others were brought to the cage. Unfair. They had no need of this or any other cage, no more than you, but your people had chosen the cage. Them. Why were they caged? Your elders spoke of the caging and saw the Others herded into the cage their grime and their clumsiness under packages too heavy, packages holding their household goods their mats their pottery their herbal bundles their medicines their wraps their tools their sick and their elderly their young their pregnant their animals their kitchen gods their stone gods of the fields their medical leaves and their medicinal leaves their strange stones and their bits of gold. The Others would die it was understood by their being herded into the cage but the others were-are one of you. One with you. These were your people your heart your sames your neighbors the same cloth made you and you worked the same fields and fished the same ponds and watered the same gardens and worshipped the same gods and saw the same sky and worried the same seasons and danced the same dances and kept the same animals and burnt in the sun until your black skins shone and your shoulders bore burdens and tools and holidays and children and the dead in the same way. The Others spoke of you and you spoke of them. Your terrors and your peaceablenesses, the sands you drew when searching for waters and the way you named the waters. Your foods and your meats and your games and your attractions. These were the same for you and for them, for them and for you. And so your elders. When they saw these people of different ancestry but the same present and presence, for you and your ancestors had shared everything, the centuries and the landscapes, with the Others, your elders decided. Let us disguise ourselves as them, the others, the herdlings, and enter the cage with them tonight. Let it be one cage as this was our One Landscape. Let it be our cage as they are our caves, our villages, our lakes. We more than share these things we live these things, these places together. Let us enter into a thorough disguise so the oppressors will not tell or smell a difference between us. Their sameness and our sameness will be our disguise and our disguise will be a sameness, sameness of motion, sameness of notion, sameness of appearance and of attribute. The samenesses we practiced outside the cage let us practice in the cage which we have willed ourselves and into which they have been herded unwillingly, unwittingly. Let the oppressors choose us or among us, or in their confusion choose to unlock the cage and release those who have been caged against their will. And let the caged stay who want to remain caged under the protective roof and let the caged who wish to leave, leave. These are our words and our deeds. And in your dream of the caged fairly and unfairly, free and forced, caught and carried, the disguises were one of brown red, red-brown chickens and roosters. Like the village fowl of great familiarity and fastidious busyness and humorous mien and daily sight and morning calls you gathered in your many under the night cage as chickens and roosters, warm in your feathers and crowded, for the unfairly caged Others outnumbered you greatly because they had been moved, so many of them had been moved to this place by the oppressor. So night fell in your cage with only places to stand but your solidarity with these, your cousins and your cousins' cousins was your comfort. And it came in the dream, reliably though barely retainable or retellable, the cage was left unlocked. Confusion by the oppressors, confusion dealt the oppressors, confusion taken on by the oppressors like a mantle of darkness and disorientation, confusion made them leave unlocked the locks. And there were so many oppressed and so few of you and the locks were left undone so without struggle or happenstance, uneventfully, the Others among you, the oppressed, the other caged fowl for whom caging was a staging for slaughter, these Others, seeing their chance even in their chicken brains, even without the power of flight, took flight, and somehow taking with them all their household items, their clothing, their religious items, their pebbles and their gold and their gods and even their foodstuffs. They slipped out into the night. In the morning when light came your few came to see, unoppressed, you were a few chickens and roosters, red-brown ones, in a cage. You looked among yourselves in the new, nearly empty place. You knew why you had done this, the elders had admonished you only the night before so your memories were good, they held in the dewy morning air. But where were your neighbors? Why hadn't they woken you? Was it treachery? Now the oppressors were coming, came, found you and looked down upon you in the cage, indistinguishable from each other, indistinguishable from the Others who you had come to protect, red-brown and well-feathered, plump, ready for slaughter. But it's us! We are of the oppressor! We are the same language, the same race, the same moiety! Spare us. This cage is not ours, not rightfully. Or. Actually. Rightfully for we chose it but we weren't pursued, hounded, herded, forced, crowded, smashed into this place. This cage place is our choice of place. Can't you see? Can't you hear our accents and know they are yours?  But the oppressors, gently fondling your feathers as they contemplated the beauty and aroma of such luscious fowl, they did what they had to do. 

The second (fourth) dream. A dream of distillation. 

The months you had spent among the enemy. With the enemy. Embedded among the enemy. One with the enemy. As if you were them, one of them, of them. As if when you looked into the water's surface you saw yourself but not yourself instead the enemy's self. The water, the vava, or as they called it in their jargon, the kulam. But you were bright among them. One of them. Your plaisance and your white teeth and same shape and shapely sameness and walking among them sitting among them eating and drinking among them riding among them lifting piles as they lifted piles moving piles watching piles and burning piles and sifting, always sifting, sifting through their things when they weren't looking. Sifting through their faces, their expressions, their verbs and parts of speech, their dress and their gravies, their shops and stores and products and produce, the way they fished, the way they ate and drank, their fluids, their moles, their cloudiness, their throwing and their walking. All this and more, their smiles you had sifted through and among. For they were your enemy and you were a spy. Their bricks and their logs, the piles they bore and how they bore them, their stretchings and their preenings, their shouts, their questions, the inflection of their sentences, the stripes they painted across their forehead and their heads of hair undyed and their sitting and shoveling and the way they shimmied up the trees and they way they responded to insects and traded and dragged their feet as they walked. The way they read their lists and the way they counted and the way they served and the way they brought requests and the way they bore requests and favors. The enemies, these others, had to be known for you and your people. They had to be known so you could get them to submit. Because they were not a people of submission. So you watched their walk and their shoulders and the way they chased their cattle and the way they pulled in their nets and the way they launched their nets against the water. The way they told their truths and told their lies and watched without watching and turned without turning and saw without looking. These snaky people like serpents. These people your people had to combat and defeat. These people who didn't know defeat, who you had to defeat every day, who you had to show defeat, who you had to humiliate, who you had to bring down, who were your eternal enemy, your eternal enemy by sworn decision of the elders and the big men of your tribe. But defeating the undefeated, the fierce looking but gentle while your gentle faces hid fierce anger, hissed fierce anger and destructiveness but where defeat came they could not be invited, could not engage, could not abide defeat. They were undefeatable and therefore your enemy, your sworn enemy, marked for defeat and extirpation for without demolishment they would more than rebuild they would dominate, come to dominate the small place that precious place that was your Own. They were the same the same the same as you in so many of their ways and these ways, these smokescreens, these samenesses of time and place, your sharing the present, your perverse acceptance of a landscape of Bothness, a place where ancients mixed and melded and molded sweeps of geography where you Both belonged. But borders! Borders had to be drawn, swords crossed, bring an end to this shared presence to peopled places bearing Both where legends shared and fires built together and temple symbols and the icons of the field and forest and lakeside and the flowers of the lake and the lotus of the pond and the birds, the peacock and the kingfisher. Sever these. Sunder these sharings. Make as two one. But the two had been made so much as One, the double portrait as a mirror of one person, one place, one being, one breath, one heart, one intent, one house, one planting, one harvesting, one dependence, one image, one medicine, one music. To take them apart, to rake them apart, to break them apart. This required more than just a sharpened stone. This required more than acid. This one people of two languages, a gorgon-headed chimera of oneness and affability had to be shorn, drawn, cleaved apart in ways occult and shy but complete, atomizing, de-anastomosing the gathered and the inbranching embrace. This is why you were set as a spy among them but your months of spying had not shown you the way to cleave, only a further cleaving unto them as you saw and felt the shared samenesses, the seamless landscape, the searing diet, the fulsome flora. Your eyes, ears, sense of touch destabilized you. Sameness was all you perceived where your job, your sending out of your place and into this, their place, though the places were the same, demanded that you find the different. The months you spent with them in physical proximity embattled your sense of purpose your sense of direction your moral compass. You were among them and of them and in them and up against them and drinking and eating with them as your ancestors and ancestors' ancestors had done for countless existences. How could you not be one? How could you not go into the next many existences with a oneness stone cold and searing hot welded, hybridized, juxtaposed, entering into another and another and another and another oneness, sameness? What was the difference? How could you find it? Your waking and sleeping wrestled with these questions. In your dreams and in this dream you gritted teeth and suffered falling feelings and felt inadequate and found neither succor nor sugar nor respite nor relaxation nor peace nor quiet nor sundry self-reliefs. You found that you were discrediting yourself and your clan and your valley and your people in the larger, latitudinal sense and in the narrow sense of your family and your ancestors. Because your ancestors were different from Their ancestors, and you only had to find the difference brought to the present, brought to the surface, brought to the light of day. You had to find it somewhere. In their gait? Their build? Their alleyways? Their cows? But sameness is all you saw no matter how hard you sought. You practiced their rites and you saw the works and irrigations and the sea through their eyes. You spent more time in their houses, their hospitals, their gathering places. Closer to them. More closed in with them. All of you people of the outside but inside with places to sit, quiet places to sit, noisy places to sit, shady places to sit but closer, hotter, more closed in, what could you find that they couldn't take away from you? That would signify you, exult you, raise you to high places among the mighty and the glorified, provide you a sitting-place among the elders of the land? This, your struggle, came to its conclusion at the end of your dream. You dreamt and then you awakened and then you knew. You had gathered up and distilled for yourself their aroma. You could smell now the essence of Them and carry it with you. With this smell, the knowledge of this smell, you could justify your works, the weeks and months you'd spent finding out, ferreting out, sniffing out the difference between You and Them. Now you carried Them in your nose and your olfactory senses and in your nerves. You carried them now, separate and distinct. But residing in you they were part of you. 

Play therapy and body awareness with traumatized adults

It's the strangest thing. For the past few weeks, during their time off, I've been giving the serving boys here a few swimming lessons. I'm no championship swimmer but I like to poke around in the water and relax. So that's what I have been training them to do. Water and relaxing in water are not in their comfort zone. It's something to think about. 

When the boys get in the water they panic. It's like they're in acid or something. I can't calm them down when they go past their comfort zone, that is, approximately up to their waist in water. They start to choke, they move awkwardly, they lose control it seems. Some people say this behavior is common because of the tsunami. But some of the boys lived far inland. And we're not talking ocean here. This is a swimming pool bounded by tiled concrete walls, where no part of the pool is more than four feet deep. I think this discomfort with the water is culturally mediated. Somehow I sense that it has to do with the way people perceive their own bodies. For example, people here don't like to get their heads wet. They think it will lead to disease. Actually it's strange. Now that I've been here for awhile I've begun to like keeping my head "dry." You sweat enough so that there's always some wetness around anyway. 

So part of the strangeness seems to be that  "eastern"concepts we have, like balance, centering, using your core etc. are things that are alien to these people even though in some settings they come by it quite naturally and can be very graceful. It's not that in the west we are necessarily super "body aware" but it's different from here. Hard to describe but different. Anyway I developed some very very basic exercises for the boys like kicking and putting their fingers together to make your hands kind of like paddles and breathing. Mostly things to just get comfortable in the water, have a feel for the water and what it does, what its limitations are, and what your limitations are in the water. Awareness. 

So yesterday I was at the pool just by myself and there was a family there who were taking off for May day, one of the zillion Sri Lankan holidays. May first had been a Sunday. Monday was declared ad hoc as a "bank holiday." So here were two bankers, the wife of the older one and (I think) sister of the younger. They had a super cute two-year-old and a seven-year-old. So first I started talking baby talk to the baby because that's kind of my thing. The family spoke English and they're pretty affluent Muslim family from Batticaloa town. The kids' mom had just barely a scarf over her head. People are a maybe bit more liberal here in Batticaloa town than Muslims who live close by in Kattankudy, just south of here. 

Anyway they were on holiday, had spent the night here in an AC room to beat the heat. They were pretty good natured and so was I. We got to talking a little bit and I said hey I can teach your big boy how to swim. By the way there are swimming lessons here every Saturday and Sunday and the real cream of the crop bring their kids to it. The parents hang around and the kids chatter and splash in the pool and for this part of the world it's an extremely rare and exciting moment. 99% of the people here don't know how to swim and more to the point this group of parents and children would have been a supremely soft target for the military or the LTTE or roaming paramilitary groups just a few years ago. So the fact that they can gather here and just chill out is really really really incredible. These people knew of the swimming lessons I think but demurred about sending their child. Maybe because they're Muslim? I know the lessons are open to everyone and I told them so. Would be great for him to join his peers in the pool on the weekend. 

Anyway back to the "swimming lessons." I was showing a few things to seven-year-old and then the father said he didn't know how to swim either. So all I did was try to show the father and his brother in law how to put their face in the water and breathe out. You can't imagine the panic and the total disconnect with their bodies. They just couldn't make themselves do it. They were holding their breath, breathing in water, forgetting to exhale, forgetting to breathe in when their faces were out of the water. But after about half an hour of practice I was able to take the adults to the next step. Bending down in the water and letting the water be over their head and breathe out. Mom of the boys was sitting up on a chair and cheering them along. You can't imagine how much laughing  and fun there was. At 10 o'clock after about an hour and a half they had to leave. But the father was so overwhelmed with happy. He told me all their lives they could only stand in the water up to their knees and splash water over their heads. 

This was like so crazy revolutionary and it was like doing less than nothing. So it takes me back to the low expectations thing I have going with my students. People are pretty disconnected from learning, from their bodies, from the ability to relax. I work with my students at home to help them connect with learning and exploration, work with their hands, relax and enjoy themselves while experiencing science. Here in the pool with me yesterday were these affluent people, pretty accomplished for who and where they are, and they couldn't even put their head into the water. This is something I predict most of us take for granted in the west. And strange. They got the most intense and incredible "swimming" lesson from me and all I did was kind of just laughed through the whole thing with them. Low expectations, informal, fun. 

So is it that "people aren't right" here? I know that 30 years of warfare, communal disharmony and distrust, extreme random violence from every angle, profound social isolation, and to top it off, the tsunami did a number  on people here. I wonder what the fear of water or best case scenario the discomfort with water represents. How it fits in with other, perhaps more profound dissociation with their immediate environment. And I wonder, because that's all I can do--I'm not a psychologist or occupational therapist or swim instructor--I wonder how a simple thing like these rudimentary exercises I tried might be a key to opening up a better future for people here. 

I know it's a huge jump. But I do wonder how better body awareness might contribute to more well-being in a population like this, where people were traumatized for so long and from so many angles. Is it worth pursuing this kind of play therapy with adults? Where would you take it? 

I want to stop assessing my undergraduates

For some years my college has been focused on student assessment. Lots of other places are too. I don't blame them. You could look at it as an accountability thing. Are we really doing our job? Are students really learning? What are they learning? How? So the language of outcomes, metrics, and "following" students through their careers are rife in our educational culture. I think we've taken it too far. 

Students at our school, and as I've learned over the past few years, students all over the world are involved in decades of testing and assessment in order to attain what they think are their educational goals. Mostly this has to do with getting into college. Students, their parents, even their communities are involved in a zero sum game of test taking and "achievement" as materialized and measured by externally imposed standards. Once they make it to university level, students have become a sort of rodent in a treadmill of test taking. Exploring, playing around with ideas, and critical thinking are lost along the way. Yet critical thinking, in lip service at least, is what we want to devolve upon our students. 

We also give lip service to interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Most of the people I know approach interdisciplinarity in a shallow way, for example a dual focus on poetry and prose in an English class. But interdisciplinary work goes much, much further than this. Doing interdisciplinary studies (some people use the word trans-disciplinary) we can build bridges among truly disparate fields. Like art and science. I'm convinced that students learn better this way and it's the kind of challenge to smart students that gives them a real impetus to explore and expand. One problem. Assessment isn't so easy in a broadly interdisciplinary setting. So mostly we don't do it. That is, we don't provide the kind of challenging interdisciplinary work that students can bite into and work with. Students really lose out this way but hey, we're able supposedly to "measure" their "performance."

But what is performance if not exploration, expanding and building ideas? So when we assess, are we even assessing the right things? And is it possible to measure a student's exploratory behavior? How then can we measure students' engagement with their work? Do we need to? 

I've been teaching for about 30 years now and what I've seen is all this test taking and assessment obstructs students' development of critical thinking skills. It gets in the way of learning. The most frequent, in fact the only question students proffer during my science lectures is, "professor, will you please repeat that last sentence?" Sometimes they ask me to repeat the last three or four sentences. Somehow my students think that grabbing my lectures word for word will give them the upper hand when it comes to taking my exams. They are disappointed, to put it mildly, when I ask them to solve problems through critical analysis in the tests I give. On multiple occasions I've had students sincerely, but with some anger, telling me how I should have constructed the exam. They've become such experts at test-taking they actually think they know how to write a test! Students' expectations of rote memorization, parroting of my words, and encyclopedic knowledge of the "material" have created what I think is a real obstacle to learning. 

I think of how our work goes during the semester in parts of my course that are not subject to examination--labs, discussion sections, intensive online problem solving through frequent twitters. Then I compare these with lecture and the actual (dreaded) days when students are tested. The energy, engagement, risk-taking, and learning are so much different. It's as though I was teaching two different classes to two different groups of students. I hate the energy of test taking days. Worse, when I open the test up to discussion in the days following the exam, student feedback is negative. For some people their experience in my course, which I have designed to be an egalitarian, relaxed, deeply mind-opening learning environment, is ruined by the tests. 

I don't pretend to offer an alternative to testing as a panacea for evaluating students. But part of me asks how much and why do we need to evaluate? Most people do not face examinations on their way to or through careers. Instead, successful work lives are based on so many things that are antithetical to the test-taking students have been doing throughout their education. It's at the university level if not much earlier that students should be given practice in critical analysis. Critical analysis, creativity, energy and innovation, not to mention discipline and engagement are the attributes most people need in a new job. Few of these attributes are addressed in an exam-heavy environment. 

So I'd like to open the floor as it were to discuss the issue of college-level assessment. What does it accomplish? How does it fit with your educational/pedagogical philosophy?What if anything do we need to be testing? Why? How would quitting the assessment game threaten or enhance your teaching program? What are the alternatives? 

Biological shapes, cultural patterns. Interdisciplinary studies.

Ironic maybe. I've always been drawn to interesting shapes. Shapes that are unexpected. Shapes that tell a story. Shapes that exist apparently outside of reason, or better, purpose. But these shapes are real. And they occur in nature, they're not some phantasmagorical imagined things. The work that I started during my PhD and continued for ten years after, work that has never really been completed or consummated, was the work of shapes. My interest was to see how tiny lichens attained their shape. How did they branch? How were their branching systems different? Could you trace those branching systems to uncover relationships among species? Could they by interpreted in some more universally-understood system of branching or shapemaking? As arcane as that work may sound it was even more deeply arcane in a way. Lichens, which are a symbiosis between a fungus and photosynthetic partner, are classified as fungi because the fungus is the sexually reproductive partner. They have certain parts of their bodies that are solely fungal. That's the part I was studying. 

But I wasn't studying the development of the fungal sexual system in lichens. The fungal part I was interested in, which might have later developed into what's colloquially called a "fruiting body," was pre-sexual, vegetative. This fungal part, about a tenth of a millimeter in size, appeared to develop on its own without any "purpose" such as extending the photosynthetic surface, or maximizing the distribution of later-to-be-developed fungal spores. If all of this is starting to sound technical let's just say I was not trying to find any "functional" or biological "reason" behind shapemaking in lichens. I was studying the development of shape for its own sake. 

If you're wondering why the work didn't reach a satisfactory level of completion, at least by my standards, it's because it was too difficult to publish in the conventional scientific journals I subscribed to. The work was way outside the bounds of what people were doing in conventional biology at that time, mainly phylogenetics. I found that work to be mechanical, reductive, profoundly in-holistic and most of all, it lacked the romance, yes romance, that the botanical world invokes. Sorry if that sounds unscientific. I fell in love with botany for the beauty and imaginativeness of plants and plant-like organisms like lichens. I couldn't be satisfied doing the test tube and  centrifuge bit.  

Fast forward to the here and now as I am finishing up a Fulbright fellowship that was devoted to shape. I came to Sri Lanka to study the shape of its landscape. Specifically I wanted to study the characteristics of its ancient landscape, which is marked by over 30,000 human-built lakes. The lakes are very ancient, some over 2500 years old, and in parts of the country they are so thickly developed that there is one lake per square kilometer. My objective was literally to explore the shape of these lakes, how they themselves are shaped, how they shape the landscape around them, and how society here has shaped itself along with the lakes, which are the source of most agricultural water and therefore life in this part of the world. 

I was surprised that many of the lakes are shaped like dagobas, the ubiquitous domed Buddhist structures that dominate the Sinhalese countryside and towns. I conjectured that the lakes, whether dagobas-shaped or not, might have been built by very early pre-Buddhist settlers who came here from India. My thought was that these bodies of water might have been used initially not only for irrigation. They may have denoted ownership, provided fish and other foods, and even protect up for the early settlers here. It became apparent that the lakes are integral to Sri Lankan life, and that the lakes' cultural importance is part of an ancient heritage. 

As I studied the lakes, learned the scholars and scholarship that surrounds them, and perceived the landscapes of which they are part, I began to draw a better understanding of Sri Lankan life. This indirect way of studying culture proved to be very useful. Ultimately I learned less about the irrigation systems and more about how they've been used, abused, mimicked, and politicized in contemporary Sri Lanka. Instead of an outside-in study of the lakes and attendant culture I got a kind of inside-out view of Sri Lanka. Something that was very much my goal. Because really, how can you tell the shape of a people and their landscapes? 

It turns out that looking at shapes, which are patterns in themselves, results in seeing further patterns. By looking at patterns you start to find outliers, unusual variations, even new patterns that challenge your old understandings. Looking at lichen shapes led to a new way of seeing lichens. In the same kind of unexpected way cultural patterns of Sri Lanka emerged for me after a study of seemingly simple shapes in the landscape. 

Two hours lost

Two hours were taken from my time this afternoon by your pontificating. It's too much. It was time I could have napped during. Or found the aspirin I was looking for after lunch. Why did I need an aspirin? Because I sat too long in one position. Why did I sit too long in one position? Because I was fighting off sleep listening to you go on and on. Patience has its limits and I nearly walked out today. Just for a bit of a breeze. Just for some peace of mind, some "alone time" which you'd think I get enough of here but mysteriously always want more. 

Besides it got cloudy, real cloudy. And dark. I wanted to trace the storm, to encourage it if I could, to have the sound of heavy rain and thunder drown out your all-knowing quite boring droning. How I wanted to get up and trace those clouds while you were going on and on. But my back hurt and I didn't want anyone's feelings hurt. Especially you because I know how delicate you are, how sensitive to a rose petal's difference in behavior, how important it is for you to have an audience. What did you need an audience for? For telling us about your cat and her behavior. For telling us about your trip to Iran. For telling us you have to get back in practice for pie baking. For gosh sakes man you're in Sri Lanka. Pies: not necessary. Not even on Thanksgiving. Get over yourself please, even if it's been eleven years since you came. It's been eleven years since you washed up here. 

Maybe after all that you're still not an expert on the whole wide narrow world here. Who made war on whom. Who was on which side, who trusted the government and whom the government trusted and who the government looked the other way from while they were beating up on whom and how the government empowered one group one time and another group another time and Sunni and Shia and Sufi and Wahhabism. Guns and knives and cutting and borders and to me it all sounded more like it's just so you can be in the know. Know why? Because I've heard people, many people, locals and foreigners, who are much more knowledgeable about this place during that time. And you know what? They are discrete. They don't let on how much they know. They listen to what others know, which you decidedly did not do today. Who are you anyway to pontificate? And your arsenal of alphabet soup paramilitaries and political parties and dates and timelines. All this, ironically enough, after I just wrote this morning how I don't care about sides. Just to add, I was and am deeply uncomfortable with this kind of talk. It's like your a jock who knows something about the conflict but it's sad how you've been here over a decade and didn't do anything. Only bake pie and get a kitten? Your monologue: Who's worthy of gossip and who's not. 

Well, good thing I know people like you. I have a close, very close, very very close relative who's the same. But we're not so close right now because I broke my cardinal rule: Keep your own mouth shut is what you must do when bully boors like this one are on the march. The verbiage the expressions the rolling of the eyes the desire for a smoke that comes out of their pores. Keep to yourself and smile, I've been in the trade long enough to know that's what you do. 

But small problem. I don't want this one to know my address. I don't want this one, the one I met today and had to shake hands with twice, to know how to find me. I don't want this one to come by any more and I don't want to be invited over for pie. I knew today when I saw him, exactly at two o'clock, exactly two hours ago. He was on the prowl for an English speaker. He had to have an ear, or what he would call "someone to talk to." Nobody in Sri Lanka comes to this or any other place exactly on time unless they're desperate for the company of another foreigner, hopefully someone unsuspecting and new and fresh. Someone who will laugh at your inane expressions, smell the need to have a smoke with you, in short, respond. Call me bad but I didn't feel responsive. I sat with my smile and I asked a few questions and I didn't get up and walk away as much as I ached to do it. I absorbed your expertise and your complaints and your quips and I smiled, stationary, unfrowning and patient for the time when you dismissed the crowd and went on to have your smoke. 

You probably gossiped about me afterwards or more likely you were so stuck in yourself you had nothing to say about me or anyone else. But I'm afraid I'll be added to your list, how many "crazy" and "crazy in the best way" and "crazy in the best possible way" people did you rolodex in today's monologue? If I'm there in your pantheon then, whatever. Maybe you can describe me as dull. Dull in the best possible way. If I was dull enough maybe you won't come back. 

I ate two bananas this morning

I ate two bananas this morning. They'd been in their plastic bag wrapped loosely in newspaper for a few days. When my friend first gave them to me he told me they're not ripe so I didn't open the bag for a couple of days. After two days one banana was kind of ripe. It was good, slightly mineraly the way some bananas are here. He had told me when I asked after the name of this strain, "these bananas don't give you any health problems." Well and good. I separated some stringy parts from the fruit like my young Fulbright friends Anna and Taryn tried to do last night when we were admonished by our host, "that's the best part. It helps with ulcers." OK. But I peeled and separated mine in secret because. I don't know. Who likes the stringy parts of a banana?

Back to my own bagful. I ate two a day for two or three days and dang if they weren't hard to separate the stringiness off of. But very good tasting and very nice texture. We don't have taste or texture like this in our bananas at home and we overlook here the humble treat of these or the kindness meant by giving a bag of them to a friend. 

Today had to be the last day. You can imagine how much I hate to throw these bananas out after they've been lovingly given. From trees right here in my friend's garden. And so not-health-problem inducing. So I steeled myself and took the last two bananas, slightly bruised, from the bottom of the bag. I was a little scared because already yesterday and the day before the bananas were breaking off from the stem. I didn't know what shape they'd be in today. 

One was kind of normal and one was soft to the touch. But there weren't fruit flies or anything around so I declared to self I will eat these. Strange surprise. Something I've never seen in a banana. Peeling them there was still the sticking-on stringiness, something I still tried to remove. But as I did that I realized the bananas were coming loose from the peel. There was no biting into these, only sticking the whole thing into your mouth. The strangest part is that these bananas had begun to deliquesce, melt in a way, and they turned out to be the most watery, juicy bananas I ever ate. The taste was utterly different today but the minerality remained, mixed now with the honey-moist sweetness of a fruit I never tasted before.