Note:

this is the 3rd of a series of accounts.

It was written after the encouragement of Carol Geary who enjoyed the first two.

(Carol Geary's page - http://home.earthlink.net/~caroling/index.html)

 

   I was then a pupil at the Reali high-school in Haifa, a seaside city on Mount Carmel in Israel - 10th grade probably, in a class emphasizing mathematics. This was considered high status, so we had professor Ari Zabotinsky (the son of the great writer and Zionist revisionist leader) of the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) as our math master. Ari's position was simple - whatever material was for our matriculation exams, we could learn ourselves. He was there just to teach us the joys of mathematics. Soon afterwards I fell out of favor with almost all the regular high-school teachers, and eventually came to an arrangement that the teacher would enter the class and I would leave, to roam the wooded hill around the school. But that transpired a bit later.

The school was situated up the hill at Beit Biram and we went there by busses. That day, we have started to learn analytic geometry, and on going back home, I must have been somewhat dreamy or confused, because I alighted the bus at a stop before my normal home bus stop. There was a public bench on the pavement, and I set there, facing a public garden called Gan Yitzhak (the garden of Isaac).

At the time I attached no importance to this garden being named after the father of my good friend (and of my big brother's second wife, later). I was becoming quite an outsider for the social life of my peers, apart from this youth (who was the only male pupil in the "literary" class, which was the lowest-status one at the Reali School. I certainly did not realize that I was as if sitting by the gate of the Garden of Eden. I was just staring out while my thoughts became totally absorbed in a beatific vision of geometrical constructions. For there was a certain figure near me, made of kinds of globes or blobs of light, that was half-seen and half intuited. I had the realization then, that human traits, characters, and whatever distinguished them, can be mapped into geometrical space and be presented as graphs and light patterns in that space. And I felt that everything that mattered in social relations could be modeled geometrically and be comprehended thereby. Space became animated - and delightful. I felt awed by my own ingenuity, which seemed to come from somewhere beyond me - a gift you are not allowed to request more of it at will.

I don't know for how long this vision lasted, and soon enough I came to forget it altogether, to be reminded of it only years later when, with the vestiges of a few other visions, I started to seek what I now call "A Pattern Language for System Transformation" (PLST).

Based on the uniqueness of my educational experience with professor Jabotinsky, I must have amalgamated his figure with the that of professor Gordon Pask in my portrayal of professor Logi-Loony and his extraordinary use of the Jabotinsky Reaction in the story "The HEJERA PLOT".

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