Lessons won and lost

Phil Burpee, Columnist

Phil Burpee, Columnist, Pincher Creek Voice

Phil Burpee is a carpenter and farmer living north of Pincher Creek. He keeps an eye on the world from under the big Alberta sky.

      There's a truism that there is no such thing as a teacher but rather merely those who have a talent for creating an environment within which learning may occur. I tend to subscribe to this notion. It is not unlike the business of doctoring - some doctors claim the ability to heal. This is patently bogus. Clearly what is really happening is that able medical practitioners are manifesting a physical or clinical environment within which healing may occur. The healing is an inside-out process - it is not delivered from the outside-in, barring, of course, certain facilitating medications and/or surgical interventions. Likewise, a good teacher may demonstrate a fact, principle or function, but it cannot be injected like a drug into the student. It must be observed, processed, contextualized and accepted. Then it can be called a lesson. 

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     My big brother was a good teacher, for he certainly created for me an environment within which learning might, and did, occur. He's been dead for twenty years, felled by a sickness for which he was unable to find a healing environment, but to him I owe whatever ability I have to perceive myself as a system within a larger system within a larger system. Amongst many other things, he made blackpowder bombs out of charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre. At ten years of age I learned more science watching the explosive disassembly of an old radio or garbage can than I ever did in years sitting behind a desk gawping listlessly at a blackboard. To learn is to absorb knowledge. It is a beautiful thing.

     He scoffed at anything self-describing as 'received wisdom', preferring to intuit his understanding of things through applied data and experiential analysis - aka learning. Where we grew up, for instance, it was cold in the Winter. Most every young lad accepted as a rite of passage the inevitability of not quite believing that your tongue would freeze to metal at twenty-below. Customary sites for this important indoctrination were either door-knobs or the nearest railway track. I chose the door-knob - not much imagination there. My brother impressively had determined (yes, even having seen your big brother do it, you still can't quite believe it enough to not give it a shot yourself), that the best place to get this done would be the steel cross-bar on the swing in the back yard.

     So he climbed up and shinnied out upside-down sloth-fashion and firmly planted his licker on the bar - and there he was. And now a whole raft of scientific discovery opened before him - the implacability of gravity, lactic acid build-up in arm muscles, transmogrification of flesh from supple to crystalline, the astonishing difficulty of speech with your tongue plastered to a steel bar - ("Go get Mom!" just sounds like "Go geh uaah!" - ??), the pernicious nature of Time, the absolute law forbidding the undoing of a thing just done (unlike on a Word doc. there is no 'Undo' arrow in real life), the sublime relationship between cause and effect, and perhaps most importantly, the simple observation that some actions are fundamentally ill-advised. Oh yeah, and the disgusting appearance of taste-buds stuck to metal after you finally rip yourself free is, in itself, pretty remarkable.

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     He also taught me how to make Molotov cocktails (purely recreational, but don't try this at home, kids), craft a functioning AM radio out of a piece of wood, a toilet paper roll with copper wire wrapped around it, a safety pin, a Gillette Blue-Blade razor, and an ear-phone from a crystal radio set (works), that a block of pure sodium immersed in a tobacco can full of water will only smoke and fizz for about ten seconds before the can vaporizes in a very impressive KA-BAM! event and a mushroom cloud of smoke and steam, that arrows shot straight up in the air will disappear for quite a few seconds before reappearing as a plummeting dot giving you about a half a second to scurry your skinny ass out of the way, that live-action BB-gun wars are fun but basically dicey. He taught me how to understand planetary mechanics, how to understand the nature of Light, how to understand the miracle of short-wave radio (he loved radio in all its forms), how to collect mercury out of old thermometers and discover how unbelievably cool stuff it is to play with (don't try this at home, kids), and once, from a mountain-top in Maine, when I was about six, how to see, if you looked real carefully, that the horizon is curved and that we inhabit a vast, rotating sphere. I couldn't have asked for a better teacher. And so I count myself twice-over lucky - once for surviving all that science, learning, learning, learning all the way - and once for growing up in the presence of a true Frontiersman of the Mind.

     But learning is by no means a foregone conclusion. Getting back up on the horse that just piled you into the dirt is all very fine and admirable as far as it goes. But if the same thing is gonna keep happening till next Tuesday, then what might otherwise be regarded as grit and determination just devolves into plain stupidity. Or, if every time you go around a corner too fast in your car you end up upside down in the ditch, and you still don't slow down, then you can't blame the laws of physics for what is patently a persisting operator error. Same thing with taunting a bull - might look cute for a few seconds - but if you even get the chance to try it again, the second or third time will probably be about the last. Because, you see, we have a deep and ready type of stupidity buried way, way down in the ancient recesses of our brains. And let's look at a bit of basic cerebral physiology here. Plopped on top of our brain stems (the lump at the top of the spine that makes us breathe and sweat and void fluids, etc.) is a tiny little mass known as the R-complex. The 'R' stands for reptilian - this is the reptile brain which we have inherited from our slithering, gnashing ancestors, enabling us to manifest ferocity, territoriality, brute cunning, urges to mate, kill, eat, etc. It didn't go away, though - just got super-imposed and surrounded by the limbic complex - or mammalian brain. This is the very much more clever processing unit enjoyed by dogs and elephants and badgers, etc. It gives rise to impulses that manifest in altruism and tenderness and loving bonds and faithfulness and eagerness to please, etc. ("Good boy, Rex!"). Superimposed and enfolded over this is the cerebrocortical complex - the ape brain, most impressively represented by the bulging frontal cortex of we humans. This gives rise to capacities of self-reflection, perception of consequence, spatial and historical reference, information storage and transmission (OK - bees do this too), ideation, idolatry, love, and the ostensible ability to self-correct. But......................

     The reptile never left. It is still wired in, way, way down in the mainframe. As soon as a squirt of adrenaline or testosterone or any of a host of other trigger chemicals enters the system, several hundred million years of careful and sequential behavioural patterning is unceremoniously, and very hastily, dumped down the evolutionary toilet. It's an ugly sight. It can happen with a single individual, most likely male - "Hey! You talkin' to me!? You talkin' to ME?!!". Or, astonishingly, it can happen with entire countries - "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." - BOOM! POW! WHACK! THUD! CRUNCH! Quite the show. ("Bad boy, George!")

     And so we look at our collective circumstance today in this province, in this country, and in this world. We no longer must rely solely on genetic wiring to pass down our mute history from one generation to the other. We have developed language, script, Gutenberg's press, TV, and the internet. What we have done in the past is no longer hidden - quite the opposite - it is graphically and minutely on display. We can't claim we didn't think it would turn out that way, when it clearly has a hundred times before. I know damn well, thanks to my bro, that when I plug in that wire with the tinfoil strip across the bare ends embedded in that peanut butter jar full of gunpowder, the bugger's gonna blow - no ifs, ands, buts or maybes. Same thing with bombing Iran. Same thing with burning several trillion barrels of oil. Same thing with crowding out the last grizzly bear. We entirely understand the consequences of our actions, yet still grimly respond to the ancient synapses fired from deep within the R-complex. The lizard still rules the roost.

     It need not be this way, of course. Thanks to the willingness of Eve to brush aside Adam's mindless inertia, and to briskly challenge what she perceived as foundationless authority, we are now blessed with the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, between this and that, between darkness and light. She looked at her simpering mate and despaired of his craven surrender to inevitability, ignorance, mental slavery, and powerlessness. And so she ate of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and today we are, in the most profound sense, indebted to her bravery, her fearless curiosity, and her sparkling presumption to know. For it is only through such continuing iconoclasm and boldness that we may learn the lessons of our own survival. Lessons won or lost. This is a war of the most essential kind. And now, in the twenty-first century, there is surely no retreat……..and surely no surrender.

Phil Burpee

March 4, 2012