Djelloul Marbrook

There are certain gewgaws, doodads and gimcracks I can’t seem to resist. So over the recent holidays I bought two green-flame candles at The Museum of Modern Art. (More about MoMA later). It turns out the flames are lovely in the near-dark, my usual state, but almost invisible in a brighter environment, and the wicks are difficult to light.

The candles—my wife and I thought it would be a splendid idea to
illuminate our New Year’s Eve in green flame—reminded me of the candles my stepfather Dominick once made. He liked to make things for the enjoyment of it. But somehow he found fireproof string to use as wick. He never lived it down, and enjoyed the joke as much as anybody.

Whenever we kidded him about it we invariably reminded him of the time he made bread. He proudly removed a hot loaf from the oven and let it cool. An hour later he dropped it and broke his toe. Dominick never made candles again, but he became a superb baker whose bread we looked forward too eagerly.

I like a new gadget almost as much as a new idea. Well, it is a new idea, isn’t it? I have a certain kind of mechanical aptitude. If I see something done, I can usually do it. But I can’t understand a thing in a manual, and it does no good at all to tell me how to do something. I need to see it. Same with poetry. Don’t read it to me, I need to see it. I suffer at poetry slams because I have nothing to read.

The Navy was the same kind of heaven a hardware store is for me. All kinds of gadgets and tools and machinery. It took me a long time to recognize I actually had mechanical aptitude, and it took me a longer time to recognize that I understood mathematics at a fairly high level. I failed math throughout my formal education. Never had a math teacher I liked, not one. They were often petty bullies who messed with our heads. But once I approached math via its history, I just naturally found my way into it.

Oh yeah, I said I’d talk about MoMA. The reason I want to say something about it is that I experienced an example the other day on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan that reinforced my notion that learning has everything to do with human interaction, the way we read each other, the signals we get from each other and how we interpret them. I was scribbling a stanza of poetry into a notebook when I noticed a young man with an appealing face studying me. He was deciding whether to approach me. Finally he walked toward me and asked me in very good English with a faint French accent if I could tell him where moh-mah was. I drew a blank, and then I asked him in French what moh-mah was. Le Musée, he said. Oh, I said, The Museum of Modern Art. Yes, we’re eleven blocks from it, I told him. He said he’d been asking people and nobody knew where moh-mah was. How could that be? Perhaps, I said, you should have said the Modern Art. Ah, he said, but I was trying to sound American. We both laughed. That will get you in trouble every time, I told him, especially in New York.

I might have passed math if I had teachers who were trying to help me instead of get over on me. I’m not blaming them, I’m just saying that each of us learns differently, and if we really want to help each other we ought try to figure out how the other guy comprehends something instead of insisting on an approved mode of transmission. There should be no approved mode of transmission, because the goal isn’t the process.

What if our politicians and preachers and teachers and civic leaders gave this a second thought? What if they stopped insisting there is only one way to think, to do, to solve? What if they gave up their catastrophic idea that an open mind is a dangerous thing because it’s apt to flip-flop? We might all learn enough to save our republic from greed and rapine policy. Well, this is a long way from those failed green candles, but that’s just how my mind works. Or doesn’t.

—DM