FISH FLOP

SMACK!
Flung from forbidding fathoms to gasp at stars in a

Silvered universe of so very many shining moments,

Only to gulp at some superfl'ous little mite;

And fall forever backward to fluid with a resounding

SMACK!

Like a gunshot that reverberates and that makes the

Head come up out of the water of its own thoughts;

To catch a glimpse of distraction from the far flung

Depths of its own fluid way since that first emerging

SMACK!

Like a hardness of light and sound, signifying presence,

To begin movement and thought, constricted to surfaces,

Ordained by the environment of limited nature where

Even a third and fourth, and the very one millionth

SMACK!

Will not reach higher than the might of the fish flop

Nor than that of the head upturned, with the stars within,

While the surface still is seen as dust places to dust,

And stars are thoughts deeper than levels of yet another

SMACK.

r.f.p.
October 1995

It's All in the Pitch!

Visceral and mesmerizing, IN DUE COURSE is the story of an old Zulu warrior’s pervasive influence on the gifted young Adam Broadford. In Northern Rhodesia the childhood promise Adam makes has their lives hurtling along a gauntlet of challenges. Worthiness of being is a thing to be earned. But due to Adam's self-righteousness, his selfishness, he is convinced he is responsible for once having sparked an enemy that results in murder, pillage, and revenge. His bid to escape his guardians when holidaying in England compounds his predicament. Forced to Return into the blistering birth of Zambia, his reactions create a cauldron of life-searing choices. In South Africa, in boarding school, he remains hounded by the ancient soothsayer’s prophecy. Conscripted as a sniper to the Zimbabwe border during the apartheid era, Adam attempts a different identity. But it is as a stoker on the railways that he determines finally to alter his seeming destiny. Still, must his last act for release from a childhood promise have to cost him his one great love?

In literary fiction born of clashing African cultures Adam's story of the search for an alternate life is a dramatic series of challenging incidents bringing him to terms with forgiveness, assimilation, compassion, and integration. Misunderstood by family, boyhood friends, and by his fellows, he intuitively strives for wisdom. Ultimately, IN DUE COURSE is not only the story of an Adam, but a story of us all.

Ding Dong for Differentiation!

Ring the Bell! I leave this profession of teaching after more than 35 years, and I have a declaration to make; an appeal to ring out; an alarm to sound. I am concerned about that dread topic, accountability; specifically, grades.


Excellence is our watchword. Yet I do not believe ‘excellence’ ought to be bruited about as a generality for students. I believe in putting people before product. I do not believe in putting product first. I believe in developing discipline and passion in the individual; I do not believe in conscripting a student to hate, loathing, despising, or even dislike of a subject. I do not believe in raising the bar so high for a given class that curriculum expectations are a series of frustrations and failures for an individual. I do not believe that a curriculum should equally challenge a general class, that a test should equally challenge all students, that a rule should equally apply to all pupils, that a standard should equally be applied to every learner, or that a student should have to take every level. I do not believe that I should have to take a subject beyond a proficiency level according to my life-needs or interests. (I personally have never used cosine theta, though no doubt my life over a bridge has depended on it, thanks to Penelope, who loves Math.) I do not for that matter believe in Drama 30 for Percival, per se, but since he chose it (or worse, was assigned to it) I am prepared to accommodate his interest and modify my expectations of his participation in order still to challenge him individually. I do not believe his grades should be a measure of comparative accountability. I do not believe in comparisons for grades. I do not believe that comparative grades are a measure of a program’s success, or a teacher’s success, or a school’s success, or a district’s success. I believe school is for everyone. It is for the individual. And for it to be so we, the education professionals and experts, should be allowed to treat students as individuals, to test students as individuals, to challenge and to promote the student entirely as an Individual.


What rings a personal bell for each is the opportunity to get lessons related to oneself, to have learning be made useful, to not have to be tested on the “clearly not my cup of tea” lessons. Percival does not care for Shakespeare, but loves quadratic equations; Penelope is just the reverse. Why require either of them to write the same test? Excellence as a goal of the product, per se, is for the rarefied few; to strive as a general populace for perpetual excellence is to court continual disappointment. Rather, let the individual strive for a personal excellence, strive for a personal best, strive to be the very best that he or she can be, and provide him or her with every individual opportunity to excel.


We ring the bell to summon the children to come unto us. Those children are as different from each other as their districts, their parents, their well-spring, and their stars have been aligned. Bells ring for individual reasons. It is for me in the particularized differentiation of lessons according to the needs of the individual that we prove ourselves as educators to be the most efficacious. I submit that implementing along with Penelope’s interests the rigour of an individualized provision for excellence may indeed have her becoming the very best of brain surgeons, and may well have Percival become the very best of mechanics, but whether no best Percival ever, or never a best Penelope, let the bell keep ringing individually for one, for each, and for all. Ding, ding, ding… Ding!

Obtuse Over Obligation

To be obligated is a sticky feeling. It is so difficult to move ahead, to enjoy, to take time for whatever else is distracting you whilst the obligation hangs over your head: Got to write to so and so; must phone him or her; should see that one or this one; have to buy a present for when I see…. And the time slips away and the intentions become so intense that sometime you can swear you actually did send that card. Really! A difficult thing, obligation. Birthdays. Christmas. Special events. Things that one must remember to…

The Christmas letters from others arrive. In January we did this, in February we did that. Then there’s this one’s health and that one’s wedding, and… one wonders where the time got to. So much of life wrapped up in those annual reports. Each day is as important as the next, really, yet of all of the weeks and months the isolated moments are those we feel others may like to hear (or at least those that we feel we’d like others to hear!) and we send them or receive them and hope our missives may be answered, privately, individually, caringly, personally.

There were over 100 friends at my wedding. There are over 100 friends I work with. There are over 700 students a year that I know by name. There are more than 100 theatre friends. There are other intimate personal friends, along with couples as friends and then business associates and overseas connections, and then there’s, oh yes, also the family, my family, her family, and our family. And the sheer volume of correspondence to each, if all of us did write, would take up hours of writing and reading. So we hope that somehow people just know we love them, we care for them, we think often of them, we consider and pray for their welfare, we hope the best for their futures and we may even treasure the past, but we can scarce write to each and every one, we can scarce send a card to each and every one, and perhaps all too true for most of us, we even can scarce spare much of a thought for each and every one. Ever flipped through an old address book? Gee, when did I last…?

Thing is, obligation would have us send the card, ensure the contact, reach out, buy the present, and even go and visit, and that sense of obligation is rather sad, for me. The commercialization of obligation is both subtle and crass. It yells at me from the department stores and the TV, and it lurks at me from the seat of my heart where I feel its laziness to get up and go write the letter, make the call, lick the stamp, walk it to the post-box. Even an e-mail, given the volume of correspondents, has become too much; and so we send the generic letter, posting it out to all and sundry, basically stating a really significant truth, for me: When I see you, I love you very much. Always.

Merry Christmas! Happy Birthday. Bless the Occasion! And to all, may every day be bright, and every sleep a very good night!  G’night!

Kohlberg's Coals

What fire imbues each of us? Why is it that in moments we are so mediocre, so average, so complacent? What is it that makes us glow, makes us impassioned, makes us reach for a Heaven even though it be beyond our grasp? How do we accept the intensity in others and yet be satisfied with its relative lack in ourselves? When do we make that essential shift that allows for what once was now to become yet something more? Wherein lies the furnace, the light, the ember that invigorates growth, potential, paradigm shifts, and the attempts at perpetuity itself? Rage, the poet says. Rage against the dying of the light.

Perpetuity. Incoherent as is the concept, it is not the stuff of stasis. For an organism to stay alive it must move, indubitably,though indistinctly, and some things even indefinitely. It is the definite end that defines life. To be alive a thing, a being, any one of us must resonate in response to the very atoms around us, or desiccate, dissolve, immolate, and die. Yet denser things do live longer, paradoxically; the fragile and specialized die from non-adaptability. The average persists longer than the rarefied. Is that why we more readily take on the relief of not having to think about our thinking, of not having to question our right to be?

Kohlberg (1927-1987) held that we are fundamentally imbued by one of eight moral precepts. Such alternate stages of thinking may well invigorate us in a given moment, but we tend predominantly to confine, define, habituate, and template ourselves in only one of the eight stages as a general continuum. As such, given Kohlberg’s levels (and par-phrasing liberally) we tend chiefly to be self-centric, ego-centric, family-group centric, socio-centric, city-centric, nation-centric, globe-centric, and universal. After all, said another 1950’s poet, weep not for whom the bells tolls, it tolls for…

And being at large in Stage Two thinking for the vast majority of us (according to Kohlberg) is where we predominantly are at. We do or do not do according to our ego-ic need of others to affirm our behaviour, existence, feelings, thoughts, intentions, habits, perceptions of life itself. So yes, I am concerned that you’ll think badly of me for forgetting your birthday. So yes, I am hoping that you’ll like me for sending you a get well card. And yes, I do drive in fear of the police.

But of the internal fire that provokes me or you to want to be yet more ~ how do I get past the need for your approbation, your approval, affirmation or commendation? How do I just do what I do because that which I do is done out of a sense of becoming a tree and not staying an acorn, being a butterfly in the making, a tadpole, a frog, a prince? And yet even more significantly, whether a lion or a lamb, how does the one allow the other just to be?

Not all of us like invigorated embers, like metamorphosis, like growth. So let us just be. Not all of us want to be different individuals. We’re individual enough. And not all of us wish to be other than we are. After all, as the good book says: Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways and be… well, yes, elephant or mouse, we each have our place.

Still, how then do I improve my thinking in this essay? What fire drives me to be yet more? To be, or…

Positive Disintegration

Positive Disintegration

by Richard Michelle-Pentelbury on Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 7:41pm

 We all disintegrate. And we rise again. We leave one birth-year for another. We leave one grade for another. We move from one place to another. And for the most part we’re lucky if we see these shifts in place, time, and experience as positive. We grow. But we also experience the loss of a pet, the sudden accident, the brutal betrayal, the death of what was in exchange for what is now. And we disintegrate. How to make the experience, whatever experience, positive?

Shipwrecked, we examine and unpack the flotsam around us. Awash with memories, we may feel the fragmentation of the present but as an unwanted gift. The relative stasis of what was had a comfort, a familiarity, an expected quality that allowed our habits more readily to adjust to the slight rhythms of the seasons, of daylight-savings time, of stopping at alternate times at the usual garage for gas, or the usual store for groceries. But when that rhythm is really distressed, broken, disengaged, and afloat around us, we have little but the inner resources of experience and trust and hope that this too shall pass. And then? We arrange our new life, assume a new route, visit different stores, keep different hours, make different friends, and we grow in more knowledge, grow in having yet more, grow in exploring some other area, enter numbers into some larger phone-book, make an advantage of having once been so dislocated, or sadly acknowledge the disadvantage of no longer having that which made us once before more at ease. But do we really grow?

Our primary habituation is with ourselves. What if it is our predominant habituation? We do need the factor of ‘the self’ met, our want for sustenance and the immediate and our need for self-gratification. At its most elementary level of operations our jails are full of such persons. Next comes the factoring in of our need to satisfy the ego, best satisfied in the eyes of others, so we make left-right choices ad infinitum, perpetually choosing one thing over another in order not only to satisfy the self, but to be accountable to our continuing perception of some other’s approval. And then, now only at a Secondary Level of Positive Disintegration, if we’re brave enough predominantly to take on the vicissitudes and verisimilitudes of a vociferous populace, we vacillate vicariously between the exigencies of being our own person and wondering whether everyone else, or at least someone else, if not a group, club, clan, or ideology is actually perhaps not ‘more right’ than we ourselves dare to be.

To be or not be? That is the third level of Positive Disintegration. The theory, posited by Kazimir Dabrowski (1905-1981), holds that in the Third Level one is predominantly conscious of holding onto one’s very own paradigm, yet still is integrative of others, being not distressed by the disavowal and disassociation and fragmentation and divisiveness of the ‘vox populi’. To be or not to be? And in ‘The Fourth’ level? There one serves entirely the needs of others, has sublimated the self to an extent that the ego needs no gratification, to the extent that the self has no desires, to the extent that the flotsam and jetsam of life has become but the boxes of mankind afloat in a universe of mankind’s own making.

And me? And you? As I look at the stuff that surrounds me, and at my attachment to it, I realize how very far I am from letting go of the things that still define me, the photos, the books, the music, the paintings, and the curriculum-vitae of a lifetime. And as I unpack yet another box, I wonder: at which point, beyond it all being consumed by some accidental fire, can I truly just… let go? To do, or not to do? The art, in either case is… letting go.

Message in a Bottle

Message in a Bottle

by Richard Michelle-Pentelbury on Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 10:54am

This will be my last missive from this address. I write as though having at last found a scrap piece of paper and a bit of charcoal. Around me is the detritus of my last life, the garbage bags, the devilish dust, the odd bits of flotsam from the surging seas of activity that has, wave after wave, altered the shore-line of my existence, rendered asunder my ship of state, and tossed me into a fragmented and dislocated existence wherein mere snapshots of free time allow for the looking up and grasping onto any memory other than the immediate. Moving houses will do that to you.
Some error in timing was made. We transitioned from the one shore to the other over a week, but the new refuge does not yet have telephone or internet connection, and since i have no cell-phone, no satellite connected palm-pilot, no ready address book, there was this distinct sense of being cut off from the past, from friends, from YOU, from life as I’d known it. And now  I write only because around me the sounds of the cleaning and dusting and last-minute packing done by the hired service is being done, affording me a moment in which to gather these thoughts in an effort to send them out to you. Soon this connection will be cut off too. Shall I post this in a bottle, this last message of mine from this last time in this old place?
While I was at work at Centennial the demands of picking up the pieces after my so very recent sojourn to Africa held me so captive that only the immediate was given focus. And given that one drives to work in the dark, and comes home in the dark, and is in a building of artificial light all day, it scarce seemed real that once, just a week and a half ago, I was under the African sun and skies, whilst now, here, I am as in Plato’s cave, the shadows on the wall dancing before me as if to make life real again. And that week and a half has been so filled with the students, the classes, the demands of mounting what is to be my last show, Pride and Prejudice, and then leaving in the dark to come here to this old house and to pack and take car-load after car-load to be emptied at the other house. Then too, there was the address to 2,000 persons to deliver at the Remembrance Day service.  Pride? Prejudice? Eschew the thought!
Boxes are so impersonal. They bear names like Kitchen, Basement, Bedroom, or R’s Stuff. And one carries each as though some sacred ashes are being transported; the condensed remains of what once was. Are our friends like that too? Are the names of Ian and Justin and Gus and Brian and Mike and Rob and Simon and Tony and Bert and Johan... well, are these persons and you too also to be but boxes in the jumble of memory for which I search as I scrabble yet once more for familiarity with things on some strange new shore?  The new tends to do that, for me. The new takes on an immediacy that packs up and condenses the past into entities given labels, at best. The new is examined and organized and mapped and referenced and made much of as one adjusts to the domestication of acclimatization. It’s much like the pot-plants that will need the new days and night times to adjust to their own new frames of new enlightenment. And the old memory remains packed up, or at best get searched for and then unpacked in terms of an immediate need. (Now then, just where did I put my precious marmalade?)
But of messages in a bottle, hoping that they’ll perhaps reach you, well.... here this one at last goes!
Now, do you receive me?  And if so, I really look forward to your response!