Zoë Aarden
Attended Thornton Hall 1987-1993
e-mail: zoe.aarden@gmail.com

September 10, 2006

Wow, what a great website! Coming across it is like being called schizophrenic for years and then finding someone else who can hear the voices, too… 'I'm not crazy! Such a place did exist once!', I would cry into the disbelieving faces of those around me!

I spent three hours looking at all the stuff on the website -- the note-taking methods, the pictures, the yellow sweaters… the B-shaded eggs! I did 66 fucking eggs before she let me go on, spanning almost the whole school year… She would smile and chuckle that that was a school record-breaker. Oh, lucky me! But funnily enough, once I got the technique, it turned out to be my favorite medium. I also remember the first life-drawing class of each school year, where this certain model would end her ten-minute slow-moving choreography (to show us how the muscles move under the body) with a backwards bridge. Gynecologists don't get as good a view, to the horror and glee of our 14- to 17-year-old selves! 

These stories are classic! Who can tell that story about their high school? Or the horrid belly dancing rehearsals that took place on the front courtyard at every hour of the early morning and afternoon… what kind of a sadist envisions making 13- to 18-year-old, self-conscious girls dance outside, in public? And tell only one of us at the last minute, and 'expect' the rest of us to find out somehow, and if we didn't, cut us from the class entirely!

I am very clearly over this. 

But it was fun, wasn't it? In the way prison can be fun when, in-between beatings and starvation and the fear of beatings and starvation, we found ways to throw dough eraser at each other in the Painting Room while She was teaching a class in the Studio without being found out by the ever-watchful surveillance of Miss Greig… (Sounds so small, but how rebellious I felt at the time!). Seeing what one can get away with in a militaristic environment is its own kind of fun, I guess.

It's like we're all survivors of a strange cult, an experience no one else can understand unless they experienced it themselves.

I remember so much about my internment there… the friendships, the laughs, the Stress, the fucked-up craziness of Her wicked Power. I have flashbacks weekly, still. But I also admire Her passion, and thank Her for instilling it in us, too. I still experience the Aesthetic Experience once a week (and call it that) and enjoy the knowledge of Western Art and the Great Religions of the World she pounded into my head (to the absence of all else), but I also appreciate what she was trying to tell us, really… That you only get one life, so live it well! And that an unexamined life is not worth living.

I think Mahatma Gandhi paraphrased this sentiment best:

"Live as if you will die tomorrow. Learn as if you will live forever."

I've spent the last 13 years engaged in an academic and ideological battle against the very Modernist agendas she drummed into my head; as a postcolonial theorist, I've spent years unraveling the complexities of Western thought to gain an ideological space for those that have been marginalized and made culturally illegitimate by these cultural hegemonies. I abhor the ethnocentric and pedagogical superiority inherent in Jungian psychology, notions of Universal Archetypes and Freudian philosophies, and pretty much everything else Miss Greig stood for, intellectually.  I also understand on some level, though, what she intended to instill in us, beyond her obviously objectionable and archaic methods of conduct, was a longing for something more.

Miss Greig's driving force, I believe, was her interest in the world's Romantic Potential. Beyond Her frantic and often contradictory raves, the need to believe in the mystery and magic of the world was what fueled her madness. Some years she was the former Prima Ballerina of the Paris Ballet (or was it the New York Ballet? Hard to keep track), when she was clearly the most physically awkward and most undancerly person any of us had ever seen, witnessed every week in ballroom dancing and belly dancing classes by all. Or how one year she was the only child of Scottish nobility (who smuggled Her into the opera at 3 months old in a duffel bag, by the way, so Her young ears 'could bask in the glory of La Boheme!'), and the next year she had '5 strapping brothers who would hoist me onto their shoulders!'.  Behind all of these tall tales was a yearning for a more impassioned life, a desire for the romantic potential.

For sure Miss Greig was a raging loon, no denying that. But she was also a very special person. She was a horrid, wicked woman, certainly, who bullied and preyed upon the vulnerable, playing power games and favorites; one cannot deny Her sickness. But what I take from Her is Her passion for the romantic world she envisioned it could be, which I believe was the driving force behind everything she attempted to create at Thornton. I don't share Her vision of what that romantic world looks like; I have my own vision, of course, but I share in Her fight for revealing and celebrating the beauty and the magic of the world. I still believe in the nobility of that pursuit. I continue still to thank Her for nurturing that in me, at a time when teenage apathy could have become the prevailing voice, as it did for many others…

I also thank Miss Greig for nurturing in me my undeniable passion for learning and for revealing to me the beautiful mysteries of the world.

But shit, was she ever a fucking crazy bitch, eh? I've never seen anyone more impeccably or unethically dressed, either. Her closet was a perfectly tailored massacre, with representation from every endangered and extinct species on the World Wildlife Endangered and Extinct Animals list! And is it just me, or was every pointer, poker and wand she had made of ivory?

Thank you all, students of Thornton, for all the laughs and tears… and for your friendship and camaraderie in those trying years. I will always have very fond memories of my time there with you all, mixed with a strong need to vomit! (The Stress of Miss Greig was killer and timeless -- what can I say?)

(Side note: I have to say, while I wasn't perfectly prepared for university coming out of Thornton, I have taught first-year university to many students coming from many different high schools all over Canada over the years as I work on my PhD, and most of them haven't a bloody clue how to write an essay or argue a thesis, either. This isn't to say that Thornton shouldn't have prepared us better or that the institution wasn't negligent in many ways, but I have to say, the general level of student preparedness in first-year university is quite appalling -- perhaps a broader note on the state of secondary education standards in Canada, this issue is certainly not isolated to Thornton Hall. Also, I still use some of Her methods of note-taking to this day! Asterisks and tildes till death!)

(My PhD is in Native Studies/Cultural theory, so the academic stylistic similarities between Miss Greig and I end at the passion and the asterisks and tildes, thankfully!)

Also, a few names that didn't make it onto the alumni list….

Daniel Gallagher

Patrick Gibson

Robin Littman

 (If these people have paid their money for silence and have chosen to pretend Thornton never happened to them, I will respect their wishes also and pretend they never graced the halls of Thornton -- no problem!)

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