Supplementary materials to FB post of August 9, 2026, on

𝗛𝗮𝗹𝗳𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗼𝗻 . . . 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘀𝗳𝗶𝗲𝗱.

Translation in English of Gabriel García Márquez's chronicle 'La Marquesita de la Sierpe.'

(The translation is followed by the original text in Spanish)

Malaria, witchcraft, and superstitions in a region of the Atlantic Coast: The man who stepped into legend.

A few years ago, a ghostly, glassy-eyed man with a belly swollen and taut as a drum walked into a city doctor's office. He said: "Doctor, I’ve come for you to take out a monkey someone put in my belly." And he explained that he came from the southeast of the department of Bolívar, from a swampland situated between San Jorge and the Cauca, beyond the cane fields of La Mojana, beyond the lowlands of La Pureza, the brambles of La Ventura, and the marshes of La Guaripa. He came from La Sierpe, a land of legend within the Atlantic coastal region of Colombia, where one of the most common episodes of daily life is to avenge an offense with a curse such as to let a monkey be born, grow, and reproduce inside the offender's belly.

A journey of no return

Speaking of La Sierpe is nothing new, for the rice merchants of San Jorge in Magangué know that a good, large grain is cultivated there, and that it can be acquired at normal prices despite transport difficulties. Anyone who feels the desire to travel to that region and has the heart to do so can catch a motorboat in Magangué that will carry them, in a few hours, navigating through the Mojana branch to the port of Sucre. There they will rent a mount that will lead them in half a day to La Guaripa. And, finally, after two days of traveling with water and mud up to their waist, they will find themselves in the quagmires of La Sierpe. Going there is relatively easy. The difficult part is returning, for it would not be at all strange if, around the bend by a ceiba tree, they force you with machete blows to dismount and right there bury you, sitting up; or make you burst from peritonitis, your belly filled with frogs.

Whoever decides to run the risks of this adventure will not find a town. They will find a swampy, tangled region where only at great intervals one catches a glimpse of sunlight. Every two or three hours they will find a primitive house, inhabited by men and women devastated by malaria, who racially present no difference whatsoever from ordinary Colombians. There are good and bad people, as everywhere, but more suspicious of outsiders than in any other place. They amuse themselves like everyone else, with a drum, a millet cane flute, and a large earthenware jar filled with aguardiente (anise-flavored liqueur derived from sugarcane) distilled in one of the rooms of the house. They are people who live poorly and eat poorly, but they do both in abundance; people who have invented prayers to protect themselves from snakebites, but are always ready to travel through the marshes for two days and two nights to pay whatever is asked for a painkiller.

The day the buzzard sings

Nothing will make the inhabitants of La Sierpe abandon their hell of malaria, witchcraft, animals, and superstitions. They harvest rice and pray that it is of good quality; they sell it in nearby towns and, with the proceeds, buy kerosene, clothes, and patented medicines. They are convinced Catholics, but they practice religion in their own way, like most Colombian peasants. They celebrate Good Friday with succulent feasts of beef, but their Good Friday is not movable; it is always the first Friday of March, the day when, according to them, "the buzzard sings."

They fall in love like Catholics and like Spaniards.
They have a tragic sense of love, marked by jealousy, aguardiente, and machete blows; and a poetic sensibility that inspires suitors to sing their maidens long, humorous love songs, of a naive and strange beauty. They marry in the Catholic tradition in nearby settlements and celebrate the event with wild parties, in one of which, on a certain occasion, the bride turned up dead from machete blows. They are people who believe in God, the Virgin, and the mystery of the Holy Trinity, but worship them in whatever object in which they think to discover divine powers, and they pray to them with prayers they have invented themselves. But above all—and in this they differ from the rest of Colombians—they believe in La Marquesita.

La Marquesita

The oldest inhabitants of La Sierpe heard from their grandparents that many years ago there lived in the region a kind, petite Spanish woman, owner of a fabulous wealth represented by livestock, gold objects, and precious stones, who was known by the name of La Marquesita. According to traditional description, the Spanish woman was fair and blonde, and never knew a husband in her life. But more than for her kindness and her valuable estate, La Marquesita was admired, respected, and served because she knew all the secret prayers to do good and evil; to raise a dying man from his bed while knowing no more of him than a description of his physique and the precise location of his residence; or to send a serpent through the quagmires so that, six days later, it would bring death to a specific enemy.

La Marquesita was a sort of big mama to those who served her in La Sierpe. She had a large, sumptuous house in the center of what is now known as the Swampland of La Sierpe. "A house with corridors and iron windows," as it is described today by those who speak about that extraordinary woman, whose herd "was so large that it took more than nine days for it to pass by." La Marquesita lived alone in her house, but once a year she made a long journey throughout the region, visiting her protégés, healing the sick, and solving economic problems.

La Marquesita could be in different places at the same time, walk on water, and call a person from her house, no matter where they were in La Sierpe. The only thing she could not do was resurrect the dead, because the souls of the dead did not belong to her. "La Marquesita had a pact with the devil," they say in La Sierpe.

The other side of the world

Legend says that La Marquesita lived as long as she wanted. And according to the most widespread version, she wanted to live more than 200 years. Her death was preceded by signs from above, earth tremors, and bad dreams among the inhabitants of La Sierpe. Before dying, La Marquesita passed on many of her secret powers to her preferred servants, except that of eternal life. She gathered her fabulous flocks in front of her house and let them circle around her for two days, until the swamp of La Sierpe was formed, a thick, inextricable sea whose surface, covered in anemones, prevents its exact boundaries from being known. For those who know the accessible side of the swamp, the region ends at the opposite shore. But until a few years ago, on that shore "the world ended, and it was guarded by a black bull with hooves and horns of gold."

It is in the center of that swamp where the inhabitants of La Sierpe believe La Marquesita's treasure and the secret to eternal life are buried.

The man who stepped into legend

A well-known character in the small settlements near La Sierpe is a rice farmer who drags a swollen, monstrous foot. He is the person who has stepped closest to the treasures of La Marquesita. He himself tells that one day he decided to no longer harvest rice, and ventured toward the center of the swamp in search of the buried wealth. Like all inhabitants of La Sierpe, he knew that the search had to be carried out during the first two days of the month of November, "in a year that is not a leap year." The man waited for the date, arrived at the edge of the swamp in the final days of October, and prepared a raft with a stove, a box of rice, bananas, cassava, salt, and a kerosene lamp. He also carried a gourd of fresh water, because the swamp water causes hernias in men, confuses women, and causes internal infections in animals.

On the 2^nd of November, the legend says, there grows every year in the center of the swamp "a calabash tree with gourds of gold," with, tied to its trunk, a canoe "that will go on its own, navigating without a skipper," toward the place where the Big Mama buried her riches. The legend adds that the canoe is guarded by gigantic rattlesnakes and white alligators.

The voyage of wonders

The man's description of his adventure is as fantastic as the legend of La Marquesita. He says that during the first twelve hours of November 1st, he navigated through the aquatic flora that grew increasingly dense and tall. He noticed nothing extraordinary that day. But at dusk, he smelled all around him strong odors of food being prepared, which stimulated his appetite and forced him to eat and drink without measure until dawn. Then, the smells were replaced by fantastic noises, "like the bellowing of a herd of bulls," and by the clamor of parrots, monkeys, and swamp hens. At dawn on November 2nd, he saw strange animals flying around the raft, winged quadrupeds with the heads and beaks of birds, and stone-curlews with metallic, shimmering plumage. Despite the noises and the slowness with which the raft advanced through the tough, tangled flora, the man says he kept paddling inward, in pursuit of the gold, precious stones, and the secret of eternal life of La Marquesita. Suddenly, at sunset on the 2nd, all noises ceased, the vegetation became less hostile, and on the horizon shone the tree of marvelous gourds brilliantly, amidst a tight ring of white spines. But "it was at a distance of about three days."

The greedy adventurer says he then paddled backward, because he did not have enough water and food for the journey to the tree. When he disembarked, his foot was beginning to swell and he felt exhausted, but he was left with the satisfaction of being the only man in La Sierpe who has dared to step onto the grounds of legend.

---ooo---

Following is the original text in Spanish:

Malaria, hechicería y supersticiones en una región de la Costa Atlántica. El hombre que pisó la leyenda.

 

Hace algunos años vino al consultorio de un médico de la ciudad un hombre espectral, vidrioso, con el vientre abultado y tenso como un tambor. Dijo: "Doctor,  vengo para que me saque un mico que me metieron en la barriga" Y explicó que venía del sureste del departamento de Bolívar, de un cenegal situado entre San Jorge y el Cauca, más allá de los cañaduzales de La Mojana, más allá de los bajos de La Pureza, de los breñales de La Ventura y de los pantanos de La Guaripa. Venía de La Sierpe, un país de leyenda dentro de la costa atlántica de Colombia, donde uno de los episodios más corrientes de la vida diaria es vengar una ofensa con un maleficio como ese de hacer que al ofensor le nazca, le crezca y se le reproduzca un mico dentro del vientre.

Viaje sin regreso

No es una novedad hablar de La Sierpe, pues los comerciantes en arroz del San Jorge en Magangué saben que allí se cultiva un grano bueno y grande, y que es posible adquirirlo a precios normales, a pesar de las dificultades del transporte. Quien se sienta con deseos de viajar a esa región y tenga ánimos para hacerlo, puede tomar en Magangué una lancha que en pocas horas lo conducirá, navegando por el brazo Mojana, hasta el puerto de Sucre. Allí tomará en alquiler una bestia que en medio día lo conducirá a La Guaripa. Y, finalmente luego de dos días de viaje con el agua y el cieno a la cintura, se encontrará en los tremedales de La Sierpe La ida es relativamente fácil. Lo difícil es el regreso, pues no tendría nada de extraño que a la vuelta de una ceiba lo bajaran de la bestia a machetazos y allí mismo lo enterraran sentado; o que reventara de peritonitis, con el vientre lleno de ranas.

Quien decida correr los riesgos de esta aventura, no encontrará un pueblo. Encontrará una región cenagosa, enmarañada, en la que sólo a grandes trechos se sorprende un atisbo de sol. Cada dos o tres horas encontrará una casa primitiva, en la que viven hombres y mujeres devastados por la malaria, que racialmente no presentan diferencia alguna con los colombianos comunes. Hay gente buena y mala, como en todas partes, pero más desconfiada de los forasteros que en cualquiera otra. Se divierten como todo el mundo, con un tambor, una caña de millo y una tinaja de aguardiente destilado en uno de los cuartos de la casa. Es gente que vive mal y come mal, pero hace ambas cosas en abundancia; que ha inventado oraciones para preservarse de las mordeduras de las serpientes, pero está siempre dispuesta a viajar a través de los pantanos durante dos días y dos noches para pagar lo que le pidan por un analgésico.

 El día que canta el gallinazo

 A los habitantes de La Sierpe nada los hará abandonar su infierno de malaria, de hechicería, de animales y supersticiones. Cosechan arroz  y tienen oraciones para que sea de buena calidad; lo venden en los pueblos cercanos y con el producto de la venta compran petróleo, ropa y medicinas de patente. Son católicos convencidos, pero practican la religión a su manera, como la mayoría de los campesinos colombianos. Celebran el Viernes Santo con suculentas comilonas de carne de res, pero su Viernes Santo no es móvil, sino el primer viernes de marzo, día en que según ellos "canta el gallinazo".

 Se enamoran como católicos y como españoles. Tienen un sentido trágico del amor, con celos, aguardiente y machetazos; y un sentido poético, que estimula a los galanes para cantar a su doncella largas y graciosas coplas de amor, de una belleza ingenua y extraña. Se casan católicamente en los pueblos vecinos y celebran el acontecimiento con fiestas borrascosas, de una de las cuales , en alguna ocasión resultó muerta a machetazos la desposada. Es gente que cree en Dios, en la Virgen y en el misterio de la Santísima Trinidad, pero los adoran en cualquier objeto en el que ellos crean descubrir facultades divinas y les rezan oraciones inventadas por ellos mismos. Pero sobre todo -y en esto se diferencian del resto de los colombianos- creen en La Marquesita.

 La Marquesita

 Los más viejos habitantes de La Sierpe oyeron decir a sus abuelos que hace muchos años vivió en la región una española bondadosa y menuda, dueña de una fabulosa riqueza representada en animales, objetos de oro y piedras preciosas, a quien se conoció con el nombre de La Marquesita. Según la descripción tradicional, la española era blanca y rubia, y no conoció marido en su vida. Pero más que por su bondad y por su valiosa hacienda, La Marquesita era admirada, respetada y servida porque conocía todas las oraciones secretas para hacer el bien y el mal; para levantar del lecho a un moribundo no conociendo de él nada más que la descripción de su físico y el lugar preciso de su residencia; o para enviar a una serpiente a través de los tremedales, a que seis días después diera muerte a un enemigo determinado.

La Marquesita era una especie de gran mamá de quienes le servían en La Sierpe. Tenía una casa grande y suntuosa en el centro de  la que ahora es conocida como la Ciénaga de la Sierpe. "Una casa con corredores y ventanas de hierro", según la describen ahora quienes hablan de aquella extraordinaria mujer, cuyo ganado "era tanto que duraba pasando más de 9 días". La Marquesita vivía sola en su casa, pero una vez al año hacía un largo viaje por toda la región, visitando a sus protegidos, sanando a los enfermos y resolviendo problemas económicos.

La Marquesita podía estar en diferentes lugares a la vez, caminar sobre las aguas y llamar desde su casa a una persona, en cualquier lugar de La Sierpe en que ésta se encontrara. Lo único que no podía hacer era resucitar a los muertos, porque el alma de los muertos no le pertenecía. "La Marquesita tenía pacto con el diablo", explican en La Sierpe.

La otra orilla del mundo

La leyenda dice que La Marquesita vivió todo el tiempo que quiso. Y según la versión más generalizada, quiso vivir más de 200 años. Su muerte estuvo precedida de signos celestes, de trastornos telúricos y de malos sueños de las habitantes de La Sierpe. Antes de morir, La Marquesita comunicó a sus servidores preferidos muchos de sus poderes secretos, menos el de la vida eterna. Concentró frente a su casa sus fabulosos rebaños y los hizo girar durante dos días en torno a ella, hasta cuando se formó la ciénaga de La Sierpe, un mar espeso, inextricable, cuya superficie cubierta de anémonas impide que se conozcan sus límites exactos. Para quienes conocen la orilla accesible de la ciénaga, la región termina en la orilla opuesta. Pero hasta hace unos años,  en esa orilla "se acababa el mundo y estaba custodiada por un toro negro con pezuñas y cuernos de oro".

Es en el centro de esa ciénaga donde los habitantes de La Sierpe creen que están sepultados el tesoro de La Marquesita y el secreto de la vida eterna.

El hombre que pisó la leyenda

Un personaje muy conocido en los villorrios cercanos a La Sierpe, es un arrocero que arrastra un pie hinchado y monstruoso.Es la persona que más cerca ha pisado los tesoros de La Marquesita. El mismo cuenta que un día resolvió no cosechar más arroz, y se aventuró hacia el centro de la ciénaga en busca de la riqueza sepultada. Como todos los habitantes de La Sierpe, éste sabía que la búsqueda debía realizarse en los dos primeros días del mes de noviembre, "en un año que no sea bisiesto". El hombre esperó la fecha, llegó a la orilla de la ciénaga en los últimos días de octubre, y preparó una balsa con un fogón, una caja de arroz, plátanos, yuca, sal y una lámpara de petróleo. Llevó asimismo un calabazo de agua, porque la ciénaga produce hernia en el hombre, desarreglos en la mujer e infecciones internas en los animales.

El 2 de noviembre, dice la leyenda, en el centro de la ciénaga crece todos los años "un totumo con calabazos de oro", a cuyo tronco está amarrada una canoa "que irá sola, navegando sin patrón", hacia el lugar en que la gran mamá sepultó sus riquezas. La leyenda agrega que la canoa está custodiada por gigantescas culebras de cascabel y por caimanes blancos.

El viaje de las maravillas

La descripción que hace el hombre de su aventura es tan fantástica como la leyenda de La Marquesita. Dice que durante las primeras doce horas del 1º de noviembre navegó por entre la flora acuática, cada vez más apretada y alta. No advirtió ese día nada extraordinario. Pero al anochecer sintió en torno suyo fuertes olores de alimentos en elaboración, que estimularon su apetito y lo obligaron a comer y beber sin medida hasta la madrugada. Luego los olores fueron reemplazados por ruidos fantásticos, "como el bramido de un viaje de toros", y por la alharaca de loros, micos y gallitos de ciénaga. Al amanecer del 2 de noviembre vio volar en torno de la balsa extraños animales, cuadrúpedos alados con cabezas y picos de aves y alcaravanes de plumaje metálico y resplandeciente. A pesar de los ruidos y de la lentitud con que la balsa avanzaba por entre la flora dura y enmarañada, el hombre dice que siguió bogando hacia adentro, en persecución del oro, las piedras preciosas y el secreto de la vida eterna de La Marquesita. Súbitamente, al atardecer del 2, cesaron todos los ruidos, la vegetación se hizo menos hostil y en el horizonte resplandeció el árbol de los calabazos maravillosos, entre un apretado cerco de espinazos blancos. Pero "estaba a una distancia como de tres días".

El codicioso aventurero dice que navegó entonces hacia atrás, porque no le alcanzaban el agua y los alimentos para el viaje hasta el árbol. Cuando desembarcó, el pie empezaba a hinchársele y se sentía extenuado, pero le quedaba la satisfacción de ser el único hombre de La Sierpe que se ha atrevido a pisarle los terrenos a la leyenda.

FOOTSTEPS TO MEASURING CELESTIAL BODIES: A giant leap towards understanding the Universe

Today, December 4, 2020, at 12:38 p.m. local time in France, I completed my first circumambulation of the planet Neptune. No rocket science was involved. I walked the 154,704.6 km length of the equatorial circumference of the planet in as little as 27 years, three months, and 27 days after I had started walking on August 9, 1993. During that same period, I had already circumambulated our own planet Earth three times, which takes no more than seven years each time, and am well on my way to complete the fourth round next year. But what does it mean to me?

Undertaking such journeys on foot impacts one in ways I find difficult to describe. It must be experienced. Knowing that the Earth's equatorial diameter is 12742 km and its circumference 40,030 km is one thing, but having walked those distances is something totally different. Over the past fifty years, I must have flown around the world several hundred times. It made hardly an impression on me. The more sophisticated the flying machines became, the more boring the journeys. I love flying, though, on small single-engine aircraft at low altitude, where one feels still connected to the Earth. But nothing beats walking. Walking has shown me how precious small our planet is, but also how beautiful it is, a sacred celestial object that I can circumambulate respectfully, leaving only light removable footprints behind.

Over the past four weeks, I have enjoyed walking in Yusraland, the land where half a year ago we buried Yusra and where the memories of her are vibrantly alive. To enter it, one crosses a small ancient bridge that dates back to the Middle Ages. From there, narrow winding trails go up and down through the mountainous terrain. Walking those paths, creating them where there aren't any, makes one breathe deeply in ways that awaken the spirit and make one feel at ease—'ease,' the profound literal meaning of Yusra's name.

YUSRA LAILA VISSER (1975-2020): An extraordinary life that ended abruptly

Late Anthropocene Rock Art Discovered on Planet Earth

A recent expedition to planet Earth found this interesting piece of late Anthropocene rock art. Earth is the planet where it is believed that our Galactic ancestors, Homo sapiens, once lived. The extraordinary piece of rock art depicted with this brief communication was found in a region on Earth called Provence in a country known as France. It dates back to around the year 2000 CE of the Earth calendar. It expresses the idea of 'love' as a binding force that keeps female and male members of the species together.

The rock painting predates by about 500 Earth years the great mass extinction to which Homo sapiens and many other species succumbed. While life is still present on Earth, it does no longer include intelligent life.

The Homo sapiens species is believed to have suffered from disharmony between its capacity to think rationally and its ability to at the same time make adjustments to its behavior in accordance with rational thought. Around the time of our rock painting there had been awareness of impending doom and warnings had been given, as can be deduced from a review article on "Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?" that appeared in 2011 (Earth calendar, CE) in the journal Nature, one of two leading scientific journals held in high esteem by the scientific community among Homo sapiens. Apparently, existing knowledge about the risks of irreversible human impact on the environment failed to result in fundamental change to patterns of behavior among the majority of our ancestors.

We owe our own existence and subsequent evolution to the development of rudimentary forms of space travel coinciding with the rapidly evolving Sixth mass extinction. It allowed a small community of Homo sapiens to escape the environmental disasters that hit planet Earth, initially establishing a small extraterrestrial community and eventually migrating to our own corner of the Galaxy.

More research is still needed to further validate the above findings.

(As earlier published on LinkedIn.)

20 YEARS OF WALKING

Twenty years ago I started walking. 

Yes, I had been walking before, but on Monday, 9 August 1993, at 6 a.m., while working in Harare, Zimbabwe, I started out on a walk wearing a pedometer, intent on walking at least 100 km that week and continue to do so every week after, accurately measuring my achievements. It’s a practice that has changed my life. It also possibly saved my life on some crucial occasions in 2008 and 2010 when a perfect state of health was essential to overcoming, and completely healing from, serious medical afflictions, which might otherwise have taken my life. Indeed, leading an active life, and in general adopting lifestyles and eating habits that remain attuned to the conditions under which we historically evolved, has been shown to contribute to good physical and mental health. Walking has, for me, become an important ingredient of the care I take to stay healthy.

Today, 7305 days or 20 years later, I have walked a total of 104,988 km. That’s an average of just over one hundred km per week. When the weather cooperates, as it currently does in southern France, I easily walk weekly distances varying from 150 to 180 km. At other times of the year, or when conditions of work interfere with my walking habits, I may walk less than a hundred km a week. My total distance walked as of today corresponds to more than two and a half times the length of a walk around the earth's equator and it’s more than a quarter of the distance between the earth and the moon. Imagine that during your lifetime you could actually walk to the moon! I have documented, and keep updating, my walking history on a weekly basis on my walking page.

Many people find it difficult to believe that it is possible for ordinary people to do what I have been doing over the past 20 years. The simple truth is that it is not difficult at all once you have made the decision to get going. If you are totally unaccustomed to walking you may want to set yourself a lower standard initially, lower than the one I adopted 20 years ago after I had been walking for several months in a less controlled fashion. You’ll soon discover that you want to improve on your initial target. Just try and experience the benefit.

Pedometers don't cost much. The good ones are surprisingly accurate. The one shown in the picture is what I am currently using. It can be connected via a USB port to a computer, allowing its contents to be downloaded from time to time for the purpose of record keeping and analysis. It's the kind of feedback you need to stay on track.

But who has the time to walk 15 km a day? Well, everyone. It's a matter of priorities. Look, for instance, at how much time one may spend on daily errands while driving around, including ending up in traffic jams and struggling to find a convenient parking spot. Many of the trips we undertake by car are to destinations only a few miles away. Such distances can easily be walked. Or, taking another example, consider the time spent sitting in front of a TV screen, mostly out of habit rather than based on motivated choices. It's my experience of the past 20 years that, all in all, my predilection for walking hasn't cost me a minute. Rather, it is far more likely that I gained years in terms of meaningful life experience. I know no better way than walking to relax the body and give the mind a chance to get fully and creatively engaged. 

Learning to live: Weighing the odds

Not long ago I received medical advice to undergo a complex surgical procedure to correct a birth defect I had been aware of for the past 18 years. I'm a perfectly healthy person otherwise, and even the congenital insufficiency of which I had been told I suffer doesn't really affect me in my daily life. However, if I don't act now I may still feel perfectly healthy for a couple more years, but it won't last for ever and things will likely start gradually deteriorating in the longer run, affecting my overall fitness and eventually seriously reducing my functionality. I could wait and undergo the operation later, perhaps several years in the future, but I will be older and perhaps less healthy by then, meaning that there will be a greater risk. The average success rate of the operation is 98%. I accepted the medical advice, and the odds of success, and will undergo the operation now--that is to say in the near future--rather than later, but it made me think. Life is a risky business.

The Austrian painter Egon Schiele lived from 1890 to 1918. Many of the works he produced during the 28 years of his life can be seen in the Leopold Museum in Vienna. 'Entschwebung' (see above) is one of them. It was painted in 1915. According to the description that accompanies the displayed work in the museum, "a partially withered meadow, which symbolizes the world, is the backdrop to the act of dying of two individuals. The lower figure still touches the ground with his feet, but his legs are about to give way. The top figure is dead, he levitates."

As one grows older, 'learning to live'--the theme of this brief reflection--turns increasingly into the challenge of learning to live comfortably with the end of life in mind. My feet still touch the ground, quite firmly actually, but thoughts about that margin of two percent of unsuccessful operations enhance perceptions of the odds of life. At any age, life is already often a balancing act of weighing the risks now against potential opportunities later. Relative certainty regarding life's affordances in the short run are balanced against the greater uncertainty of what can potentially be achieved in a longer term perspective. But the older one grows, the more limited the overall time span becomes in which short and long term considerations must be accommodated, until, eventually, the distinction starts disappearing altogether. By then, the transition between still touching the ground and already levitating becomes a smooth one.

Casting, occasionally, our anchor in the ocean of time

In recent days, the Learning Development Institute has started organizing so-called Lakeside Conversations. These dialogic events are being hosted by Lya and Jan Visser on behalf of the Institute. Following is a brief description of what these conversations entail.

Here is what we have in mind with the Lakeside Conversations.

The Learning Development Institute has, over the ten years of its existence, organized transdisciplinary dialogue that usually involved groups of participants of several tens to more than a hundred people at a time. Examples are the debates on the Meaning of Learning (MOL), those around the Book of Problems (BOP) or concerning the Building of the Scientific Mind (BtSM). Traces of these past events can be found in various locations on the Web site of the Learning Development Institute. On an on-and-off basis, we have also opened our house to receive guests from the LDI community or sympathetic to LDI's mission and had very interesting conversations with them. Based on that valuable experience, we have now decided to become more proactive in this area and, still on an ad hoc basis, wish to host, whenever the opportunity arises, conversations about things that matter at one of the places where we regularly live in southern France and The Netherlands, or even where we may be traveling, such as in South Florida.


These events are called Lakeside Conversations or, in French, Conversations au bord du lac, not only because of the setting of where we spend part of our time in the Low Countries, literally in the immediate vicinity of a small lake, called Lingemeer (Lake Linge), but also inspired by the opening lines of a poem written in 1820 by Alphonse de Lamartine.

And so, driven on ceaselessly toward
new shores, carried beyond return into eternal
darkness, shall we never cast anchor for a
single day in the ocean of time?

Click here for the full translation of this beautiful poem.

We are glad that these localized meetings have a much smaller ecological footprint than the larger ones we will continue to organize from time to time.

This is how it works.

Typically, these events take place around dishes and glasses whose delicious, refreshing and uplifting contents we share as much as the thoughts, ideas and experiences we bring to the table. While, by nature of these events, participation is by invitation, anyone is welcome to indicate their interest in participating by writing to us. In other words, if you are part of the LDI community, i.e., if you have ever seriously collaborated with us on implementing LDI's mission, don't hesitate to be in touch if you happen to be in or to be traveling to The Netherlands or France or any of those multiple other places where we may be, because we stay never very long anywhere. We shall be happy to host you, as many of you have experienced in the past, and invite, whenever possible, like minded spirits to cast their anchor at the same place, so that we can all share thoughts, food and drinks. In the spirit of social networking, those invited are welcome to suggests others whom they feel should join the party. This may include joining at a distance via some form of teleconferencing, such as by using Skype video or audio, via telephone, or employing a video link using the H.323 standard.


Here is what we like the Lakeside Conversations to focus on.

We feel that there is no shortage of issues that serve as food for thought. Some of them may be related to LDI's current work in the areas of Building the Scientific Mind (BtSM) and Learning for Sustainable Futures (LfSF). However, we are naturally also open to any suggestions. Over time, we assume some workable process will emerge to ensure that matters of discussion reflect the interests of the community of those who participate in these conversations, while at the same time serving to propel LDI's work forward. They may well turn out to fall in line with Christopher Phillips's ideas of the Socrates Café.

Just as a start, during the past three weeks we had conversations about the development of Basic Books in Science for the Life Sciences (Sept 2, 2009); Collective Intelligence (Sept 13, 2009); and Learning for Sustainable Futures (Sept 17, 2009). No more than a start, but the success of these initial Lakeside Conversations and the enthusiasm they generated among those who participated, encourages us to continue to develop this model further.

To stay tuned join the Facebook page of the Learning Development Institute, which will announce forthcoming events whenever they are being planned long enough in advance, or check out regularly the Web site of the Learning Development Institute.

Understanding the world in diverse ways: Kieran Egan's perspective on reimagining the learning environment

In The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up, Kieran Egan refers to education as "the process in which we maximize the tool kit we individually take from the external storehouse of culture" (p. 40). I take the term 'education' to comprise any kind of learning, whether deliberately self-chosen, culturally expected, state enforced or facilitated, or accidentally engaged in. Egan's affirmation then makes sense. The accelerated evolution of our species at its current stage of development is to a much greater extent determined by our ability to interact with the cultural legacy to which our ancestors contributed than by the genomic heritage they left behind. This sets us apart from any other species in the animal kingdom. It is the reason why the particular development our brains have undergone is the greatest gift we owe to evolution.

The tools Egan refers to are cognitive tools, the kind of mental faculties that "enable the brains to do cultural work" (p. 40). In fact, they are themselves part of the cultural heritage of humankind. One acquires the tools and the abilities associated with their usage by interacting with that cultural heritage. Hence Egan's above cited notion of education. He identifies these tools in the context of five different kinds of understanding, i.e., somatic, mythic, romantic, philosophical, and ironic understanding. The table below provides a quick overview of these five kinds of understanding. A much more elaborate rationale can be found in Chapter 3 of Egan's book.


We develop the cognitive tools in these five domains successively as we grow more mature in our understanding of the world. However, as we become mentally more sophisticated, we mustn't throw out prior ways of understanding as we develop the cognitive tools associated with new ways of understanding. As we progress through life we need them all. We must keep the prior tools in our tool kits as we are continually in need of understanding the world in complex ways and from multiple perspectives.

Egan's idea of 'cognitive tools that allow the brains to do cultural work' leading to different kinds of understanding is based on a conception of the mind as "an ambivalent thing, made up of culture drawn from outside the organism and of cognition within" (p. 84). It creates a framework for thinking about educational reform based on a scheme that "combines epistemological, psychological and emotional characteristics together" (p. 84).

Egan uses that scheme in the second half of the book in which he describes a history of the future of education on earth from 2010 to 2060 in five ten-year intervals from the perspective of a fictitious researcher coming from a planet outside our own solar system. This is an interesting way to test the ideas developed in the first part of the book by means of a thought experiment regarding how the world would change if such ideas were put into practice in such a way as to avoid that they would be rejected. After all, many good ideas get rejected as soon as it comes to implementing them in settings that are impervious to change, as both traditionalist and progressivist educational environments tend to be.

Depending on one's attitude towards anything Utopian, one may variously like the description that ensues. I, for one, was more enthralled by what I read in the first part of the book than by my subsequent exposure to the road to Utopia. The more ideal the world of education became as the story of the future enfolded in Egan's book, the more uncomfortable I felt with the impending state of perfection and the gradual disappearance of problems. Would there be anything left after 2060 that one might want to meaningfully engage in to further improve the world and the human condition?

One of the more provocative assertions regarding the future of education has to do with the use of technology in education. Current expectations are that technology will have a positive influence on the quality of the school environment. Contrary to that expectation, Egan's thought experiment points towards the "near absence" (p. 167) of technology in the schools in the 2040-2050 decade. Says Egan:

'Access to information' had been one of the mantras of the early days, when computers began to have an effect on education. But access to knowledge had never been the problem, and it should have been clear then, and was to many, of course. Even a hundred years earlier, students had access to plenty of knowledge; the problem was getting it into the students, and getting it to mean anything much to them. The most fundamental change in schooling was tied up with precisely that problem. Technology had its uses in providing immediate access to any information required, but the more important feature of the new schooling was the recognition of how to use the older technologies of human communication like the story and mental images, which connect knowledge with human emotions. (pp. 167-168.)

No doubt, interesting food for thought!

REFERENCE

Egan, K. (2008). The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Syngué sabour

I could not recall having ever heard of Atiq Rahimi when a friend of mine in nearby Avignon, whom I visited the other day, told me about a book he had just read that he felt I shouldn't fail reading myself as well. The scanty details he provided about the story itself were unconvincing, but something in his voice that words cannot describe told me that I had no choice but buying the book. So, back at home, already past midnight, I ordered the book online and found it in the mail two days later. Another three days and I had read the book.

Atiq Rahimi is an Afghan novelist and filmmaker, exiled in Paris, France, whose previous work was written in Farsi. Singué sabour - Pierre de patience (not translated into English yet, as far as I know) is his first novel directly written in French. It landed him the prestigious Prix Goncourt, an honor rarely bestowed on other than French nationals.

Rahimi writes a powerful prose. Low impact short sentences that together create a cumulative effect that is different from, but not less potent than some of the famous opening lines known from the literature that resonate in the mind long after they have been read. In a short opening paragraph Rahimi leads his readers into a room that will be the setting for most of what happens as the story unfolds. Its various features are painted with broad strokes of the brush. The second paragraph focuses the readers’ attention on a man’s photo portrait in that same room, which is otherwise devoid of ornaments. In the third paragraph the camera pans to a man, lying on a mattress against a wall opposite the photograph. The same man as the one depicted in the portrait, but older now and exhausted. In the fourth paragraph we see the man being nursed by a woman, his wife. We gradually learn that the man is a fighter with some religious cause. Nothing out of the ordinary in a country like Afghanistan, where most people adhere to some religious cause and a fair proportion of the men translate such adherence into violent opposition to those who share different convictions. It so happens that he got wounded, can no longer move or speak, and is being kept alive thanks to the care of the woman.

In the course of the events the woman becomes convinced that the man listens to her and can understand her, despite the fact that he cannot speak or emit any signal that would show comprehension. But any such proof is not really what she is looking for. According to a Persian myth there exists a magic stone, the ‘patience stone’ (syngué sabour), that you need merely put in front of you to entrust to it all your misery and suffering. The stone will, like a sponge, absorb it all until, one day, it bursts into pieces. On that day you will be relieved. The man having become the woman’s singué sabour, the novel turns into a monologue that the reader overhears. The monologue reflects some of the specificity of the man-woman relationships as they are embedded in Afghan culture. However, that cultural context is only the setting that one may expect to be the natural choice of a writer who grew up in it. The reader does not have to be familiar with that particular culture to absorb and process the messages contained in the monologue.

The book is a small miracle of transcultural communication about the intertwined, connected, yet separate worlds of male and female human existence--full of complexity, pain, and occasional tenderness and beauty. There is much to be learned from imbibing this monologue, whether you are a man or a woman.

Rubble

What follows is the only slightly edited text of a contribution I made yesterday (January 13, 2009) to a discussion on the LearningSocietiesConference list. In what I write I make reference to thoughts expressed by two other list members. As the list is for members only, I quote below two fragments taken from posts by Khalida Qattash and Katrien Dupont.

Among other thoughts about the current events in Gaza, Khalida had contributed a poem that ended as follows:
Nevertheless, you are gruesomely lucky,
'Cause despite your fortunate being,
You must survive the coincidental guilt
Of being yourself and not
A condemned, tracked, and raided,
Nobody, 'cause you're not Gazan!

Katrien had contributed with the following thoughts:
Could we send action pamflets around somehow to distribute the message that the war is over and people WILL have to live together always ? Maybe this way everyone starts to believe peace is possible !! . . . .What if a soldier entered and you started hugging him massively telling him the war is over ? There's nothing crazy enough to try if it lights up a spark in his/her soul. Just never let yours die !!! For peace !

Following is my own contribution that I was encouraged to share with a wider audience via this blog.

These are hard times for those who want to retain a useful balance between emotions and considered argumentation. I have a special relationship with the lasting conflict in the Middle East and its immediate background. Here is what explains that relationship.

I was a child during the Second World War and grew up amidst the ruins of what was left of the city of Rotterdam after it had been destroyed on May 14, 1940, by what was then considered unprecedented massive bombardment during the first days of the German invasion of The Netherlands. Our house stood at the perimeter of the wasteland that remained. As a child I witnessed the atrocities of war, saw my Jewish neighbors, among which a girl roughly my age, being deported to never come back; I saw my father being taken away and was glad to see him reappear seven or eight months later after the war had ended; I vividly recall the sound of the blast when one of Werner von Braun’s missiles, destined for London, didn’t make it to there but hit Rotterdam instead, a few streets away from where we lived; and I can still access imagery stored in my neural network of planes in the sky overhead engaging in air combat with shrapnel dropping all around us.

I also witnessed reconstruction and reconciliation in the years following the war. It’s difficult to erase childhood memories, but one can learn to live with them and love and appreciate former enemies.

It was a good preparation for later in life as I lived through a couple of other wars and forms of violent conflict, often feeling morally and emotionally associated with those who committed violence against violent oppression. The liberation struggles in Southern Africa are the setting of that experience. I became the mature adult that I believe I now am while living between 1971 and 1993 in that part of the world, almost 13 years of which during ugly armed conflict, fomented largely by foreign interests and financing, in Mozambique, as well as being in relatively close touch with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, many of whose principal actors operated at that time from within Mozambique.

Palestine is in between the above experiences. I was a molecular biophysicist in the mid-1960’s. Molecular biology was still an emerging scientific field under development at but a few places around the world: Cambridge, London, Paris, Uppsala, Haifa, Rehoboth are some of those that come to mind. I ended up spending a year at the Theoretical Chemistry Department at the Technion in Haifa as a research fellow, having been awarded a prestigious scholarship to do so. My perceptions of the state of Israel were naïve when I accepted the offer. They were influenced by how the creation of that state had been depicted in Western Europe (still from a perspective that perceived colonization as something quite normal) and the pain that never disappears of having witnessed the slaughter of one’s fellow human beings, particularly those with which one holds relationships of proximity as those that exist between children who live in the same street and play together. Against that background the survival of a people destined to be totally exterminated by means not at all remote from those that industrial societies invent and develop to advance their capitalistic goals, was--and still is--reason for joy. It was reason for joy to me.

We had no money and the only way to reach Haifa from where we lived in The Netherlands was to drive there by car. On the way we had a bad car accident just outside Aleppo, Syria, where we consequently had to stay for several weeks before continuing our journey. It was the beginning of an eye-opening experience. Through conversations with the people we met we became aware of alternative perceptions and realities. Uninterested in politics then I had never heard the name of Balfour and discovered, feeling ashamed to be so ignorant, that any school kid in Syria knew that name (school knowledge of course, probably not very profound, perhaps even with strong elements of indoctrination, but it contrasted with my own total ignorance).

Life in Israel at that time wasn’t as bad as it is now. It was still before the 5th of June 1967, the time when things started changing quite dramatically (in my view and that of others I’ve read about it). Discussions were open and enlightened, at least in the circles in which I moved among my Israeli colleagues. But I also moved in parallel circles, those of the Arab citizens living inside Israel’s borders. Among them was the poet Samih Al-Qasim. Conversations with Samih opened my eyes further, awoke in me the recognition that, though I don’t like politics, I couldn’t ignore political realities, and through him I got to know others.

I was still in Haifa when sirens sounded again. It had been some time since the war of my childhood. I was still in bed when we heard the sound. During at least a month prior to it I had witnessed and become irritated by the psychological build-up to a war that was still to happen but had meanwhile been firmly implanted in the minds of people. Days prior to the event I had been attending a lecture by a visiting Israeli scientist who bid farewell to us, the audience, with the words: “See you after the war.” Rather than joining the people we heard rushing down the stairs of the apartment building where we occupied two rooms and a kitchen at the top, we stayed in bed, annoyed, waiting for things to happen that never happened. Stupid, perhaps, but that’s what we did. In fact, what happened, we soon found out, happened across the borders. I stayed in Israel during the six days of that short war that many in Europe applauded while it filled me with sadness. Those six days seemed to have changed the minds of many of my Israeli friends and the colleagues with whom I closely collaborated on scientific matters. I stayed for another month before returning to Europe. When I finally left, Samih said: “I hope to see you again in better circumstances.” In 1973 we met again in Jerusalem. He repeated the same words.

You don’t have to be a poet for those words to become an integral part of your continuous discourse. Any Palestinian will likely feel that way and so will many other people on this planet. In fact, I think any Israeli in his or her right mind should feel that way as well. Surely, I feel that way when I think of the many people I have met in the countries and territories whose history and current realities have been marked by events that should have never happened. Yet they happened. Anyone can become a victim. Anyone can become an oppressor. Those who have once been victims seem more apt turning themselves into the opposite; adopting the logic of those at whose hands they once suffered.

The arrow of time points in one direction only. It’s forward. You can’t undo history. We are all the product of injustices to which our ancestors fell victim or of which they were the perpetrators, or both. After the apartheid regime finally ended in South Africa, the parties to the conflict of the past subjected themselves to a process of unearthing truths and reconciling what had seemed impossible to reconcile. It’s an encouraging example of what can be done. Somehow the madness must stop. While the conflict still rages, we must be clear and lucid in condemning the crimes that are being perpetrated, in the first place to avoid that they will happen again. We must understand the past and recognize what went wrong (Khalida’s point--well taken), not in an effort to point fingers at those who did it, but trying to comprehend fully the picture we are looking at. From that perspective we must not look back, and certainly not look back with a view to reconstituting the conditions of the past, which has never been a great success, the creation of the state of Israel perhaps being an enlightening example, in retrospect, of what should not have been done. We must look forward imaginatively and creatively, envisioning new futures (Katrien’s point--equally well taken). Surely, such futures are futures of peace. That’s why I like Katrien’s bold idea to just waking the world up to an awareness of ‘Hey, the war is over.’ This may be difficult for those Gazans who have become ‘condemned, tracked and raided nobodies’ (Khalida’s poetic words). It’s the gruesome luck of us who have been spared that condition that we are still somebody, perhaps feeling a sense of guilt because we are so much more fortunate, but, as we are not yet ourselves buried under the rubble we are the ones who can help clear the mess and collectively construct new ways forward.

I’m using the word ‘rubble’ literally, as I watch the events in Gaza unfold on my TV screen, and figuratively. What I have learned is that you are under the rubble both while you are dominating others and while you are being dominated. There are people ‘not under the rubble,’ ‘non-Gazans’ in the figurative sense, in the camp of those who are being dominated as well as among the dominators. In addition, there are lots such people not party to the conflict in the immediate sense, though we are all somehow connected to it by varying degrees of association. It helps if those not under the rubble get to know each other better. That’s what I find significant and encouraging in reading the correspondence between Katrien and Khalida. Allow me to join you.