Creative Turbulence

                                     "The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, 

                              but to be able to tolerate insecurity. Creativity requires 

                                             the courage to let go of certainties."

                                                                  Erich Fromm

I was attempting to describe one of the other Prep Year Lecturers to one of my office mates, Jacob, the other day. "He's gotta be almost seventy, British, kinda, I dunno, stand-offish."

"That could be any of 'em!" Jacob laughs, and I laugh too.

It is a peculiar thing to find oneself teaching English amongst a large group of native English speakers in an all English speaking program in a very much non-English speaking country, embedded in a very much not English speaking region and culture in a place on pretty much the precisely opposite side of the globe.

There are just under eighty of us working as ESL teachers here at the "oil college" in Dhahran. I recently came to understand that the municipality of Dhahran itself came about for the express purpose of giving Saudi Aramco, the oil giant responsible for twenty five percent of the globe's oil supply, a home. Originally named The Arabian American Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, now owned in whole by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is a Kingdom within a Kingdom. As I was expressing to a colleague his past week that I would like very much to get inside Aramco, he asked why I was so interested. Well, I replied, I guess I feel like a peasant living in the village just outside the walls of the castle who just wants to get a glimpse inside to see what transpires there behind the giant walls, the secure perimeter. There are wooden, American style houses, as the rest of the country, all of the buildings and housing on campus included, are made of concrete, there is a cinema, which otherwise do not exist in KSA, a church, the only one in this country, alcohol, stores, even a golf course. And inside women can drive. The fact that there are women at all, that one can freely mingle with them, that they are not cloaked, is quite a draw.

King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals is like an add on to Aramco, a feeder institution serving THE industry responsible for roughly eight-five percent of the GDP of KSA. One of the last attacks by radical Islamists against the al Sa'ud's connection to the kafirs, the infidels, the West, occurred here at the gates of Aramco, on the border of KFUPM, in 2006 when two explosive packed trucks were driven to the guard station where a small gun battle took place. It is the symbol, for the hard core fundamentalists here, of everything that is wrong with the royal family that holds all political power. Aramco is a small piece of America embedded within possibly the most strict, anti-Western Islamic state that exists on this planet. 

The reason why the Saudi government desires its petroleum engineers to learn English is so that they can operate inside of a system that is in whole a part of the Anglo-American economic sphere. The government wants its engineers to be able to go to graduate programs in Britain on the US, where the beating heart of the petroleum circulation system is situated. In Saudi Arabia it is customary to import white collar workers for the most important industries: energy services; military training; security contractors; university instructors and much of the staff; communication industries. The government has quotas in place for how many Saudis must be hired by any company, twenty-five percent, because otherwise it would be so much less. This process, like so very many different aspects of life here is termed 'Saudiazation." 

If something has been Saudized, it has been altered, co-opted, or some how diluted. It is used here in the same way that the term FUBAR was used in the 'Nam. Before I came here I read on forums contributed by Western expats, many of which complained about the working virtues of Saudi men, about the lack of a good work ethic. Two examples, one is a Britisher writing that in their office, he and his fellows had their own interpretation of the oft used Arabic phrase, "Inshallah," which literally translates as "God willing." This man stated that when a Saudi in his office is asked if something will be completed on time, say a report, that when the response is, "Inshalah," that he and his coworkers have learned to translate it as, "Not a bloody chance in hell, mate." Example two, the Director of my program told me, my first day here, that if I wanted to get something done that depended on other staff, meaning non-Western staff, in our Program, that I should try to do it between 7:30 and 10:00 am, because that is when most of them were here. Inshallah.

So what kind of man comes to work in a place like this, in an ESL program here? Well, to assemble a constellation of characteristics of my fellow Lecturers that I have observed since arriving, I would say that it is the kind of man who works best alone, the kind of man who is a bit of an introvert, who likes to spend his evenings doing his own thing, who likes words maybe more than other people, who feels alienated in his native culture. The kind of men who collect, like tumbleweeds against fence lines in the open plains, men who collect at the far side of the world. Wary men, men who maybe were on the periphery of the social groupings in their adolescent years and dove into books, into writing, into their studies. Who became more comfortable with quantifiable, knowable phenomena like linguistics or etymologies or syntax and the phonetic alphabet instead of the amorphous, unpredictable, often hurtful phenomena like human relationships. Men who have learned, maybe the hard way, that words hurt more than sticks, but only when wielded by living, breathing humans, not when printed on a page or proliferated like a spring rain on a word processing device.

It has been a goal of mine to make friends here. I am pretty good at making friends. It has been a bit of a tough sell. It seems quite evident that my coworkers, the men who live above me, next to me, would rather spend their evenings in their flats by themselves on the net, on a movie, reading a book, word jockeying, than relating to others or sharing consciousness. As though their are risks, unnecessary risks perhaps, to be taken in socializing. Someone once pointed out to me that ESL instructors are made up, by and large, of assertive women and passive men. My experience over my career in this field bears out that, with exceptions, this is a truism.

Maybe it's a desire to be a big fish in a small pond. I mean the only real requirement to be an ESL speaker is to be a native speaker of English. Throw some book learning and a degree or two on top of that and go to the orient, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East, and viola, somebody's the bomb. Given that the respect for teachers is pretty automatically given in most of these countries, it is a pretty heady experience to be called, "Sir," to have others insist that you walk through the door first, to be the top of the food chain without even having first had to earn it.

Did I enter this field to get in on this bonanza of goodies? I don't think so. My story of getting into the field is based more, at least in my subjective opinion, in pragmatics and the desire for adventure. Back in 1993, when my older boy, Teo, was some months old, his mother Trina, and I, decided to move from the Maple Leaf neighborhood in north Seattle, around 80th Ave N., to Ellensburg because we wanted our son to be able to be near his family, his grandparents, specifically. My heart and mind have always centered on the farm where I was reared, my father and step- mothers' property on the west side of the Kittitas Valley; it has been and still is the nexus at the center of my physical, emotional, mental, spiritual universe.  I didn't get to know either of my grandfathers, never had that relationship, and I always wanted it. For my children it was a gift that I wanted them to be able to have. So Trina, Teo, and I moved to the farm, MLP Shamba is its name, the initials being those of my older brothers and myself, and shamba being the Swahili word for farm. 

After a year or so, we three moved into a house in town. It was expensive, nine hundred dollars a month, if I remember correctly, even in 1993. After a time Trina and I decided that if we moved into student housing up at Brooklane Village, with rent in the three hundred dollar a month range, the money saved would pay for one of us to get a Master's Degree, which is gold for a certified teacher, moving one way up the pay scale; both of is were certified teachers. Trina wanted to stay with Teo and Trina was also pregnant now with our second child, Paolo by this time. I had no real strong desire for any particular field, finding most academic fields of high interest, so we thought that if we wanted to rear our kids for part of their lives in a first world, foreign country like say Western Europe, that a MA in ESL would set up a fairly easy work permit situation. Since I have always liked words and since my BA is in language/literature/writing, it was decided.

One thing that has struck me the older I get is the great degree to which people place limitations on their lives. I feel like more and more I notice that people have these refrains that issue forth from them that often begin with phrases like, "I can't," or "I never," or "I hate," or "I don't." Like if you suggest a place to eat, a place to go, a new hobby, some novel experience and the reply is, "I don't like this or that kind of thing," or, "I can't do that kind of thing," "I hate people who...." It becomes more apparent to me that under the guise of finding out what they like, so many people rule out new experiences, new people, the landscapes of new lands, both metaphoric and literal. "I don't eat. Mexican food," "you know I can't stand yuppies," "I won't travel anywhere where they don't speak English." 

Isn't it somewhat like spending your life carefully researching and constructing a perfect, finely crafted cage and then stepping inside of it? Is it to make for oneself a sense of security? To extend the metaphor, each new limiting statement or resolve, "I can't stand liberals," or, "I refuse to go into that kind of place," just welds one more bar onto that cage. My father, a cultural anthropologist, has long drummed into his children the twin gyroscopic principles of predictability and variability. Organisms strive to increase the former while lowering the latter. Just so a dog crawls under the table in the corner to keep its variability low and its predictability high. Let us extrapolate out from that point and see that in the distance lies a very secure and very static, very unchanging, stable, stagnant, half dead future. And all the while, time, that amazing teacher that kills all of its pupils, is marching on, clipping off the branches of the option tree at a quicker and quicker rate until all that remains as a viable option is the view from under that table in the corner where the predictability keeps stacking up and the opportunities for living, for change, for novelty continue to dwindle.

The human immune system grows weaker from stagnation. Stress, anxiety, fear of change all degrade the bodies ability to stay healthy. This is not, by the way, just my opinion, it is science.  Think about it. Think of the people you know, do a quick survey. Do a fast correlation. Which group of your family and friends have more stress related issues, the ones who get out, travel, make new friends, laugh a lot, take chances, or the ones who stay home and live fearful, routinized, staid lives? The strength of the immune system is largely dependent on how in control we feel. Ironically, people who stay under the table do so precisely because they have great anxieties and fears about change, about not being in control. But life is all about change. That is just how the game is designed. Entropy. The tendency of things towards disorder. Stuff happens, right? So the expectation and embracing of change just cuts the whole thing off at the knees, freeing one to feel in control of their ability to respond positively to change. Luck is when preparation encounters opportunity. Change is opportunity. Jump on it. Go with it. One can not swim upstream, but one can direct which way downstream they are going. 

There is one more quote from Erich Fromm that is pertinent to this issue, "The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers." All one really needs to do is to breathe. That's it. All the rest is really just trappings. Don't get me wrong, I am very, very attached to much of these trappings. I am very attached to my family and my friends, especially to my two sons. I am very attached to my best friend, my dog, Walter. I am more or less addicted to novelty, to new experiences. But when the stress is high, the anxiety synapses are firing uncontrollably I slow down, sit down and I breathe. I do not alter my strategy of embracing change. Like a blossom opening, manifesting, I observe it, smell it, marvel. Not to suggest that sometimes I am not overwhelmed, that I don't at time simply freak out. Certainly I do, and in certain periods of my life, quite a lot of the last ten years, for example, I have spent so much time in a state of palpable despair that it just plum wore me out.

I sit here on my back patio right now, listening to an ineffably beautiful instrumental guitar piece done by John Denver on his Rocky Mountain High album called Season Suite: Late Winter, Into Spring. The melody is so exquisite, so delicate, a melody straight from above. What did Michelangelo say, the angel already existed in the marble, he just set it free. Thusly so with this one. It is a piece that has, at times in the past, brought such an emotional tidal surge through me that I have no response that isn't spoken in the language of tears. Today I feel fatigue, but not sadness. The past years have been filled with such unexplainably great lunacy and emotional terror and insecurity, but not today. No, not now. For years there persisted such a constant and bottomless sea of betrayal, deception, pain, that every moment was only perceivable to me as a horrific version on now. Always now and not in the good way of being grounded in the now, but rather in a manner in which I felt utterly trapped and unable to even want to see any other possibility that could exist. I felt so trapped in a now that was a series of unending and totally self inflicted mechanisms of torture. It was me who would not step off of the hamster wheel of self destruction. 

Today I know who I am once again. Today I have a past, a present, and a future. I enjoy being in the present today. Each day begins well  and ends well. My emotional state is not a wildly swinging pendulum. Today each day is a gift, that is what I call a present. The present. This one. This life, here, today. 

My job is great. I adore my students. Even the lazy ones, all of them. My daily goal is to break down the barriers between the me in this body, the one pushing these virtual keys, and the me in the bodies of the thirty five beings that share four hours with me mixing consciousness, eroding the perceived edges of ourselves, swimming in the cloud of energy that we revel in whilst we play the game of I'll be teacher this time and you'll be students. The actors on the stage are all playing their parts and it works, it is good, it feels right. 

I have had my coordinator, the Level Two coordinator, Jacob, a thirty something from Michigan, also one of my office mates, tell me not to worry about my student evaluations because everyone understands that newbies here are naturally not gonna get good evals. I assured him that I am in no way concerned both because I expect to get sterling marks from my students and because evaluations do not mean much to me; I know that I am doing a great job and that is much more important to me than a number, and what am I going to do with "good numbers"? What my students and I share each day is a joy. A symbol on paper, on a computer screen, has about as much meaning to me as a number on my home loan, on a credit card statement. They are numbers, symbols, they are not my life or what transpires between me and all of the other mes running around that I am busily pursuing in order to know and to share time and consciousness with. Show me a person who puts much investment in a number and I'll show you someone who is not happy, someone whose medicine cabinet is rife with gastrointestinal tablets, someone with high blood pressure or colitis or back problems. Numbers and other symbols, money, for example, the ultimate symbolic item in most peoples' lives, are an ultimately silly, hollow, fruitless phenomenon to invest one's limited and passing life energies and joys on. They are static, two dimensional parasites, drains, sinkholes, objects of dark magic like Druidic runes that can be cast, spun,  and read, whose placement on a page are as omens and oracles of doom. As for me, I prefer people and I prefer laughter and I prefer sand in my toes, the lapping of the surf, the gurgle of a stream, a rain storm.

If you think that the things that you see with your eyes and feel with your fingers, the manifestations of "reality" that you allow to dictate your decisions, that keep you awake at night filled with worry, are anything but what we as a being, we human beings, collectively agree are real in this hologram that we maneuver through each day, then you are not keeping up with science. What our eyes perceive are only certain, and truly limited, portions of the spectrum of the electromagnetic patterns that we think of as light. If you understand the science of quantum physics, meaning the science of what is, then you also understand that we play in but one of multitudes, perhaps an infinite number, of parallel dimensions that exist all here and now around and through us. You also understand that our feeble perception of time is also an agreed upon phenomenon, that time is just a way for us to understand more simply what is so that we can operate with some sense of order in this vastly, vastly entropic universe. Time indeed does not flow, does not move forward at all. It is not a flowing river, it is a frozen, unmoving river that we agree to walk forward on. Quantum physicists agree that time is fixed, does not move, does not flow. Indeed what we perceive is not actually what is. Today this is what is known. In my small part of this universe I do my very best to play the game that is most suitable for me, to pass on to when and where it serves me best. To play by the rules of the ones who sit at the top of the economic food chain is to give tacit agreement to follow rules put down to benefit those persons.

In some ways, I suppose, to have chosen to come to the Kingdom here, to join in this absurdist theater at the far end of the world is maybe both joining in and not joining into the great game. A land full of symbols, certainly, but symbols I do not yet understand, and a land full of people, like myself, trying to circumvent many of the rules and yet largely here to "get ahead" in the very same system of rules and symbols. While this is undeniably true, I still focus on the fact that I am in a place that incorporates a great deal of disequilibrium, novelty, and constant challenges born out of the uncertainties of a different culture, a different landscape, a different climate (hit 91 degrees today), and a different job. As Fromm noted at the top, creativity requires the embracing of uncertainty; much art erupts out of periods of creative turbulence, and I know in my life I have learned as I have moved along the frozen river that time is that putting myself in tumult can accelerate and give rise to greater bouts of spontaneous artistic creation. When I speak of art I do not restrict that definitions to writing, painting, etc., but to a broader meaning which encompasses a manner of being, a way of perceiving the parts of God around me, the shaking if leaves in the trees, the grin of a two years old, my interaction with another version of me who is tending the cash register at the coffee stand.