Mysteries of English Class #1
ME THE TEACHER: Do you have a cat?
CHANDRA THE STUDENT: (in his thoughts): (मेरो बिरालो छैन! /Who cares? Anyway, you know I don’t. The landlord says no pets, even though the city allows it. But landlords for refugees can do what they want. Anyway, why would I want a cat? We have no mice. I don’t want a cat. I don’t want a snake. Feed a cat? What? I don’t want mice just so the cat has something to eat!
PAOLO FREIRE THE PEDAGOGICAL HERO: Never ask students questions that you already know the answers to.
M: But I’m teaching question formation and short answers!
PF: Then ask questions that matter.
M: What if I come here stumbling in as a solipsistic necrotic that boxes everything into a geometric boredom, and I can’t get it open to see inside and find out for sure, so how do I get it open?
PF: Not by asking Chandra if he has a cat. Why not ask yourself why the mnemonic you use to remember Chandra’s name is the movie Chandu the Magician, the corny racist 1930’s mystery-of-the-orient thriller that would probably be incoherent hilarity to Chandra, the magician Bhutanese farmer of rice, corn, pigs and black and yellow dal?
M: So it’s only to be a bickering back and forth about how to transmit emanations of kinetic poses, epistemic statues that fissure inside calcified language toward some Pygmalion of technical training: Chandra the magician, coding his way off the farm and into the great digital egg of the world? Is that it?
PF: “If the structure does not permit dialog, change the structure.”
M: So just prescribe me a purity of elixirs I drink to de-Hyde my cultural imperialism with a calumny of bourgeois bloodletting?
PF: “Language is never neutral.”
M: Left to suck on dice as history rations hope?
PF: “The radical person is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled.”
M: But what conjuration summons the phosphor and tongue? Should I learn Nepali?
PF: That would not be your effector. Only another mirror to break between your toes.
M: Hey, Jacques Lacan said, “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.”
C: I still don’t want a cat.
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