The most important question when you sit down to write an assembly is how to start. How to start and what to say. The two most important questions when you write an assembly are how to start and what to say. How to start, what to say, and how to say it. The three most important questions… Look, I’ll start again.
Today’s assembly is centred on answering those questions and weaves an alliterative tricolon into an encouragement to think politically, write poetically, and act communally. I’m going to recommend a novel, a podcast, a play, and I’m going to indulge in a chain of intertextual reference that will leave you wondering “Can giants really learn Latin?”.
We start with Ben Okri: he’s a Nigerian- born British poet and author who went to a primary school in Peckham, returned to secondary school in Nigeria, survived the civil war and came back to the UK to study comparative literature at Essex University. I’ve read one of his books – Songs of Enchantment – but didn’t know his poetry until I looked it up. The poet will come later, but first the novelist.
Wikipedia says that Okri is hard to categorize. Okri says that there are simply more dimensions to reality. All I can say is that I loved the writing and struggled with the story – although I admit that I didn’t help myself by picking up the second book of a trilogy so I have no idea how he starts it and didn’t really understand what he said. I can, however, tell you that how he said it was mind-blowingly beautiful.
The reason that I’ve started with Okri – I’m sure you’ve been wondering – is not his writing, but his appearance on an episode of a podcast I’ve been splurging. It’s Natalie Haynes stands up for the classics and it’s incredibly Harris Westminster – she’s a classicist, a student of Latin and Greek, and she’s quite a scholar, but she’s also extremely funny: before taking on the podcast she made a living as a stand-up comedian. Okri joined her for her episode on Horace, the leading lyric poet at the time of Augustus and was asked whether Horace was a political poet. Okri said that he thought he must have been to have survived those times of shifting factions and revolution: he also said that politics emerges from the sense that something isn’t right, and a political poet’s job is to encapsulate that unease and communicate it in the best possible words.
I’ve been thinking about the sense that something isn’t right and I keep coming back to the thought that somebody has been punching holes in the walls of Steel House. It troubles me.
The sense that something isn’t right is troubling, and I think that one of the problems with the media age is that we hear of so many things that aren’t right, and the things that aren’t right are so huge that the big question if you’re thinking politically is where you start. Where you start and what you say about it. Where you start, what you say about it and how you say it. Essentially I’m claiming that assemblies are very like politics – but with more poetry - and my suggestion is to start small and precise. Fixing everything that’s wrong with the universe is a big goal – and we have ambitions, you and I, we like big goals, we fancy ourselves to take on the world – but we have to get started and when you’re getting started you need to find your niche. What can you actually make a difference to – and you can all make a difference: ending world war may be beyond you, right now, but shaking hands on an argument and accepting an apology from someone who hurt you should not be.
The thing about those holes, you see, is that they were made by one of us – and I thought we were a team. We share Steel House, our refuge from not just the rain but the ignorance of the world, and if we spend money fixing holes then we’re not buying books (there are at least two more in the Ben Okri trilogy that I need to read). Maybe whoever it is didn’t realise that, doesn’t understand that broken things only get fixed if someone uses time and money to make them better, that every piece of destruction hurts us all.
Ignorance is a sad thing – I have to confess that I was pretty ignorant about Horace before I listened to Natalie Haynes and am still a long way from her level of scholarship. Where I do know quite a lot is in education, running schools, and sometimes I hear a political suggestion for fixing education and recognise an idea that I’ve had in the past and either tried out or thought through and found that the detail is a lot more difficult than the big picture. If you don’t know the detail you don’t understand how hard it is. I think this is true in lots of areas – the ideas we have to fix something we don’t know much about seem straightforward, but when you look closely, it’s a lot more complicated than you’d hoped. If you’re really going to change things – and I hope that each one of you is going to change things – then you need to examine the microstructure. You need to be nerdy in the way that I am about running sixth forms, in the way Natalie Haynes is about Horace whose politics, by the way, are slippery – he sided with Marc Antony in the years following Julius Caesar’s death before accepting a pardon from the victorious Octavian (as Augustus was known before he became emperor). I’ve just spoiled the end of a Shakespeare play, but it was 2000 years ago and if you’re not keeping up with current affairs there’s only so much I can do.
Before Harris Westminster got started my career had been in schools that had younger students and the year 9s were the most difficult. There was a period when they had SATS to do which calmed them down, but by and large they were big enough to be a pain without being mature enough to take responsibility. In a school like that it would be the year 9s who made holes in things, but we don’t have year 9s – we only have year 12s and year 13s, so whoever is breaking our school is one of us – and I don’t really get it. Maybe it’s you. If it is, then please come and talk to me and help me understand – I’m sure it’s more complicated than it seems – let me help you make amends. Or just stop it. You could do that.
Things are more complicated than they seem, there is always more than one way to see the world, more than one argument, there are always subtleties, nuances, and when you work out what needs to be done you need to express it in a way that picks up that nuance. For this you will need to develop your rhetorical skills: Quintilian was a rhetorician from the 1st century AD whose Latin was sufficiently fine that Rabelais had his student giant Pantagruel use him as an example in the 16th century, and Quintilian said that Horace was full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures and felicitously daring in his choice of words. Felicitously daring – I like that. So maybe you should read some Horace, or maybe Okri – also a brilliant chooser of words. Here’s that poem I promised you:
Leaves that fall
Ought to breed
Fire from stone.
The world counts
on our fall.
Our solitude interests
The butterflies
And the lost gold
Of the afternoons
Ochre and blue walls
And the fading peaks
Of volcanoes
And the sunlight
Plummeting beyond
The hills waken
Leaves to their
Lost trees
To discover
You still have
A world
To make
At sunset
Sobers
The stones
It’s called Arequipa and is named after a Peruvian town whose name in the local Quecha language means “Yes, stay” because the chief invited someone to settle there: either his people, originally, or the arriving Spanish. Probably. The story is unclear. There’s a bunch of uncertainty and nuance, and certainly a colonist’s claim that they were invited to stay should be interrogated rather than simply accepted, but it’s a beautiful poem and I’m struck by that last stanza: to discover you still have a world to make at sunset sobers the stones.
Harris Westminster has been at Steel House for ten years, Ofsted have been twice and given us the best possible review both times, we’re routinely in the paper for educational success, we attract and select the most amazing young people in London to study here – I hope you’re proud to be part of our community. But we still have a world to make, and that thought sobers us: whenever I say anything in assembly there are seven hundred pairs of ears that hear it, and each takes it their own way. However nerdy, detailed and careful I am in what I say, I need to say it with nuance, to allow for different understanding and views – what one person might need to hear could feel unkind targeted at another. If anyone ever needed to be felicitously daring…
So let us make the world together, to recognise each sunset that there is more to do, let us be niche, nerdy and nuanced in our responses to the troubling aspects of the world. Actually, I recommend being niche, nerdy and nuanced in all your responses – particularly in your writing – it’s a set of ideas that will allow you to think more clearly and write more beautifully.
And those holes. If it’s you, please stop. If you know who it is then please get them to stop, and if they won’t, tell me so that I can. We don’t have ochre and blue walls or the fading peaks of distant volcanoes, but the lost gold of the afternoons is the time between the last lesson and the close of the library – those hours of study when we’re grateful for the shelter, the quiet, the refuge of academia – we should be grateful, we should be proud, we should work together to protect it from vandals.
There’s a lot to trouble us in this world and recognising that is the start of politics – I hope you do recognise it, I hope you find poetry that brings it to your attention, beautifully encapsulated in the perfect words: and if you don’t then I hope you have a go at writing some of it yourself, and if not poetry, then beautiful prose, daringly felicitous. There’s a lot to trouble us in this world but we can make it better, one nerdy and nuanced niche at a time.
Footnotes:
1. The title and the joke of the first paragraph are taken from Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch. If you've managed to miss it so far you should definitely look it up.
2. The concern about students mistreating the building has come up before: War is Hell deals with graffiti in the toilets.