Lego House or Lobster Pot Bay ? The Secret Life of the Mind

The entertainer James May an eccentric who could only be English was inspired enough to create a house made entirely of Lego bricks ( not surprisingly it was a little fragile in the British climate, and did not meet certain building regulations an area of little concern in Georgia! ) . Shabbily treated by Legoland, who added the insult of stealing his idea to the injury of not accepting the original donation (on the grounds that it was not built by specialist model-makers, and would be too costly to transplant ! ) James May was forced to witness the loss of his masterpiece, which, in the picture above, we see being destroyed. . .It also strikes me as what the medievals might have called a type for the deliberate destruction of another persons tenderest emotions by the cold tyranny of logic ; and as such deserves to be commemorated (to James Mays eternal canonization!) in the stained-glass or sculpture of some new Romanesque cathedral of the spirit, yet to be built. It makes the recent filching of a Hepworth sculpture, from Wolverhampton, by the Royal Bank of Scotland not usually noted for their esthetic interests ! a matter of mere quotidian curiosity. . . Let us remember this precedent when next we visit Billund. . . or even (albeit unlikely!) Wolverhampton. The maritime abstract sculpture was perhaps the type of the peregrinatory football team of that ilk. . . Who is to say ?But even more tellingly, let us remember the friability and unsustainability of living in a world of ideas built only of Lego bricks.Such is the world of international relations at this minute, which cannot even contain an eighteenth-century style war; such has been the world of schooling since Summerhill and Bryanston went out of fashion. . . It can be found at every street-corner.The idea of the miniature model is a ludic one which we see all around us, for example in childrens play. Recently I watched with rapt attention as my four-year-old neighbour, Nata, concocted an imaginary supper from wood shavings and splinters rubbing various pieces of wood together to process the meal, and (in her imagination) stewing and boiling the sawdust in some old, wrecked, plastic dishes her mother had let her have. Ideas from the minds of babes and infants which might surprise Stephen Hawking . . .Conventional schooling and academy-based learning might also be interested to know that it seems to assume that we are all James Mays with our own inner Lego house; and that there we will infallibly store, order, and process there all the Gradgrindian facts which they have no hesitation in continuing to serve up, almost as if the micro-chip revolution had never happenedNot so, says the Hawkingesque, quantum part of me. . . *Below are more photographs of the beautiful interior of James Mays now destroyed house

Marvelous as this now lost domain is (The Lost Domain is the English title of Alain-Fourniers wonderful, mysterious book) and it compels me to believe that there is something lurking here which in ideal conditions (although possibly only dreams!) we might even be able, in a certain sense, to recreate I cannot but think that the ideal learning scenario (for languages at least) equates more to the humble placement of lobster pots at low tide, and at high tide examining the contents. Its less subject to interference from corporate finance and the vagaries of bankers; and depends more on the natural rhythms of life and mind. . . *I cant help thinking, too, that the older scenario, where knowledge was dredged carefully from the library (from the town library, or even inter-library loans, if the school library could not help out!) then reprocessed, like so much nuclear fuel, into the homework essay: then presented in class, then marked graded even (there was even a BBC boss called Michael Grade!) then allegedly worked into ones preparation for an exam whose aim was for a brief second to show full command, full knowledge (like facing one fast ball from Trueman at Lords) I cant help thinking that this era has gone forever. And that what it meant, if it meant anything at all, is now just Eliots husk of meaning.Here is an image of what I mean:

Cowdrey is out, caught brilliantly by Benaud in the gulley. . . Today, knowledge and facts are invisible until you log on and click. And all our attention spans are far shorter these days; so that obviously the learning product needs to be honed to match. . .Its not so much that theres not time for all that grammatical study and hard work which in earlier eras guaranteed the firm knowledge of a language for life: I am not even sure (given the Einsteinian equivalence of time with space) that, if done, this work even meaningfully then exists at all . . . It somehow burns up; it somehow enters an unsuspected black hole . . .Im sure, too, that as soon as possible our brain moults; and we become another person speaking the languages we know; thus freeing up for learning valuable memory resources for the mind of the (first) person whom (briefly) we are. . . Im temporarily this person and for people like me, Im trying to create meaningful language courses. In my experience, the chief maestro of lobster pots (I briefly knew him well enough to say hi to, and respected his charm and unworldly charisma) was a fisherman on the Isle of Bryher, Scilly, John Pender universally known as Johnny Potts on account of the lobster pots he tended night and day, to catch succulent treats for the tables of the great restaurants of these fabled islands. . .

He was softly spoken, when he spoke at all. But his dedication to, and rootedness in his sea and island craft told me all I needed to know about finding a true and durable intellectual centre for our no less durable, but equally hazardous, intellectual undertakings.Those countryside testimonies will not go away. They reflect rhythms which the city only dimly remembers; and which it ignores at its peril. Our speeded-up life needs to slow down and perceive things which would have been obvious to our grandparents; even to our parents. . .As we yet inhabit, for yet a season, the Lego house, let our minds be distracted by the call of the seagulls in the harbor and thus to some philosophical search for constants which still make sense in our world of sophisticated machinery and constant communication. There could just be another way.