Donald M.Austin - Newark Academy

sonof porridge
ON OF PORRIDGE
were obviously recent offerings, left in faith that the
unknown power of this place would help bring loved
ones home safe from the sea.
One of the reasons I ruined my porridge that day was
because I was stirring it with the wrong hand and in
the wrong direction. As a sinister left-hander, it’s just
more natural for me to stir widdershins, or anti-clockwise.
This is said to invoke the devil, or at least bring bad
luck to the stirrer; I should have been using my right
hand and moving the wooden spurtle (one does not stir
oats with a spoon!) deiseal, or sunwise.
But the main reason was that I forgot the most important lesson
I learned in my weeks in Scotland, a lesson that allowed me to
write clearly, to observe honestly, and to learn openly: we can
really only do one thing at a time really well. When I looked at
caves, castles and cathedrals hundreds and hundreds of years
old, their stones carved with symbols now lost to time, I
considered the value of focusing on one concept, idea or task.
At Newark Academy, we do not just stir our porridge. We stir
three pots at once while checking our e-mail on our iPhones
and applying to college and putting assignments on the web
and going to meetings and taking five instead of 55 minutes
for lunch. We need to help one another consider what marks
we will leave – on each other, on our school and on our world.
We need to slow down and consume appropriately. I posed
this question in my journal, and my answer follows:
IF I COULD ONLY CARVE ONE STONE, WHAT
WOULD I FORCE ONTO THAT SURFACE, OR STAND
IN THE SHADOW OF, OR CALL OUT OF IT?
THIS LIFE IS A STONE, A STONE IN THE RAIN.
There is something at work here on me, something caught up
in the net of sky held pregnant, apostate. The forests that I
draw as gray v’s marching along the horizon are not woods
from the past – Birnham Wood coming to Dunsinane – they
are relatively young soldiers recruited to keep Moray from
washing away into itself, the firth. And yet they are part of
something that has been reigning here and has been for
centuries. This is geologic, not human time. Had the citizens
who cling like ionic barnacles to this coast, dipping into the
sea to claim small sustenance, and in return offering some of
their own every once in a while to the waves, had these folk
not planted firs, this something that watches over this place
would have continued with its giving and taking, its washing
away and resculpting, in its own circle. As my taxi driver said,
“it’s all a circle, pet. Sometimes we’re just not far away enough
to see the circle for what it is.”
There is a dialect to this rain, more difficult to unpack than
the Doric here, which calls crows corbies, and asks “dae ye ken”
instead of our “y’know,” or “uh-uh.” I can catch drops on my
tongue and feel them individually – they are so large. The
Doric word dreiach won’t quite do; it means this thick mist,
but is also a synonym for the human expression of ennui. And
this is not human. It has no interest in my interpretation, and
as such is invincible, intractable, bedrock-low, the bass note
that can’t be heard but is sent through the choir of the ribs.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth asked – why does everything appall me? –
after his meeting on the heath with three who decided to throw
themselves at the mercy of a brooding, unopened eye, the
guardian of every prick of gorse and thistle; the progenitor of
every shade of heather; the boon behind every cloud. I suspect
every mountaineer, every space-sailor, every sea-rimed diver, is
a witch. How could they not be, when they possess a sure and
arcane knowledge of what we perceive as secular, and the infinite
space between that and time as it is? To hold one’s breath and
dive for the bottom, or leap upwards toward the white sky, or
crawl umbilical between the stars, or to stand by this sea, is to
be set right-sized; in a sense, to be appalled, or at least to be
struck anew by one’s own relative insignificance in the larger
scheme of things. The best we can do is keep our eyes open.
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