Sylvia's Journal

Once again I swiftly surfaced from the depth of the subconscious on the sound of stereophonic alarms going off on either side of the bed (his and hers); two different tones rudely interrupting my active and intense dream state. I was teaching in a workshop that was culturally homogenous but for me. It was a steep hierarchical culture and I tried to read the mood in order to determine whether I could question practices related to how one approached the chief. The workshop swung from chaos with no one listening to a rigid and hierarchical affair with no one speaking but the boss. Luckily the boss was a woman and I felt I was making some headway, explaining to her something about group dynamics. But I never found out whether I had overstepped my bounds or not and whether my intervention made any difference because of those two loud alarms.

Some of the elements of the dream I could connect to my upcoming trip to Afghanistan, others to the movie about Idi Amin I saw last night; and all has some meaning against the general backdrop of my work that takes me, by definition, into deep cultural currents where the surface says little about what happens underneath.

This too was the case, some forty plus years ago, in my years in secondary school in Haarlem, in a class that looks very homogenous except for one girl from China whose parents had settled in Holland. One of my former classmates has been finding people on the internet on various social websites and has brought us all together, at least virtually for now. I am following the back and forth emails full of memories with increasing amazement as my former classmates come to life in ways I never knew them. I discovered that some are dead – which shocked me a bit since I do not consider myself of a generation in which peers are dying already. Others, I learn now, came from very disturbed families or were disturbed themselves. Some can be googled and I learn more things I never even suspected: books written, canvasses painted, music and drugs.

These complex and multidimensional lives were already in full bloom when our paths crossed in the old Latin school tucked away in the center of Haarlem behind the central market square. But I had no idea. There was Emile. I knew that something was wrong because he could not look you into the eye and plucked his eyebrows incessantly with his fingers in one continuous nervous tic. We knew he was odd and we treated him like that – ruthless, without any grace or compassion. Now I think he probably had Asperger’s Syndrome or something like that. He was brilliant and died much too young. I was pleased to see that somewhere on the internet he was honored and that his books live on. Funny, that may not happen for the most adapted of us.

I don’t have many memories of my time at the school, and certainly not of the students. I had found my best friends elsewhere, at the rowing club where I spent all my free time. No one there went to a stuffy Latin school and I always envied their much cooler schools. As a result I never got to know my classmates well and certainly did not appreciate the diversity we had there and the fascinating lives that were unfolding. I am catching up now, with much curiosity and some regret.