The Rivers North of the Future

Imagining the future plays a big role in the rhetoric of education. How can we best prepare the learner for an uncertain future is a recurring MoE landscape for curriculum re-engineering.

So when I read:

Maria had longed to be a nun since she was a young girl,
yet when she became old enough discovered that it wasn't at all what she thought.
Programme notes - Sound of Music
I just knew I was onto something.

I spent three hours thinking about Maria’s dilemma, whilst trapped amongst 150 nuns yearning for the hills, and an abundance of edelweiss and lederhosen on Friday night.

I wonder if I will ever be old enough to discover that what I have longed is not all that I had thought. How do any of us get far enough ahead of our lives to have enough to fairly reflect upon – and if we can reflect, does the burden of what has gone before colour all future possibility?

Chance connection rules me at present – so was unsurprised when on receiving the photocopied foreword of a new book by David Cayley, I found an answer of sorts in the title.

The Rivers North of the Future The testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley. House of Anansi Press.

I was surprised by the impact of this connection. I haven’t moved in my mind since. This is quite unusual for me. I haven’t been able to think of much else beyond "thinking about my thinking" about the title ever since.

The book title is taken from a Paul Celan poem, and just wish I could speak German so that I did not have to rely on translation.

In den Flüssen nördlich der Zukunft werf ich das Netz aus, das du zögernd beschwerst mit von Steinem geschriebenen Schatten

In rivers north of the future
I cast the net, which you
hesitantly weight
with shadows stones
wrote.
Translated by Pierre Joris

Into the rivers north of the future
I cast out the net, that you
hesitantly burden with stone-engraved
shadows.
Musca Nagel

“It speaks of a hoped-for “not yet,” time and a place that cannot be reached by simply projecting from the present, since it lies north of the future. And, even in these inaccessible waters, the nets that can be cast out are “burdened with stone-engraved shadows,” the weight of all that has been.” (Charles Tayor in Foreword - Cayley 2005)

The Rivers North of the Future. - I have been playing with these ideas in my mind – they are quite remarkable, creating so many different connections and thought links that I have had to distract and recenter myself in the dance. And when the thinking about the thinking overwhelmed even the dance, I have retreated to the corridor and "onslidswitched" my Hawai’i hula doll who is even now swinging her extraordinary plastic hips to “Pearly Shells”.