[2] Some of these words, especially those regarding dreaming & pure sorcery, I’m afraid, will have to wait until Volume Two, which I have yet to contemplate.
The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.
[1] “Lifelong learning,” a dogma of every goddam faculty training, has long devolved to a cliche, an eye-rolling idol, piling on “new skills & practices” in name only, mere semantic changes, not actual thinking.
albionspeak: a draft of language (6.5)
School Study Guide
Usage & Triage
Dear Reader, you saw how my Home Study Guide & Midterm (Lessons 1-3) focused almost exclusively on vocabulary—“words, words, words,” as Hamlet mocks in mock madness. As an 8th grade (high-school level) Geometry teacher, I tried my best to emphasize—both from the front of the classroom, but also with lots of early simple quizzes—just how essential it was for students to get on top of the new vocab words immediately, in September, which was an alien task for many of my talented math-kids (especially the ones with high-functioning autism). They’d done great, of course, in arithmetic for years & cruised through Algebra the year before—often confident to the point of complacency—but many didn’t like language and didn’t realize how lost they could get in Geometry without the precise terms. I’d point out, for instance, that the next year’s freshman Physical Science class was the most flunked course in high school and that this was attributed to the fact that it, along with sophomore Biology, included more new words than any course outside of foreign language, more than in English or Social Studies. Still, many students could not hear me.
Complacency is sleep, ultimately nonexistence. Most parents I dealt with in suburbia were successful, college-educated professionals. They made plenty of money (far more than I), had nice cars & houses, attended their kids’ sporting events, and traveled with their families for a week to Disneyland, often in the middle of 8th grade, so they wouldn’t later interrupt the busy sports seasons of busy busy high school, where their kids were fully expected to get A’s & B’s (which meant B’s). This was considered “responsible parenting.” Of course they wanted the best for their children—which meant they didn’t ever want to see their kids struggle or suffer—and so if everyone could just follow the script, and nothing bad happened, and their kids got into a state school (maybe with a sports scholarship!), then, despite the frats & drugs & football rallies, they’d turn out just perfect, just like their parents. Once out of college, so went the plan, why then they’d be fully-fledged flag-waving humans, who could demand a “good job” (= income) and marry someone special (i.e., rich or attractive); and thus, in the end, around age 22, they’d never have to take another class or read another book that didn't entertain them or lead to orgasm. They’d never have to think again. Dream on, America!
Needless to say, I have a problem with this formula for life, with any dream that imposes a set program and with nearly all the standard American measures of success. Of course I, too, have a nice home in suburbia and attended all my kids’ events & performances, making sure they got A’s whenever possible; I even took them to Disney World in Florida—albeit for but a single, ridiculously expensive day on our 15,000 mile road trip around the U.S. Indeed, we found Disney World a puffed up temple to all that’s “fun & lightweight,” a family Vegas devoid of truth & risk & value (= fake life)—probably the lowest point of our three-month journey. We much preferred, for instance, the freeway-exit Waffle House restaurants, cheap & entirely unpretentious, authentic cultural venues with great food.
Each year I also had the privilege to teach a handful of really lucky kids (Mandarin Chinese especially, also disproportionately a few Jews), whose parents were remarkable individuals who themselves lived & practiced intrinsic learning.[1] They knew that school was supplementary only, that parents alone are responsible for their children’s rearing, which takes place every minute of every day in any number of forms & idioms—including, if somewhat rarely, fun & play. They were raising disciplined thinkers, for they themselves knew how to think and that thinking never ends; it’s not formulaic. And they were preparing their children for anything, as these parents saw well the world changing way too fast, that no coursework in 2010, say, could provide all the skills needed for 2030. Everyone will need retraining. While they, like I, could not foresee which specific onslaughts might manifest first, they certainly saw climate change steamrolling toward us and understood the abject fragility of our society & planet. These Jews & Chinese (among others) especially had absorbed the terrible lessons of their ancient pasts and saw that suburbia, historically speaking, was no more than a tent city—in fact, that it would never last the century. They were not complacent.
For balance I need to add here—before I list the vocab below—that most of my students took basic math, Pre-Algebra, and they’d never liked math or really any class in school, and their absent parents didn’t much care. Many did no homework or any work at all, for they saw no empty future, because they never looked. Teaching these students was how I really earned my paycheck—not trying to save their eternal souls, but hoping merely to steer them clear of so many fuck-ups caused by stupid ignorance. Any child who stuck with me and learned their fractions, by way of my daily disciplines & practice, stood a good chance of surviving high school, might well then lead a productive life & pay taxes, might even, within or without the American dream-machine, find a way to find themselves. Failing my class, of course—and I failed many, because I was truthful & fair—never by itself condemned anyone to the streets; and indeed many kids I flunked, I was pleased to hear later, pulled themselves up in high school. Failure can be a great lesson. But these children’s lives were generally much harder over time, and today in 2020 most of these grown up kids, I’m sure, are hardly ready for our current environmental crisis, starting with our first global watershed of many—coronavirus.
So this School study guide highlights new words, but the focus now is on usage. In fact, I recommend, dear Reader, you don’t worry yet about the new vocab that I don’t put in bold type.[2] Let’s practice using the words you need right now. I’ve known many people, fluent in a second or third language, who insist they learned best via sleeping with a native, dreaming in a foreign tongue. Okay, I can’t do that here. But I can set up questions to get you talking where, within the paradigm, no other terms suffice. Just be patient; fluency takes practice.
School Vocabulary (Lessons 4-6)
absence the Good overseer
aliah Guide overview
aleph
anamnesis idolatry place
attic (the letter in the…) immersion POV
auras Infinity port
auroras intent pulling
caring the Jewel Net School
Charybdis Scylla
clue karass seeing (trees)
contact kite sequence
cricket knots serpent
shrine (the fable of the…)
daimon learning circle shift (of attention)
lice soul
eclipse the loom steps
eternity lucidity/lucid dream
lunar attention telos
fiber lure [1]tiger (& tiger-swallowing)
[2]tiger (in dreams)
figure triad
filament ma’at
firefishes mandala vectors
flame many-mindedness the Village
flight moths Vocation
fog
the Forest the Nine Men wampeter
free will
origin