El hombre invisible

The invisible man
Pablo Neruda 
(my translation)

I laugh
I smile
at the old poets,
I adore all
the poetry that's written,
all the dew, moon, diamond, every
silvery submerged drop,
that was my ancient brother,
adding to the rose,
but
I smile,
they always say "I",
at every step
something happens to them,
it is always "I",
through the streets
only they walk
or the sweet girl they love,
nobody else,
fisherman don't pass by,
nor bookshop salesmen,
bricklayers don't pass by,
nobody falls
from a scaffold,
nobody suffers,
nobody loves,
only my poor brother,
the poet,
everything seems
to happen to him
and to his sweet beloved,
nobody lives
but him alone,
nobody cries from hunger
or from rage,
no man suffers in his verses
because he can't
pay the rent,
in poetry they don't
throw anyone out into the street
with beds and with chairs
and nothing happens
in factories either,
nothing happens,
they make umbrellas, cups,
guns, trains,
they extract minerals
scratching at hell,
there are strikes,
soldiers come,
they shoot,
they shoot at the people,
that is to say,
at poetry,
and my brother
the poet
was in love,
or was suffering
because his feelings are sea-like,
he loves remote
ports for their names,
and writes about oceans
that he doesn't know,
together with life, full to the brim
like corn with its kernels,
he passes by without knowing how
to thresh it,
he rises and falls
without touching the earth,
or sometimes
he feels so deep
and dark,
he is so big
that he doesn't fit inside himself,
he gets tangled and untangles himself,
he declares himself damned,
he carries his cross of darkness
with great difficulty,
he thinks he is different
than the rest of the world,
every day he eats bread
but has never seen
a baker
nor has he entered a meeting
of the baker's union,
and so my poor brother
himself goes dark,
he twists and twists himself again
and he finds that he is
interesting,
interesting,
that is the word,
I am not above
my brother,
but I smile,
because I go through the streets,
and I am the only one who doesn't exist,
life flows by
like every river,
I am the only invisible one,
there are no mysterious shadows,
there are no darknesses,
the whole world speaks to me,
they want to tell me things,
they tell me about their relatives,
about their miseries
and about their joys,
everybody passes by and everybody
tells me something,
and they do so many things!:
they chop wood,
they put up electrical lines,
they knead until late into the night
our daily bread,
with an iron spear
they perforate the intestines
of the earth
and transform iron
into locks,
they rise up into the sky and carry
letters, weeping, kisses,
at every port
someone is there,
someone is born,
or the one I love awaits me,
and I pass by and they ask me
to sing about these things,
I don't have time,
I must think about everything,
must go back home,
pass by the party headquarters,
what can I do,
everything begs me
to speak,
everything begs me
to sing and to always sing,
everything is full
of dreams and sounds,
life is a box
full of songs, it opens
and flies and a flock
of birds
that want to tell me something comes
resting on my shoulders,
life is a struggle
like a river flowing by
and men
want to tell me,
to tell you,
why they fight,
if they die,
why they die,
and I pass by and I don't have
time for so many lives,
I want
everyone to live
in my life
and to sing in my song,
I am not important,
I don't have time
for my own concerns,
by day and by night
I have to note down what happens,
and not forget anybody.
It's true that I soon
become tired
and I look at the stars,
I stretch myself out on the grass,
a violin-colored insect passes by,
I place one arm
across a small breast
or below the waist
of the sweet one I love,
and I watch the
severe
velvet of the trembling night
with its frozen constellations,
then
I feel the wave of mysteries
lift up into my soul,
infancy,
the sound of weeping in corners,
sad adolescence,
and it makes me sleepy,
and I sleep
like an apple tree,
I fall asleep
immediately
with the stars or without the stars,
with my lover or without her,
and when I arise,
the night has gone,
the street has awoken before I have,
the poor young women go
to their work,
the fishermen return
from the ocean,
the miners
enter into the mine
with new shoes on,
everything is alive,
everyone passes by,
they go on hurriedly,
and I barely have time
to get dressed,
I have to run:
nobody can
pass by without me knowing
where they are going, what
has happened to them.
I can't
live without life,
without man being man
and I run and I see and I hear
and I sing,
the stars don't have
anything to do with me,
solitude has neither
flower nor fruit.
Give me for my life
every life,
give me all the pain
of the the whole world,
I am going to transform it
into hope.
Give me
every joy,
even the most secret ones,
because if it weren't this way,
how would any of you know about it?
I have to tell it all,
give me
the struggles
from every day
because they are my song,
and in this way we will walk together,
elbow to elbow,
all men,
my song brings them together:
the song of the invisible man
that sings with all men.

Inquiry and implications

Inquiry

Often times when we think of school, we think of the teacher, standing at the whiteboard expounding or sounding out or conjugating or dictating or solving or explaining or diagramming.  She has the knowledge, it lives in her, she must know her stuff. Then, through pedagogical voodoo, she transfers this thing that lives in her, the finer points of biology or French or calculus or European History or carpentry or computer programming, sends it like an email with all those ones and zeroes into the brains of the awaiting Others, those adolescents who will receive the information, interpret it, and reproduce it.

I propose that this is a misconception.  Our world gives and receives information a quintillion times a day.  (You're probably thinking "quintillion is totally a made up word."  To prove my point about giving and receiving information, click here to see whether I am making it up).  Now, I could have just included that definition here and been done with it, and you may have read it and chuckled to yourself at my pluck and cleverness.  But that would have been evidence of this misconception: that I have the knowledge, you don't have the knowledge, and that I must place the knowledge into your brain like cookies into the cookie jar.  But by clicking and searching and taking just one more step, you prove your own curiosity, that natural instinct to explore and know the world.  And in the act of inquiring further, I allow you to build meaning on your own terms and in your own way.

This seems to be getting at a new concept of knowledge, because in this scenario, who has the knowledge?  Where does it come from?  Did I give it to you?  Did you make it?  What does it say about you?  What does it say about me?

Implications

And the bigger question that follows all of these other questions is: why does it matter?  Quite frankly it matters because everything in our society and world has changed dramatically over the last 50 years except for one area: education.  If you walked into a classroom from the 1960s, you might have found something like this:

And then, if you were to walk into a classroom this year, you might have found something like this:

What do you see?  The same thing with a screen?  

Now, many people are saying these days that our "system is broken" and that we as a nation must do something differently in education to "fix it."  Unfortunately, more often than not those are code words for buzzy political ideas about test scores, teacher evaluation and money, none of which address the eerie similarity that we observe in these two pictures at 50 years remove.

I don't wish to say that students should no longer sit in desks or raise their hands to speak, but something in the nature of the interaction between student and teacher and subject matter seems to have been left untapped as we have remained static in our educational practice through the years.  I am doing my own inquiry into these things, and I think it has something to do with curiosity, originality, undoing hierarchies in the classroom and society, and helping students prefer to name and know the world on their own terms rather than speak when prompted and remain in their passive role as receiver.