By Henry Birdsey
MONDAY:
We started off the morning listening (some less interested than others) to Tal ranting about the current status of the football world around the globe. (For those less culturally integrated, “Football” is played with the foot, not by tackling to get an oval pigskin lump) Isabel talked about how she wanted ice cream, but was too lazy to go to the store but she and her sister went to a creamy stand and talked together. The new rage of “skate board guys” out on the patio is growing rapidly.
“Skateboarding not a phase, it’s a passion,” says seventh grader, Evan Sandoe
Nate talked about how his Dad woke him up at the un-godly hour of 6:55 A.M. (We laughed at him about his teenage sloth-like sleeping pattern. Wow that’s real early) and made him go for a swim in their pond, and Tal proceeded to tell us about his days at Camp Cherokee in Georgia and how he went swimming every morning in the lake in the nude. Rider Talked about his pony, Mike, who he has known since he was three, was leaving to go to another barn, and Rider felt like part of his childhood was leaving. Anna read “Minor Bird” by Robert Frost:
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.
Tal warned the whole school about the upcoming annual Ninth grade hike and how metaphorically, the ninth graders are leaving and it is time in those two day for the sevies and eighties to step up, or as Tal describes it: “Man up and Woman up!” The younger students have the time (and opportunity) to be the great leaders and sculptors of the school. Yared told us that his leg injury was getting better and he could run and bike now. We cheered. We stared in horror at the giant smiley face Edgar had drawn reading: Happy Harold!
In math, some of us learned about inequalities, linear equations, the tangent ratio, secant, central, and inscribed angles, the law of sines and cosines. There were some exasperated groans, and some cheers of joy at a finished sheet of homework torn out of a notebook left on the big room table along with orange peels, empty organic yogurt containers, guitar picks, a graduated flask belonging to the science room, and Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman.
The whole school has been recording the weather for a few weeks, and growing genuine Vermont pond-weed and algae in our reeking fish tank. We observed the atmospheric pressure on our inaccurate home-made barometer. We tested vacuums and iron filing in test tubes. We turned in our water molecule cartoon strips and Nitrogen labs.
After lunch, we watched a short movie, as a conclusion oo Reed Martin’s project on the Koinonia commune. The name of the movie “Briars in the Cotton Patch”, was a metaphor for what Koinonia was in the world and outside society. They were people unafraid of community integration between blacks and whites. With each advancement of the community, it was described as a thorn into the majority of the society, the cotton bush. People cried as they remembered the days of the commune and the feelings it gave them. Members philosophized and contemplated what it meant to take the teachings, the spirit, and the body of Jesus Christ, and bring in to life in whatever form on earth. People came to Koinonia for an escape from the material world, to be closer to the land, and for an alternate life of Christianity. Clarence Jordan, the founder and spiritual leader was the drive behind this thorn into the southern United States.
“We succeeded spiritually, not statistically.”
“I won’t step aside, but I won’t create trouble.”
“God, Let me die with my working boots on.”
“We will fear mediocrity over failure.”
-all quotes by Jordan
There are two kinds of revolt. Both of which can achieve something, on some level, but the big mistakes are made by making the wrong decision about what kind of revolutions are efficient and truly Eutopian. One kind is violent, loud, directly powerful. Another is quiet, revolt of the mind, carried into society with reasonable caution, but rightly stubborn in the belief. Clarence Jordan, I think was the second. An emotionally raging pacifist with not only a vision, but a place where humans, divided by judgment of society, can live in harmony like brothers and sisters.
I believe, in an abstract sense, the majority of the time, that this is what NBS is supposed to be. There are no confines but greatness, and we should want to be and actually be working, seeking, striving for this greatness with every thing we do. We are not revolutionaries, not yet, but before we fight, we must understand which way to do it, and most importantly, WHY.
TUESDAY:
Morning meeting: Claire is excited about her science project on the climate of Hawaii, and has made a great beginning on her comic about two botony nerds in on Vacation in Hawaii, and on a deeper level, she read Isabel’s story, and saw how many “stages” or “phases” that Isabel has gone through over her three years at NBS and Claire was thinking about what her own phases would be. Tal swaggered about, showing off himself about the school grounds, feeling superior about his Koinonia Commune T-shirt, saying he was wearing his Clarence Jorden get-up, since he was wearing torn jeans as well. Sophie read the poem “Alone with everybody” a favorite of mine, by the one and only: Charles Bukowski.
the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too much
and nobody finds the one
but keep looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.
there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.
the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill
nothing else
fills.
Reed Messner gave his project on the Renaissance. Reed’s project was totally amazing.
He told us about the spiritual awakening and revelation of Francesco Petrarch, at the summit of Mt. Ventoux. He was disgusted with the past ages of medieval times when society thought the human could not evolve anymore. He named this the “dark ages. ”Petrarch was the first humanist, and father of the Renaissance (meaning “rebirth” in French) The Renaissance movement spread through Europe and spawned the beginnings, and exponential development of drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, religion, literature, poetry, and a new society spreading from Florence, Italy, across Europe (partly owning to the physical closeness of cultures in Europe, Tal said—). We learned about architects, Vetruvius and Brunelleschi, and artists famous from their work in that time period and artistic rivalry, Michaelangelo (“Sistine Chapel,” “David”) and Leonardo Da Vinci (“Mona Lisa,” the flying machine, miscellaneous writings and inventions) Artists weren’t truly respected until the Renaissance, and at this time, they also developed a genius step toward painting with the discovery of linear perspective, making a 2 dimensional surface appear to be three dimensional, or showing an object in 3D form. This discovery started the offspring of Realism in the art world. We looked at the Mona Lisa, which used the golden ratio to show the parts of the head proportionally. And in the “Last Supper”, the lines of linear perspective point directly to the center of the painting, which is Christ’s eye. Tal noted that the windows in the background of the “Last Supper” were mimicked by Picasso in “Guernica,” which, in it’s own way, is a contemporary re-play of the Last Supper. Reed told us that Leonardo was working with a telescope, 400 years before one was actually used in astronomy officially.
In the time of the Renaissance, even more so than the development of society in terms of art, and literature, in my opinion, was the fact that at this time, people began to understand science, astronomy, and human body, but religion (mostly Christianity) also developed, parallel to science. They operated intertwining through the science of art and spirit of it. That is an ultimate middle path.
In the afternoon, the eighth and ninth grade lit. class watched a documentary about Picasso’s “Guernica,” painted during the Spanish civil war, as a response to the bombing of the twon of Guernica in 1937 in the Spanish Civil War. “Guernica,” the painting is an important part in our current literature book, My Name Is Asher Lev. The film showed a few out of hundreds of pre-Guernica sketches, with only a few shapes, and objects that came through in the final piece. Picasso made the painting, which is 11 feet tall and 26 feet long, in eight stages, using structures of diagonal, horizontal, and vertical lines to divide the surface into fractions. It showed the development of each character and object, and separated the figures in triads that are grouped together mostly based on expression and symbolic meaning. We looked in detail at the flower in the hand of the dead soldier, the arrow pointing up from the ground, the windows (in fact much like those of the last supper), the horse covered in newspaper, the lamp at the top of the painting, slightly resembling a human eye, the raging bull, symbolizing power, destruction, and blind rage, the Pieta-like weeping mother and her dead child, the woman with the oil lamp, the staggering woman looking at the light from an open door, and closed door and doorknob at the far right, the shades of light, the hollow neck of the dead soldier, and his hand, resembling the hand of Jesus in Grunewald‘s Crucifixion interpretation where the hands of Jesus are clawing, and violent looking, rather than traditional crucifixions, where the hands are open, gracefully. Picasso used in this monumental painting bits and pieces of strategy and style of past artists. He took all things in that current world and compacted it into a painting, full with every bit of meaning, left to decipher, again and again.
In science, we prepared for our Ultimate Frisbee match by watching videos of professional ultimate players, and then playing our match in the rain. NBS played Vermont Commons in Burlington and lost 12-4, but VCS trains all year. Traditionally in ultimate Frisbee, each team sings a song after the game. We did a version of “London Calling” by The Clash, and changed the lyrics a little to fit the circumstances:
Vermont Commons in a faraway town
Now that war is declared-and the battle come down
Vermont Commons, when the disk went up
Came out of the cupboard with the ultimate huck.
Vermont Commons, now don't look at us
Their flick is fantastic, left us in the dust
Vermont Commons, see we ain't got no swing
Not when their D keeps us on the wing.
CHORUS
The ice age is coming, the disk is zooming in
They got them some wheels and they're determined to win
A nuclear error, but we have no fear
Vermont Commons by the lake...-and we live…down by the river
(The North Branch River in Ripton, that is)
WEDNESDAY:
Nathan and his family’s foreign exchange student from Spain, Yoann, had an argument (about cereal we think), but Nate said that even though they were mad at each other at the beginning, the fight brought them closer together. Anneke went home and read books about Guernica, which covered her whole desk. Multiple people said how much Reed’s project inspired them to be really good on theirs, including myself, and I already gave mine. We talked about how things (projects in this case) can seem large, overwhelming, and lifeless, but when you begin to learn about it, the vast worlds of knowledge behind each idea, fact and feeling, the stuff (whatever it may be) comes to life because it is understood.
In the afternoon, we went to the basement and did our somewhat unstructured art class. Most of us were in the stage of making large self-portrait collages using shredded, dusty, and out of date (by at least 30 years) National Geographics and world book encyclopedias, using faces, textures, objects, 1979 Cadillac car logos, Jimmy Cliff pictures, burning buildings, dolphins, sunrises, mules, rural Chinese farm fields, and a whole lot of sticky (and mostly dried out) YES (brand) paste to hold it all together.
THURSDAY:
Cassie presented her project on Communism and McCarthyism. The basic definition of is “a system where financial and social status is common among all people” and all “property is held in common.”
Cassie told us about the meaning of the symbol of communism, the red star with a hammer and sickle. The red color represents defiance, and the five points of the star represent the five basic ideas of communism, or the five fingers on the hand of a worker. The hammer symbolizes industrial progress and power, and the sickle represents the importance of the common agricultural worker. Some of the first communist ideas were in Sparta, where everyone lived for the city, not for self or family. They fought. Plato was also considered by some to be one of the first people with communist ideas. At that time, some religious groups (even some Christians) had some communist attributes.
“Nature has given every man the right to the enjoyment of an equal share in all property” -Francois-Noel Babeuf
FNB was a radical anarchist in post Revolutionayy France who advocated for all property to be held in commona and to use violent methods to over-throw the new system. He is considered to be the first anarchist, as well as a communistic thinker.
Cassie told us about the official beginnings of the communism idea, starting with Karl Marx. Marx, as a young man, aimed to conquer the world with poetry, but soon realized that he was not a productive poet. In fact, according to Cassie, he was a crappy poet. After this failure, he began writing for revolutionary papers until these were shut down by the government. He wanted to commit to his communist ideas and make them known, because he believed religion was a drug, and a temporary solution to personal and societal problems and unhappiness. The real problem is the reason why people feel the need to put all faith into a religion and not into the real problem. Marx believed that with communism, the high and low classes could both benefit from one thing rather than the higher class becoming higher, and the lower class staying stationary. Marx met Friedrich Engels, and together they wrote multiple books about communism, and most famously, they were the authors of the Communist Manifesto.
We talked about the Russian Revolution, led by Vladamir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in 1917, and the first and second Red Scares. We learned about “The Hollywood 10”, 10 actors, all accused of being communist, and projecting communist ideas through their films. Tal warned us that we will be learing all about the Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Wobblies, and the American Communist Party when we are in High School.
In the afternoon, in the 8th and 9th grade lit. Class, reading My Name is Asher Lev , we talked about Asher being in Paris and finally, making the biggest decision as an artist. He painted a crucifixion, but he is an observant Jew. He is causing his family pain by painting of Christian form, but the crucifixion he paints, called Brooklyn Crucifixion I is of his family. His mother, torn apart, supporting both Asher’s Fathers work in building Jewish yeshiva schools, and Asher’s passion for art. She worked for both of them. We said that even though this painting might cause pain to his family on the surface, it is a painting of appreciation. A painting of thanks. A painting of love.
FRIDAY:
In our morning meeting, I read “Summit and Gravity” by Octavio Paz:
There's a motionless tree
And another one coming forward
A river of trees
Hits my chest
The green surge
Is good fortune
You are dressed in red
You are
The seal of the scorched year
The carnal firebrand
The star fruit
In you like sun
The hour rests
Above an abyss of clarities
The height is clouded by birds
Their beaks construct the night
Their wings carry the day
Planted in the crest of light
Between firmness and vertigo
You are
Transparent balance
-Octavio Paz
(Editor's Note: Tal thinks Octavio’s poem expresses an idea we are all trying to achieve, and may yet achieve, the place where “wings carry the day/ planted in a crest of light between firmness and vertigo.”) And Nathan read a poem I had sent to him the previous night by Charles Bukowski called “16 bit intel 8088 chip”
16 bit intel 8088 Chip
With an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.
I thought of this poem after talking with Tal about the ongoing war at NBS about which word processing device is better, The PC, or The Mac. (Tal said he has been listening to this ridiculous argument by his teen students for 23 years, since he first started teaching). This poem was read in attempt to show the universal meaninglessness of technology.
Later, we worked with Rose, making signs out of glass and concrete for our future human size sundial. And everyone else worked on the soon to be garden with shovels, rakes, spikes, trowels, garden carts, and Nepalese hoes. Tal repeatedly asked who was the best peasant. He said being the best peasant was a very high honor.
In the afternoon, Tal read two stories. The first was written by Aylee. Before reading, Tal bluntly announced:
“This story is about dandelions.”
Aylee wrote about how when she was little, she had an obsession, a love for dandelions. It meant spring, freedom, happiness. And she got older, and realized that it was not fitting for a sixth grader to sit in a field and look at dandelions and four leaf clovers. But in seventh grade, she got an email from some classmates. Thee email was a list of things her classmates “loved”. She remembered her love of dandelions. She saw that all those years the dandelions had not changed. She had and in her changing she he had moved to new things, and was now coming back.
“The silence is crazy with noise, if only I could hear it” said Aylee in her story. (editor’s note: Isn’t this what we are trying to do?)
Then we read Sarah’s story. It was about her two childhood friends, Anneke and Aylee. She was only ever with one at a time, and this made Sarah feel like her heart was in two places, but when Anneke and Aylee came together, at NBS in seventh grade, they became best friends, leaving Sarah out. Sarah judged them for their “dippy-nes” and superficiality, but came to realize that there were layers of meaning under them, but they were covered by everyday life, and Sarah wanted to love their best selves, just like she wanted to preserve her best self. She couldn’t be strictly against “superficiality” all of the time. She couldn’t judge clothes, or lipstick, or music. The outside never changed the inside. Her fear of “dippy-ness” was not from other people. It was self-inflicted, it was fear of losing herself, for an internal reason.
The world is not changing. We are. NBS is not changing. The students are. We are nearing the end of the year. For some, the end of their NBS career. It’s scary. To leave a place that has provided comfort for three years. But if we didn’t have to move on, then our time wouldn’t be precious. We can only take, in our precious time, what we have learned, into whatever new place, internal or external, we find ourselves in.
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