Read this post with this playlist in youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W4vrgm_5oM
Reading has always been the biggest of my hobbies. I fish, photograph, track, collect MTG cards, but reading, comics, books, booklets, handouts, websites, leaflets … has always been my biggest hobby.
Perhaps it is because the automatism is very close to hearing (you see the images in the letter set and automatically search or give meaning to the image, ie read). When my daughter was being literate one day in the car, she read aloud a sign that had written “fishmonger.” Then he dropped an unforgettable pearl: “I hate learning to read. Now I can’t not read things. ”
Well, well, this week I’ve been thinking about how I learned to enjoy reading and everything the act of reading has brought me as good in life. Much of my career as a psychologist depends on what I have learned from academic books and papers. Much of my intellectual background and experience, my repertoire for life, has been taken from the books.
Leia aqui em Português!!
But in a discussion with my mother (she is always so stubborn and submissive, we always argue), I was reminded by her that my taste for books started late (for her of course), around 13 years old. According to her, before that, I use to read-only comics: Monica’s gang (Brasilian wonderful comic), Disney comics, and then superheroes (Batman and Spider-Man).
But, I decided to move my chest and remembered some fun passages (if seen from today’s look). I attended elementary school (the former primary school) at Eny Caldeira Municipal School, in the Tingui neighborhood of Curitiba. It was a model school at the time, it had good lunch, dentist, camp, covered patio and math and science classes with teacher Maria do Socorro.
She was not a teacher of communication and expression (Portuguese language).
But as a math teacher, she required a good interpretation of a text, after all, you need to know what the fucking the little Jack did with the oranges and who ate how many fucking oranges to create the math problem.
I did not know that.
Like a good hollow-headed parrot, I read, but in fact, it did not attribute the cumulative meaning to the words that follow each other in a text, so that it can make some sense. I just made the correct noise of the words (in which I was good, by the way, I was a good reader), but I went through the text without attaching its meaning.
Therefore, I did not interpret the text and could not solve the problem of little Jack and his oranges.
The teachers Maria do Socorro, one day stood beside me (I had a low grade on her subject) while I solved one of those huge problems that we had to copy from the board with readable handwriting. She kept analyzing me and suddenly realized that I didn’t understand anything.
She read my notebook and I had copied everything right. He saw that I had read what I had copied. But, she saw that Chip and Dale weren’t talking inside my head. She turns to me and asks, “Raul, what does this text say?” Immediately, I started reading it to her. She interrupted (imagine the teacher’s patience) and asked gently, “What does the text mean? What did you understand about him? ”
My social repertoire is narrow today, imagine when I was 8 years old. I filled my eyes with tears, a giant lump in my throat, and Chip and Dale worked frantically not to let me cry in front of the class (who was not even caring about the event, nor did they see it).
Gently she said, “In this paragraph, you have a math problem, don’t you? That is, it tells a short story so that you understand what you need to find as an answer, don’t you? What story does he tell? What story is in this paragraph? ”
At that moment, Dale jumped and Chip stopped trying to make me disappear. Both looked at the text and, in the middle of the words, I found a story about little Jack with his oranges.
She went to the box where the class library books were, picked up a book called “the devil’s beetle” from the Firefly Collection. “Raul, read this book every day, always trying to understand what’s going on in the story. You’ll have to tell the class in a few days. ”
Instead of reading to the class, I packed it with “the God-Free Alley” from the same collection. Soon I could access my parents’ library. In fact, my mother considers the beginning of my relationship with books, the moment I started to read, the moment the books have started to be an issue to conversations with. Four years after my teacher transformed me into a non-parrot kid.
Both my father and mother have tried hard to like comic books. My father, once, even talked about Batman with me. But it must be a horror to them: piles and boxes of comics collected by me and my brother. Tintin, Asterix, Spiderman, Batman, Wolverine, Luck Lucky, Garfield, Mafalda, Snoopy, Jacket, Hagar, Angeli, Laerte, Glauco …
But it was in a Snoopy that I found a text that would make sense in my life forever, and I still have that text copied 5 times in a diary so I never forget it. My parents received the Mafalda’s, Snoopy, and others from friends who were refugees outside the country at the time of dictatorship (the old one) in Brazil. Inside a Snoopy was a 10-page article about audience perception of an event.
The text spoke of a theater already prepared for the show to begin. The audience preparing to be silent. Comes in a running clown with a bag in his hand, goes up on the stage, looks sideways and runs to the aisle. Then two men in uniform do the same.
A few minutes later, audience reports are collected. To my surprise, (maybe about 10 years old) people report the most diverse things possible about the same event. As diverse as you can imagine: people who saw nothing, people who saw a chase with gunshots, sirens, and deaths.
Each has a different interpretation of the world around them. What a crazy thing, it took me ten years of my life to understand that each one’s perception is different, that we don’t see, don’t understand, and therefore don’t feel the world the same way.
Each one is each one. And therefore I cannot assume that the other understood as I would expect, much less demand that he do so. It is not possible to standardize the human from the midline. There is no law, religion, gender, state, norm, rule, standard that can draw a line that says what is normal in human terms. There is no normal for the simplest of reasons: each one is each one.
Well, I became a psychologist!
The impression that this text made on me, while so obvious, led me on the journey of trying to understand what it is like to be the other one. What it is like to be in the place you occupy in existence: how you see the world, how you understand this world, how you see and understand yourself in front of the world.
If each one is each one, my point of understanding, my point of view of the world is not relative. It is, solid, true and, above all, imperious! That is, it is imperative in my life. But, on the other hand, your point of view is also solid, true and compelling in your life.
You read from my blog that viewpoints, even if imperative, can be changed with changing core beliefs. But that does not make them less imperative about life when the other view begins to guide behavior, it becomes imperative.
But, you have yours and I have mine and neither is relative and both are imperative. An attempt to mix the two, an attempt to merge the two is to try to relativize. To explain this I like the example of coffee in marriage: A woman likes weak coffee, her wife likes weak coffee. If they make weak coffee, kindly to the wife, the woman will be dissatisfied. If they make strong coffee the wife will be dissatisfied. If they make average coffee, both will be dissatisfied.
The solution is to understand each one’s imperative, accept the differences and make two coffees, one weak and one strong the woman and her wife will be satisfied.
Of course, this is much more laborious. Understanding that the other is itself, a creature, a being, a unique and independent entity, to respect that is very laborious. In fact, understanding this is so laborious that it takes us 20 years to reach adulthood, where we should have learned that egocentrism is a baby thing. A basic prerogative of the adult is to recognize that we are a collective formed of unique entities.
Therefore, recognizing that rubbish thrown on the street bothers other bystanders, recognize that no one has an obligation to hear their biblical cries in the street or on the facebook group. The collective of the unique entities neither belongs to you nor is you.
They are unique entities, so by right, they may think that the good bad-guy is a dead bad-guy or the good bad-guy is a free bad-guy. But they may also think that it is the law that governs the collective space who decides who is guilty or not, coordinated by the professionals eligible for such: lawyers, judges, and prosecutors. So, whatever is the individual opinion, it has no rule over the collective space.
It seems strange that I pull this subject into a text where I write about reading activity and what I could learn from it. But I learned a lot about marriage with Peter Parker (Spider-Man, sorry for the spoiler) with Mary Jane Watson (later, Watson-Parker).
Every night he went to jump around the city hanging on his webs. And she, as an adult, understood this situation and lived well with it despite the moments of loneliness. The clear view of each with their own. Peter Parker, always self-pitying, spent jumping hours around town thinking, “She’s not happy with me,” “she deserves better,” (spoiler) “in the theater and on TV she will find a better man.”
At this point, what the superhero did was to attribute his imperatives, his points of views to someone else. And because they are imperative, he believed these thoughts with great enthusiasm. I will not tell you what happens next, buy the comics in suet and read.
But there, I was seeing through the art of the comic the reflection in parallel of each one, she propped her elbows on the window thinking: “my hero, come back safe”, and he, in the next block, thinking: “I should leave MJ in peace, so she will be happy. ” She was waiting for him and he was being egocentric and childish. She was taking care of her own well-being, he was trying to control the world with thought, like a spoiled brat.
Reading a comic book is no different from reading a good book or package insert. All are somehow, on some scale, instructional materials. Experiences described in words that, with good interpretation of the text, may contain important lessons for life and for the formation of the individual repertoire.
It is as if little Jack and his oranges, The fox, and grapes continue to bring us information that helps us solve life’s problems.
At the departure of the arrival of international flights at Guarulhos International Airport, we have endless signs informing directions and destinations. We have a plethora of signs informing you about documents, rules, products, luggage, destinations … We also have employees from time to time to give verbal information. But the culmination is the (unreduced) pool of employees shouting directions and instructions to people who have not read or interpreted the signs.
Thanks to Professor Maria do Socorro, today I read Plato and signs.
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