Seeing the world with chemical eyes.

At unexpected times, I am reminded that Ainan sees the world in a rather different way, to most young boys. He sees the world with chemical eyes.

A few weeks ago, I was out with Ainan. Now, anyone who knows Malaysia will know that there are open drains beside the roads, perhaps to offset the chance of floods. We had just come out of a Starbucks onto a quiet roadway, that ran along the shops. At the outer edge of the little road, was a wall. We stepped up onto the wall. Immediately beyond it, was a ditch all along the road, that acted a drain. Beyond that, was the main road proper, that we wanted to get to, in search of a taxi.

So, we stepped up onto the wall and jumped across the ditch, down onto the side of the main road beyond.

Ainan said nothing.

We spent some ten minutes trying to flag down a taxi – and being ignored by the very few which passed by.

“Let’s go back to Starbucks and call a cab from there.”, I suggested to Ainan.

So, we walked across the road, to the drainage ditch. With an effortful stretch, Ainan stretched his leg across the ditch and stepped up onto the wall.

Standing on the top of the wall, he remarked: “That was an endothermic reaction.”

He looked down at me. “...and when we came out it was...”

“...an exothermic reaction!”, I said filling in.

He had a point. To return the way we had come and go up to the wall, from down beside the drainage ditch, required an input of energy...hence endothermic. To come down off the wall, one only had to use gravity to do so...so, in a sense, energy came out, from one...an exothermic reaction.

I thought it was very telling of the way he sees the world that he should notice a physical and visual analogy to endothermic and exothermic reactions, whilst out walking around town.

Not for the first time, I was moved to reflect that children of his own age, would not grasp his thoughts, should he ever choose to express them, unfiltered, to them. Of course, he never really did that. With children his own age, he would select his utterances very carefully and never really reveal what he was truly thinking. He would decide to talk about something else, something more readily understood, than to actually make the remarks that came, unbidden, to mind.

For me, I was happy to have a glimpse of the way he interprets the world, as we crossed the ditch. He allowed me to see, for a moment, how he perceives, analyzes and understands the world. Of course, he did so, because he knew that I would understand his reference. Had I been another child, he would have walked in silence.

This incident is a simple example of his chemical perception. Often it is not so simple. Sometimes, I really have to reflect on what he has said, carefully, so elusive is it. At such times, I do wonder how many people he shall really be able to connect with, fully, in his lifetime. Such people would have to be quite unusual in their own way, I think. I do hope he manages to gather around him enough such people to feel properly connected to the world. In the meantime, I shall be there for him, when he chooses to speak his mind. I hope it is enough, for now.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

A tale of two guns.

I read, with some recognition, of the sobering tale of David Lubin, an actor, who found himself in a perilous situation on set, recently. Mr. Lubin had been playing a masked gunman, whilst “shooting”, in Alpha Market, in the Cole Valley area of San Francisco. Unfortunately, for Mr. Lubin, a local resident was strangely observant and unobservant at the same time: they saw his gun, but didn’t see the camera crew attending to him. The local reported a crime in progress and the police responded.

Now, Mr. Lubin was not expecting real life police to turn up. When asked to drop his gun, under gunpoint, he froze and neither moved nor complied. Luckily for him, the police decided to disarm him, rather than shoot him. He was arrested – but not charged when the police found out the true situation.

I note that quite a few Internet commenters chimed in with remarks about police brutality, heavy-handedness and general stupidity. However, that is not what I saw in this situation. I see a remarkably and very fortunate restraint in the police response. Had the police been as they are so often portrayed, Mr. David Lubin would now have the credentials R.I.P after his name.

In contrast, I would like to remind you of the case of Kirk Abella, an actor in the British film “Going Somewhere” who went somewhere he didn’t expect: the afterlife. Kirk Abella was shot dead on a film set in the Philippines under almost identical circumstances. Kirk was playing a gunman on a motorbike, when a local resident reported a crime underway. A community watchman, Eddie Cuizon, gave chase and shot the actor in the back, when he saw a gun being drawn. The gun, of course, was a plastic replica. Cuizon gave himself up to the police when he finally understood what he had done. He was charged with murder.

Curiously, community watchmen in the Philippines are not even supposed to be armed. They are supposed to carry nothing more than batons. So, it seems that Eddie Cuizon took his own initiative to arm himself. No doubt that won’t look too good at sentencing.

These two tales make me reflect that David Lubin was very lucky indeed. He could so easily be a dead man, today. Worringly, the film that David Lubin had been working on, had all the right permits for shooting. Apparently, though, this information didn’t reach the policemen on the ground.

I hope that lessons are learnt from these two cases. Policemen should always try to make an arrest, of a living suspect, if at all possible and should not do as Eddie Cuizon – shoot first, and find out later what it was all about.

I am led to wonder how many actors, on film sets, have been harmed by the police, the world over. After all, most contemporary films seem to involve guns. So, out of the hundreds of thousands of fake gun crimes, on film sets around the world each year – how many of them lead to police intervention? It is a worrying thought. If anyone has the answer, please respond below.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

The despair of an artist.

An artist chooses a life without a predictable outcome. No artist can possibly know whether or not they will succeed in their own lifetime, at the outset of their career. Thus, it is that artists must gamble on a success that may never come. This leads some to despair, when their long sought recognition does not come, in the passing of the decades.

Many years ago, I was invited to an art exhibition. The work was pretty good, in its own way, though not my kind of work. I studied each piece with self-conscious care, for a very good reason. You see, the artworks were by a recently deceased artist, who was the father of my, then, girlfriend’s landlady. I studied each work with particular care to show my respect. The artist had, in fact, committed suicide, in despair at the recognition which had never come to him.

I have never forgotten that evening. What marked it out for me was the gaze of my girlfriend’s landlady. She looked not on her father’s works, which were, no doubt, very familiar to her, but on the guests. She scrutinized each and every face, to see their reactions to her father’s work. She wanted to see that they liked it, that his life’s work had some meaning for them. There was a sadness in her, a watchfulness and an expectancy which had a flavour all of its own. This art exhibition had been organized by her, to let the world see her father’s work. In a way, she was trying to give him in death, what he had lacked in life: recognition. The venue was a very slick one. I remember that well. It had the air of “high art” about it. So she was really trying to ensure that his work would be seen in the right way. There were many people there that night – so she had managed to get a good turn out, too. I studied my girlfriend’s landlady as much as I studied the art. There was something very vulnerable about her. She really needed everyone to enjoy her father’s art. She really needed, in a kind of desperate way, for his work to have meant something.

It was a very sad thing to have to watch. She was trying to do for her father, in death, what life had never done for him. Perhaps she felt she should have tried sooner, whilst he had been alive. Perhaps she felt that what she did now, was too late. The exhibition was her gift to her father – it was also an act of mourning.

Recognition often comes slowly to artists. There are so many artists in the world, each competing for attention, that it is quite easy to be overlooked at first – or even for a very long time, indeed. It is a cliché that an artist should be discovered after death – but that does happen, as we all know. Quite a few artists made modest names, if at all, during their lifetimes, and only grew to legends after death. Perhaps that was what motivated my girlfriend’s landlady’s father to commit suicide – perhaps he saw it as a career move, a means to propel himself to fame.

It should not be this way. All artists should be recognized and supported during their lifetimes. The only way this could happen is if the means to create a name for oneself, were more immediately accessible – the galleries, the magazines and the newspapers. Yet, they are not accessible, and have limited slots available. There is also the matter of taste. Sometimes, innovative work is overlooked, because it does not conform to the tastes of the time: it is only much later, sometimes long after the death of an artist, when tastes change, that people are able to appreciate work. So, that, too, is a factor. There needs to be some means to recognize work independent of the tastes of the time – and that seems an almost incurable condition.

The only practical answer to all of this is for the artist themselves to become immune to the response to their work. An artist should learn to work on, irrespective of the response to their work and to be content whether or not it is accepted. This is the only solution to this age old problem. The artist must learn not to care for success and recognition – for only then will they not miss them, and despair over them, should they not be forthcoming in a reasonable time frame.

I realize that this is a difficult solution. I am proposing that artist’s create without thought of success. Yet, that is what a true artist would do – create because they have to. Perhaps that is why some artists built great oeuvres despite a lack of worldly success: they did so, because they had to. They created because to do otherwise would destroy them.

No artist should kill themselves because they are not being recognized. The answer to that situation is to continue to create good work and to continue to try to reach out and show the work. If luck is with the artist, recognition will come, some day. Despair must not be entertained – for to yield to it, is to destroy all the potential the artist has – and, despite my girlfriend’s landlady’s father’s possible motivation, that is never a good career move, and does not enhance the likelihood of recognition in any way.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)