Although I got over my Woody Allen obsession around the time I discovered he'd hooked up with his adopted child, I'm still a massive fan of his classic films. In Manhattan - a glorious film - he and Diane Keaton are arguing about the nature of knowledge (does it even have a nature?) and in response to Keaton's statement that she has "... a million facts at her fingertips", Allen, in his inimitable way, states that:"They [facts] mean nothing because nothing worth knowing is understood with the mind. Everything valuable enters through a different opening, if you'll excuse the disgusting imagery."
I'm totally on team Allen with this. Being in Oxford, it's easy to lose sight of this when surrounded with hordes of over-confident and verbose folk who read books whilst walking down the street (this never ceases to amaze me, incidentally. I don't know anywhere else in the UK - with the exception of Cambridge, perhaps - that people could get away with this without getting the shit kicked out of 'em) and quote reams of Latin on command. It's easy to feel cowed and I suspect that most people equate academic achievement and an ability to retain and regurgitate knowledge in books with "being smart". Bullshit, I say. An education and being educated are two very different things in my mini world. I've met intensely academic people who are utterly lacking in emotional intelligence and vice versa. I know who'd I'd choose to share a pint with in this situation.
My darling father is a painter and decorator by trade and one of the smartest, most politically aware and knowledgeable people I've ever met. He also happens to possess an incredible capacity for empathy and social justice. He gets up at 0545 every morning and has a "reading hour" where he sits and ploughs through political and historical tomes. He does night classes in things like "The Civil Rights Movement" and "20th Century Britain before 1979". He's a old-school socialist who knocks on the doors of the muppets who live near my parents and tries to explain why voting for the BNP is not a good thing. When I'm frequently bamboozled by some political motion or grappling with the Israel/Palestine conflict, he's the person I call who can make sense of the madness in a coherent and no-nonsense way. The man is gold.
Despite this, he constantly describes himself as "just a daft painter" and makes jokes about how he "doesn't know 'owt" which equally breaks my heart and makes me fucking furious. He has massive life experience and massive knowledge learned from books but his spelling sucks and he left school with shitty grades at 15 and he's not formally educated, doesn't have the confidence and was never encouraged to achieve therefore he considers himself "thick". He didn't read a book until he was thirty fucking years old. OK; he's much older than a lot of the Oxford kids I'm comparing him to but lots of those Oxbridge kids grow up to be cunts. Sorry.
Wow... just looked back and seen how much I've written and how much I've digressed. This really wasn't meant to be a one-woman ode to my father although it all ties in to my original sentiment(s) which I believe are worthy of a list. Yes!
1) Verbosity is fancy, esoteric bullshit. I do not consider it advantageous. It alienates people and makes them feel inferior and useless. Most people are not academics. The masses are the people most in need of education and reaching out to them in a language them can understand is a skill and a privilege.
2) "Education" means formal academic training (or lack of) and it also means things like learning about diversity, i.e. something that I consider more essential to a harmonious society than all the Shakespeare you can shake a stick at.
3) People who are not in possession of a extensive vocabulary and who get wigged out when asked a question or when put on the spot are not lesser beings!! I'd like to think that most intelligent people would agree with this in theory, but it's fucking remarkable how easily people switch off/zone out/resort to hideous stereotypes when confronted with such a person. Yes; communicating is very important but an inability to do this with ease or coherence does not mean that folk are any less capable of experiencing and feeling things or accurately identifying something as right or wrong. Not possessing the language to express thoughts, feelings and experiences accurately and clearly can be one of the most intensely frustrating and infuriating experiences and something I think a lot of "problem youth" can attribute to their aforementioned "problems".
On another matter, emotional intelligence is something I consider really valuable. I don't really wanna spend time with people who don't know how to fucking behave or treat people with courtesy and respect which is I guess one way to interpret emotional intelligence - the ability to empathise, perhaps. Maybe I'm as bad as the intellectual snobs for my inverted fascism? Historically, those things concerned with the "emotional" tend to be disregarded as unscientific, subjective and frivolous. This might be because emotion is traditionally linked to the feminine. Another reason to fly the flag for it, as far as I'm concerned...
I'm not confident I've actually achieved what I set out to with this post but it's time to chill with a film so I'm signing off now. I suspect I've been shamelessly contradictory and hypocritical but I can't really be fucked to go through it all again. I've also been boozing whilst typing so that might explain the scattered nature of this post. Trying to keep to the original intent of a post without digressing is hard! Does anyone else find this? In conclusion: University of Life for me EVERY TIME.
Enjoy the gorgeous pic of Keaton (and Allen)
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