My Mum is a custodian of epic proportions. Things from decades even 50 years ago, of worth, are carefully stored. In her garage, there are even the school exercise books of my children with their early writing, poetry and stories. My grandfather’s old medals, certificates, and awards for shooting etc are all on shelves safe and sound. My father’s letters of reference as a young teacher, his qualifications and his many letters are wrapped up with care. The very first letter he sent to my mum over 70 years ago can still be retrieved and read. The pages worn thin, with lines from folding and unfolding, show my father’s handwriting and thoughts. On the wall opposite me is an oil painting by my grandmother which is around a hundred years old. I’ve known this about my mum for years that she takes care of things and people with tenderness. In her attic, above the garage, there is even a huge bag of my artwork from school. It includes work from my primary school years P3 and P4. Today, for the first time in almost 60 years I got a ladder and braved the spiders and their webs, to get the bag down.
As I took out one of my earliest pieces (see above) from P3 in primary school the art took me back. Made of material stuck on a sort of canvas, I can actually remember making it. It is indelibly branded in my memory. I did it in the room used for sewing and knitting. That must sound odd to a modern audience but there was a time when very young primary students would spend hours mastering all kinds of stitches (both in sewing and knitting). As our artwork required material we were making our creations in this room.
The teacher was the wife of the headmaster a man who had suffered from polio as a child and limped badly. His father had been a captain of a tea clipper (merchant sailing vessel of the 1860s) which shows how old I am! Anyway, Mrs Philips, his wife, mostly taught P1s those innocents to whom school must have seemed a bit of a shock. In Northern Ireland you start school aged only 4 and if you happen to have a birthday in July you would be a 3-year-old who had just had turned 4 a matter of weeks previously.
Mrs Philips was terrifying indeed. She seemed permanently furious with all children. I am not sure if she was born like that or had morphed into this type of enraged teacher with age but the end result was awful. This particular picture, of mine I remember so well because while I made it one of her P1s was locked in the sewing box room adjacent to the class and roared and wept the entire period. Someone whispered that he had wet himself with fear and as punishment had been locked in the storage cupboard. The sound of his howls and his suffering was heart-breaking and being young myself the horror of it went deep. Sometime during that endless class, I promised myself I would never become immune to the suffering of others. As I stuck material with a shaking hand onto my board I pledged that if there was any other choice as an adult I would choose not to inflict pain such as this.
In later years I could rationalize and tell myself that perhaps Mrs Philips had not always been like this. Maybe, she had been a good mother and treated her own children well. Indeed, it was possible she had taught primary school for years and did a tremendous job and this present version of herself was not characteristic of the real person she had been for most of her adult life. I began to think of people like a graphic line with goodness on the y-axis and time on the x-axis, sometimes down and sometimes up. Perhaps, Mrs Philips was in the abusive phase only at this point in her life?
Then, at university, I suddenly thought that a simple line is not adequate to reflect a person. Perhaps instead we should use an extra dimension, making an area. What if a person’s character is proportional to the area under the line. That would be much harder to determine but be more accurate because if you stayed loving for 40 of your 60 years then you would have a larger area under the curve. It makes sense, doesn’t it? If you had been a vicious person for 60 years you could end up with an area of roughly 120 but a loving person for that length of time would have a tremendous score of 600! But, what if you are a hurtful teacher but a loving mother?
Obviously, we need another dimension. What if we added a three-dimensional approach to our diagram? This could represent all the other aspects of our lives, how we treat our parents, grandparents, neighbours, our dog etc. Instead of an area, we would be looking at a volume where that line is rotated through 360 degrees in space. Here it is shown for a simple line rather than our jagged line but it gives the principle. Our character is now represented not by a line or an area but by solid volume.
But though this might reflect much more about a person’s character it still fails to take into account all the interactions that happen to each of us as we pass through life. You can meet an amazing person who inspires you to be better than you ever were before. So perhaps 3-dimensional shapes that interact with others to substantially change would be closer to reality. Not a totally solid volume but a more malleable shape.
Then, we have had occasions when religions have come along and changed not only individuals but whole civilizations. It often seems that at the start of a religion dramatic positive changes happen to a whole populations' spirituality and then with time corruption can set in. Meaningless rituals and corrupt clergy can play too big a role. Perhaps, then the character can be represented as malleable solids/volumes interacting with each other in a liquid (representing for example religion). When religion is a dense, deep, inspirational contribution to life the molded volumes/solids all float higher on top. When, religion becomes corrupt, materialistic, divisive, and fanatical the liquid becomes less dense and lighter without meaning or sense at which point the shapes sink into its depths far from the surface above.
Knowledge is praiseworthy when it is coupled with ethical conduct and virtuous character ...
Bahá'í writings
