Generat (from Latin): to beget, to procreate, to make, to give birth.
What are we making? What are we helping our children create? Where in our society can we think creatively? The school and university systems teaches young people to move around pieces of found information - bites, bytes - retrieved data they organise into rehearsed formulae in order to satisfy a set of criteria. To make marking and assessment easy for the poor waylaid teachers, the examiners, the government data gathers. For the unfilled table that must be filled; the table no one reads.
My students have often learned the criteria before they have learned to engage with the material. The criteria: the guard dog yapping suspiciously at the sight or sound of any intruder — Independent Thought — often unsure where it might be heading. Not yet. Give Thought time to think.
I have spent my teaching life trying to help students create meaning. It takes time and practice, because reading is difficult. I mean the practice of reading deeply, reflectively, meeting with words. I mean submerging yourself in literature, works of art, sometimes film and paintings, essays, well formed thoughts, shapely thinking.
I tell them that we don’t read for a reward - the ubiquitous grade - anyone can get a visa stamp if they turn up to the embassy at the right time with the right form correctly filled in. The man behind the desk may not even look at you; as long as you are in the system, your data recorded, he’s not interested. Data does not adhere; it cannot build relationships; it rarely if ever looks you in the eye. ‘What’s your name again?’
Reading is difficult and so is writing. I’m currently reading a difficult book, nearly as difficult as James Joyce. I have to keep rereading —looping back through sentences and words. Good books ask that of me: to reread. They exist on several layers at once, and I’m aware they are three dimensional, closer to sculpture perhaps. I cannot see the whole all at once and so I must circle and re circle, weave in and out. My attention is necessarily split - there’s a lot going on here I think — I’ll have to go back and read that again. I’ve lost the thread; I’ve forgotten his name. Is this ‘Alfred’ his grandfather? Who does Alfred belong to? What’s his beef?
I return and pick up the thread. I dropped it because I started following another thread around away from the words, back towards myself. That is another loop I go on, that old habit of looking for myself. Sometimes that self meets happily with the loop I’m already on - my reading thread — sometimes it takes me off course, but I’m aware of it. I’m aware of how distracted I’ve become, so I make myself return - reread, remake the thread, the tread - because reading is making a piece of fabric. Making a new piece of material inside my head.
Sometimes when the threads begin to spin I catch a rhythm, I go under the words. I begin to make images, draw out pictures, even make new words. I create characters inside my head; I see and hear versions of events; see and hear voices inside my head. I make those voices from my silent reading and now they reverberate. I can hear them, they speak to me; we are attached.
Let’s call this attachment consciousness - the novelist would — and consciousness wavers every few pages or so. It wanders off. But that is reading: my body and mind wandering through the imagined space, the gaps created by words. That is reading — wandering back and forth between this world which lies inside the mind of a character called Busner — and my momentary desire to lift the kettle to the tap and make tea again for the third time this morning.
Busner is distracted too — he’s always distracted — thinking of his body and its nagging desires. They never end — desire is like that — and Busner is constantly waylaid; he never seems to follow a through line. It’s a miracle he manages to hold down a job or do anything at all with that wandering mind telling him what to do. He’s reading the world, he’s scrutinising, noting it all down: what we all do, what we all say, including the parts that remain unsaid. Those silent words inside our head marching and marching around in circles asking to be heard — it all begins with reading.