Have you seen dignity?

Fat man lookin' in a blade of steel
Thin man lookin' at his last meal
Hollow man lookin' in a cottonfield
For dignity

Wise man lookin' in a blade of grass
Young man lookin' in the shadows that pass
Poor man lookin' through painted glass
For dignity

I am in bus 224 heading towards Madrid’s Avenida de America station where I will enter the city’s Metro network. The buildings aligning the A2 motorway are moving past slowly. We are in a traffic jam as I listen to these first lines of Bob Dylan’s Dignity. I have crammed Carmen’s MP3 player with melancholic autumn songs and this is simply another shining example. I join the Jester’s search for Dignity as my mind wonders back to a class I had just given up north in Madrid.

As often in English class conversation had turned to the benign. “Which news events have had the most impact on you in your life time?” I ask almost feeling the shame. They know we have to talk about something.

I had already offered them some examples: Diana’s death, September the 11th, The Fall of the Berlin Wall (who ever mentions this one nowadays? Impact seems to be a concept which can be replaced by time), etc. Of course I completely overlooked the painfully obvious.

One girl had tears in her eyes. “Shit,” I thought. “March the 11th”. Or as they say here: 11M (Once M). It was indeed this event she was about to share with us.

She told us that she comes from a suburb of Madrid which was particularly affected by the Madrid Bombings in 2004. The train she took every day to get to her downtown University was one of those targeted. Luckily that day there was a student strike at the Uni, so many – including my student – opted to stay at home. However, one of her classmates decided to go to the library anyway to study. He was one of the 192 people to die that day.

The benign didn’t feel so benign anymore and by now the girl had switched to Spanish. English class had been put on hold for a while and replaced by group therapy – which seems to be the second usage of language classes in general anyway.

She continued her story about how a friend of hers lost an eye in one of the blasts and that he still went into the wreckage to pull out people. He has been traumatized for life. And about that nearly everybody in her suburb knew of somebody who had lost someone.

The class came to an end as did her story. The last five minutes had been spent talking Spanish but this didn’t seem to bother anybody. I turned my attention back to Dylan. Where was Dignity on that March day in 2004? He tries to answer but just sings.

So many roads, so much at stake
So many dead ends, I'm at the edge of the lake
Sometimes I wonder what it's gonna take
To find dignity

When he finishes I notice that traffic has begun speeding up again and so has the music. Out of nowhere appear the ‘Barenaked Ladies’ whose song ‘If I had a million dollars’ brings the necessary comic relief I had been waiting for ever since the class had finished.

The song is about what they would do if they had a million dollars. At one stage they sing:

Well, I'd buy you John Merrick's remains
(Ooh, all them crazy elephant bones)

As the song is humorous I decided to find out who John Merrick was and the next day I read it on Wikipedia. It turns out that John Merrick (1862-90) was known in his Victorian lifetime as ‘The Elephant Man’. The picture clearly shows why. Apparently Micheal Jackson once tried to buy his bones for exactly 1 million dollars, but this was turned down. Jacko wanted to by them because ‘the story reminded me of me a lot’.

His story makes fascinating reading and I started wondering about Dignity again. If there ever was a person who was in search of Dignity than it would have been this guy, John Merrick. And he would be looking in a mirror. I was not surprised to find out that one of the main books about his life was titled: The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity.